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up to is plot summaries with a little critical seasoning; but since blatant
synopses are pedestrian affairs, we tend to get somewhat oblique and
foreshortened ones, making
Eight Modern Writers
not quite so good a
sophomore English trot as it might have been.
The style is often charming, suffused with pleasant imagery and
wit. When James writes about New York, "he has an assured command
of his social scene, whereas in the international novels we have a constant
sense of characters conspiring with their creator to keep up a high style,
like women on the walls of a Royal Academy exhibition, anxiously
holding poses of unaccustomed stateliness and grace." Or: "William
Butler Yeats was one day to celebrate in verse a Butler who had borne
arms at the Boyne. But he was unfortunately under a misapprehension
as to which side this forebear had fought on, making necessary not the
least curious of the innumerable revisions of his work." But the leisureli–
ness can bog down into stagnancy, as in this comment on
Tess of the
D'Urbervilles:
The regardlessness of the universe towards that which has
tragically come to consciousness within it is now seen as
min–
iatured in the regardlessness of society towards the individual.
THE NEW YORKER THEATER
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