James

the rich and devoted and foolish; The Next Time
is about a novelist who fails in his struggles to
make money by his work because he is incapable
of writing anything less than masterpieces. "The
Figure in the Carpet" (in Embarrassments),
which may be said to end this series of stories,
says the last word which may be said by any
writer to his critics. They must look, the hero
says, in the whole of the writer's work for his
"primal plan," the string his pearls are strung
on, the complex figure in the Persian carpet of
his art. "If my great affair's a secret, that's
only because it's a secret in spite of itself . . .
I not only never took the smallest precaution to
keep it so, but never dreamed of any such acci-
dent" (The Novels and Tales, XV, 232).

This is, of course, James speaking about him-
self no less than in behalf of his character. He
had not sought the esoteric reputation which he
had won. Obscurity was his destiny not his de-
sign. He had set out to identify and represent
certain subtle relationships which he perceived
binding men and women together in the human
picture before his eyes, and he would not call it
his fault if his perceptions had proved more deli-
cate than those of the reading public at large.
He had tried to make national contrasts inter-
esting; he had tried to diversify his matter in the
long novels of the eighties; he had tried a new
literary form in his plays; he had, restricting
himself for a time as to dimensions, written about
the artistic life as no Anglo-Saxon had ever done.
Nothing had availed him with the wider audi-
ence which he, not altogether logically, sought to
please. He now', after his decade of concession,
reconciled himself to his limited fate, discovered
the house at Rye which was thereafter to be his
residence, left London, and settled down to the
untrammeled practice of his art.

Absorbed as he was in his great enterprise,
James had experienced, much less invited, no
striking outer events in his life. Quiet work in
London or at the seaside, with yearly visits to
France or Italy, made up his existence. His
sister Alice, who had come to England after the
death of their parents, died in 1892. Except with
her, Henry James had few ties that could be
called intimate, though he had numerous friends,
most of them also men of letters: Robert Louis
Stevenson, Edmund Gosse, Sidney Colvin, A. C.
Benson, and his old American friends and cor-
respondents Howells and Norton, and his broth-
er William. Though he wrote many letters, he
did not write them to many persons. More than
half his published letters for the period between
1882 and 1897 were to William James, Howells,
Norton, Stevenson, and Gosse, And yet he was

James

a Uterary figure of increasing prestige, a kind of
distinguished legend, among a very considerable
circle. The founders of The Yellow Book, to
which he contributed three stories in 1894-95,
regarded it as one of their chief triumphs to have
obtained his cooperation. These adventurous art-
ists, it was plain, valued him no less than did
the scholars of a more academic tradition who
w'ere his special friends.

During the five years 1898-1903 James, hap-
pier in his house at Rye than he had ever been
anywhere else, abandoned himself with serene
completeness to his art. Always prolific, he now
became even more so, thanks not only to the
habit of dictation which he had acquired, but
also to—what was more important—the mood of
resignation which had succeeded his mood of re-
sentment and which now allowed him to write,
without conflict, in his own way for his own
audience. The period saw written the further
short stories included in The Two Magics (1898 ),
The Soft Side (1900), The Better Sort (1903) ;
the shorter novels with which he turned back
from his experiments in brevity: The Spoils of
Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (i897),/w
the Cage (1898), The Awkward Age (1899),
The Sacred Fount (1901); and the three great
novels in which he brought his art, in its most
characteristic aspects, to its peak: The Wings
of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903),
The Golden Bowl (1904). And as if it were not
enough to produce a greater quantity of imag-
inative prose of such quality than any other nov-
elist had ever produced in an equal length of
time, James prepared in addition the admirable
William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903)
and carried on a constantly extending corre-
spondence.

Again and again in these later books James
concerned himself with the adventures of ex-
quisite souls among the pitfalls and conspiracies
of the rough world. In The Spoils of Poynton,
an English widow7, in accordance with the hard
English law, must give up her beautiful house,
filled with beautiful objects collected by her, to
her insensitive son and his stupid bride. In What
Maisie Knew, "The Turn of the Screw" (from
The Two Magics), and The Awkward Age the
tender spirits upon which the world presses are
children or very young persons. In the three
major novels, by a romantic reversion which is
not so surprising as it seems at first thought, the
sensitive characters are Americans, who bring
into a fast-and-loose society certain old-fashioned
virtues and graces, such as simplicity, truthful-
ness, monogamy, solvency. Not that James in
these stories undertook to pass moral judgments

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