Whatever Flaubert may have said about his _Education Sentimentale_ as a potential preventive of the débâcle of 1870, _if people had_ read _it_, and whatever Gautier's friend may have said about _Emaux et Camées_ as the last resistance to the Prussians, from Dr. Rudolph Staub's paragraph in _The Bundle of Letters_ to the last and almost only public act of his life, James displayed a steady perception and a steady consideration of the qualities of different western races, whose consequences none of us can escape.
And these forces, in precisely that they are not political and executive and therefore transient, factitious, but in precisely that they are the forces of race temperaments, are major forces and are indeed as great protagonists as any author could have chosen. They are firmer ground than Flaubert's when he chooses public events as in the opening of the third part of _Education Sentimentale_.
The portrayal of these forces, to seize a term from philology, may be said to constitute "original research"--to be Henry James's own addendum; not that this greatly matters. He saw, analyzed, and presented them. He had most assuredly a greater awareness than was granted to Balzac or to Mr. Charles Dickens or to M. Victor Hugo who composed the _Légende des Siècles._
His statement that he never went down town has been urged greatly against him. A butler is a servant, tempered with upper-class contacts. Mr. Newman, the American, has emerged from the making of wash-tubs; the family in _The Pupil_ can scarcely be termed upper-class, however, and the factor of money, Balzac's, _ἀνάγκη_, scarcely enters his stories.
We may leave Hardy writing Sagas. We may admit that there is a greater _robustezza_ in Balzac's messiness, simply because he is perpetually concerned, inaccurately, with the factor of money, of earning one's exiguous living.
We may admit the shadowy nature of some of James's writing, and agree whimsically with R.H.C. (in the _New Age_) that James will be quite comfortable after death, as he had been dealing with ghosts all his life.
James's third donation is perhaps a less sweeping affair and of more concern to his compatriots than to any one who might conceivably translate him into an alien tongue, or even to those who publish his writings in England.