January 1, 1944
Three Portraits from Gide’s Journal
[We now have André Gide’s Journal in a collected edition which covers the fifty years of his life from 1889 to 1939. It is a great possession, a document of […]
January 1, 1944
The Blood of a Poet
Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète is one of the authentic classics ‘bi of the cinema, in the small group that includes Caligari, The Ten Days that Shook the World, some […]
September 26, 1943
In the Country of the Blue
We are now about to assay the deep bias, the controlling, characteristic tension in the fiction of Henry James as it erupts in those tales where the theme is that […]
September 26, 1943
Henry and William: Two Notes
A radical temperamental difference seems to separate Henry James from his brother, orienting them towards opposite quarters. This difference expresses itself in many ways, but most obviously through the countries […]
September 26, 1943
Sensibility and Technique: Preface to a Critique
“There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth … than that of the perfect dependence of the ‘moral’ sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life […]
September 26, 1943
Myth and Dialectic in Later Novels
The general occasions of the “last period” are tolerably clear, if scarcely of the same order of being. There is, first, the gradual loss of the larger audience reached by […]
September 26, 1943
James and the Plastic Arts
At the outset of recapturing his memories in A Small Boy and Others, James declared that the only terms in which life had treated him to experience were “in the […]
September 26, 1943
The Demuth Pictures
In his preface to The Golden Bowl Henry James explains, at some length, why he chose purely photographic decorations, rather than illustrations, for the New York Edition of his Novels […]
September 22, 1943
James’s Idea of Dramatic Form
It has often been pointed out that James’s attempt to write for the theatre marks an important turning point in his career. He had behind him a certain success as […]
September 22, 1943
The Days Before
Of late, when America has somewhat reluctantly decided to claim Henry James as its own, in spite of his having renounced so serious an obligation as his citizenship, there has […]
September 22, 1943
James the Melodramatist
In a foolish essay entitled “Books and You,” Mr. Somerset Maugham, while scorning James’s work as trivial and superficial, is nevertheless forced to admit that it somehow “keeps the reader […]
July 1, 1943
Positive and Near-Positive Aesthetics
I don’t so very much mind this being chided by Miss Herschberger for not speaking handsomely enough about poetry. In the remarks of mine to which she refers I was […]