thing called a sacrament. It is because he had a natural
affinity for this mystical materialism that Meredith, in spite of his
affectations, is a poet: and, in spite of his Victorian Agnosticism (or
ignorance) is a pious Pagan and not a mere Pantheist. Mr. Henry James is
at the other extreme. His thrill is not so much in symbol or mysterious
emblem as in the absence of interventions and protections between mind
and mind. It is not mystery: it is rather a sort of terror at knowing
too much. He lives in glass houses; he is akin to Maeterlinck in a
feeling of the nakedness of souls. None of the Meredithian things, wind
or wine or sex or stark nonsense, ever gets between Mr. James and his
prey. But the thing is a deficiency as well as a talent: we cannot but
admire the figures that walk about in his afternoon drawing-rooms; but
we have a certain sense that they are figures that have no faces.

For the rest, he is most widely known, or perhaps only most widely
chaffed, because of a literary style that lends itself to parody and is
a glorious feast for Mr. Max Beerbohm. It may be called The Hampered, or
Obstacle Race Style, in which one continually trips over commas and
relative clauses; and where the sense has to be perpetually qualified
lest it should mean too much. But such satire, however friendly, is in
some sense unfair to him; because it leaves out his sense of general
artistic design, which is not only high, but bold. This appears, I
think, most strongly in his short stories; in his long novels the reader
(or at least one reader) does get rather tired of everybody treating
everybody else in a manner which in real life would be an impossible
intellectual strain. But in his short studies there is the unanswerable
thing called real originality; especially in the very shape and point of
the tale. It may sound odd to compare him to Mr. Rudyard Kipling: but he
is like Kipling and also like Wells in this practical sense: that no one
ever wrote a story at all like the _Mark of the Beast_; no one ever
wrote a story at all like _A Kink in Space_: and in the same sense no
one ever wrote a story like _The Great Good Place_. It is alone in order
and species; and it is masterly. He struck his deepest note in that
terrible story, _The Turn of the Screw_; and though there is in the
heart of that horror a truth of repentance and religion, it is again
notable of the Victorian writers that the only supernatural note they
can strike assur