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 say, from the beginning of the last five years of the Nineteenth to the end of the first five years of the Twentieth century.
As a matter of fact, "The Golden Bowl," one of his most elaborate and exhaustive masterpieces, was published in November, 1904; and "The Sacred Fount," perhaps the most difficult as it is certainly one of the most characteristic of all his stories, appeared very much earlier. But taking his works as a whole, that epoch—from 1895 to 1905—may be regarded as his apogee, as his "Great Noon."
"The Awkward Age," for instance, the book of all others for which initiated admirers have an insistent devotion, appeared in 1899, while the collection of stories entitled "The Better Sort," which includes that masterpiece of tenderhearted malice "The Beldonald Holbein," came out in 1903.
As I have hinted, the whole question of selecting the period of a great artist's manner which contains his most significant work is largely a matter of taste; and the thing—as we have seen—is complicated by all sorts of overlappings, reversions, anticipations; but if I were myself pressed to suggest a brief list of books, which might be found to contain the quintessential qualities both of Henry James' attitude and his method, I should certainly include "The Tragic Muse," "The Spoils of Poynton," "What Maisie Knew," "The Ambassadors," "The Private Life" and "The Soft Side," whatever else it were difficult to omit.
Putting everything he wrote together, and letting these many-coloured opals and amethysts of intellectual imagination slide through our passionate fingers, I would perhaps select "The Great Good Place" as the best of all his short stories, and "The Tragic Muse" as the best of all his longer ones.
One sometimes, at unfortunately rare intervals, comes across a person who has really "collected" Henry James from the very beginning. Such persons are greatly to be envied. I think perhaps, they are the only bibliophiles for whom I have a tenderness; for they prove themselves so much more than bibliophiles; they prove themselves wise and prudent anticipators of the verdict of posterity.
It is impossible to enjoy the reprinted editions, in their tiresome monotony of luxurious bindings, as delicately as one enjoyed these first flowers of the author's genius, dewy with his authentic blessing. I am myself proud to recall the fact that, before the nineteenth century closed, I had secured a whole shelf of these sibylline volumes; buying most of them—I can recall the occasion—in one huge derelict pile from a certain friendly book-shop in Brighton; and leaving the precious parcel, promise of more than royal delights, in some little waiting-room on the sun-bathed Georgian front, while I walked the beach like a Grand Vizier who has received a present from the Sultan.
The only people who are to be more envied than those who have collected Henry James from the beginning—and these alas! are most of them grey-headed now—are the people who, possessed of the true interior unction, have by some accident of obstructing circumstance been debarred from this voluptuous pleasure until late in their experience. What ecstasies such persons have in store for them, what "linked sweetness long-drawn out" of sybaritish enjoyment!