hout a mental agility which seems to me
unnecessarily fatiguing. A novel ought to be like a walk; George
Meredith makes it into an obstacle race.

Then, again, Henry James is an indubitably great writer; though you
amused me once by saying that you felt you really had not time to read
his later books. Well, for myself, I confess that his earlier books,
such as Roderick Hudson and the Portrait of a Lady, are books that I
recur to again and again. They are perfectly proportioned and admirably
lucid. If they have a fault, and I do not readily admit it, it is that
the characters are not quite full-blooded enough. Still, there is quite
enough of what is called "virility" about in literature; and it is
refreshing to find oneself in the company of people who preserve at all
events the conventional decencies of life. But Henry James has in his
later books taken a new departure; he is infinitely subtle and
extraordinarily delicate; but he is obscure where he used to be lucid,
and his characters now talk in so allusive and birdlike a way, hop so
briskly from twig to twig, that one cannot keep the connection in one's
mind. He seems to be so afraid of anything that is obvious or
plain-spoken, that his art conceals not art but nature. I declare that
in his conversations I have not unfrequently to reckon back to see who
has got the ball; then, too, those long, closely printed pages, such as
one sees in The Wings of a Dove, without paragraphs, without breathing
places, pages of minute and refined analysis--there is a high
intellectual pleasure in reading them, but there is a mental strain as
well. It is as though one wandered in tortuous passages, full of
beautiful and curious things, without ever reaching the rooms of the
house. What I want, in a work of imagination, is to step as simply as
possible into the presence of an emotion, the white heat of a
situation. With Henry James I do not feel certain what the situation
is. At the same time his books are full of fine things; he has learnt a
splendid use of metaphor, when the whole page seems, as it were,
stained with some poetical thought, as though one had shut a fruit into
the book, and its juice had tinted the whole of a page. But that is not
sufficient; and I confess I close one of his later volumes in a
condition of admiring mystification. I do not know what it has all been
about; the characters have appeared, have nodded and smiled
inscrutably, have let fall sentences which seem