rowd. Now that
Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English speaking author who
is really keeping his self-respect and sticking for perfection. Of
course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of
human actions and motives, Henry James. In the last four years he
has published, I believe, just two small volumes, "The Lesson of the
Master" and "Terminations," and in those two little volumes of short
stories he who will may find out something of what it means to be
really an artist. The framework is perfect and the polish is
absolutely without flaw. They are sometimes a little hard, always
calculating and dispassionate, but they are perfect. I wish James
would write about modern society, about "degeneracy" and the new
woman and all the rest of it. Not that he would throw any light on
it. He seldom does; but he would say such awfully clever things
about it, and turn on so many side-lights. And then his sentences!
If his character novels were all wrong one could read him forever
for the mere beauty of his sentences. He never lets his phrases run
away with him. They are never dull and never too brilliant. He
subjects them to the general tone of his sentence and has his whole
paragraph partake of the same predominating color. You are never
startled, never surprised, never thrilled or never enraptured;
always delighted by that masterly prose that is as correct, as
classical, as calm and as subtle as the music of Mozart.

_The Courier_, November 16, 1895

It is strange that from "Felicia" down, the stage novel has never
been a success. Henry James' "Tragic Muse" is the only theatrical
novel that has a particle of the real spirit of the stage in it, a
glimpse of the enthusiasm, the devotion, the exaltation and the
sordid, the frivolous and the vulgar which are so strangely and
inextricably blended in that life of the green room. For although
Henry James cannot write plays he can write passing well of the
people who enact them. He has put into one book all those inevitable
attendants of the drama, the patronizing theatre goer who loves it
above all things and yet feels so far superior to it personally; the
old tragedienne, the queen of a dying school whose word is law and
whose judgments are to a young actor as the judgments of God; and of
course there is the girl, the aspirant, the tragic muse who beats
and beats upon those brazen doors that guard the unapproachable
unti