226 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



as the method of happy improvisation, but a man must be extremely 

 confident in his faculty to encounter the risks it involves. Spon- 

 taneity and design do not appear to rhyme together, yet I feel in the 

 case of the writers whom I have named that the result would have 

 been richer if the exuberance of invention had submitted itself to a 

 more careful regulation. One may surely organize one's wealth of 

 material with no necessary sacrifice of the appearance at least of 

 spontaneity. 



George Sand whom I have named among the writers relying for 

 their charm upon the unpremeditated facility of their invention 

 stands apart from the literary tradition of France, where carefulness 

 of design and a studied calculation of effect prevail in the novel to a 

 degree which few English readers recognize, and fewer still appreciate. 

 In France the reading public is more discriminating and exacting than 

 with us. We are satisfied certainly on easier terms, and a writer of 

 fiction wins our approval if he can describe vigorously or poetically, 

 write good dialogue, set a group of living characters in motion, and 

 above all if he can persuade us to yield ourselves to his moral judg- 

 ments and to concede the soundness of his social criticism. These 

 are all essential things in fiction, and even the least didactic of novel- 

 ists cannot write a great book which dispenses vrith any of them. But 

 I fear that our ordinary successful writer aims at his effect from point 

 to point, and taking advantage of the reader's habitual carelessness 

 of mind neglects the fuller possibilities for beauty which the novel 

 presents as a form of art. One novelist, however, we have had 

 amongst us who set himself a severer standard of technical excellence 

 than even the most exactingly conscientious of French writers, and it 

 is for this reason that I have chosen Henry James to exemplify some 

 of the more interesting aspects of composition. 



Since Henry James's death two uncompleted novels have been 

 published, "The Ivory Tower" and "The Sense of the Past," and 

 both of them fortunately for our purpose are provided with a kind of 

 "scenario" or rough colloquial sketch in which the author discussed 

 with himself the various difficulties presented by his subject, and the 

 manner in which he proposed to solve them. Such an opportunity 

 of penetrating into the artist's workshop has never been offered to us 

 by an author of the first rank, and we can almost afford to resign the 

 finished materpiece for the privilege of participating in the act of its 

 creation. 



As originally planned "The Ivory Tower" would have been com- 

 pleted in ten books, but it breaks off abruptly at the opening of Book 

 IV. The commentary permits us to measure our loss, for the subject 

 as there presented fairly teems with Jamesian types and fairly bristles 



