Henry James

Partial Portraits Henry James

MR. ELLIOT CABOT has made a very interesting contribution to a class of books of which ourliterature, 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-Iuse that term because they consist largely of letters and extracts from letters: nothing couldresemble less the manner in which the mere bookmaker strings together his frequentlyquestionable 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, andmanaged to be constantly and happily illustrative. And his work, moreover, strikes us as thebetter done from the fact that it stands for one of the two things that make an absorbing memoir agood deal more than for the other. If these two things be the conscience of the writer and thecareer of his hero, it is not difficult to see on which side the biographer of Emerson has foundhimself strongest. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a man of genius, but he led for nearly eighty yearsa life in which the sequence of events had little of the rapidity, or the complexity, that a spectatorlove