The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (6.1895)

By Henry James 59
a grand indifference, into a reckless consciousness of art. The
voice of the market had suddenly grown faint and far ; he had
come back at the last, as people so often do, to one of the moods,
the sincerities, of his prime. Was he really, with a blurred sense
of the pressing, doing something now only for himself? We
wondered and waited—we felt that he was a little confused.
What had happened, I was afterwards satisfied, was that he had
quite forgotten whether he generally sold or not. He had merely
waked up one morning again in the country of the blue, and he
had stayed there with a good conscience and a great idea. He
stayed till death knocked at the gate, for the pen dropped from his
hand only at the moment when, from sudden failure of the heart,
his eyes, as he sank back in his chair, closed for ever. Deroga-
tion is a splendid fragment ; it evidently would have been one of
his high successes. How far it would have waked up the libraries
is of course a very different question.