Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/315

 and unaccounted for that he could regard the story as truly and effectually ‘done’—a favourite word of his, expressing his highest praise. But, for a full understanding of the originality of his methods of criticism and creation it is necessary to study carefully the prefaces written for the collected edition.

Even the most enthusiastic admirers of James's later work have sometimes felt that the importance of his subjects was hardly equal to the immense elaboration of his treatment of them—a judgement more crudely expressed by saying that ‘nothing happens’ in his books, for all their densely packed extent. It is true that his central theme, baldly stated, is often a small affair, and that he seldom allows a glimpse of the fiercer passions that are the common stock-in-trade of the novelist. But this criticism implies some misunderstanding of his view of a subject—the importance of which he held to depend primarily on the value, the intelligence, and the sensibility, of the people involved. An event is nothing in itself; the question is what a fine mind will make of it; and more and more, in James's books, the characters tended to become men and women of rare and acute perception, capable of making the utmost of all their experience. A very simple theme, entrusted to a few such people, would give him more than enough for dramatic development; and if their deeper feelings remain all but hidden under the delicate surface-play of their reflections and reactions, it was because the last results and furthest implications of a thing were to him always more significant, more charged with history, than the thing itself in its nakedness could possibly be. Hence his dislike of the raw, the crude, the staring, his love of the toned and seasoned and civilized, both in literature and in life. In the immense procession of characters that he created, while it is the American girl (Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer of The Portrait, and many more) who predominates in his earlier books, the type nearest his mind in his later fiction is perhaps the ‘poor sensitive gentleman’ of stories like The Altar of the Dead, The Great Good Place, Broken Wings, with Strether of The Ambassadors at the head of them—elderly men, slightly worn and battered and blighted in the struggle of life, but profoundly versed, to use another characteristic phrase of James's, in the ‘wear and tear of discrimination’.

Besides some twenty novels and nearly a hundred short stories, James published several volumes of sketches of travel and of literary criticism. He also wrote a number of plays; indeed for several years, from about 1890 to 1894, he devoted himself almost entirely to a determined attempt to win fame and fortune as a dramatist. The venture, which on the whole was certainly against the set of his genius, was not successful; very few of his plays have been acted, and none has had any lasting success on the stage. In The American Scene (1906) he recorded the profusion of impressions that he received from a visit to America after an absence of twenty years. Towards the end of his life he wrote two volumes (and part of a third) of reminiscences of his childhood and youth, an evocation of early days in America and Europe which shows how intense had been the activity of his imagination from his earliest years. A collection of his singularly rich and copious letters was published in 1920.

During the earlier years of his life in London, James probably seemed to those who knew him but slightly a somewhat critical onlooker, highly correct in style and manner, with a cautious reserve not easily to be penetrated. He was engaged in exploring the social world that readily opened to him; he was seen at innumerable dinner-parties and country-house visits, observantly making his way; but it was long before he felt able to lay aside the guarded prudence of a stranger and to take his ease in his acquired home. Meanwhile, among a host of acquaintances his intimate friends were few—among them may be named Burne-Jones, George du Maurier, J. R. Lowell, R. L. Stevenson; and perhaps it was only to his own family, and particularly to his brother William, to whom he was very deeply attached, that he freely confided his mind. Gradually a remarkable change took place in him; after twenty years of England he seemed at last to feel at home, and no one who met him in later days could think of him as other than the most genial, expansive, and sympathetic of friends. To a wide and ever increasing circle he became a figure uniquely impressive for the weight, the authority, the luxuriant elaboration of his mind, and lovable to the same degree for his ripe humour, his loyalty, his inexhaustible kindness—as also for something more, for a strain of odd and unexpected simplicity, that survived in him after a lifetime of ironic observation and experience. Yet those who knew him best remained conscious of something secluded and inaccessible in his genius, sufficient to itself and shared with no one. 289