It would be possible to go over this formidable list of angles of human vision, and find evidence somewhere in his books sufficient to make him out an adherent of every one of them. Consider his use of the supernatural for instance. Hardly any modern writer makes so constant, so artistic a use of the machinery of the invisible world; and yet who would have the temerity to say that Henry James believed even so much as in ghosts?
I know nothing of Mr. James' formal religious views, or to what pious communion, if any, that brooding forehead and disillusioned eyes were wont to drift on days of devotion. But I cannot resist a secret fancy that it was to some old-fashioned and not too ritualistic Anglican church that he sometimes may have been met proceeding, in silk hat and well-polished shoes, at the close of a long Autumn afternoon, across the fallen leaves of Hyde Park!
There is an unction, a dreamy thrill about some of those descriptions of town and country churches in conventional England which would suggest that he had no secularistic aversion to these modest usages. Perhaps, like Charles Darwin, he would have answered impertinent questions about his faith by pointing to just such patient unexcluding shrines of drowsy controversy-hating piety.
I cannot see him listening to modernistic rhetoric. I cannot see him prostrated before ritualistic revivals. But I can see him sitting placid and still, like a great well-groomed visitor in "Egypt and Morocco," listening pensively to some old-fashioned clergyman, whose goodness of heart redeems the innocence of his brain; while the mellow sunshine falls through the high windows upon the fair hair of Nanda or Aggie, or Mamie or Nina or Maud, thinking quiet thoughts in front of him.
It is strange how difficult it is to forget the personal appearance of this great man when one reads his works. What a head he had; what weight of massive brooding bulk! When one thinks of the head of Henry James and the head of Oscar Wilde—both of them with something that suggests the classical ages in their flesh-heavy contours—one is inclined to agree with Shakespeare's Caesar in his suspicion of "lean men."
Think of the harassed and rat-like physiognomy of nearly all the younger writers of our day! Do their countenances suggest, as these of James and Wilde, that their pens will "drop fatness"? Can one not discern the envious eye, the serpent's tongue, the scowl of the aggressive dissenter, the leer of the street urchin?
How excellent it is, in this modern world, to come upon the "equinimitas" of the great ages! After all, in the confused noises of our human arena, it is something to encounter an author who preserves restraint and dignity and urbanity. It is something more to encounter one who has, in the very depths of his soul, the ancient virtue of magnanimity.
This American visitor to Europe brings back to us those "good manners of the soul" which we were in danger of forgetting; and the more we read the writings of Henry James, the more fully we become aware that there is only one origin of this spiritual charm, this aristocratic grace; and that is a sensitive and noble heart.
The movement of literature at the present time is all towards action and adventure. This is right and proper in its place, and a good antidote to the tedious moralising of the past generation.
The influence of Nietzsche upon the spiritual plane, and that of the war upon the emotional plane, have thrown us violently out of the sphere of aesthetic receptivity into the sphere of heroic and laconic wrestling.