almost said) fuller
without it. Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant;
a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational,
flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate
thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience,
like an air artificially made by a discreet musician. A proposition of
geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a
fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both
untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.
The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to
life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of
leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, a difference
which is designed and significant, and is both the method and the
meaning of the work.

The life of man is not the subject of novels, but the inexhaustible
magazine from which subjects are to be selected; the name of these is
legion; and with each new subject--for here again I must differ by the
whole width of heaven from Mr. James--the true artist will vary his
method and change the point of attack. That which was in one case an
excellence, will become a defect in another; what was the making of one
book, will in the next be impertinent or dull. First each novel, and
then each class of novels, exists by and for itself. I will take, for
instance, three main classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the
novel of adventure, which appeals to certain almost sensual and quite
illogical tendencies in man; second, the novel of character, which
appeals to our intellectual appreciation of man's foibles and mingled
and inconstant motives; and third, the dramatic novel, which deals with
the same stuff as the serious theatre, and appeals to our emotional
nature and moral judgment.

And first for the novel of adventure. Mr. James refers, with singular
generosity of praise, to a little book about a quest for hidden
treasure; but he lets fall, by the way, some rather startling words. In
this book he misses what he calls the "immense luxury" of being able to
quarrel with his author. The luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our
judgment, to be submerged by the tale as by a billow, and only to awake,
and begin to distinguish and find fault, when the piece is over and the
volume laid aside. Still more remarkable is Mr. James's reason. He
cannot cr