Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/90

story, "Sir Edmund Orme," is an example of this. The ghost of Sir Edmund is invisible to all but two persons, and all that these two have in common is a great love for one woman—a low: so great that, as we read,it seems almost natural that it should suffice to rarefy mortal sense and extend its range beyond things of matter. There is something, too, of this mystical element in "The Madonna of the Future," although here the question is not of the dead appearing, but of one whose gaze is so constantly fixed upon the ideal that the real becomes a shadow. It is the story of Don Quixote over again, but, in place of the knight, we have Theobald, the poor artist, in place of Dulcinea, his model Serafina, whose virtue, whose beauty is as imaginary as was that of her Spanish prototype. The scene is laid in the Florence of today—that Florence whose hotel windows look out upon Arno's bank, where Dante's gaze first lit upon Beatrice, where the shrine of Our Lady of the Flower is thronged by a cosmopolitan crowd who refuse her homage. And upon this background, mediæval in outline but modern in every detail, the little wan figure of the artist stands out, imaginary no doubt as an individual, but typical of how much pathos, of how much high endeavour! There are some to whom Quixote himself is merely a caricature; there are others to whom he recalls a singleness of aim, a tender sensibility, an undaunted courage which was once theirs. They are wiser now: they have seen how ridiculous is vain effort, how contemptible a figure he cuts who sets himself a task beyond his strength, and yet . . . But in this vein Mr. James has never done better than in the "Altar of the Dead." The many will never so much as read it—the many who can only read stories which they can imagine of the "people over the way;" but to the few who grieve when the Master is content to do merely well what he can do exquisitely, this last story comes as a pledge of yet further possi-

bilities,