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The Portrait of a Lady Henry James

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The Portrait of a Lady Henry James The Portrait of a Lady Henry James The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, Vol. XI. Selected by Charles William Eliot Copyright © 2001 Bartleby.com, Inc. Bibliographic Record Contents Biographical Note Criticisms and Interpretations I. By William Dean Howells II. From “The Nation” III. By W. C. Brownell IV. By R. A. Scott List of Characters Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI Chapter XVII Chapter XVIII Chapter XIX Chapter XX Chapter XXI Chapter XXII Chapter XXIII Chapter XXIV Chapter XXV Chapter XXVI Chapter XXVII Chapter XXVIII Chapter XXIX Chapter XXX Chapter XXXI Chapter XXXII Chapter XXXIII Chapter XXXIV Chapter XXXV Chapter XXXVI Chapter XXXVII Chapter XXXVIII Chapter XXXIX Chapter XL Chapter XLI Chapter XLII Chapter XLIII Chapter XLIV Chapter XLV Chapter XLVI Chapter XLVII Chapter XLVIII Chapter XLIX Chapter L Chapter LI Chapter LII Chapter LIII Chapter LIV Chapter LV Biographical Note THOUGH Henry James lived to the age of seventy-three, and though his literary career covered half a century, the story of his external life can be told in a few sentences. He was born in New York on April 15, 1843, the son of Henry James, a Swedenborgian minister who wrote on theology with an originality and in a style which go far to explain the source of the most remarkable characteristics of both the novelist and of his elder brother William, the psychologist and philosopher. Henry James, Jr., has given in “A Small Boy and Others,” if not a chronicle, at least a series of pictures of persons and places, and still more of the atmospheres of persons and places, that impressed his youthful imagination and stayed in his memory till old age. The family, we gather, was in race a mixture of Irish, Scottish, and English, and had been established at Albany, where Henry spent part of his boyhood. His youth was a wandering one, with “small vague spasms of school,” but with abundance of educative and imaginatively stimulating associations and experiences, first in New York, then in London, Paris, and Geneva. At seventeen he returned to America and entered the Harvard Law School, but soon gave up the law for literature. He published his first story in the “Atlantic Monthly” in 1865, and four years later went back to Europe. His home for the rest of his life was in England, in London or at Rye in Sussex, though he made occasional visits to the Continent and to America. When the war broke out in 1914 he took an active interest in the relief of the Belgian refugees, and he testified to his allegiance to the cause of the country in which he had spent the greater part of his life by becoming a citizen of Britain. On February 28, 1916, he died in London. Though Henry James’s reputation rests chiefly on his fiction, he was a critic of exquisite taste and rare delicacy of expression. Among the most important of his writings in this field are “French Poets and Novelists” (1878), “Life of Hawthorne” (1879), “Partial Portraits” (1888), and “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905). His gift for conveying the special flavor and distinction of places found expression in several volumes of impressions of travel, such as “Portraits of Places” (1884), “A Little Tour in France” (1884), and “The American Scene” (1906). His more important fiction began with “Watch and Ward” (1871), “A Passionate Pilgrim” (1875)—one of the best of his shorter stories, “Roderick Hudson” (1875), and “The American” (1877). He reached the larger public in 1878 with “Daisy Miller,” and from this date he was justly regarded as the most successful interpreter of American character from the cosmopolitan point of view. “The Portrait of a Lady” appeared in 1881 when he was at the height of his powers, and, as much as any of his books, is agreed upon as his masterpiece. As time went on James’s prose became more and more intricate and allusive, and though such later works as “The Wings of the Dove” (1902), “The Ambassadors” (1903), and “The Golden Bowl” (1904) show an increase rather than a falling off in his power of subtle analysis and his feeling for the individual quality of people and of social groups, many of his readers were estranged by the difficulty of the style, and his vogue remained limited. Henry James was the most conscientious of artists. His motive for writing lay in the impulse to represent those things in life that roused his own interest and curiosity, and to such representation he confined himself, making no concession to “what the public wants.” Thus we must take him on his own terms or not at all. But if we do take him on his own terms, we are rewarded by a unique rendering of human motive and behavior in a series of the most interesting predicaments, a rendering which yields an intense intellectual pleasure and not infrequently touches even tragic depths. And his instrument of expression, however involved it may later have become, is seen in such a book as “The Portrait of a Lady” to be unsurpassed in its power of portraying those subtleties and refinements of mood and character for which the author had an eye keen beyond that of any of his rivals in English. W. A. N. Criticisms and Interpretations I. By William Dean Howells IF we take him at all we must take him on his own ground, for clearly he will not come to ours. We must make concessions to him, not in this respect only, but in several others, chief among which is the motive for reading fiction. By example, at least, he teaches that it is the pursuit and not the end which should give us pleasure; for he often prefers to leave us to our own conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he has interested us. There is no question, of course, but he could tell the story of Isabel in “The Portrait of a Lady” to the end, yet he does not tell it. We must agree, then, to take what seems a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name for this new kind in fiction. Evidently it is the character, not the fate, of his people which occupies him; when he has fully developed their character he leaves them to what destiny the reader pleases. The analytic tendency seems to have increased with him as his work has gone on. Some of the earlier tales were very dramatic: “A Passionate Pilgrim,” which I should rank above all his other short stories, and for certain rich poetical qualities, above everything else that he has done, is eminently dramatic. But I do not find much that I should call dramatic in “The Portrait of a Lady,” while I do find in it an amount of analysis which I should call super-abundance if it were not all such good literature. The novelist’s main business is to possess his reader with a due conception of his characters and the situations in which they find themselves. If he does more or less than this he equally fails. I have sometimes thought that Mr. James’s danger was to do more, but when I have been ready to declare this excess an error of his method I have hesitated. Could anything be superfluous that had given me so much pleasure as I read? Certainly from only one point of view, and this is a rather narrow, technical one. It seems to me that an enlightened criticism will recognize in Mr. James’s fiction a metaphysical genius working to æsthetic results, and will not be disposed to deny it any method it chooses to employ. No other novelist, except George Eliot, has dealt so largely in analysis of motive, has so fully explained and commented upon the springs of action in the persons of the drama, both before and after the facts. These novelists are more alike than any others in their processes, but with George Eliot an ethical purpose is dominant, and with Mr. James an artistic purpose. I do not know just how it should be stated of two such noble and generous types of character as Dorothea and Isabel Archer, but I think that we sympathize with the former in grand aims that chiefly concern others, and with the latter in beautiful dreams that primarily concern herself. Both are unselfish and devoted women, sublimely true to a mistaken ideal in their marriages; but, though they come to this common martyrdom, the original difference in them remains. Isabel has her great weaknesses, as Dorothea had; but these seem to me, on the whole, the most nobly imagined and the most nobly intentioned women in modern fiction; and I think Isabel is the more subtly divined of the two. If we speak of mere characterization, we must not fail to acknowledge the perfection of Gilbert Osmond. It was a profound stroke to make him an American by birth. No European could realize so fully in his own life the ideal of a European dilettante in all the meaning of that cheapened word; as no European could so deeply and tenderly feel the sweetness and loveliness of the English past as the sick American, Searle, in “The Passionate Pilgrim.”—From “Henry James, Jr.,” in “The Century Magazine” (November, 1882). Criticisms and Interpretations From “The Nation” IT has long been evident that Mr.
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