Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/314

 so rich in variety and so expressive of national character.

The Tragic Muse (1890) may be said to inaugurate James's second period, partly because the peculiar development of his art begins to show plainly in this book, partly because he here for the first time treated on a large scale a subject from English life, social, political, and artistic. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Awkward Age (1899), and in several volumes of short stories, he continued to explore the field of English character, though it remained true that the England of his knowledge was confined to a comparatively small circle of London life. His sensitive appreciation of the minute distinctions, the fine shades, the all but inaudible tones, in the intercourse of very civilized people, together with his now complete mastery of his craft, began to give his work the strange and deeply individual aspect which it wore increasingly to the end. His style, matching the extreme subtlety of his perceptions and discriminations, developed an intricacy which might sometimes appear perversely obscure, though at its best it is really the simple expression of the effects he sought—suggestive, evocative effects, that gradually shape out a solid impression. (It is worth mentioning that all his later books were dictated by him to his secretary, a practice that fostered and perhaps exaggerated the natural amplitude of his style.) His fiction thus passed imperceptibly into its final phase, culminating in his three last novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (written before The Wings, but not published till 1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In these books he returned once more to the ‘international’ theme, the contrast of American and European character, bringing the maturity of his experience and his imagination to bear on the subject which had occupied so much of his early work. After The Golden Bowl he wrote no more fiction, save a few short stories, till 1914, when he began to work upon two long novels, The Ivory Tower, and The Sense of the Past, both of which he left unfinished at his death. These two fragments were published posthumously in 1917, together with the extremely interesting notes which he had composed for his own guidance—a kind of leisurely rumination over the subject in hand which more than anything else reveals the working of his imagination.

For the revised and collected edition of his novels and tales, the issue of which began in 1907, James wrote a series of prefaces, partly reminiscent, mainly critical, which are of the highest importance as a summary of his view of the art of fiction. This view he had elaborated by degrees through many years of uninterrupted work; and he was certainly the first novelist in any language to explore with such thoroughness the nature and the possibilities of the craft. Even the passionate absorption in technical matters of such a writer as Flaubert seems slight and partial compared with the energy, the concentration, and the lucidity of James's thought upon the question of the portrayal of life in a novel. The form and design of a story had preoccupied him from the first; and if much of his early work was curiously thin, as though he were shy of plunging into the depths of human nature, it was largely because he would not attempt anything that he felt to be beyond his means, while he was engaged in consciously perfecting these. The most obvious influences under which he began to write were those of Hawthorne and Turgenev; but he was soon pursuing his own way in the search for a manner of presentation that should satisfy his more and more exacting criticism. It is not possible to describe in a few words the complexity of the art which reached its highest point, to the author's mind, in The Ambassadors; but what is perhaps most characteristic in it is the rhythmical alternation of ‘drama’ and ‘picture’ (they are James's words) in the treatment of the subject. By ‘picture’ he meant the rendering of life as reflected in the mind of some chosen onlooker (as the hero, Strether, in The Ambassadors), watching and meditating upon the scene before him; by ‘drama’ the placing of a scene directly before the reader, without the intervention of any reflecting, interpreting consciousness. All his later books (with one exception) are built up by the use of these contrasted methods, the old-fashioned device of ‘telling’ the story (‘on the author's poor word of honour’, as he put it) being entirely discarded. The single exception is The Awkward Age, in which the dramatic method alone is used, and there is no ‘going behind’ any of the characters, to share their thought. It may be said very roughly that he employs ‘picture’ for the preparation of an effect, ‘drama’ for its climax; the purpose throughout being to make the story show itself (instead of being merely narrated), to the enhancement of its force and weight. It was only when this process had been carried so far as to leave no relevant aspect of the subject in hand 288