The beauty that suffuses _The Ambassadors_ is the reward due to a fine artist for hard work. James knew exactly what he wanted, he pursued the narrow path of æsthetic duty, and success to the full extent of his possibilities has crowned him. The pattern has woven itself with modulation and reservations Anatole France will never attain. Woven itself wonderfully. But at what sacrifice! So enormous is the sacrifice that many readers cannot get interested in James, although they can follow what he says (his difficulty has been much exaggerated), and can appreciate his effects. They cannot grant his premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel. He has, in the first place, a very short list of characters. I have already mentioned two--the observer who tries to influence the action, and the second-rate outsider (to whom, for example, all the brilliant opening of _What Maisie Knew_ is entrusted). Then there is the sympathetic foil--very lively and frequently female--in _The Ambassadors_. Maria Gostrey plays this part; there is the wonderful rare heroine, whom Mme. de Vionnet approached and who is consummated by Milly in _The Wings of the Dove_; there is sometimes a villain, sometimes a young artist with generous impulses; and that is about all. For so fine a novelist it is a poor show. In the second place, the characters, beside being few in number, are constructed on very stingy lines. They are incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income, their servants are noiseless or resemble themselves, no social explanation of the world we know is possible for them, for there are no stupid people in their world, no barriers of language, and no poor. Even their sensations are limited. They can land in Europe and look at works of art and at each other, but that is all. Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James's pages--maimed yet specialized. They remind one of the exquisite deformities who haunted Egyptian art in the reign of Akhenaton--huge heads and tiny legs, but nevertheless charming. In the following reign they disappear.