Complete Works

creation.  Yet, it is always felt in the truthfulness of his art; it is there, it surrounds the scene, it presses close upon it.  It is made visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the contacts of the fine consciences, in their perplexities, in the sophism of their mistakes.  For a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one.  What is natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the intangible, ever-present, right.  It is most visible in their ultimate triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of renunciation.  Energetic, not violent: the distinction is wide, enormous, like that between substance and shadow.
    Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold of the substance, of what is worth having, of what is worth holding.  The contrary opinion has been, if not absolutely affirmed, then at least implied, with some frequency.  To most of us, living willingly in a sort of intellectual moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of truth, the shadows so firmly renounced by Mr. Henry James’s men and women, stand out endowed with extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary that their rejection offends, by its uncalled-for scrupulousness, those business-like instincts which a careful Providence has implanted in our breasts.  And, apart from that just cause of discontent, it is obvious that a solution by rejection must always present a certain lack of finality, especially startling when contrasted with the usual methods of solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden death.  Why the reading public which, as a body, has never laid upon a story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of Divine Omnipotence, is utterly incomprehensible.  But so it is; and these solutions are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which our hearts yearn with a longing greater than the longing for the loaves and fishes of this earth.  Perhaps the only true desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be set at rest.  One is never set at rest by Mr. Henry James’s novels.  His books end as an episode in life ends.  You remain with the sense of the life still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is felt in that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word has been read.  It is eminently satisfying, but it is not final.  Mr. Henry James, great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the impossible.
     

ALPHONSE DAUDET — 1898
     
    It is sweet to talk decorously of the dead who are part of our past, our indisputable possession.  One must admit regretfully that to-day is but a scramble, that to-morrow may never come; it is only the precious yesterday that cannot be taken away from us.  A gift from the dead, great and little, it makes life supportable, it almost makes one believe in a benevolent scheme of creation.  And some kind of belief is very necessary.  But the real knowledge of matters infinitely more profound than any conceivable scheme of creation is with the dead alone.  That is why our talk about them should be as decorous as their silence.  Their generosity and their discretion deserve nothing less at our hands; and they, who belong already to the unchangeable, would probably disdain to claim more than this from a mankind that changes its loves and its hates about every twenty-five years — at the coming of every new and wiser generation.
    One of the most generous of the dead is Daudet, who, with a prodigality approaching magnificence, gave himself up to us without reserve in his work, with all his qualities and all his faults.  Neither his qualities nor his faults were great, though they were by no means imperceptible.  It is only his generosity that is out of the common.  What strikes one most in his work is the disinterestedness of the toiler.  With more talent than many bigger men, he did not preach about himself, he did not attempt to persuade mankind into a belief of his own greatness.  He never posed as a scientist or as a seer, not even as a prophet; and he neglected his interests to the point of never propounding a theory for the purpose of giving a tremendous significance to his art, alone of all things, in a world that, by some strange oversight, has not been supplied with an obvious meaning.  Neither did he affect a passive attitude before the spectacle of life, an attitude which in