There is, throughout his work, an unpleasing strain, like
the vibration of a rope drawn out too tight,--a strain and a tug of
intellectual intensity, that is not fulfilled by any corresponding
intellectual wisdom. His descriptions of nature, in his poems, as well
as in his prose works, have an original vigor and a pungent tang of
their own; but the twisted violence of their introduction, full of
queer jolts and jerks, prevents their impressing one with any sense of
calm or finality. They are too aphoristic, these passages. They are
too clever. They smell too much of the lamp. The same fault may be
remarked in the rounding off of the Meredithian plots where one is so
seldom conscious of the presence of the "inevitable" and so teased by
the "obstinate questionings" of purely mental problems.
Reading Henry James one feels like a wisp of straw floating down a
wide smooth river; reading Meredith one is flicked and flapped and
beaten, as if beneath a hand with a flail.
64. HENRY JAMES. THE AMBASSADORS. THE TRAGIC MUSE. THE SOFT SIDE. THE
BETTER SORT. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE. THE GOLDEN BOWL.
Henry James is the most purely "artistic" as he is the most profoundly
"intellectual" of all the European writers of our age.
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