HENRY JAMES
85
Voyt, who,-though this has not been told to Maud,-is Mrs. Dyott's
lover. The conversation centers on Maud's reading on the contrast
between Anglo-Saxon fiction and the French. The Colonel holds
that "they do what they feel, and they feel more things than
we." Granting the superior continental maturity, Maud holds that
their fiction still lacks variety, that their lovers are
all
the same,
that, for instance, they never portray "a decent woman." The
Colonel contends that you must choose, since "the subject the novelist
treats is the rise, the formation, the development, the climax and for
the most part the decline of _a relation....
If
a relation stops, where's
the story?
If
it doesn't stop, where's the innocence?"
If
you don't
choose, you're back in the floundering evasions of the English novel.
Maud doesn't argue, but she is not convinced. Mter the Colonel
has left, she indicates why she feels so sure of her grounds. She herself
is absorbed in the kind of inner drama which French fiction neglects.
v
She is in love, but she will not say with whom; the man does not even
suspect it, and she is determined, for unspoken reasons, that he should
not. Mrs. Dyott tacitly guesses the truth, that Maud is in love with
the Colonel, and when she next sees him, tells him so. He is aston–
ished, but has then to grant that Maud's "consciousness, if they let
it alone-as thev of course after this mercifully
must-was,
in the
last analysis, a
ki~d
of shy romance like their own, a thing to make the /
fortune of any author up to the mark- one who should have the
invention or who
could
have the. courage ; but a small scared starved
subjective satisfaction that would do her no harm and nobody else
any good. Who but a duffer- he struck to his contention-would see
the shadow of a 'story' in it?"
Wells and his million followers would agree with the Colonel. I
have deliberately ended James' plea on one of his special cases of
scruples and renunciation, for such cases are recurrent threads in
his carpet. The question, however, remains whether they are too spe–
cial to make a living figure. Nothing could have shocked James worse
than Wells' notion that the patiently projected essence of his stories
amounted to nothing more than "a bit of string." For James, unlike
the aesthetes of the nineties, always insisted on the supreme impor-
tance of subject, yet insisted also that what was important could not /
be legislated arbitrarily but must be determined by the artist's own
seasoned vision of experience, and that substance could be produced '
only through form.
