k writes as the editor of the _Letters_. Mrs.
Wharton adds to criticism of the _Letters_ illuminating personal
reminiscences.

2. One of the important _Prefaces_ on James's theory of the novel and his
method of work is that to the _Portrait of a Lady_, from which the
extract below is taken. In speaking of Turgenev's attitude toward his
characters, James says:

He saw them, in that fashion, as disponible, saw them subject to the
chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly but
then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most
bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together
the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the
creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to
produce and to feel.

"To arrive at these things is to arrive at my 'story,' he said, "and
that's the way I look for it. The result is that I'm often accused
of not having 'story' enough...."

So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I
drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may
reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image _en
disponible_. It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have
met for just that blest habit of one's own imagination, the trick of
investing some conceived or encountered individual, some brace or
group of individuals, with the germinal property and authority. I
was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of
their setting--a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which
struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse.
I might envy, though I couldn't emulate, the imaginative writer so
constituted as to see his fable first and to make out his agents
afterwards: I could think so little of any situation that didn't
depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and
thereby on their way of taking it....

The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree
of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which
his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its
ability to "grow" with due freshness and straightness any vision of
life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality. That
element is but another name for the