Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute studies of New England character, he was never, in his relations to that section, or, for that matter, to any locality save possibly London, anything more than a "visiting mind." His grandfather was an Irish merchant in Albany. His father, Henry James, was a philosopher and wit, a man of comfortable fortune, who lived at times in Newport, Concord, and Boston, but who was residing in New York when his son Henry was born in 1843. No child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to country, without a family or a voting-place, without college or church or creed or profession or responsibility of any kind save to his own exigent ideals of truth and beauty, Henry James came to be the very pattern of a cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native country for nearly thirty years and then returning for a few months to write some intricate pages about that American Scene which he understood far less truly than the average immigrant, he died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American citizenship and become a British subject in order to show his sympathy with the Empire, then at war. It was the sole evidence of political emotion in a lifetime of seventy-three years. American writing men are justly proud, nevertheless, of this expatriated craftsman. The American is inclined to admire good workmanship of any kind, as far as he can understand the mechanism of it. The task of really understanding Henry James has been left chiefly to clever women and to a few critics, but ever since A Passionate Pilgrim and Roderick Hudson appeared in 1875, it has been recognized that here was a master, in his own fashion. What that fashion is may now be known by anyone who will take the pains to read the author's prefaces to the New York edition of his revised works. Never, not even in the Paris which James loved, has an artist put his intentions and his self-criticism more definitively upon paper. The secret of Henry James is told plainly enough here: a specially equipped intelligence, a freedom from normal responsibilities, a consuming desire to create beautiful things, and, as life unfolded its complexities and nuances before his vision, an increasing passion to seek the beauty which lies entangled and betrayed, a beauty often adumbrated rather than made plastic, stories that must be hinted at rather than told, raptures that exist for the initiated only. The much discussed early and middle and later manners of James are only various campaigns of this one questing spirit, changing his procedure as the elusive object of his search hid itself by this or that device of protective coloration or swift escape. It is as if a collector of rare butterflies had one method of capturing them in Madagascar, another for the Orinoco, and still another for Japan--though Henry James found his Japan and Orinoco and Madagascar all in London town!