James

siding with fellow-artists against the public. The
ten years after 1886 saw his resentment grow,
struggle, and finally surrender to a kind of philo-
sophic acquiescence. During those years he pub-
lished, except for The Tragic Muse, no long
novel, but confined himself to plays, essays, and
short stories.

His plays met with no success whatever. A
dramatic version of The American was produced
in 1891, ran for two months in London, and fig-
ured for some time in the provincial repertory
of the producing company, which in the later
life of the play insisted upon a happy ending,
much against James's will. In 1893 another play,
Guy Domville, was more elaborately produced
in London, ran for a month, failed, and has never
been revived or even printed. The hostility of
the audience the first night so shocked and hurt
the author that he could not afterward bear the
least reference to it. Concluding that "y°u can't
make a sow's ear out of a silk purse," he gave
up the theatre for good, though four of his com-
edies were published in the two volumes called
Theatricals (1894-95). James wanted both the
immediate success and the money that the stage
can bring, but he was too sensitive to endure the
discomforts associated with writing for it, and
he lacked the gift of dramatic force and emphasis
which might have enabled him to win enough
recognition to offset the discomforts which were
his only return for his efforts.

As an essayist James had already, before the
period of his resentment began, achieved a gen-
uine distinction in the opinion of his proper audi-
ence. French Poets and Novelists (1878), Haw-
thorne (1879), Portraits of Places (1883), A
Little Tour in France (1885), contain critical
and descriptive writing which is still fresh and
valuable. If Partial Portraits (1888), Picture
and Text (1893), and Essays in London and
Elsewhere (1893) are generally less well known
than the earlier books, they are nevertheless of
the same scrupulous quality and texture. James's
literary criticism is notably that of one artist
studying another, pointing out how the other has
done his work, analyzing it with gravity and
subtlety, but always in the end estimating it,
though with urbane good temper, with reference
to the aims and methods which the critic prefers
because, as artist, he himself practises them. So
with James's description of places, which are
richly pictorial studies of such backgrounds as
he might have used for stories, studied no less
deliberately and harmoniously than they would
Jiave been if they had served, as some of them
were to serve, to set the stage for imagined ac-
Yet there was little in the essays to catch

James

the attention of that wider world which James,
because of his occasional loneliness in the world
of his creation, desired to interest.

Nor was there much more of that attractive
power in the short stories—or short novels—of
the period, which for discerning readers never-
theless make up a body of brief narrative su-
perior in their combination of delicacy, dexter-
ity, beauty, and variety to any similar works
ever written in English by a single hand. The
Siege of London (1883), Tales of Three Cities
(1884), The Author of Beltraffio (1885), Sto-
ries Revived (1885), The AspernPapers (1888),
A London Life (1889), The Lesson of the Mas-
ter (1892), The Real Thing and Other Tales
(1893), The Private Life (1893), The Wheel of
Time (1893), Termination (1895), Embarrass-
ments (1896), though they have been overshad-
owed by the longer novels, have not deserved to
be. In writing them James had a fairly definite
purpose. "I want," he told Stevenson in 1888,
"to leave a multitude of pictures of my time,
projecting my small circular frame upon as many
different spots as possible, ... so that the num-
ber may constitute a total having a certain val-
ue as observation and testimony" (Letters, I,
138). He wanted, that is, to serve as an his-
torian. His short stories play an important part
in this service, which is greater than most of his
critics, concerned first of all with his art, have
pointed out. That he was a specialist in his re-
searches need not, in an age of specialism, be
held against him. To write histories of the
hearts and nerves and moods of an age, histories
of intricate situations, is still to write history.
And James remains the principal historian of
the latter part of the nineteenth century, so far
as that is to be studied in the lives of his special
types of character in his chosen circles of soci-
ety.

James's sense of the plight of the artist in the
world appears frequently in these stories. The
Author of Beltraffio exhibits the wife of a writer
as so afraid of his influence upon their son that
she actually—if not intentionally—lets the boy
die to save him from contamination. The Aspern
Papers recounts the strife between the former
mistress of the famous Jeffrey Aspern and the
critic who wants to publish the poet's letters.
The Lesson of the Master argues that perfection
in art may not be reached by an artist who lets
his powers be drawn away by wife and children.
The Death of the Lion is about a genius who
dies neglected in a country house while his host-
ess gets credit for being his patron; The Coxon
Fund is about a literary parasite, in some re-
spects like Coleridge at Highgate, sponging on

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