And this reward came to Henry James in the ripeness of his talents; even further perhaps it entered his life and his conversation. The stages of his emergence are marked quite clearly in his work. He displays himself in _French Poets and Novelists_, constantly balancing over the question of whether or no the characters presented in their works are, or are not, fit persons to be received in the James family back-parlor.
In _The Tragic Muse_ he is still didactic quite openly. The things he believes still leap out nakedly among the people and things he is portraying; the parable is not yet wholly incarnate in the narrative.
To lay all his faults on the table, we may begin with his self-confessed limitation, that "he never went down town." He displayed in fact a passion for high life comparable only to that supposed to inhere in the readers of a magazine called _Forget-me-not._
Hardy, with his eye on the Greek tragedians, has produced an epic tonality, and _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ is perhaps more easily comparable to the Grettir Saga than to the novels of Mr. Hardy's contemporaries. Hardy is, on his other side, a contemporary of Sir Walter Scott.
Balzac gains what force his crude writing permits him by representing his people under the _ἀνάγκη_ of modernity, cash necessity; James, by leaving cash necessity nearly always out of the story, sacrifices, or rather fails to attain, certain intensities.
He never manages the classic, I mean as Flaubert gives us in each main character: _Everyman_. One may conceivably be bored by certain pages in Flaubert, but one takes from him a solid and concrete memory, a property. Emma Bovary and Frederic and M. Arnoux are respectively every woman and every man of their period. Maupassant's _Bel Ami_ is not. Neither are Henry James's people. They are always, or nearly always, the bibelots.
But he does, nevertheless, treat of major forces, even of epic forces, and in a way all his own. If Balzac tried to give a whole civilization, a whole humanity, James was not content with a rough sketch of one country.
As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national qualities are the great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals; trying to determine from the given microscopic slide the nature of the Frenchness, Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemicals too little regarded, have in our time exploded for want of watching. They are the permanent and fundamental hostilities and incompatibles. We may rest our claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his protagonists, in the magnitude of the forces he analyzed and portrayed. This is not the bare matter of a number of titled people, a few duchesses and a few butlers.