ou can get from the writer." One is
much securer of one's judgment at twenty-nine than, say, at forty-five;
but if this was a mistake of mine I am not yet old enough to regret it.
The story was called "Poor Richard," and it dealt with the conscience
of a man very much in love with a woman who loved his rival. He told
this rival a lie, which sent him away to his death on the field,--in
that day nearly every fictitious personage had something to do with the
war,--but Poor Richard's lie did not win him his love. It still seems
to me that the situation was strongly and finely felt. One's pity
went, as it should, with the liar; but the whole story had a pathos
which lingers in my mind equally with a sense of the new literary
qualities which gave me such delight in it. I admired, as we must in
all that Mr. James has written, the finished workmanship in which there
is no loss of vigor; the luminous and uncommon use of words, the
originality of phrase, the whole clear and beautiful style, which I
confess I weakly liked the better for the occasional gallicisms
remaining from an inveterate habit of French. Those who know the
writings of Mr. Henry James will recognize the inherited felicity of
diction which is so striking in the writings of Mr. Henry James, Jr.
The son's diction is not so racy as the father's; it lacks its daring,
but it is as fortunate and graphic; and I cannot give it greater praise
than this, though it has, when he will, a splendor and state which is
wholly its own.

Mr. James is now so universally recognized that I shall seem to be
making an unwarrantable claim when I express my belief that the
popularity of his stories was once largely confined to Mr. Field's
assistant. They had characteristics which forbade any editor to refuse
them; and there are no anecdotes of thrice-rejected manuscripts finally
printed to tell of him; his work was at once successful with all the
magazines. But with the readers of "The Atlantic," of "Harper's," of
"Lippincott's," of "The Galaxy," of "The Century," it was another
affair. The flavor was so strange, that, with rare exceptions, they
had to "learn to like" it. Probably few writers have in the same
degree compelled the liking of their readers. He was reluctantly
accepted, partly through a mistake as to his attitude--through the
confusion of his point of view with his private opinion--in the
reader's mind. This confusion caused the tears of rage which bedewed
our co