I want her name ... her Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have some bright combination with that; the essence of which is a surname of two syllables and ending in a consonant—­also beginning with one.  I am thinking of Moyra Grabham, the latter excellent thing was in The Times of two or three days ago; the only fault is a little too much meaning.

Consciousness in artistry can seldom have descended to minuter details with a larger gesture.  One would not have missed these games of genius with syllables and consonants for worlds.  Is it all an exquisite farce or is it splendidly heroic?  Are we here spectators of the incongruous heroism of an artist who puts a hero’s earnestness into getting the last perfection of shine on to a boot or the last fine shade of meaning into the manner in which he says, “No, thank you, no sugar”?  No, it is something more than that.  It is the heroism of a man who lived at every turn and trifle for his craft—­who seems to have had almost no life outside it.  In the temple of his art, he found the very dust of the sanctuary holy.  He had the perfect piety of the artist in the least as well as in the greatest things.

3.  HOW HE WAS BORN AGAIN

As one reads the last fragment of the autobiography of Henry James, one cannot help thinking of him as a convert giving his testimony.  Henry James was converted into an Englishman with the same sense of being born again as is felt by many a convert to Christianity.  He can speak of the joy of it all only in superlatives.  He had the convert’s sense of—­in his own phrase—­“agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know how endearingly enough to name them I).”  He speaks of “this really prodigious flush” of his first full experience of England.  He passes on the effect of his religious rapture when he tells us that “really wherever I looked, and still more wherever I pressed, I sank in and in up to my nose.”  How breathlessly he conjures up the scene of his dedication, as he calls it, in the coffee-room of a Liverpool hotel on that gusty, “overwhelmingly English” March morning in 1869, on which at the age of almost twenty-six he fortunately and fatally landed on these shores,

     with immediate intensities of appreciation, as I may call the
     muffled accompaniment, for fear of almost indecently overnaming it.

He looks back, with how exquisite a humour and seriousness, on that morning as having finally settled his destiny as an artist.  “This doom,” he writes:—­

This doom of inordinate exposure to appearances, aspects, images, every protrusive item almost, in the great beheld sum of things, I regard ... as having settled upon me once for all while I observed, for instance, that in England the plate of buttered muffins and its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after hot water had been ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that circumstance in a perfect cloud of