ABSTRACT
The way to judge is to try to walk all round —on which see how remarkably far have to go.” When the great novelist wrote these lines of Balzac must have thinking not only of the formidable number of the Frenchman’s books, but still more of the rich multiplicity of ideas. It is futile to lament that the author was not permitted to develop this richly–conceived scene. The folly and danger of allowing interest in the past or speculation as to the future to absorb and make neglect dear, delightful present, is a lesson Heny James has already delicately enforced in many of tales: in the curiously pathetic “Maud–Evelyn,” in that grimly powerful tale. It is because of the insight they afford into the working of one of the most subtly analytic brains of the century that may regard the notes to these very quintessence of Henry James.
