But not all his books. There
is no collected edition to date, such as some of "our masters" have been
provided with; no neat rows of volumes in buckram or half calf, putting
forth a hasty claim to completeness, and conveying to my mind a hint of
finality, of a surrender to fate of that field in which all these
victories have been won. Nothing of the sort has been done for Mr. Henry
James's victories in England.
In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one would
not exhaust oneself in barren marvelling over mere bindings, had not the
fact, or rather the absence of the material fact, prominent in the case
of other men whose writing counts, (for good or evil)--had it not been, I
say, expressive of a direct truth spiritual and intellectual; an accident
of--I suppose--the publishing business acquiring a symbolic meaning from
its negative nature. Because, emphatically, in the body of Mr. Henry
James's work there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of
surrender, or even of probability of surrender, to his own victorious
achievement in that field where he is a master. Happily, he will never
be able to claim completeness; and, were he to confess to it in a moment
of self-ignorance, he would not be believed by the very minds for whom
such a confession naturally would be meant.
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