Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/104

HENRY JAMES First of all, I must take down that title. It makes a banner altogether too bold. A book might main- tain it — a fat, four-square book ; but a bit of an article built in a corner out of a wretched dole of three-thousand-odd words must never attempt to uphold it, must never pretend it can say anything adequate about the work of the man who is certainly the greatest of all living artists (yes, painters and poets swept in) — at once the most profuse and precise, the most affluent and exquisite — the completed mass ^ of whose creative work hangs before us now like the cloud of a cathedral — actually equipped, too, in the shape of the new prolonged passages of exterior comment and self-criticism, with its cathedral-like approaches, ambulatories, cloisters, where the arriving reader may positively pace to and fro with the writer — the late visitor with the old master-mason — raising his eyes reverently to the finished achievement of which the latter lingeringly, wonderfully, talks. Why, to make a mere ground-plan of these outer courts alone — a hem as elaborate as lace — would take far more than one's three-thousand dull dots. All they ^ The reference here is to the First Collected Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James — Vols. I-XXIV, 8s. 6d. net each (Macmillan & Co., Ltd.) — and to the new, long, rumi- native Prefaces with which these volumes are enriched. 78