[EDGAR] HENRY JAMES AND HIS METHOD 235 



we have been discussing. "The Golden Bowl" is constructed with 

 care, yet we have direct access to the mind of the Prince in the first 

 volume, and in the second volume we are made free of the mind of 

 Maggie Verver. We have generous contact too with Mrs. Assingham's 

 range of impressions; and among the characters of the first order of 

 importance it is only Charlotte who is revealed to us by indirection, 

 from hints of dialogue that is to say or by the casual comments of her 

 friends. The question naturally arises why James in "The Ambassa- 

 dors" did not avail himself of the privilege of narration in the first 

 person, but with the question comes the ready answer that his dearly 

 earned compactness of treatment could never have been attained 

 with the temptations to fluidity and divagation inherent in the first 

 personal form. He evidently was willing to sacrifice much for this 

 precious unity, and on the whole he has made the sacrifice I think 

 with adequate compensation. In that scintillating book "The 

 Awkward Age" it pleased him to experiment in a new direction. No 

 single character usurps our attention, which is centered here on a 

 chosen group whose individual members reveal themselves in dialogue 

 of the most sparkling quality. Of reflective analysis there is not a 

 trace, and the reader is blessedly left alone to make his own reflections 

 and reach his own conclusions. 



"The Ambassadors" is a remarkable tour de force, but it is a book 

 in which James has imposed even upon himself a standard of composi- 

 tion too exactingly and too unnecessarily high. Strether's powers of 

 reaction and his capacity for expression are, as we have seen, taxed 

 to the utmost to prevent the unity of impression from passing into 

 monotony. Our writer's method has a reaction also on the dialogue 

 which deserves to be noted since it concerns the whole series of the 

 novels. His people talk well, and for the most part naturally, in 

 short crisp sentences which bear no difiiculty for the reader who has 

 penetrated to the heart of the situation. If adverse comment is to be 

 made it is that the conversations are too firmly under control. I am 

 well aware that many novelists of distinction err in the other direction, 

 and try to get more results out of dialogue than it is capable of giving. 

 It offers more temptations for brilliance and more occasion for orna- 

 mentation than the blocks of narrative, description or reflection that 

 are, as it were, the solid masonry out of which the novel is built. 

 The dinner-party conversations of "Diana," and the sayings at large 

 of Meredith's epigrammatic tribe illustrate at once the temptation 

 and the danger. Let us glance for a moment at the practice of the 

 three novelists whom as masters of the craft James most admired. 

 Balzac, to whom especially he acknowledges his deep indebted- 

 ness, kept his dialogue in due subordination. Its function with 



