One must remember too that, after all, Henry James is a great déraciné, a passionate pilgrim from the new world making amorous advances toward the old. It is always difficult, in a country which is not one's own, to feel the sting of conscience with regard to social injustices as sharply as one feels it at home. Travelling in Egypt or Morocco, one seems to take it carelessly for granted that there should be scenes of miserable poverty sprinkled around the picturesque objects of our aesthetic tour.
Well! England and France and Italy are to Henry James like Egypt and Morocco; and as long as he finds us picturesquely and charmingly ourselves; set that is, in our proper setting, and with the picturesque background of local colour behind us—he naturally does not feel it incumbent upon him to worry himself very greatly over our social inequalities.
But there is probably more in it than that. These things—the presence or the absence of the revolutionary conscience—are matters, when one gets to the bottom of it, of individual temperament, and James, the kindest and most charitable of men in his personal life, was simply untouched by that particular spark of "saeva indignatio."
It was not out of stupidity or any lack of sensitiveness that he let it alone. Perhaps—who can tell?—he, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, overcame "the temptation of pity," and deliberately turned aside from the "ugliest man's" cries.
One feels in one's more ardent moments, when the wish to smite this accursed economic system some shattering blow becomes red-hot, a little chilled, it must be confessed, when one recalls that immense brow, heavy with brooding intellect, and those dreamy, full-orbed Shakespearian eyes. Was the man, one is tempted to wonder then, too great, too lonely, too wise, to believe in any beautiful desperate change in the tragic "pathos of distance" between man and man? Was indeed the whole mortal business of human life a sort of grand tour of "Egypt and Morocco" to him; a mere long-drawn-out search after aesthetic sensations and a patient satisfying of Olympian curiosity?
No novelist that has ever lived "shows his hand" 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.