There is no solution; believe me, no solution of life’s enigma worth the reading.... What solution can you hope to find, brooding on your own heart, on this narrow plot of grass shut in by lofty walls? You, and natures like yours, make this great error; you are moralizing and speculating upon what life ought to be, and in the meantime it slips by you, and you are nothing, and life is gone. I have heard, you doubtless, in a fine concert of viols extemporary descant upon a thorough-bass in the Italian manner, when each performer in turn plays such a variety of descant, in concordance to the bass, as his skill and the present invention may suggest to him. In this manner of play the consonances invariably fall true upon a given note, and every succeeding note of the ground is met, now in the unison or octave, now in the concords, preserving the melody throughout by the laws of motion and sound. I have thought that this is life. To a solemn bass of mystery and of the unseen each man plays his own descant, as his taste or fate suggests; but this manner of play is so governed and controlled by what seems a fatal necessity that all melts into a species of harmony; and even the very discords and dissonances, the wild passions and deeds of men, are so attempered and adjusted that without them the entire piece would be incomplete. In this way I look upon life as a spectacle. IV LITERARY MEN WHO LOVED MUSIC THE MUSICAL TASTE OF TURGÉNIEFF I Mr. Henry James, who is exquisitely aware of the presence of others, has written of Iván Turgénieff with astonishing candor. In his Partial Portraits a picture of the great, gentle Russian writer is slowly built up by strokes like smoke. There is much of his troubled melancholy, some of his humor, and, rare for Mr. James, distinct allusions to Turgénieff’s attitude in the presence of the American-born novelist’s work. Turgénieff cared little for criticism. It pleased him to know that his friends loved him and read his books. He did not read theirs; Mr. James admits he did not pretend to read _his_, though the older man confessed to having found one of the novels written _de main de maitre_. His heedlessness about himself and his affairs is proverbial. He was robbed of 130,000 francs, “a fairly large slice of his fortune,” he writes Flaubert, but has blame for himself, not for the dishonest steward of his estates. Like Flaubert, he was rich, very rich for a literary man, and like the author of Bouvard et Pécuchet, he was continually giving, eternally giving, said his Paris friends, indignant at the spectacle of both men denuding themselves of more than their surplus income.