I own that I regret the loss
of the poetry, but you cannot ask a man to keep on being a poet
for you; it is hardly for him to choose; yet I compare rather
discontentedly in my own mind such impassioned creations as
Searle and the painter in "The Madonna of the Future" with "Daisy
Miller," of whose slight, thin personality I also feel the
indefinable charm, and of the tragedy of whose innocence I
recognize the delicate pathos. Looking back to those early
stories, where Mr. James stood at the dividing ways of the novel
and the romance, I am sometimes sorry that he declared even
superficially for the former. His best efforts seem to me those
of romance; his best types have an ideal development, like Isabel
and Claire Belgarde and Bessy Alden and poor Daisy and even
Newman. But, doubtless, he has chosen wisely; perhaps the
romance is an outworn form, and would not lend itself to the
reproduction of even the ideality of modern life. I myself waver
somewhat in my preference--if it is a preference--when I think of
such people as Lord Warburton and the Touchetts, whom I take to
be all decidedly of this world. The first of these especially
interested me as a probable type of the English nobleman, who
amiably accepts the existing situation with all its possibilities
of political and social change, and insists not at all upon the
surviving feudalities, but means to be a manly and simple
gentleman in any event.
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