To lay all his faults on the table, we may begin with his self-confessed limitation, that "he never went down town." He displayed in fact a passion for high life comparable only to that supposed to inhere in the readers of a magazine called Forget-me-not.
Hardy, with his eye on the Greek tragedians, has produced an epic tonality, and The Mayor of Casterbridge is perhaps more easily comparable to the Grettir Saga than to the novels of Mr. Hardy's contemporaries. Hardy is, on his other side, a contemporary of Sir Walter Scott.
Balzac gains what force his crude writing permits him by representing his people under the ἀνάγκη of modernity, cash necessity; James, by leaving cash necessity nearly always out of the story, sacrifices, or rather fails to attain, certain intensities.
He never manages the classic, I mean as Flaubert gives us in each main character: Everyman. One may conceivably be bored by certain pages in Flaubert, but one takes from him a solid and concrete memory, a property. Emma Bovary and Frederic and M. Arnoux are respectively every woman and every man of their period. Maupassant's Bel Ami is not. Neither are Henry James's people. They are always, or nearly always, the bibelots.
But he does, nevertheless, treat of major forces, even of epic forces, and in a way all his own. If Balzac tried to give a whole civilization, a whole humanity, James was not content with a rough sketch of one country.
As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national qualities are the great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals; trying to determine from the given microscopic slide the nature of the Frenchness, Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemicals too little regarded, have in our time exploded for want of watching. They are the permanent and fundamental hostilities and incompatibles. We may rest our claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his protagonists, in the magnitude of the forces he analyzed and portrayed. This is not the bare matter of a number of titled people, a few duchesses and a few butlers.
Whatever Flaubert may have said about his Education Sentimentale as a potential preventive of the débâcle of 1870, if people had read it, and whatever Gautier's friend may have said about Emaux et Camées as the last resistance to the Prussians, from Dr. Rudolph Staub's paragraph in The Bundle of Letters to the last and almost only public act of his life, James displayed a steady perception and a steady consideration of the qualities of different western races, whose consequences none of us can escape.
And these forces, in precisely that they are not political and executive and therefore transient, factitious, but in precisely that they are the forces of race temperaments, are major forces and are indeed as great protagonists as any author could have chosen. They are firmer ground than Flaubert's when he chooses public events as in the opening of the third part of Education Sentimentale.
The portrayal of these forces, to seize a term from philology, may be said to constitute "original research"—to be Henry James's own addendum; not that this greatly matters. He saw, analyzed, and presented them. He had most assuredly a greater awareness than was granted to Balzac or to Mr. Charles Dickens or to M. Victor Hugo who composed the Légende des Siècles.
His statement that he never went down town has been urged greatly against him. A butler is a servant, tempered with upper-class contacts. Mr. Newman, the American, has emerged from the making of wash-tubs; the family in The Pupil can scarcely be termed upper-class, however, and the factor of money, Balzac's, ἀνάγκη, scarcely enters his stories.