HENRT JAMES
77
prefaces were to be another. In
it
the ideal readers are those for whom
"literature was a game of skill," since "skill meant courage, and
courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life." In
the view of the novelist Hugh Vereker that life could be conveyed only
indirectly, symbolically; his particular sense of it ran through all his
books as their "exquisite scheme," "like a complex figure in a Persian
carpet." James' title has given a phrase to the close textual criticism
which he helped
t~
inaugurate. Gide used it in his journal ( 1927)
and Eliot, in introducing Wilson Knight's interpretation of Shake–
speare's imaginative patterns ( 1930) held it up as the critic's goal.
The impulse behind the phrase has quickened our awareness that the
task of the critic today, after a century of historical accretion, is to
see an artist's work not piece-meal but in its significant entirety, to
find his compelling portrait in his works.
2.
But the question that James' contemporaries might well a'ik was
where he found, round about him at that hour, any models on which
he could plead verisimilitude for his supersubtle Neil Paradays and
Ralph Limberts and Hugh Verekers. He could only answer that
they had been "fathered but on his own intimate experience," that
they had been "drawn preponderantly from the depths of the design–
er's own mind." But such an origin, he insisted, did not permit their
being dismissed as unreal, since he had deliberately projected their
situations as a form of what he called "operative irony," as a means
of asserting that "if the life about us for the last thirty years refuses
warrant for these examples, then so much the worse for that life."
If
pressed further, he could have specified, as he did in
his
letters,
how barren he found the sensibility of his milieu, in contrast with
the analytic alertness of the French or of Turgenev. There was no
novelist in England with whom he could share
his
aims. He saw quite
through the pointless elaborations of his somewhat older
contempor~ry
Meredith. On finishing
Lord Ormont and His Aminta
(
1894) he was
moved to declare to Gosse that he doubted "if any equal quantity of
extravagant verbiage, of airs and graces, of phrases and attitudes, of
obscurities and alembications, ever
started
less their subject. . . . ''
He granted that he might be overstating the case, but he could not
escape the conviction that many of Meredith's "profundities and tor–
tuosities prove when threshed out to be only pretentious statements of
