omedy, and into the larger air of the permanent life-forces.
It is the universal element which one misses in these clever and
interesting books, that universal element which in the work of Henry
James is never absent, however slight and frivolous his immediate
subject or however commonplace and conventional his characters.

Is it, after all, not they,--these younger philosophical realists--but he,
the great urbane humanist, who restricts his scope, narrowing it
down to oft-repeated types and familiar scenes, which, as the world
swings forward, seem to present themselves over and over again as
an integral and classic embodiment of the permanent forces of life?
It might seem so sometimes; especially when one considers how
little new or startling "action" there is in Henry James, how few
romantic or outstanding figures there are to arrest us with the shock
of sensational surprise. Or is it, when we get to the bottom of the
difference--this difference which separates Henry James from the
bulk of our younger novelists--not a matter of subject at all, but
purely a matter of method and mental atmosphere?

May it not, perhaps, turn out that all those younger men are
preoccupied with some purely personal philosophy of life, some
definite scheme of things--like the pattern idea in "Human
Bondage"--to which they are anxious to sacrifice their experiences
and subordinate their imaginations? Are they not all, as a matter of
fact, interested more deeply in hitting home some original
philosophical nail, than in letting the vast human tragedy strike them
out of a clear sky? But it matters little which way it is. The fact that
concerns us now is to note that Henry James has still no rival, nor
anything approaching a rival, in his universal treatment of European
Society. None, even among our most cynical and disillusioned
younger writers, are able to get as completely rid as he of any "a
priori" system or able to envisage, as he did, in passionate colourless
curiosity, the panorama of human characters drawn out along the
common road of ordinary civilised life.

Putting Flaubert aside, Henry James is the only one of the great
modern novelists to be absolutely free from any philosophical
system. Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Balzac, Hardy, de Maupassant,
D'Annunzio--they all have their metaphysical or anti-metaphysical
bias, their gesture of faith or denial.

Even Flaubert himself makes a kind of philosophic attitude out of
his loathing for t