The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (7.1895)

A Few Notes upon Mr. James

By Lena Milman

I

o think of form as characteristic of emptiness, as though all


1 spheres were bubbles, is an aesthetic heresy bequeathed to us
by the Puritans who, as surely as they added to our national
muscle, bereft us of a certain sensibility of touch. In their eyes,
art was a mere concession to the bauble-loving folly of the crowd,
and beauty itself was anathema to the wise few unless it clothed
some grave moral teaching, which could not otherwise be made
acceptable to the foolish many. Bunyan could not help but deck
his parable in the beautiful prose of his day, but he would have
scorned to bespangle it consciously with jewels of diction, and he
could only shudder if he realised that Mercy and Greatheart spoke
the same idiom as the players of Vanity Fair.
The contempt for the short story prevalent in England, but
unknown elsewhere, is surely as traceable to Puritan influence as
the mutilation of the Mary Altar at Ely, and of the shrine of
Saint Thomas ; for, insisting, as it has become our English bent
to do, upon some serious side-purpose in art, we are not content
with a beautiful suggestion, with a sketch be it never so masterly ;
the narrative must illustrate a principle, the picture, a fact. It is