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Show art, but as the sources of his material. He took everything they could give and he gave it back in his books. With this constant preoccupation, it was natural that the people least interesting to him were the comparatively dumb. To be "inarticulate" was for him the cardinal social sin. [t amounted to a wilful witholding of treasures of alien experience. And if he could extract no satisfaction from contemplating the keepers of golden silence, he could gain little more from intercourse with the numerous persons he dismissed from his attention as "simple organisms." These he held to be mere waste of any writer's time, and it was characteristic that his constant appreciation of the works of Mrs. Wharton was ballled by the popularity of Ethan Frome, because he considered that the gifted author had spent her labour on creatures too easily comprehensible to be worth her pains. He g;eatly preferred The Reef, where, as he said, "she deals With persons really fine and complicated." We might arrive at the same conclusion from a study of the prefaces to the New York Edition. More often than not, the initial idea for a tale came to Henry James through the medium of other people's talk. From a welter of anecdote he could unerringly pick out the living nucleus for a reconstructed and balanced work of art. His instinct for selection was aGimir~ble and he could afford ~o let it range freely among a prof~sion of proffered subjects, secure that it would alight on the most promiSing .. But he liked to have the subjects presented With a httle artful discrimination even in the first instance. He was dependent on conv~rsation, but It mu~t be educated and up to a point intelligent con~ ersatiOn: There IS an early letter written from Italy In I 874, I? which he complains of having hardly spoken to an Itahan creature in nearly a year's sojourn, "save was~erwo~en and waiters. This, you 'll say, is my own stupidity, he continues, "but granting this gladly, it proves that even a creature addicted as much to sentimentalising as I am over the whole mise en scene ofltalian life, doesn't find an easy initiation into what lies behind it. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the pitifulness of this absurd want of reciprocity between Italy itself and all my rhapsodies about it." Other wanderers might have found more of Italy in washerwomen and waiters, here guaranteed to be the true native article, than in all the nobility of Rome or the Anglo-Americans of Venice, but that was not Henry James's way. For him neither pearls nor diamonds fell from the lips of waiters and washerwomen, and princesses never walked in his world disguised as goosegirls. Friend~hips are maintained by the communication of speech and letters. Henry James was a voluminous letter-writer and exhaustively communicative in his talk upon every subject but one, his own work, which was his own real life. It was not because he was indifferent to what people thought of his books that he evaded discussion about them. He was always touched and pleased by any evidence that he had been intelligently read, but he never went a step out of his way to seek this assurance. He found it safest to assume that nobody read him, and he liked his friends none the worse for their incapacity. Meanwhile, the volumes of his published works-visible, palpable, readable proof of that unceasing travail of the creative spirit which was always labouring behind the barrier of his silence-piled themselves up year after year, to be dropped on to the tables of booksellers and pushed on to the shelves of libraries, to be bought and cherished by the faithful, ignored by the multitude, and treated as a test of mental endurance by the kind of person who organised the Browning Society. Fortunately for literature, Henry James did not lend himself to exploitation by any Jacobean Society. Instead of inventing riddles for prize students, he zs |