that he enters the light of a new and
refined inquisitiveness. He is as watchful as a cat. Half his pleasure
seems to come from waiting for the extraordinary to peep and peer out of
the ordinary. That is his adventure. He prefers it to seas of bloodshed.
One may quarrel with it, if one demands that art shall be as violent as
war and shall not subdue itself to the level of a game. But those who
enjoy the spectacle of a game played with perfect skill will always find
reading Henry James an exciting experience.

It would be unfair, however, to suggest that the literature of Henry
James can be finally summed up as a game. He is unquestionably a
virtuoso: he uses his genius as an instrument upon which he loves to
reveal his dexterity, even when he is shy of revealing his immortal
soul. But he is not so inhuman in his art as some of his admirers have
held him to be. Mr. Hueffer, I think, has described him as pitiless, and
even cruel. But can one call _Daisy Miller_ pitiless? Or _What Maisie
Knew_? Certainly, those autobiographical volumes, _A Small Boy and
Others_ and _Notes of a Son and Brother_, which may be counted among the
most wonderful of the author's novels, are pervaded by exquisite
affections which to a pitiless nature would have been impossible.

Henry James is even sufficiently human to take sides with his
characters. He never does this to the point of lying about them. But he
is in his own still way passionately on the side of the finer types. In
_The Turn of the Screw_, which seems to me to be the greatest
ghost-story in the English language, he has dramatized the duel between
good and evil; and the effect of it, at the end of all its horrors, is
that of a hymn in praise of courage. One feels--though a more perverse
theory of the story has been put forward--that the governess, who fights
against the evil in the big house, has the author also fighting as her
ally and the children's. Similarly, Maisie has a friend in the author.

He is never more human, perhaps, than when he is writing, not about
human beings, but about books. It is not inconceivable that he will live
as a critic long after he is forgotten as a novelist. No book of
criticism to compare with his _Notes on Novelists_ has been published in
the present century. He brought his imagination to bear upon books as he
brought his critical and analytical faculty to bear upon human beings.
Here there was room for real heroes. He idolized his authors as he
i