Page:EB1911 - Volume 15.djvu/160

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JAMES, J. A.—JAMES OF HEREFORD, BARON
  

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