[EDGAR] HENRY JAMES AND HIS METHOD 239 



demanded and his serene impartiality was never obtained by the 

 sacrifice of his sympathy. 



The drift of reaHsm in France has been largely in the direction 

 of pessimism, and its most gifted authors write under the conviction 

 that the truth is cruel. Their work is chiefly directed towards the 

 exposition of human folly in a world where vice alone assumes heroic 

 proportions. Only where vice is concerned are they willing to select 

 extreme examples, and they prefer for the most part to confine their 

 observation within the limits of mediocrity. James is not in the habit 

 of launching characters of extraordinary power, but his fine-sighted 

 Strethers and his sensitive Maggie Ververs are multiplied throughout 

 his books, and we are not surprised that this pre-occupation of French 

 writers with the commonplace evoked from him an energetic protest. 

 In Frederic Moreau Flaubert has presented us with one of his char- 

 acteristically fatuous central figures. "Why," James queries, "did 

 Flaubert choose, as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict, 

 such inferior and in the case of Frederic such abject human specimens ? 

 .... He wished in each case to make a picture of experience — 

 middling experience it is true — and of the world close to him; but if 

 he imagined nothing better for his purpose than such a heroine and 

 such a hero, both such limited reflectors and registers, we are forced 

 to believe it to have been by a defect of his mind." The author's 

 preface to the "Princess Casamassima" assigns reasons for his own 

 preference for personages who are forceful enough to produce and 

 sensitive enough to appreciate the situations in which they are involved. 



If we imagine human character as it were on a descending scale 

 of complete awareness, half-awareness and un-awareness, we must 

 assign James's principal figures to the first named category, not 

 because they are necessarily extraordinary but because they are 

 always exquisitely alive. It must be admitted that from book to 

 book they somewhat too closely resemble one another in their intel- 

 lectual organisation. It is only by the special situations, and not by 

 peculiarities of mind or temperament that Milly Theale and Maggie 

 Verver are differentiated, and Strether the American and Mr. Long- 

 don the Englishman have a like identity. The advantage for James 

 of their high competence is that they can absorb all the intellectual 

 effort that he is capable of bestowing on them. He concentrates the 

 full powers of his mind in registering their moods, their impressions 

 and their opinions, and exercises his inventive faculty to the utmost 

 in devising their appropriate environment and the conditions that 

 call their activities into play. His secondary characters, his half- 

 aware people as I may describe them, are not given the same ample 

 opportunity of development. James does not consider that they 



