64. HENRY JAMES. THE AMBASSADORS. THE TRAGIC MUSE. THE SOFT SIDE. THE BETTER SORT. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE. THE GOLDEN BOWL.
Henry James is the most purely "artistic" as he is the most profoundly "intellectual" of all the European writers of our age. His fame will steadily grow, and his extraordinary genius will more and more create that finer taste by which alone he can be appreciated.
No novelist who has ever lived has "taken art" so seriously. But it is art, and not life, he takes seriously; and, therefore, along with his methods of elaborate patience, one is conscious of a most delicate and whimsical playfulness—sparing literally nothing. In spite of his beautiful cosmopolitanism it must never be forgotten that at bottom Henry James is richly and wonderfully American. That tender and gracious "penchant" of his for pure-souled and modest-minded young men, for their high resolves, their noble renunciations, their touching faith, is an indication of how much he has exploited—in the completest aesthetic sense—the naive puritanism of his great nation.
In regard to his style one may remark three main divergent epochs; the first closing with the opening of the "nineties," and the third beginning about the year 1903. Of these the second seems to the present compiler the best; being, indeed, more intellectualized and subtle than the first and less mannered and obscure than the final one. The finest works he produced would thus be found to be those on one side or the other of the year 1900.
The subtlety of Henry James is a subtlety which is caused not by philosophical but by psychological distinctions and it is a subtlety which enlarges our sympathy for the average human nature of middle class people to a degree that must, in the very deepest sense of the word, be called moral.
The wisdom to be derived from him is all of a piece with the pleasure—both being the result of a fuller, richer, and more discriminating consciousness of the tragic complexity of quite little and unimportant characters. To a real lover of Henry James the greyest and least promising aspects of ordinary life seem to hold up to us infinite possibilities of delicate excitement. It is indeed out of excitement—partly intellectual and partly aesthetic,—that his great effects are produced. And yet the final effect is always one of resignation and calm—as with all the supreme masters.