Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/123

HENRY JAMES 97 senses were made keen — the very conditions that preserved them gave them practice ; and thus at last when the day arrived and he ran out to meet reality he saw it all with unhabituated eyes, with a freshness that turned common things to marvels, and became the romantic realist we now know — our justest of observers and the most joyous of our artists, the man who has made fiction exacter than ever before, an acuter presentation of life, and at the same time ("and therefore" indeed) filled it fuller than ever before of a proud and lasting beauty, a beauty as great as that of poetic drama at its best — made it fairer in both senses of that word. So at any rate one roughs it out, perhaps auda- ciously, once more — and here, indeed, in this new book is proof enough and to spare of at least that perpetuated boyishness, that capacity for an amazed adoration of the ordinary. For the events of his young years were all immensely ordinary, the meekest little matters-of-fact : just visits to uncles and visits to aunts — a walk down Broadway un- accompanied — a ride on a Newfoundland — a perusal of The Lamplighter — a performance of Uncle Toms Cabin. Yet it is with cries like ravishing ! and marvellous! with ineffable unsurpassable hour and in- finitely rich and strange that he now greets and gloats over this nursery bread-and-butter banquet. Something on page 133 thrills him by its "pre- ponderant, unthinkable queerness." It is the question of Aunt Wyckoff's exact age. Something else, on page 35, a deed of "calm, cool courage," compels him to " lose " himself in admiration of " the consistency, the superiority, the sublimity" of its performer. All agog with excitement, you peer over his rapt shoulders and discover a small playfellow pro- nouncing Ohio 0-ee-oh. A quiet family party at his cousin Kate's is "a night Men of Letters. Q