Art. 4.-HENRY JAMES.

THE life that an artist lives within the borders of his art, the adventure of his imagination, has never been more fully set forth than it is in the work of Henry James, He has left, in the long and unbroken succession of his books, what is surely the most complete of all statements of the literary case,' as he might have called it himself. It is a statement, in the first place, by a man intenselyamong masters of our own tongue, at any rate, one may as well say uniquely-aware of the nature of his task, a critic who took up the most haphazard of literary forms and turned it into the most ordered and finished; a statement, moreover, even in an age of ready writers, lavishly detailed and voluminous. A fastidiously critical gift is supposed to mean sterility in production; most kinds of fluency can only cover the ground by neglecting many scruples. Henry James not only neglected none, but he cultivated them, as some thought, beyond the limit of fanaticism. Yet his work is no slender growth, checked and hampered in its movement by so much care, but a broad and gathering stream, flowing steadily year by year and in full view, as unlike as possible to the rare and curious possession bequeathed to an enlightened few.

This very amplitude of his work, coupled with the fact of its increasing closeness of texture, is enough to prove that Henry James, in his search for perfection of form, faced towards the open, absorbing, for his peculiar use, an ever stronger and deeper impression of humanity. He was immensely fastidious, but his detestation of what was obvious or stale was as far as could be from making him shy of the touch of life. He rather exposed himself to it, with appreciative deliberation, more and more; and there was no one to whom every moment of experience appeared so thickly populous. All who knew him must recall the splendid freedom with which he would throw open his imagination to receive the lightest appeal. This freedom, it is true, was in no way casual or promiscuous; nothing about him was ever that. Anything that might be offered him, sight or suggestion or play of thought, which was without character, without style, futile, insignificant, he swept from him in scorn. But for whatever had substance and reality, or was marked with the

distinction of life, his welcome was instant and royal; it would be recreated in the crucible of his mind and given out again with rich profusion. There is not indeed a single aspect of his art which can be rightly apprehended except in the light of his genial, generous passion for the world and its fulness. He has described how from the beginning he saw in himself a spectator of life, one born to watch and brood over the part he would leave others to play. But to think of him as anywhere save at the heart of things, engaged in unnumbered relations and prodigal of his power, cannot be possible for a moment to those who possess the memory of his look and speech. The difference between this impartial onlooker and ordinary folk was that he, more than they all, refused to hoard the capacity of giving and taking, dealt bounteously in the interchange of human currency, set standards of liberality and comprehension by every thought and act. For such a man there could be no danger that his art would withdraw into itself, losing touch with the world. His whole life, rather, would be lived in his art, his art would fill his life. So it was; and so it happens that his work, in its rounded completion, is his portrait.

A critical account of his fiction, within the space of a few pages, is out of the question; moreover, he wrote it himself, by no means in a few pages, in the prefaces to the collected edition of his novels. That wonderful commentary awaits and entices a critic, though apparently so far in vain. In a brief sketch it is only possible to indicate the barest outline of an achievement so strange and new, not attempting to appraise its final value, but simply following through certain phases the development of the most original novelist of our time.

Of his earliest work there was very little that he allowed in the end to survive; most of the tales of his youth-and many of later years-were ruthlessly excluded from the edition in which, a few years ago, he arrayed and revised so much of his fiction as could pass his scrutiny. When we remember the kind of criticism he would bend, out of the ripeness of his experience, on the unsuspecting novelist who came his way, it is easy to understand that his own far-away beginnings may

have seemed to him somewhat thin. No doubt they were; in contrast, indeed, with the rich and aureate harvest of his maturity, their pallor is only too striking. Yet there was one respect in which the slightest of his early anecdotes and sketches of character were always remarkable, and doubly so as the production of a very young man. Surprising, certainly, is the self-command with which their author selects just those few light handfuls of life he could be sure of accounting for, and refrains from embarrassing himself with another blade or fibre ; but this, perhaps, was not their most promising feature, and it might have been supposed that such circumspection was too precocious to be fruitful. Rarer and a great deal more significant was the perfectly sure instinct with which the youthful writer was able, as he surveyed his world, to distinguish good quality, native excellencethe finer grain,' in his own phrase-from the mass of inferiority in which it is always entangled, devoting his skill to whatever would take the stamp of art most sensitively and refusing to squander it upon the rest. This gift, more than all the demure and finished composure of those days, was to become the heart round which there clustered the fruition of later years.

It is, in fact, by this sharp sense for life at its most alert, intelligence at its highest lucidity, feeling at its most exquisitely timed vibration, that the novel of Henry James is ultimately directed. Every one of his later developments was controlled by the single desire to make the very most of the very best. He had large ideas, as we know, about the very most that could be made of a thing; the cry sometimes went up that they spread beyond the limits of breathable air. But it is not through either wonder or dismay, whichever it may be, that the mere difficulties of his final form are likely to be solved. They were not arbitrary, nor were they the result of a failing control of his purpose. They were entirely natural, and the clue is surely to be found in his imperious demand, on behalf of art, for an utterly satisfying task. Nothing could be too good for art; and the seeing eye discerns in life particular shining threads which offer to art the occasion for the fullest display of its power. Henry James sought patiently, consistently, and passionately for these. However critical he might be of the

manner in which the picture was drawn, he was not less exacting in his choice of the matter to be represented; and this because neither matter nor manner, except at their most perfect, could fitly cooperate with the other. As fine material awaits the deft hand, deft hand seeks fine material; both are wasted until they meet. Henry James is too often regarded as the devotee of curious workmanship, the novelist who lost sight of the end in the means. Certainly he always gave his subject as much expansion as it could possibly bear; that was a point of honour with him. But it was only as his theme grew deeper and denser that the more mazy ramifications of his fancy were allowed to flourish. The degree to which they finally budded and branched shows the force of the straining, exuberant, insistent life that he found in the images he chose to represent. He would touch no others.

The population of his novels, first and last, ranging as they do over two shores of an ocean, some the freshest offshoots of a new and untried society, others toned and polished by centuries of tradition, the lightest, the weightiest, the most scarred and ravaged of his characters -all are alike in this, that they can all be trusted to respond at once and freely to the pressure of experience. The sight of Roderick Hudson, radiant in the spring of his genius, raised a whole chapter of his friend's existence to the acutest pitch; if Roderick had been able to support the burden of his gift and to become the greatest sculptor of the world, he could never have been a sharper event than he was, for his brief flash, in the quick consciousness of Rowland Mallet. Christopher Newman, faced in his provincial blankness by the romance of the distinguished old portals of the Faubourg St Germain, stood in most pictorial contrast with the life inside them; but his story is much more than the mere account of what happened to him; it is in his own long ruminating gaze, as it penetrated the ancient precincts and finally turned away with a loftier pride than their own. An event or an incident, in Henry James's view, even of the kind usually considered most stirring, is in itself of no moment. All depends upon the quality of the life which it affects; if it hurls itself against a dull surface it can have no history. Isabel Archer, in 'The Portrait of a Lady,' her charm,

her candour, her cleverness, her capacity for seeing and feeling and learning-not only is the story of her youth seen through these, but in a perfectly natural sense they are that story. Whatever happens to Isabel happens to her power of recognising it; the men and women around her, and the things they do, are the men, women, things, that she is able to perceive in them. Her life is no mere chronicle, pieced together by an impersonal observer. It is an enacting of the play of experience within the theatre of herself.

A vivid mind and a train of circumstance apt to kindle it; a difficult issue, a delicate relation, or simply an attuned and favouring atmosphere, with an imagination, at hand or in the forefront, ready to abound and createthese would spring to meet each other on a chance word or a momentary glimpse, and so the drama would be started. As time went on, Henry James tended more and more to surrender the action of his novels to the care of the remarkable people he chose to write about; he left it to them, that is, and to their crystal-edged insight, to show that they could raise what befell them into a region of dignity and beauty. Whether they always succeeded is another question. At least he uncomprornisingly required them to put forward their best efforts, and gave them no trite or pointless matters to handle. They had an easier time, no doubt, in the days when he allowed them to move in the common world and to share it with their fellow-men. Afterwards, when he kept his elect souls more closely to their task, he had his own good reason for doing so; but this was not until he had taken full stock of the various life he happened to have mixed in. Though he finally lavished all his art on the problem of reproducing the whole reverberation, without losing the faintest echo, of some doubt or difficulty or triumph through a receptive and retentive mind, he had long been held by the world of characters and classes, of manners and customs, and had written many books in which its display was fully faced. In this part of his work he was greatly favoured by the chances of his own time.

An American of his quality and opportunities was certain to be cosmopolitan. Europe drew him and kept him fast, but a man of less insatiable imagination might