Henry James, Jr. | Page 5

all his other short
stories, and for certain rich poetical qualities, above everything else that
he has done, is eminently dramatic. But I do not find much that I should
call dramatic in "The Portrait of a Lady," while I do find in it an
amount of analysis which I should call superabundance if it were not all
such good literature. The novelist's main business is to possess his
reader with a due conception of his characters and the situations in
which they find themselves. If he does more or less than this he equally
fails. I have sometimes thought that Mr. James's danger was to do more,
but when I have been ready to declare this excess an error of his
method I have hesitated. Could anything be superfluous that had given
me so much pleasure as I read? Certainly from only one point of view,
and this a rather narrow, technical one. It seems to me that an
enlightened criticism will recognize in Mr. James's fiction a
metaphysical genius working to aesthetic results, and will not be
disposed to deny it any method it chooses to employ. No other novelist,
except George Eliot, has dealt so largely in analysis of motive, has so
fully explained and commented upon the springs of action in the
persons of the drama, both before and after the facts. These novelists
are more alike than any others in their processes, but with George Eliot
an ethical purpose is dominant, and with Mr. James an artistic purpose.
I do not know just how it should be stated of two such noble and
generous types of character as Dorothea and Isabel Archer, but I think
that we sympathize with the former in grand aims that chiefly concern
others, and with the latter in beautiful dreams that primarily concern
herself. Both are unselfish and devoted women, sublimely true to a
mistaken ideal in their marriages; but, though they come to this
common martyrdom, the original difference in them remains. Isabel has
her great weaknesses, as Dorothea had, but these seem to me, on the
whole, the most nobly imagined and the most nobly intentioned women
in modern fiction; and I think Isabel is the more subtly divined of the
two. If we speak of mere characterization, we must not fail to
acknowledge the perfection of Gilbert Osmond. It was a profound

stroke to make him an American by birth. No European could realize so
fully in his own life the ideal of a European dilettante in all the
meaning of that cheapened word; as no European could so deeply and
tenderly feel the sweetness and loveliness of the English past as the
sick American, Searle, in "The Passionate Pilgrim."
What is called the international novel is popularly dated from the
publication of "Daisy Miller," though "Roderick Hudson" and "The
American" had gone before; but it really began in the beautiful story
which I have just named. Mr. James, who invented this species in
fiction, first contrasted in the "Passionate Pilgrim" the New World and
Old World moods, ideals, and prejudices, and he did it there with a
richness of poetic effect which he has since never equalled. I own that I
regret the loss of the poetry, but you cannot ask a man to keep on being
a poet for you; it is hardly for him to choose; yet I compare rather
discontentedly in my own mind such impassioned creations as Searle
and the painter in "The Madonna of the Future" with "Daisy Miller," of
whose slight, thin personality I also feel the indefinable charm, and of
the tragedy of whose innocence I recognize the delicate pathos.
Looking back to those early stories, where Mr. James stood at the
dividing ways of the novel and the romance, I am sometimes sorry that
he declared even superficially for the former. His best efforts seem to
me those of romance; his best types have an ideal development, like
Isabel and Claire Belgarde and Bessy Alden and poor Daisy and even
Newman. But, doubtless, he has chosen wisely; perhaps the romance is
an outworn form, and would not lend itself to the reproduction of even
the ideality of modern life. I myself waver somewhat in my
preference--if it is a preference--when I think of such people as Lord
Warburton and the Touchetts, whom I take to be all decidedly of this
world. The first of these especially interested me as a probable type of
the English nobleman, who amiably accepts the existing situation with
all its possibilities of political and social change, and insists not at all
upon the surviving feudalities, but means to be a manly and simple
gentleman in any event. An American is not able to pronounce as to the
verity of the type; I only know