1 - A Mirror for Americans: Contemporary Criticism, 1866–1916

Summary

There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning. … The only classification of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life and that which has it not.

— Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”

JAMES DID NOT BURST, a fledgling, onto the literary scene with his first volume of stories, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875). Those stories, and other writings, already had been published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Galaxy; his first story, “A Tragedy of Error,” appeared in the Continental Monthly in February, 1864 and his first reviewed story, “A Landscape Painter,” appeared in the Nation in 1866 (Gard 3–4). By the time James's novels began to appear in book form in the 1870s, readers were familiar with them because they had been serialized, usually for more than a year. Reviewers, then, often confirmed, rather than shaped, the strong, but mixed, response that James elicited from readers. Some reviewers praised him as a “charming” and graceful fiction writer (Gard 4). But as William Dean Howells noted in his review of A Passionate Pilgrim, others felt an instant and abiding dislike. James, Howells said, “has not had to struggle with indifference, that subtlest enemy of literary reputations” (Vann 10). Yet he did have to struggle, throughout his career, to overcome persistent negative appraisal of his style and themes.