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

"frost performs the effect of fire," this impartiality comes at
last to the same result as sympathy. We may be quite sure that
Mr. James does not like the peculiar phase of our civilization
typified in Henrietta Stackpole; but he treats her with such
exquisite justice that he lets US like her. It is an extreme
case, but I confidently allege it in proof.

His impartiality is part of the reserve with which he works in
most respects, and which at first glance makes us say that he is
wanting in humor. But I feel pretty certain that Mr. James has
not been able to disinherit himself to this degree. We Americans
are terribly in earnest about making ourselves, individually and
collectively; but I fancy that our prevailing mood in the face of
all problems is that of an abiding faith which can afford to be
funny. He has himself indicated that we have, as a nation, as a
people, our joke, and every one of us is in the joke more or
less. We may, some of us, dislike it extremely, disapprove it
wholly, and even abhor it, but we are in the joke all the same,
and no one of us is safe from becoming the great American
humorist at any given moment. The danger is not apparent in Mr.
James's case, and I confess that I read him with a relief in the
comparative immunity that he affords from the national
facetiousness. Many of his people are humorously imagined, or
rather humorously SEEN, like Daisy Miller's mother, but these do
not give a dominant color; the business in hand is commonly
serious, and the droll people are subordinated. They abound,
nevertheless, and many of them are perfectly new finds, like Mr.
Tristram in "The American," the bill-paying father in the
"Pension Beaurepas," the anxiously Europeanizing mother in the
same story, the amusing little Madame de Belgarde, Henrietta
Stackpole, and even Newman himself. But though Mr. James
portrays the humorous in character, he is decidedly not on
humorous terms with his reader; he ignores rather than recognizes
the fact that they are both in the joke.

If we take him at all we must take him on his own ground, for
clearly he will not come to ours. We must make concessions to
him, not in this respect only, but in several others, chief among
which is the motive for reading fiction. By example, at least,
he teaches that it is the pursuit and not the end which should
give us pleasure; for he often prefers to leave us to our own
conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he has
interested us. There is no question, of course, but he could
tell the story of Isabel in "The Portrait of a Lady" to the end,
yet he does not tell it. We must agree, then, to take what seems
a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name
for this new kind in fiction. Evidently it is the character, not
the fate, of his people which occupies him; when he has fully
developed their character he leaves them to what destiny the
reader pleases.