ch and the casual lapses of ordinary human conversation.

In spite of all his detachment no novelist diffuses his personal
temperament so completely through his work as Henry James does.
In this sense--in the sense of temperamental style--he is far more
personal than Balzac and incomparably more so than Turgenief.

One does not, in reading these great authors, savour the actual style
on every page, in every sentence. We have large blank spaces, so to
speak, of straightforward colourless narrative. But there are no
"blank spaces" in Henry James. Every sentence is penetrated and
heavy with the fragrance of his peculiar grace. One might almost
say--so strong is this subjective element in the great objective
aesthete--that James writes novels like an essayist, like some
epicurean Walter Pater, suddenly grown interested in common
humanity, and finding in the psychology of ordinary people a
provocation and a stimulus as insidious and suggestive as in the
lines and colours of mediaeval art. This _essayist attitude_ accounts
largely for those superior "inverted commas" which throw such a
clear space of ironic detachment round his characters and his scenes.

On the other hand, what a man he is for concealing his _opinions!_
Who can lay his finger on a single formal announcement of moral or
philosophical partizanship in Henry James? Who can catch him for a
moment declaring himself a conservative, a liberal, a Christian, a
pagan, a pantheist, a pluralist, a socialist, a reactionary, a single
taxer, a realist, a symbolist, an empiricist, a believer in ideals, a
materialist, an advocate of New Thought, an esoteric Buddhist, an
Hegelian, a Pragmatist, a Free Lover?

It would be possible to go over this formidable list of angles of
human vision, and find evidence somewhere in his books sufficient
to make him out an adherent of every one of them. Consider his use
of the supernatural for instance. Hardly any modern writer makes so
constant, so artistic a use of the machinery of the invisible world;
and yet who would have the temerity to say that Henry James
believed even so much as in ghosts?

I know nothing of Mr. James' formal religious views, or to what
pious communion, if any, that brooding forehead and disillusioned
eyes were wont to drift on days of devotion. But I cannot resist a
secret fancy that it was to some old-fashioned and not too ritualistic
Anglican church that he sometimes may have been met proceeding,
in silk hat