l case, and almost a generic;
but it is not only in Boswell, it is in every biography with any salt of
life, it is in every history where events and men, rather than ideas,
are presented--in Tacitus, in Carlyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay--that
the novelist will find many of his own methods most conspicuously and
adroitly handled. He will find besides that he, who is free--who has the
right to invent or steal a missing incident, who has the right, more
precious still, of wholesale omission--is frequently defeated, and, with
all his advantages, leaves a less strong impression of reality and
passion. Mr. James utters his mind with a becoming fervour on the
sanctity of truth to the novelist; on a more careful examination truth
will seem a word of very debateable propriety, not only for the labours
of the novelist, but for those of the historian. No art--to use the
daring phrase of Mr. James--can successfully "compete with life"; and
the art that seeks to do so is condemned to perish _montibus aviis_.
Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most
various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the
ear, to the mind--the seat of wonder, to the touch--so thrillingly
delicate, and to the belly--so imperious when starved. It combines and
employs in its manifestation the method and material, not of one art
only, but of all the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few
of life's majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of
light and colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth of
incident, of moral obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture, and
agony, with which it teems. To "compete with life," whose sun we cannot
look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and slay us--to compete
with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire,
the bitterness of death and separation--here is, indeed, a projected
escalade of heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress
coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed
with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the
insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense; none can "compete with
life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts, but these
facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even when we read of
the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are surprised and justly
commend the author's talent, if our pulse be quicken