rs to them for many years to come.

2. THE ARTIST AT WORK.

Henry James's amanuensis, Miss Theodora Bosanquet, wrote an article a
year or two ago in the _Fortnightly Review_, describing how the great
man wrote his novels. Since 1895 or 1896 he dictated them, and they were
taken down, not in shorthand, but directly on the typewriter. He was
particular even about the sort of typewriter. It must be a Remington.
"Other kinds sounded different notes, and it was almost impossibly
disconcerting for him to dictate to something that made no responsive
sound at all." He did not, however, pour himself out to his amanuensis
without having made a preliminary survey of the ground. "He liked to
'break ground' by talking to himself day by day about the characters and
the construction until the whole thing was clearly before his mind's
eye. This preliminary talking out the scheme was, of course, duly
recorded by the typewriter. "It is not that he made rough drafts of his
novels-sketches to be afterwards amplified. "His method might better be
compared with Zola's habit of writing long letters to himself about
characters in his next book until they became alive enough for him to
begin a novel about them." Henry James has himself, as Miss Bosanquet
points out, described his method of work in _The Death of a Lion_, in
which it is attributed to his hero, Neil Paraday. "Loose, liberal,
confident," he declares of Faraday's "scenario," as one might call it,
"it might be passed for a great, gossiping, eloquent letter--the
overflow into talk of an artist's amorous plan."

Almost the chief interest of Henry James's two posthumous novels is the
fact that we are given not only the novels themselves--or, rather, the
fragments of them that the author had written--but the "great,
gossiping, eloquent letters" in which he soliloquized about them. As a
rule, these preliminary soliloquies ran to about thirty thousand words,
and were destroyed as soon as the novel in hand was finished. So
delightful are they--such thrilling revelations of the workings of an
artist's mind--that one does not quite know whether or not to
congratulate oneself on the fact that the last books have been left mere
torsos. Which would one rather have--a complete novel or the torso of a
novel with the artist's dream of how to make it perfect? It is not easy
to decide. What makes it all the more difficult to decide in the present
instance is one's feeling that _The Sense of