do not find much that I should call dramatic in "The Portrait of
a Lady," while I do find in it an amount of analysis which I
should call superabundance if it were not all such good
literature. The novelist's main business is to possess his
reader with a due conception of his characters and the situations
in which they find themselves. If he does more or less than this
he equally fails. I have sometimes thought that Mr. James's
danger was to do more, but when I have been ready to declare this
excess an error of his method I have hesitated. Could anything
be superfluous that had given me so much pleasure as I read?
Certainly from only one point of view, and this a rather narrow,
technical one. It seems to me that an enlightened criticism will
recognize in Mr. James's fiction a metaphysical genius working to
aesthetic results, and will not be disposed to deny it any method
it chooses to employ. No other novelist, except George Eliot,
has dealt so largely in analysis of motive, has so fully
explained and commented upon the springs of action in the persons
of the drama, both before and after the facts. These novelists
are more alike than any others in their processes, but with
George Eliot an ethical purpose is dominant, and with Mr. James
an artistic purpose. I do not know just how it should be stated
of two such noble and generous types of character as Dorothea and
Isabel Archer, but I think that we sympathize with the former in
grand aims that chiefly concern others, and with the latter in
beautiful dreams that primarily concern herself. Both are
unselfish and devoted women, sublimely true to a mistaken ideal
in their marriages; but, though they come to this common
martyrdom, the original difference in them remains. Isabel has
her great weaknesses, as Dorothea had, but these seem to me, on
the whole, the most nobly imagined and the most nobly intentioned