James's Essay Research Articles

Learning to Read Childishly with “Master James”

This essay will read over the shoulder of Henry James as he reads a “boy's book” by Robert Louis stevenson, with the Design of using that seemingly unlikely encounter to think about children, books, and learning to read. An attentive reader of Stevenson's books for children and adults, James shared an affection and admiration for the man and the works with many of his contemporaries. The two became friendly after communicating in the pages ofLongman's Magazinein 1884, beginning with James's essay “The Art of Fiction.” Often overlooked in discussions of this much cited essay is, first, the venue, a magazine that would become largely devoted to boys' adventure serials, and, second, the weight that James gives there to the recently publishedTreasure Island(1883), which he treats as exemplary in that it “succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts.” He contrasted it to Edmond de Goncourt'sChérie, which “deplorably” failed in its effort to depict “the development of the moral consciousness of a child” (61), as much as James thought that particular “country” worthy of the art of fiction (62). The reader will “say Yes or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before” him, and, as to childhood, James asserts expert personal knowledge. After all, he writes, “I have been a child in fact, but I have been on a quest for a buried treasure only in supposition” (62).

San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice Edited by Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson (review)

San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice. Edited by Henry Maguire and Robert S. Nelson. [Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia.] (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Distrib. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 2010. Pp. viii, 295. $60.00. ISBN 978-0-88402-360-9.)This is a complicated book, in which a complex of issues is dealt with in interlocking fashion. On the face of things, it is a set of individual essays by eight scholars consolidating their contributions to a colloquium held in Baltimore under the auspices of Johns Hopkins University and Dumbarton Oaks, under the title From Enrico to Andrea Dandolo: Imitation, Appropriation, and Meaning at San Marco in (May 2007). All eight (including Maguire and Nelson) are active specialists, to one extent or another, in Venetian studies.The Ducal Basilica of San Marco has been one of the most studied of Christian churches for generations. The landmark studies have long been the two grand works of the Austrian scholar Otto Demus: The Church of San Marco in Venice: History, Architecture, Sculpture (W ashington, DC, 1960), and The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice (4 vols., Chicago, 1984). It is not an exaggeration to say that this new book is the single most important one to deal with the great church-its qualities, its decoration, its surroundings, and its messages-since Demus's massive volumes.The key to this collection's purpose is the word myths. Over the course of the Serene Republic's history, many of were generated, partly to convey at home and abroad the message of Venice's supposed stability, internal harmony, the commitment of its citizens to the interests of the state beyond personal interests, the binding ideal of justice, and majesty of empire. The myths could also be embodied in traditional stories attached to individual decorations or appurtenances of the church. And, beyond the myths propagated by Venice's image-making, there have been myths developed by observers and scholars of things Venetian.Indeed, Liz James's essay on Mosaic Matters definitively explodes Demus's vague assumption that the glass tesserae that went into the basilica's staggering mosaic programs, and the artists who executed them, were Byzantine in origins. For more than two decades, moreover, it has been known that the so-called Pilastri Acritani that stand outside the basilica's south wall are not trophies from a Venetian conquest of the Genoese in Acre but booty from the church of Hagios Polyeuktos in Constantinople, as Nelson himself explicates. …

Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology

Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology

<em>Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century</em>, edited by Frank Ferguson and James McConnel

Reviewed by: Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century Crawford Gribben (bio) Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Frank Ferguson and James McConnel; pp. 182. Dublin and Portland: Four Courts Press, 2009, £50.00, $70.00. This wide-ranging collection of twelve essays complicates the stabilities of the Victorian age in Ireland and Scotland. Its authors, many of them early career academics, consider topics as variant as tourism, agricultural technology, economics, tuberculosis, and [End Page 334] sectarian parades. A number of chapters make significant contributions to their individual fields of study. Each investigates the "cosy roseat glow of pan-Celticism" (7), and many of the finest chapters unpack aspects of the "complicated nature of Ulster-Scottish identity" (9), an identity that, Clare M. Norcio explains, inhabits a "cultural no-man's land between Irishness and Scottishness" (31). Thus the volume's editors are at pains to emphasise that "this book is not simply about varieties of Hiberno-Scottish tension," and that "dissonance is one of the central themes to emerge from this collection" (7). Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century is at its stongest when its contributors adopt the comparative approach that makes best sense of the project's objectives. Kevin James's essay on "Scotland and 'Tourist Development' in Late-Victorian Ireland" is a suggestive exploration of a theme that is increasingly recognised as important across disciplines. James's account demonstrates that national image was being formed in tourist discourse in comparative and often evaluative terms. Norcio's study of "Societies and Seminaries: Technological Exchange in Ulster Agriculture" provides a nice case study of the means by which farming in northeast Ireland was supposedly improved by those who were and those who merely believed themselves to be Scots. Andrew R. Holmes's discussion of "Irish Presbyterian Commemorations of their Scottish Past, c. 1830–1914" contextualises the complexities of one kind of identity formation in the largest Protestant denomination in the northeast and advances the conclusions of his important recent work in this area. Frank Ferguson's consideration of "'The Third Character': The Articulation of Scottish Identities in Two Irish Writers" similarly observes the tensions and opportunities provided by this juxtaposition, if not combination, of nations, literatures, and cultures. Peter Gray's investigation of "Thomas Chalmers and Irish Poverty," meanwhile, is a masterful discussion of an unjustifiably overlooked theme in nineteenth-century Irish-Scottish relations, and Patrick Maume's essay, "From Scotland's Storied Land: William McComb and Scots-Irish Presbyterian Identity," provides a thorough and insightful analysis of one of the period's most widely read representatives of this distinctive confessional and cultural tradition. Matthew Potter's essay, "The Urban Local State in Scotland and Ireland to 1900: Parallels and Contrasts," demonstrates a series of parallels that appear surprising in the context of the political differentiation that had, historically, marked these islands. Susan Kelly's "Tuberculosis Cures Used in Ireland, 1700–1950" strays outside the collection's chronological boundaries to extremely good effect, drawing especially richly on the older folkways, the influence of which lingered into and beyond the nineteenth century. Richard B. McCready's investigation of Dundee St. Patrick's Day celebrations in the second half of the nineteenth century offers a surprising account of a diaspora's construction of a national identity in exile, as well as a description of national difference within the boundaries of Scottish Catholicism. Finally, Amy O'Reilly's study of the Hibernian Society of Glasgow from 1792 to 1824, though oddly placed toward the end of the collection, neatly juxtaposes its conclusions with those of S. Karly Kehoe's "Irish Migrants and the Recruitment of Catholic Sisters in Glasgow, 1847–1878" to demonstrate the complexity of the often transreligious character of Irish institutions in Scotland and the frequent divisions between Irish and Scottish adherents within the institutions of Scottish Catholicism. Despite these and other achievements, the essays in this volume do not address the breadth of topic promised in the title. A subtitle would have clarified those [End Page 335] aspects of Ireland and Scotland in the Nineteenth Century with which the collection aimed especially to deal, and might have explained the rationale for including the final essay...

London Eyes: William Dean Howells and the Shift to Instant Photography

Owen Clayton, "London Eyes: William Dean Howells and the Shift to Instant Photography"(pp. 374–394) Toward the end of the nineteenth century, one of William Dean Howells's many avid readers, finally meeting him in the flesh, expressed surprise that the famed writer was not dead. Although he had not actually departed from the world, it was true that by this time the venerable "Dean"was at a low ebb. While younger authors were taking the novel in directions about which he was, at the least, ambivalent, Howells was aware that his own best work was behind him. Yet, throughout his career, he maintained a desire to test different literary approaches. In England in 1904, Howells tested a conceit that would allow him to keep pace with the literary movements of the day. This consisted of an extended photographic metaphor: an association of himself with the Kodak camera. He used this figuration to move beyond the philosophical foundations of his previous work. Criticism has largely overlooked this endeavor, which Howells buried away in the somewhat obscure travelogue London Films (1905). This essay shows how London Films used its photographic metaphor to question positivistic observational assumptions, the way in which this was a response to William James's Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), and, finally, why Howells ultimately went back on his attempt to create a Kodak school in fiction.

"This Matter of Attention and Discrimination": Henry James's Essays on Speech, Manners, and American Women

Three essays by Henry James—"The Question of Our Speech," "The Speech of American Women," and "The Manners of American Women"—comprise what he calls an "exceptional inquiry" into the changing cultural status of American women and the shifting American scene. Pursuing a line of reasoning that these essays demonstrate a deliberate series in which the ideas of the later two essays build upon the themes and implications set forth in the first, this article argues that James fosters the development of a critical acumen that would allow women to make penetrating distinctions that go beyond the superficial or the tacit and to acquire a keen practical judgment that recognizes the relations among these distinctions.

The Society for Textual Scholarship

Rudyard Kipling and Wolcott Balestier's Literary Collaboration: A Possible Source for James's "Collaboration" by Adeline R. Tintner Henry James's tale "Collaboration" (1892) about the artistic collaboration between a poet and a composer, though thought-provoking, has never had criticism of any kind. A "trifling" although "artful" anecdote, it is seen by Leon Edel as a reflection of a possible collaboration between Constance Fenimore Woolson and James for the writing of a play, but there is only her word for it in a letter that may represent simply wishful thinking on her part and/or placation on his. Certain facts, however, indicate that an artistic collaboration that did actually take place between two writers, though James was not one of them, does lie behind the tale. Just about the time James wrote it, he was deeply personally involved with two collaborators--an American, Wolcott Balestier, and Rudyard Kipling. It is their collaboration in a novel of the East and the West, The Naulahka (1891) and the conjunction of their talents and personal histories that seem to be reflected in James's "Collaboration." James became very friendly with the twenty-nine-year-old Balestier in 1890, some time after the latter became his literary agent. Kipling and Balestier met during 1891, and in the months before the untimely death from typhoid fever of the young American they became extremely intimate, to the extent that they wrote their novel together, an activity James described in his memorial essay on Balestier as his young friend's "working in concert with that extraordinary genius," Kipling. Balestier had written only three stories, all of which take place in the town of Topaz, Colorado, and he brought this locale and some of its characters to The Naulahka. The novel is centered around the stealing of a priceless Indian necklace by a Western American from Topaz, its return, and his winning of a mannish girl not too interested in marriage but finally committed to it. The meeting of Balestier, the writer of the West, with Kipling, the writer of the East, developed into a passionate friendship as well as a collaboration between two writers from different cultural milieux. This is reflected in James's story "Collaboration." After the shockingly sudden death of young Balestier in Germany, Kipling married his sister, Caroline Balestier, and James gave away the bride. The general impression has been that the love between the two men was satisfied by the one left alive through marriage to the dead man's sister. The dates of James's story seem to fit in with the dates of the tragedy and of James's commemorative essay on Balestier. James went to Dresden after 1. Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), p. 319. 2. Leon Edel, "A Young Man from the Provinces: Rudyard Kipling and Wolcott Balestier," in The Age of Kipling, ed. John Gross (New York: Simon and Schuster , 1972), p. 70. THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW 140 WINTER, 1983 Balestier's death on December 6, 1891, and in May, 1892, James's essay on Balestier appeared in The Cosmopolitan Magazine. It soon reappeared on June 17, 1892, as the foreword to The Average Woman, Balestier's volume containing his three short stories. From June until July James was in Siena visiting the Bourgets, and he probably wrote "Collaboration," right after Balestier's book appeared, during the summer months, for it was published in The English Illustrated Magazine in September, 1892.3 The atmosphere of Bourget and the reading in manuscript of his novel Cosmopolis, which would be published the next year, with its notion of what cosmopolitanism was (decadent and destructive ) was something James would take issue with. No doubt his little story was also determined in its shape and scope by a desire to refute Bourget's notion of cosmopolitanism and to replace it by his own theory, which saw in an extended internationalism, as he tells us in his tale, a refinement and advancement of civilization in which "the exchange of points of view and comparison of accents" take place and "beauty flourishes in a country without boundaries."4 it is "the land of dreams—the country of...

The Art of Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: The Art of Fiction Stephen Arata (bio) Henry James , "The Art of Fiction" (1884) Consult just about any anthology of modern literary criticism and you are likely to find Henry James's "The Art of Fiction" somewhere on the premises. This 1884 essay—I am not going out on a limb here—is the best-known theoretical statement on the novel published in Victorian England. Together with a handful of other essays and, more pyrotechnically, the 1907-09 prefaces to the New York edition of his works, "The Art of Fiction" established James's posthumous reputation as the foremost narrative theorist of his era. For Anglo-American critics in the middle decades of the twentieth century, that reputation was decisively shaped by Percy Lubbock and R.P. Blackmur. Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921) and Blackmur's introductory essay to The Art of the Novel (1934) celebrate James for shaking the novel—theory and practice alike—out of its cozy Victorian slumber and charging it with modern sophistication and rigour. For the New Critics who read him by way of Lubbock and Blackmur, it was James's mastery of technique and his attention to novelistic form that separated his achievement from those loose, baggy monsters casually turned out by his immediate forebears. It was likewise, in this view, James's conception of his art as a sacred office that helped deliver narrative fiction from the banal moralism and misguided social activism characteristic of the Victorian novel. Such views have not worn well, and few would now argue either that Victorian novelists were unsophisticated in the practice of their craft or that James's own novels conform more than intermittently to New Critical standards. (Then again, neither would James.) If "The Art of Fiction" no longer seems the proto-Modernist manifesto it once was taken for, it nevertheless remains essential reading for literary critics. Its interest is not merely antiquarian, either. At this historical remove, what is most striking about the essay is the continuing relevance of the case it makes for the activity of criticism itself. In terms that are still recognizable, "The Art of Fiction" validates what we do. If some of James's evaluative criteria seem less compelling than they once did, his impassioned defence of the importance—as well as the pleasure—of criticism retains its freshness. This is not always the case with Matthew Arnold, whose apologies for criticism often sound, well, apologetic, as if Arnold were disappointed with the world for getting itself into such a state that criticism had become necessary and disappointed with himself for giving in to the critical impulse. It is doubtful that Arnold ever believed, as James did, that to exercise our critical faculties is to "enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures" (50). "The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle," James avers a few pages earlier, "but the theory too is interesting" (45). The occasional [End Page 53] dilettantishness of his phrasing should not obscure the serious, indeed crucial, benefits James attributes to acts of responsible criticism. He does not, as Oscar Wilde would a half-decade later, go so far as to say that criticism is on par with the other creative arts, but he does insist that the arts are immeasurably enriched by creative criticism. It seems clear that James was moved to write "The Art of Fiction" primarily in the hope of getting a discussion going. He is less concerned, that is, to insist on the validity of his own critical methodology (though he does so insist) than to open a space for critical debate. Throughout the 1880s, James continually presents himself as a critic in search of someone to talk with. Later commentators have pointed out that the critical landscape was not quite so arid as James made it out to be. There is some truth to their claim, but only some, as anyone who has spent much time reading Victorian periodical literature dating from prior to 1890 will probably attest. Much more common are sentiments such as those expressed by Walter Besant in the lecture to which James's essay was a direct response. "I, for one...

Henry James and Dirty French Novels

James's essays on such French novelists as Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, and George Sand display considerable discomfort with their portrayal of sexuality, yet at the same time–as is especially apparent in his comments on Sand–a deep fascination with the subject. In a letter to Paul Bourget in 1887, criticizing his French disciple's novel Mensonges , he is more than usually explicit about what bothers him in the representation of sexual activities. In his later work, we see James more and more attempting to find a place for sexuality as a force that–like evil–is crucial and yet not directly representable.

Ghosts, Crowds, and Spectacles: Visions of Venetian Travel in Henry James's Italian Hours

Reflecting upon a young American painter whom he sees at work copying the interior of St. Mark's Cathedral, Henry James writes, in a tone that seems both wistful and rhapsodic: "The mere use of one's eyes in Venice is happiness enough" (52). With these lines that begin the essay Venice: An Early Impression, James voices one of the more striking and curious phrases that appears in his travel writings.1 Moreover, despite its wide-eyed hyperbole, this phrase expresses what may be the controlling idea that extends throughout Italian Hours, the collection of James's essays devoted to travel in Italy.2 In these pieces, James continually reminds the reader that, more anything else, he goes to Italy to see, to become a sensitive witness to its intense visual splendor. These initial observations suggest, therefore, that the appeal to the primacy of the visual may be a point of departure for a reading of James's Italian travel texts and, especially as it is formulated here, as a point of instability. What does it mean to "see" in Italy? What does it mean to see through Italy, as if Italy acts as a lens that directs and focuses the energies of one's vision? The fact that the mere vision exercised in the act of painting is sufficient for happiness suggests, ironically, that vision cannot be so "mere." What makes this more than a simple cliché, however, is the subsequent qualification that it is a happiness "consistent with the preservation of reason," a controlled, measured, decorous happiness (52). "[U]nperplexed by [End Page 277] the mocking elusive soul of things and satisfied with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye; fond of colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance between them," this "young American painter" seems as much an archetype and a metaphor for the ideal of the Italian experience as an actual character (52). It is the ideal of one who takes pleasure in the "wholesome light bathed surfaces of things," who finds happiness in the illuminations of plastic form (52). "Strictly formal beauty," as James will say near the conclusion of the essay, "seems best to express our conception of spiritual beauty" (60). James equates vision, light, reason, and pleasure here; to see is to be happy, to have vision is to have reason, and all are unified within a field of "light" that is both metaphor and actual substance. Boundaries collapse; opposites blur together: "Sea and sky seem to meet halfway, to blend their tones into a soft iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred nameless local reflections" (52–3). The everyday, concrete reality of Venice, the "slimy brick, marble battered and befouled," the "rags, dirt [and] decay," becomes visible and knowable through this "inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere," this "clear tissue" of light that is flung "against every object of vision" (52–3). Finally, there is "nothing but the light to see"; the city becomes a "longing for pure radiance" (53). At the same time, and perhaps as a result of the intense radiant energy of Venice, James confesses that he must "renounce all attempt to express" in words all that he sees (53). This is one of many aporetic gestures made throughout Italian Hours, and the admission of the inability to express a given visual impression in writing is, in fact, one of the signal traits of the rhetorical style in the texts. Why, however, does James make such a gesture here? How should one interpret this overflowing, this situating of consciousness in and of a light that yet seems somewhere and somehow beyond words? On one hand, this is the affectation of a travel writer reporting to a popular audience, one for whom the pleasure of Italy consists in good part in the sentimental luxury of visions too beautiful for words...

The ‘great religion of the elevator’

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the language used by different writers to describe the counter pointed moments of birth and destruction of the skyscraper and its iconic value in collective American identity. To this end, a comparative study is offered of Henry James's essay on New York in his late text, The American scene, and contemporary reports of the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The apparent oppositions of sacred and profane, church and temple in the narratives are shown to be undercut by an inevitable reversal in which the sacred is made profane and the profanity of “terrorism” is imbued with sacred grace.

Guest Editorial: The Resistance to Belief

William James's essay “The Will to Believe” proposed that we are sometimes justified, even obligated, to believe from our strong emotional or passional nature that something is true, even though there may not be total logical, evidential proof—which he also wrote is not to be found in this world. This essay explores situations, using a recent dear-death experience (NDE) example, in which there are reasonable evidence and logic, and yet belief seems to be withheld. I postulate and discuss nonrational influences producing resistance to belief, including the fear of being in error, the fear of rejection from the scientific community, irrational requirements of logicality, avoidance of consequences, and paradigm fixation. I also discuss issues in philosophy of science and epistemology in regard to proof.

RE-READING ‘THE WILL TO BELIEVE’

Since its first publication one hundred years ago, William James's essay 'The Will to Believe' has been criticized as providing 'an unrestricted license for wishful thinking' in religious matters. The criticism is based on the assumption that James is attempting to justify belief in traditional theism. A careful reading of this essay, and other works by James in which he addresses the issue of religious faith, reveals that the religious question for him is not whether a theistic God exists, but whether the universe offers us possibilities of meaning and fulfilment, whether life is worth living. James's argument is that we have a right to believe that this is so-an argument that is more cogent and convincing than it is often thought to be.

James, Degas, and the Modern View

If caf6 alliance between painters and writers in Paris in 1870s and early '80s resembled stormy marriage giving rise to revolution, connection between their distant relatives in London was decidedly less familial. There fiction writer was looked upon as something of bastard child among prodigy of sister arts, certainly beneath painter in cultural and aesthetic rank and not about to be included in forums concerning future heights of English aesthetics. Writing to Grace Norton around this time, Henry James confessed, suppose it is demon of envy-but I can't help contrasting greater reward of successful painter, here, and his glory and honour generally, with so much more modest emoluments of men of letters.' And among literati themselves there was, in James's words, almost no care for literary discussion,2 making fiction writer's profession all less worthy of English esteem. By 1884, however, with Walter Besant's essay on The Art of Fiction and James's now famous response of same title, there appeared from literary side of London rhetoric intended to spark critical discourse among writers and designed also and perhaps more significantly to legitimize novel's relatively recent birth by establishing close ancestral ties with painting. Although by French standards two essays resulted in little more than flurry of exchanged ideas among writers, something really did result regarding status of fiction in sisterhood of English arts. As Mark Spilka has observed, Besant wanted British public to take fiction seriously as an art, and although this was not then a national sentiment.... it became one moment he spoke, for Besant himself was register for national mind, and what he had just recorded was arrival of newly-received idea. This, according to Spilka, was the chief source of James's encouragement from Besant's lecture. If he could press strongly and intelligently enough in favor of this newly-arrived commonplace, he could affect English and American climate for his own kind of fiction; he could educate and enlarge his own limited audience and so insure his own artistic freedom.3 Anyone least familiar with James essay knows lengths to which James pushed his rhetoric in order to confirm once and for all equal hereditary standing between painting and fiction. When he let it be known that the analogy between art of painter and art of novels is ... complete,4 he was couching cultural propaganda in critical terms. This is certainly not to suggest that his critical motives were purely ulterior, but this kind of quasi-political double entendre appears again

The Foundations of James's Ethics of Belief

When James's essay The Will to Believe was first delivered in 1895,1 it marked the expression of James's mature views on the so-called ethics of belief, a theme which had been an important one in his philosophizing since as early as 1870. James's mature ethics of belief may be characterized roughly as follows. It consists in two duties, one right, and one fact concerning belief. We always have a duty to consult or attend to whatever evidence there might be concerning a given hypothesis, where a is anything proposed to belief. Further, given that the evidence is sufficient to determine the issue, we have a duty to believe according to the evidence; however, in any case where the evidence is inadequate to determine an issue, we have the right to believe, disbelieve, or withhold belief with respect to a hypothesis concerning that issue. Finally, there are instances where, regardless of our grasp of evidence, we cannot suspend judgment, we must either believe or disbelieve-in short, there exist in real life what James calls forced options. While the foregoing omits some of the detail of the position, it does, in the main, represent James's doctrine.2 With the publication, in 1897, of that essay in a book bearing the same title,3 there rapidly developed a widespread negative reaction to the workin short, the essay created a scandal. What James had done was deliberately and vigorously to oppose, with his own doctrine, another rather widely accepted ethics of belief, associated with W. K. Clifford in England, who had in 1877

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

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-

James and the Rationality of Determinism

Imprecision in literary style does not, of course, entail the absence of rigorous thought, though it may make the thread of the latter harder to lay open for inspection. Failure to see the logical structure of James 's essays has led some philosophers to say, as Santayana did, tha t James suffered from a pathological repugnance to the processes of exact thought. 2 The most effective reply to this sort of charge would be an explication of the logical essentials of at least one of James 's philosophic essays, and this is the pr imary task of the present paper. The question of determinism was not one of mere casual interest for James. He had abandoned the Swedenborgian brand of mysticism bequeathed to him by his father, since it flatly denied morali ty in the name of religion. But the empiricist alternative tha t so strongly appealed to James seemed hardly an improvement, since it denied morali ty in the name of t ru th :

Two Questions Raised by William James's Essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’

William James's essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War,’ written in 1910, at the end of his life, has received an increasing amount of attention during the last thirty years. This paper would raise two questions about its relation to the main body of James's work. We recall that in the essay James argues for the worthwhileness of the martial virtues in themselves and claims that, since it would in any case be difficult to get rid of them, some way of expressing them in peaceful channels should be found. A few phrases have a peculiarly modern ring. “It would be preposterous,” he says, “if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese.” Instead of military life, a conscription of youth for the battle against nature is therefore recommended. “A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.”