Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/83

 countrymen and for England—a love none the less real because so undemonstrative that superficial observers describe him as cosmopolitan. In one so guiltless of Chauvinism as Mr. James, it is surely not a little charming to find how rarely the exigencies of narrative induce him to portray his own country-people in a light altogether unamiable. Her innocence, her untimely death, forbid us to think lightly even of that type of frivolity, Miss Annie P. Miller; and of all Mr. James's portraits of women, surely the most lovable is that of Euphemia Cleve, afterwards "Madame de Mauves." So great, indeed, is his love for England, his appreciation of things English, that he would fain persuade himself that it is shared by his countrymen in general:

"The latent preparedness of the American mind for even the most characteristic features of English life is a fact I never have got to the bottom of. The roots of it are so deeply buried in the soil of our early culture, that without some great upheaval of experience it would be hard to say when and where and how it begins. It makes an American's enjoyment of England an emotion more intimate, as the French say, than his enjoyment, for instance, of Italy or Spain."

With a delightful style, a facile invention, a wide culture, what writer could be better equipped than Mr. James?

Alas, that he must write for a generation upon whom two at least of these qualities are as though they were not! Alas, that it should be the concurrence of illiterate opinion, (an opinion often then most illiterate when most elegantly uttered,) that constitutes popularity! The select multitude that surges up Belgravian staircases, that larger one that spends its holidays among the bowers of Rosherville, agree in preferring "Claudian" to "Hamlet," Mr. Jerome's humour to Elia's, Mr. Ellis Roberts's adaptations to Mr. Watts' portraits. There are certain elementary emotions, there