The question that most interests me is the one I posed at the outset: Is this to be the fiction of the future, are The Wings of a Dove or The Ambassadors—the latter is a marvellous illusion—and studies of the like to be considered as prose equivalents of such moderns as Whistler, Monet, Munch, Debussy, Rodin, Richard Strauss, and the rest? In latter-day art the tendency to throw overboard superfluous baggage is a marked one. The James novel is one of grand simplifications. As the symphony has been modified by Berlioz and Liszt until it assumed the shape of the symphonic poem, and was finally made over into the guise of the tone-poem by Richard Strauss, so the novel of manners of the future must stem from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education or else remain an academic imitation, a replica of Thackeray or of George Eliot’s inelastic moulds. Despite its length—“heavenly,” as Schumann would say—Sentimental Education contains in solution all that the newer novelists have since accomplished. Zola has clumsily patterned after it, Daudet found there his impressionism anticipated. All the new men, Maupassant, Huysmans, Loti, Barrès, Mirbeau, and others, discovered in this cyclopædic man what they needed; for if Flaubert is the father of realism he is also a parent of symbolism. His excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric significance to his words sound the note of symbolism. Mr. James dislikes Sentimental Education, yet he has not failed to benefit by the radical formal changes Flaubert introduced in his novel, changes more revolutionary than Wagner’s in the music-drama. I call the James novel a simplification. All the conventional chapter endings are dispensed with; many are suspended cadences. All barren modulations from event to event are swept away—unprepared dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive padding—that bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at every speech of a character’s name. The elliptical method James has absorbed from Flaubert; his oblique psychology is his own. All this makes difficult reading for the reader accustomed to the cheap hypnotic passes of fiction mediums. Nothing is forestalled, nothing is obvious, and one is forever turning the curve of the unexpected; yet while the story is trying in its bareness, the situations are not abnormal. You rub your eyes when you finish, for with all your attention, painful in its intensity, you have witnessed a pictorial evocation; both picture and evocation wear magic in their misty attenuations. And there is always the triumph of poetic feeling over mere sentiment. Surely Milly Theale is the most exquisite portrait in his gallery of exquisite portraiture. Her life is a miracle, and her ending supreme art. The entire book is filled with the faintly audible patter of destiny’s tread behind the arras of life, of microphonic reverberations, of a crescendo that sets your soul shivering long before the climax.