Yes!-- ... He was a priest to us all Of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we saw with his eyes and were glad. For that was indeed true of Henry James as of Wordsworth. The "wonder and bloom," no less than the ugly or heartbreaking things, which, like the disfiguring rags of old Laertes, hide them from us--he could weave them all, with an untiring hand, into the many-colored web of his art. Olive Chancellor, Madame Mauve, Milly, in _The Wings of a Dove_--the most exquisite, in some ways, of all his women--Roderick Hudson, St. George, the woman doctor in the _Bostonians,_ the French family in the _Reverberation_, Brooksmith--and innumerable others--it was the wealth and facility of it all that was so amazing! There is enough observation of character in a chapter of the _Bostonians,_ a story he thought little of, and did not include in his collected edition, to shame a Wells novel of the newer sort, with its floods of clever, half-considered journalism in the guise of conversation, hiding an essential poverty of creation. _Ann Veronica_ and the _New Machiavelli_, and several other tales by the same writer, set practically the same scene, and handle the same characters under different names. Of an art so false and confused Henry James could never have been capable. His people, his situations, have the sharp separateness--and something of the inexhaustibleness--of nature, which does not mix her molds. As to method, naturally I often discussed with him some of the difficult problems of presentation. The posthumous sketches of work in progress, published since his death, show how he delighted in these problems, in their very difficulties, in their endless opportunities. As he often said to me, he could never read a novel that interested him without taking it mentally to pieces and rewriting it in his own way. Some of his letters to me are brilliant examples of this habit of his. Technique, presentation, were then immensely important to him; important as they never could have been to Tolstoy, who probably thought very little consciously about them. Mr. James, as we all know, thought a great deal about them--sometimes, I venture to think, too much. In _The Wings of a Dove_, for instance, a subject full of beauty and tragedy is almost spoiled by an artificial technique, which is responsible for a scene on which, as it seems to me, the whole illusion of the book is shattered. The conversation in the Venice apartment where the two fiancé's--one of whom, at least, the man, is commended to our sympathy as a decent and probable human being--make their cynical bargain in the very presence of the dying Milly, for whose money they are plotting, is in some ways a _tour de force_ of construction. It is the central point on which many threads converge and from which many depart. But to my mind, as I have said, it invalidates the story. Mr. James is here writing as a _virtuoso_, and not as the great artist we know him to be.