It has always surprised Europeans that Henry James, the most intellectual of modern novelists, should have been an American; for most Europeans believe, as does Lowes Dickinson, that we are an intelligent but an unintellectual race. Was the fact so surprising after all? The most thoroughgoing pessimists come from optimistic communities. Henry James, considered as a literary phenomenon, represented a sensitive mind's reaction against the obviousness of the life that one finds in most American "best sellers." I suppose that he reacted too far. I feel sure of it when he is so unobvious that I cannot understand him. And yet every American writer must feel a little proud that there was one of our race who could make the great refusal of popularity, sever, with those intricate pen strokes of his, the bonds of interest that might have held the "general reader," and write just as well as he knew how.

Whether his novels and short stories gained by this heroic "highbrowism," is another question. Certainly they did not always do so. To get a million of readers is no sure sign of greatness; but to find only thousands, as did Henry James in his later books, is to be deplored. In "Daisy Miller" and "The Bostonians" he was a popular novelist of the best kind, a novelist who drew the best people to be his readers. But men read "The Golden Bowl" and "The Wings of the Dove" because they were skilful rather than because they were interesting. They were novelists' novels, like the professional matinees that "stars" give on Tuesday afternoons for the benefit of rivals and imitators in art.

But to stop here would be to misunderstand totally the greatest craftsman that has come out of America. The flat truth is that Henry James was not a novelist at all, at least in the good, old- fashioned sense that we usually give to the word. He was primarily a critic; the greatest American critic since Poe. Sometimes he criticized literature with supreme success, as in his "Notes on Novelists" of 1914; but ordinarily he criticized life. His later novels are one-fifth story, one-fifth character creation, and the rest pure criticism of life.

There is a curious passage in his "A Small Boy and Others"-the biography of the youth of William James and himself-telling how as a child in the hotels and resorts of Europe he spent his time in looking on at what was happening about him. He never got into the game very far, because he preferred to think about it. That is what Henry James did all his life long. He looked on, thought about life with that wonderfully keen, and subtle, and humorous mind of his, turned it into criticism; then fitted the results with enough plot to make them move,—and there was a so-called novel. Every one knows how in his last edition he rewrote some of his early stories to make them more subtle. It would have been amusing if he had seen fit to rewrite them altogether as critical essays upon international life! I wonder how much they would have suffered by the change.

This is why so many readers have been very proud of Henry James, and yet unable to defend him successfully against critics who pulled out handfuls of serpentine sentences from his latest novel, asking, "Do you call this fiction?" It was not fiction, not fiction at least as she used to be written; it was subtle, graceful, cunning analysis of life. Fiction is synthesis— building up, making a Becky Sharp, inventing a Meg Merrilies, constructing a plot. Criticism is analysis—taking down, Henry James was not so good at putting together as at taking to pieces. He was able in one art, but in the other he was great.

The current tendency to make every new figure in world literature conform to Greatness of a recognized variety or be dismissed, is unfortunate and misleading. We are to be congratulated that the greatness of Henry James was of a peculiar and irregular kind, a keen, inventing greatness, American in this if in nothing else. Unnumbered writers of the day, of whom Mr. Kipling is not the least eminent, have profited by his influence, and learned from him to give the final, subtle thought its final form. If that form in his own case was tortuous, intricate, difficult, why so was the thought. If it makes hard reading, his subject at least got hard thinking. Before you condemn that curious style of his-so easy to parody, so hard to imitate—ask whether such refinement of thought as his could be much more simply expressed. Sometimes he could have been simpler, undoubtedly; it was his fault that he did not care to be; but that "plain American" would usually have served his purpose, is certainly false.

Henry James must yield first honors as a novelist, it may be, to others of his century if not of his generation. As a writer, above all as a writer of fine, imaginative criticism of the intellect as it moves through the complexities of modern civilization, he yields to no one of our time. Whether he has earned his distinction as an American writer I do not know, although I am inclined to believe that he is more American than the critics suspect; but as a master of English, and as a great figure in the broad sweep of international English literature, his place is secure.

Samuel Butler's "Erewhon" has passed safely into the earthly paradise of the so-called classics. It has been recommended by distinguished men of letters, reprinted and far more widely read than on its first appearance; it has passed, by quotation and reference, into contemporary literature, and been taught in college classes. "Erewhon Revisited," written thirty years after "Erewhon," is less well known.

Mr. Moreby Acklom (whose name, let me assure the suspicious reader, is his own and not an Erewhonian inversion), in a most informing preface to a new edition, makes two assertions which may serve as my excuse for again endeavoring to explain the fascination for our generation of the work of Samuel Butler. College professors, he avers, have an antipathy for Samuel Butler; the chief interest of Butler, he further states, was in theology. Now I am a college professor without antipathy to Samuel Butler, with, on the contrary, the warmest admiration for his sardonic genius. And furthermore Butler's antipathy for college professors, which is supposed to have drawn their fire in return, is based upon a ruling passion far deeper than his accidental interest in theology, a passion that gives the tone and also the key to the best of his writings and which brought him into conflict with the "vested interests" of his times. It is his passion for honest thinking. If Butler's mark had been theology merely, his books would have passed with the interest in his target. He would be as difficult reading to-day as Swift in his "Tale of a Tub."

Like most of the great satirists of the world, Butler's saeva indignatio was aroused by the daily conflicts between reason and stupidity, between candor and disingenuousness, with all their mutations of hypocrisy, guile, deceit, and sham. In "Erewhon" it was human unreason, as a clever youth sees it, that he was attacking. We remember vividly the beautiful Erewhonians, who knew disease to be sin, but believed vice to be only disease. We remember the "straighteners" who gave moral medicine to the ethically unwell, the musical banks, the hypothetical language, the machines that threatened to master men, as in the war of 1914- 1918 and in the industrial system of to-day they have mastered men and made them their slaves. There was a youthful vigor in "Erewhon," a joyous negligence as to where the blow should fall, a sense of not being responsible for the world the author flicked with his lash, which saved the book from the condemnation that would have been its fate had the Victorians taken it seriously. It was an uneven book, beginning with vivid narrative in the best tradition of Defoe, losing itself finally in difficult argument, and cut short in mid-career.

"Erewhon Revisited" is much better constructed. The old craftsman has profited by his years of labor in the British Museum. He has a story to tell, and tells it, weighting it with satire judiciously, as a fisherman weights his set line. If his tale becomes unreal it is only when he knows the author is ready to hear the author in person. If the Erewhon of his first visit does not fit his new conception he ruthlessly changes it. One misses the satiric tours de force of the first "Erewhon." There is nothing so brilliant as the chapters on disease and machines which for fifty years since life has been illustrating. But "Erewhon Revisited" is a finished book; it has artistic unity.

And why does Butler revisit Erewhon? Not because he was trained as a priest and must have an excuse to rediscuss theology, although the story of the book suggests this explanation. Higgs, the mysterious stranger of "Erewhon," who escaped by a balloon, has become a subject for myth. In Erewhon he is declared the child of the sun. Miracles gather about the supreme miracle of his air-born departure. His "Sayings," a mixture of Biblical quotation and homely philosophy, strained through Erewhonian intellects, become a new ethics and a new theology. His clothes are adopted for national wear (although through uncertainty as to how to put them on one part of the kingdom goes with buttons and pockets behind). Sunchildism becomes the state religion. The musical banks, which had been trading in stale idealism, take it over and get new life; and the professors of Bridgeford, the intellectuals of the kingdom, capitalize it, as we say to-day, and thus tighten their grip on the public's mind and purse.

Butler's purpose is transparent. It is not, as Longmans, who refused the work, believed, to attack Christianity. It is rather to expose the ease with which a good man and his message (Higgs brought with him to Erewhon evangelical Christianity) can become miraculous, can become an instrument for politics and a cause of sham. Indeed, Butler says in so many words to the Anglicans of his day: "Hold fast to your Christianity, for false as it is it is better than what its enemies would substitute; but go easy with the miraculous, the mythical, the ritualistic. These 'tamper with the one sure and everlasting word of God revealed to us by human experience.'"

All this is permanent enough, but I cannot believe, as most commentators do, that it is the heart of the book; or if it is the heart of the book, it is not its fire. The satiric rage of Butler, who in the person of Higgs returns to Erewhon to find himself deified, does not fall upon the fanatic worshipers of the sunchild, nor even upon the musical banks who have grown strong through his cult. It kindles for the ridiculous Hanky and Panky, professors respectively of worldly wisdom and worldly unwisdom at Bridgeford, and hence, according to Mr. Acklom, the antipathy toward Butler of all college professors.

But it is not because they are professors that Butler hates Hanky and Panky; it is because they represent that guaranteed authority which in every civilization can and does exploit the passions and the weaknesses of human nature for its own material welfare. Butler had been conducting a lifelong warfare against scholars who defended the status quo of the church and against scientists who were consolidating a strategic (and remunerative) position for themselves in the universities. He saw, or thought he saw, English religion milked for the benefit of Oxford and Cambridge graduates needful of "livings"; and Darwinism and the new sciences generally being swept into the maw of the same professionally intellectual class. A free lance himself, with a table in the British Museum, some books and a deficit instead of an income from his intellectual labors, he attacked the vested interests of his world.

He exposed the dangers which wait upon all miraculous religions, the shams which they give birth to. But not because he was obsessed with theology. If he had lived in the nineteen hundreds he would have studied, I think, sociology and economics instead of theology and biology. He would have attacked, in England, the House of Lords instead of Oxford, and had an eye for the intellectuals who are beginning to sway the mighty power of the labor unions. He would have been a Radical-Conservative and voted against both the British Labor party and the Coalition. In America he would have lashed the trusts, execrated the Anti-Saloon League, admired and been exasperated by Mr. Wilson, hated the Republican party, and probably have voted for it lest worse follow its defeat. He would have been, in short, a liberal of a species very much needed just now in America, a bad party man, destructive rather than constructive, no leader, but a satirist when, God knows, we need one for the clearing of our mental atmosphere.

And unless I am wrong throughout this brief analysis, Samuel Butler, who mentally and spiritually is essentially our contemporary, would not, if he were writing now, concern himself with theology at all, but with the shams and unreasons which are the vested tyrannies set over us to-day. Erewhon, when we last hear of it, is about to become a modern colonial state. Its concern is with an army and with economics. Chow-Bok, the savage, now become a missionary bishop, is about to administer its ecclesiastical system. Its spiritual problems no longer center upon the validity of miraculous tradition and the logic of a theological code. But the vested interests (represented by Pocus, the son of Hanky) remain. These Butler would attack in the needed fashion. These remain the enemy.