232 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



himself for the strange beauty of the fact. But a species of disen- 

 chantment rests upon his soul. His friends profess their eagerness to 

 retain him, but he is old and worn and resists their solicitation. He is 

 serenely conscious of the loss of Mrs. Newsome's favour, and life in 

 Woollett seems sufficiently meagre to him now. But thither the book 

 at its close returns him, with few hopes but many gracious memories 

 and a mind awakened. 



From the outline I have given we can sufficiently divine the 

 author's intention. His main concern evidently is not with the story 

 of an infatuation represented in the relations of Chad and his Countess, 

 for in the planning of his action James never yields to the romantic 

 allurement of scenes in which this couple should be permitted to occupy 

 the foreground alone. Everything that occurs in the book, every 

 scene, every dialogue, every reflection is sifted through the mind of 

 Strether, so that whatever else may be sacrificed the author has 

 secured the advantage of a complete centralisation of the interest. 

 Much obviously depended on the right choice of this central character. 

 In an earlier and weaker book "The American," James presents us 

 with Christopher Newman whose virtues are decidely not those of 

 the imagination, and who is incapable therefore of assimilating or 

 transmitting the finer values of the life with which he is in such im- 

 perfect contact. James never repeated this error. In all his subse- 

 quent books there will be found one or more persons characterised by 

 an extreme sensitiveness to impressions, who serve therefore as subtle 

 registers for recording all the finer implications of the most complex 

 environment. Of these the ageing Strether is perhaps the most 

 exquisite in organisation. Of imagination all compact, he is a man 

 on whom nothing is lost, for whom the outer world emphatically 

 exists, and in whose mind the most delicate processes of adjustment 

 perpetually shape themselves to new perceptions of significance. 

 Chad has but to make his late first appearance in a theatre-box for 

 Strether to realise from the mere manner of his entrance that some- 

 thing momentous has occurred. His business now will be not with the 

 unsophisticated youth that Woollett had known, but with a man whom 

 the Woollett scales could not measure nor the Woollett judgment 

 appraise. Reflection is stimulated by the realisation that his own 

 life ofi^ers but a stunted growth. For its expansion it needed a mel- 

 lower and a richer soil. Strether stands one day among the Odéon 

 book-stalls, and his mind revives the first impressions that thirty 

 years of absence have overworn. "He was there on some chance of 

 feeling the brush of the wing of the stray spirit of youth. He felt it 

 in fact, he had it beside him; the old arcade indeed, as his inner sense 

 listened, gave out the faint sound, as from far off, of the wild waving 



