nformist? He
must have met some black coats, we are compelled to suppose, in
the drawing-rooms of his country houses. Did he perhaps, like so
many of his discreet and cautious young men, "conform" without
"committing himself," in these high places?

If I were asked what types of character--among men I mean--emerge
as most characteristic of his interest and as best lending themselves
to his method, I should put my finger upon those pathetic
middle-aged persons, like Mr. Verver in "The Golden Bowl," or Mr.
Longdon in "The Awkward Age," who, full of riches and sad
experience, have retired completely from active life, only to exercise
from the depths of their sumptuous houses and secluded gardens, a
sort of fairy influence upon the fortunes of their younger friends.

In the second place, I would indicate, as characteristic of this author,
those wealthy and amiable young men who, as a general rule from
America, but sometimes from the country-houses of England,
wander at large and with genial "artistic" sympathies through the
picturesque cities of Europe, carrying their susceptible hearts and
sound moral principles into "pension" and "studio" where they are
permitted to encounter those other favourite "subjects" of this
cosmopolitan author, the wandering poverty-stricken gentlewoman
with her engaging daughters, or the ambiguous adventuress with her
shadowy past. The only persons who seem allowed to work at their
trade in Henry James, are the writers and artists. These labour
continually and with most interesting results. Indeed no great
novelist, not even Balzac himself, has written so well about authors
and painters. Paul Bourget attempts it, but there is a certain pedantic
air of a craftsman writing about craftsmen, a connoisseur writing
about connoisseurs, in his treatment of such things, which detracts
from the human interest. Paul Bourget lacks, too, that fine malice,
that sly arch humour, which saves Henry James from ever making
his artists "professional" or his writers prolix.

But if he describes fellow-labourers thus sympathetically, it must
not be forgotten that by far the most fascinating "artistic" person in
all his books, is that astonishing Gabriel Nash in "The Tragic Muse."
And the role of Gabriel Nash is to do nothing at all. To do nothing;
but to be perpetually and insidiously enticing others, out of the
sphere of all practical duties, responsibilities and undertakings,
to renounce everything for art. Any