To Mrs. Humphry Ward

Lamb House, Rye.
July 26th, 1899.

Dear Mrs. Ward,

I beg you not to believe that if you elicit a reply from me—to your so interesting letter just received—you do so at any cost to any extreme or uncomfortable pressure that I'm just now under. I am always behind with everything—and it's no worse than usual. Besides I shall be very brief. But I must say two or three words—not only because these are the noblest speculations that can engage the human mind, but because—to a degree that distresses me—you labour under two or three mistakes as to what, the other day, I at all wanted to express. I don't myself, for that matter, recognise what you mean by any "old difference" between us on any score—and least of all when you appear to glance at it as an opinion of mine (if I understand you, that is,) as to there being but one general "hard and fast rule of presentation." I protest that I have never had with you any difference—consciously—on any such point, and rather resent, frankly, your attributing to me a judgment so imbecile. I hold that there are five million such "rules" (or as many as there are subjects in all the world—I fear the subjects are not 5,000,000!) only each of them imposed, artistically, by the particular case—involved in the writer's responsibility to it; and each then—and then only—"hard and fast" with an immitigable hardness and fastness. I don't see, without this latter condition, where any work of art, any artistic question is, or any artistic probity. Of course, a 1000 times, there are as many magnificent and imperative cases as you like of presenting a thing by "going behind" as many forms of consciousness as you like—all Dickens, Balzac, Thackeray, Tolstoi (save when they use the autobiographic dodge,) are huge illustrations of it. But they are illustrations of extreme and calculated selection, or singleness, too, whenever that has been, by the case, imposed on them. My own immortal works, for that matter, if I may make bold, are recognizable instances of all the variation. I "go behind" right and left in "The Princess Casamassima," "The Bostonians," "The Tragic Muse," just as I do the same but singly in "The American" and "Maisie," and just as I do it consistently never at all (save for a false and limited appearance, here and there, of doing it a little, which I haven't time to explain) in "The Awkward Age." So far from not seeing what you mean in Pêcheur d'Islande, I see it as a most beautiful example—a crystal-clear one. It's a picture of a relation (a single relation) and that relation isn't given at all unless given on both sides, because, practically, there are no other relations to make other feet for the situation to walk withal. The logic jumps at the eyes. Therefore acquit me, please, please, of anything so abject as putting forward anything at once specific and a priori. "Then why," I hear you ask, "do you pronounce for my book a priori?" Only because of a mistake, doubtless, for which I do here humble penance—that of assuming too precipitately, and with the freedom of an inevitably too-foreshortened letter, that I was dealing with it a posteriori!—and that on the evidence of only those few pages and of a somewhat confused recollection of what, in Rome, you told me of your elements. Or rather—more correctly—I was giving way to my irresistible need of wondering how, given the subject, one could best work one's self into the presence of it. And, lo and behold, the subject isn't (of course, in so scant a show and brief a piece) "given" at all—I have doubtless simply, with violence and mutilation, stolen it. It is of the nature of that violence that I'm a wretched person to read a novel—I begin so quickly and concomitantly, for myself, to write it rather—even before I know clearly what it's about! The novel I can only read, I can't read at all! And I had, to be just with me, one attenuation—I thought I gathered from the pages already absorbed that your parti pris as to your process with "Eleanor" was already defined—and defined as "dramatic"—and that was a kind of lead: the people all, as it were, phenomenal to a particular imagination (hers) and that imagination, with all its contents, phenomenal to the reader. I, in fine, just rudely and egotistically thrust forward the beastly way I should have done it. But there is too much to say about these things—and I am writing too much—and yet haven't said half I want to—and, above all, there being so much, it is doubtless better not to attempt to say pen in hand what one can say but so partially. And yet I must still add one or two things more. What I said above about the "rule" of presentation being, in each case, hard and fast, that I will go to the stake and burn with slow fire for—the slowest that will burn at all. I hold the artist must (infinitely!) know how he is doing it, or he is not doing it at all. I hold he must have a perception of the interests of his subject that grasps him as in a vise, and that (the subject being of course formulated in his mind) he sees as sharply the way that most presents it, and presents most of it, as against the ways that comparatively give it away. And he must there choose and stick and be consistent—and that is the hard-and-fastness and the vise. I am afraid I do differ with you if you mean that the picture can get any objective unity from any other source than that; can get it from, e.g., the "personality of the author." From the personality of the author (which, however enchanting, is a thing for the reader only, and not for the author himself, without humiliating abdications, to my sense, to count in at all) it can get nothing but a unity of execution and of tone. There is no short cut for the subject, in other words, out of the process, which, having made out most what it (the subject) is, treats it most, handles it, in that relation, with the most consistent economy. May I say, to exonerate myself a little, that when, e.g., I see you make Lucy "phenomenal" to Eleanor (one has to express it briefly and somehow,) I find myself supposing completely that you "know how you're doing it," and enjoy, as critic, the sweet peace that comes with that sense. But I haven't the sense that you "know how you're doing it" when, at the point you've reached, I see you make Lucy phenomenal, even for one attempted stroke, to the little secretary of embassy. And the reason of this is that Eleanor counts as presented, and thereby is something to go behind. The secretary doesn't count as presented (and isn't he moreover engaged, at the very moment—your moment—in being phenomenal himself, to Lucy?) and is therefore, practically, nothing to go behind. The promiscuous shiftings of standpoint and centre of Tolstoi and Balzac for instance (which come, to my eye, from their being not so much big dramatists as big painters—as Loti is a painter,) are the inevitable result of the quantity of presenting their genius launches them in. With the complexity they pile up they can get no clearness without trying again and again for new centres. And they don't always get it. However, I don't mean to say they don't get enough. And I hasten to add that you have—I wholly recognise—every right to reply to me: "Cease your intolerable chatter and dry up your preposterous deluge. If you will have the decent civility to wait, you will see that I 'present' also—anch' io!—enough for every freedom I use with it!"—And with my full assent to that, and my profuse prostration in the dust for this extravagant discourse, with all faith, gratitude, appreciation and affection, I do cease, dear Mrs. Ward, I dry up! and am yours most breathlessly,

HENRY JAMES.