"That idea I picked up when I corrected George Eliot's proofs, oh! so long ago!" one can imagine Mr James saying, "that idea that art must be ballasted by didacticism can't be true for me. I've fined it down, in my reading of the French, to an opinion that the artist should use his fancy work to decorate useful articles; but still it isn't true for me. For I must, before I can decorate them, make the useful articles of thought my own, and they are just the one thing that for all my mental wealth I can't acquire. I see them often enough in the shop-windows--the moral and political and philosophical problems so prodigiously produced by my age--and many times have tried the door, but to my touch it never opens, so I have to describe them as I see them through the glass, without having felt or known them with the intimacy of possession! It's true I did once deal with a situation in the history of two peoples, but I see now that in its international character there was an intimation that it was the last with which I should ever effectively concern myself. For I'm destructively not national; my mind is engraved with the sights and social customs of half-a-dozen countries, and with the deep traditions of not one, and how can I deal deeply with the conduct of a people when I haven't a notion of the quality or quantity of the traditions which are, after all, its mainspring? It seems to me that the cry of "Art for Art's sake," which is being raised by those young men, and which certainly isn't true for _them_, may be true for _me_. What if henceforth I release the winged steed of my recording art from the obligation of dragging up the steep hill of my inaptitude the dray filled with the heavy goods which I have amassed in my perhaps so mistaken desire for a respectably weighty subject, and let the poor thing just beautifully soar?"