We must pause here a moment to be emphatic. Art is not life and never can be. Life is not art and never can be. This is just as true of writing as of painting or sculpture. All art is necessarily dead. All art is necessarily a _representation_ of life or some aspect of it. The moment a person begins to paint or to model or to write and allow himself to think of any kind of _art_ in what he is doing, he goes into a fourth dimension--and life exists in only three dimensions. This is not to say that art is undesirable; it is highly desirable, is, in fact, almost as necessary to our souls as a fourth dimension is to the mathematician. The fourth dimension is a spiritual necessity to the mathematician; it is the future life in the terms of his trade. And so, if a writer would keep life in what he writes, he must not think of art at all. He must not have any of the artist’s special preoccupations. He must go at his writing just as he would go at living. If he could keep self-consciousness of what he is doing or trying to do entirely out of his work he would succeed completely. And succeed completely he never does. How nearly he can come to complete success we know from some of Kipling, O. Henry, most of Conrad, one book of Thomas Hardy’s--we name a few modern writers just for the sake of specific illustration and illustration instantly familiar to any reader of this book. Mrs. Wharton is sometimes spoken of as a pupil of Henry James, and the resemblance is strong in some of her work to that of James, but she is not his pupil. It is simply a case of the similar products of largely similar inheritances and environment. Both these writers were from birth well-to-do, both had exceptional education and lived and moved in cultivated surroundings. Their endowments were not unlike though more disparate than their circumstances. James had a greater gift and ruined it more completely. _The Portrait of a Lady_ is the everlasting witness of what he might have done by the fact of what, in that superb novel, he did do. _Ethan Frome_, _The House of Mirth_ and _Summer_ are all inferior to _The Portrait of a Lady_ and all superior to James’s later work.