Rapidity of movement is foreign to his method; he is not concerned with movement. On the portrait of one lady he will expend two hundred thousand words. Basil in _The Bostonians_ passes the evening with his Cousin Olive: the call occupies nine chapters; Verena Tarrant calls on Miss Chancellor: it is two chapters before either of them moves or speaks. It transports us back into the eighteenth century to the nine-volume novel. At every step analysis, searchings for the springs of thought and act--philosophizing. Lord Warburton stands before Miss Archer to propose marriage, but before we hear his voice we must analyze minutely his sensations and hers. Her first feeling was alarm. "This alarm was composed of several elements, not all of which were disagreeable; she had spent several days in analyzing them," etc. A review of this analysis fills a page. Then we study the psychology of the lover. First, he wonders why he is about to propose: "He calculated that he had spent about twenty-six hours in her company. He had summed up all this--the perversity of the impulse, the--" etc., etc. A proposal each step and speech of which is followed by a careful clinic to determine the resultant emotion, and a rigid analysis of all the elements that combined to produce that particular shade of emotion and no other, can hardly satisfy the demands of the average modern reader of fiction. It is the province of the novel to produce with verisimilitude an area of human life and to make the reader for a swift period at home in that area; it is not the record of a scientific investigation. V James has dealt almost wholly with exceptions and unusual cases. His "Bostonians" are not typical Bostonians at all--it is not too strong to declare that they are abnormalities; his "Europeans" are almost as bad; his characters studied along the grand tour are rare exceptions if we compare them with the great average American type. Of strong, elemental men and women, the personalities shown by novelists like Fielding and Tolstoy and Hardy and Mark Twain, he knows nothing. He is feminine rather than masculine; he is exquisite rather than strong. In his essay on Turgenieff he records that the great Russian was never one of his admirers. "I do not think my stories struck him as quite meat for men." There is a lack, too, of seriousness: the novels really accomplish nothing. "The manner," according to Turgenieff's opinion, "is more apparent than the matter." Style is preferred to message. There is no humor, no stirring of emotions, nothing pitched above the key of perfect refinement--the reader does not feel and therefore does not care. It is a mere intellectual exercise, a problem in psychology.