After all, it is soon over—the whole motley farce—and, while it lasts, nothing in it matters so very greatly, or at any rate matters enough to disturb our amusement, our good-temper, our toleration. Nothing matters so very greatly. And yet everything—each of us, as we try to make our difficult meanings clear, the meanings of our hidden souls, and each of these meanings themselves as we stammer them forth to one another—matters so "wonderfully," so "beautifully"!
The tangled thread of our days may be knotted and twisted; but, after all, if we have the magnanimity to let off lightly those "who trespass against us" we have not learnt our aesthetic lesson of regarding the whole business of life as a complicated Henry James story, altogether in vain.
We have come to regard the world as a more or less amusing Spectacle, without forgetting to be decently considerate of the other shadows in the gilt-framed mirror!
Perhaps, in our final estimate of him, what emerges most definitely as Henry James' doctrine is the height and depth and breadth of the gulf which separates those who have taste and sensitiveness from those who have none. That is the "motif" of the "Spoils of Poynton," and I do not know any one of all his books more instinct with his peculiar spiritual essence.
Below every other controversy and struggle in the world is the controversy between those who possess this secret of "The Finer Grain" and those who have it not. There can be no reconciliation, no truce, no "rapport" between these. At best there can be only mitigated hostility on the one side, and ironical submission on the other. The world is made after this fashion and after no other, and the best policy is to follow our great artists and turn the contrast between the two into a cause of aesthetic entertainment.
Duality rules the universe. If it were not for the fools there would be no wisdom. If it were not for those who could never understand him, there could be no Henry James.
One comes at any rate to see, from the exquisite success upon us of this author's method, how futile it is, in this world whereof the beginning and the end are dreams, to bind an artist down to tedious and photographic reality.
People do not and perhaps never will—even in archetypal Platonic drawing-rooms—converse with one another quite so goldenly; or tell the amber-coloured beads of their secret psychology with quite so felicitous an unction. What matter? It is the prerogative of fine and great art to create, by its shaping and formative imagination, new and impossible worlds for our enjoyment.
And the world created by Henry James is like some classic Arcadia of psychological beauty—some universal Garden of Versailles unprofaned by the noises of the crowd—where among the terraces and fountains delicate Watteau-like figures move and whisper and make love in a soft artificial fairy moonlight dimmed and tinted with the shadows of passions and misty with the rain of tender regrets; human figures without name or place. For who remembers the names of these sweet phantoms or the titles of their "great good places" in this hospitable fairy-land of the harassed sensitive ones of the earth; where courtesy is the only law of existence and good taste the only moral code?