fell in love with the “point of view,” and the good and the bad qualities of his work all follow from this literary passion. He is a very sensitive impressionist, with a technique that can fix the most elusive phase of character and render the most baffling surface. The skill is unending with which he places his characters in such relations and under such lights that they flash out in due succession their continuously varying facets. At times he may seem to forget that a character is something incalculably more than the sum of all its phases; and then his characters tend to have their existence, as Positivists expect to have their immortality, simply and solely in the minds of other people. But when his method is at its best, the delicate phases of character that he transcribes coalesce perfectly into clearly defined and suggestive images of living, acting men and women. Doubtless, there is a certain initiation necessary for the enjoyment of Mr James. He presupposes a cosmopolitan outlook, a certain interest in art and in social artifice, and no little abstract curiosity about the workings of the human mechanism. But for speculative readers, for readers who care for art in life as well as for life in art, and for readers above all who want to encounter and comprehend a great variety of very modern and finely modulated characters, Mr James holds a place of his own, unrivalled as an interpreter of the world of to-day.
For a list of the short stories of Mr Henry James, collections of them in volume form, and other works, see bibliographies by F. A. King, in The Novels of Henry James, by Elisabeth L. Cary (New York and London, 1905), and by Le Roy Phillips, A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James (Boston, Mass., 1906). In 1909 an édition de luxe of Henry James’s novels was published in 24 volumes.
JAMES, JOHN ANGELL (1785–1859), English Nonconformist
divine, was born at Blandford, Dorsetshire, on the 6th of June
1785. At the close of his seven years’ apprenticeship to a linen-draper
at Poole he decided to become a preacher, and in 1802
he went to David Bogue’s training institution at Gosport.
A year and a half later, on a visit to Birmingham, his preaching
was so highly esteemed by the congregation of Carr’s Lane
Independent chapel that they invited him to exercise his
ministry amongst them; he settled there in 1805, and was ordained
in May 1806. For several years his success as a preacher
was comparatively small; but he jumped into popularity about
1814, and began to attract large crowds wherever he officiated.
At the same time his religious writings, the best known of which
are The Anxious Inquirer and An Earnest Ministry, acquired
a wide circulation. James was a typical Congregational preacher
of the early 19th century, massive and elaborate rather than
original. His preaching displayed little or nothing of Calvinism,
the earlier severity of which had been modified in Birmingham
by Edward Williams, one of his predecessors. He was one
of the founders of the Evangelical Alliance and of the Congregational
Union of England and Wales. Municipal interests appealed
strongly to him, and he was also for many years chairman of
Spring Hill (afterwards Mansfield) College. He died at Birmingham
on the 1st of October 1859.
A collected edition of James’s works appeared in 1860–1864. See A Review of the Life and Character of J. Angell James (1860), by J. Campbell, and Life and Letters of J. A. James (1861), edited by his successor, R. W. Dale, who also contributed a sketch of his predecessor to Pulpit Memorials (1878).
JAMES, THOMAS (c. 1573–1629), English librarian, was born
at Newport, Isle of Wight. He was educated at Winchester and
New College, Oxford, and became a fellow of New College in
1593. His wide knowledge of books, together with his skill in
deciphering manuscripts and detecting literary forgeries, secured
him in 1602 the post of librarian to the library founded in that
year by Sir Thomas Bodley at Oxford. At the same time he
was made rector of St Aldate’s, Oxford. In 1605 he compiled a
classified catalogue of the books in the Bodleian Library, but in
1620 substituted for it an alphabetical catalogue. The arrangement
in 1610, whereby the Stationers’ Company undertook to
supply the Bodleian Library with every book published, was
James’s suggestion. Ill health compelled him to resign his post
in 1620, and he died at Oxford in August 1629.
JAMES, WILLIAM (d. 1827), English naval historian, author
of the Naval History of Great Britain from the Declaration of War
by France in 1793 to the Accession of George IV., practised as
a proctor in the admiralty court of Jamaica between 1801 and
1813. He was in the United States when the war of 1812 broke
out, and was detained as a prisoner, but escaped to Halifax.
His literary career began by letters to the Naval Chronicle over
the signature of “Boxer.” In 1816 he published An Inquiry into
the Merits of the Principal Naval Actions between Great Britain
and the United States. In this pamphlet, which James reprinted
in 1817, enlarged and with a new title, his object was to prove
that the American frigates were stronger than their British
opponents nominally of the same class. In 1819 he began his
Naval History, which appeared in five volumes (1822–1824), and
was reprinted in six volumes (1826). It is a monument of painstaking
accuracy in all such matters as dates, names, tonnage,
armament and movements of ships, though no attempt is ever
made to show the connexion between the various movements.
James died on the 28th of May 1827 in London, leaving a widow
who received a civil list pension of £100.
An edition of the Naval History in six volumes, with additions and notes by Capt. F. Chamier, was published in 1837, and a further one in 1886. An edition epitomized by R. O’Byrne appeared in 1888, and an Index by C. G. Toogood was issued by the Navy Records Society in 1895.
JAMES, WILLIAM (1842–1910), American philosopher, son
of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James, and brother of
the novelist Henry James, was born on the 11th of January 1842
at New York City. He graduated M.D. at Harvard in 1870. Two
years after he was appointed a lecturer at Harvard in anatomy
and physiology, and later in psychology and philosophy. Subsequently
he became assistant professor of philosophy (1880–1885),
professor (1885–1889), professor of psychology (1889–1897) and
professor of philosophy (1897–1907). In 1899–1901 he delivered
the Gifford lectures on natural religion at the university of
Edinburgh, and in 1908 the Hibbert lectures at Manchester
College, Oxford. With the appearance of his Principles of
Psychology (2 vols., 1890), James at once stepped into the front
rank of psychologists as a leader of the physical school, a position
which he maintained not only by the brilliance of his analogies
but also by the freshness and unconventionality of his
style. In metaphysics he upheld the idealist position from the
empirical standpoint. Beside the Principles of Psychology,
which appeared in a shorter form in 1892 (Psychology), his chief
works are: The Will to Believe (1897); Human Immortality
(Boston, 1898); Talks to Teachers (1899); The Varieties of
Religious Experience (New York, 1902); Pragmatism—a New
Name for some Old Ways of Thinking (1907); A Pluralistic
Universe (1909; Hibbert lectures), in which, though he still
attacked the hypothesis of absolutism, he admitted it as a
legitimate alternative. He received honorary degrees from
Padua (1893), Princeton (1896), Edinburgh (1902), Harvard
(1905). He died on the 27th of August 1910.
JAMES OF HEREFORD, HENRY JAMES, 1st Baron
(1828– ), English lawyer and statesman, son of P. T. James,
surgeon, was born at Hereford on the 30th of October 1828, and
educated at Cheltenham College. A prizeman of the Inner
Temple, he was called to the bar in 1852 and joined the Oxford
circuit, where he soon came into prominence. In 1867 he was
made “postman” of the court of exchequer, and in 1869 became
a Q.C. At the general election of 1868 he obtained a seat in
parliament for Taunton as a Liberal, by the unseating of Mr
Serjeant Cox on a scrutiny in March 1869, and he kept the seat
till 1885, when he was returned for Bury. He attracted attention
in parliament by his speeches in 1872 in the debates on the
Judicature Act. In 1873 (September) he was made solicitor-general,
and in November attorney-general, and knighted;
and when Gladstone returned to power in 1880 he resumed his
office. He was responsible for carrying the Corrupt Practices
Act of 1883. On Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule, Sir Henry
James parted from him and became one of the most influential
of the Liberal Unionists: Gladstone had offered him the lord
chancellorship in 1886, but he declined it; and the knowledge
