Henry James

I

IF any career can be called happy before it is closed, that of Mr. Henry James may certainly be so called. It has been a long one — much longer already than the space of time allotted to a generation. It has been quite free from any kind of mistake: there is probably nothing in it he would change if he could — for though he has more or less slightly revised two or three of his early books, the need of doing so would not have occurred to any one whose record was not so satisfactory on the whole as to make it seem to him worth while to add a touch or two and make it quite as he would have it. It has been, in a very special way and to a very marked degree, an honorable career. He has scrupulously followed his ideal. Neither necessity nor opportunity has prevented him from doing, apparently, just what he wanted. He has never, at any rate, yielded to the temptation to give the public what it wanted. The rewards of so doing are very great. Most writers in belittling them would be justly suspected of affectation. They include, for example, the pleasure of being read, and this is a pleasure usually so difficult to forego when it is attainable that Mr. James’s indifference to it is striking. And — what is still more striking — he has never, as he himself expresses it somewhere in characterization of some other writer, — who must, however, have been his own inferior in this respect, — he has never “saved for his next book.” Of his special order of talent fecundity is not what one would naturally have predicted, and though he has abundantly demonstrated his possession of it, he must have long given us his best before he could have been at all sure that he could count on matching his best indefinitely. Into the frame of every book he packed, not only the substance called for by the subject, but a substance as remarkable for containing all he could himself bring to it, as for compression. At least, if his substance has sometimes been thin, it has always been considered; however fine-spun its texture, it has always been composed of thought. And his expression, tenuous as it may sometimes appear, is (especially, indeed, when its tenuity is greatest) so often dependent for its comprehension on what it suggests rather than on what it states as to compel the inference that it is incomplete expression, after all, of the amount of thought behind it.

So that he never leaves the impression of superficiality. His material, even his result, may be as slight as his own insistent predetermination can make it; it is impossible not to feel that it is the work of an artist who is not only serious, but profound. Behind his sketch you feel the careful and elaborate preliminary study; back of his triviality you feel the man of reflection. And this is not at all because his triviality — to call it such — is significant in itself. It often is, and the trifling feature, incident, movement, or phrase, often has a typical value that makes it in effect but the expression of a larger thing than it embodies. But often, on the other hand, it is difficult to assign any strikingly interpretative or illustrative value to the insubstantial phenomena that he is at the pains of observing so narrowly and recording so copiously. And yet it can occur to no sensitive and candid intelligence to refer to the capacity of the recorder this flimsiness of the record. One has the sense in the treatment, the technic, of a firm and vigorous hand— such as is, in general, perhaps,needed for the carving of “émaux et camées.” And still more in the substance one perceives, as well as argues, the solidity and dignity underlying the superficial and insignificant details with which “wonderfully ” — to use a favorite word of Mr. James — they are occupied. The sense of contrast is indeed often piquant. Cuvier lecturing on a single bone and reconstructing the entire skeleton from it is naturally impressive, but Mr. James often presents the spectacle of a Cuvier absorbed in the positive fascinations of the single bone itself, — yet plainly preserving the effect of a Cuvier the while. If, in a word, his work sometimes seems superficial, it never seems the work of a superficial personality; and the exasperation of some of his unfriendly critics proceeds from wondering, not so much how a writer who has produced such substantial, can also produce such trifling, work, as how the writer whose very treatment of triviality shows him to be serious can be so interested in the superficial.

The explanation, I think, is that to Mr. James himself life, considered as artistic material, is so serious and so significant that nothing it contains seems trivial to him. And as artistic material is, in fact, the only way in which he appears to consider it at all. In spite of his prolixity on occasion, there is no padding in his books, no filling in of general ideas or other interesting distention. His parentheses are, it is true, apt to be cognate digressions rather than nuances of the matter in hand. But that is a question of style, and in any case addiction to parentheses is apt to proceed from an unwillingness to stray very far from the matter in hand, to let go one’s hold of it. And save for his parentheses, Mr. James holds his reader to the matter — or rather the absence of matter — in hand rather remorselessly. One would like more space, more air.

His copiousness, too, is the result of his seriousness. If he eschews the foreign, he revels in the pertinent; and, pertinence being his sole standard of exclusion, he is bound to include much that is trivial. We have the paradox of an art attitude that is immaculate with an art product that is ineffective. It is as crowded with detail and as tight as a pre-Raphaelite picture,because there are no salutary sacrifices. It is not because he is a man, but because he is an artist, that nothing human is foreign to him. No rectitude was ever less partial or more passionless. No novelist ever evinced more profound respect for his material as material, or conformed his art more rigorously to its characteristic expression. Thus it is due to his seriousness that a good deal of his substance seems less significant to his readers than to him, both in itself and because (out of his own deep respect for it, doubtless) he does little or nothing to enhance its interest and importance. It is not commonly appreciated that his work is, after all, the quintessence of realism.

II

The successive three “manners” of the painters have been found in it. Mr. James has had, at any rate, two. There is a noteworthy difference between his earlier and his later fiction, though the period of transition between them is not very definite as a period. Perhaps The Tragic Muse comprises it. He has, however, thrown himself so devotedly into his latest phase as to make everything preceding it appear as the stages of an evolution. Tendencies, nevertheless, in his earlier work, marked enough to individualize it sharply, have developed until they have subdued all other characteristics, and have made of him perhaps the most individual novelist of his day, who at the same time is also in the current of its tendency, — Mr. Meredith standing quite apart from this in eminent isolation. It is through these tendencies, developed as they have been, that in virtue of originality as well as of excellence he has won his particular place in the hierarchy of fiction. He has created a genre of his own. He has the distinction that makes the scientist a savant; he has contributed something to the sum, the common stock. His distinction has really a scientific aspect, independent, that is to say, of quality, of intrinsic merit. If it should be asserted that Mr. Meredith has done the same thing,—in a way, too, not so very differently,—it can be replied that he has done so by weakening the correspondence of fiction to life, whereas Mr. James has striven hard for its intensification; it is not the construction of the scientific toy, however interesting it may be, and however much science there may be in it, that makes the savant. This flowering of Mr. James’s tendencies has, in fact, been precisely what he conceives to be the achievement of a more and more intimate and exquisite correspondence with life in his art. This at least has been his conscious, his professed aim. His observation, always his master faculty, has grown more and more acute, his concentration upon the apprehensible phenomena of the actual world of men and women—and children — closer, his interest in producing his illusion by reproducing these in as nearly as possible their actual essence and actual relations, far more absorbing and complete. Indeed, he has been so interested in producing his illusion in precisely this way, that he has decidedly compromised, I think, the certainty of producing it at all.

He has parted, then, with his past,— the past, let us say, of The Portrait of a Lady, — in the pursuit of a more complete illusion of nature than he could feel that he achieved on his old lines,— the old lines, let us add, observed in the masterpieces of fiction hitherto. It is true that his observation has been from the first so clearly his distinguishing faculty that his present practice may superficially seem to differ from his former merely in degree. But a little more closely considered, it is a matter rather of development than of augmentation. In the course of its exercise his talent has been transformed. He has reversed the relation between his observation and his imagination, and instead of using the former to supply material for the latter, has enlisted the latter very expressly — oh! sometimes, indeed, worked it very hard — in the service of his observation. Of what he might have achieved by pursuing a different course, I cannot myself think without regret. But instead of seeking that equilibrium of one’s powers which seems particularly pertinent to the expression of precisely such an organization as his, — instead of, to that end, curbing his curiosity and cultivating his constructive, his reflective, his imaginative side, the one being already markedly preponderant and the other comparatively slender, — he has followed the path of temperamental preference and developed his natural bent. The result is his present eminence, which is, in consequence, incontestably more nearly unique, but which is not for that reason necessarily more distinguished. His art has thus become, one is inclined to say, the ordered exploitation of his experiences. The change from his earlier manner is so great that it constitutes, as I say, a transformation. It is somewhat as if a transcendentalist philosopher should become so enamoured of truth as, finding it inexhaustibly manifested in everything, to fall in love with phenomena and gradually acquire an absolutely a posteriori point of view. Like Lessing, Mr. James has “bowed humbly to the left hand,” and, saying to the Almighty, “pure truth is for Thee alone,” has renounced the vision for the pursuit.

The most delicate, the most refined and elegant of contemporary romancers has thus become the most thorough-going realist of even current fiction. It is but a popular error to confound realism with grossness, and it is his complete exclusion of idealism and preoccupation with the objective that I have in mind in speaking of his realism as so marked; though of recent years he has annexed the field of grossness also,— cultivating it, of course, with particular circumspection, — and thus rounded out his domain. It must be granted that his realism does not leave a very vivid impression of reality, on the one hand, and that, on the other, it does not always produce the effect of a very close correspondence to actual life and character. The Spoils of Poynton, with its inadequate motive and aspiration after the tragic; The Other House, with its attempt to domesticate melodrama; In the Cage, with its exclusion of all the surrounding data, needed to give authenticity to an even robuster theme; The Awkward Age, with its impossible cleverness of stupid people, are, as pictures of life, neither very lifelike nor very much alive. But that is a matter of art. The attitude of the artist is plainly, uncompromisingly realistic. It is the real with which his fancy, his imaginativeness, is exclusively preoccupied. To discover new and unsuspected phenomena in its psychology is the aim of his divination as well as of his scrutiny. The ideal counterpart of the real and the actual which even such realists as Thackeray and George Eliot have constantly, however subconsciously, in mind, and the image of which, whether or no as universal as the Platonic philosophy pretends, is at least part of the material of the imaginative artist, — furnishing more or less vaguely the standard by which he admeasures both his own creation and its model, when he has one, — this ideal counterpart, so to speak, is curiously absent from Mr. James’s contemplation. Given a character with certain traits, suggested, no doubt, by certain specific experiences, its action is not deduced by ideal logic, but arrived at through induction from the artist’s entire stock of pertinent general experience, and modeled by its insistent pressure. “What conduct does my — rather unusual — experience lead me to expect of a personage constituted thus and so, in such and such circumstances ?” — one may imagine Mr. James reflecting.

Categories like realism and idealism are but convenient, and not exact, and in the practice of any artist both inspirations must be alternately present in the execution of detail, though one of them is surely apt to preponderate in the general conception and in the artist’s attitude. But it is certainly true that what may be called the ideal of realism has never been held more devoutly — not even by Zola — than it is by Mr. James. All his subtlety, his refinement, his extreme plasticity, his acquaintance with the academic as well as the actual, are at the service of truth, and that order of truth which is to be discovered rather than divined. Long ago, in speaking of George Sand’s idealism, which he admitted to be “very beautiful,” he observed: " Something even better in a novelist is that tender appreciation of actuality which makes even the application of a single coat of rose-color seem an act of violence.” The inspiration is a little different from Thackeray’s “If truth is not always pleasant, at least it is best.” It is more “artistic,” perhaps, certainly more disinterested. And at the present day Mr. James would no doubt go farther, omit the word “tender,” and for “rosecolor” substitute simply “any color at all.” It is an unselfish creed, one may remark in passing. Color is a variety of form, and it is a commonplace that form is the only passport to posterity. Moreover, as Mr. James concedes, even idealism at times is “very beautiful,” and to be compelled to forego beauty in “appreciation of the actual” (for its actuality, that is to say, rather than its beauty) must for an artist be a rigorous renunciation.

Mr. James has renounced it for the most part with admirable consistency, and his latest works are, in effort and inspiration at least, the very apotheosis of the actual—however their absence of color or other elements of form and the encumbrances of their style (the distinction is his own) may fail to secure the desired effect of actuality for them. What Maisie knew, for example, may seem to have been learned by a preternaturally precocious child, so that her actuality has not, perhaps, the relief desired by her author. But she can have no other raison d’être — for the supposition that even incidentally she is designed to illustrate the charm of the flower on the dunghill can be at best but a mere guess, so colorlessly is the assumed actuality of her precocity and extraordinary situation exhibited. The book, indeed, in this respect is a masterpiece of reserve. It is conspicuously free from any taint of rose-color. And in its suppression of the superfluous — such as even the remotest recognition of the pathos of Maisie’s situation — it is an excellent illustration of an order of art that must be radically theoretic, since it could not be the instinctive and spontaneous expression of a normally humane motive.

III

The truth is that our fiction is in a period of transition, which perhaps is necessarily hostile to spontaneity and favorable to the artificial. We speculate so much as to whether fiction is “a finer art ” as practised by the little, than it was in the day of the great, masters, that the present time may fairly be called the reign of theory in fiction — as indeed it is in art of any kind. And Mr. James’s art is in nothing more modern than in being theoretic. Whatever it is or is not, it is that. Difficult as, in many respects, it is to characterize, it is plainly what it is by precise intention, by system. Difficult as his theory is to define, it is perfectly clear that his art is the product of it. It is, in a word, a critical product. And it is so because his temperament is the critical temperament. Now, whatever may be said of the compatibility or incompatibility of the critical and the creative temperaments, in the matter of creating fiction it is evident that the critical genius wall be a different kind of a practitioner from the creative genius. The latter may be considered to produce the “criticism of life,” but the former will be likely to produce such criticism at one remove — with, in a word, theory interposed. Even supposing the creator to be also a critic, if his creative imagination preponderates, his theory will be a theory of life, whereas the theory of the writer in whom the critical bent preponderates will be a theory of art. We are said to suffer nowadays from a dearth of the creative imagination. Science, the great, the most nearly universal of the interests of the present time, is perhaps thought to be hostile to its entertainment, its development. But science with its own speedy determination toward specialism is probably less fatal to the imagination than is generally presumed. On the contrary, within its own range, its many ranges, it doubtless stimulates and fosters it. The decline of the creative imagination in literature, in poetry, and in fiction, is far more distinctly traceable to the spread of culture, with the consequent unexampled development of the philosophic and critical spirit and its inevitable invasion of the field of creative activity, the field, that is to say, of art. The contemporary artist, if he thinks at all, is compelled to think critically, to philosophize more expressly and specifically than the classic artist was. Consequently, even the creative imagination pure and simple is nowadays more rarely to be encountered than this imagination in combination with critical reflection.

But with Mr. James the case is far simpler. It would be idle to deny to the author of a shelf-full of novels and a thousand or two characters the possession of the creative imagination, however concentrated upon actuality and inspired by experience. Yet it is particularly true of him among the writers of even our own time that his critical faculty is eminently preponderant; that he has, as I say, essentially the critical temperament. He has never devoted himself very formally to criticism, never squared his elbows and settled down to the business of it. It has always been somewhat incidental and secondary with him. His essays have been limited to belles lettres in range, and they have not been the rounded, complete, and final characterization of the subject from a central point of view, such as the essays of Arnold, of Carlyle, or of Lowell. They have been instead rather agglutinate than synthetic, one may say, — not very attentively distributed or organized. But they have more than eschewed pedantry — they have been felicity itself; each a series of penetrating remarks, an agglomeration of light but telling touches, immensely discriminating, and absolutely free from traditional or temperamental deflection, marked by a taste at once fastidiously academic, and at the same time sensitively impressionable. The two volumes French Poets and Novelists and Partial Portraits stand at the head of American literary criticism. The Life of Hawthorne is, as a piece of criticism, altogether unrivaled in the voluminous English Men of Letters series to which all the eminent English critics have contributed. One may feel that his view of the general is, in this work, too elevated to permit him always correctly to judge the specific — leads him to characterize, for instance, Hawthorne’s environment as a handicap to him, whereas it was an opportunity. But to this same broad and academic view, which measures the individual by the standard of the type (and how few there are to whom this standard does not equitably apply!), we owe the most searching thing ever said about Hawthorne: “Man’s conscience was his theme, but he saw it in the light of a creative fancy which added out of its own substance an interest, and I may almost say, an importance.” The genius itself of criticism is in the application to Tennyson’s

of the epithets “curt” and “reserved” by comparison with Musset’s Letter to Lamartine. The essay on Maupassant is an unsurpassed critical performance. In Daniel Deronda: a Conversation, there are more penetrating things said about George Eliot, one is tempted to say, than in all else that has been written about her. And Mr. James’s penetration is uniformly based on good sense. It is — perhaps ominously — never fanciful. He writes of Musset and George Sand, of Balzac and Trollope, with a disinterested discrimination absolutely judicial. His fondness for Daudet, for Turgénieff, for Stevenson, is nothing in comparison with his interest in the art they practise, the art of which he is apt to consider all its practitioners somewhat too exclusively merely as its exponents. If he has a passion, it is for the art of fiction itself.

This is the theme, indeed, on which his criticism has centred, and the fact is extremely significant. It is almost exact to say that he has no other. He is vaguely preoccupied by it, even in the composition of his own fictions. That is what I mean by calling his art theoretic. It carefully, explicitly, with conviction, illustrates his theory. He has an essay expressly devoted to the topic, but he has almost none in which it is not more or less incidentally considered. In The Art of Fiction he says, “It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way, ” and that “the degree of interest” such an incident has “will depend upon the skill of the painter,” meaning the author. In his essay on Daudet he says: “The appearance of things is constantly more complicated as the world grows older, and it needs a more and more patient art, a closer notation, to divide it into its parts; ” “Life is, immensely, a matter of surface, and if our emotions in general are interesting, the form of those emotions has the merit of being the most definite thing about them; ” “Putting people into books is what the novelist lives on;” “It is the real — the transmuted real —that he gives us best; the fruit of a process that adds to observation what a kiss adds to a greeting. The joy, the excitement of recognition, are keen, even when the object recognized is dismal.”

Each of these sentences — and many more might be cited — is a key to his own fiction. The last is particularly indicative. The joy of recognition is what apparently he aims at exciting in his readers ; what certainly he often succeeds in exciting to the exclusion of other emotions, though the kiss he adds to his greeting—to adopt his charming figure — is oftenest, perhaps, an extremely chaste salute. Of course, in a sense, the word recognition defines the Platonic explanation of all appreciation of phenomena, but it is needless to say that Mr. James does not use the word in this sense, but refers to recognition of what we have already encountered in this life. And it must be admitted that the pleasure we take in his characters largely depends on whether or no we have so encountered them. If we have not, we are sometimes a little at sea as to the source of even his own interest in them, which, though certainly never profoundly personal, is often extremely prolonged. If we have, we experience the delight of the aficionado in the virtuosity with which what is already more or less vaguely familiar is unfolded to our recognition. But even in this case the recognition is something quite different from that with which we realize the actuality of a largely imaginative character. We recognize Daisy Miller, for example, differently from Becky Sharp.

For one thing, we are not so anxious to meet her again. I know of nothing that attests so plainly the preponderance of virtuosity in Mr. James’s art as the indisposition of his readers to re-read his books. This would not be so true if this element of his work frankly appeared. If he himself accepted it as such, he would make more of it in the traditional way, give it more form, express it more attentively, harmonize its character and statement more explicitly. There is no difficulty in re-reading Anatole France. But Mr. James’s virtuosity is not a matter of treatment, of expression, of “process,” as he would say. It is an integral part of the very fabric of his conception. It is engaged and involved in the substance of his works. The substance suffers accordingly. Instead of “a closer and more intimate correspondence with life,” the result of his critical theorizing about the what and the how of fiction is a confusion of life and art, which are actually as distinct as subject and statement. Virtuosity of technic is legitimate enough, but virtuosity of vision is quite another thing. And it is to this that Mr. James’s study and practice of the art for which he has quite as much of a passion as a penchant have finally brought him. The Sacred Fount,The Turn of the Screw, are marked instances of it. But all the later books show the tendency, a tendency all the more marked for the virility and elevation with which it is accompanied, and perhaps inevitable in the product of an overmastering critical faculty exercised in philosophizing about, even in the process of practising, an eminently constructive art.

IV

When we predicate elusiveness of Mr. James’s fiction we mean much more than that his meaning is occasionally obscure. We mean that he himself always eludes us. The completeness with which he does so, it is perhaps possible to consider the measure of his success. The famous theory that prescribes disinterestedness in art may be invoked in favor of this view. Every one is familiar with this theory, so brilliantly expounded by Taine, so cordially approved by Maupassant, so favorably viewed by Mr. James himself. Any one to whom Aristotle’s dictum that virtue resides in a mean seems especially applicable to art theories, must find it difficult to accept this prescription even in theory. Even in theory it seems possible to have too little as well as too much of the artist himself in any work of art. The presence of the personality of the artist, indeed, may be called the constituting element of a work of art. It is even the element that makes one scientific demonstration what the scientists themselves call more “beautiful” than another. But in practice one may surely say that in some instances or on some occasions we do not feel the artist enough in his work. Just as on others we are altogether too conscious of him.

It is the latter difficulty that has been the more frequent in fiction up to the present age, perhaps, and in English fiction perhaps up to the present moment. And very likely it is this circumstance that has led to the generalization, and the present popularity of the generalization, which insists on the attitude of disinterested curiosity as the only properly artistic attitude. Even in criticism, so much had been endured from the other attitude, Arnold — whose practice, to be sure, was quite different — observed that the great art was “to get oneself out of the way and let humanity judge.” We have had so much partisanship that we have proscribed personality.

Disinterested curiosity is, however, itself a very personal matter. Carried to the extent to which it is carried by Mr. James, at least, it becomes very sensible, a very appreciable element of a work of art. It is forced upon one’s notice as much as an aggressive and intrusive personal element could be. To say that if you set the pieces of a work of art in a certain relative position they will automatically, as it were, generate the effect to be produced is to be tremendously sanguine of their intrinsic interest and force. Even then the artist’s presence is only minimized, not excluded, one may logically observe; the pieces must be set together in a certain way, and this way will depend on the idiosyncrasy of the artist and not upon the inherent affinity of the pieces. They may have a law of combination, but to prepare them for its operation the law must be perceived by the artist as a force to illustrate rather than merely to “notate,” if the result is to have an artistic rather than a scientific interest. As Mr. James himself has aptly said, “Art is merely a point of view, and genius mainly a way of looking at things.” And specifically as to fiction M. Bourget reports him as agreeing with him that the truest definition of a novel is “a personal view of life.” How is the “point of view,” above all the “personal” point of view, to be perceived, if the artist himself eludes us completely ? What is it we are looking at — the phenomena he is recording, or his view of the phenomena ? But the phenomena should of themselves show his view, it may be contended. If they do, there is nothing to be said. The question at bottom is, do they ?

The old practice gave us the point of view by stating it; nor could its statement even then always be called an artistic intrusion, a false note, a disillusion. It was not always imposed on the phenomena by main strength. When Thackeray was reproached with marrying Henry Esmond to Lady Castlewood, he replied, “ I did n’t do it; they did it themselves.” Some such artistic rectitude as that, recognizing the law of his own creations, is certainly to be required of the artist. But if his devotion is so thorough-going as to involve complete self-effacement, the practical result will be the disappearance, or at least the obscuration, of his point of view. That, I think, is the peril which Mr. James’s theory and practice of art have not sufficiently recognized. Disinterested curiosity may have much of the value that has been claimed for it. It may have been too much neglected in the past. And to point out its logical self-contradiction as an absolute prescription may be conceded to savor of hair-splitting. It is, nevertheless, only valuable as a means, as an agent. When it is worked so hard as itself to become a part of the effect, its value ceases. And in Mr. James’s later work what we get, what we see, what impresses us, is not the point of view, it is his own disinterested curiosity. It counts as part, as a main part, of the spectacle he provides for us. We see him busily getting out of the way, visibly withdrawing behind the screen of his story, illustrating his theory by palpably withholding from us the expected, the needful, exposition and explanation, making of his work, in fine, a kind of elaborate and complicated fortification between us and his personality.

One notable effect of this detachment in the novelist is that his characters do not seem to be his characters. Being the results of his observation, the fruit of his experiences, they do not count as his creations. We meet Mr. James’s in life, — or we do not meet them, — as it happens; but they do not figure importantly for us in the world of art. American travelers who drift about Europe — doubtless American residents of London—encounter their counterparts from time to time, and note with a pleasure that is always more acute than permanent how cleverly, how searchingly, Mr. James has caught an individual or fixed a type. Necessarily, however, a museum thus collected has rather an anthropological than an artistic interest. The novelist’s personages are not sufficiently unified by his own penchant, preference, personality, to constitute a society of varied individuals viewed and portrayed from one definite and particular point of view — as the characters of the great novelists do. There is not enough of their creator in them to constitute them a particular society. The society is simply differentiated by the variety and circumscribed by the limits of Mr. James’s experience (and, of course, its suggestions to an extremely sensitive and speculative mind); it is not coördinated, and, as it were, organized into an ideal correlation of the actual world as conceived by a novelist of imagination,—imagination not only such as Thackeray’s and George Eliot’s, but such as Trollope’s, even.

V

It is, however, not precise enough to say that Mr. James’s mind is essentially critical, and that therefore his attitude is essentially detached. There are two sufficiently distinct varieties of the critical mind, the philosophical and the scientific. Mr. James’s is the latter. And when that portion of literature which includes the works of the imagination is conceived as a criticism of life, it is so conceived in virtue of its illustrating the former — the philosophical spirit. So far as fiction is a criticism of life, it is so because it exhibits a philosophy of life, in general or in some particular. It is far more the scientific habit of viewing life and its phenomena that Mr. James illustrates. His characteristic attitude is that of scrutiny. His inspiration is curiosity. Certainly to affirm of so mature, so thoughtful, and so penetratingly observant a writer, that he has no philosophy of life would, aside from its impertinence, be quite unwarrantable. It is impossible not to feel in his fiction that he has made his own synthesis of “all this unintelligible world.” However impersonal and objective his art, it cannot conceal this. It is enough to be felt to give weight to his utterances, to furnish credentials for the larger correspondences and comparisons of his pictures to their moral analogies in life, to add authoritativeness to his expositions, and exorcise suspicion of their ephemeralness and superficiality. What I mean is that even in such a work as The Sacred Fount is to be discerned the man who has reflected on the traits and currents of existence, on their character and their implications, as well as the writer who notes the phenomena, without correlating them through the principles, of human life.

But what this philosophy is, it is idle to speculate. It is doubtless profound enough, and though one does not argue introspection of Mr. James’s temperament,— unless, indeed, his work betray an effort to escape it, as the nuisance it may easily become, — he could doubtless sketch it for us if inclined, and very eloquently and even elaborately draw out for us its principles and positions. But he has no interest whatever in doing so — no interest in giving us even a hint of it. One may infer that taste plays a large part in it, the taste that some philosophers have made the foundation and standard of morals, — the taste, perhaps, that prevents him from disclosing it. He has the air of assuming its universality, as if, indeed, it were a matter of breeding, a mere preference for “the best” in life as in art, a system, in a word, whose sanctions are instinctive, and so not strongly enough or consciously enough felt to call for emphasis or exposition. No manifestation or quality or incarnation of “the best” evokes his enthusiasm. That it “may prevail ” is the youngest of his cares. His philosophy appears in the penumbra of his performance as a cultivated indifference, or at most a subconscious basis of moral fastidiousness on which the superstructure that monopolizes his interest is erected.

There are two sufficiently obvious results. In the first place, his work has less importance as literature, because it has significance only as art. In the next place, his individuality is not accented, his books are not unified. If they were pervaded by, or even tinctured with, some general philosophic character, they would count in the mass for far more, — his œuvre, as the French say, would have more relief, his position in literature would be better defined and more important. As it is, for the lack of some unifying philosophy, each one is an independent illustration of some particular exercise of his talent, and his personality is dissipated by being thus disseminated.

What is it to have a philosophy of life ? In any sense in which it may be legitimately required of the artist, even of the artist who deals expressly with life, — of the poet, the dramatist, or the writer of fiction, — to have a philosophy of life certainly does not demand the possession of a body of doctrine “based on inter-dependent, subordinate, and coherent principles,” as has been prescribed by pedantry for criticism. It is simply to be profoundly impressed by certain truths. These truths need not be recondite, but they must be deeply felt. They need be in no degree original. The writer’s originality will have abundant scope in their expression. Goethe, it is true, replied to a perhaps not wholly pedantic criticism of Wilhelm Meister: “I should think a rich, manifold life brought close to our eyes would be enough in itself without any express tendency.” And Goethe is probably the greatest example of the artist and the philosopher combined. This observation, however, is confined to a single work; it is impossible to think of the author of Wilhelm Meister as the author only of it and of works of like aim and scope. And furthermore, the life which Mr. James’s books bring close to our eyes, though manifold, is not rich. It is remarkably multifarious, but “rich” is precisely the last epithet that could properly be applied to it.

It is, nevertheless, the result of observation of the most highly developed material, and if it lack vitality, it is not because it is commonplace or rudimentary. The converse is so pointedly the case as to constitute Mr. James’s chief excellence. It has been said of him that he has, not sounded the depths, but “charted the shallows” of life. But to say this is quite to miss the point about him. Occupy himself with the shallows he certainly often does, though quite without any attempt to chart them, any attempt at completeness. It is evident that he is not concerned to show them as shallows, with the inference that they compose a far larger part of life than is apprehended by current mechanical optimism. He does not deal with them in any such philosophical spirit. His scientific curiosity does not distinguish between the phenomena, all of which seem inexhaustibly interesting to him. Except certain coarsenesses, which probably seem almost, pathologic to him, or at any rate too ordinary and commonplace for treatment, nothing is to him, as I have said, too insignificant to be interesting, considered as material for artistic treatment. The treatment is to dignify the theme always. And in this attitude no one can fail to see, if not a deeper interest in art than in life, at least an interest in life so impartial and inclusive as to approach aridity so far as feeling is concerned. To take an interest in making interesting what is in itself perfectly colorless is, one must admit, almost to avow a fondness for the tour de force dear to the dilettante. Still it would be misleading to insist on this, because Mr. James’s intention is, on the whole, to indicate the significance of the apparently trifling, and not to protest that an artistic effect can be got out of next to nothing. It betrays the interest of the naturalist asseverating that nothing is really trifling, since it exists.

It is easy to lose one’s way in endeavoring to follow the clue of Mr. James’s preoccupation, but with due attention I think it may be done. And his interest in making interesting the pose and gesture of a lady standing by a table, let me recapitulate, is not, or is only a little, to produce an artistic effect with a minimum of means; nor is it to show that of such trifles human life is largely composed; it is to show that in life itself such things are interesting not only because everything is, but also because, though slight, they are subtle and certain indications of the character to which they belong. In this way he can find something recondite in what is superficially very simple. And I should say that it is, in a word, to the pursuit of the recondite in life that he has come more and more to consecrate his extraordinary powers. He sees it in everything, in the simple as well as in the complicated, in the shallows as well as in the depths. That is all one can truthfully say, perhaps, though of course in seeking it in the familiar and the commonplace it is difficult to avoid the semblance of mystification.

The pursuit of the recondite, however, is quite inconsistent with much dwelling on the meaning of life as a whole. And it is owing to his taking this so much for granted as so largely to exclude it from his fiction, that the life which Mr. James “brings close” to us should lack the “richness” that Goethe claimed for Wilhelm Meister. If he conceived the shallows as shallows and the depths as depths, he could hardly avoid taking a less arid view of them, and the astonishing variety of the phenomena that entertain and even absorb him would be grouped in some synthetic way around centres of coördinating feeling, instead of unrolled like a panorama of trifles hitherto unconsidered and tragedies hitherto unsuspected — exhibited like a naturalist’s collection made in a country accessible to all, but heretofore unvisited by the scientist with the seeing eye.

Hence, I think, the lack of large vitality in his books, of a sensibly noble and moving effect. The search for the recondite involves the absence of direct dealing with the elemental. The passions are perforce minimized, from being treated in their differentiation rather than in their universality, as well as from being so swamped in minutiæ as largely to lose their energy. His books are not moral theses, but psychological themes, studies not of forces, but of manifestations. The latter are related as cause and effect, perhaps, but not combined in far-reaching suggestiveness. The theme has weight at times, morally considered, but it is not rendered typical, as in George Eliot, for example. It is never either ominous or reassuring. It is never brought close, in Goethe’s words, to the reader. It makes him reflect, but speculatively; reason, but academically. It is an unfolding, a laying bare, but not a putting together. The imagination to which it is due is too tinctured with curiosity to be truly constructive. It has the disadvantage of never taking possession of the theme and conducting it masterfully. It is not a priori enough. It is held in the leash of observation and fettered by its voluntary submission to the material, to exhibit rather than to arrange which is its specific ambition. The work as a whole is thus necessarily coldly conceived. The heat is in the narration of detail. And thus the reader is impressed far more by the detail than by either the grand construction or by the general design. Above all, the characters, the portraiture of human nature, upon which the vitality of fiction depends, suffer from the recondite quality, which wars with the elemental and thus tends to eliminate the typical, the representative, which constitutes the basis of both effective illusion and significant truth. But of course all that makes types interesting is the possession of a philosophy of life. They imply classification, which is the last thing to be looked for in the espièglerie of the most precocious conceivable child among us merely occupied in taking notes.

VI

After all, the supreme test of a novelist’s abiding interest is the humanity of his characters. This is so true that Mr. James himself professes a preference for The House of the Seven Gables over the other romances of Hawthorne because it seems to him more of a novel. Hawthorne, however, was not a novelist, and The House of the Seven Gables, though no doubt his best novel, is the least characteristic of his larger productions. Actual life was not his theme. As Mr. James himself has pointed out, his characters, save for the Donatello of The Marble Faun, include no types. The same might be said of the personages of later and far less romantic writers. The type in fiction has become a little old-fashioned — at least the labeled and easily recognized type has. It is relegated to the stage, where, apparently, it will continue, from the limitations of the histrionic art, to be a necessity. In the novel it has largely succumbed to the conquering force of psychology, which in creating an individual and to that end emphasizing his idiosyncrasies has, almost proportionally, robbed him of his typical interest. And this is a loss for which absolutely nothing can atone in the work of the realistic novelist whose theme is actual life.

The list of Mr. James’s novels is a long one, and his short stories are very numerous; and among them all there is not one with a perfunctory or desultory inspiration. Why is it that they in no sense constitute a comédie humaine ? They are very populous; why is it that the characters that people them have so little relief ? Taken together they constitute the least successful element of his fiction. Partly this is because, as I say, they possess so little typical quality. But why also do they possess so little personal interest? They have, seemingly, astonishingly little, even for their creator. So far from knowing the sound of their voices, as Thackeray said of his, he is apparently less preoccupied with them than about the situation— the “predicament,” he would aptly say — in which he places them. Apparently he is chiefly concerned with what they are to do when confronted with the complications his ingenuity devises for them, — how they are to “pull it off.” These complications are sometimes very slight, in order to show what trifles control destinies; sometimes they are very grave, and designed to show the conflict of the soul with warring desires and distracting perplexities. And they are never commonplace — any more than the characters themselves, each one of which is intimately observed and thoroughly respected as an individuality. But their situation rather than themselves is what constitutes the claim, the raison d’être, of the book in which they figure. The interest in the book, accordingly, becomes analogous to that of a game in which the outcome rather than the pieces monopolizes the attention. It cannot be said that the pieces are not attentively described,— some of them, indeed, are very artistically and even beautifully carved, — but it is the moves that count most of all. Will Densher give a plausible solution to the recondite problem of how to combine the qualities of a cad and of a gentleman? Will Maisie decide for or against Sir Claude ? What decision will Sir Claude himself make ? Has Vanderbank ideality enough to marry Nanda ? The game is very well, often exquisitely, played; and the result, which, nevertheless, from all we know of the characters, we can rarely foresee, wears — when we argue it out in retrospect as the author clearly has done in advance — the proper artistic aspect of a foregone conclusion. Mr. James rarely seems to impose it himself; except on the few occasions when, as in The Princess Casamassima or The Other House, he deals in melodrama, in which he almost never succeeds in being convincing, his rectitude is so strong a reliance as to exclude all impression of perversity or willfulness and convey the agreeable sense of sufficiently fatalistic predestination. Meantime you find out about the characters from the result. Since it has turned out in this way, they must have been such and such persons. In other words, they have not been characterized very vividly, have not been presented very completely as human beings.

At least they do not people one’s memory, I think, as the personages of many inferior artists do. When one thinks of the number of characters that Mr. James has created, each, as I have said, carefully individualized, and none of them replicas, — an amazing world they certainly compose in their originality and variety, — it is odd what an effort it is to recall even their names. The immortal Daisy Miller, the sensitive and highly organized Ralph Touchett, the robust and thoroughly national Christopher Newman, the gentle Miss Pynsent, and a number of others that do remain in one’s memory, mainly belong to the earlier novels and form but a small proportion of the great number of their author’s creations. Different readers, however, would no doubt answer this rather crude test differently, and in any case it is not because they fail in precision that Mr. James’s personages lose distinctness as their story, like all stories, fades from the recollection. They have a sharp enough outline, but they are not completely enough characterized.

Why ? Why is it that when the American heroine of one of his stories, beautifully elaborated in detail, a perfect specimen of Dutch intarsia, kills herself because her English husband publishes a savage book about her country, we find ourselves perfectly unprepared for this dénouement ? Why is it that with all the pains expended on the portrait of the extraordinary Mrs. Headway of The Siege of London, we never quite get his point of view, but are kept considering the social duty of the prig who passes his valuable time in observing her attempts at rehabilitation and — no doubt most justly —exposes her in the end ? There is nothing to complain of in the result, the problem is worked out satisfactorily enough, but Mrs. Headway herself does not count for us, does not hang together, in the way in which Augier’s L’Aventurière does, or even Dumas’s Baronne d’Ange. It would be difficult, for example, and for this reason, to make a play of The Siege of London.

The answer to this query, the explanation of this incompleteness of characterization in Mr. James’s nevertheless very precise personages, consists, I think, in the fact that he rather pointedly neglects the province of the heart. This has been from the first the natural peril of the psychological novelist, the neglect of what in the Scripture view constitutes “the whole man,” just as the neglect of the mind — which discriminates and defines personalities once constituted — was the defect of the psychological novelist’s predecessor. But for Mr. James this peril has manifestly no terrors. The province of the heart seems to him, perhaps, so much to be taken for granted as to be on the whole rather negligible, so far as romantic exploitation is concerned.

Incidentally, one may ask, if all the finest things in the world are to be assumed, what is there left for exploitation ? Matter for curiosity mainly — the curiosity which in Mr. James is so sharp and so fruitful. The realm of the affections is that which — ex vi termini, one may say — most engages and attaches. Are we to be interested in fiction without liking it ? And are we to savor art without experiencing emotion ? The fact that no one rereads Mr. James means that his form, however adequate and effective, is not in itself agreeable. But it means still more that his “content” is not attaching. When Lockhart once made some remark to Scott about poets and novelists looking at life as mere material for art, the “veteran Chief of Letters” observed: “I fear you have some very young ideas in your head. We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling, unless we have taught ourselves to consider everything as moonshine compared with the education of the heart.” Is it possible that Mr. James’s controlling idea is a “young one”? Is his undoubted originality, after all, the exploitation of what seemed to so wise a practitioner as Scott, “moonshine”? That would account, perhaps, for the pallid light that often fills his canvas when his characters are grouped in a scene where “the human heart” — insight into which used to be deemed the standard of the novelist’s excellence — has a part of any prominence to play. The voluntary abandonment by the novelist of such a field of interest as the province of the heart is witness, at all events, of an asceticism whose compensations ought in prudence to be thoroughly assured. Implied, understood — this domain! Very well, one may reply, but what a field of universal interest you neglect, what a rigorously puritanic sacrifice you make!

Thus to neglect the general field which the historic poets and romancers have so fruitfully cultivated results, however, in only a negative disadvantage, it may be contended, and Mr. James’s psychology may be thought by many readers a fair compensation. It is certainly prodigiously well done. A writer with nothing more and nothing better to his credit than the group of stories assembled under the title The Better Sort has an indisputable claim to be considered a master, whatever one may think of the tenuity of his themes and the disproportionate attentiveness of their treatment. “It is proprement dit, but it is pale,” he makes a supposititious Frenchman say of his romance, in his clever and suggestive The Point of View ; and he frankly records his failure to interest Turgénieff in the fictions he used to send him from time to time. All the same, a new genre is a new genre, and as such it is idle to belittle Mr. James’s, as readers too dull to seize its qualities sometimes impertinently and impatiently do. But specifically and positively a novelist’s neglect of the province of the heart involves the disadvantage of necessarily incomplete portraiture.

A picture of human life without reference to the passions, the depiction of human character minus this preponderating constituent element of it, cannot but be limited and defective. The view that halfconsciously regards the passions as either titanic or vulgar, and therefore only pertinent as artistic material to either tragedy or journalism, is a curiously superficial one. The most controlled and systematized life, provided it illustrate any ideality, is inspired by them as fully as the least directed and most irregular. The diminution of demonstrativeness under the influence of civilization is no measure of the diminution of feeling; and even if we feel less than our forefathers, our feeling is still the dominant element in us. Every one’s consciousness attests this, that of the ascetic as well as that of the epicurean, that of the patrician and the brahmin as well as that of the peasant and the clown. Whether the drama of human life is of the soul or of the senses, it is equally real, universal, and the resultant of the passions. To assume that the modern man, whatever the degree of his complicated differentiation, is any more destitute of them than his autochthonous ancestor, is to leave out of consideration the controlling constituent of his nature and the mainspring of his action. All of these personages that people Mr. James’s extraordinarily varied world must have them, and the circumstance that he rarely, if ever, tells us what they are, makes us feel our acquaintance with his personages to be partial and superficial. At times we can infer them, it is true. But every art, certainly not excepting the novelist’s, needs all the aid it can get to make itself effective, and reliance on inference instead of statement results here in a very shadowy kind of substance.

Is it because of a certain coolness in Mr. James’s own temperament that his report of human nature is thus incomplete ? Does he make us weep — or laugh — so little because he is so unmoved himself, because he illustrates so imperturbably and fastidiously the converse of the Horatian maxim ? Candidly speaking, perhaps we have no business to inquire. Whether it is due to his theory or to the temperament responsible for his theory, perhaps it is both pertinent and proper to rest in the indisputable fact that he does leave us unmoved. After all, the main question is, does the fact have for us the compensations that evidently it has for him ? Say that he deals so little with the emotions because preoccupation with them deflects and distracts from the business of presenting in all its force of singularization and relief, at whatever cost of completeness, the truths and traits of human nature that most interest him, that interest him so intensely. Say even, in other words, that to feel an emotional interest in his personages is for an author to incur the risk of a partiality inconsistent with artistic rectitude. Certainly it is impossible to be blind to this controlling rectitude in Mr. James, impossible to avoid recognizing — however easy we may suspect nature has made it for him —his unalterable fidelity to his main purpose in his fictions, which is to clothe and depict the idea he wishes to illustrate, whatever becomes of his people in the process. Say, too, that though sometimes, in consequence, these remain very much on the hither side of realization; though sometimes they are subjected to remorseless procrustean treatment; and though they never take possession of the scene themselves and tell or enact their own story, without, at any rate, our feeling that they rely largely on the subtlest of prompters, they nevertheless always strictly subserve the larger design of their creator. Grant all this. The salient fact remains that their creator is too much concerned with the laws of his universe, apparently, to assign them other than vicarious functions, or to take other than what is called an “intellectual” interest in them.

And this is an interest extremely difficult for an author to make his readers share. The reader is much more readily interested through his sympathies, and cannot be relied upon to attach to phenomena which exclude these the same importance which the writer who is exploiting them does. He will readily respond to the author who illustrates “What a piece of work is man! ” and at the same time imperfectly echo the enthusiasm of the artist who exclaims, “How beautiful a thing is this perspective!” Mr. James’s enthusiasm, one may fancifully say, is for the perspective rather than for the substance of human nature, and even this, of course, in taking it from him, we are obliged to enjoy at one remove; so that, even supposing our pure curiosity to equal his, we can hardly be counted on to feel the same amount for his report of life as he feels for life itself. We need something of him to compensate for the inevitable loss of heat involved in the process of translation. And this he is extremely chary of giving us. What chiefly we perceive is his own curiosity.

Of this, indeed, we get, I think, a surfeit. Without more warmth than he either feels or will suffer himself to exhibit, it is difficult for him to communicate the zest he plainly takes in the particular material he in general exploits. It is too special, too occasional, too recondite, at times certainly too trivial, to stand on its own merits, aided merely by extraordinary but wholly unemotional cleverness of presentation. In fact, I think one may excusably go so far as to confess a certain antipathy to the degree in which the author exhibits this curiosity. Scrutiny so searching seems to exclude chivalry. In the Cage, for instance, is a wonderful study, but so persistent and penetrating as to appear positively pitiless. How many years ago was it that Arnold complained that curiosity, which had a good sense in French, had a bad one in English ? For Mr. James it is not only not a defect, and not merely a quality, but a cardinal virtue. Balzac was certainly not a sentimentalist, yet Taine ascribes what he considers the superiority of Valérie Marneffe to Rebecca Sharp to the fact that Balzac “aime sa Valérie.” Would it ever occur to any one to suspect that Mr. James “loved” any of his characters? Ralph Touchett, perhaps; but surely the extraordinary attention that almost all his later personages receive from him is not an affectionate interest, and, as I say, I think the result is less completeness of presentment, less vigor of portraiture.

Perhaps his frequent practice of identifying himself with one of his characters by making him narrate the tale is in part responsible for this impression of extreme coolness in the narrator that we get from the book and unconsciously refer to the author. There are a number of his stories in which the fictitious narrator exhibits his cold-blooded curiosity with a naïve single-mindedness that awakens positive distaste. One winces at the scrutiny of defenseless personages practised by the narrators of The Pension Beaurepas,— a delightful sketch; of Four Meetings, — a masterpiece of satire and of pathos; of a dozen other tales in which some inhuman naturalist studies his spitted specimens. The most conspicuous instance of this is undoubtedly The Sacred Fount, which for this reason is a disagreeable as well as a mystifying book. The amount of prying, eavesdropping, “snooping,” in that exasperating performance is prodigious, and the unconsciousness of indiscretion combined with its outrageousness gives one a very uncomfortable feeling,— a feeling, too, whose discomfort is aggravated by the insipidity of the fanciful phenomena which evoke in the narrator such a disproportionate interest. Perhaps this nosing curiosity is itself a trait of the “week-end ” in England, and designed to be pilloried as such. No one can know. But in this case one may wish the point had been made plainer, even in a book where it is apparently the author’s intention to make everything obscure.

There are, moreover, many stories by Mr. James in which this pathologic curiosity is manifested, not by the narrator,— for whom there is some artistic excuse, — but by one or more of the characters. The Siege of London is an example. From this story one might infer that the close observation of a squirming and suffering though doubtless highly reprehensible woman could really occupy the leisure of a scrupulous gentleman. Is it true that curiosity is a “passion” of our attenuated modern life, — curiosity of this kind, I mean; the curiosity that feeds on the conduct and motives of one’s fellows in whom one feels no other interest ? It is at all events true that it is the one “passion” celebrated with any ample cordiality by Mr. James, whether or no to inquire if he shares it be to inquire “too curiously.” He himself — whom nothing escapes that he does not exclude, one is sometimes tempted to think — has noted the characteristic. I wish I could put my hand on the passage — I am confident it is in one of his earlier works — in which he speaks of a certain indiscreet closeness of observation as a disagreeable trait of a certain order of Frenchman! But surely no French writer of distinction has ever shown it in such inadvertent profusion as Mr. James. Mr. James has carried the famous watchword, “disinterested curiosity” so far, in a word, that his curiosity is not merely impartial, but excessive. It is “disinterested” enough in the sense hitherto intended by the epithet, but in its own exercise it is ferociously egoistic. He is not merely detached; his detachment is enthusiastic. One may say he is ardently frigid. The result, I think, is the detachment of his readers; certainly the elimination from the field of interest of those characters and that part of every character which, too fundamental and general to reward mere curiosity, nevertheless constitute the most real, the most attaching, and the most substantial elements of human life.

VII

It is possibly owing in some degree to his dispassionateness that Mr. James passes popularly for preëminently the novelist of culture. A writer so refined and so detached is inferentially the product of letters as well as of life. Less than any other would it seem congruous to associate with him the notion of crudity in any of its aspects or degrees, the notion of non-conformity to the canon, recalcitrancy to the received. And certainly he has neglected nothing of the best that has been thought and said in the world so far as his own art is concerned. He does not look at life through books; far from it. But with the books that illustrate the problem of how art should look at life he is thoroughly familiar. On the art and in the province of latter-day fiction, at any rate, there is certainly nothing he has not read — and perfectly assimilated. No writer in any department of literature can more distinctly leave the impression of acquaintance with the modern classics of his chosen field in all languages, and with all the commentaries on them. There is, besides, in his moral attitude, his turn of phrase, his absence of emphasis, his esoteric diction, his carelessness of communication, even, his air of noblesse oblige, his patrician fastidiousness and manifest contentment with justification by his own standards, in the wide range of his exclusions, and — above all — in his preference for dealing with high differentiation instead of the elementary and universal, — in all this there is clearly manifest the aristocratic conformity to the conclusions of culture and of the good taste which culture alone — even if only — can supply.

There is, however, this peculiarity about his culture, considered as an element of his equipment. It is very far from being with him, as it is sometimes assumed to be in the case of the literary or other artist, a handicap on his energy, his originality — an emasculating rather than an invigorating force. It has, on the contrary, been a stimulant as well as a guiding agent in his activity. But its singularity consists in the circumstance that, though unmistakably culture, it is culture of a highly specialized kind. Prominent as Mr. James’s culture is, in a word, it is precisely the lack of background, the background that it is eminently the province of culture to supply, that is the conspicuous lack in his work considered as a whole, considered with reference to its permanent appeal, considered, in brief, as a contribution to literature. Is there any other writer whose work, taken in the mass, is so considerable and marked by such extreme cleverness, so much insight, and so much real power, which is also so extremely dependent upon its own qualities and character and so little upon its relations and correspondences? It is so altogether of the present time, of the moment, that it seems almost an analogue of the current instantaneous photography. Behind it one feels the writer interested, not in Molière,but in Daudet,notin Fielding, but in Trollope, not in Dante, but in Théophile Gautier. He writes about “Le Capitaine Fracasse, ” not about “Don Quixote,” about the “Comédie Humaine,” not about the world of Shakespeare. This is treading on delicate ground, and where the end of culture is in any wise so conspicuously achieved as it is in Mr. James, it is perhaps impertinent to inquire as to his use of the means. But where a waiter’s work is so voluminous as his, as well as of such a high order, it is in the interest of definition to inquire why his evident culture betrays so little evidence of interest in the classics of literature or the course of history. It is very likely true that for the writer of modern fiction an acquaintance with Salammbô is of more instant pertinence than saturation with the Divine Comedy, that such an essay as Mr. James’s on Maupassant — a very nearly perfect masterpiece — is more apposite than Lowell’s — rather inadequate — paper on Don Quixote. I only point out that from the point of view of culture, his preoccupation with Du Maurier and Reinhart and Abbey and Stevenson and Miss Woolson indicates culture of an unusually contemporary kind. In mere point of time Mme. de Sabran is as far back as I remember his going. How exquisite his treatment of these more or less current themes has occasionally been I do not need to say, or repeat. If in the last analysis there is a tincture of “journalism” in this, it is journalism of a very high class, and perhaps anything nowadays without a trace of journalism is justly to be suspected of pedantry and pretension, qualities absolutely foreign to Mr. James’s genius. They are wholly absent, too, in such “journalism” as his books of travel,— the Little Tour in France, which is curiously dependent upon “the excellent Mr. Murray” and derives from the “redbook” rather than from the library; and the Portraits of Places which, however abounding in penetration and justesse, — I recall some remarkable pages about Tintoretto, for example, — is too enamoured of the actual to think twice about its origins. But for a literary figure that seems and really is the antipodes of some of the prominent and by no means negligible apostles of crudity of the present day, it is plain that his rather exclusive interest in the literature of the present day is a peculiarity worth remark. The man is always more than the special province in which his talent is exercised, and Mr. James’s culture is such that one does not associate him with such writers of fiction as Wilkie Collins, say, so much as with Arnold and Lowell and Browning and Tennyson and Thackeray and George Eliot and Bulwer. But beside any one of these, his culture seems quite modern and current in its substance and preoccupations.

It is not, however, merely paradoxical, and therefore noteworthy, that his culture should be at once so conspicuous and so apparently partial. The circumstance is particularly significant because it is particularly disadvantageous to his impressiveness as a writer of fiction. “ L’artiste moderne,” says Paul Bourget, “lequel se double toujours d’un critique et d’un érudit.” The critic is conspicuous enough in Mr. James, but one cannot help thinking that precisely his kind of fiction would be more effective if he were more evidently érudit. For example, a writer interested in the Antigone, and imbued with the spirit of its succession, would naturally and instinctively be less absorbed in what Maisie knew,—to mention what is certainly a very remarkable, but what is also, by the very perfection of its execution, shown to be a fantastic book, except on the supposition that whatever is, is important. Saturation with contemporary belles lettres will no doubt suffice an artist whose talent, like that of Mr. James, is of the first class, for the production of delightful works, but to produce works for the pantheon of the world’s masterpieces without a more or less constant — even if subconscious — reference to the figures already on their august pedestals, fringes the chimerical. One could wish the representative American novelist to be less interested in inventing a new game of fiction than in figuring as the “heir of all the ages.” For lovers of “the last new book,” Mr. James’s is no doubt the most important. But why should it not be an “event” — such as one of Thackeray’s or George Eliot’s used to be ? It is certainly not because his talent is inferior; is it because his culture is limited, as well as because, as I have already said, his art is as theoretic as his philosophy of life is obscure ?

To take the particular instance of The Awkward Age, which may be called Mr. James’s masterpiece, — at least among the later novels. I cannot better explain what I have in mind in speaking of his peculiar kind of culture than by saying that The Awkward Age strikes one as a little like Lilliput without Gulliver. One has only to imagine what Swift’s picture of that interesting kingdom would be if the figure that lends it its significance were left out of it. Its significance, of course, depends wholly on the sense of contrast, the play of proportion. So does the significance of the corresponding Brobdingnag. And not at all exclusively in an artistic sense, it is to be borne in mind, but in a literary and human one. If the futilities and niaiseries of The Awkward Age, instead of being idealized by the main strength of imputed importance, were depicted from a standpoint perhaps even less artistically detached, but more removed in spirit by knowledge of and interest in the sociology of the human species previous to its latest illustration by a wretched little clique of negligible Londoners, the negligibility of these dramatis personæ would be far more forcefully felt. It would constitute a thesis. As it is, the thesis apparently of an extraordinary number of pages is that a girl freely brought up may turn out a better girl than one claustrally reared. Of course this is not really all. There is a corollary — a coda: the former does not get married and the latter does. And there is a still further moral to be drawn by those expert in nuances of the kind. But one feels like asking brutally, in the name of literature, if this order of it is worth while, is worth the lavish expenditure of the best literary talent we have. If it is, there is nothing more to be said. But it can only be considered worth while by the amateur of novelty, and must seem attenuated from the standpoint of culture.

It is not a matter of realism. Fielding was a realist, if ever there was one. But is it likely that without his classical culture such a realist as Fielding, even, would have depicted figures of such commanding importance and universal interest as those with which his novels are peopled ? Can one fancy Gibbon praising with the same elaborate enthusiasm that he expressed for Tom Jones the “exquisite picture of human life and manners” provided by The Awkward Age or The Other House, — supremely clever as is the art of these books and their fellows ? Nor is it a question of art. Mr. Meredith, for example, is not a realist like Mr. James, but his art constantly suggests that of the younger writer. Yet it differs from Mr. James’s not more in its preoccupations — with the fanciful, that is to say, rather than the real — than in its whole attitude, which, in spite of its absence of pedantry and close correspondence to the matter in hand, is obviously, markedly, the attitude of culture, the attitude of not being absorbed by, swamped in, the importance of the matter in hand, but of treating it at least enough at arm’s length to avoid exaggerating its importance. He leaves the impression of a certain lack of seriousness.

He has the air of the dilettante; which, to my sense, Mr. James never has. But he also leaves the impression, and has the air inseparably connected with what is understood by culture. In art of any kind at the present time, it is well known that culture is not overvalued. It is quite generally imagined that we should gain rather than lose, for instance, by having Raphael without the Church and Rembrandt without the Bible. But the special art of fiction has not yet been emancipated to this implied extent, because the general life of humanity, of which this art is ex hypothesi a picture, is felt to have a unity superior in interest and importance to any of its variations.

Too great an interest in the history, as well as in the present status, of mankind, therefore, can hardly be exacted of the creator of a mimic world, I will not say of Mr. James’s pretensions, for he makes none, but of his powers, of which in justice too much cannot be exacted. A novelist in whom the historic sense is lacking is, one would say, particularly liable to lack also that sense of proportion which alone can secure the right emphasis and accent in his pictures of contemporary life — if they are to have any reach and compass of significance, if they are to rise very far above the plane of art for art’s sake. From the point of view of culture as a factor in a novelist’s production, it may be said, surely, that no one knows his own time who knows only it. Any conspectus of the sociology of the present day, in other words, that neglects its aspect as an evolution, neglects also its meaning. The life of the present day can no more be satisfactorily represented and interpreted in isolation in fiction than in history or sociology. To record its facts, even its subtlest and most recondite facts, those that have hitherto been neglected by more cursory observers, without at the same time admeasuring them, in however indirect and unconscious fashion, by reference to previous stages of the evolution, or at least the succession, to which the life of the present day belongs is, measurably, to lose sight of their meaning, of the reason for recording them. As Buckle said, very acutely, any one who thinks a fact valuable in itself may be a good judge of facts, but cannot be of value. And it is hardly too much to say that this is how Mr. James impresses us in his recent studies of English society, the studies that, taken in the mass, constitute the bulk, as in some respects they do the flower, of his work. He is an excellent judge of the phenomena — the sharp-eyed and penetrating critic for whom, in a sense, perhaps, this extraordinary and extraordinarily inept society has in fancied security unwittingly been waiting. But of their value he seems to be no judge at all. If his culture included such development of the historic sense as would present to his indirect vision the analogues of other civilizations, other societies, other milieux, he could hardly avoid placing as well as fixing his phenomena. And this would, I think, give an altogether different aspect and value to his work.

In illustration, I may refer to a portion— the most interesting, and, I am inclined to think, the most important though not perhaps the most “wonder ful” portion — of this work itself. There was a time when Mr. James did things with obvious zest, with a freedom that excluded the notion of the theoretic; when he communicated pleasure by first feeling it himself; when, therefore, there was a strong personal note in what he wrote, and he did not alienate by his aloofness; when, indeed, one could perceive and enjoy a strain of positive gayety in his compositions. Has any reader of his, I wonder, any doubt as to the period I have in mind ? I refer to the period of his studies in contemporary sociology, so to speak, the years when the contrast between America and Europe preoccupied him so delightfully. Then he produced “documents ” of real value and of striking vitality. He had the field all to himself, and worked it to his own distinct profit and that of his readers. Then he portrayed types and drew out their suggestiveness.

His characters were not only real, but representative. He provided material not only for the keenest enjoyment, but for reflection. His scientific curiosity resulted in something eminently worth while, something in which he excelled so notably as virtually to seem, if indeed he was not literally, the originator of a new and most engaging genre of romance, — to be, one may say, the Bopp of the comparative method as applied to fiction.

The literature that he produced at this period owes its superiority to his current product in general import and interest, I think, precisely to this factor of culture on which he now places so little reliance. It was inspired and penetrated with the spirit of cosmopolitanism, that is to say, culture in which the contemporary is substituted for the more universal element, and, if it does not quite make up in vividness for what it lacks in breadth, certainly performs the similar inestimable service of providing a standard that establishes the relative value and interest of the material directly dealt with. Out of his familiarity with contemporary society in America, England, France, and Italy, grew a series of novels and tales that were full of vigor, piquancy, truth, and significance. The play of the characters against contrasting backgrounds was most varied and interesting. The contrasts of points of view, of conventions and ideas, of customs and traditions, gave a richness of texture to the web of his fiction which, since it has lacked these, it has disadvantageously lost. His return to the cosmopolitan motif in The Ambassadors and (measurably) in The Golden Bowl is accordingly a welcome one, and would be still more welcome if the development of this motif were not now incrusted and obscured with mannerisms of presentation accreted in the pursuit of what no doubt seems to the author a “closer correspondence with life,” but what certainly seems to the reader a more restricted order of art, —an art, at any rate, so largely dependent on scrutiny as perforce to dispense with the significance to be expected only of the culture it suggests, but does not illustrate. It is a part of Mr. James’s distinction that he gives us so much as to make us wish for more, that he entertains us on so high a plane that we ask to be conducted still higher, and that his penetration reveals to us such wonders in the particular locale, that we call upon him to show us “the kingdoms of the earth.”

VIII

We could readily forego anything that he lacks, however, if he would demolish for us the chevaux-de-frise of his later style. In early days his style was eminently clear, and at the same time wholly adequate, but in the course of years it has become an exceedingly complicated vehicle. Its complexity is probably quite voluntary. Indeed, like his whole attitude, it is even theoretic. It images, no doubt, the multifariousness of its substance, of which it follows the nuances and subtleties, and with its parentheses and afterthoughts and qualifications, its hints and hesitations, its indirection and innuendo, pursues the devious and haphazard development of the drama of life itself. It is thoroughly alive and sincere. It has mannerisms, but no affectations. One gets tired of the frequent recurrence of certain favorite words and locutions, but the author’s fondness for them is always genuine. Least of all are they perfunctory, any more than is any other manifestation of Mr. James’s intellectual activity. His vocabulary is remarkable, both in range and in intimate felicity; and it is the academic vocabulary, rendered vigorous by accents of raciness now and then, the acme of literary breeding, without, however, a trace of bookish aridity. He is less desultory than almost any writer of anything like his voluminousness. His scrupulous care involves often quite needless precautions, as if the reader were watching for a slip, — “like a terrier at a rat-hole,” a sufferer from his superfluous concessions once impatiently observed. But his precision involves no strain. His style in general shows no effort, though it ought to be said that, on the other hand, it also shows no restraint. It is tremendously personal in its pointed neglect of conformity to any ideal of what, as style, it should be. It avoids thus most conspicuously the hackneyed traits of rhetorical excellence. And certainly the pursuit of technical perfection may easily be too explicit, too systematic. Correctness is perhaps the stupidest way of achieving artificiality. But a writer of Mr. James’s rhetorical fertility, combined with his distinction in the matter of taste, need have no fear of incurring artificiality in deferring to the more elementary requirements of the rhetorical canon.

He has, however, chosen to be an original writer in a way that precludes him from being, as a writer, a great one. Just as his theory of art prevents his more important fiction from being a rounded and synthetic image of life seen from a certain centralizing point of view, and makes of it an essay at conveying the sense and illusion of life by following, instead of focusing, its phenomena, so his theory of style prevents him from creating a texture of expression with any independent interest of its own. The interest of his expression consists solely in its correspondence to the character of what it endeavors to express. So concentrated upon this end is he that he very rarely gives scope to the talent for beautiful and effective expression which occasional lapses from his rigorous practice show him to possess in a distinguished degree. There are entire volumes of his writings that do not contain a sentence like, for example, this from a brief essay on Hawthorne: “His beautiful and light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky pane.” Of a writer who has this touch, this capacity, in his equipment, it is justifiable to lament that his theory of art has so largely prevented his exercise of it. The fact that his practice has not atrophied the faculty — clear enough from a rare but perfect exhibition of it from time to time — only increases our regret. We do not ask of Mr. James’s fastidiousness the purple patch of poetic prose, any more than we expect from him any kind of mediocrity whatever. But when a writer, who shows us unmistakably now and then that he could give us frequent equivalents of such episodes as the death of Ralph Touchett, rigorously refrains through a long series of admirable books from producing anything of greater extent than a sentence or a paragraph that can be called classic, that has the classic “note,” we may, I think, legitimately complain that his theory of art is exasperatingly exacting.

And of what may be called the strategy, in distinction from the tactics, of style he is quite as pointedly negligent. The elements of combination, distribution, climax, the whole larger organization and articulation of literary presentment, are dissembled, if not disdained. Even if it be possible to secure a greater sense of life by eliminating the sense of art in the general treatment of a fiction, — which is certainly carrying the theory of ars celare artem very far (the first word in the aphorism having hitherto stood for “art,” and the last for “artifice”), — even if in attitude and construction, that is to say, the amount of life in Mr. James’s books atones for the absence of the visible, sensible, satisfying element of art as art, it is nevertheless clear that in style as such there is nothing whatever that can atone for the absence of art. Skill is an insufficient substitute; it is science, not art, that is the adaptation of means to ends. And upon skill Mr. James places his whole reliance.

He is, of course, supremely skillful. His invention, for example, which has almost the force and value of the creative imagination, appears in particularly exhaustless variety in the introductions of his short stories. Each one is a study in exordiums, as skillful as Cicero’s. And the way in which the narrative proceeds, the characters are introduced, and the incidents succeed one another, is most attentively considered. But no amount of skill and care compensate for the loss of integumental interest in the handling, the technic, the style, that is involved in a subordination of style to content so complete as positively to seem designed to flout the traditional convention which makes the interpenetration of the two the ideal. Such an ideal is perhaps a little too obvious for Mr. James, who is as uninterested in “the obvious” as he is unconcerned about “the sublime,” of which, according to a time-honored theory, the obvious is a necessary constituent.

The loss of interest involved in obscurity is, to begin with, enormous. Such elaborate care as that of Mr. James should at least secure clearness. But with all his scrupulousness, clearness never seems to be an object of his care. At least, this is true of his later work. In his earlier, his clearness was so conspicuous as almost to suggest limitation. There are extremely flat-footed things to be encountered in it now and then — as, for example, his reprehension of the trivial in Hawthorne, the “parochial” in Thoreau. But since his later, his preponderant, and what we must consider his true, manner has been established, no one needs to be reminded that obscurity has been one of its main traits. His concern is to be precise, not to be clear. He follows his thought with the most intimate exactness — no doubt — in its subtile sinuosities, into its complicated connotations, unto its utmost attenuations; but it is often so elusive, so insaisissable — by others than himself — that he may perfectly express without in the least communicating it. Yet the very texture of his obscurity is composed of incontestable evidences that he is a master of expression. The reader’s pleasure becomes a task, and his task the torture of Tantalus,

It is simply marvelous that such copiousness can be so elliptical. It is usually in greater condensation —such as Emerson’s — that we miss the connectives. The fact attests the remarkable fullness of his intellectual operations, but such plenitude imposes the necessity of restraint in direct proportion to the unusual extent and complexity of its material. “Simplification” is a favorite word with Mr. James, but he himself never simplifies for our benefit. Beyond question, he does for his own. He has clearly preliminarily mastered his complicated theme in its centrality; he indisputably sits in the centre of the web in whose fine-spun meshes his readers are entangled. If in reading one of his fictions you are conscious of being in a maze, you know that there is an issue if you are but clever enough to find it. Mr. James gives you no help. He flatters you by assuming that you are sufficiently clever. His work, he seems to say, is done when he has constructed his labyrinth in emulating correspondence with the complexity of his model life, and at the same time furnished a potentially discoverable clue to it. There are readers who find the clue, it is not to be doubted, and follow it in all its serpentine wanderings, though they seem to do so in virtue of a special sense — the sense, it might be called, of understandingly savoring Mr. Henry James. But its possessors are marked individuals in every one’s acquaintance; and it need not be said that they are exceptionally clever people. There are others, the mystically inclined, and therefore perhaps more numerous, who divine the significance that is hidden from the wise and prudent. But to the majority of intelligent and cultivated readers, whose appreciation constitutes fame, the great mass of his later writing is of a difficulty to conquer which requires an amount of effort disproportionate to the sense of assured reward.

Are the masterpieces of the future to be written in this fashion ? If they are, they will differ signally from the masterpieces of the past in the substitution of a highly idiosyncratic manner for the hitherto essential element of style ; and in consequence they will require a second reading, not, as heretofore, for the discovery of “new beauties,” or the savoring again of old ones, but to be understood at all In which case, one may surmise, they will have to be very well worth while. It can hardly be hoped that they will be as well worth while as those of Mr. James, and the chances are, accordingly, that he will occupy the very nearly unique niche in the history of fiction — hard by that of Mr. Meredith, perhaps — of being the last as well as the first of his line. He has a host of imitators, it is true; he has, in a way, founded a school, but as yet certainly this has produced no masterpieces. Has he himself ? If so, they are, at all events, not unmistakably of the scale and on the plane suggested by his unmistakable powers, — powers that make it impossible to measure him otherwise than by the standards of the really great novelists and of the masters of English prose.