14 Henry James: The Art of Fiction

Dr. Shashi Khurana

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Objectives 

 

This chapter aims at elucidating Henry James’s essay “The Art of Fiction,” published in Longman’s Magazine 4 (1884) and reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888). The chapter also discusses James’s assumptions for which he criticizes Mr. Walter Besant’s “The Art of Fiction” (1884). Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” is a reply to Mr. Walter Besant’s “The Art of Fiction”.

 

Besant’s ethical views of writing fiction inspired many of his contemporary fiction-writers, critics, and reviewers. Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” is one of the parts of that debate. It presents realism as a great tool to express what James called “impression of life.” There are two parts in this module. The first part presents Henry James as critic of Novelistic Art and the second part elucidates his “The Art of Fiction.” Walter Besant and Henry James: On the Art of Fiction.

Part I

Henry James as Critic of Novelistic Art

 

Henry James (1843–1916) was a British-American novelist and critic. He remained an artistic- realist till the end. His famous novels were published between 1901-1914 (the death of Victoria and the beginning of World War I). Since King Edward VII reigned from 1901 to 1910, the period is also called the Edwardian Period in English Literature. Besides writing novels based on observed lives of the Americans and the English, Henry James wrote many critical notes on writers and propagandists. Martha Nussbaum has rightly remarked that James’s The Ambassadors challenged the conception of rule-dominated moral reasoning. (Noël Carroll “Art and the Moral Realm”).

 

In this module Henry James’s works are critically assessed to justify him as a critic. His works of criticism carry various titles: French Poets and Novelists (I878), Hawthorne (I879), Partial Portraits (1888), Essays in London and Elsewhere (I893), and Notes on Novelists (1914). His Views and Reviews (1908) contains his early reviews, introductions, and pronouncements in letters. Some other critical notes, reviews and epistles were published posthumously titled Notes and Reviews (1921), The Future of the Novel (I956), American Essays (I956), and Literary Reviews and Essays (1957).

 

As a critic, besides writing prefaces to his novels, Henry James meditated critically on contemporary novelists and predecessors. As a young reviewer, he referred repeatedly to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work. He was fond of reading the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804- 1864). He often used Hawthorne’s work as touchstone to assess awareness of other novelists to hidden realities of societies. His first lengthy discussion of Hawthorne appeared in The Nation in March, 1872. He also wrote about Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Balzac, Goethe, Gautier, Matthew Arnold, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Alphonse Daudet. He criticized Beuve for his negative responses to Honoré de Balzac .. He criticized Hippolyte Taine (1828-93) for not giving enough attention attention to “the intellectual climate of our literature.” However, he admires Taine’s essay on Balzac. He admires Balzac and Gautier for their art of representing life and moral responsibility. He liked Matthew Arnold’s idea of high seriousness and moral value and followed the theory of criticism of life as an ingredient of the novel. It seems that he formulates his theory of criticism on the observation of Arnold as moral critic. He appreciated Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, George Eliot, Miss Harriet Prescott, Wells, Bennett, and Turgenev for their artistic capacities to represent life. He ridiculed A.C. Swinburne, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde for their futile artistic attempts. He praised the concept of “The New Novel” for its actual connection with realities and signs of life.

 

The critics regard James as a realist because he believes that an artist must have the power of selecting the most suitable sign, mark, incident, or the fragment of an event to exemplify existing society as a whole. In Hawthorne he remarks that an artist is not historian but a knower of the original event. He does not open the documents of the events but gives hints. In Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes (1914) he asserts, “Art cannot imitate life, if it does, it becomes a reflection of confusion” (“Gabriele D’Annunzio” 275). He differentiates life from art: “Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection”(AF) He believes that art is a “chemical process, the crucible or retort from which things emerge for a new function” (LC: 1984. 930) and that the artist is an alchemist who “renews something like the old dream of the secret of life”. In other words, we can say that he includes intentions of both the writer and the reader and their crafts of understanding the world. He does not allow his author to write anything irrelevant to the understanding of the reader. It is with this vision of art that he often maintains distinction between the novel and romance. If romance adheres to adventure, dare, and acts of struggling characters, he accepts it and affirms that it adheres to unnatural things or subject matters. In The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction, James declares: “Literature, is an objective, projected result; it is life that is the unconscious, the agitated, the struggling, floundering cause”.

 

Henry James thinks that an artist is an alchemist because he knows how to uniform varieties of form, unity, tone and he knows how to create illusion — the illusion of a world which is akin to our living reality. This reality doubles the charm of art and entertains the reader. This art of the novelist validates his greatness because it produces enjoyment and cheerfulness in the reader. The Artist’s art of creating illusion depends on the power of his art to mirror the signs of realities. Henry James contends: “The artist should have at least tried his best to be cheerful” (“Ivan Turgenev” LC: 997). Art of an artist “must lift up the reader’s heart” (“Alexandre Dumas” 279). This contention inspires his belief that “Life is dispiriting; art is inspiring” (“Alexandre Dumas” LC: 279). In Essays in London and Elsewhere he condemns Turgenev for his gloomy writing; condemns Flaubert for his social and political partiality and for his hatred of the bourgeoisie.

 

Henry James is one of the greatest masters of modern literature who developed the novelistic art as genre-theory. R. P. Blackmur edited James’s “Prefaces” into one volume titled The Art of the Novel (1934) which exemplify how the novel reflects the tints of life. He says in his “Prefaces” to his novels that an art of enjoyment remains after exorcising the sophisticated artistry, imaginative, or factual imitation.

 

Critics’ Remarks on Henry James as Critic 

 

T. S. Eliot does not consider Henry James a successful literary critic. He says, “His criticism of books and writers is feeble … Henry was not a literary critic” (“On Henry James” 1918; 1945). Eliot acknowledges James as a novelist and remarks in this context that “he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it” (1918; 1945). In his essay “Arnold and Pater,” Eliot’s concluding remarks justify James as a follower of Art for Art’s Sake and not a realist novelist (Selected Essays 405). However, René Wellek in his essay “Henry James’s Literary Theory and Criticism” (1958) neglects Eliot’s bitter criticism and appreciates Henry James’s art of criticism. He elucidates how his works constitute a bridge between the early nineteenth century criticism and modern criticism.

 

Henry James to my mind is by far the best American critic of the nineteenth century who … is brimful of ideas and critical concepts and has a well-defined theory and a point of view which allow him to characterize sensitively and evaluate persuasively a wide range of writers: largely, of course, the French, English, and American novelists of his own time…All his life he was acutely conscious of the low status and condition of English and American criticism, and the need of a revival of criticism, especially of the novel.

 

Percy Lubbock (1879-1965) in The Craft of Fiction (1921) calls James “the only real scholar in the art” and considers him “the novelist who carried his research into the theory of the art further than any other”.

 

Morris Roberts’s Henry James’s Criticism declares that “no critic has ever gone more deeply  into the philosophy of art” (1929 120) R. P. Blackmur appreciates James’s “Prefaces” to the New York edition of his novels as “the most sustained and the most eloquent and original piece of literary criticism in existence”. Garry L. Hagberg , a professor, philosopher, and jazz musician, studied Henry James in the purview of Wittgensteinian theory of meaning and justified him as a philosophic literary critic in his book Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory (1994). Henry James’s critical essays canonized the theory of narrative technique, artistry, psychological realism and are still cited in the discourses of M.M. Bakhtin, Gerard Genet, and Frederic Jameson. Frederic Jameson has admired Henry James’s concept of “Point of View” as a historic act in relation to his interpretation of “reification” and “commodification.” Jameson has disseminated James’s views of fiction with reference to the fictional potent of reflecting the masses (See “The Vanishing Mediator” in Ideologies of Theories (2008); “Romance and Reification” in The Political Unconscious (1981; 2002).

 

Part II 

 

Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” and “the era of discussion”

 

In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James has used the phrase “the era of discussion” with reference to the then ongoing debate on the art of fiction. In the debate there were chiefly four writers of his time: William Dean Howells, Besant, James, and Stevenson. The root of the “era of discussion” (AF 52) is Howells’s essay “Henry James Jr.” written in response to Henry James’s art of characterization and published in The Century Magazine November 1882. The essay set  off the controversy for the author’s racial observation of Henry James’s work. In this essay, Howells introduces James’s works in relation with his family background and his personal associations. Howells observes James’s art of characterization and calls him the “artistic-analyst” novelist. He says, “Evidently it is the character, not the fate, of his people which occupies him” (Howells). He also called him an American representative of the Zola school i.e. the school of realism. He Henry James: “annalist” and “analyst” and admires him as a greater novelist than any other of his time. For Howells James does not tell the stories through intricate plots but presents an analysis of characters taken from society. “In one manner or other the stories were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist thinks about persons and situations. Mr. James gratifies this philosophic desire” Howells contends.

 

Howells introduced the phrase “The Art of Fiction” in a statement regarding the English novel . He says: “The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray.” Two years later, Mr. Walter Besant, a novelist, a critic and a historian, delivered a lecture on “The Art of Fiction” at the Royal Institution in London on 25 April 1884. This lecture inspired many contemporary critics and review writers to speak for and against the art of fiction. On April 26, 1884, an evening newspaper the Pal Mal Gazette published a short review of the lecture in the column “Occasional Notes.” On April 30, the Pal Mal Gazette published “The Art of Fiction.” In May, Chatto and Windus published the lecture with the author’s notes and comments. R.H. Hutton published a review of “Mr. Besant’s Lecture on Art of Fiction.” In 1891 the New Review revived the debate through two symposia, “The Science of Fiction,” featuring Besant, Paul Barget, and Thomas Hardy, and “The Science of Criticism,” featuring James, Lang, and Edmund Gosse. In 1895 Henry James’s former friend and the young novelist Vernon Lee, added some relevant ideas in his “On Literary Construction” published in the Contemporary Review. Rob Davidson noted the popularity of the topic in The Master and the Dean:

 

Besant’s essay, subsequently published in pamphlet form, was briefly reviewed by the Pall Mall Gazette and the Spectator in London, while in the United States the Nation, the New York Times, and the New York Tribune fleetingly noted Besant’s ideas. Besant’s lecture provoked more ripples than waves, but James clearly saw an opportunity; his own “Art of Fiction” appeared in Longman’s Magazine in September 1884.

 

Henry James responded to this current debate with the same title “The Art of Fiction.” He joined this debate in the Longman’s Magazine. He called the very affair “the era of discussion” to  which R.L. Stevenson gave a rejoinder in Longman’s Magazine in winter and wrote an essay, “A Humble Remonstrance.” James called Stevenson’s essay a “genuine rejoinder” in his letter written to Stevenson on December 5, 1884. “The Art of Fiction” was reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888). Stevenson’s “rejoinder” was included in Memories and Portraits. James’s “The Art of Fiction” is a response to Mr. Besant views on “The Arts of Fiction.” James contradicts Besant’s ideas of art of fiction that conform to Belle Letters and the training of the artist. Besant is of the view that fiction is one of the Fine Arts. He advances three propositions for it. He says that:

  1. Fiction is an Art in every way worthy to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Poetry ; that is to say, her field is as boundless, her possibilities as vast, her excellences as worthy of admiration, as may be claimed for any of her sister Arts.
  2.  It is an Art which is governed and directed by general laws; and that these laws may be laid down and taught with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion.
  3. Like the other Fine Arts, Fiction is so far removed from the mere mechanical arts, that no laws or rules whatever can teach it to those who have not already been endowed with the natural and necessary gifts.

James’s response to Besant’s “Art of Fiction” establishes a theory of fiction as a literary genre. In the beginning of “The Art of Fiction,” James states that the novel had never been identified as a literary genre. He said that there was no idea printed or documented that could circulate the knowledge of the creation of fiction, could declare rules and methods of reading, understanding and writing fiction. He states that fiction “had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it – of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison.” Moreover, he appreciated Mr. Walter Besant’s setting up a meaningful debate on the theory of novel as an art. However, his opinion is different than that of Besant’s. Unlike Besant, James was fond of reading art as personal impressions of life. Here ‘personal’ corresponds to what he termed the “author’s art of execution” based on “exercise of freedom.” As confessed in his letter to Stevenson, he says “My pages, in Longman, were simply a plea for liberty.” After reading James’s “The Art of Fiction”, one may conclude that Henry James wanted to see the novelistic art free from classical strains. In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, despised the reading of fiction calling it a “kill-time” rather than a “pass-time.” He imagined it as a “species of amusement” which is nothing but “spitting over a bridge”.  Henry  James appreciates the artistry of the novelist who represents artistic illusion as real as it was before its conversion in the hands of an artist. This becomes possible only if an artist feels that he has the liberty to write what he feels or whatever he experiences as “personal impressions of life.” In this manner, Fiction competes with life. The artist lives beyond petty rules made by Besant in his “The Art of Fiction.” Henry James’s arguments in response to Besant’s art of fiction maybe stated thus:

  1. He believes that art lives upon developing arguments, experiment, curiosity, “upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints… Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they are frank and sincere.”
  2. Literature should be either instructive or amusing. The most important objective of the author is how to make his writing interesting and catchy.
  3. Author as artist must realize his power of freedom to feel and execute his feeling after its filtrations. The art of fiction cannot be disowned or cannot be trained or taught.
  4. He justifies the categories of the good and bad novels: “the bad is swept, with all the daubed canvases and spoiled marble, into some unvisited limbo or infinite rubbish-yard, beneath the back-windows of the world, and the good subsists and emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection.”

Thinking and its execution belongs to the author. Neither thinking nor its execution can be taught. Art of thinking cannot be imitated nor can it be represented in its actual condition, because the art of thinking lies in innovativeness of an individual. Henry James affirms that “the old Evangelical hostility” and theories developed under its impression (Platonic Idealism of Art) since the Renaissance have damaged the value of Fiction. He contradicts Besant’s idea of art saying that art includes liberty of the artist. He differentiates a novelist from a painter. The painter knows the scientific materials he uses in the painting whereas a novelist knows his articles or subjects but he has to choose, select, or opt for the subjects of characterization and events that constitute plot—a living plot which tells of an analysis of life; a contrast of the past and the present. The selection of incidents which takes place in day-to-day life also dwells in the space of a writer’s “freedom to feel and say”:

 

A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say.

 

The author chooses the form after choosing the facts or subjects, and then he chooses tone and finally executes it for the readers’ pleasure. These qualities of an author make him a novelist. They are the result of his personal effort: “The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that,” Henry James contends. He thinks that the artistry of an author is measured through measuring his art of execution—the result of immeasurable attempts. The art of a novelist is the result of a personal effort” and that is why, art without author is meaningless. Art is not sufficient; artistry of an author produces effect in the art. Artistry is not the subject of divine inspiration as Besant declares in his last proposition but a result of the artist’s personal effort. James emphasizes that the art of fiction lives upon the author’s art of experimental execution: “there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant — no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.”.

 

Creativity cannot be taught, nor can it be injected by any other than the writer himself. Art is boundless and the artist has limitless power of execution. Henry James objects to Besant’s idea of the possibility of teaching how to write fiction or how to become an artist. James’s idea of “liberty” contradicts Besant’s idea. In fact, he contradicts all that Mr. Besant attributes to the rules to be followed by the novelist and the subjects he chooses for his novel. He objects to the “precision and exactness” of “the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion” and “conscious moral purpose;” and “It is almost impossible to estimate too highly the value of careful workmanship—that is, of style;” however “the most important point of all is the story;” and “the story is everything.”

 

He agrees with critics who believe that fiction ought to reflect Realism. However, his contention about the sense of reality in the novel is a bit different from that of other Realists. For him, documentation of exactness of reality in an artistic manner is not a possible act because of immensity and uncertainty of realities: “humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms” (64). Social reality cannot be represented as it is found in the society. The filtration of realities is a process of novelist’s art of execution. He also agrees with critics who believe that the novel is an expression of the novelist’s personal experience. However, he thinks, “experience is limitless.” How can an exact experience be expressed? He clarifies that an experience is like a “spider-web”: “Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue”.

 

An Experience cannot be expressed as it is apprehended. Thus both reality and experience are inexpressible phenomena. On this ground, he discards Besant and affirms that expression of reality and experience lacks ‘preciseness and exactness’ and that the novel is not the writer’s experience or the result of the seen world but “impressions” or “tints” of lived experience. For him, impression is the unseen experience filtered from the seen one; it is an implication of an incident (Besant call it “experience”), a pattern, “air of reality” etc.” The power of the artist lies in the power of writing such traces, “impressions,” “air of reality” etc. As he says:

 

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this  cluster of gifts may almost be  said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe.

 

The soul of a novel is not the story but incidents. For James, experience is an incident; and this incident embellishes the novelistic art. This thinking demolishes the classic difference between the novel of character and the novel of incident. James thinks that the soul of novel is not the story but incidents illustrated by its author. Howells has also traced this feature in the novels of Henry James. Howells thinks, implicitly, that Henry James is an analyst of persons and situations. So, James believes in exposition of incidents (i.e. impressions of life or air of reality) not in the story-telling. Because “when one says picture, one says of character; when one says novel, one says of incident … What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character?” (AF 69). Besides making a distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident, he also makes a distinction between interesting and uninteresting novels. The interesting novels untie the unseen realities contained in the experience. A typical selection, an inclusive selection, of incidents exposes the impression of life. In that sense, the novel competes with life. The interesting novels are products of a mind that is far from sophisticated artistry, and near to “conscious increase of freedom”, to a skill to know the taste of contemporary readers that may expose the world.

 

James compares the narrative arts of Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) with Ivan Turgénieff for exemplifying what he called interesting and uninteresting narration. He compares so as to emphasize on the tangibility of contents “hidden in the bosom of common things”.

 

The air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel —the merit in which all its other merits (including that conscious moral purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there, they are all as nothing, and if these be there they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the study of this exquisite process, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end of the art of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, his torment, his delight. It is here, in very truth, that he competes with life; it is here that he competes with his brother, the painter, in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the color, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle. 

 

Henry James objects to Besant’s idea of story as the soul of novel. He differentiates the story from the novel as one differentiates “the idea and the form; the needle and thread.” Story is not the novel. It is the idea to the form called novel that is “the most magnificent form of art” (AF 79). He also objects to the concept of “fiction without adventure.” He interprets romance to its literal meaning i.e. adventure, mystery, wonder, strangeness, and sensuousness, relating it to the novels of R.L. Stevenson, M. Edmond de Goncourt, and George Eliot (AF 81). For Besant the novel of romance damages ‘moral purpose’ of the novel, but James understands the term in relation to what he has already called ‘the interesting novel.’ The word ‘interesting’ is the key to his concept of novelistic art. It serves as the purpose of the novel with the help of which Henry James contradicts Besant’s ‘moral purpose’ of the novel.

 

Henry James emphasizes that the perfection of the novel depends on the liberty of an author and his art of execution. The perfection of art is itself the most interesting purpose. Regarding the English novel, he says that the moral purpose, in connection with societal corruption (Plato has talked of it) and art, is a ‘diffidence’ or shyness of the author (82). This shyness or diffidence leads to the imperfect art, because, it does not have resultants of individual artistic effort; it does not reflect the openness, vastness, liberty of an individual novelist. A bound author, a shy author, or a diffidence author is an author who is confused of optimism and pessimism, good and evil.

 

He cannot explore the wisdom of the world. The author’s purpose is not to preach or teach but to open choices of how to live humanly. In order to do it, he must be enjoyable, must be interesting. Thus, James justifies that the only aim of the novelist is to write ‘interesting.’ This intended purpose will itself teach him how to touch the heart and mind of the readers. It is a bit difficult task. It seems easy but it is a difficult one. ‘To make the art ‘interesting’ is the deepest quality of the artist. Henry James seems Longinian when he points out that “the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer”.

 

There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together; that is, in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. In proportion as that mind is rich and noble, will the novel, the picture, the statue, partake of the substance of beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my vision, to have purpose enough.

 

With his freedom, an author can produce that truth which is common to everyone’s perception. Recognition of this perception increases the charm of a work of art. That is why, the only moral purpose of an author is to express true account of “impressions of life”. In his words: “the only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be interesting. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it” (AF 84). Thus, Henry James’s “Art of Fiction” maybe enumerated as below:

  1. Art of painting and art of fiction are two different genres of art because the former is more scientific and destined than the later one.
  2. Art is not sufficient in itself. Artistry is neither a divine gift nor an inspired one. It is the result of innumerable attempts with liberty by the author. The author’s “exercise of freedom” helps him write the “interesting” novel.
  3. An author cannot express all his experiences because experiences are like spider-webs. Artistry of an author lies in identifying the “impressions of life” and incidents in the experienced or seen subjects.
  4. Besant talks about “selection” as an art of the writer concerning the expression of the story whereas James thinks about the “selection” which must be meshed up with freedom of the author to select whatever he wants to make the novel “interesting”; to select a typical “sense of reality” which enriches the subject of fiction(74-75). However, he clarifies that there is no reality that reflects society as it is. He relates the “art of selection” to the selection of “air of reality” from immensity of reality; to pictorial description of the unseen in the seen (i.e. experience); the “personal impression of life”; and not all the experiences.
  5. “Art is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive”. This characteristic of an author carries him away from what Mr. Besant termed “laws of fiction”—harmony, perspective, and proportion.
  6. He dissolves the classical distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident; and adores what he terms “interesting” novel. He clarifies that these distinctions are made for the reader’s convenience but do not work where there is a talk of art of fiction as a theory. He relates this idea to the term ‘romance’ interpreting it as an interesting element in the novels, and thus he appreciates Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
  7. “Story” is an idea that needs a form called the novel. Thus, “story” is not the soul of the novel, but the presentation of the story is the soul of the artistry of a novelist. Henry James defines plot in connection with character, “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”.
  8. There is no “conscious moral purpose” of an author to moralize, or to preach the readers. He denies all Evangelical views against art and says that the only purpose of an author is to make his story ‘interesting’, exposing truth embedded in the so-called truths.
  9. It can only be possible when the author uses his liberty freely without any restriction of negative thinking. He clarifies that the art of fiction is related to execution of fiction, “questions of art are the questions of execution,” it does not concern with issues related to moral or immoral (80-81). “For many people art means rose-colored windows and selection means picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off shallow commonplaces about the province of art and the limits of art, till you are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and the limits of ignorance”.

An artist lives beyond territories of common thinking of the masses which tend to to differentiate one from the other in the name of morality/immorality; pessimism/optimism; good/evil and vice versa. The only thing that is under him, is his art of execution based on exercise of freedom. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. His famous pronouncement for artist concludes “The Art of Fiction”:

 

All life belongs to you, and don’t listen either to those who would shut you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine air and turning away her head from the truth of things. There is no impression of life in it.

you can view video on Henry James: The Art of Fiction

 

Reference

  1. Partial Portraits (1888); Essays in London and Elsewhere (I893); Notes on Novelists (1914); Views and Reviews (I908); Notes and Reviews (1921); The Future of the Novel (I956) ; American Essays (I956); Literary Reviews and Essays (1957)
  2. Besant, Walter and Henry James: On the Art of Fiction. Cupples & Hurg. 1984. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027192941 Web.
  3. Blackmur, R. P. Introduction. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. New York. I934. pp. 7-8.
  4. Hagberg, G. L. Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.
  5. Spilka, Mark. “Henry James and Walter Besant: Art of Fiction Controversy” http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345427
  6. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1817), Biographia Literaria, 2 vols, ed. J. Shawcross (1917), Oxford: OUP.
  7. Dupee, F.W. ed. “On Henry James” (I9I8), in The Question of Henry James New York. I945. pp. 109-110.
  8. James. Henry, French Poets and Novelists (I878) available at www.guttenberg.org Web.
  9. —        The Letters of Henry James. Selected and Edited by Percy Lubbock, Vol. I. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1920. View online: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38776/38776-h/38776-h.htm#page_152 Walter Besant and Henry James: On the Art of Fiction (Hereafter AF) 3-5
  10. —        Hawthorne (I879)