Surely part of the greatness of Henry James resides in the fact that James Baldwin thought him great. Between he and his brother William, I tend to think that Henry was the more accomplished psychologist. William mistook psychology for a science; Henry knew better and the deft psychological portraits that appear as character studies throughout his fiction are as masterful as any found in modern literature.
For example: in a review of James Elliot Cabot's 2 volume A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (published in 1887 and reviewed by James in Macmillan Magazine that same year), James captures Emerson's life and personality with a few sentences:
"Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his Discourses on America, contests Emerson's complete right to the title of a man of letters; yet letters surely were the very texture of his history. Passions, alternations, affairs, adventures had absolutely no part in it. It stretched itself out in enviable quiet--a quiet in which we hear the jotting of the pencil in the notebook. It is the very life for literature (I mean for one's own, not that of another): fifty years of residence in the home of one's forefathers, pervaded by reading, by walking in the woods and the daily addition of sentence to sentence."
James does not stop there, for he is not writing a biography of Emerson but, rather, a review of a memoir. With those lines, however, he has introduced us to the Sage of Concord in a manner that establishes for the reader what she can expect from any life of Emerson. Baldwin was right to admire him: James had--and still has--few peers in American letters.
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