genius fell back to the lowest level, perhaps, to which it is possible for poetic genius to fall.  He reduced his imagination to a passive sensorium for the registering of impressions.  No element of construction remained in it, and therefore no element of penetration.  But his scope was wide; and his lazy, desultory apprehension was poetical.  His work, for the very reason that it is so rudimentary, contains a beginning, or rather many beginnings, that might possibly grow into a noble moral imagination, a worthy filling for the human mind.  An American in the nineteenth century who completely disregarded the genteel tradition could hardly have done more.

But there is another distinguished man, lately lost to this country, who has given some rude shocks to this tradition and who, as much as Whitman, may be regarded as representing the genuine, the long silent American mind—­I mean William James.  He and his brother Henry were as tightly swaddled in the genteel tradition as any infant geniuses could be, for they were born before 1850, and in a Swedenborgian household.  Yet they burst those bands almost entirely.  The ways in which the two brothers freed themselves, however, are interestingly different.  Mr. Henry James has done it by adopting the point of view of the outer world, and by turning the genteel American tradition, as he turns everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis.  For him it is a curious habit of mind, intimately comprehended, to be compared with other habits of mind, also well known to him.  Thus he has overcome the genteel tradition in the classic way, by understanding it.  With William James too this infusion of worldly insight and European sympathies was a potent influence, especially in his earlier days; but the chief source of his liberty was another.  It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality, similar to that of nobody else.  Convictions and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil.  He had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority.  His scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world.  His way of thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in a measure the whole ultra-modern, radical world.  Thus he eluded the genteel tradition in the romantic way, by continuing it into its opposite.  The romantic mind, glorified in Hegel’s dialectic (which is not dialectic at all, but a sort of tragi-comic history of experience), is always rendering its thoughts unrecognisable through the infusion of new insights, and through the insensible transformation of the moral feeling that accompanies them, till at last it has completely reversed its old judgments under cover of expanding them.  Thus the genteel tradition was led a merry dance when it fell again into the hands of a genuine and vigorous romanticist like William James.  He restored their revolutionary force to its neutralised elements, by picking them out afresh, and emphasising them separately, according to his personal predilections.