https://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/conrad.html

from Joseph Conrad's _Notes on Life and Letters_ (J. M. Dent edition,
1921):

HENRY JAMES--AN APPRECIATION--1905

The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry
James's work. His books stand on my shelves in a place whose
accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion. But not all
his books. There is no collected edition to date, such as some of
"our masters" have been provided with; no neat rows of volumes in
buckram or half calf, putting forth a hasty claim to completeness,
and conveying to my mind a hint of finality, of a surrender to fate
of that field in which all these victories have been won. Nothing of
the sort has been done for Mr. Henry James's victories in England.

In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one
would not exhaust oneself in barren marvelling over mere bindings,
had not the fact, or rather the absence of the material fact,
prominent in the case of other men whose writing counts, (for good or
evil)--had it not been, I say, expressive of a direct truth spiritual
and intellectual; an accident of--I suppose--the publishing business
acquiring a symbolic meaning from its negative nature. Because,
emphatically, in the body of Mr. Henry James's work there is no
suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender, or even of
probability of surrender, to his own victorious achievement in that
field where he is a master. Happily, he will never be able to claim
completeness; and, were he to confess to it in a moment of
self-ignorance, he would not be believed by the very minds for whom
such a confession naturally would be meant. It is impossible to think
of Mr. Henry James becoming "complete" otherwise than by the
brutality of our common fate whose finality is meaningless--in the
sense of its logic being of a material order, the logic of a falling
stone.

I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen;
indeed, I heard that of late he had been dictating; but I know that
his mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of
intellectual youth. The thing--a privilege--a miracle--what you
will--is not quite hidden from the meanest of us who run as we read.
To those who have the grace to stay their feet it is manifest. After
some twenty years of attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's
work, it grows into absolute conviction which, all personal feeling
apart, brings a sense of happiness into one's artistic existence. If
gratitude, as someone defined it, is a lively sense of favours to
come, it becomes very easy to be grateful to the author of The
Ambassadors--to name the latest of his works. The favours are sure to
come; the spring of that benevolence will never run dry. The stream
of inspiration flows brimful in a predetermined direction, unaffected
by the periods of drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms
of the land of letters, without languor or violence in its force,
never running back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of
its course through that richly inhabited country its fertility has
created for our delectation, for our judgment, for our exploring. It
is, in fact, a magic spring.

With this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the
inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as applied to Mr. Henry
James's inspiration, may be dropped. In its volume and force the body
of his work may be compared rather to a majestic river. All creative
art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive,
enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of
mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the
earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality.

Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be
compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts
of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work,
this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair
words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling
forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form
of permanence in this world of relative values--the permanence of
memory. And the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of
the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, "Take me out of
myself!" meaning really, out of my perishable activity into the light
of imperishable consciousness. But everything is relative, and the
light of consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of
the things of this earth, imperishable only as against the
short-lived work of our industrious hands.

When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last
airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon
a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to
misery and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes
against the feeble glow of the sun. The artistic faculty, of which
each of us has a minute grain, may find its voice in some individual
of that last group, gifted with a power of expression and courageous
enough to interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms of
his temperament, in terms of art. I do not mean to say that he would
attempt to beguile the last moments of humanity by an ingenious tale.
It would be too much to expect--from humanity. I doubt the heroism of
the hearers. As to the heroism of the artist, no doubt is necessary.
There would be on his part no heroism. The artist in his calling of
interpreter creates (the clearest form of demonstration) because he
must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death;
and the postulate was, that there is a group alive, clustered on his
threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to hear
the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth. It is
safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who
would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without
to-morrow--whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic
comment, who can guess?

For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind,
I am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate,
strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable.
For mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its
indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the battlefield among its own
dead, in the manner of an army having won a barren victory. It will
not know when it is beaten. And perhaps it is right in that quality.
The victories are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a
purely strategical, utilitarian point of view. Mr. Henry James seems
to hold that belief. Nobody has rendered better, perhaps, the
tenacity of temper, or known how to drape the robe of spiritual
honour about the drooping form of a victor in a barren strife. And
the honour is always well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry James
chronicles with such subtle and direct insight are, though only
personal contests, desperate in their silence, none the less heroic
(in the modern sense) for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of
arms and sound of trumpets. Those are adventures in which only choice
souls are ever involved. And Mr. Henry James records them with a
fearless and insistent fidelity to the PERIPETIES of the contest, and
the feelings of the combatants.

The fiercest excitements of a romance DE CAPE ET D'EPEE, the romance
of yard-arm and boarding pike so dear to youth, whose knowledge of
action (as of other things) is imperfect and limited, are matched,
for the quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by the
difficulties presented, to the sense of truth, of necessity--before
all, of conduct--of Mr. Henry James's men and women. His mankind is
delightful. It is delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own
itself beaten; it will sleep on the battlefield. These warlike images
come by themselves under the pen; since from the duality of man's
nature and the competition of individuals, the life-history of the
earth must in the last instance be a history of a really very
relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his
passions will leave a man alone. In virtue of these allies and
enemies, he holds his precarious dominion, he possesses his fleeting
significance; and it is this relation in all its manifestations,
great and little, superficial or profound, and this relation alone,
that is commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the
novelist in the only possible way in which the task can be performed:
by the independent creation of circumstance and character, achieved
against all the difficulties of expression, in an imaginative effort
finding its inspiration from the reality of forms and sensations.
That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is
the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built
for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no other
secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is
resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation. It is the
uttermost limit of our power; it is the most potent and effective
force at our disposal on which rest the labours of a solitary man in
his study, the rock on which have been built commonwealths whose
might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans. Like a natural force
which is obscured as much as illuminated by the multiplicity of
phenomena, the power of renunciation is obscured by the mass of
weaknesses, vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and
compromises which make up the sum of our activity. But no man or
woman worthy of the name can pretend to anything more, to anything
greater. And Mr. Henry James's men and women are worthy of the name,
within the limits his art, so clear, so sure of itself, has drawn
round their activities. He would be the last to claim for them
Titanic proportions. The earth itself has grown smaller in the course
of ages. But in every sphere of human perplexities and emotions,
there are more greatnesses than one--not counting here the greatness
of the artist himself. Wherever he stands, at the beginning or the
end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions, or
his passions to his gods. That is the problem, great enough, in all
truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and knowledge.

In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr.
Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as
the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. I
think that the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is
unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.
But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being
based on the reality of forms and the observation of social
phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of
print and handwriting--on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is
nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too,
and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the
expounder, of human experience. As is meet for a man of his descent
and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine consciences.

Of course, this is a general statement; but I don't think its truth
will be, or can be questioned. Its fault is that it leaves so much
out; and, besides, Mr. Henry James is much too considerable to be put
into the nutshell of a phrase. The fact remains that he has made his
choice, and that his choice is justified up to the hilt by the
success of his art. He has taken for himself the greater part. The
range of a fine conscience covers more good and evil than the range
of conscience which may be called, roughly, not fine; a conscience,
less troubled by the nice discrimination of shades of conduct. A fine
conscience is more concerned with essentials; its triumphs are more
perfect, if less profitable, in a worldly sense. There is, in short,
more truth in its working for a historian to detect and to show. It
is a thing of infinite complication and suggestion. None of these
escapes the art of Mr. Henry James. He has mastered the country, his
domain, not wild indeed, but full of romantic glimpses, of deep
shadows and sunny places. There are no secrets left within his range.
He has disclosed them as they should be disclosed--that is,
beautifully. And, indeed, ugliness has but little place in this world
of his creation. Yet, it is always felt in the truthfulness of his
art; it is there, it surrounds the scene, it presses close upon it.
It is made visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the contacts of
the fine consciences, in their perplexities, in the sophism of their
mistakes. For a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one. What is
natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the
intangible, ever-present, right. It is most visible in their ultimate
triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of
renunciation. Energetic, not violent: the distinction is wide,
enormous, like that between substance and shadow.

Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold of the substance, of
what is worth having, of what is worth holding. The contrary opinion
has been, if not absolutely affirmed, then at least implied, with
some frequency. To most of us, living willingly in a sort of
intellectual moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of truth, the
shadows so firmly renounced by Mr. Henry James's men and women, stand
out endowed with extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary
that their rejection offends, by its uncalled-for scrupulousness,
those business-like instincts which a careful Providence has
implanted in our breasts. And, apart from that just cause of
discontent, it is obvious that a solution by rejection must always
present a certain lack of finality, especially startling when
contrasted with the usual methods of solution by rewards and
punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden
death. Why the reading public which, as a body, has never laid upon a
story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this
sham of Divine Omnipotence, is utterly incomprehensible. But so it
is; and these solutions are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the
desire for finality, for which our hearts yearn with a longing
greater than the longing for the loaves and fishes of this earth.
Perhaps the only true desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its
hours of leisure, is to be set at rest. One is never set at rest by
Mr. Henry James's novels. His books end as an episode in life ends.
You remain with the sense of the life still going on; and even the
subtle presence of the dead is felt in that silence that comes upon
the artist-creation when the last word has been read. It is eminently
satisfying, but it is not final. Mr. Henry James, great artist and
faithful historian, never attempts the impossible.