Henry James, Jr. | Page 3

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HENRY JAMES, JR.
by William Dean Howells

The events of Mr. James's life--as we agree to understand events--may
be told in a very few words. His race is Irish on his father's side and
Scotch on his mother's, to which mingled strains the generalizer may
attribute, if he likes, that union of vivid expression and dispassionate
analysis which has characterized his work from the first. There are
none of those early struggles with poverty, which render the lives of so
many distinguished Americans monotonous reading, to record in his
case: the cabin hearth-fire did not light him to the youthful pursuit of
literature; he had from the start all those advantages which, when they
go too far, become limitations.

He was born in New York city in the year 1843, and his first lessons in
life and letters were the best which the metropolis--so small in the
perspective diminishing to that date--could afford. In his twelfth year
his family went abroad, and after some stay in England made a long
sojourn in France and Switzerland. They returned to America in 1860,
placing themselves at Newport, and for a year or two Mr. James was at
the Harvard Law School, where, perhaps, he did not study a great deal
of law. His father removed from Newport to Cambridge in 1866, and
there Mr. James remained till he went abroad, three years later, for the
residence in England and Italy which, with infrequent visits home, has
continued ever since.
It was during these three years of his Cambridge life that I became
acquainted with his work. He had already printed a tale--"The Story of
a Year"--in the "Atlantic Monthly," when I was asked to be Mr. Fields's
assistant in the management, and it was my fortune to read Mr. James's
second contribution in manuscript. "Would you take it?" asked my
chief. "Yes, and all the stories you can get from the writer." One is
much securer of one's judgment at twenty-nine than, say, at forty-five;
but if this was a mistake of mine I am not yet old enough to regret it.
The story was called "Poor Richard," and it dealt with the conscience of
a man very much in love with a woman who loved his rival. He told
this rival a lie, which sent him away to his death on the field,--in that
day nearly every fictitious personage had something to do with the
war,--but Poor Richard's lie did not win him his love. It still seems to
me that the situation was strongly and finely felt. One's pity went, as it
should, with the liar; but the whole story had a pathos which lingers in
my mind equally with a sense of the new literary qualities which gave
me such delight in it. I admired, as we must in all that Mr. James has
written, the finished workmanship in which there is no loss of vigor;
the luminous and uncommon use of words, the originality of phrase,
the whole clear and beautiful style, which I confess I weakly liked the
better for the occasional gallicisms remaining from an inveterate habit
of French. Those who know the writings of Mr. Henry James will
recognize the inherited felicity of diction which is so striking in the
writings of Mr. Henry James, Jr. The son's diction is not so racy as the
father's; it lacks its daring, but it is as fortunate and graphic; and I

cannot give it greater praise than this, though it has, when he will, a
splendor and state which is wholly its own.
Mr. James is now so universally recognized that I shall seem to be
making an unwarrantable claim when I express my belief that the
popularity of his stories was once largely confined to Mr. Field's
assistant. They had characteristics which forbade any editor to refuse
them; and there are no anecdotes of thrice-rejected manuscripts finally
printed to tell of him; his work was at once successful with all the
magazines. But with the readers of "The Atlantic," of "Harper's,"