Our critical emphasis in the past has been
wrong. It should, to follow Hardy's own words, be set not upon the
idea, the suggested explanation of misfortune, but upon the living
creatures in his novels and poems alike. It is the characters he
wrought in pity, and, it would appear, in hope, that make him a
great man in our modern world, although only once did he pass
beyond the bounds of his primitive Wessex. The novelist of pity
and its poet, not the spokesman for pessimism, is the title I
solicit for him.
HENRY JAMES
It has always surprised Europeans that Henry James, the most
intellectual of modern novelists, should have been an American;
for most Europeans believe, as does Lowes Dickinson, that we are
an intelligent but an unintellectual race. Was the fact so
surprising after all? The most thoroughgoing pessimists come from
optimistic communities. Henry James, considered as a literary
phenomenon, represented a sensitive mind's reaction against the
obviousness of the life that one finds in most American "best
sellers." I suppose that he reacted too far. I feel sure of it
when he is so unobvious that I cannot understand him.
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