American book reviewers, I am convinced from a study of my returns from the clipping bureaus for ten years, dealing with my offerings in two kinds of fiction, are a solid phalanx of realists where they are anything at all. This attitude is due, I imagine, to the fact that journalism deals, or is supposed to deal, with facts. Realism is certainly more favorably received than romance. I cheerfully subscribe to the doctrine that fiction that lays strong hands upon aspects of life as we are living it is a nobler achievement than tales that provide merely an evening’s entertainment. Mr. James has, however, simplified this whole question. He says, “The only classification of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life, and that which has it not”; and if we must reduce this matter of fiction to law, his dictum might well be accepted as the first and last canon. And in this connection I should like to record my increasing admiration for all that Mr. James has written of novels and novelists. In one place and another he has expressed himself fully and confidently on fiction as a department of literature. The lecture on Balzac that he gave in this country a few years ago is a masterly and authoritative document on the novel in general. His “Partial Portraits” is a rich mine of ripe observation on the distinguishing qualities of a number of his contemporaries, and the same volume contains a suggestive and stimulating essay on fiction as an art. With these in mind it seems to me a matter for tears that Mr. James, with his splendid equipment and beautiful genius, should have devoted himself so sedulously, in his own performances in fiction, to the contemplation of cramped foreign vistas and exotic types, when all this wide, surging, eager, laboring America lay ready to his hand.