recognition, the determination in advance, of the just limits and the
just extent of the situation, ANY situation, that appeals, and that yet,
by the presumable, the helpful law of situations, must have its reserves
as well as its promises. The storyteller considers it because it
promises, and undertakes it, often, just because also making out, as he
believes, where the promise conveniently drops. The promise, for
instance, of the case I have just named, the case of the account to be
taken, in a circle of free talk, of a new and innocent, a wholly
unacclimatised presence, as to which such accommodations have never had
to come up, might well have appeared as limited as it was lively; and if
these pages were not before us to register my illusion I should never
have made a braver claim for it. They themselves admonish me, however,
in fifty interesting ways, and they especially emphasise that truth of
the vanity of the a priori test of what an idee-mere may have to give.
The truth is that what a happy thought has to give depends immensely on
the general turn of the mind capable of it, and on the fact that its
loyal entertainer, cultivating fondly its possible relations and
extensions, the bright efflorescence latent in it, but having to take
other things in their order too, is terribly at the mercy of his mind.
That organ has only to exhale, in its degree, a fostering tropic air in
order to produce complications almost beyond reckoning. The trap laid
for his superficial convenience resides in the fact that, though the
relations of a human figure or a social occurrence are what make such
objects interesting, they also make them, to the same tune, difficult to
isolate, to surround with the sharp black line, to frame in the square,
the circle, the charming oval, that helps any arrangement of objects to
become a picture. The storyteller has but to have been condemned by
nature to a liberally amused and beguiled, a richly sophisticated, view
of relations and a fine inquisitive speculative sense for them, to find
himself at moments flounder in a deep warm jungle. These are the moments