up for this by ranking him with Shakespeare. He is great among
the second, not among the first poets.

VI

HENRY JAMES

1. THE NOVELIST OF GRAINS AND SCRUPLES

Henry James is an example of a writer who enjoyed immense fame but
little popularity. Some of his best books, I believe, never passed into
second editions. He was, above all novelists, an esoteric author. His
disciples had the pleasure of feeling like persons initiated into
mysteries. He was subject, like a religious teacher, to all kinds of
conflicting interpretations. He puzzled and exasperated even intelligent
people. They often wondered what he meant and whether it was worth
writing about. Mr. Wells, or whoever wrote _Boon_, compared him to a
hippopotamus picking up a pea.

Certainly he laboured over trifles as though he were trying to pile
Pelion on Ossa. He was capable, had he been a poet, of writing an epic
made up of incidents chosen from the gossip of an old maid in the upper
middle classes. He was the novelist of grains and scruples. I have heard
it urged that he was the supreme incarnation of the Nonconformist
conscience, perpetually concerned with infinitesimal details of conduct.
As a matter of fact, there was much more of the aesthete in him than of
the Nonconformist. He lived for his tastes. It is because he is a
novelist of tastes rather than of passions that he is unlikely ever to
be popular even to the degree to, which Meredith is popular.

One imagines him, from his childhood, as a perfect connoisseur, a
dilettante. He has told us how, as a child, in New York, Paris, London,
and Geneva, he enjoyed more than anything else the "far from showy
practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping." And, while giving us
this picture of the small boy that was himself, he comments:

There was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand:
just to _be_ somewhere--almost anywhere would do--and somehow
receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a
vibration.

That is the essential Henry James--the collector of impressions and
vibrations. "Almost anywhere would do": that is what makes some of his
stories just miss being as insipid as the verse in a magazine. On the
other hand, of few of his stories is this true. His personality was too
definitely marked to leave any of his work flavourless. His work
reflects him as the arrangement of a room may reflect a charming lady.
He brings into every little world