Sense Of Vocation Research Articles

Adams' Esther: The Morality of Taste

THE extraordinary sensibility of Henry Adams, with its delicate and powerful response to history, to art, to human personality, would seem to demand expression in the art of fiction. Yet better novels than Esther have been written by men less curious about life and less informed, even by writers with a vastly inferior faculty of style. What Adams lacked, probably, was just the sense of vocation that so completely possessed his friend Henry James. He was a deliberate amateur.