dolized none of his characters. There is something of moral passion in
the reverence with which he writes of the labours of Flaubert and Balzac
and Stevenson and even of Zola.

He lied none of them into perfection, it is true. He accepted, and even
advertised their limitations. But in each of them he found an example of
the hero as artist. His characterization of Flaubert as the "operative
conscience or vicarious sacrifice" of a styleless literary age is the
pure gold of criticism. "The piety most real to her," Fleda says in _The
Spoils of Poynton_, "was to be on one's knees before one's high
standard." Henry James himself had that kind of piety. Above all recent
men of letters, he was on his knees to his high standard.

People may wonder whether his standard was not, to an excessive degree,
a standard of subtlety rather than of creative imagination--at least, in
his later period. And undoubtedly his subtlety was to some extent a
matter of make-believe. He loved to take a simple conversation, and, by
introducing a few subtle changes, to convert it into a sort of
hieroglyphics that need an interpreter. He grew more and more to believe
that it was not possible to tell the simple truth except in an involved
way. He would define a gesture with as much labour as Shakespeare would
devote to the entire portrait of a woman. He was a realist of civilized
society in which both speech and action have to be sifted with
scientific care before they will yield their grain of motive. The
humorous patience with which Henry James seeks for that grain is one of
the distinctive features of his genius.

But, it may be asked, are his people real? They certainly are real in
the relationships in which he exhibits them, but they are real like
people to whom one has been introduced in a foreign city rather than
like people who are one's friends. One does not remember them like the
characters in Meredith or Mr. Hardy. Henry James, indeed, is himself the
outstanding character in his books. That fine and humorous collector of
European ladies and gentlemen, that savourer of the little lives of the
Old World and the little adventures of those who have escaped from the
New, that artist who brooded over his fellows in the spirit less of a
poet than a man of science, that sober and fastidious trifler--this is
the image which presides over his books, and which gives them their
special character, and will attract tiny but enthusiastic companies of
reade