He goes deep into some individuals, not deep into society. For all his unique originality, he is a conventional man of the world, as conventional as Thackeray. He is distinctly not a philosopher. As man of letters, professional craftsman, he is a thorough workman; as an interpreter of human life in its main issues he is a dilettante, never even betraying that he understands or has ever questioned where Newman, Verver and Miss Theale got their money and how, or what supports the newspaper whose brazen reporter is so annoying, what the newspaper means as a social force, beyond the fact that a journalist is importunate in the presence of gentlemen. Mr. James is not a snob, because he has too much candour and good sense, but he has never strayed imaginatively outside his own comfortable cultivated class. Some of his persons are uncultivated and some are impecunious, but they are the poor and the vulgar of the upper crust, not the real poor, the real common majority. He does not know as much as any one of fifteen younger novelists in England and America knows about all the principal economic and social varieties to be found in a single town. He is almost morbid on the subject of vulgarity. It is a fine trait to dislike vulgarity, but it is not altogether wholesome to feel obliged to name it as vulgar every time one comes anywhere near it. Indeed it is a kind of vulgarity to be so uneasy about it; it is not polite to flaunt one's wealth, and it is not the largest most natural kind of elegance to betray a continuous consciousness of inelegance: it is simpler to let things and people tell their own story, unlabelled, and to assume that the reader will know that this style of speech on that style of housefurnishing is vulgar or is not. Mr. James has two technical defects, one of style, the other of method. The defect of style is due to his habit of writing with his eye and his mind instead of with his ear. His great mind saves him perfectly when he is writing in his own person; but too often when he makes a character speak, he equips it with a peculiarly Henry-James sentence, a fault not unlike Browning's, but more pardonable in a poet than in a writer of realistic fiction. Says Kate Croy: "We needn't, I grant you, in that case wait." With all due deference to the author of her wonderful being, what she would have said is: "I grant you that in that case we needn't wait." Folks talk that way in America, and (one stands on the testimony of other novelists) in England. Of Robert Assingham, a good straightforward military man, Mr. James says, "He disengaged, he would be damned if he didn't - they were both phrases he repeatedly used his responsibility." Now he would be damned, no doubt; that sounds right; but fancy his saying, "I disengage my responsibility!" To disengage one's responsibility is what a very full-worded man of letters does, but not what a blunt and none too clever military man does. ""She'll depreciate to you,' Mrs. Assingham added 'your property." That is, in spoken English, ""She'll depreciate your property to you,' added Mrs. Assingham." "Run down your property," would be still better, more life-like. Mr. Verver, an American business man, is the hero of the following hiccoughing row of phrases: ""Well, I mean, too,' he had gone on, 'that we haven't, no doubt, enough, the sense of difficulty." The James sentence, as a rule, will be found, upon scrutiny, to contain, admirably, each thing in its place, the entire idea; and whatever another writer, more naturally following the path of least resistance, which, on the whole, is that path normally pursued by the human mind, would tag on, as who should say, as an afterthought, he cunningly, and true to an ideally more perfect intellectual arrangement, inserts, or more properly builds in, so that, in fine, to the English language is wonderfully restored, in him, some of the effect, so long lost, of the periodic sentence. But people don't talk that way, even the rather intellectual and delightfully clever human beings that he assembles. The other defect, that of method, is the vice of his virtue. He is critic of human life. He devises an interesting situation and then stands off and explains it. The good effect of this, which no other novelist quite so curiously affords, is a warrant of intellectual integrity, as if he wanted the reader to watch the story with him, discover things simultaneously with the author. The difficulty is that having assumed that he does not know all about it, but is a spectator too, he then, without any new action, gesture or speech to furnish new knowledge, plunges into the midmost mind of the character and tells things that are working there which only a god could know. When Daniel Defoe, narrating external events, professes ignorance of something, he plays a pretty game with the reader's credulity; for the reader immediately claps the positive on the negative and concludes that what Defoe does tell he does know all about. This device is a good one to establish verisimilitude in an autobiographical narrative. But it obviously is not successful, applied to a novel in which the author deals with psychological processes known only to the omniscient creator. "What she was thinking of I am unable to say. I hazard the supposition," etc. The reader's inner self retorts, "My dear sir, you made her; if you do not know, you ought to, or there is no use pretending that you knew all you told us a few pages back." "We confess," says our author, "to having perhaps read into the scene, prematurely, a critical character that took longer to develop." That sounds like candour and ought to strengthen the illusion that the writer is telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth as he knows it. But its effect is quite otherwise; it disturbs credulity, ruffles illusion, as when the theatre drop with the castle painted on it wavers in a gust from the wings. Anything is bad art which makes a reader say: "This is not so." And Mr. James frequently does things in the talk of his characters and in his own comments which spoil the show. In "The Turn of the Screw" he takes the governess's story out of her lips and retranslates it into an unconvincing idiom, so that what ought to be a great tragic parable, a ghost story even more terribly significant than Ibsen's "Ghosts," misses fire; the more so in that the very nature of the story gives hostages to probability at the outset. The plain fact is that many of Mr. James's stories do not sound true. They are the work of a critic, and they are interesting chiefly to those who like to follow 1 with their intellects the wonderful process of his intellect. This is especially the case with his later books, which have, perhaps unfortunately, obscured those that made his reputation. The first books, "Roderick Hudson," "The Princess Casamassima,” “The Portrait of a Lady," "The American,” are straightaway and simple. How came it that the critic ran away with the novelist? One reason, it is safe to guess, is that he lacks narrative material; his mind is better than the intrinsic value of the subject he deals with; he says highly intelligent and wise things about relatively unimportant situations. The great novelists, voluminous as they are, make you feel that they are telling only part of what they know, that there is a great life behind them. Mr. James is like a great scientific mind imprisoned with a few bugs. They are interesting bugs and he says wonderful things about them. So long as the door is shut and one cannot hear the clamour of life outside, one is content to study them with him, unflaggingly fascinated. The minute, intricate fidelity of his observation is such that it taxes the full capacity of the reader's attention. He is a chronicler of mental processes when there is process, and an analyst of stationary mental states. A good deal of the human intellect is comparatively static, so that his work is often mere exposition, unfolding rather than progressing. It is a treat to watch him trace an idea, to follow it as it swims up, touched here by a motive, there by a circumstance, until it finally takes shape on the lips of a character. Because of his large if not predominant interest in the minds of his |