" so little, in the
sense of coming before the foot-lights and making gestures to the
crowd; but in a deeper implication, none shows it more constantly.

To have a style so marked and sealed, so stamped and dyed for one's
own in the integral way James has it, a style so personal and unique
that its peculiar flavour rises from every single sentence on the page,
is indeed, in a deep sense, to betray one's hidden soul to the world.

This, at any rate, is the only kind of betrayal that we--the general
public--are permitted to surprise him in; unless one counts as a
personal revelation the grave portentous solemnity of his technical
prefaces. Like that amiable girl in Wilhelm Meister who, when
asked whether she had ever loved, replied "Never--or always!"
Henry James may be said to have never "coined his soul" or always
to have coined it.

This style of his--so dyed and ingrained with personality--becomes
in his later books, a stumbling-block to many readers; to the readers
who want their "story" and have no wish to be teased and distracted
"en route." Certainly his style thickens and gathers in fuller intensity
as well as diffuses itself in wider atmospheric attenuation as his later
manner grows upon him. The thing becomes at once richer and more
evasive. But this implies no violent or sudden change, such as might
excite suspicion of any arbitrary "tour-de-force." The characteristic
elements are there from the beginning. They are only emphasized
and drawn out to their logical issues by the process of his
development.

From the very start he possesses a style which has its own flavour. It
is only that the perfume of it diffuses itself more insidiously, in
proportion as its petals, so to speak, warmed by the sun of maturer
experience and subtler imagination, open to the air.

The result of this natural and organic development is precisely what
one would have anticipated. Lovers of simple story-telling prefer the
earlier work with its Daisy Miller, Roderick Hudson, and The
Portrait of a Lady.

Virtuosos of rare psychological achievements and of strange
aesthetic experiments prefer his very latest writings, including such
a difficult and complicated book as "The Golden Bowl" or the short
stories in "The Finer Grain."

On the other hand, those among us who are concerned with sheer
beauty of form apart both from exciting subjects and psychological
curiosities, hold by the intermediate period--the period extending, let
us