ist of Grain

ric author. His disciples had the pleasure of feeling like persons initiated into mysteries. He was subject, like a religious teacher, to all kinds of conflicting interpretations. He puzzled an

was the novelist of grains and scruples. I have heard it urged that he was the supreme incarnation of the Nonconformist conscience, perpetually concerned with infinitesimal details of conduct. As a matter of fact, there was much m

n New York, Paris, London, and Geneva, he enjoyed more than anything else the "far from showy practice of wonde

just to be somewhere-almost anywhere would do-and somehow receiv

k flavourless. His work reflects him as the arrangement of a room may reflect a charming lady. He brings into every little world that he enters the light of a new and refined inquisitiveness. He is as watchful as a cat. Half his pleasure seems to come from waiting for the extraordinary to peep and peer out of the ordina

evealing his immortal soul. But he is not so inhuman in his art as some of his admirers have held him to be. Mr. Hueffer, I think, has described him as pitiless, and even cruel. But can one call Daisy Miller pitiless? Or What Maisie Knew? Certainly,

hich seems to me to be the greatest ghost-story in the English language, he has dramatized the duel between good and evil; and the effect of it, at the end of all its horrors, is that of a hymn in praise of courage. One feels-thou

mpare with his Notes on Novelists has been published in the present century. He brought his imagination to bear upon books as he brought his critical and analytical faculty to bear upon human beings. Here there was room f

on of Flaubert as the "operative conscience or vicarious sacrifice" of a styleless literary age is the pure gold of criticism. "The piety most real to her," Fleda says in The Spoils o

ing a few subtle changes, to convert it into a sort of hieroglyphics that need an interpreter. He grew more and more to believe that it was not possible to tell the simple truth except in an involved way. He would define a gesture with as much labour as Shakespeare would devote to the entire

redith or Mr. Hardy. Henry James, indeed, is himself the outstanding character in his books. That fine and humorous collector of European ladies and gentlemen, that savourer of the little lives of the Old World and the little adventures of those who have escaped from the New, that artist who b

Artist

He did not, however, pour himself out to his amanuensis without having made a preliminary survey of the ground. "He liked to 'break ground' by talking to himself day by day about the characters and the construction until the whole thing was clearly before his mind's eye. This preliminary talking out the scheme was, of course, duly recorded by the typewriter. "It is not that he made rough drafts of his novels-sketches to be afterwards amplified. "His method might better be compared with Zola's ha

nt instance is one's feeling that The Sense of the Past, had it been completed, would have been very nearly a masterpiece. In it Henry James hoped to get what he called a "kind of quasi-turn-of-screw effect." Here, as in The Turn of the Screw, he was dealing with a sort of ghosts-whether subjective or objective in their reality does not matter. His hero is a young American who had never been to Europe till he was about thirty, and yet was possessed by that almost sensual sense of the past which made Henry James, as a small boy, put his nose into English books and try to sniff in and smell from their pages the older world from which they came. The inheritance of an old house in a London square-a house in which the clocks had stopped, as it were, in 1820-brings the young man over to England, though the lady with whom h

dren of nature might have begun to take notice. Ages, generations, inventions, corruptions, had produced it, and it seemed, wherever it rested, to be filtered thro

t work with love of the act." He could observe the inanimate things of the Old World almost as if they were living things. No naturalist spying for patient hours upon birds in the hope of discovering their secrets could have

ches for the tear on the cheek or the blood-drop from t

that has often been written in a gross, mechanical way. Here it is all delicate-a study of nuances and subtle relationships. For Ralph, though perfect in the 1820 manner, has something of the changeling about him-something that gradually makes people think him "queer," and in the end arouses in him the dim beginnings of nostalgia for his own time. It is a fascinating theme as Henry James works it out-doubly fascinating as he talk

see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of possibilities in it tha

less illumina

a bit difficult to put, though entirely expressible with patience, and as I catch hold of the

ies. And what tiny little animals he sometimes manages to catch by the tip of the tail in some

ht betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?... No, no-no l

re which is to betray the "abnormalism" of his hero to

t right, and it will be

ge in the stor

onvincing; rather beautifu

another

of my elation-though after a little

el, in the 1820 world, is to repeat exactly the experience

, by a momentarily-confused appearance, an assumption, that he doesn't repeat it

ich Henry James describes his hero at the crisis of his experience, when the latter begins to feel that he is

r-headed nails at the very points and under the very tops that I reserve for them. That's it, the silver na

urn made possible by a noble act of self-sacrifice on the part of a second 1820 girl who sends him from her, yet "without an excess of the kind of romanticism I don't want." There is another woman-the modern

o anything so ar

thor laid it aside at the beginning of the war, feeling that "he could no longer work upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life." Especially interesting is the "scenario,"

which is a surname of two syllables and ending in a consonant-also beginning with one. I am thinking of Moyra Grabha

the incongruous heroism of an artist who puts a hero's earnestness into getting the last perfection of shine on to a boot or the last fine shade of meaning into the manner in which he says, "No, thank you, no sugar"? No, it is something more than that. It is the hero

e was Bo

the convert's sense of-in his own phrase-"agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know how endearingly enough to name them I)." He speaks of "this really prodigious flush" of his first full experience of England. He passes on the effect of his religious rapture when he tells us that "really wherever I looked, and still

as I may call the muffled accompaniment, f

iousness, on that morning as having finally settle

having settled upon me once for all while I observed, for instance, that in England the plate of buttered muffins and its cover were sacredly set

ains out of muffins all his days. His ecstasy and his curiosity were nine times out of ten larger than their objects. Thus, though he was intensely interested in English life, he was interested in it, not in its largeness a

at of a convert. His ecstasy was that of a convert: his curiosity was that of a connoisseur. As he recalls his first experience of a London eating-house of

ith local colour, and one could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one's elbows or one's

rill of sundry invitations to breakfast" still survived on his palate more than forty years afterwards. Not that these meals were recalled as gorges of the stomach: they were merely gorges of sensation, gorges of the sense of the past. The breakfasts associated him "at a jump" with the ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Rogers. They had also a documentary value as "the exciting note of a social order in which every one wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon an office or a store...." It was on

r an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely

rough it "was to seem privileged to such immensities as history would find left her to record but with bated breath." He recalls again "the particular sweetness of wonder" with which he haunted certain pictures in the National Gallery, but it is himself, not the National Gallery, that he writes about. Of Titian and Rembrandt and Rubens he communicates no

all of us have felt on being introduced to people and places and pictures we have dreamed about from our youth. Who has not felt the same kind of joy as Henry James felt when George Eliot allowed him to run for the doctor? "I shook off my fellow-visitor," he relates, "for swifter cleaving of the air, and I recall still feeling that I cleft it even in the dull four-wheeler." After he had delivered

ll, who had tossed or otherwise mauled him, and, th

ite aberration," had a superb conclusion, which "left our adventure an approved ruin." As James was about to leave, and indeed was at the step of the brougham with Mrs. Greville, G.H. Lewes called on him to wait a moment. He returned to the door

" I hear him unreservedly plead while he thrusts the

she, in turn, with the best intentions, had tried to leave with George Eliot, to be read and admired. George Eliot and Lewes had

an unconsidered trifle; grudging, as they so justifiedly did, the impingement of such matters on their consciousness. The vivid demonstration of o

he same, James was disappointed in Tennyson. He expected to find him a poet signed and stamped, and found him only a bo

her knowing nor comm

ning, but much rather to set up some rush of sensibility." What a lovely touch of malice there is in his desc

always repay them, on the spot, in heavily-shovelled coi

nfessional raptures. It may be objected that Henry James's wit is only a new form of the old-fashioned periphrasis. He might be described as the last of the periphrastic humorists. At the same time, if ever in any