236 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



him is to illumine a situation and to reveal character, though Heaven 

 knows he takes full advantage elsewhere in his books of the author's 

 privilege to vent his own opinions. Flaubert's mind was not rich 

 in general views, and he had not the same temptation to make his 

 characters talk at random and at large; yet his conversations re- 

 peatedly drift beyond the limits of the central situation. The apothe- 

 cary Homais is a part of Emma's mean and narrow world, but his 

 divagations have nothing whatever to do with her particular problem. 

 Their sole yet ample justification is that they solidly establish the 

 character and exhibit the vanity and pompous insincerity with which 

 the author's ironic vision chose to endow him. Turgénief's range in 

 dialogue is still freer from restraint. It does not usurp the function 

 of narrative, but it does everything of which dialogue is legitimately 

 capable. It marks character and illuminates a situation of course, 

 but also it is a well grooved channel through which flows a brimming 

 river of ideas. So long as the ideas are in character their utterance 

 infringes no law of art, and Turgénief satisfied this condition by intro- 

 ducing into his books voluble talkers whose expansiveness is their 

 temperamental sign. To return to James. While his conversations 

 are generally as we say "in character," they still do not mark character 

 so incisively as the conversations of Balzac, who constantly finds 

 the unconscious revealing word that lays bare its most hidden tracts. 

 Indeed it is often by reticence rather than speech that James's char- 

 acteis betray themselves to us, a peculiarity which is well exemplified 

 in the pleasant game of hide and seek that we play throughout "The 

 Golden Bowl." His reverence, too, for the dominant theme does 

 not allow him even in the reflective passages the author's license of 

 variegated comment in which Balzac so freely indulges himself, and 

 I can think of no character like Flaubert's Homais who is permitted 

 to reveal himself in terms and by actions that do not chime with the 

 particular intention of the book. It is his solicitude for tone and 

 atmosphere that has compelled this reserve, and James probably 

 feels that the business he has in mind, the necessity of exhibiting the 

 interrelations of his chosen group, is matter large enough to occupy 

 and to repay his full attention. "The Tragic Muse" whose theme is 

 art, and "Princess Casamassima" whose theme is socialism are the 

 only full length novels in which, thanks to the subject matter, the 

 conversations are allowed a flexible range. 



It must not be inferred that James reconciles himself to any 

 absolute sacrifice of variety in his chosen method. The variety is 

 there, but how he secures it is his own secret, and is divined only by 

 readers who consent to give him the courtesy of their intellectual 

 co-operation. His seeming eftortlessness is not divorced from labour, 



