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                           PARTIAL PORTRAITS

                       [Illustration: colophon]




                           PARTIAL PORTRAITS

                                  BY
                              HENRY JAMES

                                London
                           MACMILLAN AND CO.
                             AND NEW YORK
                                 1894

                         _All rights reserved_


                               COPYRIGHT
                                  BY
                              HENRY JAMES
                                 1888

                 _First Edition 1888. Reprinted 1894_




NOTICE


The following attempts at literary portraiture originally appeared, with
three exceptions, in American periodicals--The _Atlantic Monthly_, _The
Century_, and _Harper’s Weekly_. The paper on Emerson was contributed to
_Macmillan’s Magazine_, that on “The Art of Fiction” to _Longman’s_ and
that on M. Guy de Maupassant to _The Fortnightly Review_. The
reminiscences of Turgénieff were written immediately after his death,
the article on Anthony Trollope on the same occasion, before the
publication of his interesting Autobiography, and the appreciation of
Alphonse Daudet before that of his three latest novels. The date affixed
to the sketch of Robert Louis Stevenson is that of composition.




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

   I. EMERSON                                                          1

  II. THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT                                        37

 III. DANIEL DERONDA: A CONVERSATION                                  65

  IV. ANTHONY TROLLOPE                                                97

   V. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON                                         137

  VI. MISS WOOLSON                                                   177

 VII. ALPHONSE DAUDET                                                195

VIII. GUY DE MAUPASSANT                                              243

  IX. IVAN TURGÉNIEFF                                                291

   X. GEORGE DU MAURIER                                              327

  XI. THE ART OF FICTION                                             375




I

EMERSON


Mr. Elliot Cabot has made a very interesting contribution to a class of
books of which our literature, more than any other, offers admirable
examples: he has given us a biography[1] intelligently and carefully
composed. These two volumes are a model of responsible editing--I use
that term because they consist largely of letters and extracts from
letters: nothing could resemble less the manner in which the mere
bookmaker strings together his frequently questionable pearls and
shovels the heap into the presence of the public. Mr. Cabot has
selected, compared, discriminated, steered an even course between
meagreness and redundancy, and managed to be constantly and happily
illustrative. And his work, moreover, strikes us as the better done from
the fact that it stands for one of the two things that make an absorbing
memoir a good deal more than for the other. If these two things be the
conscience of the writer and the career of his hero, it is not
difficult to see on which side the biographer of Emerson has found
himself strongest. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a man of genius, but he led
for nearly eighty years a life in which the sequence of events had
little of the rapidity, or the complexity, that a spectator loves. There
is something we miss very much as we turn these pages--something that
has a kind of accidental, inevitable presence in almost any personal
record--something that may be most definitely indicated under the name
of colour. We lay down the book with a singular impression of
paleness--an impression that comes partly from the tone of the
biographer and partly from the moral complexion of his subject, but
mainly from the vacancy of the page itself. That of Emerson’s personal
history is condensed into the single word Concord