"JIMJR10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Howells William Dean)

personage had something to do with the war,--but Poor Richard's
lie did not win him his love. It still seems to me that the
situation was strongly and finely felt. One's pity went, as it
should, with the liar; but the whole story had a pathos which
lingers in my mind equally with a sense of the new literary
qualities which gave me such delight in it. I admired, as we
must in all that Mr. James has written, the finished workmanship
in which there is no loss of vigor; the luminous and uncommon use
of words, the originality of phrase, the whole clear and
beautiful style, which I confess I weakly liked the better for
the occasional gallicisms remaining from an inveterate habit of
French. Those who know the writings of Mr. Henry James will
recognize the inherited felicity of diction which is so striking
in the writings of Mr. Henry James, Jr. The son's diction is not
so racy as the father's; it lacks its daring, but it is as
fortunate and graphic; and I cannot give it greater praise than
this, though it has, when he will, a splendor and state which is
wholly its own.

Mr. James is now so universally recognized that I shall seem to
be making an unwarrantable claim when I express my belief that
the popularity of his stories was once largely confined to Mr.
Field's assistant. They had characteristics which forbade any
editor to refuse them; and there are no anecdotes of
thrice-rejected manuscripts finally printed to tell of him; his
work was at once successful with all the magazines. But with the
readers of "The Atlantic," of "Harper's," of "Lippincott's," of
"The Galaxy," of "The Century," it was another affair. The
flavor was so strange, that, with rare exceptions, they had to
"learn to like" it. Probably few writers have in the same degree
compelled the liking of their readers. He was reluctantly
accepted, partly through a mistake as to his attitude--through
the confusion of his point of view with his private opinion--in
the reader's mind. This confusion caused the tears of rage which
bedewed our continent in behalf of the "average American girl"
supposed to be satirized in Daisy Miller, and prevented the
perception of the fact that, so far as the average American girl
was studied at all in Daisy Miller, her indestructible innocence,
her invulnerable new-worldliness, had never been so delicately
appreciated. It was so plain that Mr. James disliked her vulgar
conditions, that the very people to whom he revealed her
essential sweetness and light were furious that he should have
seemed not to see what existed through him. In other words, they
would have liked him better if he had been a worse artist--if he
had been a little more confidential.

But that artistic impartiality which puzzled so many in the
treatment of Daisy Miller is one of the qualities most valuable
in the eyes of those who care how things are done, and I am not
sure that it is not Mr. James's most characteristic quality. As