woven that message, or meaning, that `figure in the carpet,' which
eluded even the elect. It is thus that we know Neil Paraday, the MS.
of whose last book was mislaid and lost so tragically, so comically.
And it is also through Paraday's disciple that we make incidental
acquaintance with Guy Walsingham, the young lady who wrote OBSESSIONS,
and with Dora Forbes, the burly man with a red moustache, who wrote
THE OTHER WAY ROUND. These two books are the only inferior books
mentioned by Mr. James. But stay, I was forgetting THE TOP OF THE
TREE, by Amy Evans; and also those nearly forty volumes by Henry St.
George. For all the greatness of his success in life, Henry St. George
is the saddest of the authors portrayed by Mr. James. His SHADOWMERE
was splendid, and its splendour is the measure of his shame--the shame
he bore so bravely--in the ruck of his `output.' He is the only one of
those authors who did not do his best. Of him alone it may not be said
that he was `generous and delicate and pursued the prize.' He is a
more pathetic figure than even Dencombe, the author of THE MIDDLE
YEARS. Dencombe's grievance was against fate, not against himself.

"It had taken too much of his life to produce too little of his art
The art had come, but it had come after everything else. `Ah, for
another go !--ah, for a better chance.'... `A second chance--that's
the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark--we
do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our
passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.'"

The scene of Dencombe's death is one of the most deeply-beautiful
things ever done by Mr. James. It is so beautiful as to be hardly sad;
it rises and glows and gladdens. It is more exquisite than anything in
THE MIDDLE YEARS. No, I will not say that. Mr. James's art can always
carry to us the conviction that his characters' books are as fine as