ment set down. There are very few epigrams, and there are pages of fluent and engaging English. What is maddening is for a man to be so right and so agreeable and so careless at once.
The examples of his rightness are everywhere. When A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published, Solomon Eagle had just the right word to say about the method: "He is a genuine realist: that is to say, he puts in the exaltations as well as the depressions . . . spiritual passions are as powerful to him as physical passions"; about the style he was equally precise; and of James Joyce's future he wrote: "the discovery of a form is the greatest problem in front of him. It is doubtful if he will make a novelist." To-day, with Ulysses pounding in our ears, what have we to add or to subtract from this? Set Henry James before Solomon Eagle and he will analyze with inspired accuracy the causes of his obscurity. But he will turn hastily from the magnificence of Henry James as a subject and like a good diplomat will cause a diversion, perhaps with the notable poem which contains the lines:
"On firmer ties his joys depend
Who has a faithful female friend!"
He resents the personal dulness of Wordsworth and he is impatient with Mr. John Galsworthy's dreariness, but that is as near to an emotion as he gets. For the rest, he talks entertainingly about epigrams and table talk and Florence Barclay, on simplified spelling, Anglo-Saxon words, and the Baconian theory.
The entertainment is excellent, but you could never guess that the man has a passion for good English, for clear thinking; for sound philosophy, for wit, for an honest presentation of life, for a thousand good things. Books are almost a wild romance with him. Only a few weeks ago, when a printers' strike threatened in England, he wrote of the books which were already announced:
"But if they did not come out, if they remained unfulfilled promises, I think that in the evenings of those months of our sullen broils they would gradually for me acquire romance. I should begin thinking of them with that acuteness of unsatisfied longing that is evoked by the memory of the great lost books of antiquity and of which one has a tinge when one reads of a work that a great writer
