HENRY JAMES.—The “Henry James Number” of the _Little Review_ is devoted to essays by various hands upon the works and characteristics of the late novelist. The most interesting essay in the volume is one by Miss Ethel Coburn Mayne reporting the first appearance and subsequent development of Henry James as witnessed by the writers for the famous _Yellow Book_, of whom Miss Mayne was not the least characteristic. What a comedy of misunderstanding it all was, and how Henry James must have smiled about it! At the outset the _Yellow Book_ writers had the distinct impression that Henry James was one of themselves; and they looked forward to exploiting the new worlds which he brought into their ken. But later on, to their disappointment, he fell away, receded from their visibility, and became, as Miss Mayne puts it, concerned less with the “world” than with the “drawing-room.” The fault, however, was not with James, nor was the change in him. The _Yellow Book_ too readily assumed that because James wrote in it, he was willing to be identified with the tendency of the school; and they thought him lacking in loyalty when afterwards it appeared that he was powerfully hostile. But how could they have deceived themselves into supposing that a progress towards the ghostly could always keep step with a progress towards the fleshly? The two were worlds apart, and if for a single moment they coincided in an issue or two of the _Yellow Book_, their subsequent divergence was only made the more obvious. I, even I, who was still young when the _Yellow Book_ began to appear, could have told its editors that Henry James was not long for their world. Between the method employed in, say, the _Death of the Lion_ and the method of Henry Harland, Max Beerbohm, Miss Mayne herself, and, subsequently, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, there was, and could be, only an accidental and momentary sympathy. James was in love with the next world, or the next state of consciousness; he was always exploring the borderland between the conscious and the super-conscious. The _Yellow Book_ writers were positively reactionary to him, for their borderland was not between men and angels, but between men and beasts. James’s “contemptuous” word for Mr. D. H. Lawrence—which Miss Mayne still groans to think of—was the most natural and inevitable under the circumstances. It might have been foreseen from the moment Henry James put his pen into the _Yellow Book_. If there are any critics left who imagine that the _Yellow Book_ was anything but a literary _cul de sac_, I commend to them this present essay by Miss Mayne. Under the disguise of criticism of Henry James, it is a confession. * * * * *