f
calm or finality. They are too aphoristic, these passages. They are
too clever. They smell too much of the lamp. The same fault may be
remarked in the rounding off of the Meredithian plots where one is so
seldom conscious of the presence of the "inevitable" and so teased by
the "obstinate questionings" of purely mental problems.

Reading Henry James one feels like a wisp of straw floating down a
wide smooth river; reading Meredith one is flicked and flapped and
beaten, as if beneath a hand with a flail.

64. HENRY JAMES. THE AMBASSADORS. THE TRAGIC MUSE. THE SOFT SIDE. THE
BETTER SORT. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE. THE GOLDEN BOWL.

Henry James is the most purely "artistic" as he is the most profoundly
"intellectual" of all the European writers of our age. His fame will
steadily grow, and his extraordinary genius will more and more create
that finer taste by which alone he can be appreciated.

No novelist who has ever lived has "taken art" so seriously. But it is
art, and not life, he takes seriously; and, therefore, along with his
methods of elaborate patience, one is conscious of a most delicate and
whimsical playfulness--sparing literally nothing. In spite of his
beautiful cosmopolitanism it must never be forgotten that at bottom
Henry James is richly and wonderfully American. That tender and
gracious "penchant" of his for pure-souled and modest-minded young
men, for their high resolves, their noble renunciations, their
touching faith, is an indication of how much he has exploited--in the
completest aesthetic sense--the naive puritanism of his great nation.

In regard to his style one may remark three main divergent epochs; the
first closing with the opening of the "nineties," and the third
beginning about the year 1903. Of these the second seems to the
present compiler the best; being, indeed, more intellectualized and
subtle than the first and less mannered and obscure than the final
one. The finest works he produced would thus be found to be those on
one side or the other of the year 1900.

The subtlety of Henry James is a subtlety which is caused not by
philosophical but by psychological distinctions and it is a subtlety
which enlarges our sympathy for the average human nature of middle
class people to a degree that must, in the very deepest sense of the
word, be called moral.

The wisdom to be derived from him is all of a piece with the
pleasure--both being the result of a fuller, richer, and more
discri