People may wonder whether his standard was not, to an excessive degree, a standard of subtlety rather than of creative imagination—­at least, in his later period.  And undoubtedly his subtlety was to some extent a matter of make-believe.  He loved to take a simple conversation, and, by introducing a few subtle changes, to convert it into a sort of hieroglyphics that need an interpreter.  He grew more and more to believe that it was not possible to tell the simple truth except in an involved way.  He would define a gesture with as much labour as Shakespeare would devote to the entire portrait of a woman.  He was a realist of civilized society in which both speech and action have to be sifted with scientific care before they will yield their grain of motive.  The humorous patience with which Henry James seeks for that grain is one of the distinctive features of his genius.

But, it may be asked, are his people real?  They certainly are real in the relationships in which he exhibits them, but they are real like people to whom one has been introduced in a foreign city rather than like people who are one’s friends.  One does not remember them like the characters in Meredith or Mr. Hardy.  Henry James, indeed, is himself the outstanding character in his books.  That fine and humorous collector of European ladies and gentlemen, that savourer of the little lives of the Old World and the little adventures of those who have escaped from the New, that artist who brooded over his fellows in the spirit less of a poet than a man of science, that sober and fastidious trifler—­this is the image which presides over his books, and which gives them their special character, and will attract tiny but enthusiastic companies of readers to them for many years to come.

2.  THE ARTIST AT WORK.

Henry James’s amanuensis, Miss Theodora Bosanquet, wrote an article a year or two ago in the Fortnightly Review, describing how the great man wrote his novels.  Since 1895 or 1896 he dictated them, and they were taken down, not in shorthand, but directly on the typewriter.  He was particular even about the sort of typewriter.  It must be a Remington.  “Other kinds sounded different notes, and it was almost impossibly disconcerting for him to dictate to something that made no responsive sound at all.”  He did not, however, pour himself out to his amanuensis without having made a preliminary survey of the ground.  “He liked to ‘break ground’ by talking to himself day by day about the characters and the construction until the whole thing was clearly before his mind’s eye.  This preliminary talking out the scheme was, of course, duly recorded by the typewriter.  “It is not that he made rough drafts of his novels-sketches to be afterwards amplified.  “His method might better be compared with Zola’s habit of writing long letters to himself about characters in his next book until they became alive enough for him to begin a novel about them.”  Henry James has himself, as Miss Bosanquet points out, described his method of work in The Death of a Lion, in which it is attributed to his hero, Neil Paraday.  “Loose, liberal, confident,” he declares of Faraday’s “scenario,” as one might call it, “it might be passed for a great, gossiping, eloquent letter—­the overflow into talk of an artist’s amorous plan.”