from him any
supreme enlightenment as to the workings of that complex organ, the
human heart, but I understand quite definitely that Mr. James knows all
about it, and could show many things if he were only interested enough
to make an effort He is the apostle of a well-bred boredom. He knows all
about society, and _bric-a-brac_, and pictures, and music, and natural
landscape, and foreign cities, and if he could feel a spice of interest
in any earthly thing he could be charming. But his listless, easy
air--of gentlemanly-giftedness fatigued--provokes and bores. He is like
a man who suppresses a yawn to tell a story. He is a blend of genuine
power and native priggery, and his faults are the more annoying because
of the virtues they obscure and spoil. He is big enough to know better.

It is likely enough that to Mr. James the fact of having been bred in
the United States has proved a disadvantage. To the robuster type of
man of letters, to the Dickens or Kipling kind of man, it would be
impossible to wish better luck than to be born into that bubbling
pot-full of things. But Mr. James's over-accentuated refinement of mind
has received the very impetus of which it stood least in need. He has
grown into a humorous disdain of vulgar emotions, partly because he
found them so rich about him. The figures which Bret Harte sees through
a haze of romance are to him essentially coarse. The thought of Mr.
James in association with Tennessee and Partner over a board supplied
with hog, flapjack and forty-rod awakes a bewildering pity in the mind.
An hour of Colonel Starbottle would soil him for a week. He is not made
for such contact. It is both curious and instructive to notice how the
too-cultured sensitiveness of a man of genius has blinded him to the
greatest truth in the human life about him. Born into the one country
where romance is still a constant factor in the lives of men, he
conceives romance to be dead. With stories worthy of a great writer's
handling transacting themselves on every hand, he is the first
elucidator of the principle that a story-teller's business is to have no
story. The vision of the sheet which was let down from Heaven to Peter
was seen in vain so far as he is concerned, but the story of that dream
holds an eternal truth for the real artist. Mr. James is not the only
man whose best-nursed and most valued part has proved to be destructive
With a little more strength he might have kept all his delicacies,
a