ith so unexpected a passion, from amid
the brutalities and sensualities of Guy de Maupassant.

No one who has ever lived has written more tenderly or beautifully
of what Charles Lamb would call "superannuated people." Old
bachelors, living in a sort of romantic exile, among mementoes of a
remote past; old maids, living in an attenuated dream of "what might
have been," and playing heart-breaking tricks with their forlorn
fancies; no one has dealt more generously, more imaginatively with
such as these. He is a little cruel to them sometimes, but with a fine
caressing cruelty which is a far greater tribute than indifference; and
is there not, after all, a certain element of cruelty in every species of
tender love?

Though more than any one capable of discerning rare and
complicated issues, where to the vulgar mind all would seem grey
and dull and profitless, Henry James has, and it is absurd not to
admit it, a "penchant" for the abnormal and the bizarre. This element
appears more often in the short stories than the longer ones, but it is
never very far away.

I sometimes think that many of the gentle and pure-souled people
who read this amiable writer go on their way through his pages
without discerning this quiver, this ripple, this vibration, of "miching
mallecho." On softly-stepping feline feet, the great sleek panther of
psychological curiosity glides into very perverse, very dubious paths.
The exquisite tenuity and flexibility of his style, light as the flutter
of a feather through the air, enable him to wander freely and at large
where almost every other writer would trip and stumble in the mud.
It is one of the most interesting phenomena in literature, this sly,
quiet, half ironic dalliance with equivocal matters.

Henry James can say things that no one else could say, and approach
subjects that no one else could approach, simply by reason of the
grave whimsical playfulness of his manner and the extraordinary
malleableness of his evasive style. It is because his style can be as
simple and clear as sunlight, and yet as airy and impalpable as the
invisible wind, that he manages to achieve these results. He uses
little words, little harmless innocent words, but by the connotation
he gives them, and the way in which he softly flings them out, one
by one, like dandelion seeds upon swiftly-sliding water, one is being
continually startled into sharp arrested attention, as if--in the silence
that follows their utteranc