It is all art in the superlative, the art of Jane Austen raised to the _n_th degree, superadded to Mr. James’s implacable curiosity about causes final. The question whether his story is worth telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered: what most concerns us is his manner in the telling. The style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions, repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms, in which the heads of young adjectives gaze despairingly and from afar at verbs that come thundering in Teutonic fashion at the close of sentences leagues long. It is all very bewildering, but more bewildering is the result when you draft out in smooth, journalistic style this peculiarly individual style. Nothing remains; Mr. James has not spoken; his dissonances cannot be resolved except by his own matchless art. In a word, his meanings evaporate when phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a lot of negating things and it may not. Either way it is not to the point. And yet the James novels may be the fiction of the future; a precursor of the book our children and grandchildren will enjoy when all the hurly-burly of noisy adventure, of cheap historical tales and still cheaper drawing-room struttings shall have vanished. A deeper notation, a wider synthesis will, I hope, be practised. In an illuminating essay Arthur Symons places Meredith among the decadents, the dissolvers of their mother speech, the men who shatter syntax to serve their artistic purposes. Henry James has belonged to this group for a longer time than any of his critics have suspected; French influences, purely formal, however, have modified his work into what it now is, what the critical men call his “third manner.” In his ruthless disregard for the niceties and conventionalities of sentence structure I see, or seem to see, the effect of the Goncourts, notably in Madame Gervaisais. No matter how involved and crabbed appears his page, a character emerges from the smoke of muttered enchantments. The chiefest fault is that his characters always speak in purest Jamesian. So do Balzac’s people. So do Dickens’s and Meredith’s. It is the fault, or virtue, of all subjective genius. Yet in his obliteration of self James recalls Flaubert; like the wind upon the troubled waters, his power is sensed rather than seen. * * * * *