realism
not to select exceptional persons or occurrences, but to take average men
and women and their average experiences. The realists protest that the
moving incident is not their trade, and that the stories have all been
told. They want no plot and no hero. They will tell no rounded tale
with a _denouement_, in which all the parts are distributed, as in the
fifth act of an old-fashioned comedy; but they will take a transcript
from life and end when they get through, without informing the reader
what becomes of the characters. And they will try to interest this
reader in "poor real life" with its "foolish face." Their acknowledged
masters are Balzac, George Eliot, Turgenieff, and Anthony {585} Trollope,
and they regard novels as studies in sociology, honest reports of the
writer's impressions, which may not be without a certain scientific value
even.

Mr. James's peculiar province is the international novel; a field which
he created for himself, but which he has occupied in company with
Howells, Mrs. Burnett, and many others. He was born into the best
traditions of New England culture, his father being a resident of
Cambridge, and a forcible writer on philosophical subjects, and his
brother, William James, a professor in Harvard University. The novelist
received most of his schooling in Europe, and has lived much abroad, with
the result that he has become half denationalized and has engrafted a
cosmopolitan indifference upon his Yankee inheritance. This, indeed, has
constituted his opportunity. A close observer and a conscientious
student of the literary art, he has added to his intellectual equipment
the advantage of a curious doubleness in his point of view. He looks at
America with the eyes of a foreigner and at Europe with the eyes of an
American. He has so far thrown himself out of relation with American
life that he describes a Boston horsecar or a New York hotel table with a
sort of amused wonder. His starting-point was in criticism, and he has
always maintained the critical attitude. He took up story-writing in
order to help himself, by practical experiment, in his chosen art of
literary criticism, and his volume on {586} _French Poets and Novelists_,
1878, is by no means the least valuable of his books. His short stories
in the magazines were collected into a volume in 1875, with the title, _A
Passionate Pilgrim and Other Stories_. One or two of these, as the _Last
of the Valerii_ and the _Mad