“Forty-five” and his quarrel with his heir, the once-dreaded James soon became a mere cipher in British politics, and his death at Rome on the 2nd of January 1766 passed almost unnoticed in London. He was buried with regal pomp in St Peter’s, where Canova’s famous monument, erected by Pius VII. in 1819, commemorates him and his two sons. As to James’s personal character, there is abundant evidence to show that he was grave, high-principled, industrious, abstemious and dignified, and that the unflattering portrait drawn of him by Thackeray in Esmond is utterly at variance with historical facts. Although a fervent Roman Catholic, he was far more reasonable and liberal in his religious views than his father, as many extant letters testify.
See Earl Stanhope, History of England and Decline of the Last Stuarts (1853); Calendar of the Stuart Papers at Windsor Castle; J. H. Jesse, Memories of the Pretenders and their Adherents (1845); Dr John Doran, ”Mann” and Manners at the Court of Florence (1876); Relazione della morte di Giacomo III., Rè d’Inghilterra; and Charles de Brosses, Lettres sur l’Italie (1885). (H. M. V.)
JAMES, DAVID (1839–1893), English actor, was born in
London, his real name being Belasco. He began his stage
career at an early age, and after 1863 gradually made his way in
humorous parts. His creation, in 1875, of the part of Perkyn
Middlewick in Our Boys made him famous as a comedian, the
performance obtaining for the piece a then unprecedented run
from the 16th of January 1875 till the 18th of April 1879. In
1885 he had another notable success as Blueskin in Little Jack
Sheppard at the Gaiety Theatre, his principal associates being
Fred Leslie and Nellie Farren. His song in this burlesque,
“Botany Bay,” became widely popular. In the part of John
Dory in Wild Oats he again made a great hit at the Criterion
Theatre in 1886; and among his other most successful impersonations
were Simon Ingot in David Garrick, Tweedie in
Tweedie’s Rights, Macclesfield in The Guv’nor, and Eccles in
Caste. His unctuous humour and unfailing spirits made him a
great favourite with the public. He died on the 2nd of October
1893.
JAMES, GEORGE PAYNE RAINSFORD (1799–1860), English
novelist, son of Pinkstan James, physician, was born in George
Street, Hanover Square, London, on the 9th of August 1799.
He was educated at a private school at Putney, and afterwards
in France. He began to write early, and had, according to his
own account, composed the stories afterwards published as
A String of Pearls before he was seventeen. As a contributor
to newspapers and magazines, he came under the notice of
Washington Irving, who encouraged him to produce his Life of
Edward the Black Prince (1822). Richelieu was finished in 1825,
and was well thought of by Sir Walter Scott (who apparently
saw it in manuscript), but was not brought out till 1829. Perhaps
Irving and Scott, from their natural amiability, were
rather dangerous advisers for a writer so inclined by nature to
abundant production as James. But he took up historical
romance writing at a lucky moment. Scott had firmly established
the popularity of the style, and James in England, like
Dumas in France, reaped the reward of their master’s labours as
well as of their own. For thirty years the author of Richelieu
continued to pour out novels of the same kind though of varying
merit. His works in prose fiction, verse narrative, and history
of an easy kind are said to number over a hundred, most of them
being three-volume novels of the usual length. Sixty-seven are
catalogued in the British Museum. The best examples of his
style are perhaps Richelieu (1829); Philip Augustus (1831);
Henry Masterton, probably the best of all (1832); Mary of
Burgundy (1833); Darnley (1839); Corse de Léon (1841); The
Smuggler (1845). His poetry does not require special mention,
nor does his history, though for a short time during the reign of
William IV. he held the office of historiographer royal. After
writing copiously for about twenty years, James in 1850 went
to America as British Consul for Massachusetts. He was
consul at Richmond, Virginia, from 1852 to 1856, when he was
appointed to a similar post at Venice, where he died on the 9th
of June 1860.
James has been compared to Dumas, and the comparison holds good in respect of kind, though by no means in respect of merit. Both had a certain gift of separating from the picturesque parts of history what could without much difficulty be worked up into picturesque fiction, and both were possessed of a ready pen. Here, however, the likeness ends. Of purely literary talent James had little. His plots are poor, his descriptions weak, his dialogue often below even a fair average, and he was deplorably prone to repeat himself. The “two cavaliers” who in one form or another open most of his books have passed into a proverb, and Thackeray’s good-natured but fatal parody of Barbazure is likely to outlast Richelieu and Darnley by many a year. Nevertheless, though James cannot be allowed any very high rank among novelists, he had a genuine narrative gift, and, though his very best books fall far below Les trois mousquetaires and La reine Margot, there is a certain even level of interest to be found in all of them. James never resorted to illegitimate methods to attract readers, and deserves such credit as may be due to a purveyor of amusement who never caters for the less creditable tastes of his guests.
His best novels were published in a revised form in 21 volumes (1844–1849).
JAMES, HENRY (1843– ), American author, was born in
New York on the 15th of April 1843. His father was Henry James
(1811–1882), a theological writer of great originality, from whom
both he and his brother Professor William James derived their
psychological subtlety and their idiomatic, picturesque English.
Most of Henry’s boyhood was spent in Europe, where he studied
under tutors in England, France and Switzerland. In 1860 he
returned to America, and began reading law at Harvard, only
to find speedily that literature, not law, was what he most cared
for. His earliest short tale, “The Story of a Year,” appeared
in 1865, in the Atlantic Monthly, and frequent stories and
sketches followed. In 1869 he again went to Europe, where he
subsequently made his home, for the most part living in London,
or at Rye in Sussex. Among his specially noteworthy works
are the following: Watch and Ward (1871); Roderick Hudson
(1875); The American (1877); Daisy Miller (1878); French Poets
and Novelists (1878); A Life of Hawthorne (1879); The Portrait of a Lady
(1881); Portraits of Places (1884); The Bostonians
(1886); Partial Portraits (1888); The Tragic Muse (1890);
Essays in London (1893); The Two Magics (1898); The Awkward
Age (1898); The Wings of the Dove (1902); The Ambassadors
(1903); The Golden Bowl (1904); English Hours (1905); The
American Scene (1907); The High Bid (1909); Italian Hours
(1909).
As a novelist, Henry James is a modern of the moderns both in subject matter and in method. He is entirely loyal to contemporary life and reverentially exact in his transcription of the phase. His characters are for the most part people of the world who conceive of life as a fine art and have the leisure to carry out their theories. Rarely are they at close quarters with any ugly practical task. They are subtle and complex with the subtlety and the complexity that come from conscious preoccupation with themselves. They are specialists in conduct and past masters in casuistry, and are full of variations and shadows of turning. Moreover, they are finely expressive of milieu; each belongs unmistakably to his class and his race; each is true to inherited moral traditions and delicately illustrative of some social code. To reveal the power and the tragedy of life through so many minutely limiting and apparently artificial conditions, and by means of characters who are somewhat self-conscious and are apt to make of life only a pleasant pastime, might well seem an impossible task. Yet it is precisely in this that Henry James is pre-eminently successful. The essentially human is what he really cares for, however much he may at times seem preoccupied with the technique of his art or with the mask of conventions through which he makes the essentially human reveal itself. Nor has “the vista of the spiritual been denied him.” No more poignant spiritual tragedy has been recounted in recent fiction than the story of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. His method, too, is as modern as his subject matter. He early
