The American (1877). Life and Form

In life without art you can find your account; but art without life is a poor affair. The American forms with Madame de Mauves a diptych illustrating the failure of Franco-American personal relationships but in the novel the ambiguity has disappeared and the balance has been broken. Except for Mr. Babcock, who remains undeveloped, and for the Tristrams who, like Mrs. Draper in the preceding tale, are mere links between the two worlds, Newman is the only American in the novel, but he is so hea..

Five-finger Exercises (1876-1886)

“I like this; it’s even better than the pictures in the gallery. It’s more of a picture.”“Everything in France is a picture—even things that are ugly,” Waterville replied.“Everything makes a subject.” When James turned his back on France in 1876 he was not leaving the country with an empty bag. He had felt from the start that if he was to be a realist at all his true field would be psychological realism and not Flaubert’s art pour l’art or Zola’s naturalism. But he had also understood that an..

Madame de Mauves (1874). Christians and Pagans

“The difference between us is simply the opposition between two distinct ways of looking at the world, which have never succeeded in getting on together, or making any kind of common ménage, since the beginning of time. They have borne all sorts of names, and my wife would tell you it’s the difference between Christian and Pagan… It’s the difference between making the most of life and making the least—” In Madame de Mauves James still uses the French setting and French secondary characters bu..

James on Art and the Novel

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. Even if James had never written a single novel, his critical writings would still have won him an important place in American literature. But we may doubt whether his criticism would have been so interesting had he not been aided in the analysis of his fellow-writers by his own experience as a novelist and whether he would have achieved such perfection in his fiction had he not studied so seriously that of..

Zola

… it is in the waste … the waste of time, of passion, of curiosity, of contact—that true initiation resides; so that the most wonderful adventures of the artist’s spirit are those, immensely quickening for his ‘authority’, that are yet not reducible to his notes. The reception of Zola in the Anglo-Saxon world throws light not only on the situation of the novel there but also on the difficulty for the Anglo-Saxon mind to accept European pessimism in general and the deterministic explanation of..

Daudet

Il est chargé de toucher les cœurs, d’ouvrir les portes à la troupe des romanciers plus farouches qui viennent derrière lui…. Le bourgeois, en l’accueillant, ne se doute pas qu’il laisse l’ennemi, le naturalisme, pénétrer dans son foyer; car lorsque M. Alphonse Daudet aura passé, les autres passeront. Zola was probably right when he said that Daudet’s main characteristic was his séduction and that he would be the one to open the door for the other naturalists. Alphonse Daudet indeed found his..

Stendhal

We recommend his books to persons of “sensibility” whose moral convictions have somewhat solidified. James was ready to accept any subject, however morally “bad,” provided the writer should be aware of the moral complexities involved in human life and in human behaviour. This appears best in his reaction towards Stendhal, whose unconventional characters are real models of psychological analysis, but certainly not models of virtue. Andrew Paton’s biography of Stendhal provided James with an op..

French Poets. Baudelaire, Musset, Gautier, Hugo

I am jealous of the brush of the wing of verse and try to dignify the petty sentiment with the name of criticism. And in addition to being jealous I am also envious—envious of the lyric mood, the lyric leak—you can say the egotistical thing—I never. James does not seem to have been much attracted by the lyric mood. We need only open his French Poets and Novelists to notice that the novelists receive by far the larger share of his attention and that when he examines a poet the latter’s prose w..

A Tragedy of Error (1864). Lame Husbands and Unfaithful Wives

“It was the act of a false woman”…“A false woman? No, it was the act of any woman—” James was twenty-one when he wrote A Tragedy of Error, a little story set in a French sea-port town. It has little literary value, but it is James’s first published tale and already reveals some of the characteristics of his later works. It is also an interesting document on the psychology of the young James. Hortense Bernier receives a letter from her lame husband, who has been travelling abroad and who quite..

Turgenev

The French capital was an accident for him, not a necessity. It touched him at many points, but it let him alone at many others, and he had, with that great tradition of ventilation of the Russian mind, windows open into distances which stretched far beyond the banlieue. It is through Turgenev that James was introduced to the other members of the Paris circle and he afterwards often joined hands with the Russian novelist over the parochialism of their French confrères. James was glad to meet ..