James's hand always; it is the Europeanizing sort like the
critical little Bostonian in the "Bundle of Letters," the ladies
shocked at Daisy Miller, the mother in the "Pension Beaurepas"
who goes about trying to be of the "native" world everywhere,
Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond, Miss Light and her mother, who
have reason to complain, if any one has. Doubtless Mr. James
does not mean to satirize such Americans, but it is interesting
to note how they strike such a keen observer. We are certainly
not allowed to like them, and the other sort find somehow a place
in our affections along with his good Europeans. It is a little
odd, by the way, that in all the printed talk about Mr.
James--and there has been no end of it--his power of engaging
your preference for certain of his people has been so little
commented on. Perhaps it is because he makes no obvious appeal
for them; but one likes such men as Lord Warburton, Newman,
Valentin, the artistic brother in "The Europeans," and Ralph
Touchett, and such women as Isabel, Claire Belgarde, Mrs.
Tristram, and certain others, with a thoroughness that is one of
the best testimonies to their vitality. This comes about through
their own qualities, and is not affected by insinuation or by
downright petting, such as we find in Dickens nearly always and
in Thackeray too often.

The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day
than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer the
confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the
former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson
or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the
past--they and their methods and interests; even Trollope and
Reade are not of the present. The new school derives from