James, HENRY, an eminent American novelist, was born in New York, 15th April 1843. He was until his father's death known to the reading public as Henry James, junior, the father (1811–82) being a well-known and original theological writer and lecturer, the exponent in turn of Sandemanianism and the system of Swedenborg. The boy was cosmopolitan from his cradle, and was educated under his father's eye in New York, Geneva, Paris, and Boulogne. In 1862 he entered the Harvard law-school, but his destiny was to be solely a man of letters, and, after the usual preliminaries of magazine-writing and shorter stories, he took his place among contemporary novelists. with Roderick Hudson in 1875. Already in 1869 he had migrated to Europe, there to reside by turns in England and in Italy. He is only less eminent as a critic, and his perfect mastery of modern French literature, added to his natural subtlety of perception, has given a quite extraordinary value to his delightful, clever, yet ineffective studies collected in French Poets and Novelists (1878) and Partial Portraits (1888). The value of the latter in particular is marred by its inconclusive conclusions, and by too indiscriminate admiration of his friends. His Hawthorne (1879), in 'English Men of Letters,' is a clever study, but yet one scarce adequate to its theme. Besides these he has published several volumes of pen-sketches of things in the Old World, written for American magazines, as Portraits of Places (1884) and A Little Tour in France (1884). His more important novels of greater or less length are The American (1878); The Europeans (1878); Daisy Miller (1878); A Bundle of Letters (1879); Washington Square (1880); The Portrait of a Lady (1881); The Bostonians (1886); Princess Casamassina (1886); The Tragic Muse (1890); What Maisie Knew (1897); and The Awkward Age (1899). Some of his cleverest work is to be found in such volumes of shorter stories as Stories Received (1885), The Reverberator (1888), The Aspern Papers (1888), and A London Life (1889).
In fiction James may be said to lead the English section of the analytical school represented in France by Bourget, Guy de Maupassant, and other too clever young writers. His stories deal mainly with the uneventful lives of Americans living or travelling in Europe, and their main interest lies in the subtle contrasts presented in the contact of a comparatively new with an ancient civilisation. James has paid a price for his citizenship of the older world, and some of his studies have been far from pleasing to his countrymen. His chief want as a novelist is a lack of vigour and of wholesome breadth in his views of life. He shrinks from a strong situation, even when it is required by dramatic necessity, and his constant foible is verbosity, which he escapes only in his shorter stories. His style is ever neat and graceful—a medium admirable for gentle satire on human weakness, unfit for the expression of the tragic and deeper side of nature. A spirit of tranquil pessimism breathes through all his work, but the burden of the world weighs but lightly on his heart.