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Henry James, Jr. By: William Dean Howells (1837-1920) |
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by William Dean Howells The events of Mr. James's life as we agree to understand events may
be told in a very few words. His race is Irish on his father's side
and Scotch on his mother's, to which mingled strains the generalizer
may attribute, if he likes, that union of vivid expression and
dispassionate analysis which has characterized his work from the first.
There are none of those early struggles with poverty, which render the
lives of so many distinguished Americans monotonous reading, to record
in his case: the cabin hearth fire did not light him to the youthful
pursuit of literature; he had from the start all those advantages
which, when they go too far, become limitations. He was born in New York city in the year 1843, and his first lessons in
life and letters were the best which the metropolis so small in the
perspective diminishing to that date could afford. In his twelfth
year his family went abroad, and after some stay in England made a long
sojourn in France and Switzerland. They returned to America in 1860,
placing themselves at Newport, and for a year or two Mr. James was at
the Harvard Law School, where, perhaps, he did not study a great deal
of law. His father removed from Newport to Cambridge in 1866, and
there Mr. James remained till he went abroad, three years later, for
the residence in England and Italy which, with infrequent visits home,
has continued ever since. It was during these three years of his Cambridge life that I became
acquainted with his work. He had already printed a tale "The Story of
a Year" in the "Atlantic Monthly," when I was asked to be Mr. Fields's
assistant in the management, and it was my fortune to read Mr. James's
second contribution in manuscript. "Would you take it?" asked my
chief. "Yes, and all the stories you can get from the writer." One is
much securer of one's judgment at twenty nine than, say, at forty five;
but if this was a mistake of mine I am not yet old enough to regret it.
The story was called "Poor Richard," and it dealt with the conscience
of a man very much in love with a woman who loved his rival. He told
this rival a lie, which sent him away to his death on the field, in
that day nearly every fictitious personage had something to do with the
war, but Poor Richard's lie did not win him his love. It still seems
to me that the situation was strongly and finely felt. One's pity
went, as it should, with the liar; but the whole story had a pathos
which lingers in my mind equally with a sense of the new literary
qualities which gave me such delight in it. I admired, as we must in
all that Mr. James has written, the finished workmanship in which there
is no loss of vigor; the luminous and uncommon use of words, the
originality of phrase, the whole clear and beautiful style, which I
confess I weakly liked the better for the occasional gallicisms
remaining from an inveterate habit of French. Those who know the
writings of Mr. Henry James will recognize the inherited felicity of
diction which is so striking in the writings of Mr. Henry James, Jr.
The son's diction is not so racy as the father's; it lacks its daring,
but it is as fortunate and graphic; and I cannot give it greater praise
than this, though it has, when he will, a splendor and state which is
wholly its own. Mr. James is now so universally recognized that I shall seem to be
making an unwarrantable claim when I express my belief that the
popularity of his stories was once largely confined to Mr. Field's
assistant. They had characteristics which forbade any editor to refuse
them; and there are no anecdotes of thrice rejected manuscripts finally
printed to tell of him; his work was at once successful with all the
magazines. But with the readers of "The Atlantic," of "Harper's," of
"Lippincott's," of "The Galaxy," of "The Century," it was another
affair. The flavor was so strange, that, with rare exceptions, they
had to "learn to like" it. Probably few writers have in the same
degree compelled the liking of their readers... Continue reading book >>
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