And perhaps it is right in that quality. The victories are not, perhaps,
so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point
of view. Mr. Henry James seems to hold that belief. Nobody has rendered
better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how to drape the robe
of spiritual honour about the drooping form of a victor in a barren
strife. And the honour is always well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry
James chronicles with such subtle and direct insight are, though only
personal contests, desperate in their silence, none the less heroic (in
the modern sense) for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of arms
and sound of trumpets. Those are adventures in which only choice souls
are ever involved. And Mr. Henry James records them with a fearless and
insistent fidelity to the _peripeties_ of the contest, and the feelings
of the combatants.

The fiercest excitements of a romance _de cape et d'epee_, the romance of
yard-arm and boarding pike so dear to youth, whose knowledge of action
(as of other things) is imperfect and limited, are matched, for the
quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by the difficulties
presented, to the sense of truth, of necessity--before all, of conduct--of
Mr. Henry James's men and women. His mankind is delightful. It is
delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own itself beaten; it will
sleep on the battlefield. These warlike images come by themselves under
the pen; since from the duality of man's nature and the competition of
individuals, the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a
history of a really very relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor
his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone. In virtue of these
allies and enemies, he holds his precarious dominion, he possesses his
fleeting significance; and it is this relation in all its manifestations,
great and little, superficial or profound, and this relation alone, that
is commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist