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women.
    In the novel, only Olive Chancellor achieves tragic dimensions, and it is because of all the characters in the book she feels most, and feeling is the domain where Henry James is transcendent. The painfully private Olive Chancellor will in the end suffer the horror of public exposure and failure as well as the loss of the person whom she loves most passionately in the world, and it is a fate she has brought upon herself. Her culpability, however, doesn’t in the least diminish the depth or reality of her pain or this reader’s immense pity for her. Stiff, humorless, prejudiced, and half blind to the reasons for her actions, the little Boston spinster becomes, in her profound sorrow and humiliation, heroic:
As soon as Ransom looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to remain with him for ever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate, rigid, she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale, glittering eyes straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Ransom had a vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there and then, bristling with steel or lurid with fire, she would have rushed on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was (p. 412).
    “In the arts,” James wrote, “feeling is always meaning” (quoted in Edel, Henry James: A Life, p. 250). For me, these words illuminate not only the novelist’s ars poetica but also James’s great strength as a writer. His experience of the world and his great empathy for other people produced a body of work that adamantly refused ready categories, received ideas, and preordained notions of all kinds in favor of the difficult, strange, tender, and always multifarious arena of human relations and emotions. I think James felt that every attempt to reduce life to a system of beliefs—religious, political, or philosophical—must inevitably become a form of lying.
    Late in his life, he tried to explain his wariness of system to two politically engaged writers: George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. As a member of the committee that had rejected a play by James, Shaw told its author in a letter, “People don’t want works of art from you. They want help, they want above all encouragement” (quoted in a note in Selected Letters, p. 380). In his response, James argued that “all direct ‘encouragement’—the thing you enjoin me on—encouragement of the short cut and say ‘artless’ order, is really more likely than not to be shallow and misleading” (Selected Letters, p. 379). Wells had hurt James by publishing a cruel attack on the older writer in a satirical book called Boon, The Mind of the Race (1915), in which he had, among other things, criticized his “view of life and literature.” To Wells, James wrote, “I have no view of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner” (Selected Letters, p. 430). And later in the same letter, he elaborated further, “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process” (p. 431). James believed in the power of art, not because he thought it would change the world or because he imagined it could be a mirror of life. Art, he explains to Wells, is “for the extension of life, which is the novel’s best gift” (p. 431).
    James was probably too subtle for his correspondents, but the idea of “extension” makes sense to me because art and the world can’t be as easily divided as we sometimes imagine. One comes from the other and