least by
intention--to the air of beauty. There is an awkwardness again in having
thus belatedly to point such features out; but in that wrought
appearance of animation and harmony, that effect of free movement and
yet of recurrent and insistent reference, _The Tragic Muse_ has struck
me again as conscious of a bright advantage.

HENRY JAMES.

BOOK FIRST

I

The people of France have made it no secret that those of England, as a
general thing, are to their perception an inexpressive and speechless
race, perpendicular and unsociable, unaddicted to enriching any bareness
of contact with verbal or other embroidery. This view might have derived
encouragement, a few years ago, in Paris, from the manner in which four
persons sat together in silence, one fine day about noon, in the garden,
as it is called, of the Palais de l'Industrie--the central court of the
great glazed bazaar where, among plants and parterres, gravelled walks
and thin fountains, are ranged the figures and groups, the monuments and
busts, which form in the annual exhibition of the Salon the department
of statuary. The spirit of observation is naturally high at the Salon,
quickened by a thousand artful or artless appeals, but it need have put
forth no great intensity to take in the characters I mention. As a
solicitation of the eye on definite grounds these visitors too
constituted a successful plastic fact; and even the most superficial
observer would have marked them as products of an insular neighbourhood,
representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on the
recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a holiday--Christmas
and Easter, Whitsuntide and the autumn--Paris besprinkles itself at a
night's notice. They had about them the indefinable professional look
of the British traveller abroad; the air of preparation for exposure,
material and moral, which is so oddly combined with the serene
revelation of security and of persistence, and which excites, according
to individual susceptibility, the ire or the admiration of foreign
communities. They were the more unmistakable as they presented mainly
the happier aspects of the energetic race to which they had the honour
to belong. The fresh diffused light of the Salon made them clear and
important; they were finished creations, in their way, and, ranged there
motionless on their green bench, were almost as much on exhibition as if
they had been hung on the line.

Thr