Complete Works

existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality.
    Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude.  It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values — the permanence of memory.  And the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, “Take me out of myself!” meaning really, out of my perishable activity into the light of imperishable consciousness.  But everything is relative, and the light of consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the things of this earth, imperishable only as against the short-lived work of our industrious hands.
    When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of the sun.  The artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain, may find its voice in some individual of that last group, gifted with a power of expression and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art.  I do not mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments of humanity by an ingenious tale.  It would be too much to expect — from humanity.  I doubt the heroism of the hearers.  As to the heroism of the artist, no doubt is necessary.  There would be on his part no heroism.  The artist in his calling of interpreter creates (the clearest form of demonstration) because he must.  He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth.  It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without to-morrow — whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess?
    For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable.  For mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity.  It will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an army having won a barren victory.  It will not know when it is beaten.  And perhaps it is right in that quality.  The victories are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point of view.  Mr. Henry James seems to hold that belief.  Nobody has rendered better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how to drape the robe of spiritual honour about the drooping form of a victor in a barren strife.  And the honour is always well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry James chronicles with such subtle and direct insight are, though only personal contests, desperate in their silence, none the less heroic (in the modern sense) for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of arms and sound of trumpets.  Those are adventures in which only choice souls are ever involved.  And Mr. Henry James records them with a fearless and insistent fidelity to the péripéties of the contest, and the feelings of the combatants.
    The fiercest excitements of a romance de cape et d’épée , the romance of yard-arm and boarding pike so dear to youth, whose knowledge of action (as of other things) is imperfect and limited, are matched, for the quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by the difficulties presented, to the sense of truth, of necessity — before all, of conduct — of Mr. Henry James’s men and women.  His mankind is delightful.  It is delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own itself beaten; it will sleep on the battlefield.  These warlike images come by themselves under the pen; since from the duality of man’s nature and the competition of individuals, the life-history of the