merican writing men are
justly proud, nevertheless, of this expatriated craftsman. The American
is inclined to admire good workmanship of any kind, as far as he can
understand the mechanism of it. The task of really understanding Henry
James has been left chiefly to clever women and to a few critics, but
ever since "A Passionate Pilgrim" and "Roderick Hudson" appeared in,
1875, it has been recognized that here was a master, in his own fashion.
What that fashion is may now be known by anyone who will take the pains
to read the author's prefaces to the New York edition of his revised
works. Never, not even in the Paris which James loved, has an artist put
his intentions and his self-criticism more definitively upon paper. The
secret of Henry James is told plainly enough here: a specially equipped
intelligence, a freedom from normal responsibilities, a consuming desire
to create beautiful things, and, as life unfolded its complexities and
nuances before his vision, an increasing passion to seek the beauty
which lies entangled and betrayed, a beauty often adumbrated rather than
made plastic, stories that must be hinted at rather than told, raptures
that exist for the initiated only. The much discussed early and middle
and later manners of James are only various campaigns of this one
questing spirit, changing his procedure as the elusive object of his
search hid itself by this or that device of protective coloration or
swift escape. It is as if a collector of rare butterflies had one method
of capturing them in Madagascar, another for the Orinoco, and still
another for Japan--though Henry James found his Japan--and Orinoco and
Madagascar all in London town!

No one who ever had the pleasure of hearing him discourse about the
art of fiction can forget the absolute seriousness of his professional
devotion; it was as though a shy celebrant were to turn and explain,
with mystical intensity and a mystic's involution and reversal of all
the values of vulgar speech, the ceremonial of some strange, high altar.
His own power as a creative artist was not always commensurate with his
intellectual endowment or with his desire after beauty, and his frank
contempt for the masses of men made it difficult for him to write
English. He preferred, as did Browning, who would have liked to reach
the masses, a dialect of his own, and he used it increasingly after
he was fifty. It was a dialect capable of infinite gradations of tone,
endless refin