1885. "Stories Revived," adding to earlier tales "The Author of Beltraffio," which opens with excess of the treading-on-eggs manner, too much to be borne for twenty-four volumes. The pretense of extent of "people" interested in art and letters, sic: "It was the most complete presentation that had yet been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of æsthetic war cry. 'People' had endeavored to sail nearer "to truth," etc."
He implies too much of art smeared on limited multitudes. One wonders if the eighties did in any great aggregate gush up to this extent. Doesn't he try to spread the special case out too wide?
The thinking is magnificently done from this passage up to page sixteen or twenty, stated with great concision. Compare it with "Madame Gervaisais" and we find Henry James much more interesting when on the upper reaches. Compare his expressiveness, the expressiveness of his indirectness with that of constatation. The two methods are curiously mixed in the opening of "Beltraffio." Such sentences as (page 30) "He said the most interesting and inspiring things" are, however, pure waste, pure "leaving the thing undone," unconcrete, unimagined; just simply bad writing or bad novelisting. As for his special case he does say a deal about the author or express a deal by him, but one is bothered by the fact that Pater, Burton, Hardy, Meredith were not, in mere history, bundled into one; that Burton had been to the East and the others had not; that no English novelist of that era would have taken the least notice of anything going on in foreign countries, presumably European, as does the supreme author of "Beltraffio."
Doubtless he is in many ways the author Henry James would have liked to meet and more illustrative of certain English tones and limitations than any historical portrait might have been. Still Henry James does lay it on ... more, I think, than the story absolutely requires. In "Beltraffio" he certainly does present (not that he does not comment to advantage) the two damn'd women appended to the gentlemanly hero of the tale. The most violent post-Strindbergian school would perhaps have called them bitches _tout bonnement_, but this word did not belong to Henry James's vocabulary and besides it is of too great an indistinctness. Author, same "bloody" (in the English sense) author with his passion for "form" appears in "Lesson of Master," and most of H.J.'s stories of literary _milieux_. Perpetual Grandisonism or Grandisonizing of this author with the passion for form, all of 'em have it. _Ma ché!_ There is, however, great intensity in these same "be-deared" and be-"poor-old"-ed pages. He has really got a main theme, a great theme, he chooses to do it in silver point rather than in the garish colors of,--well, of Cherbuliez, or the terms of a religious maniac with three-foot long carving knife.