gnize 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