UC-NRLF 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 A CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 FORD MADOX HUEFFER 
 
 LONDON 
 MART IN S E C K ER 
 
 XVII BUCKINGHAM STREET 
 ADELPHI 
 
TO 
 
 MRS. EDWARD HERON ALLEN 
 
 WHO SO MUCH LIGHTENED THESE 
 
 LABOURS, THIS, WITH 
 
 AFFECTION 
 
 LOAN STACK 
 
 LONDON : MARTIN SECKER (LTD) 1916 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 AUK 
 
 I. INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 II. SUBJECTS 15 
 
 III. TEMPERAMENTS 91 
 
 IV. METHODS 148 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 LET me say at once that I regard the works of 
 Mr. Henry James as those most worthy of 
 attention by the critics most worthy of 
 attention of all the work that is to-day pouring 
 from the groaning presses of continents. In 
 saying this I conceal for the moment my private 
 opinion which doesn t in the least matter to 
 anyone, though it is an opinion that can hardly 
 be called anything but mature that Mr. 
 James is the greatest of living writers and in 
 consequence, for me, the greatest of living men. 
 I might, that is to say, have thought, as I 
 have, that Mr. James is the greatest of living 
 men without ever contemplating thus setting 
 out to write a book about him. A man may 
 be supremely great and offer no opportunity 
 for comment of any kind. I cannot, that is to 
 say, imagine any serious writer setting to work 
 to say anything about Shakespeare, about 
 Turgenieff, or for the matter of that about 
 Nelson or Moltke. There are people who just 
 * are," consummate in various degrees, perfect 
 
 7 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 engines of providence. It is a little difficult, 
 or at any rate it would call for a great number 
 of words to explain exactly what I mean ; but 
 in order to avoid the danger of being considered 
 paradoxical I will venture here and now upon 
 a rough digest of that number of words so as 
 to plan out the ground of this book. 
 
 Thus, when I say that no one can write 
 much about Shakespeare or Turgenieff I say 
 it because, thank God, we know nothing what 
 ever about Shakespeare. He is personally 
 nothing but a wise smile and a couple of 
 anecdotes. And his work, considered from a 
 literary point of view, is too consummate for 
 any literary comment. You can annotate his 
 words and his historic matter to an extent that 
 has provided us with fifty libraries of peda 
 gogic dullness or of anecdotal interest, as the 
 case may be ; but the beautiful spirit of the 
 man you cannot in any way touch. So in a 
 sense it is with Turgenieff whom Mr. James 
 calls at one moment " my distinguished 
 friend," at another "the amiable Russian" ; 
 but finally, being worthy of himself, he styles 
 him " the beautiful genius." 
 
 And that is all that can be said about 
 Turgenieff he was "the beautiful genius." 
 Again, thank God, we know as little of his 
 personality as we know of Shakespeare s. I 
 8 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 do not mean to say that he is as tangibly 
 indefinite a solar myth ; we know enough 
 about him to be able to say that he was 
 not the late Mr. Pobiedonostieff, procurator 
 of the Holy Synod, and to be certain that his 
 work was not written by the late Count Tolstoy. 
 Fragments of his personality are, in fact, 
 recoverable here and there. These two eyes 
 have seen him in a studio ; a rather nasty 
 Slav, Russian, or Pole has written a rather 
 nasty book about him. In this he attempts 
 to place the beautiful genius " in an un 
 favourable light as sneering at his great French 
 fellow- workers. To-day Young Russia sneers 
 at him for not being a Collectivist, a Nihilist, 
 a Marxist, a Syndicalist, or what you will. 
 And Young England, which is always syco- 
 phantically at the bidding of any whining 
 Intellectual, whether Celt or Slav, repeats the 
 lament of Young Russia that Turgenieff was 
 not a Collectivist, a Marxist, and all the rest 
 of it. And against Turgenieff Young England 
 erects the banner of Dostoievsky, as if the 
 fame of that portentous writer of enormous 
 detective stories, that sad man with the native 
 Slav genius for telling immensely long and 
 formless tales, must destroy the art, the 
 poetry and the exquisitness that are in the 
 works of " the beautiful genius." . . . 
 
 9 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 At any rate, precious little is recoverable of 
 the personality of Turgenieff. We know that 
 he shot partridges which perhaps he shouldn t 
 have done. We know also that he purchased 
 cakes of scented soap for a mistress whom 
 perhaps he shouldn t or perhaps he should 
 have had. But the fact is that he lived partly 
 amongst men of letters who could not find 
 anything much to say about his work and 
 partly amongst gentlefolk who did not want 
 to say much about his personality. Therefore 
 he remains, baffling and enticing, but practi 
 cally, too, only a smile and a couple of anec 
 dotes. About his work the critic can say no 
 more than he can about that of Shakespeare. 
 Its surface is too compact, is too polished ; 
 the critical pickaxe or geological hammer just 
 cannot get up a little chunk of that marble for 
 chemical analysis. It exists as the grass exists 
 which the good God made to grow, and that is 
 the end of the matter. 
 
 Similarly, as I have said, with Nelson and 
 Field-Marshal von Moltke. These were "the 
 beautiful geniuses " of embattled nations. 
 Their genius probably consisted in their being 
 ready to take chances. You may analyse the 
 .strategy of Nelson just as you may analyse 
 that of Von Moltke, but you cannot say why 
 God was on their side, and until you can say 
 10 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 that you cannot very well say much that is to 
 the point. Nelson ought never to have fought 
 the battle of Trafalgar ; the chances, in that 
 particular spot of the Bay of Biscay, were 
 seven to one that such an unfavourable wind 
 must there spring up as should frustrate the 
 manoeuvres ordered from the Victory. Simi 
 larly, Moltke should never have fought Grave - 
 lotte ; the chances were twenty-seven to one 
 that the Crown Prince of Saxony would not 
 arrive in time ; the chances were eleven to one 
 in favour of the French rifle ; there was 
 practically no chance that the German troops 
 would face that hill of death in the final 
 charge and, in the event of any of these evil 
 chances taking effect, final disaster was all that 
 Germany could have expected. 
 
 Thus, once more there is very little to be 
 said about these matters. 
 
 There is very little, in short, to be said about 
 pure genius. It is just a thing that is. And 
 there is nothing left for us, who are in the end 
 but the stuff with which to fill graveyards, to 
 say more than that marvellous are the ways 
 of Providence that gives to a few so much and 
 to the vast many nothing at all. But there 
 remains a second by no means secondary 
 order of great people into whose work it 
 is possible, and very profitable, minutely to 
 
 11 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 enquire. For, if you can t say much about 
 Moltke you can discover pretty easily, and 
 descant for long upon, the strategy of Marl- 
 borough ; if you can t say much about Shake 
 speare you might write several books about 
 the craftsmanship of Goethe ; if Johannes 
 Sebastian Bach defies the pen as far as his 
 peculiar magic is concerned, the pen can find 
 endless objects for its activity in the music 
 drama of Richard Wagner ; or, if you can t 
 find out how Turgenieff did any single blessed 
 thing you could write a volume about the 
 wording of one paragraph by Flaubert. To 
 this latter category belong the works of Mr. 
 Henry James. 
 
 Mr. Henry James has of course his share of 
 the talent which can t be defined. He has, 
 that is to say, plenty of personality. You 
 could no more confound him, say, with Theo- 
 phile Gautier than you could confound Homer 
 with Dante or with Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 
 but in addition to having to being a tem 
 perament Mr. James has a conscious crafts 
 manship. His temperament we may define 
 clearly enough if Providence provides the 
 words, though we couldn t, any of us, say 
 where in the world he got it from. But his 
 craftsmanship, his conscious literary modifica 
 tions, his changes of word for word, the 
 12 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 maturing of his muse, the way in which quite 
 consciously he mellows his vintages, all these 
 things he has very efficiently betrayed to us. 
 And it is this betrayal that makes one select 
 his work rather than that of Monsieur Anatole 
 France, of Monsieur Henri de Regnier ; for the 
 matter of that of Monsieur Andre Gide, of 
 Mr. Joseph Conrad, or Mr. W. H. Hudson to 
 name the other really great writers of our day 
 for analysis. With any one of these five fine 
 spirits you might go a long way. You might 
 define their geniuses, you might dimly guess 
 at their methods, but you can t as you can 
 with Mr. James say quite definitely that here 
 he changed the words "she answered" into 
 the words " she indefinitely responded." Mr. 
 James has in fact given hostages to all of us 
 who will be at the pains of a little grubbing up 
 these definite facts as to his methods ; the 
 others have given us practically nothing of the 
 sort, so that, in their cases, if one submitted 
 them to the pains of vivisection one must leave 
 the whole question of their methods very much 
 to conjecture. In planning out therefore the 
 following book I propose firstly to state 
 why this writer appears to me to be the 
 greatest author of our day which is as much 
 as to say why he is valuable to the world ; 
 secondly, I shall attempt to define his tem- 
 
 13 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 perament to the extent of trying to show how 
 far it is a mirror of the concrete things and the 
 invisible tendencies of our day ; and in the 
 third place I shall attempt for the instruction 
 of this day of ours, to define, as clearly as may 
 be, what are the methods of this distinguished 
 writer. This I am aware is, as the American 
 poet said, " all sorts of a job." 
 
 I am aware too that the charges may 
 be brought against me that, firstly, in these 
 pages I have made a profuse use of the " I." 
 I can t help that. I have wanted to be plain 
 and, in matters difficult to express, such 
 locutions as " the present writer add con 
 fusion. These are the present writer s personal 
 impressions of our author s work put as 
 clearly as the medium will allow. 
 
 Moreover, there are in these pages a great 
 many disquisitions on the " conditions " of 
 modern life. But for these also I do not 
 apologise. You cannot write about a great 
 writer of Actualities without giving some 
 account of the times in which he lived. You 
 cannot write about Euripides and ignore 
 Athens. (I am aware that it is usual to do so !) 
 
 14 
 
II 
 
 SUBJECTS 
 
 I HAVE said that I consider the author of The 
 Spoils of Poynton the greatest writer now 
 living ; let me now bring forward the reasons 
 for this belief. Greatness as it appears to me 
 is a quality possibly connected with, but 
 certainly not solely dependent upon, artistry. 
 I should hesitate in fact to say that Mr. James 
 is the greatest artist now living ; indeed, I 
 should hesitate to say whether any one artist 
 was ever greater than any other artist. This, 
 however, is a point upon which I by no means 
 wish to dogmatise. If I say that I regard 
 Christina Rossetti as as great an artist as, 
 let us say, Horace, or that I regard Beckford 
 who wrote the letters from Portugal as as 
 great an artist as Prosper Merimee or Shake 
 speare or Mr. W. H. Hudson or Fran9ois 
 Villon, I mean simply that artistry appears 
 to me to be just a quality that either you 
 have or you haven t. If you have it you are 
 as great but no greater than any other artist, 
 
 15 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 and every other artist is as great but no 
 greater than yourself. I do not mean to say 
 that the effects of your art upon the world 
 may not be greater or less than that of any 
 other artist. It is very likely that the actual 
 effect of Christina Rossetti upon the present 
 age is greater than that of the writer of the 
 single line : 
 
 /xev eyo crc^cv, A6i t TraAcu TTOTO. 
 
 yet it would be absurd to deny that Sappho 
 was as great an artist as the author of Goblin 
 Market, just as it would be absurd to deny 
 that the sculptor of the Winged Victory was 
 as great an artist as Monsieur Rodin or Michael 
 Angelo. It appears to me, then, that the 
 quality of being an artist is such another 
 quality as are beauty, race, honesty or fineness 
 of temperament a quality conferred by the 
 gods upon the men whom they love. 
 
 But then again we come upon the use to 
 which the artist will put the measure of the 
 light vouchsafed him. God forbid that I 
 should say that all artists are equal in their 
 output, their moral values or, for the matter 
 of that, in their technical industry. The 
 works of Shakespeare are longer than the 
 Bible ; Franois Villon was a scamp, whereas 
 Mr. James in a literary sense would adorn 
 16 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 the society of any Cathedral close. Balzac 
 poured out an unceasing stream of imaginings 
 without any particular attention to methods. 
 Flaubert was thinking of methods all day 
 long. 
 
 I have said somewhere else that the supreme 
 quality of art is to be interesting, and after 
 some years of reflection upon the matter I 
 do not get any further than that, though I can 
 put it in another way. The real essence of 
 art is a sense of appropriateness, almost as / 
 it were a sense of decency. The real artist 
 feels for his subject a quality of chastity ; 
 whilst he is handling it he will no more 
 introduce into it extraneous or unsuitable 
 matter than a lady of niceness will go to 
 the opera in the costume she reserves for 
 the golf course. At the same time, this 
 sense of appropriateness in the texture and 
 conception of the work will no more affect, 
 say, the takings of a railway company than 
 will the opera costume of any lady however 
 negligent or however strong-minded. Yet 
 undoubtedly writers may quite remarkably 
 affect the takings of railway companies which, 
 in an Anglo-Saxon community, may well be 
 taken to be the most important things in 
 the world. If we put it upon a very small 
 scale, it is, I believe, statistically true that 
 B 17 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 one book brings in an income of 70,000 a year 
 to the Great Western Railway Company, that 
 book being Lorna Doone ; for it is estimated 
 that, every year, 60,000 people visit Exmoor 
 and the neighbourhood on account of the 
 glamour that Mr. Blackmore threw over that 
 quite charming country. Or think, again, 
 of all the shipping, the railway, the transport 
 and the motor companies that are kept alive 
 by pilgrims to the shrine of one writer or 
 another at Stratford-on-Avon. Or consider, 
 again, how whole populations have been set 
 moving by writings about various regions. 
 How much population has the vast city which 
 we inhabit gained from the poetic imagining 
 that the streets of London are paved with 
 gold ; or what do the plains of Canada, the 
 mountains of Central North America or the 
 islands in the Gulf of Mexico not owe to the 
 imaginings of poets of one kind or another ? 
 Consider how the Dominion of Canada re 
 sented the poetic appellation of Our Lady of 
 the Snows and why ? Simply because Canada 
 was afraid that intending emigrants might be 
 frightened away by that epithet, shadowing 
 as it seemed to do an arctic climate. 
 
 That such greatness then may appertain 
 to the usually despised profession of writing 
 few will probably deny. Nay, the great railway 
 18 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 companies themselves give evidence of this 
 fact, for, if you will write to any one of them 
 and state that it is your intention to write 
 a book about any given tract of country 
 served by their line, they will at once present 
 you free of charge with a first-class season 
 ticket over the whole of their system. But 
 they will never stop to enquire whether you 
 are an artist or not, or whether you possess 
 a sense of appropriateness or of the chastity 
 of your subject. 
 
 It is not, however, this type of greatness that 
 I claim to any great extent for the author of 
 The American Scene. For, roughly speaking, 
 when the reader embarks upon that magnificent 
 book of impressions he reads for many pages 
 with a sense of deep, of complete, and finally of 
 utter non-comprehension. And bewilderment 
 accompanies him through the long process of 
 perusal. But when you close the book- at 
 that very moment a sense of extraordinary 
 reality overwhelms you. You will find that 
 you have actually been in New York whose 
 note is the scream of trolley wheels upon 
 inefficiently laid granite setts ; you will find 
 that you have actually been at Manhattan 
 Beach, where ladies, so lacking in elusiveness, 
 say and do the odd, queer things in the high, 
 queer voices. It is, The American Scene, an 
 
 19 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 amazing piece of artistry, but I do not imagine 
 that it ever made any single soul desire to 
 join the scanty company of rubber-necks who 
 visit the United States. Let us not, however, 
 deny to this distinguished author all claims 
 to this particular form of greatness, for many 
 of us have undoubtedly done no more in 
 visiting the country of the Lilies than follow 
 in the footsteps of the author of A Little 
 Tour in France. 
 
 Or, again, how many New Englanders may 
 not have been brought to the Old World by 
 the limpid, beautiful and delightful phrases 
 of what we now call the early James ? What 
 may not Daisy Miller, The Four Meetings, 
 A Passionate Pilgrim, Roderick Hudson, or, 
 for the matter of that, The Spoils of Poynton, 
 have done to swell the receipts, in the 80 s 
 and the 90 s, of the American touring agencies ? 
 But it is not distinctively in this light that we 
 have to view the greatness of our eminent 
 Subject. It is not especially as the conductor 
 of populations across mountains and floods 
 that the figure of Mr. James saute, as you 
 might say, aux yeux. His greatness, to put it 
 succinctly, is that of the historian the 
 historian of one, of two, and possibly of three 
 or more, civilisations. (Let it be understood 
 that in this section I am in no way considering 
 20 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 Mr. James art, but merely his services to 
 the Republic.) And. roughly speaking, the 
 two services that a writer can render to 
 the State are, firstly, that he can induce 
 its inhabitants to become more moral ; 
 secondly, he can render them better educated. / 
 Mr. James is practically no sort of moralist \ / 
 at all. I do not mean to say that any word / 
 he has ever written need bring the blush to 
 the cheek of any inhabitant of any Cathedral 
 close whose society, as I have said, Mr. 
 James literary figure would so eminently 
 adorn. But Mr. James conscious purpose in\ / 
 writing can obviously never have been to ]y 
 make people better. It might be possible J 
 that a perusal of What Maisie Knew might 
 show to several erring personages that the 
 Divorce Courts are exceedingly troublesome 
 places to get into ; or, to read The Spoils of 
 Poynton, might shock various other persons, 
 engaged in family quarrels about money, 
 into frames of mind less sordid. It is con 
 ceivable, in fact, that the works of Mr. James 
 may have been a civilising agency. But I 
 can observe little if any trace in all the 
 voluminous works of this writer of a desire 
 to leave humanity any better than he found 
 it. He observes the characters of his work 
 with a comic or with a patronising spirit ; 
 
 21 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 whether they be the victims or the oppressors 
 we seem to hear him saying of them : " Poor 
 dears." He would speak of 1C poor dear 
 Maisie " just as he would speak of " poor dear 
 Mrs. Gereth " who lost the Spoils; or just 
 as, for the matter of that, you may hear 
 him speak of " poor dear Flaubert," poor 
 dear Shakespeare," or " poor dear Balzac," 
 Napoleon the First, Napoleon the Third, or 
 anybody in the world. Compassion or any 
 trace of a desire to be helpful are in fact 
 almost entirely wanting in the works of this 
 impersonal writer. They are absent in a 
 way that characterises no other author known 
 to me. Flaubert, Heaven knows, is impersonal 
 enough ; yet it is impossible to read Madame 
 Bo vary and to mark Emma s frantic running 
 from pillar to post to pick up a little money, 
 whilst the net is closing all round her, without 
 feeling that Flaubert had an immense sense 
 of pity, and that Flaubert, had he come 
 across Emma in real life, would have lent her 
 considerable sums of money. Similarly with 
 Mr. James great master, it is impossible to 
 read Lisa or Smoke or A Sportsman s Sketches, 
 impersonal observation although they all may 
 be, without feeling Turgenieff s immense sym 
 pathy with the mental or material sufferings 
 of his characters. The absence of this charac- 
 22 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 teristic is extraordinarily striking in Mr. James 
 work. Maisie is for him just a child in a 
 basement. Or, if you will read either the 
 original or the revised version of The Four 
 Meetings you will be almost appalled by this 
 peculiar passionlessness. The Four Meetings 
 is the story of a New England schoolmistress 
 with a passionate yearning to see Europe. 
 She gets as far as Havre upon one occasion 
 and is promptly sponged upon by a worthless 
 relation who extracts from her all her money, 
 so that she has to return to New England on 
 the very evening of her arrival. And, some 
 time afterwards, when she is again beginning 
 to save up a little money for the purpose of 
 visiting Europe and it is impossible to say 
 how intensely and how horribly Mr. James 
 has rendered her yearning to see Chamounix 
 or Venice she is descended upon by the 
 soi-disant wife of the worthless cousin, the 
 runaway wife of someone like a small French 
 hairdresser. This lady, giving herself out to 
 be a Countess, battens upon the New England 
 schoolmistress until the very day of the 
 latter lady s death. In whichever version 
 we read this nouvelle we are compelled to say 
 that it is unsurpassed in the literature of 
 any language or of any age. It is the perfect 
 " longish short story." First published in 
 
 23 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 1883 and, presumably, written at about that 
 date, this story has been considerably re 
 written for Volume XVI of Mr. James com 
 plete edition which was published in 1909. 
 These facts are merely bibliographical, but 
 what jumps at your eyes in reading either 
 version is the singular pitilessness of the 
 narrator. The story, that is to say, is put 
 into the mouth of a third party who writes 
 in the first person. In the first version this 
 narrator seems to present himself as a quiet, 
 gentle, observant young New Englander. In 
 the latter version, he appears to be a sardonic, 
 rather florid, rather garrulous, international 
 American in the later years of his life. But 
 in neither case, whether as a young and 
 modest man or an elderly and patronising 
 personality, does the narrator give any evidence 
 of its even occurring to him that he might 
 conceivably render some assistance to the 
 poor victim of her infamous connections. It 
 never apparently occurs to either narrator 
 to offer to lend the lady at Havre, after she 
 had been robbed, five or six pounds so that 
 she might at least spend a day or two in 
 Paris after having come so far. And it never 
 seems to have occurred to either narrator to 
 say to the poor New England school marm 
 that the cuckoo in her particular nest was no 
 24 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 Countess at all, but merely an infamous 
 adventuress who should be instantly turned 
 out of the little weather-boarded house. No, 
 the narrator just lets the thing go on and 
 concludes with the scoffing remark : " I could 
 feel how right my poor friend had been in 
 her conviction that she should still see some 
 thing of that dear old Europe." This state 
 ment, implying as it did that a fragment of 
 Europe, in the shape of the sham Countess, 
 had descended upon that poor New England 
 victim, seems to me to be one of the most 
 pitiless sentences ever penned by the hand of 
 man. 
 
 I am aware that these remarks are open to 
 the objection that, if the narrator had made 
 the offer of the five or six pounds, and, if it had 
 been accepted, the story would have gone to 
 pieces. But of course the New England school 
 mistress would never have accepted the money 
 just as she would never have believed any 
 vague surmises that the narrator might have 
 made as to the Countess s origin. The real fact 
 is that Mr. James knows very well that he was 
 giving just an extra turn to the tragedy of the 
 story by making his narrator so abnormally 
 unhelpful. And the other fact remains : ob 
 viously Mr. James does not consider that he 
 came into this world to make it any better 
 
 25 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 otherwise than it could be bettered by his 
 observation and the setting down of his 
 observations. He does not, that is to say, 
 expect to improve the world by advocating 
 anything. He doesn t suggest that divorce 
 laws or marriage laws or prison laws or social 
 laws should be altered. He merely gives you 
 material. Upon the views which you may 
 gather from this material you are at liberty to 
 form your verd ct and to direct your votes when 
 the questions of divorce, marriage, crime, or 
 society may come before you in a practical 
 sense. 
 
 That, then, is the secret of Mr. James great 
 ness in so far as it applies to the outer world. 
 As to what may be his personal aims, as to 
 what may go on within the cavernous recesses 
 of his artist s mind, we have simply no means 
 of knowing, and very likely he has simply no 
 means of knowing himself. Nay, I will even 
 go so far as to say that he couldn t by any 
 possibility be the great writer that he is if he 
 had any public aims. What Maisie Knew, 
 that is to say, would certainly not have been 
 a passionless masterpiece if Mr. James had 
 thought that it was his business, as a writer, 
 passionately to uphold on the one hand the 
 claim of marriage to be a sacrament, or on the 
 other passionately to decry the claim of the 
 26 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 marriage law to any existence whatever. In 
 deed, whatever the figure of Mr. James, the 
 individual, may be, the figure of Mr. James, 
 the writer, is that of a philosophic anarchist. 
 In the whole array of Mr. James books, except 
 for the mention of the employment of a 
 solicitor and even that appears to be regarded 
 as the vaguest of expedients in The Spoils of 
 Poynton, and except for the fact that the 
 divorce laws obviously have some but a 
 quite shadily defined influence upon the 
 career of Maisie, I cannot recall any single 
 instance of the mention of the law, or for the 
 matter of that of a policeman in any one of 
 Mr. James quarter of a century of volumes of 
 fiction. This is how that formidable engine, 
 the Law of England, seems to present itself 
 to this distinguished writer : 
 
 The litigation had seemed interminable so 
 What Maisie Knew opens and had, in fact, 
 been complicated ; but by the decision on 
 the Appeal the judgment of the Divorce Court 
 was confirmed as to the assignment of the 
 child. The father, who, though bespattered 
 from head to foot, had made good his case, 
 was, in pursuance of this triumph, appointed 
 to keep her : it was not so much that the 
 mother s character had been more absolutely 
 damaged as that the brilliancy of a lady s 
 complexion (and this lady s in court was im- 
 
 27 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 mensely remarked) might be more regarded as 
 showing the spots. 
 
 This, then, with its charming vagueness, 
 is apparently all the legal paraphernalia upon 
 which this long book is founded. Yet it is 
 characteristic that, in defiance of English legal 
 procedure, a lady s complexion should have 
 any effect or be remarked on at all in an Appeal 
 Court. In a Divisional Court of the Probate, 
 Divorce and Admiralty Division, Mrs. Farange s 
 complexion might have played its part in the 
 eyes of the jury. But in the Appeal Court, con 
 sisting as it does of three judges and no jury ; 
 in which the witnesses are not re-examined 
 and not necessarily present at all ; which 
 devotes the whole of its time to the considera 
 tion of legal points not one of which could by 
 any possibility turn upon the quantity of 
 peroxide used by a lady the question of the 
 state of her skin could not, I believe, have had 
 any influence at all. In a similar way the 
 tremendous engine of the law is disposed of in 
 The Spoils of Poynton. The Spoils of Poynton 
 turns upon whether a mother or a prospective 
 daughter-in-law is to grab the beautiful con 
 tents of one of the most beautiful houses in 
 England : 
 28 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 44 And did you think," [Fleda Vetch asks the 
 unfortunate son of the mother and fiance of the 
 prospective daughter-in-law], " your mother 
 would see you ? " 
 
 44 I wasn t sure, but I thought it right to try 
 to put it to her kindly, don t you see ? If 
 she won t see me, she has herself to thank. 
 The only other way would have been to set the 
 lawyers at her." 
 
 4 I am glad you didn t do that." 
 
 4 I m dashed if I want to," Owen honestly 
 responded. 44 But what s a fellow to do if she 
 won t meet a fellow ? " 
 
 44 What do you call meeting a fellow ? " 
 Fleda asked with a smile. 
 
 4 4 Why, letting me tell her a dozen things she 
 can have." 
 
 This was a transaction that Fleda had after a 
 moment to give up trying to represent to her 
 self. 44 If she won t do that ? " she went 
 
 on. 
 
 44 I ll leave it all to my solicitor. He won t 
 let her off, by Jove. I know the fellow ! " 
 
 4 That s horrible ! " said Fleda, looking at 
 him in woe. 
 
 44 It s utterly beastly." 
 
 And this, as regards the 4 4 plaintiff in what 
 might have been a protracted legal dispute, 
 is to all intents and purposes all that is said 
 about the law in this wonderful book. As 
 regards the 44 defendant," the mother who for 
 
 29 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 the moment is in possession of the " Spoils, r 
 who is sitting in the house and refusing to quit 
 it, our author is a little more definite. But 
 indeed Mrs. Gereth is a character of somewhat 
 more definite will than are many that Mr. 
 James asks us to consider. And Mrs. Gereth, 
 at least for a moment, looks at the situation 
 quite definitely : 
 
 . . . Fleda asked Mrs. Gereth if she literally 
 meant to shut herself up and stand a siege, or 
 if it might be her idea to expose herself, more 
 informally, to be dragged out of the house by 
 constables. 
 
 " Oh, I prefer the constables and the drag 
 ging ! the heroine of Poynton had readily 
 answered. " I want to make Owen and Mona 
 do everythingthat will bemost publicly odious." 
 She gave it out as her one thought now to force 
 them to a line that would dishonour them and 
 dishonour the tradition they embodied. . . . 
 
 And, in the end, in spite of the threat of the 
 solicitor and the other threat of submitting 
 only to policemen, the question of the occupa 
 tion of Poynton solves itself upon a purely 
 moral note, as is to be expected in our author s 
 works. In actual English life of to-day, given 
 Mrs. Gereth with her tendencies which are those 
 of the eternal brigand, and, given the Brig- 
 stocks, those perfectly English people " the 
 30 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 worst horror of their house, called Waterbath, 
 " was the acres of varnish, something adver 
 tised and smelly, with which everything was 
 smeared : it was Fleda Vetch s conviction that 
 the application of it by their own hands, and 
 hilariously shoving each other was the amuse 
 ment of the Brigstocks on rainy days " given 
 these exceedingly English people, with the 
 rather will-less but quite English figure of 
 Owen Gereth between them, the problem 
 would have become one, really, of affidavits, 
 of interim orders of the court, of the pur 
 loining of small valuables, of false evidence 
 by servants, tradesmen, vicars wives com 
 panions and heaven knows whom. But for 
 Mr. James English life is a matter of smooth 
 nesses, civilisations, and that very avoidance 
 of publicity which Mrs. Gereth felt to be her 
 strongest weapon. 
 
 The Brigstocks of Waterbath desired to 
 acquire Poynton by right of marriage : 
 
 There had been in the first place the ex 
 quisite old house itself, early Jacobean, 
 -supreme in every part ; a provocation, an 
 inspiration, the matchless canvas for a picture. 
 Then there had been her [Mrs. Gereth s] 
 husband s sympathy and generosity, his know 
 ledge and love, their perfect accord and beau 
 tiful life together, twenty-six years of planning 
 
 31 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 and seeking, a long sunny harvest of taste and 
 curiosity. Lastly, she never denied, there had 
 been her personal gift, the genius, the passion, 
 the patience of the collector. . . . 
 
 " Don t you think it s rather jolly, the old 
 shop ? " Owen Gereth had asked his fiancee. 
 
 " Oh, it s all right," Mona Brigstock had 
 graciously remarked ; and then they had, 
 probably, with a slap on the back, run another 
 race up or down a green bank. 
 
 And this the Brigstocks desired to acquire 
 by marriage. 
 
 And the real ambition of the Brigstocks, 
 their real passion, was as follows : 
 
 At the end of five minutes the young lady 
 from Waterbath suddenly and perversely 
 said : " Why has she never had a winter 
 garden thrown out ? If ever I have a place of 
 my own I mean to have one." 
 
 Fleda, dismayed, could see the thing some 
 thing glazed and piped, on iron pillars, with 
 untidy plants and cane sofas ; a shiny excres 
 cence on the noble face of Poynton. She re 
 membered at Waterbath a conservatory where 
 she had caught a bad cold in the company of a 
 stuffed cockatoo fastened to a tropical bough 
 and a waterless fountain composed of shells 
 stuck into some hardened paste. She asked 
 Mona if her idea would be to make something 
 like this conservatory ; to which Mona re 
 plied : " Oh, no, much finer ; we haven t got 
 a winter garden at Waterbath." 
 
 32 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 Now nothing in the world could be a 
 stronger passion than the passion of an 
 English family, with their solicitors, and the 
 paraphernalia of the law at their back, to 
 stick a small Crystal Palace on to the back of 
 a Jacobean house like Poynton ; and nothing 
 could be stronger than the determination of 
 an English freebooter of the type of Mrs. 
 Gereth to prevent their doing anything of the 
 sort, to stick to Poynton, to mother Poynton, 
 to go on adding in spite of straitened circum 
 stances treasure to treasure. Mr. James has 
 quite rightly discerned in this, his greatest 
 book, that these passions are the very 
 strongest that exist in English society of 
 to-day. The Brigstocks would automatically 
 call in a policeman ; Mrs. Gereth would 
 desperately commandeer, steal, lie, swear 
 false affidavits, allege undue influence, suborn 
 false witnesses, and so on, these being the 
 daily occupations of all quite good English 
 families where questions of property are 
 concerned. 
 
 But that hasn t been Mr. James method in 
 dealing with this subject. Being, as he so 
 essentially is, an un-Americanised American, 
 he couldn t in that way treat what he con 
 sidered at the start and what, after many 
 disillusionments, he would still like to con- 
 c 33 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 sider an ancient civilisation, the inhabitants 
 of all these homes of ancient peace, the dei>i- 
 zens of all these West End drawing-rooms 
 and better -class suburban garden parties. 
 It isn t in fact Mr. James business to treat 
 of subjects that. centre round Fleet Street, 
 where are to be found amongst other monu 
 ments of our great civilisation, the Royal 
 Courts of Justice. In the preface to one of 
 his novels he has told us that he never could 
 bring himself to treat of a "down town" 
 subject "down town" being the American 
 expression for " business," since most of the 
 business of New York is conducted between 
 Fourteenth Street and the Battery, just as 
 most of the business of London is conducted 
 between the Law Courts and the eastern 
 limit of the City proper. No, the spirit in 
 which the negotiations attending The Spoils 
 of Poynton is conducted is not in any way a 
 "down town," but an "up town" spirit. 
 In order to get away from the affidavits, the 
 interim orders, and the writs, Mr. James 
 introduces into his 1 4 affair the figure of 
 Fleda Vetch. And Fleda Vetch is, as you 
 might say, the apotheosis of civilisation of 
 the " up town " spirit the spirit of that 
 West End which is so distinctly not the spirit of 
 the City, but which is so distinctly the spirit of 
 34 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 whatever is creditable that our civilisation has 
 to show. It is as if to a table of financiers, 
 of " down town " or of city men, to a board 
 of directors with their devious manners, their 
 queer points of view, their obscure knowledges 
 of wire-pulling, of bribery, with shares of 
 rigging the market as if, to such a body, a 
 decent-minded individual from the West End 
 or from a country house should have been 
 introduced as if, that is to say, Christ 
 should come to Chicago or to any other 
 " Third Floor Back." The chances would be 
 that Our Lord would do little enough, but 
 still He would have a chance. And this 
 particular chance Mr. James chooses to give 
 to his Fleda Vetch. She is an angel making 
 a wonderful visit and, if the results do not end 
 in the salvation of Poynton and if they do 
 end in a great deal of pain of heart to Fleda 
 herself, nevertheless the resultant of her visit 
 is the preservation of the public decency. 
 Her apparition practically puts into Mrs. 
 Gereth s head the idea that Mona Brigstock 
 may be outwitted and crushed by the attrac 
 tion of Fleda far more effectually than by any 
 buccaneering on her own part. And, in the 
 presence of Fleda, Owen Gereth is struck 
 with the idea that to serve writs upon his 
 mother would be horrible, would be dis- 
 
 35 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 gusting. Thus the story works itself out, 
 down to the burning of Poynton, in an 
 atmosphere of increasing delicacy. The case 
 of " Gereth versus Gereth " and possibly of 
 * Brigstock intervening" never got into the 
 list ; it stopped, by the grace of Fleda, at the 
 mention of the policemen and at the mention 
 of the solicitor. 
 
 So that, roughly speaking, if Mr. James 
 have any moral lesson to inculcate, that 
 would be his formulation of his particular 
 lesson that a civilising personality intro 
 duced into an affair is better than any law 
 suit. And it should be pointed out very 
 carefully that nowhere does Mr. James in 
 this story preach any change of the law. He 
 appears to accept implicitly the state of things 
 as it is. I don t mean to say that he doesn t, 
 from the contemplation of the characters, 
 crawling as it were around his serene footstool, 
 discern the fact that some of them might 
 like certain of our laws to be changed. 
 Yet even this, in the mouths of his characters, 
 amounts far more to a desire for a change in 
 sentiment than for a change in legislation : 
 
 [Mrs. Gereth] hated the effacement to which 
 English usage reduced the widowed mother ; 
 she had discoursed of it passionately to Fleda, 
 and contrasted it with the beautiful homage 
 
 36 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 paid by other countries to women in that 
 position, women no better than herself, whom 
 she had seen acclaimed and enthroned, whom 
 she had known and envied ; she made, in 
 short, as little as possible a secret of the injury, 
 the bitterness she found in it. . . . Hadn t she 
 often told Fleda of her friend Mme. de Jaume, 
 the wittiest of women, but a small black 
 crooked person, each of whose three boys when 
 absent wrote to her every day of their lives. 
 She had the house in Paris, she had the house 
 in Poitou, she had more than in the lifetime of 
 her husband to whom, in spite of her appear 
 ance, she had afforded repeated calls for 
 jealousy because she was to have till the end 
 of her days the supreme word about every 
 thing. It was easy to see how Mrs. Gereth 
 would have given again and again her com 
 plexion, her figure, and even perhaps the spot 
 less virtue she had still more successfully re 
 tained to have been the consecrated Mme. de 
 Jaume. She wasn t, alas, and this was what 
 she had at present a splendid occasion to 
 protest against. 
 
 It is possible, that in this last sentence we 
 may discern the beginnings of a trace present 
 in Mr. James mind of the germs of what is 
 now called militant suffragism. But it is 
 none the less odd to observe that hitherto, as 
 I have before said, what is principally in the 
 mind of Mr. James character is rather a 
 
 37 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 change in sentiment than any change in the 
 law. She desires more that a woman s son 
 should write to her every day of his life in 
 which case she would be pretty sure to keep 
 him off the Mona Brigstocks of the world 
 than any legislative enactment that a man 
 should upon marriage make a compulsory 
 settlement upon his wife, or upon his deathbed 
 make in her favour compulsory testamentary 
 bequests. 
 
 And the consideration, in memory of the 
 whole range of Mr. James work, doesn t seem 
 to give me, in this respect, any other lesson. 
 
 I say " in memory " because, although ever 
 since the age of eighteen I have read with 
 attention every work of our distinguished 
 author that I could at all lay my hands on, 
 and although, for the purposes of this book, 
 I have made a careful, textual comparison 
 between the earlier stories of our author in 
 their original form, and themselves decked 
 out in the fine linen in which Mr. James later 
 years delight all the same, I can t be said 
 to have made any very German study of this 
 author s works. After all, Germany with its 
 annotators will long survive myself ; more 
 over the French habit of writing immense and 
 immensely trustworthy baccalaureate mono 
 graphs upon particular authors will also long 
 38 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 outlive us and our day. Therefore I am 
 presenting you rather with my impressions of 
 our author s work than the outpourings of 
 any note-books. This_Senis to me to be the 
 proper method for dealing with an author 
 who, more than anything else, is an impres 
 sionist. So that, .when I say the only traces 
 of the actions of the law to be found in 
 Mr. James voluminous writings, I don t mean 
 to say that litigation is nowhere else men 
 tioned in the quarter century of large volumes ; 
 I only mean to say that these passages in 
 What Maisie Knew and The Spoils of Poynton 
 are really the only ones that have made any 
 salient impression on my mind. I am, in 
 short, making for a definite purpose a carefully 
 studied exaggeration. Any fault-finder upon 
 the point of fact is at liberty to bring up 
 against me, for instance, that matchless nou- 
 velle which is a part of the " late " James, and 
 is called The Bench of Desolation. I don t 
 know whether the actual bench in this par 
 ticular case was the tribunal that tried the 
 action or whether it was the seat decorating 
 the parade upon which sat so frequently the 
 victim of his country s tricky laws. The story 
 wonderful to relate is the story of an action 
 for breach of promise. You can t of course 
 imagine any subject more preposterous for 
 
 39 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 Mr. James treatment. And indeed he doesn t 
 treat it as far as the action is concerned, 
 though it comes, as near as Mr. James can 
 by any possibility be expected to come, to 
 the mention of writs, justifications, and the 
 rest of it. No indeed, this story of the ruin 
 and the subsequent salvation of a small 
 country tradesman gives you no more than, 
 as it were, the veriest echoes, heard in the 
 suburbs or at the seaside of what is passing 
 in Fleet Street where the Law Courts are. 
 The small shopkeeper is sued for breach by 
 a determined, masterful, and quite pleasant 
 woman who is the last person that you would 
 expect to take any such proceedings who is 
 in fact quite " civilised," quite the lady. The 
 small shopkeeper he deals in books and prints 
 and is therefore himself of a comparatively 
 scholarly and "civilised" kind in his des 
 perate efforts to pay off by instalments the 
 heavy damages that were awarded against him, 
 and also to provide for the slight extravagances 
 of a rather silly little wife whom he eventually 
 marries sinks slowly down and down the 
 hill of indigence. The wife dies ; bankruptcy 
 confronts him ; then there turns up for his 
 salvation the woman who has ruined him. 
 She is wealthy ; she appears to own hotels 
 for you never can for the life of you tell quite 
 40 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 definitely what any of Mr. James characters 
 own, any more than you ever know quite 
 precisely what any of your own friends own. 
 At any rate, she is quite blazingly wealthy. 
 And she tells the ruined small shopkeeper 
 that the whole of her intention in bringing the 
 action for breach of promise was to provide 
 for his old age. She had foreseen that the 
 weak amiability of his so civilised character 
 would eventually bring him to bankruptcy 
 in any case. By getting out of him a largish 
 sum which was partly capital and partly 
 income, she has forced him to save, in, as it 
 were, her money-box, the quite enviable sum 
 which, by means of successful investment, 
 management and re-investment she is thus, to 
 wards the end of his life, able to pour with 
 proper restrictions into his lap. 
 
 Thus, it will appear that, although The Bench 
 of Desolation is at first sight the story of a 
 breach of promise case, it is in reality nothing 
 of the sort. It concerns rather the device of 
 a far-seeing woman to save a man from himself, 
 I don t see that any particular moral is to be 
 drawn from this story. 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 II 
 
 I don t, for the matter of that, see that any 
 moral at all is to be drawn from any of Mr. 
 James work. For, if, upon the one hand, 
 you get as far with The Spoils of Poynton or 
 with What Maisie Knew as to say that one 
 of their definite morals is that publicity and 
 the odiousness of the Courts of Law are things 
 to be avoided ; on the other hand, you might 
 learn from The Bench of Desolation the 
 simple lesson that the publicity and the 
 odiousness of the Courts of Law may be turned 
 to account by a clever woman to such an 
 extent as to make, at any rate, something of 
 a man out of a quite weak-kneed individual. 
 In any case, the one moral for what it is worth 
 may well counteract the other. 
 
 I made my first acquaintance with the 
 works of our distinguished subject during my 
 gentle youth which covered the last years of 
 the eighties and the early nineties. I call it 
 my " gentle youth " because, whatever may be 
 the case with the youths of other people, my 
 own early and late adolescence was a period 
 for me of extreme submission to authority ; 
 42 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 it is only in fact in later life that I have 
 become impatient of fools. The works of Mr. 
 James, then, were thrust into my hands by 
 the sort of brow-beating, "advanced" in 
 tellectuals who, let us say, founded the Fabian 
 Society, the Independent Theatre Society, 
 The Browning Society, or any of the numerous 
 Societies that flourished or merely existed in the 
 nineties. And, whilst these works were thrust 
 into my hands, it was enjoined upon me to 
 believe, I was in fact brow-beaten into 
 trying to see as if it were the ultimate end, 
 the ultimate aim, the causa causans of our 
 author s existence in all Mr. James books, 
 from Daisy Miller nay, from that very Watch 
 and Ward which is now no more than a ghost 
 in works of reference to The Spoils ofPoynton 
 itself ; I was told to believe that, in The Real 
 Thing, as in The Lesson of the Master, in the 
 Pension Beaurepas as in The Princess Casa- 
 massima, the one thing for which I was 
 to look was the Profound Moral Purpose. 
 
 Now the profound moral purpose of the 
 nineties was a curious thing made up of social 
 ism, free thought, the profession of free love, 
 going hand in hand with an intense sexual 
 continence that to all intents and purposes 
 ended in emasculation, and going along, also, 
 hand in hand with lime-washed bedroom 
 
 43 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 walls and other aesthetic paraphernalia. It 
 was, that is to say, the profound moral purpose 
 of the nineties, that really frightened me out 
 of my life. 
 
 I never knew during the years when 
 I was reading the early and the middle 
 James, when I wasn t, in one way or the 
 other, offending against the great moral pur 
 pose of the universe. And I used to read, 
 say, The Diary of a Man of Fifty in the 
 hope that there it would be plain as it 
 wasn t in any other terrestrial phenomena 
 that had come under my view that there, at 
 least, that particular and very frightening 
 Figure in the Carpet, the moral purpose of the 
 universe, would be made manifest. I read 
 Mr. James, in fact, naively and gropingly, as 
 the young read, in the hope of becoming a 
 better Fabian and a wiser supporter of the 
 Independent Theatre. But I could not square 
 it out. 
 
 I could not square it out with the work 
 of Mr. James any more than I could square 
 it out with the world that we live in ; prob 
 ably because the one is so like the other. 
 I have said elsewhere that, considering that 
 our contacts with humanity are nowadays 
 so much a matter of acquaintanceship and 
 so little a matter of friendship, considering 
 44 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 that for ourselves, moving about as men 
 do to-day, we may know so many men 
 and so little of the lives of any one man, 
 the greatest service that any novelist can 
 render to the Republic, the greatest ser 
 vice that any one man can render to the 
 State, is to draw an unbiassed picture of 
 the world we live in. To beguile by pretty 
 fancies, to lead armies, to invent new 
 means of transport, to devise systems of 
 irrigation all these things are mere steps 
 in the dark ; and it is very much to be 
 doubted whether any lawgiver can, in the 
 present state of things, be anything but a 
 curse to society. It seems at least to be the 
 property of almost every law that to-day we 
 frame to be infinitely more of a flail to a large 
 number of people than of a service to any 
 living soul. Regarding the matter historically, 
 we may safely say that the feudal system in 
 its perfection has died out of the world except 
 in the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, 
 and Sark. The Middle Ages with their em 
 pirical and tricky enactments against regrat- 
 ing and the like ; the constitutional theories, 
 such as they were, of the Commonwealth and 
 the Stuart age, have disappeared ; the Whig- 
 gism of Cobden and Bright, the bourgeois 
 democracy of the first and third Republics 
 
 45 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 arid the oppressive, cruel, ignorant and blind 
 theorising of later Fabianism have all died 
 away. We stand to-day, in the matter of 
 political theories, naked to the wind and 
 blind to the sunlight. We have a sort of 
 vague uneasy feeling that the old feudalism 
 and the old union of Christendom beneath a 
 spiritual headship may in the end be infinitely 
 better than anything that was ever devised 
 by the Mother of Parliaments in England, the 
 Constituent Assemblies in France, or all the 
 Rules of the Constitution of the United States. 
 And, just at this moment when by the nature 
 of things we know so many men and so little 
 of the lives of men, we are faced also by a sort 
 of beggardom of political theories. It remains 
 therefore for the novelist and particularly 
 for the realist among novelists to give us 
 the very matter upon which we shall build 
 the theories of the new body politic. And, 
 assuredly, the man who can do this for us 
 is conferring upon us a greater benefit than 
 the man who can make two blades of grass 
 grow where one grew before ; since what is 
 the good of substituting two blades for one 
 what is the benefit to society at large if the 
 only individual to benefit by it is some company 
 promoter ? 
 
 That is the reason for my saying that I 
 46 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 consider Mr. James to be the greatest man now 
 living. He, more than anybody, has observed 
 human society as it now is, and more than 
 anybody has faithfully rendered his obser 
 vations for us. It is perfectly true that his 
 hunting grounds have been almost exclusively 
 " up town " ones that he has frequented the 
 West End and the country house, practically 
 never going once in his literary life east of 
 Temple Bar or lower than Fourteenth Street. 
 But a scientist has a perfect right nay more, 
 it is the absolute duty of the scientist to 
 limit his observations to the habits of 
 lepidoptera, or to the bacilli of cancer 
 if he does not feel himself adapted for enquiry 
 into the habits of bulls, bears, elephants or 
 foxes. Mr. James, to put the matter shortly, 
 has preferred to enquire into the habits of 
 the comfortable classes and of their dependents 
 and no other human being has made the 
 serious attempt to enquire with an unbiassed 
 mind into the habits and necessities of any 
 other class or race of the habitable globe as 
 it is. That is why Mr. James deserves so well 
 of the Republic. 
 
 I am aware that my penultimate statement 
 is what is called a large proposition, but I 
 think I am justified in making it. The English 
 novel has hitherto occupied a very lowly 
 
 47 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 position, whether in the world of art or in the 
 world where sermons are preached, political 
 speeches listened to, railway trains run, or 
 ships plough the sea ; and, in both these 
 worlds, its lowly position has upon the whole 
 been justified. The critic has been forced to 
 say that the English novelist has hardly ever 
 regarded his art as an art ; the man of affairs 
 has said that to read English novels was waste 
 of time. And both the critic and man of 
 affairs have hitherto been right. The worlds 
 of art and affairs are widely different spheres, 
 but that is not to say that they are spheres 
 that should not interact one upon the other. 
 Indeed, my grand-aunt Eliza amply summed 
 the matter up, busy woman as she was, when 
 she exclaimed that sooner than be idle she 
 would take a book and read. But this attitude 
 is only justifiable in a world of affairs that 
 can t get hold of books worth reading. For, 
 when books are worth reading the world of 
 affairs that omits to read them is lost both 
 commercially and spiritually. You cannot 
 have a business community of any honesty 
 unless you have a literature to set a high 
 standard. And you could not even run a very 
 efficient cotton-spinning industry unless you 
 kept in your mind some idea of how fashions 
 change some idea, that is to say, of the 
 48 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 psychology of dress of whatever class it is 
 that you have to cater for. The really efficient 
 maker of Manchester goods is the man whose 
 knowledge of psychology, the world over, 
 is so considerable that he will be able to say 
 considerably beforehand in what year cotton 
 frocks will be very largely worn in the West 
 End when it goes into the country, and in 
 what year woollen sweaters will take the 
 place of cotton frocks. Or, again, he should 
 be able to prophesy at what time an increased 
 demand for his wares will come from the East. 
 Now I do not mean to say that a study of the 
 works of Mr. Henry James, however close, 
 will show a manufacturer at precisely what 
 moment mousseline de laine will supersede 
 white cotton ; but a careful study of those 
 same books would show that manufacturer 
 what a tricky thing the psychology of the 
 smart to smartish woman may be. It would 
 give him, that is to say, tips as to the un- 
 desirability of keeping his eggs for too long 
 all in the same basket. It might be said 
 that the manufacturer might learn these things 
 from the study of his own trade but, owing to 
 some human fatality in the fabric trades, 
 this is not the case. Do we not daily read that 
 the English manufacturer who is too busy 
 to read novels is being ousted all over the 
 D 49 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 world by his German rival, a much more 
 intelligent being and one whose reading of 
 literature is so considerable as to be, by com 
 parison, vast ? This is not paradox ; it is 
 really a fact that the German manufacturing 
 class do take ari intense interest in literature. 
 
 I have recorded elsewhere my meeting, in 
 a corridor train, a Jewish stocking merchant 
 of Cologne who stated to me in accents of 
 almost tearful sincerity that, if his daughter 
 could marry a real but penniless poet he 
 would willingly give her an enormous dower, 
 whereas if she married a manufacturer he 
 would give her only half the sum, and would 
 insist upon the bridegroom making an at 
 least equal settlement. This gentleman was 
 then on his way to England where, owing to 
 his subsequent exertions, his firm almost 
 completely captured the woollen sweater-coat 
 trade. The fact is that imagination is as 
 useful a quality in a manufacturer as, let us 
 say, attention to detail. And if my Jewish 
 friend had kept himself as little in touch with 
 the products of imagination as the English 
 small tailors who were ruined by him sweater- 
 coats having, as the phrase is, almost entirely 
 " knocked out tailor-mades " my Jewish 
 friend would have been as ruined as are the 
 English tailors. 
 50 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 But, to return to the more tangible propo 
 sition that there are practically no English 
 novels that are not artistically negligible, and 
 that it would not be a waste of time, or at 
 any rate that it would be any more than an 
 agreeable occupation for leisure moments, to 
 read. Let us for a moment survey the entire 
 field. 
 
 I was once asked to write a history of 
 the English novel a technical history. I 
 considered the idea at first with enthusiasm ; 
 it appeared to be just exactly the job that I 
 wanted. But, gradually, the glory of the 
 idea faded out as fade the hues of the dying 
 flying fish. As a matter of fact, there is no 
 technical history of the English novel. There 
 is, of course, a history. You could write about 
 the lives of Defoe and Fielding and Sarah 
 Fielding and Richardson and Scott and Dickens 
 and Thackeray and Meredith and all the rest 
 of them. But you can t find much more than 
 three sentences to say of the methods of any 
 one of them. They may have had great natures 
 or they may have been buoyant storytellers, 
 but of art they hadn t a pennyworth between 
 them, and they did not care even that amount 
 for analysis of human nature. I don t mean 
 to say that they weren t amusing or entertain 
 ing, or some of them romantic and others of 
 
 51 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 them calculated to take you out of yourself 
 but, regarded as conscious literature their works 
 are just splendidly null. And regarded as in 
 formers upon human nature they have hardly 
 the value of police reports which colour all the 
 characters black or white. They deal in 
 heroes and villains, those fabulous monsters ; 
 which is as much as to say that they have 
 remained psychologically upon the level of 
 Sir John Mandeville. We attend upon their 
 performances as we attend the meetings at the 
 National Sports Club, and when the hero 
 bashes the villain one in the jaw we throw up 
 our caps and shout " hurray ! " But that has 
 nothing to do nothing on earth to do, with 
 the world we live in. 
 
 Mr. James has no connection with these 
 amiable amateurs. If he is an un- American 
 ised American, as at the first glimpse we are 
 tempted to call him, he is surely the least 
 naturalised of all the English. And, indeed, 
 it is only in our haste that we can speak of him 
 as un-American. Actually he is the most 
 American product that New England ever 
 turned out. I don t mean to say that, arrayed 
 in a top hat, with a shovelful of medals on 
 his breast and decorated with a gaily-coloured 
 scarf across his stomach, he goes hurrahing 
 through the streets because some one, by buy- 
 52 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 ing up the Thirteenth Ward, has got in his 
 nominee for district attorney. No, the " get- 
 tings in of Mr. Henry James are of another 
 order. 
 
 But let us go back to two gentlemen whom 
 I have treated with scant courtesy let us 
 go back to Defoe and still more to Richard 
 son, for, if we in the least wish to understand 
 the figure of Mr. James we must consider the 
 figure of the author of Clarissa. Defoe, in 
 fact, was a realist of the city and of the mart. 
 He touched boldly upon those " down town " 
 subjects from which Mr. James muse flees 
 with averted face. But Richardson was the 
 " up town," the West End realist of his day. 
 And it is amazing to consider how, tempera 
 mentally, the author of Pamela foreshadows 
 for us the figure of the author of The Golden 
 Bowl. It is amazing, that is, until you come 
 to consider how it is obvious and predestined. 
 
 Mr. Henry James, the reader may reply, 
 comes to us from France, where he was the 
 pupil of Turgenieff. That is perfectly true. 
 But Richardson the spirit of Richardson 
 abandoning these isles to Fielding and the 
 Romanticists crossed the Channel. It be 
 came reincarnated in, it was the chief in 
 fluence upon, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists. 
 Diderot begot, as you might say, Chateau- 
 
 53 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 briand aud even Stendhal ; and Stendhal 
 and Chateaubriand between them had for 
 children Flaubert, Maupassant, the Goncourts, 
 Gautier, and the very air of the very circle 
 in which Turgenieff and the young James went 
 about together. It is not my business to be 
 unnecessarily biographical, but I cannot resist 
 mentioning a glimpse of a letter that was 
 kindly afforded me by a French writer a little 
 time ago. The letter was written by Flaubert, 
 and recounts how Turgenieff had brought to 
 see him a young American who had enraged 
 Flaubert beyond belief. He had, this young 
 American, spoken disrespectfully of the style 
 of Prosper Merimee. Now, says in effect the 
 great author of Madame Bovary, Prosper 
 Merimee was no great shakes. But that was 
 more than he could stand from any Ameri 
 can. . . . 
 
 That young American was Mr. James. 
 
 To come back, however, from this biogra 
 phical digression to which, however, I must 
 later once more return^ to come back to the 
 question of what is the real greatness of Mr. 
 James, I must allow myself an immensely 
 long quotation from one of his prefaces a 
 quotation throwing light upon, or at least 
 adumbrating the matter of why during all his 
 54 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 literary life he remained so sedulously 4 up 
 town." 
 
 What is more to the point is the moral I at 
 present find myself drawing from the fact that, 
 then turning over my American impressions, 
 those proceeding from a brief but profusely 
 peopled stay in New York, I should have fished 
 up that none so very precious particle as one 
 of the pearls of the collection. Such a circum 
 stance comes back, for me, to that fact of 
 my insuperably restricted experience and my 
 various missing American clues or rather at 
 least to my felt lack of the most important of 
 them all on which the current of these re 
 marks has already led me to dilate. There had 
 been indubitably and multitudinously, for me, 
 in my native city, the world " down-town " 
 since how otherwise should the sense of 
 " going" down, the sense of hovering at the 
 narrow gates and skirting the so violently 
 overscored outer face of the monstrous laby 
 rinth that stretches from Canal Street to the 
 Battery, have taken on, to me, the intensity 
 of a worrying, a tormenting impression ? Yet 
 it was an impression any attempt at the active 
 cultivation of which, one had been almost 
 violently admonished, could but find one in the 
 last degree unprepared and uneducated. . . . 
 
 For there it was ; not only that the major 
 key was " down-town," but that down-town 
 was, all itself, the major key absolutely, ex 
 clusively ; with the inevitable consequence 
 
 55 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 that if the minor was " up-town," and (by a 
 parity of reasoning) " up-town " the minor, so 
 the field was meagre and the inspiration thin 
 for any unfortunate practically banished from 
 the true pasture. Such an unfortunate, even 
 at the time I speak of, had still to confess to 
 the memory of a not inconsiderably earlier 
 season when, seated for several months at the 
 very moderate altitude of Twenty-fifth Street, 
 he felt himself day by day alone in that scale 
 of the balance ; alone, I mean, with the music- 
 masters and French pastry-cooks, the ladies 
 and children immensely present and im 
 mensely numerous these, but testifying with a 
 collective voice to the extraordinary absence 
 (save as pieced together through a thousand 
 gaps and indirectnesses) of a serious male 
 interest. One had heard and seen novels and 
 plays appraised as lacking, detrimentally, a 
 serious female ; but the higher walks in that 
 community might at the period I speak of 
 have formed a picture bright and animated, no 
 doubt, but marked with the very opposite 
 defect. . . . 
 
 What it came to was that up-town would do 
 for me simply what up-town could and 
 seemed in a manner apologetically conscious 
 that this mightn t be described as much. The 
 kind of appeal to interest embodied in these 
 portrayals and in several of their like com 
 panions was the measure of the whole minor 
 exhibition, which affected me as virtually 
 saying : Yes, I m either that that range and 
 
 56 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 order of things, or I m nothing at all ; there 
 fore make the most of me ! " . . . 
 
 To ride the nouvelle down-town, to prance 
 and curvet and caracole with it there that 
 would have been the true ecstasy. But a 
 single spill such as I so easily might have 
 had in Wall Street or wherever would have 
 forbidden me, for very shame, in the eyes of 
 the expert and the knowing, ever to mount 
 again ; so that in short it wasn t to be risked 
 on any terms. 
 
 There were meanwhile the alternatives, of 
 course that I might renounce the nouvelle, or 
 else might abjure that " American life," the 
 characteristic towniness of which was lighted 
 for me, even though so imperfectly, by New 
 York and Boston by those centres only. 
 Such extremities, however, I simply couldn t 
 afford artistically, sentimentally, financially, 
 or by any other sacrifice to face ; and if the 
 fact nevertheless remains that an adjustment, 
 under both the heads in question, had eventu 
 ally to take place, every inch of my doubtless 
 meagre ground was yet first contested, every 
 turn and twist of my scant material economic 
 ally used. . . . 
 
 As I wind up with this companion-study to 
 Daisy Miller the considerable assortment of 
 my shorter tales, I seem to see it symbolise my 
 sense of my having waited with something of a 
 subtle patience, my having still hoped as 
 against hope that the so ebbing and obliging 
 seasons would somehow strike for me some 
 
 57 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 small flash of what I have called the major 
 light would suffer, I mean, to glimmer out, 
 through however odd a crevice or however 
 vouchsafed a contact, just enough of a wander 
 ing air from the down-town penetralia as 
 might embolden, as might inform, as might, 
 straining a point, even conceivably inspire 
 (always where the nouvelle, and the nouvelle 
 only, should be concerned) ; all to the advan 
 tage of my extension of view and my variation 
 of theme. A whole passage of intellectual 
 history, if the term be not too pompous, 
 occupies in fact, to my present sense, the 
 waiting, the so fondly speculative interval : 
 in which I seem to see myself rather a high and 
 dry, yet irrepressibly hopeful artistic Micawber, 
 cocking an ostensibly confident hat and prac 
 tising an almost passionate system of" bluff " ; 
 insisting, in fine, that something (out of the 
 just-named penetralia) would turn up if only 
 the right imaginative hanging about on the 
 chance, if only the true intelligent attention, 
 were piously persisted in. 
 
 Put into my own much less luxuriant 
 phraseology these passages simply mean that, 
 throughout all his life, Mr. James has regarded 
 the business life at least with curiosity and 
 possibly with some small measure of awe. But 
 I cannot believe, however much Mr. James 
 might wish to hoodwink us into believing it, 
 that our distinguished subject ever had any 
 58 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 yearning to penetrate practically into the 
 secrets of business life. And, indeed, let us 
 take upon ourselves to throw down the glove 
 that Mr. James, not being militant in any 
 sense here upon earth, has been unwilling to 
 throw down. Let us say boldly for, indeed, 
 in an Anglo-Saxon community it needs saying 
 that business and whatever takes place 
 * down town " or in the City is simply not 
 worth the attention of any intelligent being. 
 It is a matter of dirty little affairs incom 
 petently handled by men of the lowest class 
 of intelligence. It can teach nobody any 
 thing and, if an immense cataclysm over 
 whelmed at once the whole of " down town " 
 New York and the whole of the financial 
 quarters of the city of London, in ten days the 
 whole system would be running again, con 
 ducted by men of similarly mediocre in 
 telligences. Of them this world contains 
 millions and millions. 
 
 It is possible that there is something to be 
 said for the actual manufacturer, the organising 
 producer of cotton, wool, coal and the rest of 
 the material products upon which our civilisa 
 tion is based. And it is certain that a great 
 deal might be said of the inventor of new 
 processes, or of the man who actually and 
 
 59 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 with his hands works in the mines, the mills,, 
 or upon the face of the earth. 
 
 The really producing classes have some 
 thing to tell that is worth the attention of a 
 man of intelligence, and so have the really 
 leisured classes. The one may tell you what 
 sort of an animal man becomes under the 
 pressure of necessity, the other may tell you 
 what sort of a being he will be when, the 
 pressure of necessity being removed, he has 
 leisure to attend specifically to those depart 
 ments of life which differentiate man from the 
 animal. And any other way of looking at 
 these problems of our civilisation is the merest 
 cant. 
 
 I am not, of course, writing a sociological 
 essay, and I have said no more than is neces 
 sary to make, for my own immediate purposes, 
 my own immediate point. And the fact 
 remains as far as Mr. James is concerned, 
 that Mr. James, if he has drawn a very perfect 
 picture of one phase of occidental life, has 
 done the greatest service that it is possible 
 to do to the humanity of his day. If he has 
 done this he has, in fact, shown us to what 
 tend all the strivings of the men digging drains 
 in the road, of the men setting brick upon 
 brick in the building of houses, of the men 
 toiling in the mines, of the inventors of new 
 60 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 engines, of the clerks incessantly blackening 
 pieces of paper, of the manufacturers organis 
 ing the labours of all these people, and of 
 the business men, Semitic or others who by 
 the means of that most rascally of all forms of 
 victimising company promoting take the 
 profits of the labour of all us toiling millions. If 
 Mr. James, then, has given us a truthful picture 
 of the leisured life that is founded upon the 
 labours of all this stuff that fills graveyards, 
 then he, more than any other person now 
 living, has afforded matter upon which the 
 sociologist of the future may build or may 
 commence his destructions. 
 
 For, given that he has achieved this, the 
 problem which will then present itself to the 
 sociologist is no more and no less than this 
 are the prizes of life, is the leisured life which \ 
 our author has depicted for us, worth the 
 striving for ? If, in short, this life is not 
 worth having this life of the West End, of the 
 country-house, of the drawing-room, possibly 
 of the studio, and of the garden party if 
 this life, which is the best that our civilisation 
 has to show, is not worth the living ; if it is 
 not pleasant, cultivated, civilised, cleanly and 
 instinct with reasonably high ideals, then, 
 indeed, Western civilisation is not worth 
 going on with, and we had better scrap the 
 
 61 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 whole of it so as to begin again. For, you 
 may by legislation increase the earnings 
 of the labourer ; you may by organising or by 
 inventing increase the wealth of our par 
 ticular Western communities, but what is the 
 use of this wealth if the only things that it 
 can buy are no better than are to be had in 
 any city store unless, along with material 
 objects that it does buy, it gets " thrown in," 
 as the phrase is, some of the things that were 
 never yet bought by mortal s money. For it is 
 no use saying anything else than that the 
 manual labourer, if you give him four hundred 
 a year and an excellent education, will have 
 no ambition to live any otherwise, things 
 being as they are, than as the dwellers in any 
 suburb. And, supposing that you gave him 
 a thousand a year he would, as things at present 
 stand, have no other ambition than to live 
 like one of the less wealthy characters of any 
 one of Mr. James books. There is no getting 
 away from these facts in any Anglo-Saxon 
 community, and even in France and Germany 
 the tendency is much the same ; though, 
 of course, in both of those countries you 
 happen upon such phenomena as farmers 
 of very large income who continue to live 
 the life and to wear the dress of farmers, 
 without any thought of snobbishly imitating 
 62 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 the lives and habits of suburban clerks or of 
 hunting gentry. 
 
 So that the problem remaining to the 
 sociologist, the politico-economist or the mere 
 voter, after reading Mr. James work is simply 
 this : is the game worth the candle ; is the 
 prize worth the life ? If they are not, then 
 political economists must entirely change their 
 views of what is meant by supply and demand, 
 introducing a new factor which I will call the 
 " worth whileness " of having one s demands 
 supplied ; the sociologist must shut up all 
 the books that he has ever read until he, too, 
 has evolved some theory of what is worth 
 while ; and the voter must insist upon the 
 closing of all the legislatures known to this 
 universe until some reasonable plan of what 
 they are all striving for shall have been arrived 
 at. For the fact is that our present systems 
 of polity and laws, being entirely based upon 
 theories of economics, we have not paid none 
 of us who are interested in public questions 
 any heed at all to the purchasing power of 
 that money which by our activities we pro 
 duce and which by our legislation we seek as 
 equally as possible to distribute. 
 
 It is because Mr. James has so wonderfully 
 paid attention to this question that I have 
 advanced for him and heaven knows he won t 
 
 63 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 thank me for it the claim to be the greatest 
 servant of the State now living. Heaven knows 
 too that, things being as they are, it isn t much 
 of a claim. For as greatness goes, looking 
 at the world as it now appears, when was there 
 ever such an amazing, such an overwhelming 
 dearth of figures ? Where is the Bismarck 
 of to-day, the dominating figure who balanced 
 our whole world in one hand whilst he used 
 the other for pouring down great draughts 
 of mixed champagne and stout ? I heard the 
 other day that there was a Bismarck of the 
 Balkans. But this morning I read that he 
 had been put in prison for peculation. Where 
 is our Napoleon of to-day ? I know of a 
 gentleman who advertises himself in public 
 conveyances as the Napoleon of the roll collar 
 for the City of London, but I know of no other 
 Napoleon. Where are our Palmerstons, our 
 Disraelis, our Lincolns, our Grants, our Stone 
 wall Jacksons, our Emersons, our Carlyles, 
 our Stephensons ? Why, even Mr. Pierpont 
 Morgan is dead, and his, I think, was the last 
 of the names with which you could have 
 conjured through the whole world. So that it 
 is not much of a claim that I am making for 
 Mr. James it is no more than saying that he 
 is the only unbiassed, voluminous and truthful 
 historian of our day. And, in our day, the 
 64 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 greatest need of society is the historian who 
 can cast a ray of light into the profound gloom, 
 into the whirl of shadows, of our social agnos 
 ticism. 
 
 I do not mean to say that we haven t to 
 day historians galore, shoals of statisticians, 
 whole heaps of philanthropic novelists, whole 
 armies of Fabian pamphleteers. We have also 
 Chancellors of the Exchequer in huge quantities 
 throughout the Empire ; there are several 
 Reichs-Kanzlers in Europe, and I have not 
 heard that there are any portfolios lacking 
 holders in the Cabinet of the President of the 
 United States. But all these things amount 
 to nothing as far as any constatation of how 
 we really stand is concerned. Our historians 
 usually commence, like myself, as advanced 
 democrats and, like myself, end as Papists 
 and upholders of the Feudal system at any 
 rate, our historians are always trying to prove 
 something, when they don t degenerate into 
 mere machines for the collection of Ur-Kunde. 
 
 Our statisticians are almost invariably gen 
 tlemen with axes to grind either for or against 
 some tariff or some social policy ; our earnest 
 English novelists are almost invariably, by 
 some fatality, sentimental humanitarians with, 
 in a public sense, an extraordinary number of 
 axes to grind. Our less earnest English 
 E 65 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 novelists remain recounters of anecdotes that 
 are usually hardly even polite, or pathologists 
 dealing exclusively in romantic exceptions. 
 And our Fabian Pamphleteers well, they 
 are still Fabian Pamphleteers, members of 
 the middle classes who try to force the working 
 man into broadcloth clothes of their own 
 particular pattern and into the employment 
 of babies bottles of their own particular make. 
 Our Chancellors of the Exchequer well, they 
 are merely the opportunists of the moment, 
 trying to force collectivist legislation upon 
 an unwilling world when their particular 
 party label bespeaks them individualists, or 
 preaching individualist sentiments beneath a 
 collectivist banner to audiences equally un 
 willing. As to the United States Cabinet 
 well, I know nothing about it ; but then, 
 neither, I think, does anyone else outside 
 Washington. 
 
 Now God forbid that I should be held as 
 saying that any of our eloquent Chancellors, 
 Fabian Pamphleteers, earnest and humani 
 tarian novelists or upholders of the feudal 
 system are in the wrong. They are probably 
 every one of them absolutely in the right, and 
 each of them would be the infallible saviour of 
 Society if only Society would listen to them, 
 or if human nature could be kept from creeping 
 66 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 in. But the point is that each and every one 
 of them is a partisan of something or other 
 each and every one of the considerable figures, 
 such as they are, of the world of to-day, with 
 its confusing currents, its incomprehensible 
 riddles, its ever present but entirely invisible 
 wire pulling, and its overwhelming babble, its 
 whole surface dominated by the waving of 
 the halfpenny papers every " figure " in the 
 world is a partisan of some cause or other. 
 Even M. Anatole France, who is a great, 
 clear and negational intellect, is an anti- 
 religious socialist, and to that end colours all 
 his writings, observing like any other politician 
 only that which he desires to observe. Mr. 
 James alone, it seems to me, in this entire 
 weltering universe, has kept his head, has 
 bestowed his sympathies upon no human 
 being and upon no cause, has remained an 
 observer, passionless and pitiless like the 
 narrator of The Four Meetings. As a writer, 
 he has had no more sympathy for chivalrous 
 feelings than for the starving poor. He 
 just sits on high, smiling his sardonic smile and 
 exclaiming from time to time : 4C Poor dear 
 old world!" 
 
 67 
 
HENRY JAME|S 
 
 III 
 
 What then distinguishes Mr. James picture 
 of society since I have claimed for it so high 
 a quality of truth from the pictures drawn 
 by Walter Scott, Thackeray, Alexander Dumas, 
 who is to all intents and purposes an English 
 novelist, or, say, from the works of Charles 
 Dickens or Charles Reade ? 
 
 Dickens was, of course, a propagandist, but, 
 when he is engaged in propagandising, his work 
 is so crude as to be almost beneath notice, 
 and as much might be said for the late Charles 
 Reade. Their novels aimed at the reform of 
 definite institutions the convict prison, the 
 debtors prison, the lunatic asylum and the 
 workhouse. They took hard cases of institu 
 tions of this description, peopled them with 
 characters all black, who perpetrated physical 
 violences and other tyrannies upon characters 
 who were white-hued as the angels are. They 
 achieved notable reforms but, as writers, 
 they were merely negligible in so far as the 
 reforming passages of their works were con 
 cerned. A considerably greater skill in 
 characterising is employed by the reforming 
 novelists of to-day by Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. 
 Wells and other writers with purposes. But 
 68 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 their works probably lose dynamic power as 
 pamphlets on account of the art that they 
 employ, whilst the value as documents is 
 seriously impaired by the bias of their minds. 
 And these more modern writers are dis 
 tinguished as coming after the distinct cleavage 
 that is to be observed in the history of the 
 English novel a cleavage that began to be 
 observed in the eighties and nineties of the 
 last century. Roughly speaking, until that 
 time the English novelist was a teller of stories 
 more or less rattling in which the characters 
 were as sharply differentiated into sheep and 
 goats as, to take typical examples, Tom Jones 
 is differentiated from Mr. Blifil, Tom Pinch 
 from Uriah Heep, or Clive from Barnes New- 
 combe. Thackeray, of course, began to have 
 some vague idea that a conventional villain 
 may be a person quite as meritorious and 
 much more heroic than the conventional hero. 
 Therefore he could give you the figure of Becky 
 Sharp, over whom he moralised in a brandy- 
 fied manner characteristic of the Georgian era 
 for Thackeray was a Georgian f a more than 
 a Victorian. But still, upon the whole, these 
 were just stories the stories of non-moral 
 lives, lived by non-moral people. In order 
 to give themselves dignity, both Fielding and 
 Thackeray and all their followers after them 
 
 69 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 indulged in fits of moralising. This, since 
 it was in solid chunks, the reader could con 
 veniently skip in order to get on with the 
 story. This tendency to buttonhole you, 
 drag you into a corner and utter ethical 
 rhapsodies, was the tribute these novelists 
 paid to the public Anglo-Saxon belief that 
 the reading of novels was a waste of time. 
 Messrs. Thackeray, Fielding and school wished, 
 as it were, to show that, although they were 
 classed with mere tellers of stories like Scott, 
 Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Harrison Ainsworth 
 and the rest, they really when they got the 
 chance could moralise as well as any bishop 
 in any sermon, or as well as any Professor Rus- 
 kin, Mr. Carlyle and the rest of the Victorian 
 prophets. Charles Reade and Charles Dickens, 
 anxious also to assert the respectability of 
 their professions, took upon themselves the 
 jobs of reforming, as we have said, gaols, 
 lunatic asylums and workhouses. When they 
 had done this they could cry out : " Behold, 
 we have cleared out these dark places in the 
 land, we are no longer mere tellers of stories." 
 And indeed they weren t or indeed they 
 were, according as their stories are skilfully or 
 unskilfully told. But with the coming of the 
 seventies, eighties, and nineties a new spirit 
 began to percolate even into England. Into 
 70 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 New England it had percolated even earlier, be 
 cause New England with its centre at Concord, 
 Massachusetts, with its highly refined moral 
 atmosphere, its essentially Old English habits 
 of life and its New England conscience, which 
 is so much more a self-consciousness New 
 England with its Emerson, its Holmes, its 
 Thoreau and, for the matter of that, its 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, was in a much more 
 gentlewomanly frame of mind than ever 
 London, with its metropolitan spirit could by 
 any possibility be. Boston, in fact, germless 
 and clean, was much more ready for the 
 inroads of a new cultural bacillus than ever 
 could be an old-world centre with its dark 
 places and its ungentlewomanly habits. The 
 new influence came much more in the shape 
 of Turgenieff than in the shapes of Flaubert 
 or George Sand ; for there is nothing in 
 Turgenieff that could bring the blush to the 
 cheek of any Boston gentlewoman. If you 
 will take the trouble to read excellent and 
 high-minded journals like the Atlantic 
 Monthlies of the seventies, you will be amazed 
 to find the immense influence that the " beau 
 tiful genius " must have had upon American 
 thought and possibly even upon American 
 life. You will find, particularly amongst the 
 important sections devoted to correspondence, 
 
 71 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 letters enough to fill volume after volume 
 wherein the Boston young ladies asked im 
 ploring questions of the editor as to whether 
 Bazarof was really a nice character, or even 
 as to whether Liza should have given up 
 Lavretsky. You will thus observe that New 
 England, far earlier than England, began to 
 concern itself with the real questions of 
 humanity which are precisely the questions 
 as to whether Bazarof was really a nice 
 character, and as to whether Liza really ought 
 to have given up Lavretsky far earlier than 
 did the England which is on the eastern side 
 of the Atlantic. And then, almost imme 
 diately afterwards, you begin to find the same 
 young ladies writing their enthusiastic or 
 imploring letters to the editor as to the ethics 
 of Daisy Miller, or as to whether Madame de 
 Cintre ought really to have given up the 
 American. America was, in fact, ready to 
 receive an even more dispassionate writer 
 than was Turgenieff, and that more dis 
 passionate writer was ready in the shape of 
 Mr. James. It had, indeed, been ready for 
 years before both for England and for the 
 Western World in the figure of Anthony 
 Trollope, who is a great figure too often for 
 gotten. But Trollope, for reasons which I 
 do not now wish to go into, was nearly as 
 72 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 much neglected in New England as were 
 those two other very great writers, Jane 
 Austen and Mrs. Gaskell. I don t mean to 
 say that America at large, at this period, did 
 not go on reading writers of the school of 
 Dickens and Thackeray or novels as porten 
 tous as The Mill on the Floss or Daniel 
 Deronda. But the hub of the universe had 
 succumbed to Turgenieff and to his disciple, 
 Mr. Henry James. Later, it succumbed to 
 Mr. William Dean Howells. 
 
 Mr. George Moore has somewhere cruelly 
 said that Mr. James came to Europe to study 
 De Maupassant, and that Mr. Howells re 
 mained in America and studied Mr. Henry 
 James. But a more exact rendering of the 
 statement would be that Mr. James came 
 to Europe and went about Paris in the society 
 of M. Turgenieff, whilst Mr. Howells remained 
 in New England and bathed himself in the 
 New England atmosphere with the New Eng 
 land conscience and all. (Mr. Howells, I 
 believe, resided, or at any rate resides, physi 
 cally, in New York ; and the state of New York 
 is not, technically, a New England State. 
 But, though Mr. Howells body may have been 
 physically somewhere up-town between Broad 
 way and Fifth Avenue or somewhere down 
 town in the neighbourhood of Franklin Square, 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 there can be no doubt that his soul was always 
 on the Common, with its high avenues of 
 thin-leaved elms, somewhere near the statue 
 of that distinguished Englishman, George 
 Washington, or at any rate between that 
 statue and Trinity Church.) In the mean 
 while, in England in the seventies there was no 
 Boston for Turgenieff to devastate. There was, 
 however, the Esthetic Circle. These poets and 
 painters were not so gentlewomanly and much 
 less emasculated, and were beginning to lay 
 claim to some of the intellectual tyranny that 
 was exercised over the great Republic of the 
 West by those refined personages with their 
 atmospheres kept clean by the winds from 
 Boston Bay. The English ^Esthetic Circle 
 never got so far as taking up Maupassant, 
 who came a little later ; but Rossetti remotely 
 and dimly perceived some of the qualities of 
 Flaubert, and with some enthusiasm he ac 
 claimed the greatness of Turgenieff. Tur 
 genieff, both as a writer and as a man, was 
 introduced into the ^Esthetic Circle by a 
 queer figure called Ralston, like Turgenieff 
 a gentle giant, but of suicidal tendencies, who 
 had lived much in Russia and who first trans 
 lated a story of Turgenieff s I forget which 
 into an occidental tongue. And in those 
 days, for Rossetti or Morris or Swinburne to 
 74 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 * take up writers was for those writers to be 
 sure of at least a succes d estime. Theo 
 Marzials would talk about them and write 
 about them, so would O Shaughnessy, so 
 would Oscar Wilde, so would Lady Mount 
 Temple and so would a limited section of the 
 Press and of society. In its dim and muddled 
 way, intellectual England would be beginning 
 to receive a new influence. And what was 
 happening was really that the spirit of 
 Richardson, which had crossed the Channel 
 to light on Diderot, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, 
 Flaubert and Turgenieff, was coming back to 
 England, or if you like, that English in 
 tellectual life was coming back into the main 
 stream of European culture. I remember 
 that, as a boy, the books that I was told to 
 read by my grandfather, who himself was a 
 figure in the aesthetic society of that day, 
 were firstly, of course, the poems of Byron 
 which I couldn t by any possibility read 
 and then Lisa, A Sportsman s Sketches, 
 Fathers and Children, and, later, Stendhal s 
 Le Rouge et le Noir and Flaubert s Madame 
 Bo vary. That would be in 1891. 
 
 But the European " influence " was as yet 
 quite subterraneous. It was, as it were, 
 practised in the cellars of the time, this 
 reading of the works of the great Russians 
 
 75 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 and the great French. For some reason or 
 other, except for Daisy Miller, I do not think 
 that the ^Esthetics ever read much of Mr. 
 Henry James, who had at that date been 
 writing for about sixteen years. I am too 
 young, of course, to say from personal obser 
 vation how far Mr. James fame had penetrated 
 in circles non-aesthetic, but I should be 
 inclined to say that, as far as he was concerned, 
 the silver Thames flowed undisturbed and with 
 no signs of conflagration. The great awaken 
 ing of the nineties was heralded for him by 
 the following episode, which I will leave Mr. 
 James to recount. 1 
 
 My clearest remembrance of any provoking 
 cause connected with the matter of the present 
 volume applies ... to ... an effort em 
 balmed, to fond memory, in a delightful associ 
 ation. I make the most of this passage of 
 literary history I like so, as I find, to recall 
 it. It lives there for me in Old Kensington 
 days ; which, though I look back at them over 
 no such great gulf of years The Death of the 
 Lion first appeared but in 1894 have already 
 faded for me to the complexion of ever so long 
 ago. It was of a Sunday afternoon early in the 
 spring of that year : a young friend, a Kensing 
 ton neighbour and an ardent man of letters, 
 
 1 Preface to Volume XV of the Collected Edition of 
 the novels of Henry James, 1909. 
 76 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 called on me to introduce a young friend of his 
 own and to bespeak my interest for a periodical 
 about to take birth, in his hands, on the most 
 original " lines " and with the happiest omens. 
 What omen could be happier, for instance, 
 than that this infant recueil, joyously christened 
 even before reaching the cradle, should take 
 the name of The Yellow Book which so cer 
 tainly would command for it the liveliest 
 attention. 
 
 It is not for me to state whether The Yellow 
 Book was merely a land post on the edge of 
 the cleavage that I have described, or whether 
 it was both a land post and the wedge that 
 drove itself in. It is certain that The Yellow 
 Book gave a chance for publication, which 
 didn t exist before and which has certainly 
 never existed since a chance for publica- j 
 tion to really fine work of a high technical 
 order. Technically, indeed, I should say that 
 this periodical, which was so lacking in in- 
 choateness as to be hardly a periodical at all 
 but rather a periodically interrupted produc 
 tion of matter of permanent interest this 
 periodical represents the high-water mark of 
 English achievement in the world of the 
 Arts. Nothing that came before it was worth 
 much attention from the serious critic, and 
 nothing that came after it, if we except per 
 haps Mr. Henley s National Observer. How- 
 
 77 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 ever that may be, it is certain that The Yellow 
 Book meant for the serious critic the end of 
 having to pay attention to the botched 
 and amateurish productions of the schools of 
 Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, Dumas and 
 George Eliot. I don t mean to say that the 
 English nuvvle hasn t gone on being 
 produced and being acclaimed by the English 
 Press. 
 
 But the critic who isn t compelled by the 
 same trade exigencies as is the reviewer has 
 had, since 1894 or thereabouts, a small body of 
 work produced which is up to a point worthy of 
 his attention and which may at least legitimately 
 excite his curiosity. Roughly speaking, before 
 the nineties there was nothing at all literally 
 nothing at all except the novels of Trollope. 
 Since 1894 there have been at times two or 
 three, at times five or six, books a year to 
 which someone of intelligence might turn his 
 
 / attention. You might, that is to say, without 
 serious diminution of self-respect, read the 
 
 \ works of Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Arnold Bennett, 
 Mr. H. G. Wells, of the late George Gissing. 
 With reservations you might read those of 
 the late Robert Louis Stevenson and the late 
 George Meredith who, if they paid no par 
 ticular attention to the architectonics of their 
 novels or to the psychology of their characters 
 78 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 these being as a rule just as black and white 
 as those to be found in the works of a Dickens 
 or a Reade did at least pay some, if a quite 
 mistaken, attention to the potential qualities 
 of words. In a class quite apart as a serious \ 
 and conscious artist the critic would have to 
 place Mr. George Moore ; as a writer whose 
 personality has great charm but whose works 
 are not technically very interesting he would / 
 await the books of Mr. Thomas Hardy. And by 
 themselves quite alone and above all others 
 he would put the books of Mr. Joseph Conrad, j 
 Mr. W. H. Hudson and Mr. Henry James. 
 
 I don t mean to say that this is by any 
 means an exhaustive list. All that I am trying 
 to point out is that, for the critic, there is 
 some hope each year of finding a book or two 
 of interest produced by a writer in the English 
 language, a state of things that was impossible 
 before the nineties. Nowadays we may expect, 
 in a novel, form and unaffected wording, 
 which are the things that interest the critic, 
 and some attempt at genuine characterisation, 
 and subjects which have some connection 
 with the real life of the day. They are, that is 
 to say, an attempt at shadowing the real 
 problems of the contact of individual with 
 individual. And it is because he was by so far 
 the earliest in the field, because his work is 
 
 79 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 so immense in bulk, so various in subject and 
 so intimately true to the life we lead, that Mr. 
 James, in the most literal sense, is to-day in 
 comparable whether amongst novelists or 
 historians. Mr. Hudson has a finer sense of 
 words, Mr. Conrad is probably the more con 
 summate artist, in the sense that he is the 
 greater poet and has paid more attention to 
 technical details ; but his stories deal so much 
 less intimately with the normal products of 
 our day that, in this particular department, he 
 scarcely comes, Oriental as he is, into com 
 parison with the great writer from the West. 
 
 Mr. James work with its immense number 
 of characters so amazingly rendered, so skilfully 
 and dispassionately dissected and laid bare, 
 is the exact mirror of the world as he knows 
 it of the world as we all know it. It contains 
 without doubt the rendering of many hard 
 cases there is the American of the book 
 called The American ; there is the lion of The 
 Death of the Lion ; there is Madame Merle in 
 The Portrait of a Lady ; there are the Colonel 
 and his wife of The Real Thing ; there is 
 Mr. Ruck of The Pension Beaurepas ; there is 
 Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove ; there 
 are the dependents upon the old lady in 
 that most wonderful of all stories called Europe. 
 There are in fact no end to the sufferers 
 80 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 amongst Mr. James characters, and we may 
 doubt whether, during the extent of its par 
 ticular " affaire," the artist who fails to find 
 employment for the two beautifully turned 
 out figures in The Real Thing isn t as much 
 to be commiserated for having them descend 
 upon him and so nearly ruin his work, as are 
 the Colonel and his wife who have to be sent 
 away. And so it is through the whole range 
 of this author s works. The normal novelist 
 presents you with the oppressor and the 
 oppressed. Mr. James presents you with the 
 proposition, not so much that there are no 
 such things as oppressors and oppressed, but 
 that, even in the act of oppressing, the op 
 pressor isn t having a very much better time 
 than his victims. He does not, that is to say, 
 picture for you starvations, gaols, workhouse 
 wards, and slave-drivers brandishing whips. 
 That is not his business. His subjects in the 
 end are selected instances of long chains of 
 embarrassments, and his tragic note is rather 
 that of the nightmare than of the murder. 
 So that, when you consider the whole crowd 
 of his characters, you have, as it were, an 
 impression, giving a colour that is almost 
 exactly the colour of the life we lead. I don t 
 know exactly how many characters there are 
 in the thirty or so of volumes of fiction that 
 F 81 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 Mr. James has given to the world, but, from 
 Sir Jeoffrey Mandeville to Brooksmith the 
 butler ; from Miss Bordereau of The Aspern 
 Papers to little Miles of The Turn of the Screw ; 
 from Mr. Searle of A Passionate Pilgrim to 
 the young lady who was the post-office clerk 
 and heroine of In the Cage there must be a 
 thousand or so of them. There must be 
 major and minor, about as many people as 
 the average man or woman will have amongst 
 their acquaintanceship, their friends figuring 
 upon their calling list or merely as their 
 dependents. You have them all : the American 
 tourists, some quite nice French people with 
 titles, an Italian prince or so, the butlers, the 
 housekeepers, the tweenie maids, the author 
 or two and the artist or two, the large crowd 
 of people in comfortable circumstances, a few 
 peers, rather more peeresses, some journalists, 
 some divorcees, and some of those vague figures 
 in the background who are in the background 
 of everybody s life, and of every garden party. 
 So that you have to imagine yourself in 
 the very centre of the London season with its 
 sense of an extraordinarily hurried but extra 
 ordinarily exciting rush through very peopled 
 time, with its high skies, its boisterous winds, 
 its ever present greenery of high trees and its 
 equally ever present feeling that the end is 
 82 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 approaching that end which will see us all 
 scattered from the moors to Silesia and from 
 Poitou to Rapallo, wherever our country 
 homes or our chateaux may be. When, 
 eventually, we get to those distant places, we 
 shall have leisure to sit down and to reflect 
 upon the season that is past and how, by it, 
 we ourselves and everybody that we know will 
 be affected in the season that is to come. 
 But for the moment we are actually at one of 
 the great garden-parties of the year. There 
 is a band playing in the square ; the roadway 
 is encumbered ; we hurry in because we have 
 three other such places to go to in the course 
 of the afternoon. But whilst we are waiting 
 in the crowd of new arrivals for our names to 
 be announced, we perceive Madame de Belle- 
 garde talking to Milly Strether, whilst the 
 Marquis gazes vacuously but still with a 
 sinister expression at the conductor of the 
 orchestra. Quite on the other side of the 
 garden Newman is talking to Princess Casa- 
 massima, for though he has lost Madame de 
 Cintre who a little outrageously went into 
 a convent and although he has settled in 
 London, he can t get away altogether from 
 the attraction of titled continentalism. The 
 author of Beltrafno is proving extremely boring 
 to Miss Kate Croy, who can t keep her eyes off 
 
 83 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 Morton Densher. Densher is actually in no 
 danger at all, since he is only asking the mature 
 lady who writes as Greville Fane all about 
 the plot of her next play. He doesn t, poor 
 man, in the least want the knowledge, but he 
 knows how to keep a conversation going. 
 By one of those slips of an otherwise perfect 
 social secretary both Beale Farange and the 
 former Mrs. Farange had been invited to the 
 same party, whereas Beale ought to have been 
 asked to the one on the 4th and the lady to 
 that given in honour of the poor dear Mahara 
 jah on the 18th. But there they are, the one 
 with his immense golden beard beneath 
 the tall plane tree in the middle of the square 
 talking to Mrs. Assingham : not far behind 
 whose back is that Prince of The Golden 
 Bowl you never can quite remember his 
 name ; but you know perfectly well that he 
 very much wants to ask her some question 
 about the precise relationship of Mr. Verver 
 with the household of Poynton or was it 
 Matcham ? Yes, certainly it must have been 
 Matcham. The former Mrs. Farange, with her 
 brilliant complexion, is being talked to by that 
 American chap, a tired and rather boring 
 enthusiast you can t remember his name ; 
 but he was the chap who tried to get hold of the 
 Aspern Papers. You think he was even ready 
 84 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 to marry the governess. It was something 
 like that at any rate. The other American 
 oh yes, his name is Winterbourne, and he 
 failed to marry that rather crude young 
 woman who died of Roman fever Winter- 
 bourne is talking to Count von Vogelstein who 
 now, with a harvest of ribbons, has retired from 
 the Diplomatic Service talking about the real 
 motives of Bismarck in 1882. Just being 
 introduced to the notice of your hostess is 
 Lord Lambeth with Lady Lambeth, the very 
 model of a British Peeress, though she was 
 actually in a former state Miss Choate of 
 Milwaukee. You see, Lord Lambeth had in 
 the end to marry dollars, so that the Duchess 
 might after all just as well have let him have 
 Bessie Westgate. Miss Westgate married in 
 the end that fellow you can t for the moment 
 remember his name who used to be always 
 everywhere because he was understood to 
 keep a diary, but who hasn t been so much 
 about since his marriage. They never are. 
 But, by Jove what an immense party it 
 is ! how jolly well our host does do them 
 when he takes it into his head to do them at 
 all. There is Bessie Westgate, and there is 
 Lord Lambeth, positively beaming straight 
 down upon her with his friendly smile. We 
 always liked her so much and isn t she well 
 
 85 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 preserved ! we shouldn t wonder . . . such 
 things do happen. . . . But no ! Mr. James 
 wouldn t, at his party, have people who 
 could by any possibility get into such a 
 position. Of course the Beale Faranges are 
 there, but they were both such very old friends. 
 And then the incomparable Brooksmith is 
 upon you with his automatic : " What name, 
 Sir?" and his equally inevitable " Oh ; it s 
 you, Sir." In answer to a just breathed 
 question on your part, before he cries out your 
 name, he answers discreetly : " No, Sir, Lady 
 Barberina is not here yet. But Lady Agatha 
 Longstraw and Miss Maisie are in the dining- 
 room across the road. It s wonderful how 
 Miss Maisie do come on, Sir. You d find Mr. 
 St. George in the dining-room too, Sir." 
 The incomparable Brooksmith can allow him 
 self this moment of garrulity because your 
 hostess is taking a minute or two to talk to 
 Lady Wantridge about Scott Homer whom 
 she hasn t seen for so many years. But 
 Lady Wantridge goes, and you take your turn 
 for a moment before the high lady whose 
 relations with your host may be whatever 
 they are ; Mr. James has at any rate deputed 
 to her the task of receiving his thousand or so 
 of guests. And having heard her say, " Oh, 
 it s only you ; run, if you are capable of 
 86 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 running, in the direction of Mrs. Medwin s 
 pink sunshade which she certainly oughtn t, 
 poor lady, to hoist upon any such occasion. . . ." 
 You perceive quite close to the pink protec 
 tion in question the tall figure of Mrs. Verveine. 
 Now how the deuce did Lady Euphemia know 
 that there was anything between if there 
 possibly could in the most indefinite manner 
 of speaking be said to be anything at all 
 between you and . . . ? But Lady Euphemia 
 knows positively everything ; she can see, 
 as it were, every one of the invisible cords that 
 runs between every one of the obscure couples 
 who so very obviously so very carefully 
 don t talk to each other but do talk almost 
 inevitably to somebody they don t in the least 
 want /to talk to. And, for just a moment, 
 you nave a sense of the immense strain, of 
 the immense pull of all the cords that such a 
 great London party means. You know to 
 yourself, as she knows to herself, how all 
 these people, beneath the high skies, amongst 
 the high trees of the square, drowning with 
 their not very loud voices the strains of the 
 discreetest of orchestras, smiling, moving, 
 appearing behind one group and disappearing 
 into another, you know the strain that is 
 upon them all, and the feeling that they all 
 
 87 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 have that this great function is no more 
 than an etape, a stage in the journey towards 
 an entire despair or towards a possible happi 
 ness, that is always in such a low and such a 
 tantalising key. But you put the thought 
 from you as you walk (and you are painfully 
 aware that it will probably be for the last 
 time !) openly towards the figure that is 
 beside the too palpable sunshade. Yes, it 
 will have to be the very last time that quite 
 openly you display at a party a really visible 
 interest in the lady who now smiles so frankly 
 at you. For you feel, boring into your back 
 or at the very least tickling between your 
 shoulders, Lady Euphemia s glance. And you 
 know perfectly well that if you don t take a 
 great deal of trouble you and Mrs. Verveine 
 will be popped alive into one of those elegant 
 volumes each of which is decorated by a photo 
 graph of Mr. Alvin Coburn s. For, after all, 
 we too know a thing or so about some people ; 
 / and don t we know that Lady Euphemia will 
 tell every single thing that she observes to our 
 distinguished host ; for isn t she just no more 
 and no less than the lady who in New York 
 refused to go down town and in London 
 averts her gaze from the Law Courts isn t 
 she, incomparable gossip that she is, just no 
 more and no less than Mr. James Muse ? 
 88 
 
SUBJECTS 
 
 Anyhow, that, for what it is worth, is the 
 exact impression caused by the reading, for a 
 matter of twenty-five years, the works of Mr. 
 James. It is the effect of an immense concourse 
 of real people, whose histories we just dimly 
 remember to have heard something about ; 
 whose figures we just dimly remember to have 
 knocked up against here and there. Real ! 
 why they are just as exactly real as anybody 
 we have ever met. The fictitious Prince von 
 Vogelstein is just as actual a person to us as 
 Prince von Metternich who was at the German 
 Embassy only the other day, and Milly Strether 
 is just as real as the poor dear little American 
 cousin Hattina who faded away out of life 
 twenty years or so ago. Nay, I will do the 
 most profound, as it is the most humiliating 
 homage, for what it is worth, that one novelist 
 can make to another. On re-reading this 
 morning, after an interval of perhaps twenty- 
 five years, The American, I find that I have 
 introduced, almost exactly as he stands in that 
 book, one of Mr. James characters into one of 
 my own novels, written five years ago. You 
 see, I first read The American during a period 
 of my boyhood that was passed very largely 
 in Paris, and very largely in exactly the same 
 society as that in which Newman himself 
 moved. And having read the book at the 
 
 89 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 same time I really, twenty years after, thought 
 that Valentin de Bellegarde was a young man 
 that I had met somewhere in the society of 
 the Blounts, the Goulds, the Uzes, the Saint 
 Maurices, and the rest of that Anglo-Saxon 
 society which was then beginning to touch 
 hands with the dwellers behind the tall and 
 silent porticoes of the Faubourg St. Germain. 
 Yes, indeed I thought that Valentin was one 
 of my own connections whom I had liked very 
 much. And so I considered myself perfectly 
 justified in lifting his figure, with such adorn 
 ments and changes as should suit my own 
 purpose, into one of my own novels. 
 
 90 
 
Ill 
 
 TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 WHEN an English firm, A, has occasion to 
 write to an English firm, B, that Messrs. B s 
 representative has called upon them with an 
 offer that does not seem attractive, they 
 make the announcement in very much the 
 same terms as those I have used . The American 
 mind, however, is much more prone to alle 
 gorical or at least to figurative speech. Mr. A. 
 meeting Mr. B. upon Broadway and narrating 
 the incident would remark something like : 
 " Your Mr. X. drifted in yesterday with a pro 
 position ; but we haven t no use for corner > 
 lots and battlefields, so we handed him a L<? 
 lemon and he quit." 
 
 The Englishman, in short, is almost incapable 
 of calling a spade a spade. His language 
 forbids it as well as his sense of caution. The 
 American, on the other hand, making a virtue 
 of the necessities of our common tongue 
 luxuriates in a riotous symbolism. The Eng 
 lishman falls back upon cliche phrases, the 
 American soars into dizzy heights of inventive 
 
 91 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 phraseology. So that, where the ordinary 
 Englishman would write that Keats or Gautier 
 lived always in the hope of writing " some 
 thing that would pay," the extraordinary 
 American and after all it is only extraordi 
 nary Americans that will waste their time on 
 anything so unprofitable as writing ! the 
 extraordinary American will write of the aspira 
 tion in question as a " hope of successfully 
 growing in his temperate garden some specimen 
 of the rank exotic whose leaves are rustling 
 cheques." And this is a very fine way of 
 putting it, representing, as our distinguished 
 subject might well say, one beat of the ex 
 tended pinions that carried him so high in (as 
 it were) the empyrean, and so far (as we all 
 know) over the vast territory of the human 
 heart. And let it be pointed out that this 
 characteristic which is, as I have said, a 
 boldness growing out of a national shrinking 
 this characteristic is much more a part of the 
 spirit of adolescent America than of ancient 
 New England. Mr. James in fact began life 
 in what he would call the last mentioned 
 parages. And, having lived nearly all his life 
 at a distance, his ear nevertheless has never 
 done anything else but listen, amidst all the 
 intermediate sounds, for any breath from that 
 enormous Child. For if, physically, there have 
 92 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 been few worse Americans, in the spirit 
 there has not been a single better one. It is 
 quite easy, in fact, to imagine Mr. James 
 saying in the street of an English country 
 town : "I think I observe a compatriot ; 
 let us go into this shop " ; and into the shop 
 we may very well imagine him forthwith 
 bolting to avoid the contact. But this is far 
 more Mr. James tribute to Mr. James own 
 mental pose, one suspects, than his real desire. 
 He doesn t, one imagines, in the least want 
 personally to avoid anybody, even if they 
 come from Falls River, New Jersey. The 
 desire of his heart is to hear what they are 
 doing in, or still more what they are doing 
 to, Washington Square. He has longed, during 
 all his residences in the Eastern World he 
 has longed as only the expatriated can long, 
 for the latest news of General H. P. Packard, 
 Miss Kitty L. Upjohn and Mr. P. C. Hatch, 
 all of Brooklyn, N.Y. 
 
 But it has been necessary for Mr. James 
 immense process of refining himself, that he 
 should keep away from the manifestations of 
 the uncontrollable, and so very high-voiced, 
 West. I have said earlier in this little study, 
 that Mr. James has had no public mission in 
 life. But that is only a half truth, if it is not 
 an absolute lie. For, during the whole seventy 
 
 93 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 years of his life which began in New England 
 in 1843, Mr. James has had just one 
 immense mission the civilising of America. 
 New England presented our subject with 
 glimpses of what a civilisation might be. 
 But you have only got to go to New England 
 to-day to realise all that New England hadn t 
 got, in those days, in the way of civilisation. 
 You have only got to go to Concord, Massa 
 chusetts with its dust, its heat, its hard 
 climate, its squalid frame houses, its mosqui 
 toes, to realise how little, on the luxurious and 
 leisured side of existence, New England had 
 to offer to a searcher after a refined, a sybaritic 
 civilisation. 
 
 I am not saying that there wasn t, between 
 Salem and Boston, enough intellectual de 
 velopment to provide a non-materialistic state 
 with fifty civilisations. It is obvious that 
 you could not have produced an Emerson, 
 a Holmes, a Thoreau or a Hawthorne or 
 f for the matter of that a Washington Irving 
 without having a morally, an intellectually and 
 even a socially refined atmosphere. Hamp- 
 stead itself could not more carefully weigh 
 its words or analyse its actions. But it 
 would be fairly safe to say that, except for 
 some few specimens of " Colonial " ware and 
 architecture you wouldn t in the sixties have 
 94 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 found in the whole of New England a single 
 article of what is called vertu. If you will 
 look at the photograph which forms the 
 frontispiece of The Spoils of Poynton, in Mr. 
 James collected edition, you will see the 
 sort of civilisation for which Mr. James 
 must obviously have craved and which 
 New England certainly couldn t have pro 
 duced. 
 
 I must confess that I myself should be ap 
 palled at having to live before such a mantel 
 piece and such a decor all this French gilding 
 of the Louis Quinze period ; all these cupids 
 surmounting florid clocks ; these vases with 
 intaglios ; these huge and floridly patterned 
 walls ; these tapestried fire-screens ; these 
 gilt chairs with backs and seats of Gobelins, 
 of Aubusson, or of petit point. But there is no 
 denying the value, the rarity and the sug 
 gestion of these articles which are described 
 as " some of the spoils " the suggestion of 
 tranquillity, of an aged civilisation, of wealth, 
 of leisure, of opulent refinement. And there 
 is no denying that not by any conceivable im 
 agination could such a mantelpiece with such 
 furnishings have been found at Brook Farm. 
 
 It was in search of these things that 
 Mr. James travelled, as he so frequently 
 did, to Florence, where palazzi, and all that 
 
 95 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 palazzi may hold, were so ready of access, 
 so easy of conquest for the refined Trans 
 atlantic. In various flashes, in various ob 
 scurities, hints, concealments, reservations and 
 reported speeches, Mr. James has set us the 
 task of piecing together a history of his tem 
 perament. The materials for this history are 
 contained in various volumes. There is, for 
 instance, his very last production, A Small 
 Boy ; there are the prefaces to the volumes of 
 his collected editions ; there are his com 
 paratively scanty collections of criticisms, the 
 most important of which are contained in the 
 volume called French Poets and Novelists ; 
 there is the life of Hawthorne ; there are the 
 books about places such as A Little Tour in 
 France, English Hours, and The American 
 Scene. It is therefore to these works that I 
 shall devote my consideration for the space of 
 this section. 
 
 A Small Boy, which is a touching tribute to 
 the memory of our subject s brother, adum 
 brates the existence, mostly in the state of 
 New York, of a young male child of two 
 young male children in a household of the 
 most eminent and of the most cultivated. As 
 far as one can make the matter out as far, 
 that is to say, as it is necessary to make it 
 out for a work which is in no sense biographical 
 96 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 Mr. James father, Henry James, senior, 
 was a person of great cultural position in 
 what is now called the Empire State. He was 
 not so much a representative citizen as a 
 public adornment. He was occupied in the 
 something like the reconciling of revealed 
 religion with science, which was then begin 
 ning to adopt the semblance of a destroyer 
 of Christianity. His published works were 
 numerous ; his eloquence renowned ; his re 
 finement undoubted. For the matter of that 
 it was demonstrable, so that we have the 
 image of two small boys, whether in the 
 clean, white-porticoed streets of Buffalo or 
 of Albany, or in the comparative rough-and- 
 tumble and noise of a yellow-painted New 
 York that contained nevertheless at that date 
 gardens and pleasaunces. We have the im 
 pression of these two small boys of the fifties, 
 pursuing a perhaps not very strenuous, but 
 certainly a very selected, educational path 
 towards that stage in which William James 
 displayed all the faculty of analysis of a 
 novelist, and Mr. Henry James all the faculties 
 of analysis of a pragmatic philosopher. 
 
 And there is no doubt that there were 
 
 afforded to the quite young James the small 
 
 boy a quite unusual number of contacts 
 
 with quite the best people. Figuratively 
 
 G 97 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 speaking, not only did this particular small 
 boy live amongst the placid eccentrics of 
 New England but, in his father s house, he 
 was exposed to the full tide that, running 
 counter to the Gulf stream, from quite early 
 days of the Victorian age, bathed the shores of 
 the Western World the tide, I mean, of Euro 
 pean celebrities. I am not, of course, writing 
 a history of American culture though indeed 
 a history of Mr. James mind might well be 
 nothing more nor less than that ; but a very 
 interesting subject lies open for some analyst 
 in recording the impressions and adventures 
 of the early tourists who entered on the 
 formidable task of visiting, lecturing in, or, 
 in whatever other intellectual way, exploiting 
 the States of before the War. You will find 
 traces of them in The Mississippi Pilot of 
 Mark Twain, where the formidable author 
 tomahawks Mrs. Trollope, and several French 
 and English writers who, having visited 
 that gigantic but uninteresting and desolate 
 stream, failed of seeing its snags and bluffs 
 and steamer saloons eye to eye with Mr. 
 Clemens. You will read the actual impressions 
 of such a visit in Martin Chuzzlewit and in 
 American Notes; or, in later American Memoirs 
 you will read of the disappointment caused 
 98 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 to distinguished hearers by Matthew Arnold s 
 faulty delivery of his lectures his mumbling 
 voice, his frigid, English mannerisms. (How, 
 alas, one sympathises with the unfortunate 
 author of The Forsaken Merman !) 
 
 At any rate, lecturing and acclaimed, or 
 lecturing and appalled, and in either case 
 overwhelmed by that immense and blinding 
 thing, the world-famed American Hospitality 
 they came, those pilgrims, in a steady 
 trickle. And it passed, that trickle, through 
 the house of Mr. Henry James, Senr., under 
 the no doubt observant eyes of Henry James. 
 Junr. It is not my business to particularise 
 who they exactly were those great figures. 
 In order to catalogue them, I should have 
 to fall back on the record of conversations 
 with our subject ; and although I should un 
 scrupulously resort to this, if it suited my turn, 
 it simply does not. It suffices to say that, 
 whatever may have been our subject s personal 
 contacts with Dickens, Thackeray, Arnold or 
 any other English celebrity to whom Henry 
 James, Senr., offered his fine hospitality, 
 nothing of their personalities " rubbed off," as 
 you might say, on to the by then adolescent 
 James or, if anything came at all it was only 
 from the restrained muse of Matthew Arnold, 
 
 99 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 whose temperament, in its rarefied way, was as 
 New England as was ever that of Emerson 
 or James Russell Lowell. 
 
 To this coloured and contemplative child 
 hood I at least cannot discern in it any 
 traces of physical activities even so violent 
 as might be implied in the record of a game 
 of baseball there succeeded an educational 
 pilgrimage to countries upon the eastern 
 verges of the Atlantic. Mr. James, that is to 
 say, studied one of the more non-committal 
 subjects law, or it may have been philos 
 ophy at a rather non-committal Swiss Uni 
 versity. I use the phrase " non-committal," 
 because it seems to me so very adequately 
 to express the institution itself, and not only 
 that, but its whole influence upon the career 
 of Mr. James. For, if our subject s Mater 
 had been Alma instead of Respectabilissima, 
 how different might not have been Mr. James 
 range of subjects, though nothing, I imagine, 
 would have made much difference to his 
 temper. I mean that, if, instead of studying 
 law at Geneva, Mr. James had " taken " 
 the humaner letters at Oxford, Bonn, Heidel 
 berg, Jena or even Paris, he might have 
 given us a picture of life much different, 
 though his sense of the value of what goes 
 to make up this troublesome career that, 
 100 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 somehow, we must get through, might have 
 remained much the same. 
 
 It is not only along the lines of classicism. 
 Classicism, it is true, has quite extraordinarily 
 little part in Mr. James pages. It is not, again, 
 only that you will not find almost no mention 
 in all the works (from Roderick Hudson to The 
 Finer Grain), of Diana, Pasiphse, Diodorus 
 Siculus, Theocritus, or even of a writer whom, 
 if he had ever mentioned him, Mr. James would 
 certainly have called " poor dear old Euri 
 pides." ... It is not, however, only that ; 
 it is that, right up to The Golden Bowl, in all 
 the writings you will discern no trace of the 
 Latin or Greek classical spirit. (I do not mean 
 to say that there is no trace of classicality in 
 all these singular and impressive works. It is, 
 however, a Puritan classicism of a totally 
 different genus.) But, even in The Golden 
 Bowl, which we may regard as containing the 
 maturest fruits of our subject s ripe philosophy, 
 we have the singular remark that the banks 
 of the Thames seemed, for the Roman prince, 
 to have much more of the atmosphere of 
 Imperial Rome than the banks of Rome s 
 Tiber. And the singularity of this remark lies 
 in attributing this imperialism not to the 
 peoples but to the places. 
 
 God knows, the gentlemen who are re- 
 
 101 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 sponsible for the Embankment may be, im 
 perially, more akin to those who built the 
 baths of Caracalla than the monsters who were 
 responsible for the modern bridge in front of 
 the Castle of St. Angelo as who should say 
 that the spirit of the British Empire is more 
 imperially Roman than that of the Kingdom 
 of Italy. But even that comparison is singu 
 larly superficial. 
 
 I am of course well aware that our subject, 
 in his careful impersonality, inserts that view 
 of the Embankment into the psychology of a 
 modern Roman prince ; so that he may well 
 retort that that view does not in any sense 
 represent his particular picture. But the 
 whole spirit of his works speaks in that direc 
 tion with no uncertain voice, and I cannot 
 recall in any of his books of travel any directly 
 countervailing pronouncement. It is, indeed, 
 there, always a question of regions Caesar never 
 knew in the spirit, though in the flesh he 
 may well have there erected monuments. 
 / Mr. James is, in fact, a purely Protestant 
 and a purely non-historic personality. (I am 
 
 / aware that I write a little as a black Papist and, 
 for what it is worth, a Tory mad about historic 
 
 I continuity.) No one else could have placed 
 a marble mantelpiece (it is one of Mr. James 
 rare betrayals of himself, that photograph !) 
 102 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 in a perfect specimen of a Jacobean manor 
 house, and have invested the mantelpiece with 
 such a veritable Jesuit s altar of gilding. They 
 could not have done it and have called the 
 results satisfactory to anybody but a collector. 
 
 But God forbid that I should be taken as 
 grumbling at Mr. James for having so little, or 
 for having none at all, of the historic sense ; 
 for being so purely modern and so purely 
 Protestant a product. His rendering, for 
 instance, of Carcassonne, in A Little Tour in 
 France, is archaeologically inferior to any one- 
 franc guide s ; but in its nice appreciation of 
 surfaces and of forms it can do more for any 
 visitor from Ilion, N.Y., or from Campden 
 Hill, W. than anything written by the hand 
 of man about Carcassonne or any other place. 
 
 So the entire appropriateness of the " re 
 spectable " University on the banks of the 
 lake as a place of study for the adolescent, 
 contemplative and refined New Englander, 
 shines out. At Oxford he might have studied 
 the niceties of the enclytic 8e in the Greek 
 Testaments ; but he was so little of a school 
 man that it would have done little for him. 
 At Goettingen he might well have " taken his 
 doctor" with a thesis upon verbal emenda 
 tions in the various texts of Strabo ; but I 
 cannot think that the spiritual geography of 
 
 103 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 A Passionate Pilgrim would have been im 
 proved by the exercise. At Oxford, again, 
 sociable soul as his writings bespeak him, he 
 must have come as much into the social tone 
 of the place as to have worn a rough pilot coat 
 with huge buttons and to have acquired the 
 art of driving a four-in-hand along the 
 Trumpington turnpike [I know that that is 
 " Cambridge "] ; at Jena, still sociable, he 
 would have worn the high jackboots and dress 
 sword of a chargierter and would have poured, 
 as the habit there is, libations of beer over the 
 bronze statue of the supposedly thirsty pious 
 founder. But here again, I cannot imagine 
 that the young James would much have 
 enjoyed these activities ; neither would his 
 books much have benefited. It is possible 
 that into his views of English spreading lawns 
 with decorative and highly intellectualised 
 house-parties, strolling, seated, and always 
 conversing upon them, he might have intro 
 duced figures engaged in pursuits more active, 
 involving pellets more mobile than the purely 
 conversational ones. But no pictures of 
 country-house pursuits as they really are, no 
 minute analyses of tennis, bridge, shooting or 
 what you will could have atoned for a potential 
 loss to the handling of what after all are Mr. 
 > James true ct subjects." No, in this, rather 
 104 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 mutedly, best of all possible worlds ; dominated 
 by a blind Destiny Who nevertheless has a 
 decent, almost a New England sense of the fit 
 ness of things, or at any rate of appropriateness 
 (so that if this particular Destiny does not 
 move in any particularly mysterious way His 
 wonders to perform, He at any rate sees that 
 sobriety, continence, and a general riding of 
 the passions on the curb are rewarded by 
 prosperity, the society of country-houses and 
 the other things still rather mutedly worth 
 having) ; in this particular best of all possible 
 worlds the best of all possible Universities for 
 our distinguished subject would certainly be 
 Genf. 
 
 And I allow myself to discover in Mr. James, 
 even at the latest epoch, a trace of I won t 
 say of affection, for the word would be ill- 
 applied to this University that is Mater, not 
 Alma, but Respectabilissima a trace of re 
 membrance of the respectability of this haunt 
 of his contemplative youth. In the first 
 version of Daisy Miller Mr. James lets his hero, 
 Winterbourne, sit upon a terrace and look at a 
 quite indefinite building that is Geneva Uni 
 versity. But, returning to this story in 1909 
 it was first conceived in 1877 Mr. James 
 obviously felt the necessity of treating his 
 elderly Mater more respectfully and even more 
 
 105 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 tenderly. Therefore into the midst of his early 
 and dispassionate sentence he interpolates the 
 words : " the grey old Academy on the 
 steep and stony hill-side," thus claiming for 
 his early place of education, product as it was 
 of Calvinism, the hue and the quality of any 
 city of dreaming spires, home of lost causes, 
 and product for in the end you cannot get 
 away from it of Papists who loved learning. 
 
 Balzac we may take to have been our 
 subject s first serious literary model or at any 
 rate his first conscious one ; and it is interest 
 ing to consider how, at any rate on the surface, 
 in their late flowering and in their determina 
 tion to produce contemporary history, the 
 voluminous author of the series of fairy tales 
 called the Comedie Humaine and the author of 
 the series of stories about worries and pertur 
 bations resembled each other. 
 
 Balzac, I learn from the pages of Mr. James 
 early study of his work for I have never been 
 able to take sufficient interest in any other 
 of Balzac s manifestations than the Contes 
 Drolatiques to study very carefully his bio 
 graphy or his bibliography Balzac * before 
 he w T as thirty years old, had published, under 
 a variety of pseudonyms, some twenty long 
 novels, veritable Grub Street productions, 
 written in sordid Paris attics, in poverty, in 
 106 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 perfect obscurity. No writer ever served a 
 more severe apprenticeship to his art, or 
 lingered more hopelessly at the ladder base 
 of fame." 1 . . . And if Mr. James, up till this 
 very month in which I am writing, had not 
 continued to manifest what is almost a rever 
 ence for Balzac, I should strongly have sus 
 pected him of writing those two sentences with 
 his tongue in his cheek. For it is impossible 
 seriously to consider that the turning out of 
 twenty veritable Grub Street productions can 
 be deemed whatever else you choose to call it 
 an apprenticeship. At any rate, " before he 
 was thirty years old," Mr. James had published 
 to all intents and purposes nothing. That is 
 to say, he had put out, firstly in the pages of 
 a magazine and then in book form, a Balzac- 
 Dickensian trifle called Watch and Ward, and 
 in one of his prefaces he seems to hint that he 
 published, here and there, various more or 
 less fugitive trifles, before he had reached the 
 fatal age for poets. And the first of his works 
 that he himself cares to rescue from oblivion 
 and we are dealing now only with the figure 
 of himself that he cares to present to us is 
 Roderick Hudson, which was begun in Florence 
 in 1874 (Mr. James being then thirty-one) and 
 finished in New York, in East 25th Street. 
 1 French Poets and Novelists. Macmillan, 1884. 
 
 107 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 Again, from the Prefaces to the Collected 
 Edition, we may gather that from twenty to 
 thirty years of age our subject led, from one 
 continental and English town to another, a 
 drifting existence of hotels and of hospitality. 
 They were, these visits, tempered with occa 
 sional returns across the water, in, as again we 
 may gather, the rather desultory attempt to 
 " take up " whatever profession it was for 
 which his studies at Geneva had more or less 
 r qualified him. But, to all intents and purposes, 
 our subject led what Catholics call the Con- 
 \templative Life, as severely withdrawn from 
 the things of this world as any religious. So 
 much at least we may assuredly lay down 
 from the long passage I have already quoted 
 relative to the attempts he made to induce his 
 Muse to trot down town. And although the 
 society of French cooks, governesses and the 
 mistresses of drawing-rooms may strike one as, 
 at first glance, a queer substitute for that of 
 priors, sub-priors, almoners and primers, it is 
 none the less, in a Puritan world given to 
 attaching its greatest interests to the takings 
 of railways, a substitute. It was, that gigantic 
 up town cloister, at least a milieu in which, 
 if you did not very much study the Sweet 
 and Divine Nature, you had ample opportu 
 nity for studying all human manifestations 
 108 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 at any rate, all that were separable from the 
 acquisition of railway interests. 
 
 So that, in Florence, in London, in Paris, at 
 Kew Gardens, Hampton Court, in haunts of 
 ancient peace, show places and in New York, 
 the states of Connecticut, Rhode Island and 
 Massachusetts, we may imagine our distin 
 guished subject, pursuing a modernly monachal 
 life, tempered by the writing for the magazines 
 of fugitive articles. He had, that is to say, 
 secured his opening for delicate, temperate and 
 contemplative prose in periodicals of the 
 dignified and older order. We imagine him 
 41 sending in" papers on Florence, Kew 
 Gardens, Hampton Court, the haunts, and 
 upon any other places where the turf was 
 smooth, the deer meditated beneath oaks and 
 the sunlight lay upon mellow walls. There can 
 be no doubt, when it comes to the reading of 
 that touching that yearning story, A Pas 
 sionate Pilgrim, that was published in 1875, 
 there can be no doubt that our author had 
 * tried his hand," had precisely served an 
 apprenticeship of a full ten years, to what is 
 called descriptive writing. For A Passionate 
 Pilgrim is the apotheosis of the turf, the deer, 
 the oak trees, the terraces of manor houses. 
 It had never been so " done " before and never 
 again will it be so done. 
 
 109 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 Roderick Hudson, look at it how you 
 will, is, in the scale of our author s work, the 
 final example of prentice work ; A Passionate 
 Pilgrim is the first masterpiece. Up till the 
 year 1874 Mr. James was indeed serving an 
 apprenticeship ; not the apprenticeship of 
 turning out twenty Grub Street novels, but 
 that real apprenticeship of living, observing, 
 and occasionally trying his hand at a paper of 
 prose for the older magazines. Mr. James, 
 in the New York of that day, was already 
 known as a personality not only of pro 
 mise but of the certainty of performance. We 
 might gather that if we did not know it from 
 the conversations of the master s early friends 
 from the statement in the Preface that 
 Roderick Hudson was designed from the first 
 for publication in The Atlantic Monthly. Of 
 course an author might destine his work for 
 The Atlantic Monthly or for The Entomo 
 logical Review and the editors of those 
 periodicals might turn it down. But Roderick 
 Hudson actually began its serial publication 
 before the story was complete, and it needs 
 very little knowledge of the sapient editors of 
 the older magazines as of the newer, for that 
 matter to perceive that they would not 
 "commission a serial" from a "hand" en 
 tirely untried. Here then is proof positive 
 110 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 that in one magazine or another there must 
 exist a considerable body of early work by 
 our author. I am however so little I conceive 
 concerned with it that I leave to some future 
 aspirant for a literary doctorate the task of 
 disinterring these prehistoric papers and, upon 
 them, founding a thesis. 
 
 The fact is that Roderick Hudson gives so 
 very completely the measure of the " earliest 
 James." For our author was never a very 
 exclusive artist in words an artist, that is to 
 say, in the sense that Flaubert and M. Anatole 
 France are artists. Neither until after until 
 long after he had written Roderick Hudson 
 did our author become a master of plot, story, 
 and motive, though his sense of form was 
 always notable. Even until he had written 
 The Portrait of a Lady, in 1879, we find that, if 
 he did not think it essential to have villainous 
 characters and heroic oppressors and op 
 pressed, he found it at least highly convenient 
 thus you have the real villains, and n atir- 
 derers at that, in The American, and the 
 villainous husband of the oppressed heroine of 
 the Portrait the villainous husband having 
 by the still more designing Mme. Merle, a real 
 tangible, illegitimate child. 
 
 That of course is Balzac Madame de Belle- 
 garde is Balzac a wicked Balzac duchess. 
 
 Ill 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 Madame Merle is improved Balzac a Balzac 
 adventuress brought a little nearer to the 
 ground and a little rendered Anglo-Saxon. 
 
 In the Preface to Roderick Hudson we find, 
 indeed, Mr. James at his confessions : 
 
 To name a place in fiction is to pretend in 
 some degree to represent it. ... I had not 
 pretended very much to " do " Northampton, 
 Mass. ... It was a peaceful, rural New 
 England community, quelconque it was not, 
 it was under no necessity of being, North 
 ampton, Mass. But one nestled, technically, 
 in those days, in the great shadow of Balzac. 
 . . . Balzac talked of Nemours and Provins : 
 therefore why shouldn t one, with fond fatuity, 
 talk of almost the only small American mile de 
 province of which one had happened to lay up, 
 long before, a pleased vision ? 
 
 Or again : 
 
 The greater complexity, the superior truth 
 (of the subject) was all more or less present to 
 me 9 only the question was, too dreadfully, 
 how to make it present to the reader ? How 
 boil down so many facts in the alembic, so 
 that the distilled result, the produced appear 
 ance, should have intensity, brevity, lucidity, 
 beauty, all the merits required for my effect ? 
 How ? when it was already so difficult, as I 
 found, to proceed even as I was proceeding ? 
 It did not help, alas, it only maddened, to 
 
 112 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 remember that Balzac would have known how, 
 and would have asked no additional credit 
 for it. ... 
 
 Thus you see how very explicitly Roderick 
 Hudson was a piece of prentice work that 
 piece, as it were, that the apprentice offers to 
 the attention of the world to show that he is 
 ready to become, if not already a master, at 
 least a very efficient journeyman. Indeed, in 
 that latter passage, you may observe the 
 apprentice is already beginning to discern that 
 his master is, at any rate in certain aspects, if 
 not wholly an amateur, at least a faulty 
 practitioner. For, if Mr. James at that early 
 age was maddened to remember that Balzac, 
 with what is no more than a trick, would have 
 turned the corner of the complexities of a given 
 subject or of life, he must have been beginning 
 to discern already the fact that Balzac, what 
 ever else he may have been, was not in the 
 least complex. He was, that is to say, on the 
 way to make the discovery that he gave to 
 the world ten years later the fact that, in 
 matters of the subtler contacts, Balzac was no 
 more than the quack doctor at the fair of life. 
 Or, to put the matter in Mr. James own 
 phrase : l 
 
 1 French Poets and Novelists. 1884. 
 H 113 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 This makes, it is true, rather a bald state 
 ment of a matter which at times seems more 
 considerable ; but it may be maintained that 
 an exact analysis of his heterogeneous opinions 
 will leave no more palpable deposit. His im 
 agination was so constant, his curiosity and 
 ingenuity so unlimited, the energy of his phrase 
 so striking, he raises such a cloud of dust 
 about him as he goes, that the reader to whom 
 he is new has a sense of his opening up gulfs 
 and vistas of thought and pouring forth flashes 
 and volleys of wisdom. But from the moment 
 that he ceases to be a simple dramatist Balzac 
 is an arrant charlatan. . . . 
 
 It is then no wonder that the young James, 
 who was beginning to have visions of com 
 plexity and to have desires to cease being " a 
 simple dramatist," should have found in his 
 master little of a guide to his new develop 
 ments. He had, in fact, with this book a 
 sense of embarcation a sense of embarcation 
 into those seas in which, if the voyager finds 
 no other pearl, he finds at least the uncharted 
 land ; there, if again he is to survive his 
 travellings, he must take life and his subject 
 and humanity with its complexities, at least, 
 seriously. " He embarks, rash adventurer " 
 I am quoting the Preface again " under the 
 star of representation, and is pledged thereby 
 to remember that the art of interesting us in 
 114 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 things . . . can only be the art of representing 
 them. ..." 
 
 It was at this point, then, that the tempera 
 ment of our subject took its definite leave of 
 the prentice frame of mind as well as of its 
 subjection to Balzac. We find him, of course, 
 writing in 1884, " the attempt," of the Comedie 
 Humaine, " was, as Balzac himself has happily 
 expressed it, to faire concurrence a Vetat civil 
 to start an opposition, as we should say in 
 America, to the civil registers." And Mr. 
 James self-consciousness being of so high an 
 order, one has little hesitation in saying that he 
 too must by 1884 have formed the design of 
 rivalling the Blue Books. He began probably 
 with no such settled ambition but neither 
 did Balzac ; it is part of the remarkable, 
 superficial parallel. * We know not how early 
 Balzac formed the plan of the Comedie 
 Humaine ; but the general preface, in which 
 he explains the unity of his work and sets forth 
 that each of his tales is a block in a single 
 immense edifice and that this edifice aims to 
 be a complete portrait of the civilisation of 
 his time this remarkable edifice dates from 
 1842. (If we call it remarkable, it is not 
 that we understand it ; though so much as 
 we have expressed may be easily gathered 
 
 from it )" 
 
 115 
 
 I 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 Isn t that passage with its reference to 
 difficulties of comprehension of his hero s 
 preface, exactly what anyone writing of Mr. 
 James, his works and his Prefaces above all 
 of his bewildering Prefaces might set down ? 
 
 But, by 1884, our subject had very obviously 
 arrived at a pretty precise valuation of the 
 pretensions of the master of the shallow 
 places in his knowledge of his absolute want 
 of any knowledge whatever. " He began very 
 early to write about countesses and duchesses ; 
 and even after he had become famous the 
 manner in which he usually portrays the 
 denizens of the Faubourg St. Germain obliges 
 us to believe that the place they occupy in his 
 books is larger than any they occupied in his 
 experience. Did he go into society ? did he 
 observe manners from a standpoint that com 
 manded the field ? It was not till he became 
 famous that he began to use the aristocratic 
 prefix ; in his earlier years he was plain M. 
 Balzac." ..." There is nothing to prove 
 that he in the least realised, as we say, the 
 existence of England and Germany. That he 
 had of course a complete theory of the British 
 constitution and the German intellect makes 
 little difference ; for Balzac s theories were 
 often in direct proportion to his ignorance. ..." 
 . . . "If, instead of committing to paper 
 116 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 impossible imaginary tales, he could have stood 
 for a while in some other relation to society 
 about him than that of a scribbler, it would 
 have been a great gain. The great general 
 defect of his manner, as we shall see, is the 
 absence of fresh air, of the trace of disinterested 
 observation ; he had from his earliest years, 
 to carry out our metaphor, an eye to the 
 shop. ..." I do not know that any more 
 complete blowing to pieces of a revered master 
 was ever perpetrated by the hand of man. 
 
 The fact is that Balzac was as complete a 
 writer of fairy tales as the Brothers Grimm, 
 Hans Christian Andersen or Brentano of the 
 Hundred Soups, and, in the main, his financiers, 
 duchesses and the rest, have no more relation 
 to life have much less relation to the life of 
 1850 than any adventurous tailor, bewitched 
 charcoal burner or Rapunzel. The Comedie 
 Humaine, except for Cesar Birotteau, the 
 Napoleon of perfumery, and for Pere Goriot, 
 the Lear of 1840 Paris, is a gigantic deception. 
 Balzac had a certain an even very intimate 
 knowledge of the Parisian lower middle class, 
 of smaller money-lenders, of the lower ranks 
 of churchmen ; and, had he limited his pro 
 jections to these, his works would have had 
 some value apart from whatever value may 
 attach to fairy tales. In a sense he had some 
 
 117 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 of the value of the pioneer ; he dimly per 
 ceived how the art of the writer of fiction 
 might be redeemed from the slur that had been 
 cast upon it by the very defects of which he 
 possessed so liberal a share. And just as 
 Dickens, Thackeray and Fielding attempted 
 to dignify their profession by appearing in the 
 robe of the preacher, so Balzac, selecting the 
 more valuable pretext, being by far the wiser 
 charlatan pretended to be at once a realist 
 and a philosopher. Had he done what he 
 pretended to do he would have been the most 
 immense as he was certainly the most in 
 dustrious figure of the modern world. But 
 the fact is that, though he had got hold of a 
 tremendous idea an idea as tremendous as 
 that of the railway, the electric telegraph, the 
 Crystal Palace or the aeroplane he was utterly 
 without either the technical knowledge or the 
 knowledge of humanity that would have carried 
 it out. He knew less of either than Dickens, 
 less than Fielding, much less than Thackeray, 
 and he knew infinitely less than Smollett, whom 
 in many ways he resembled. But, if to all 
 intents and purposes he succeeded not at ail, 
 he was of this inestimable service to humanity : 
 he handed on to later writers that one great 
 idea of their functions, the aspiration to faire 
 118 
 
TEMPERA ME1\TS 
 
 concurrence a I etat civil to beat the Blue 
 Book out of the field. 
 
 And the first of all writers the first at any 
 rate of writers in the Anglo-Saxon tongue to 
 take advantage of this particular lesson of the 
 master was our author. Let us consider what 
 were Mr. James advantages. Perhaps the 
 first of these was that at an early age he had 
 read the line of Musset s : " Mon verre n est 
 pas grand mais je bois dans mon verre " ; 
 perhaps the second was that he was a citizen 
 of the United States. 
 
 As regards the size of Mr. James glass, I 
 have said almost sufficient. It was bounded 
 upon the one hand by his own temperament, 
 on the other by the human heart, and those 
 seem to me to be bounds sufficient for any 
 ordinary writer. I was talking the other day 
 to an active and intelligent Englishman one 
 of His Majesty s ministers upon this very 
 subject. He brought forward as a damning 
 indictment of our subject the fact that Mr. 
 James in none of his works deals with Politics, 
 War, the Lower Classes or Religion with any 
 of the things that are properly written with 
 capital letters. I suppose that it is a sufficient 
 answer -not to report a desultory conversation 
 to say that Mr. James knows nothing of 
 Politics, War, or the Lower Classes. Nobody 
 
 119 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 does. Nowadays all these things are so much 
 in the melting-pot of conflicting theories that 
 for anyone to dogmatise upon what would be 
 the outcome of, say, a war between Prussia 
 and France ; upon where the Liberal or any 
 other party will be in ten years time ; or how 
 fittingly to deal with the Lower Classes to 
 dogmatise upon any of these themes that will 
 so very efficiently settle themselves without 
 any of our talking would be to write oneself 
 down an ass indeed. It is true that that con 
 sideration will never hinder from doing so, my 
 self or any other novelist, writer of leading 
 articles, or pamphleteer. But it has hindered 
 Mr. James, who is a wise man and who had the 
 horrible example of Honore de Balzac very 
 much before his eyes in early life. As to 
 Religion, that, in Protestant communities, is as 
 it should be, very much in the melting-pot too. 
 Mr. James, regarding the matter from an 
 individualist standpoint, as all introspective 
 Puritans must do, never really has it out of his 
 mind. In so far as every one of his books turns 
 upon an ethical point he may in a Protestant 
 community where ethics is so large a propor 
 tion and dogma so little, of Religion be 
 regarded as a purely religious writer. Indeed, 
 occasionally, in such stories as The Altar of the 
 Dead, The Great Good Place or The Turn of the 
 120 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 Screw, he has permitted himself what he calls 
 " indiscretions " which implies that he has 
 written stories that propagandise in favour of 
 his particular interpretation of the Infinite. 
 
 But apart from these very few candidly 
 labelled indiscretions, Mr. James has never 
 committed the sin of writing what he " wanted " 
 to write. For, if you ever chance to make, to 
 an English novelist, any objections to parts 
 of his work to the way in which he has ruined 
 the " form " of his works by dragging in 
 digressions about erotics, humanitarianism, 
 engineering or what you will, he will, your 
 English friend, reply that he "wanted" to 
 write it ; as who should say he wanted to get 
 it off his chest. That of course is a very 
 relieving process for the novelist ; as for the 
 individual may be the practice of expectoration 
 in public places. To the community, as to 
 literature, it is death. The novelist is not there 
 to write what he " wants " but what he has, 
 at the bidding of blind but august Destiny, to 
 set down. Not what he wants but what he 
 can, finally and consummately, put on paper 
 is the final duty of the writer. It is the 
 measure of Mr. James stern performance of 
 his duty that he has never written anything 
 more upon the subject of the invisible world 
 than the two or three stories that I have cited. 
 
 121 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 And the nature of those stories, the obviously 
 high pressure at which they were written, the 
 obviously strong emotionalism that inspires 
 them, proves to us sufficiently what a lot our 
 poor master had all ready to get off his chest. 
 But it all remains a part of this great writer s 
 private imaginings ; and the world is by so 
 much the better the better for the image of 
 a great man who has greatly resisted a tempta 
 tion that is more deleterious than drink, 
 lechery, or any other of the cardinal sins. 
 
 Mr. James, then, has limited himself to 
 writing of what he knows. And he has limited 
 himself to writing about what he knows 
 intimately and within himself. The ordinary 
 writer the Pre-Jamesian Anglo-Saxon, the 
 Pre-Balzacian Continental, Balzac himself, I 
 myself, and my friend Mr. Blank whose new 
 work will be published on Monday by Messrs. 
 Dash and Flutter they, we, all of you, pretty 
 nearly, do not so limit ourselves. If we are 
 acquainted with the term " nine-cylinder, 160 
 horse-power, non -rotary Breguet engine " and 
 the fact or perhaps it is not the fact that a 
 petrol engine running at high pressure develops 
 the fumes of carbon monoxide or dioxide 
 given these facts we will, any one of us, under 
 take right away to provide you with the 
 122 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 psychology of the driver of an aeroplane who 
 becomes dizzy at ninety miles an hour and is 
 dashed to pieces. We should also provide 
 him with a lady friend to be dashed with him. 
 That is the method of Shakespeare, Mr. 
 Kipling, Mr. Wells, and whom you will, who 
 either came before, or have not learned the 
 lessons of, the Deluge. I do not mean to say 
 that there are not some of us who will not be 
 more conscientious in acquiring the details of 
 the buzz, bang, rush, whirr, pull the right lever, 
 order. But, roughly speaking, our method is 
 to infer to the measure of the deductive 
 genius vouchsafed us from a few spanners 
 the whole body of an aeroplane, the whole 
 psychology of the pilot. We try, that is to say, 
 to infer what would be the feelings of a * chap " 
 going through the air at ninety miles an hour 
 --to infer them from what would be our own 
 feelings as we imagine them to be likely to be. 
 That is how Shakespeare produced the King 
 of Denmark for our delight ; so that Hamlet s 
 stepfather is of no interest for us except as a 
 sidelight on the inestimable character of poor 
 dear Shakespeare and is entirely valueless as 
 a document pour servir, or as a guide to be 
 haviour in the presence of a sovereign. 
 
 As regards the second of the golden spoons 
 
 123 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 that Mr. James had in his mouth I mean 
 when he was born an American. . . . 
 
 There can be no doubt that this in itself is 
 very largely responsible for his knowledge 
 apart from his mere surmises as to the human 
 heart and as to human manners. The position 
 of the American of some resources and of 
 leisure was, in European society of the nine 
 teenth century, one of a singular felicity. 
 Without, or almost without, letters of intro 
 duction or social passports of any kind, the 
 American " went anywhere." Anywhere in 
 the world into the courts of the Emperors of 
 Austria as into the bosom of English county 
 families ! To know, or to admit an American 
 into your family circle, appeared to commit 
 you to nothing. There was the whole immense 
 Herring Pond between yourself and their 
 homes and you just accepted the strange and 
 generally quiet creatures on their face values, 
 without any question as to their origins, and 
 taking their comfortable wealths for granted. 
 Thus Mr. James could really get to " know " 
 people in a way that would be absolutely 
 sealed to any European young writer whether 
 he were Honor e de Balzac or Charles Dickens. 
 You can figure him (I am not in any way 
 attempting to do more than draw a fancy 
 portrait) a quiet, extremely well-mannered 
 124 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 and unassuming young gentleman, reputed to 
 be very wealthy and in command of an entire 
 leisure, without indeed even so much tax on 
 his time as an occasional professional call in at 
 the Legation or ministry of his country. Still 
 he would be he was taken on the footing of 
 a young diplomat and, if he proved, on nearer 
 acquaintance, to be a thought more " in 
 tellectual " than one is accustomed to find in 
 the young men that one meets in good houses, 
 that was only part of a transatlantic oddness. 
 Some oddnesses the amiable creatures must be 
 allowed to possess, considering their distant 
 and hazy origins ; you could be thankful if 
 they did not sleep with derringers under their 
 pillows which they sometimes did or pick 
 their teeth with bowie knives. 
 
 Thus we may consider that Mr. James, 
 starting upon his European career, came in, at 
 once, upon the very top. If he had been an 
 English writer he would have been at it 
 twenty years before he knew an English 
 countess ; he would die without having ex 
 changed ten words with the wife of a duke, 
 just as Balzac died without having had a 
 glimpse of an interior of the Faubourg St. 
 Germain. But that street of high walls had 
 no terrors for Mr. James, and if his Madame 
 de Bellegarde in some ways resembles a Balzac 
 
 125 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 Marchioness, that is much more owing to the 
 hold that Balzac and his methods had over our 
 subject s imagination than to any want of 
 social knowledge. Mr. James, I mean, knew 
 perfectly well that the matrons of the most 
 corrupt of European aristocracies do not go 
 murdering their husbands in order to secure 
 eligible partis for their daughters. That is 
 just a proceeding out of the fairy-tale realm 
 of the Comedie Humaine. And indeed the 
 whole machinery of the murder is amusingly 
 handled. You can see the young James 
 boggling at an actual poisoning so that the 
 Marquis, from what one can make out of 
 the episode, died at a look from his atrocious 
 wife. Just imagine a vieux marcheur of a 
 marquis, cynical, improper and given in 
 addition to intrigues with housemaids, fading 
 out of life presumably because he learns from 
 a look that he has lost his wife s affections, 
 for all the world as if he had been the New 
 England heroine of a sentimental tale ! Mr. 
 James, even at that early date, knew better 
 as far as Life was concerned ; but his com 
 parative inexperience in the construction of 
 novels led him into the paths of staginess. 
 His desire was to give us the problem of what 
 an aristocratic family would do when faced 
 with a transatlantic gentleman with some sort 
 126 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 of a " hold " over them. His invention went,, 
 however, at that date, no further than a 
 "letter" a veritable patte de mouche at 
 which the most craven of aristocrats would 
 have roared with laughter. Nothing, indeed, 
 could well be more comic than to observe how 
 the Muse of our subject, who even at that date 
 was a delicate and contemplative young lady, 
 minces around and refines upon this portentous 
 subject which Mr. James tyrannously pre 
 sented to her, for all the world as if she had 
 been presented with the task of ending the 
 story of the proud Lady Dedlock and her dis 
 agreeable past. 
 
 But the change came soon enough ; soon 
 enough we find Mr. James beginning to listen 
 to the voice of the lady who was so faithful to 
 him through life. She made herself heard with 
 her not loud, but distinct and persistent, organ 
 long before even The American not to men 
 tion The Portrait of a Lady was under way. 
 
 Mr. James bibliography is a little difficult 
 to follow, but, as far as I can make it out, 
 Madame de Mauves, A Passionate Pilgrim 
 and The Madonna of the Future were written 
 immediately after Roderick Hudson and im 
 mediately before The American. In these 
 three stories our master was beginning to find 
 himself. 
 
 127 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 If it is obvious it is none the less significant 
 that, whereas our subject s novels remained 
 until a latish date by comparison but only by 
 comparison crude, his very earliest short 
 stories have a quality of vague fragrance, of 
 indeterminateness, of charm. I can imagine 
 several reasons for this. 
 
 In the first place, there is the reason pru 
 dential. In the seventies of the last century 
 anything in the nature of an exploring of one s 
 temperament, and an exploiting of it, was no 
 mean experiment. The dogma that it was 
 necessary to have a story, " with a beginning, 
 a middle, and an end " all complete, was 
 hardly then doubted. It might be the story of 
 a scrap of paper ; it might, as in the case of 
 The Portrait of a Lady, turn round no more than 
 the wicked husband and the femme incom- 
 prise, but " plot " there must be. Now to pin 
 on to a mere experiment the immense labour, 
 the long lapse of mere time, that go to the 
 writing of a full-dress novel would be a very 
 rash proceeding and Mr. James was never the 
 person to be rash. He would, in the nature of 
 things, prefer to confine his desire for writing 
 studies to his shorter flights. 
 
 Secondly, we have to consider that, whatever 
 he may or may not have otherwise been, Mr. 
 James is and was from the first the great 
 128 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 master of the nouvelle in the Anglo-Saxon 
 tongue. This form (which is to the ordinary 
 "plotted" short story what vers libre is to 
 the sonnet) can only be called in English 
 the longish-short story or the longish-short 
 sketch. You do not find in it the economically 
 worded, carefully progressing set of apparently 
 discursive episodes, all resolved, as it were, in 
 the coup de cannon of the last sentence, that 
 are found in one of the conies of Maupassant ; 
 nor, on the other hand, is it a short novel like 
 Paul and Virginia, The Vicar of Wakefield, or 
 Colomba. It is rather no more and no less 
 than the consideration of an " affair." The 
 whole of the story, of the murder, of the liaison, 
 of the bequest, might well be related in the 
 opening of the first paragraph. 
 
 The author might then devote the whole of 
 the rest of the " action " to the consideration 
 of the mental states of the various characters 
 affected. I do not mean to say that he must 
 do this ; still less is the Anglo-Saxon novelist 
 to be allowed, as he is perpetually trying to do, 
 to escape from the claims of " form " under the 
 pretext that he is writing a nouvelle. The 
 " form" of this type of production, like the 
 form of vers libre, is infinitely the more difficult 
 simply because it is the more undefined. That, 
 however, is a matter to which I shall return. 
 1 129 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 What I am mainly concerned with here is the 
 fact that the nouvelle appears to offer unrivalled 
 scope for the development of one s tempera 
 ment and that in it in A Passionate Pilgrim 
 as in The Madonna of the Future; in Daisy Miller 
 as in The Four Meetings Mr. James for many 
 years had all the appearance of developing his. 
 This brings me at once to the consideration 
 of Turgenieff, though I am aware that it never 
 takes much to do that. I am still not con 
 cerned historically with exactly when our 
 subject came across the beautiful genius men 
 tally, or with the precise date on which he met 
 him in the flesh. But the very first meeting 
 with a nouvelle by the Russian writer must 
 have been a wonderful eye-opener for our 
 master. It must wonderfully, I mean, have 
 shown him " what could be done " by, let us 
 say, a contemplative and leisured young New 
 Englander, wandering desultorily across Europe 
 and privileged to hear the gossip of the best 
 people. For admission into European into 
 any society means no more and no less than 
 the privilege to hear its gossip, to receive some 
 of the confidences of matrons as to their worries 
 about their daughters, to be privileged to hear 
 some of the real, private views of the men folk 
 as to certain others of their sex. This New 
 Englander, thus wandering and thus privileged, 
 130 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 and above all loving (and being able to use) 
 gossip as no one else ever loved or used it this 
 happy prince, Mr. James found himself to be. 
 And, if the beautiful genius had not yet taken 
 hold of him, there could not be any doubt that 
 in the early seventies our distinguished friend 
 was peculiarly in a state of grace was pecu 
 liarly open to the ravages of that particular 
 bacillus. 
 
 I think that in two quotations from one of 
 our author s prefaces I can give you the whole 
 of this one side of his figure. This is Mr. James 
 writing in the summer of 1873, the story called 
 Madame de Mauves : 
 
 I recall the tolerably wide court of an old inn 
 at Bad-Homburg in the Taunus Hills a de 
 jected and forlorn little place (its seconde 
 jeunesse not yet in sight) during the years 
 immediately following the Franco-Prussian 
 war, which had overturned, with that of 
 Baden Baden, its altar, the well-appointed 
 worship of the great goddess Chance a homely 
 enclosure on the ground level of which I occu 
 pied a dampish, dusky, unsunned room, cool, 
 however, to the relief of the fevered Muse, 
 during some very hot weather. The place was 
 so dark that I could see my way to and from 
 my inkstand, I remember, but by keeping the 
 door to the court open thanks to which also 
 the Muse, witness of many mild domestic in- 
 
 131 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 cidents, was distracted and beguiled. In this 
 retreat I was visited by the gentle Euphemia ; 
 I sat in crepuscular comfort pouring forth again 
 and no doubt artfully editing, the confidences 
 with which she honoured me. 
 
 And isn t it just precisely after such a visit 
 of his lady that Mr. James may have got up 
 and strolled amidst the shaded paths around 
 the pump-room the paths across which nowa 
 days the golf balls fly ? And, strolling decor 
 ously, must he not have met another decorous 
 stroller, he listening with his sweet, sad, 
 enigmatic smile to the confidences of Princess 
 P - who would be upon his right arm, and 
 at the same time to those of landed-proprietor 
 
 W ff who would be grumbling into his left 
 
 ear ? Can t we imagine, in fact, that, strolling 
 at such a pace, in much such a season, in that 
 sort of place and frame of mind, in the con 
 templative and respectable seventies, our 
 author first met the beautiful genius ? Let me 
 once more hasten to say that this is only an 
 imaginary picture of what might have hap 
 pened, Turgenieff having been much at 
 Nauheim, Homburg and similar places of sad 
 or agreeable loungings. It would not be even 
 necessary to postulate that our author ever 
 met the Russian writer ; Turgenieff was in 
 those days so much in the air, and the air then 
 132 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 was so exactly suited to his frame of mind and 
 so ready for his pervasion, that no actual 
 meeting would have been in the least necessary. 
 Mr. James would have had " to go about with " 
 the beautiful genius, if not in his actual 
 company, in Paris, in Florence, on the Taunus 
 Hills or in the haunts of ancient peace he 
 would have had to have Turgenieff with him, 
 if not at his side, then, in his head, in his heart, 
 in his pockets, in his portmanteau. 
 
 That then was the early James, in his 
 chastened, rarefied, not yet quite European 
 habit. Let us take a picture of him in his more 
 luxuriant robustness, in his full strength, as 
 nearly pagan as it was possible for one to be 
 who was born under the shadow of Brook 
 Farm or of Concord in its entirety. Mr. James 
 is speaking here of how he got hold of the 
 " subject " of The Reverberator that was pub 
 lished in 1888. 
 
 It was in a grand old city of the south of 
 Europe (though neither in Rome nor yet in 
 Florence) long years ago, and during a winter 
 spent there in the seeing of many people on 
 the pleasantest terms in the world, as they 
 now seem to me to have been, as well as in the 
 hearing of infinite talk talk, mainly, inex 
 haustibly about persons and the personal 
 equation and the personal mystery. This 
 somehow had to be in an odd, easy, friendly, a 
 
 133 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 miscellaneous, many coloured little metro 
 polis, where the casual exotic society was a 
 thing of heterogeneous vivid patches, but with 
 a fine old native basis. . . . 
 
 Between, however, the chastened, compara 
 tively reticent days and this luxuriance of 
 phrase and of gossip as well between these 
 two phases there went a whole mint of de 
 velopments. This we might well call the frame 
 of mind of A Little Tour in France : this 
 developed later into the frame of mind of The 
 American Scene which again and later still 
 was to become the mystifications and be 
 wilderments of The Prefaces, those wild 
 debauches. 
 
 But, in between the circumstances of 
 Madame de Mauves of 1873, and the writing 
 of The Little Tour, we have to place as it 
 helps us to place our subject the collected 
 papers of the volume called French Poets and 
 Novelists. The volume was published in 
 England in 1884, but the papers, as far as their 
 writing was concerned, had been scattered 
 through several previous years. In this 
 volume our author desperately belauds Balzac, 
 places Turgenieff at the top of the tree, damns 
 Flaubert whom he always disliked poor dear 
 old Flaubert ! by bracketing him in the same 
 paper with Charles de Bernard, an even then 
 134 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 forgotten scribbler who hopelessly imitated 
 but in some respects improved upon Balzac. 
 He writes about Musset with great justice and 
 very little sympathy ; about ce pauvre Theo 
 with a great deal of sympathy and not much 
 critical justice ; about George Sand with 
 relish as a wicked old woman, and about 
 Merimee with pity for his physical ills and with 
 not much feeling for his clear, hard diction. 
 
 French Poets and Novelists is, in fact, much 
 more however skilfully Mr. James sought to 
 veil the fact an expression of likes and dis 
 likes than a display of criticism, criticism 
 dealing with things by a certain standard and 
 leaving liking to take care of itself. That does 
 not make the volume any less valuable as an 
 index to our present study the development 
 of Mr. James temperament. As such it is 
 just simply of the highest order. 
 
 To write of L Education Sentimentale that 
 illuminating work of which someone has said 
 that even to begin to understand it you must 
 read it fourteen times and I, I who speak to 
 you, have done that and affirm the truth of the 
 other writer s statement to write of this book 
 thus : 
 
 . . . To read it is, to the finer sense, like 
 masticating ashes and sawdust. L Education 
 Sentimentale is elaborately and massively 
 
 135 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 dreary. That a novel should have a certain 
 charm seems to us the most rudimentary of 
 principles, and there is no mote charm in this 
 laborious monument to a treacherous ideal 
 than there is interest in a heap of gravel 
 
 such writing is the merest petulance, the merest 
 vexation. The vexation was not without cause 
 for L Education Sentimentale is, in its own 
 self, that real Comedie Humaine that Balzac 
 professed to have written ; and it is vexing 
 to find that a real person has come along to do 
 what one s pet charlatan has only professed to 
 perform. 
 
 Or again, such an obiter dictum as this, intro 
 duced into an article upon Charles Baudelaire 
 whom our author much disliked : " Baude 
 laire was a poet, and for a poet to be a realist 
 is nonsense " to read such a sentence ! 
 makes one despair of human nature. But the 
 fact is that our master was at that date a 
 revolutionist of letters who, coming from New 
 England in search of the Finer Sense and the 
 Finer Reticence of Europe, much disliked what 
 he found. Mr. James was in the same boat as 
 Flaubert and Baudelaire, but his dislike for 
 their figures in its expression was unbounded. 
 Flaubert looked at life with all its dirt, its 
 treacheries, its accepted ideas and, by rendering 
 them to the life, might well have driven them 
 136 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 out of existence. Mr. James also has looked 
 at life with its treacheries, its banalities, its 
 shirkings and its charlatanries, all of them 
 founded on the essential dirtiness of human 
 nature, qui vous donne une fiere idee de 
 rhomme! Like Flaubert, he has rendered 
 these tendencies of his fellows, but with a 
 more delicate irony ; and, if the world read 
 him to any great extent, the world might well 
 be a pleasant er place. 
 
 Yes, Mr. James was in the same boat with 
 Flaubert, with Zola, with Turgenieff, with 
 Maupassant, even with Baudelaire. But, since 
 he had come to Europe to find respectability, 
 he tried desperately to ally himself with 
 the comparatively established Balzac, Sand, 
 Charles de Bernard. One expects him almost, 
 in these manifestoes, to enthrone Dumas Pere, 
 and all his contemporaries the aristocratic 
 Turgenieff alone excepted (though even the 
 beautiful genius whom he sets on a level with 
 George Eliot ! was to be reproached, according 
 to our author, with " delighting in sadness "). 
 All his other contemporaries of any signi 
 ficance our author shrinks from. If it would 
 be too much to say that this suggests to us the 
 figure of Satan rebuking sin, at the very least 
 it must suggest the elegantly habited form of 
 a Robespierre animadverting on the dress, 
 
 137 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 habits and aspirations of Danton, St. Just, 
 Maillard and Couthon. 
 
 The real fact is this : The volume called 
 French Poets and Novelists is, before anything, 
 the first expression of a gigantic disappoint 
 ment the first formal confession of all the 
 young James illusions perdus. It is impossible 
 to imagine that Mr. James was ever even 
 relatively naif ; yet, at the cost of scrupulously 
 investigating, we find the impossible imagina 
 tion become the indubitable fact. There is a 
 passage in A Passionate Pilgrim that puts 
 the matter exactly enough and all the more 
 exactly because our subject, in his later 
 revision, has very efficiently and with a 
 mature and bitter irony, crossed the " t s " and 
 dotted every " i." For, if this is what the 
 fictitious Passionate Pilgrim came to find in 
 Europe, isn t it what Mr. James, a pilgrim just 
 as passionate and by now much more hopeless, 
 so vainly sought ? 
 
 It was my thought that I believed in pleasure 
 here below ; I believe in it still, but as I believe 
 in the immortality of the soul. The soul is 
 immortal certainly if you ve got one ; but 
 most people haven t. Pleasure would be right 
 if it were pleasure right through ; but it never 
 is. My taste was to be the best in the world : 
 well, perhaps it was. ... I think I should 
 
 138 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 have been all right in a world arranged on 
 different lines. Before heaven, sir whoever 
 you are I m in practice so absurdly tender 
 hearted that I can afford to say it ; I entered 
 upon life a perfect gentleman. I had the love 
 of old forms and pleasant rites, and I found 
 them nowhere found a world all hard lines 
 and harsh lights, without lines, without com 
 position, as they say of pictures, without the 
 lovely mystery of colour. . . . Sitting here in 
 this old park, in this old country, I feel that I 
 hover on the misty verge of what might have 
 been ! I should have been born here, not 
 there ; here my makeshift distinctions would 
 have found things they d have been true of. 
 . . . This is a world I could have got on with 
 beautifully. 
 
 Thus the Passionate Pilgrim, sitting in no 
 place further to seek than Hampton Court 
 this poor American, with all his naivete still 
 virgin, voices what is the final, sad message of 
 Henry James to humanity. Or perhaps the 
 last words of The Madonna of the Future may 
 enshrine the final message : " I seemed to 
 catch the other . . . echo : Cats and monkeys, 
 monkeys and cats all human life is there. 
 But that is perhaps too much of an echo of the 
 k * beautiful genius" to be true James ! No, I 
 prefer " The soul is immortal certainly if 
 you ve got one ; but most people haven t ! 
 
 139 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure right 
 through ; but it never is." And this, you will 
 observe, is the gentleman who reproached 
 Turgenieff with delighting in sadness, Flaubert 
 with cynicism, and Baudelaire with loving 
 dirt ! 
 
 But that was in the early eighties when some 
 of our subject s illusions still remained. 
 
 I have said that the conscious or uncon 
 scious mission of Mr. James was to civilise his 
 people whom he always loved. To put it 
 more exactly, now that we have a little de 
 veloped our theme, we should say that our 
 author s mission in coming to the Old World 
 was to find a milieu, an atmosphere, upon 
 which America might safely model hers an 
 atmosphere in which wise and sympathetic 
 duchesses and countesses said always the right 
 thing, observed the " old forms and pleasant 
 rites," an atmosphere half that of Florence^ 
 half of Hampton Court with a flavour of 
 Versailles. From Italy, France and England 
 the dayspring was to have come ; but half a 
 century of pilgrimages have left him with no 
 further message than that that the soul s 
 immortal, but that most people have not got 
 souls are in the end just the stuff with which 
 to fill graveyards ; that cela vous donne une 
 fiere idee de Vhomme ; homo homini lupus, or 
 140 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 any other old message of all the old messages 
 of this old and wise world. Bric-a-brac, pal- 
 lazzi, chateaux, haunts of ancient peace these 
 the pilgrim found in matchless abundance, 
 in scores, in hundreds. Poynton, Matcham, 
 Lackley, Hampton. ..." The gondola 
 stopped ; the old palace was there. How 
 charming ! it s grey and pink. ..." From 
 the first visit to Madonnas of the Louvre, in 
 The American, to the last days of the epony 
 mous vessel of The Golden Bowl, there is no 
 end to the articles de vertu. . . . But as for the 
 duchesses with souls well, most duchesses 
 haven t got them ! 
 
 Italy gives you as her final figure the Prince 
 of the last novel a person not much different 
 from any American ; England gives you, as 
 the coping-stones of its haunts of humanity, 
 Beale Farrange, the child bandied from pillar 
 to post ; the Gereths, mother and son 
 brigand or imbecile ; and the Brigstocks. 
 And France well, as France would France 
 first knocked the stuffing out of our poor 
 master s Utopia. . . . For, from New England 
 the young James had looked upon Europe as 
 a place where Balzac and George Eliot were 
 worshipped in an atmosphere of old forms and 
 pleasant rites. And in France he found 
 Revolution an atrocious figure of a sort of 
 
 141 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 berserker in a dressing-gown who was banging 
 down all the pillars of all the old academies 
 
 and roaring out "A bos /" well, down with 
 
 accepted ideas ! 
 
 It was not, in fact, rest, amenities, serenities 
 other than in title standards, rites, or 
 anything settled, that Mr. James was to find 
 in Europe. ... It was rather the shaking off 
 of aeademicisms ; he left far more respect 
 ability behind him, in New England. And the 
 final knock came from an Empire of which 
 New England might well never have heard 
 New England which cherished its reasoned 
 optimism ; its belief in a Destiny that gives a 
 chastenedly good time to the sober, the 
 industrious, the continent, to those in fact, 
 that bridle, self-consciously, their passions. . . 
 
 That virus we may see already working in 
 so early a book as The Portrait of a Lady* 
 There, the self-conscious, self-bridling New 
 England heroine ensues a lifetime of yearning 
 misery at the hands of a possibly exaggerated, 
 but still quite possible, pair of selfish scoun 
 drels, so that Providence fails of its mission. 
 . . . No, the writer who, acting by the 
 standards of New England, in 1884, reproves 
 the Russian author for delighting in sadness^ 
 could very soon give Turgenieff several points 
 and a good beating. For the Russian could 
 142 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 never have written The Turn of the Screw ; 
 and. if he could have given us Daisy Miller, he 
 certainly could not have written : " Cats and 
 monkeys, monkeys and cats all human life 
 is there. ..." At the end of one of the 
 Russian s books a character is left, sitting 
 gazing enigmatically into space and wondering 
 if Russia will ever produce a Man. But what 
 Mr. James wants is a civilisation and just 
 because the American s aspirations are bound 
 less by comparison, so his final note is despair. 
 Turgenieff s is only an enigmatic sadness. . . . 
 That is the nett result. As to the stages of 
 despair I have not the space I have not 
 indeed the inclination to pursue them very 
 minutely. . . . We have the decidedly con 
 tinental Mr. James who continued until the 
 early eighties, ending perhaps with A Little 
 Tour in France, in which he may have been 
 taking a farewell conscious or unconscious of 
 Latin ideas. We have the international frame 
 of mind, as our author calls it a phase which 
 produced The Four Meetings, An International 
 Episode, The Pension Beaurepas, The Siege of 
 London. Lady Barbarina a phase which 
 lasted, let us say, for four or five years with 
 occasional revivals. We have what Mr. James 
 calls the " Kensington days " which produced 
 the wonderful studies of English authors and 
 
 143 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 artists with their infinitely saddest of all lives 
 led by mortal man. Those days of contact 
 with the wonderful Yellow Book group gave 
 us that wonderful series of stories The Death 
 of the Lion, The Lesson of the Master, The 
 Next Time, The Real Thing, The Coxon Fund, 
 Greville Fane and just as the wonderful 
 periodical was the only place in which these 
 stories could have appeared, so our wonderful 
 master was the only man who could have given 
 us those nouvelles. I harp so upon the word 
 wonderful because I find literally nothing to 
 say about these things I have just wonder, 
 and that is all there is to it. . . . 
 
 And then, in what it is convenient to label 
 the Rye days, our master gave us firstly the 
 final masterpiece I don t mean the last, but 
 the most consummate in The Spoils of Poyn- 
 ton. It was as if, with the failure and passing 
 of The Yellow Book and of the Yellow group ; 
 with the extinction of the last attempt at an 
 establishment of a literary and artistic life in 
 England with the passing of the glorious early 
 nineties, Mr. James gave up the attempt to 
 make an artistic milieu interesting to the 
 inhabitants of this island. The first and only 
 attempt ! There is no doubt that it was 
 another disillusionment. . . . 
 
 Our subject had tried to find in London, in 
 144 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 English society, a region, or at least a corner, 
 in which the only really productive class (of all 
 the classes and all the masses) might be, if not 
 honoured, then at least allowed some social 
 value, even if it were the barest of social 
 existences. But, with The Death of the Lion 
 he had seen to the bottom of that possibility. 
 A master, as he seems to tell us, might have 
 a chance of an invitation to an " English 
 country house," but only on condition that he 
 was, a Lion. And then he would have to 
 compete with Guy Walsingham, the lady 
 novelist with a male pseudonym, and with a 
 moustached wonder writing under a lady s 
 name ; and he would, the master, be allowed 
 no fire in his bedroom and would die of pneu 
 monia in such a way as to get the hostess great 
 credit in the Press for having afforded the 
 master a room in which to die. . . . 
 
 So that, giving up this attempt to paint a 
 life which is no life (since in England the 
 author, as such, ranks beneath the governess 
 and the vicar and just above the servants, has 
 no canons, no costume, no habits as a class 
 and no rank in the State, and it is impossible 
 to make c atmospheric studies of a life where 
 there are no habits, no costumes, no manners, 
 no canons, no standard, no solidarity, no aims, 
 and no rank in the State !) giving up this 
 K 145 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 impossible attempt Mr. James devoted himself 
 to the task of portraying the lives of English 
 people who were just people good people, 
 comfortably off, as a rule. He had tried to 
 find his Great Good Place his earthly Utopia 
 in Italy, in France, in English literary life. 
 He had failed. 
 
 He found English people who were just 
 people singularly nasty. For he gave us The 
 Spoils of Poynton, a romance of English grab ; 
 What Maisie Knew, a romance of the English 
 habit of trying to shift responsibility ; The 
 Turn of the Screw, a romance of the English 
 habit of leaving young children to the care of 
 improper governesses and salacious valets ; 
 and so on, right up to The Golden Bowl and 
 The Bench of Desolation, neither of which 
 could be called exactly c pretty stories, 
 though the latter is cheerful by comparison 
 and in a desolating way. 
 
 So that it was not there, I imagine, that he 
 found his Place. It was again I imagine in 
 desperation that, quite late, he essayed a 
 pilgrimage amongst his own people. This was 
 probably foreshadowed in The Golden Bowl, 
 which was another international story, re- 
 introducing American characters. It is diffi 
 cult to say how much Mr. James enjoyed the 
 American Scene ; the splendid product is there 
 146 
 
TEMPERAMENTS 
 
 for examination ; but I will hazard a small 
 fortune in a bet that our author, if he did not 
 find the average American any whit less 
 desirable or less civilised than the average 
 European, brought away nothing that could 
 shake his conviction that most people have not 
 got souls. . . . 
 
 Therefore we have the image of the Great 
 Good Place that only real castle in the air, 
 that ever-unattained and ever-waiting region, 
 beyond the frontiers of every horizon, the place 
 that, when our eyes are weary and when we 
 shut them, we may imagine. Of that place- 
 indeed but it is not in Europe Mr. James 
 may say with his Pilgrim : 
 
 " Sitting here, in this old park, in this old 
 country, I feel that I hover on the misty verge 
 of what might have been. I should have been 
 born here, not there ; here my makeshift 
 distinctions would have found things they d 
 have been true of . . ." 
 
 But that old park, in that old country, exists, 
 alas and alas, only in Mr. James mind. . . . 
 
 147 
 
IV 
 M : E T H O D S 
 
 THE writing of this little book has proved 
 almost the most thankless-r-as it is certainly 
 the most formidable task that I ever under 
 took. Under protest, as it were, I have written 
 some weary chapters upon our subject s sub 
 jects. That, I believe, is demanded in a mono 
 graph upon a writer s works and, it would be, 
 I am credibly informed, obtaining attention 
 under false pretences to omit some such 
 speculation. I have written, not so un 
 willingly some further chapters still against 
 the collar upon Mr. James temperament, 
 which is the same thing as his " message." 
 I had hoped to do some of the sort of work 
 that I really like doing when I came to the 
 chapter upon this master s methods upon his 
 44 technique." 
 
 I can t myself, for the life of me, see that a 
 writer s subjects concern any soul but himself. 
 They have nothing more to do with criticism 
 than eggs with aeroplanes. A critic may like 
 a class of subject or may dislike them for 
 148 
 
METHODS 
 
 myself I like books about fox-hunting better 
 than any other book to have a good read in. 
 I would rather read Tilbury Nogo than Daniel 
 Deronda, and any book of Surtees than any 
 book of George Meredith excepting perhaps 
 Evan Harrington, which is a jolly thing with a 
 good description of country house cricket. 
 But that is merely a statement of preferences, 
 like any other English writing about books. 
 This latter leads the reader, as a rule, no further 
 than to tell him that Messrs. Lang, Collins, or 
 who you will, like reading about golf, Charlotte 
 Corday, the Murder in the Red Barn and, what 
 you will facts which may be interesting in 
 themselves but which have nothing to do with 
 how a book should be, or is not, written. 
 
 Similarly with disquisitions upon the tem 
 perament of a writer since temperament is a 
 thing like sunshine or the growing of grass, a 
 gift of the good God. One may write about it 
 if one likes, if one has nothing better to do ; 
 it is a sort of gossip like any other sort of 
 gossip and, if it does no good in particular, it 
 breaks no bones. Twenty of us, confined in a 
 country house by a south-westerly gale, may 
 well set to work to discuss the temperaments 
 of our friends. " I like so and so," one of us 
 will say, "he is so considerate " ; "I prefer 
 Mrs. Dash," another replies, " she is so force- 
 
 149 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 ful." But all the talk will not make the friend 
 of So-and-so, with a taste for the milder 
 virtues, like Mrs. Dash whose attractions are of 
 a more vigorous type. That is as much as to 
 say that any penny-a-liner might call your 
 attention to the temperament of Mr. W. H. 
 Hudson, which is the most beautiful thing that 
 God ever made, though twenty thousand first- 
 class critics thundering together could not make 
 Mr. James like Flaubert. Still, disquisitions 
 upon temperament may do this amount of 
 good : Supposing that the only work of Mr. 
 James that you had happened to glance at had 
 been The Great Good Place, and supposing that 
 you have no taste for mysticism, preferring the 
 eerily horrible or the suavely social ! You 
 would have put Mr. James volume down and 
 would have sworn never to take another up. 
 Then coming in some newspaper quotation 
 upon some passage about The Turn of the 
 Screw, which is the most eerie and harrowing 
 story that was ever written you might dis 
 cover that here was a temperament, after all, 
 infinitely to your taste. So that some profit 
 might come from that form of writing. 
 
 But criticism concerns itself with methods 
 and with methods and again with methods 
 and with nothing else. So that, having waded 
 wearily through a considerable amount of 
 150 
 
METHODS 
 
 writing that I can only compare to duty-calls, 
 I was rejoicing at the thought of letting myself 
 go. I felt as a horse does w r hen, after a tiring 
 day between the shafts, it is let loose into a 
 goodly grass field. There seemed to be such 
 reams that one might, all joyfully, write about 
 the methods of this supremely great master of 
 method. I had promised myself the real treat 
 of my life. ... 
 
 But alas, there is nothing to write ! I do 
 not mean to say that nothing could have been 
 written but it has all been done. Mr. James 
 has done it himself. In the matchless and 
 certainly bewildering series of Prefaces to the 
 Collected Edition, there is no single story that 
 has not been annotated, critically written 
 about and (again critically) sucked as dry as 
 any orange. There is nothing left for the poor 
 critic but the merest of quotations. 
 
 I desired to say that the supremest discovery 
 in the literary art of our day is that of Impres 
 sionism, that the supreme function of Impres 
 sionism is selection, and that Mr. James has 
 carried the power of selection so far that he 
 can create an impression with nothing at all. 
 And, indeed, that had been what for many 
 years I have been desiring to say about our 
 master ! He can convey an impression, an 
 atmosphere of what you will with literally 
 
 151 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 nothing. Embarrassment, chastened happi 
 ness for his happiness is always tinged with 
 regret greed, horror, social vacuity he can 
 give it you all with a purely blank page. His 
 characters will talk about rain, about the 
 opera, about the moral aspects of the selling of 
 Old Masters to the New Republic, and those 
 conversations will convey to your mind that 
 the quiet talkers are living in an atmosphere 
 of horror, of bankruptcy, of passion hopeless 
 as the Dies Irae ! That is the supreme trick of 
 art to-day, since that is how we really talk 
 about the musical glasses whilst our lives 
 crumble to pieces around us. Shakespeare did 
 that once or twice as when Desdemona 
 gossips about her mother s maid called Bar 
 bara whilst she is under the very shadow of 
 death ; but there is hardly any other novelist 
 that has done it. Our subject does it, however, 
 all the time, and that is one reason for the 
 impression that his books give us of vibrating 
 reality. I think the word vibrating exactly 
 expresses it ; the sensation is due to the fact 
 that the mind passes, as it does in real life, 
 perpetually backwards and forwards between 
 the apparent aspect of things and the essen 
 tials of life. If you have ever, I mean, been 
 ruined, it will have been a succession of pictures 
 like the following. Things have been going to 
 152 
 
METHODS 
 
 the devil with you for some time ; you have 
 been worried and worn and badgered and 
 beaten. The thing will be at its climax to 
 morrow. You cannot stand the strain in town 
 and you ask your best friend who won t be a 
 friend any more to-morrow, human nature 
 being what it is ! to take a day off at golf 
 with you. In the afternoon, whilst the Courts 
 or the Stock Exchange or some woman up in 
 town are sending you to the devil, you play 
 a foursome, with two other friends. The sky 
 is blue ; you joke about the hardness of the 
 greens ; your partner makes an extraordinary 
 stroke at the ninth hole ; you put in some 
 gossip about a woman in a green jersey who 
 is playing at the fourteenth. From what one 
 of the other men replies you become aware 
 that all those three men know that to-morrow 
 there will be an end of you ; the sense of that 
 immense catastrophe broods all over the green 
 and sunlit landscape. You take your mashie 
 and make the approach shot of your life whilst 
 you are joking about the other fellow s neck 
 tie, and he says that if you play like that on 
 the second of next month you will certainly 
 take the club medal, though he knows, and 
 you know, and they all know you know, 
 that by the second of next month not a soul 
 there will talk to you or play with you. So 
 
 153 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 you finish the match three up and you walk 
 into the club house and pick up an illustrated 
 paper. . . . 
 
 That, you know, is what life really is a 
 series of such meaningless episodes beneath the 
 shadow of doom or of impending bliss, if you 
 prefer it. And that is what Henry James 
 gives you an immense body of work all 
 dominated with that vibration with that 
 balancing of the mind between the great out 
 lines and the petty details. And, at times, as 
 I have said, he does this so consummately that 
 all mention of the major motive is left out 
 altogether. But it is superfluous for me to say 
 this because it is already said in a Preface. 
 Consider this : 
 
 Only make the reader s general vision of evil 
 intense enough, I said to myself 
 
 Mr. James is considering how to make The 
 Turn of the Screw sufficiently horrible 
 
 and that already is a charming job and his 
 own experience, his own imagination, his own 
 sympathy (with the children) and horror (of 
 their false friends) will supply him quite suffi 
 ciently with all the particulars . Make him think 
 the evil, make him think it for himself, and you 
 are released from weak specifications. This 
 ingenuity I took pains as indeed great pains 
 were required to apply ; and with a success 
 
 154 
 
METHODS 
 
 apparently beyond my liveliest hope. . . . 
 How can I feel my calculation to have failed 
 ... on my being assailed, as has befallen me, 
 with the charge of a monstrous emphasis, the 
 charge of indecently expatiating [upon the 
 corruption of soul of two haunted children] ? 
 There is ... not an inch of expatiation . . . 
 my values are positively all blanks save so far 
 as an excited horror . . . proceeds to read 
 into them more or less fantastic figures. . . . 
 
 Here again is one passage which exactly 
 gives you the measure of how the horror is 
 suggested. You. are dealing with a little boy 
 who has been expelled from school on a vague 
 charge. This little boy and his sister have ~\ 
 been corrupted in ways that are never shown 
 by a governess and a valet in whose society 
 they had been once left and who now, being 
 dead, haunt, as revenants, the doomed children. 
 The new governess is asking him why he was 
 expelled from school, and the little boy answers 
 that he did not open letters, did not steal. 
 
 "What then did you do?" 
 
 He looked in vague pain all round the top 
 of the room and drew his breath two or three 
 times as if with difficulty. He might have been 
 standing at the bottom of the sea and raising 
 his eyes to some green twilight. " Well I said 
 things." 
 
 " Only that ? " 
 
 155 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 44 They thought it enough ! " . . . 
 
 " But to whom did you say them ? . . . 
 
 Was it to every one ? " I asked. 
 " No, it was only to But he gave a 
 
 sick little headshake. " I don t remember 
 
 their names." 
 
 44 Were they then so many ? " 
 
 No only a few. Those I liked." 
 
 "... And did they repeat what you said," 
 
 I went on after a pause. . . . 
 
 44 Oh, yes," he nevertheless replied 4 they 
 
 must have repeated them. To those they liked. 
 
 44 And those things came round ? " 
 
 44 To the masters ? Oh yes ! " he answered 
 
 very simply. 
 
 I have stripped this episode of all its descrip 
 tive passages save one in order to reduce it to 
 the barest and most crude of bones, in order to 
 show just exactly what the hard skeleton is. 
 And it will be observed that the whole matter 
 the whole skeleton or the only bone of it 
 is the one word 44 things " 44 I said 
 things." 
 
 But, as I have said, Mr. James, unfortun 
 ately for me, has uttered already practically 
 all that there is to be said about his own 
 methods. Let us therefore under the heading 
 of 4t form " follow, by means of quotations, 
 his methods in the construction of some of his, 
 stories. 
 156 
 
METHODS 
 
 Here we have our author, at a dinner, 
 gathering the scheme for a single-figure 
 story 1 : 
 
 For by what else in the world but by fatal 
 design had I been placed at dinner one autumn 
 evening of old London days face to face with 
 a gentleman, met for the first time, though 
 favourably known to me by name and fame, 
 in whom I recognised the most unbridled 
 colloquial romancer the " joy of life " had ever 
 found occasion to envy ? Under what other 
 conceivable coercion had I been invited to 
 reckon, through the evening, with the type, 
 with the character, with the countenance of 
 this magnificent master s wife, who, veracious, 
 serene, and charming, yet not once meeting 
 straight the eyes of one of us, did her duty by 
 each, and by her husband most of all, without 
 so much as, in the vulgar phrase, turning a 
 hair ? It was long ago, but I have never, to 
 this hour, forgotten the evening itself em 
 balmed for me now in an old-time sweetness 
 beyond any aspect of my reproduction. I 
 made but a fifth person, the other couple our 
 host and hostess ; between whom and one of 
 the company, while we listened to the woven 
 wonders of a summer holiday, the exploits of 
 a salamander, among Mediterranean isles, were 
 exchanged, dimly and discreetly, ever so 
 guardedly, but all expressively, imperceptible 
 lingering looks. It was exquisite, it could but 
 
 1 Collected Edition, Preface to Vol. XII. 
 
 157 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 become, inevitably, some "short story" or 
 other, which it clearly prefitted as the hand 
 the glove. 
 
 Here again is Mr. James catching hold, at 
 first hand, of the germ once more at a dinner- 
 table once more with the mind quickly at 
 work of The Spoils of Poynton 1 : 
 
 So it was, at any rate, that when my amiable 
 friend, on the Christmas Eve, before the table 
 that glowed safe and fair through the brown 
 London night, spoke of such an odd matter 
 as that a good lady in the north, always well 
 looked on, was at daggers drawn with her only 
 son, ever hitherto exemplary, over the owner 
 ship of the valuable furniture of a fine old house 
 just accruing to the young man by his father s 
 death, I instantly became aware, with my 
 44 sense for the subject," of the prick of inocu 
 lation ; the whole of the virus, as I have called 
 it, being infused by that single touch. There 
 had been but ten words, yet I had recognised 
 in them, as in a flash, all the possibilities of 
 the little drama of my Spoils, which glimmered 
 then and there into life ; so that when in the 
 next breath I began to hear of action taken, 
 on the beautiful ground, by our engaged adver 
 saries, tipped each, from that instant, with the 
 light of the highest disntiction, I saw clumsy 
 Life again at her stupid work. For the action 
 
 1 Collected Edition, Vol. X, Preface, p. 1. 
 158 
 
METHODS 
 
 taken, and on which my friend, as I knew she 
 would, had already begun all complacently and 
 benightedly further to report, I had absolutely, 
 and could have, no scrap of use. . . . 
 
 Or here you have Mr. James catching hold 
 of an idea and, in the very motion of catching 
 that golden ball, rendering it more complex 
 and more symmetrical 1 : 
 
 I recognise again, for the first of these three 
 Tales, another instance of the growth of the 
 44 great oak " from the little acorn ; since What 
 Maisie Knew is at least a tree that spreads 
 beyond any provision its small germ might on 
 a first handling have appeared likely to make 
 for it. The accidental mention had been made 
 to me of the manner in which the situation of 
 some luckless child of a divorced couple was 
 affected, under my informant s eyes, by the re 
 marriage of one of its parents I forget which ; 
 so that, thanks to the limited desire for its 
 company expressed by the step-parent, the 
 law of its little life, its being entertained in 
 rotation by its father and its mother, wouldn t 
 easily prevail. Whereas all of these persons 
 had at first vindictively desired to keep it 
 from the other, so at present the re-married 
 relative sought now rather to be rid of it that 
 is to leave it as much as possible, and beyond 
 the appointed times and seasons, on the hands 
 
 1 Collected Edition, Vol. XI, Preface. 
 
 159 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 of the adversary ; which malpractice, resented 
 by the latter as bad faith, would of course be 
 repaid and avenged by an equal treachery. 
 The wretched infant was thus to find itself 
 practically disowned, rebounding from racquet 
 to racquet like a tennis ball or a shuttlecock. 
 This figure could but touch the fancy to the 
 quick and strike one as the beginning of a 
 story a story commanding a great choice of 
 developments. I recollect, however, promptly 
 thinking that for a proper symmetry the 
 second parent should marry too which in the 
 case named to me indeed would probably soon 
 occur, and was in any case what the ideal of 
 the situation required. 
 
 And with that we enter at once upon the 
 vexed and controversial ground of the " hand 
 ling" that an author may permit himself of 
 his subject, once he has picked it up. The 
 French school of the seventies and eighties 
 Maupassant, Flaubert, the Goncourts and the 
 rest, up to M. France himself held that a 
 subject from the life was the merest suggestion. 
 Once the suggestion was taken hold of, it 
 should be turned over and over in the mind 
 until the last drop of suggestion that could 
 come from the original idea was squeezed out 
 of it. So that, in such a masterpiece of this 
 type as Madame Bovary, or for the matter of 
 160 
 
METHODS 
 
 that, Germinie Lacerteux, every incident, every 
 word, every apparent digression, made towards 
 the inevitable end. In that way a feeling of 
 destiny was produced, a grim semblance of an 
 implacable outside Providence. Of course the 
 real fineness of the art lay in concealing the 
 art in making the digressions appear like 
 real negligences, as they appear in the life .we 
 lead. Outside this school there has been arising 
 another, which, for convenience, we may call 
 the neo-Russian school ; though, as regards 
 the construction of their stories, these might 
 almost as well be called neo-Primitives. 
 
 The Russians, in fact, like any other peasant 
 people, have an inborn gift of telling stories ; 
 they have no need to be hurried, since for 
 thousands and untold thousands of years they 
 have been peasants without any hope of 
 becoming anything else. They tell, round their 
 stoves, stories of an incredible length for which, 
 since they are also a very patient people, they 
 find ready and attentive listeners. They leave 
 nothing out, they sacrifice nothing in the 
 desire to come more quickly to an end. They 
 go on and on talking, talking. Their gift is, 
 in fact, the exact inverse of that of the Ameri 
 can " anecdotist " or of the Japanese poets 
 who will get an epic into four lines : 
 
 161 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 " I went to fetch water from the spring : 
 I found that a convolvulus had twined its tendrils 
 
 round the well-rope. 
 I went and borrowed water from my neighbour. ..." 
 
 A Russian peasant would take two days in 
 telling that story, giving you the genealogy 
 and the history of the province, the fact that 
 it was necessary to bribe the Governor with 
 rouble notes hidden in bread-offerings, and 
 hour-long dissertations on the goodness of God 
 and the nature of the feelings that it is probable 
 a clinging tendril might have. And this is not 
 merely a matter of selection. It is the self- 
 protective spirit of the race which does not and 
 cannot feel itself safe unless every loophole for 
 objection is closed up. It needs documented 
 reality and documented reality and again 
 documented reality. 
 
 In that way you have such writers as the 
 late Count Tolstoy and the late Fyodor 
 Dostoieffsky, story-tellers of the most intense 
 literal realism, with an unrivalled gift for 
 rendering the scenes that they choose for 
 rendering. They choose those scenes, however, 
 without much consideration of whether they 
 have any effect in carrying the story forward, 
 or are of any other use than that of expressing 
 passionate convictions of the author. Between 
 the French schools and the Russian there stands 
 102 
 
METHODS 
 
 the figure of Turgenieff who had instinctively 
 a great deal of the Frenchman s art his very 
 first short story is as finished in form as the 
 most perfect of Maupassant s conies and who 
 had a self-effacement unknown otherwise 
 amongst the Russians who are mostly peda 
 gogues. And the most valuable of all the 
 innumerable matters in Mr. James Prefaces 
 concerns itself with the beautiful genius as a 
 builder up of stories 1 : 
 
 I have always fondly remembered a remark 
 that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan 
 Turgenieff in regard to his own experience of 
 the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began 
 for him almost always with the vision of some 
 person or persons, who hovered before him, 
 soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, 
 interesting him and appealing to him just as 
 they were and by what they were. 1 He saw 
 them, in that fashion, as disponibles, saw them 
 subject to the chances, the complications of 
 existence, and saw them vividly, but then had 
 to find for them the right relations, those that 
 would most bring them out ; to imagine, to 
 invent and select and piece together the situa 
 tions most useful and favourable to the sense 
 of the creatures themselves, the complications 
 they would be most likely to produce and to 
 feel. 
 
 To arrive at these things is to arrive at my 
 1 Collected Edition, Preface, Vol. III. 
 
 163 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 4 story, " he said, * and that s the way I look 
 for it. The result is that I m often accused of 
 not having story enough. I seem to myself 
 to have as much as I need to show my people, 
 to exhibit their relations with each other ; for 
 that is all my measure. If I watch them long 
 enough I see them come together, I see them 
 placed., I see them engaged in this or that act 
 and in this or that difficulty. How they look 
 and move and speak and behave, always in the 
 setting I have found for them, is my account 
 of them of which I dare say, alas, que cela 
 manque souvent d architecture. But I would 
 rather, I think, have too little architecture 
 than too much when there s danger of its 
 interfering with my measure of the truth. 
 The French of course like more of it than I 
 give having by their own genius such a hand 
 for it ; and indeed one must give all one can. 
 As for the origin of one s wind-blown germs 
 themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where 
 they come from ? We have to go too far back, 
 too far behind, to say. Isn t it all we can say 
 that they come from every quarter of heaven, 
 that they are there at almost any turn of the 
 road ? They accumulate, and we are always 
 picking them over, selecting among them. 
 They are the breath of life by which I mean 
 that life, in its own way, breathes them upon 
 us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and 
 imposed floated into our minds by the 
 current of life. That reduces to imbecility 
 the vain critic s quarrel, so often, with one s 
 
 164 
 
MET H_O D S 
 
 subject, when he hasn t the wit to accept it. 
 Will he point out then which other it should 
 properly have been ? his office being, essen 
 tially, to point out. // en serait bien embarrasse. 
 Ah, when he points out what I ve done or 
 failed to do with it, that s another matter : 
 there he s on his ground. I give him up my 
 4 architecture, " my distinguished friend con 
 cluded, " as much as he will." 
 
 Mr. James, if he professes himself infinitely 
 grateful to Turgenieff for the service of these 
 hints, nevertheless inclines actually rather to 
 the French method of building up a subject. 
 In a note upon Daisy Miller, his earliest 
 44 story," he characteristically justifies his pro 
 ceedings which characterise his later years 
 even more than his former 1 : 
 
 It was in Italy again in Venice and in the 
 prized society of an interesting friend, now 
 dead, with whom I happened to wait, on the 
 Grand Canal, at the animated water-steps 
 of one of the hotels. The considerable little 
 terrace there was so disposed as to make a 
 salient stage for certain demonstrations on 
 the part of two young girls, children they, if 
 ever, of Nature and of freedom, whose use of 
 those resources, in the general public eye, and 
 under our own as we sat in the gondola, drew 
 
 1 Collected Edition, Vol. XVIII, Preface. 
 
 165 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 from the lips of a second companion, sociably 
 afloat with us, the remark that there before 
 us, with no sign absent, were a couple of attest 
 ing Daisy Millers. Then it was that, in my 
 charming hostess s prompt protest, the whirli 
 gig, as I have called it, at once betrayed itself. 
 4 4 How can you liken those creatures to a figure 
 of which the only fault is touchingly to have 
 transmuted so sorry a type and to have, by a 
 poetic artifice, not only led our judgment of 
 it astray, but made any judgment quite im 
 possible ? " With which this gentle lady and 
 admirable critic turned on the author himself. 
 41 You know you quite falsified, by the turn 
 you gave it, the thing you had begun with 
 having in mind, the thing you had had, to 
 satiety, the chance of observing : your 
 pretty perversion of it, or your unprincipled 
 mystification of our sense of it, does it really 
 too much honour in spite of which, none the 
 less, as anything charming or touching always 
 to that extent justifies itself, we after a fashion 
 forgive and understand you. But why waste 
 your romance ? There are cases, too many, 
 in which you ve done it again ; in which, pro 
 voked by a spirit of observation at first no 
 doubt sufficiently sincere, and with the 
 measured and felt truth fairly twitching your 
 sleeve, you have yielded to your incurable 
 prejudice in favour of grace to whatever it 
 is in you that makes so inordinately for form 
 and prettiness and pathos ; not to say some 
 times for misplaced drolling. Is it that you ve 
 
 166 
 
METHODS 
 
 after all too much imagination ? Those awful 
 young women capering at the hotel door, they 
 are the real little Daisy Millers that were ; 
 whereas yours in the tale is such a one, more s 
 the pity, as for pitch of the ingenuous, for 
 quality of the artless couldn t possibly have 
 been at all." My answer to all which bristled 
 of course with more professions than I can or 
 need report here ; the chief of them inevitably 
 to the effect that my supposedly typical little 
 figure was of course pure poetry, and had never 
 been anything else ; since this is what helpful 
 imagination, in however slight a dose, ever 
 directly makes for. 
 
 Thus according to our subject s conscious 
 canons an author is justified in sacrificing, if 
 not the inherent probabilities of his " affair," 
 then at least the photographic realities, to his 
 sense of beauty. Beauty he elsewhere defines 
 as the fun, the interest, the amusingness, the 
 awakening qualities of a .story. . . . 
 
 Action, that is to say, in the sense of any 
 body s doing anything, is singularly rare in any 
 of Mr. James nouvelles ; but what the French 
 call progression d effet is never absent from 
 the almost apparently negligible of them. 
 The aspect of the ct affair " in hand will change 
 incredibly whilst the characters do no more 
 than sit in arm-chairs or open bookcases. In 
 that sense " nouvelles" by this author, how- 
 
 167 
 
HENRY JA3VTES 
 
 ever much they may resemble " studies," are 
 never anything of the sort. The treatment of 
 mental progressions is so rare in Anglo-Saxon 
 and for the matter of that in Latin fiction 
 that the unsuspecting reader might well mis 
 take the mood of The Lesson of the Master for 
 the mood of Bielshin Prairie, which is a true 
 sketch. Mr. James, however, has never, as 
 far as I can recall, given us a real sketch, any 
 more than Daisy Miller, which he labels " a 
 study" is a real study. The Point of View 
 might pass for one of these, but as a matter of 
 fact it is a true short story, the account of 
 conflicting irresolutions ending in a deter 
 mination. To a school of readers whose chief 
 pabula are spotless detectives conflicting with 
 besmirched criminals, traffickers in white slaves 
 with unspotted victims, or idle rich with spot 
 less poor and the black generally with the 
 white ; whose " action " is limited to the de 
 ciphering of cryptograms, the unveiling of ad 
 venturesses, the dismantling of the stage with 
 revolver shots and so on to the readers of 
 such enlivening fictions the actions and pro 
 gressions of our author those conflicts of ir 
 resolution with irresolution whose only pistol 
 shot is the arriving at a determination may 
 well bear the aspects of studies in metaphysics. 
 168 
 
METHODS 
 
 But, actually upon its larger scale and with 
 its reversing of the order of the incidents, every 
 short story of Mr. James is a true short story 
 as dependent for surprise upon its last word 
 as is La Parure. If you will take The Turn of 
 the Screw, with its apparent digressions, its 
 speculations, its turns and its twists, you will 
 see that the real interest centres round the 
 proposition : Is the narrator right or wrong 
 in thinking that if the little boy can only 
 disburden himself of a full confession he will 
 be saved for ever from the evil ascendancy of 
 Peter Quint. And this hangs in the balance 
 until the very last sentence settles it : 
 
 4 We were alone with the quiet day, and 
 his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped." 
 
 Maupassant would have told the story in ten 
 pages, Mr. James taking one hundred and 
 fifty. But, though the French genius would 
 have removed from it the aspect of being a 
 nouvelle, he could have made it no more of a 
 conte, except for the shortness. Mr. James* 
 sense of form is, in fact, so nice as to be un 
 rivalled ; his sense of his subject is nearly as 
 fierce as Flaubert s : his digressions are no 
 more digressions ; his disquisitions no more 
 disquisitions. If he seldom goes so far as to 
 

 HENRY JAMES 
 
 give us a final sentence like : " Personne ne 
 croyait que VAbbe s etait donne la mort," 
 he does it as if to show us that he can, 
 superbly in the sentence I have just quoted. 
 Generally it strikes him as a device too barbaric 
 and one to be shrunk from. 
 
 Mr. James, in fact, shrinks from most 
 definite things. Heaven knows there is no 
 reason why he should not shrink from them 
 just as his and our nations just as all Anglo- 
 Saxondom shrinks from the definite statement. 
 His glass the poor dear English language and 
 the poor dear Puritan temperament isn t very 
 big, but it is capable of infinite arabesques. 
 The Latin and the Papist spirit isn t in the 
 least afraid of definition or of coarseness if the 
 defining of a situation calls for coarseness, 
 cynicism or brutality. * Tu es Petrus, et 
 super ..." we are accustomed to say, taking 
 the words on their face value. . . . But the 
 American and the Englishman, the essential 
 Protestants, shrink from a direct proposition 
 whether it be made by Our Lord or by any 
 other person. And, if they shrink from the 
 hearing of a direct proposition, refining and 
 refining away the incidence, until it appears no 
 more than allegory in the end, still more will 
 they shrink from putting a direct statement 
 170 
 
METHODS 
 
 into direct words. As I have pointed out else 
 where, when a French peasant sees a suspicious 
 character upon the road, he says : " C est 
 qu que maoufatan" "It s some evildoer," 
 the English farm labourer would say : 4 I 
 guess he s up to no good." And, just as the 
 Anglo-Saxon shrinks from a direct statement 
 of fact insisting that it shall be said to him 
 instead of " The majority of the House of 
 Commons closured the Budget through 
 44 Le Roy remercy ses bon sujets et ainsi le 
 veult? which is a silly sort of lie or just as he 
 prefers the allegorical statement : " We handed 
 him a lemon and he quit," to a harsh account 
 of business proceedings, so invariably, wishing 
 all statements made to him if they are to 
 carry conviction to be wrapped up in allegory, 
 he is the best Anglo-Saxon who most wraps up 
 his statements. 
 
 Mr. James expresses matchlessly his race 
 and its religion. These call for delicate and 
 sympathetic deeds and gentle surmises rather 
 than for clear actions and definite beliefs. So 
 Mr. James first refines all action out of his work 
 all non-psychological action and, little by 
 little, sets himself to express himself purely in 
 allegory. 
 
 What he has got from abroad is the technique 
 
 171 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 of Form, and in that he has reunited the 
 stream of Anglo-Saxon imagination with the 
 broad stream of international culture. He 
 has in short written, in English, books that are 
 worthy to be read by readers of the great 
 Continental writers. As far as his phraseology 
 goes (and le style c est Vhomme) he has expressed 
 his race. And for a man to have attained to 
 international rank with phrases intimately 
 national, is the supreme achievement of writers 
 a glory that is reserved only for the Dantes, 
 the Goethes and the Shakespeares, who none 
 the less remain supremely national. 
 
 I am not saying that the tendency to write 
 allegorically may not be carried too far. To 
 say that " X had not succeeded in planting in 
 his temperate garden a specimen of the rank 
 exotic each of whose leaves is a rustling 
 cheque," may have its disadvantages as well 
 as its advantages considered as a way of ex 
 pressing the fact that X wrote books that did 
 not pay. It is not at any rate journalese, that 
 flail of the Anglo-Saxon race, that infinite 
 corrupter of the Anglo-Saxon mind, that des 
 tined and ultimate cause of the downfall of 
 Anglo-Saxon empires, since the race that can 
 not either in allegories or in direct speech think 
 clearly is doomed to fall before nations who 
 172 
 
METHODS 
 
 can ; and Japan is ever on the threshold with 
 the tendrils twining round its well-ropes. . . . 
 
 But the question of the taste for allegorical 
 modes of expression is after all only a question 
 of taste. Personally I should say that Mr. 
 James " style" strikes me as almost un 
 approachable up to the day when he concluded 
 The Spoils of Poynton ; it is lucid, picturesque 
 and as forcible as it can be, considering that he 
 writes in English. With What Maisie Knew 
 it begins to become, as we should say in talking 
 of pheasants, a little " high." And so it goes 
 on until, with the Prefaces and with A Small 
 Boy, it just simply soars. There is not any 
 other word for it. . . . 
 
 But that is only a question again of taste, 
 and it is very possible that generations trained 
 in the appreciation of this author will find 
 vapid what to me seems clear, and that such a 
 sentence as the succession of fifty thousand 
 sentences such as : " There at any rate /or 
 the story, that is, for the pearl of my idea I 
 had to take, in the name of the particular 
 instance, no less deep and straight a dive into 
 the deep sea of a certain general truth than I 
 had taken in quest of Flicker bridge." 
 
 It obviously means something they all 
 obviously mean something, the five hundred 
 
 173 
 
HENRY JAMES 
 
 thousand sentences of the Prefaces, of A 
 Small Boy, of The American Scene. If you will 
 read them aloud you will find them reasonably 
 clear. For the latest James the James of the 
 latest stage is simply colloquial. Nothing 
 more and nothing less. It is a matter of 
 inflexions of the voice much more than of 
 commas or even of italics. And I have found 
 repeatedly that when I read a passage aloud, 
 whether from the Prefaces or The Golden Bowl, 
 it became, to myself at least, infinitely clear, 
 though no less infinitely embroidered and 
 decorative. 
 
 Whether that implies that, in his latest 
 phase, Mr. James has been riding his Muse 
 and his Method to death, or whether it means 
 that he is sapiently aiming a shaft at oblivion. 
 I am scarcely concerned to say. It has at 
 any rate been anticipated that all the novels 
 of the indefinitely distant future shall be read 
 out from gramophones to public assemblies. 
 In that Utopia A Small Boy would be limpid. 
 
 But of this I am certain : Looking upon the 
 immense range of the books written by this 
 author, upon the immensity of the scrupulous 
 labours, upon the fineness of the mind, the 
 nobility of the character, the highness of the 
 hope, the greatness of the quest, the felicity 
 174 
 
METHODS 
 
 of the genius and the truth that is at once 
 beauty and more than beauty of this I am 
 certain, that such immortality as mankind has 
 to bestow (most of them haven t any souls !) 
 whether of the talking hooter, or of the silent 
 pages, will rest upon the author of Daisy 
 Miller. It will rest also with the author of The 
 Golden BowL 
 
PRINTED BY 
 
 WM. BRENDON AND SON, LTD., 
 PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND. 
 
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