74
PARTISAN REVIEW
an aitist now past fifty. He had only one answer: "Produce again–
produce; produce better than ever, and all will yet be well." And
even before the end of his letter to Howells he had rallied to the point
of taking delight in the fact that he was "bursting with ideas and
subjects."
He had already reached a partial resolution of
his
dilemma by
dramatizing the problems over which he had been brooding, even
though he could find for some of the resulting stories no more likely
channel of publication than
The
r
ellow Book. The Death of the Lion
was printed by Harland with eclat as the leading item in
his
first
issue ( 1894), though James was increasingly to feel the incongruity
of having appeared among the newer aesthetes, the descendants of
Pater; and was to take characteristic solace that his "comparatively
so incurious text" had at least not provoked Beardsley into a perverse
illustration.
How little characteristic it was of him to view his problems
grimly is borne out by the tone of this story, where the situation is
the reverse of James' own, that of the sudden fame of a heretofore
unsuccessful writer. The whole is shot through with Flaubert's refrain
about "the hatred of literature," as the admiring young critic who
tells the story reflects that now Neil Paraday's rare talent is "to be
squeezed into his horrible age." But though the "lion" is soon ex–
hausted and thus killed by the violence with which he is taken up
by Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, the handling of the theme is on a comic
plane. No one at the country house where they are so ardently discus–
sing his new book, while he lies sick upstairs, may have read beyond
its twentieth page, and his hostess may end by losing his last manu–
script, but still he has had the unique privilege of being brought into
the sphere of
hi~
popular contemporaries, Guy Walsingham, the lady–
author of
Obsessions,
and Dora Forbes, of
The Other Way Round,
who turns out to be a man with a big red moustache.
How clearly James observed the role played by the best-selling
author of his day, and how little he envied it, may be read in the
winning portrait he gives of Greville Fane, another lady whose pen
dipped into gold. The reason why the critic-the most frequent nar–
rator for these stories-liked her go much is that she rested him so
from literature. He marvelled at her continued success, since her books
were in no relation to life, until he reflected that "It's only real suc–
cess that wanes, it's only solid things that melt." What endeared her
