to do with the final result.

In the meantime it is not surprising that he has his imitators.
Whatever exceptions we take to his methods or his results, we cannot
deny him a very great literary genius. To me there is a perpetual
delight in his way of saying things, and I cannot wonder that younger
men try to catch the trick of it. The disappointing thing for them is
that it is not a trick, but an inherent virtue. His style is, upon the
whole, better than that of any other novelist I know; it is always
easy, without being trivial, and it is often stately, without being
stiff; it gives a charm to everything he writes; and he has written so
much and in such various directions, that we should be judging him very
incompletely if we considered him only as a novelist. His book of
European sketches must rank him with the most enlightened and agreeable
travelers; and it might be fitly supplemented from his uncollected
papers with a volume of American sketches. In his essays on modern
French writers he indicates his critical range and grasp; but he
scarcely does more, as his criticisms in "The Atlantic" and "The
Nation" and elsewhere could abundantly testify.

There are indeed those who insist that criticism is his true vocation,
and are impatient of his devotion to fiction; but I suspect that these
admirers are mistaken. A novelists he is not, after the old fashion,
or after any fashion but his own; yet since he has finally made his
public in his own way of story-telling--or call it character-painting
if you prefer,--it must be conceded that he has chosen best for himself
and his readers in choosing the form of fiction for what he has to say.
It is, after all, what a writer has to say rather than what he has to
tell that we care for nowadays. In one manner or other the stories
were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the
novelist thinks about persons and situations. Mr. James gratifies this
philosophic desire. If he sometimes forbears to tell us what he thinks
of the last state of his people, it is perhaps because that does not
interest him, and a large-minded criticism might well insist that it
was childish to demand that it must interest him.

I am not sure that any criticism is sufficiently large-minded for this.
I own that I like a finished story; but then also I like those which
Mr. James seems not to finish. This is probably the position of most
of his readers, who cannot very logically accou