Henry James, Jr. | Page 7

These great men are of the past--they and their methods and
interests; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present. The new
school derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any others;
but it studies human nature much more in its wonted aspects, and finds
its ethical and dramatic examples in the operation of lighter but not
really less vital motives. The moving accident is certainly not its trade;
and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire catastrophes. it is largely
influenced by French fiction in form; but it is the realism of Daudet

rather than the realism of Zola that prevails with it, and it has a soul of
its own which is above the business of recording the rather brutish
pursuit of a woman by a man, which seems to be the chief end of the
French novelist. This school, which is so largely of the future as well as
the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James; it is he who is
shaping and directing American fiction, at least. It is the ambition of
the younger contributors to write like him; he has his following more
distinctly recognizable than that of any other English-writing novelist.
Whether he will so far control this following as to decide the nature of
the novel with us remains to be seen. Will the reader be content to
accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story, which is
apt to leave him arbiter of the destiny of the author's creations? Will he
find his account in the unflagging interest of their development? Mr.
James's growing popularity seems to suggest that this may be the case;
but the work of Mr. James's imitators will have much to do with the
final result.
In the meantime it is not surprising that he has his imitators. Whatever
exceptions we take to his methods or his results, we cannot deny him a
very great literary genius. To me there is a perpetual delight in his way
of saying things, and I cannot wonder that younger men try to catch the
trick of it. The disappointing thing for them is that it is not a trick, but
an inherent virtue. His style is, upon the whole, better than that of any
other novelist I know; it is always easy, without being trivial, and it is
often stately, without being stiff; it gives a charm to everything he
writes; and he has written so much and in such various directions, that
we should be judging him very incompletely if we considered him only
as a novelist. His book of European sketches must rank him with the
most enlightened and agreeable travelers; and it might be fitly
supplemented from his uncollected papers with a volume of American
sketches. In his essays on modern French writers he indicates his
critical range and grasp; but he scarcely does more, as his criticisms in
"The Atlantic" and "The Nation" and elsewhere could abundantly
testify.
There are indeed those who insist that criticism is his true vocation, and
are impatient of his devotion to fiction; but I suspect that these admirers

are mistaken. A novelists he is not, after the old fashion, or after any
fashion but his own; yet since he has finally made his public in his own
way of story-telling--or call it character-painting if you prefer,--it must
be conceded that he has chosen best for himself and his readers in
choosing the form of fiction for what he has to say. It is, after all, what
a writer has to say rather than what he has to tell that we care for
nowadays. In one manner or other the stories were all told long ago;
and now we want merely to know what the novelist thinks about
persons and situations. Mr. James gratifies this philosophic desire. If he
sometimes forbears to tell us what he thinks of the last state of his
people, it is perhaps because that does not interest him, and a
large-minded criticism might well insist that it was childish to demand
that it must interest him.
I am not sure that any criticism is sufficiently large-minded for this. I
own that I like a finished story; but then also I like those which Mr.
James seems not to finish. This is probably the position of most of his
readers, who cannot very logically account for either preference. We
can only make sure that we have here an annalist, or analyst, as we
choose, who fascinates us from his first page to his last, whose
narrative or whose comment may enter into any minuteness of detail
without fatiguing us, and can only truly grieve us when it ceases.

End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of Henry James, Jr., by Howells