Henry James had a happier life than any celibate who does not dedicate his days to verbal praise of God is entitled to have. Responsibilities as well as possessions are necessary for our happiness. They create facets which permit us contact with life; they tend to frustrate the increasing activities of the canker worm, egocentrism; and they succeed in convincing him who possesses them that he is but a leaf on the tree of humanity and not a branch or a bough. Had Henry James done his share in peopling the earth he would have been as happy as any man I have ever known save William Osler.

To uphold as a major thesis that, by forsaking the land of his birth he had not given an adequate earnest of his talent, that he had failed to saturate himself with life, that in his old age he found himself astray in the gloomy wood, and that “it had been too much for him over there,” must appear contrary to common sense or sound judgment to any one who knew Henry James, who admired him as an artist and loved him as a man.

Is it not natural that a sensitive man, supremely susceptible to the seductiveness of society, should, when the pulse of life begins to intermit, dwell upon the terrors of loneliness; become apprehensive of a future that would find him bereft of the sympathy that is the balm of life, of that understanding which is the support of the inelastic artery? Henry James knew that such society, sympathy, and staff were in Cambridge, that they were composited in the family of his brother William, that he might have to go to them, as we all have to go to the spring if there is no one to bring us the water.

He minimised the defects of his countrymen and exalted the virtues of his country as he grew older. It is the way of a man with the world. How often have I heard widows whose wounds I had dressed in their matrimonial days, speak of their husbands as Anthony Burgesse spoke of the Staffordshire Puritan Thomas Blake? “His kindness towards you could not be considered without love, his presence without reverence, his conversation without imitation. To see him live was a provocation to a godly life, to see him dying might have made one weary of living.”

Any pilgrim who sets out on a journey may properly anticipate the necessities of life even though he does not take them with him, but it would be fatuous for him to hope for the comforts, and beyond belief that he should expect the luxuries. Henry James in his pilgrimage found the necessities, the comforts, and the luxuries, and we can never be sufficiently grateful to the country of his adoption for having given them to him without the asking.

François Mauriac, one of France’s coming great novelists, one indeed who may be considered as having already arrived, said something in explanation of his latest novel with which Henry James, at least in his old age, would have agreed: “Even after years of living in Paris of friendships, of loves and of travels, when the novelist is convinced that he has accumulated enough human experience to fill a thousand plots, he is astonished that his heroes always come from beyond this tumultuous life—that they take shape in the darkest period of years lived far from Paris and that they draw all their wealth from so much poverty and aridity.” This constant going back to the years of youth and early adolescence which obsesses François Mauriac has been felt by Henry James and it is something of that sort that he had in mind when, wishing to pump the pure essence of his wisdom and experience into his most brilliant disciple, Edith Wharton, he said: “She must be tethered to native pasture, even if it reduces her to a backyard in New York.”

Henry James was a master craftsman. He was concerned more with the pattern than with the material with which he worked. He was continually searching—not material but new ways of arranging it. M. Poiret reminds me of Henry James. Material does not concern him much. It is the way it is cut and basted. The finish is important too, but that is a detail. The pattern is the thing.

IV
LITTERATEURS: FOREIGN WRITERS

Anatole France Himself, by Jean-Jacques Brousson.
Anatole France and His Circle, by Paul Gsell.
Anatole France, the Man and His Work, by J. Lewis May.
Anatole France à la Béchellerie, by Marcel Le Goff.
Sainte-Beuve, by Lewis Freeman Mott.
Leonid Andreyev, by Alexander Kaun.
Joseph Conrad, by Ford Madox Ford.
John Donne, by Hugh l’Anson Fausset.
The Wind and the Rain, by Thomas Burke.
Robert Louis Stevenson, by John A. Steuart.

Anatole France was picturesque, enigmatic and intriguing. He attracted illuminators and interpreters. His protracted age gave biographers ample time to prepare their revelations, interpretations and judgments which came with a rush soon after his death—and before, and which still come. The last of all these biographies is the best, that is, it gives the best picture of him, both as individual and as savant. M. Brousson, his Secretary for many years, had abundant opportunity to see Anatole France without the mask he habitually wore. He has embodied his observations and reflections in Anatole France Himself, and all readers save literary historians and critics will find it satisfying.