II
HENRY JAMES
This essay on James is a dull grind of an affair, a Baedecker to a continent.
I set out to explain, not why Henry James is less read than formerly I do not know that he is. I tried to set down a few reasons why he ought to be, or at least might be, more read.
Some may say that his work was over, well over, finely completed ; there is mass of that work, heavy for one man's shoulders to have borne up, labor enough for two life-times; still we would have had a few more years of his writing. Perhaps the grasp was relaxing, perhaps we should have had no strongly-planned book; but we should have had paragraphs here and there, and we should have had, at least, conversation, wonderful conversation; even if we did not hear it ourselves, we should
have known that it was going on somewhere. The massive head, the slow uplift of the hand, gli occhi onesti e tardi, the long sentences piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with its "wu-a-wait a little, wait a little, something will come;" blague and benignity and the weight of so many years' careful, incessant labor of minute observation always
