Henry James and Walter Besant: "The Art of Fiction" Controversy

Abstract

April 25, 1884, the popular novelist and antiquarian Walter Besant delivered a lecture called Art of Fiction at the Royal Institution in London. the following day the Pall Mall Gazette devoted a short paragraph to the lecture in its Occasional Notes; and on April 30 it printed a longer response-also called Art of Fiction-from the critic Andrew Lang. In May, Chatto and Windus published the lecture with the author's notes and additions. The Spectator for May 24 carried an unsigned review of this edition, Mr. Besant on the Art of Fiction, by its editor, R. H. Hutton; and passing references appeared that year and next in other journals.1 James joined the debate in Longman's Magazine in the fall with his own version of Art of Fiction; to which Robert Louis Stevenson rejoined in the winter Longman's with Humble Remonstrance. In 1891 the New Review revived the debate through two symposia, Science of Fiction, featuring Besant, Paul Bourget, and Thomas Hardy, and Science of Criticism, featuring James, Lang, and Edmund Gosse. In 1895 James's erstwhile friend, the young novelist Vernon Lee, added some relevant ideas On Literary Construction in the Contemporary Review. These are the chief British contributions to that era of discussion, as James called it, through which the novel in England and America acquired its first modern credo. The American contribution was more noncommittal: it consisted of brief reviews of Besant's lecture in the Nation (July 3, 1884), the New York Times (August 31, 1884), and the New York Tribune (August 29, 1884); of copious quotations from James's essay by his friend Grace Norton in the Nation (September 25, 1884); and of pirate editions coupling Besant's lecture with James's response as central items in the great debate.2 Technically the era of discussion had begun in 1882 with William Dean Howells' controversial essay, Henry James, Jr., in Century Magazine, and Stevenson's Gossip on Romance in Longman's. A small uproar over the role of character and incident in fiction had been set off by these entries which re-