Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors

[52] comes through mere daily duty to the professional man, the business man, the journalist. Mr. James has kept a little too good company: we do not find in his books such refreshing types of hearty and robust manhood as Howells, with all his daintiness, finds it easy to depict in Colonel Ellison and the skipper of the Aroostook. Then Mr. James's life has been so far transatlantic, that one hardly knows whether he would wish to be accounted an American writer, after all; so that his education, his point of view, his methods, all unite to place him in a class by himself.

It is pleasant to see a man write, as he has always done, with abundant energy, and seemingly from the mere love of writing. Yet it is impossible to deny that he has suffered from this very profusion. Much of his early work seems a sort of self-training, gained at the expense of his readers; each sheet, each story, has been hurried into print before the ink was dry, in order to test it on the public,--a method singularly removed from the long and lonely maturing of Hawthorne. “L'oisivete est necessaire aux esprits, aussi bien que le travail.” Even the later books of Mr. James, especially his travels and his essays, show something of this defect. What a quarry of admirable suggestions is, for instance, his essay on Balzac;