disappointing thing for them is that it is not a trick, but an
inherent virtue. His style is, upon the whole, better than that
of any other novelist I know; it is always easy, without being
trivial, and it is often stately, without being stiff; it gives a
charm to everything he writes; and he has written so much and in
such various directions, that we should be judging him very
incompletely if we considered him only as a novelist. His book
of European sketches must rank him with the most enlightened and
agreeable travelers; and it might be fitly supplemented from his
uncollected papers with a volume of American sketches. In his
essays on modern French writers he indicates his critical range
and grasp; but he scarcely does more, as his criticisms in "The
Atlantic" and "The Nation" and elsewhere could abundantly
testify.

There are indeed those who insist that criticism is his true
vocation, and are impatient of his devotion to fiction; but I
suspect that these admirers are mistaken. A novelists he is not,
after the old fashion, or after any fashion but his own; yet
since he has finally made his public in his own way of
story-telling--or call it character-painting if you prefer,--it
must be conceded that he has chosen best for himself and his
readers in choosing the form of fiction for what he has to say.
It is, after all, what a writer has to say rather than what he
has to tell that we care for nowadays. In one manner or other
the stories were all told long ago; and now we want merely to
know what the novelist thinks about persons and situations. Mr.
James gratifies this philosophic desire. If he sometimes
forbears to tell us what he thinks of the last state of his
people, it is perhaps because that does not interest him, and a