It has always surprised Europeans that Henry James, the most intellectual of modern novelists, should have been an American; for most Europeans believe, as does Lowes Dickinson, that we are an intelligent but an unintellectual race. Was the fact so surprising after all? The most thoroughgoing pessimists come from optimistic communities. Henry James, considered as a literary phenomenon, represented a sensitive mind's reaction against the obviousness of the life that one finds in most American "best sellers." I suppose that he reacted too far. I feel sure of it when he is so unobvious that I cannot understand him. And yet every American writer must feel a little proud that there was one of our race who could make the great refusal of popularity, sever, with those intricate pen strokes of his, the bonds of interest that might have held the "general reader," and write just as well as he knew how. Whether his novels and short stories gained by this heroic "highbrowism," is another question. Certainly they did not always do so. To get a million of readers is no sure sign of greatness; but to find only thousands, as did Henry James in his later books, is to be deplored. In "Daisy Miller" and "The Bostonians" he was a popular novelist of the best kind, a novelist who drew the best people to be his readers. But men read "The Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove" because they were skilful rather than because they were interesting. They were novelists' novels, like the professional matinees that "stars" give on Tuesday afternoons for the benefit of rivals and imitators in art. But to stop here would be to misunderstand totally the greatest craftsman that has come out of America. The flat truth is that Henry James was not a novelist at all, at least in the good, old- fashioned sense that we usually give to the word. He was primarily a critic; the greatest American critic since Poe. Sometimes he criticized literature with supreme success, as in his "Notes on Novelists" of 1914; but ordinarily he criticized life. His later novels are one-fifth story, one-fifth character creation, and the rest pure criticism of life.