Attention: Second Year/ Henry James

The following quotations from Henry James ( 1843-1916) will be discussed this week:

*The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million... but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher. The Portrait of a Lady ( 1908 ed) preface

*The war has used up words. (in New York Times 21 March 1915)

*Everything ran to form, and the successful books were apt to resemble little vases, skillfully moulded and chiseled, into which unclean things had been dropped. (James on the modern French novel)

*I have loved France as I have never loved a woman.

*It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

*If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

*What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

*To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

*I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

*Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

*In art economy is always beauty.

*She had an unequalled gift . . . of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

*Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

*The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

*Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?

*The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

*Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

*Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

*There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.

"The Ambassadors", Book Fifth, Chapter 3

Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.

"The Ambassadors", Book Fourth, Chapter 2