78
PARTISAN REVIEW
the very simplest propositions." On the other hand, James was tern
peramentally at the opposite pole from Hardy, and never got close
to him than granting that
Tess
"is chock-full of faults and falsity, and
yet has a singular beauty."
He continued to appreciate Howells and was in intermittent
correspondence with him; but the one English practitioner of his craf
with whom he felt a kinship was Stevenson, whom, unfortunately,
he had come to know only a year before Stevenson left for the South
Seas. But James' letters show the pitch of his admiration, which prob–
ably seems excessive to most readers now. What drew James to him
was their common devotion to style. He also felt that he had at last
found a reader who could understand what "an abject density and
puerility" the current standards of criticism had fallen to. He was not
blind to Stevenson's limitations, to his frequent mere "cleverness," to
his "awfully jolly" side, but with Stevenson's departure he stated that
he had "literally no one" left to share with, that he was "more and
more shut up to the solitude inevitably the portion, in these islands,
of him who would really try, even in so small a way as mine, to
do
it."
Then, during the rehearsals of
Gu.y
Domville,
came the news of
Stevenson's death.
James was never to lose his avid curiosity in any potential incar–
nations of the artist, and, as late as 1914, in his essay on
The New
Novel,
he was welcoming the promise of D. H. Lawrence, and, too
generously, that of Hugh Walpole and Compton Mackenzie. Almost a
quarter of a century before, he had been writing Stevenson that "the
only news in literature" was "the infant monster of a Kipling."
As
though by the law of opposites James had been fascinated by the
virility of his first stories, and thought that perhaps he contained "the
seeds of an English Balzac." But as the years went on and James
applied the demands of mature criticism, he wrote an incisive thumb–
nail critique to Grace Norton: "My view of
his
prose future has
much shrunken in the light of one's increasingly observing how little
of life he can make use of. ... He has come steadily from the less
simple in subject to the more simple- from the Anglo-Indians to
the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to
the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish
to the engines and the screws.... " And the trouble with his handling
of "steam and patriotism" was that it was so "mixed up with God."
Just at this time, near the close of the century, James' attention
