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the only spirit he could fully serve.”
    He served it well and produced an impressive body of work—thirty-five volumes in the most inclusive posthumous edition of his fiction. “Nothing could be allowed to interfere for long with the labour from which he never rested,” his secretary eventually recalled, “except perhaps during sleep.” But the fiction itself was not enough and neither was it enough that he revised the work of his youth and “matured” those books, making them right, with countless touches that were fine, and then finer. His sacred rage took him further than that and led him to brood on all that he had done before, and then from 1907 to 1909, in the prefaces to his New York Edition, he described his own fiction and then the genre of fiction itself, which he took more seriously than anyone ever had. He presented the novel—so often in his time considered a mere entertainment—as a genuine art form that could be as rich as painting and as hard as marble. Convinced “that the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms,” he avoided talk of inspired magic, or of a poet who has drunk the milk of paradise, and instead presented a mastery entirely unrelated to any galvanizing glance of the Muse. The prefaces may seem like tracts of a new theology, but above all they work—as the first preface introduces his subject—at the demystification of art and the clearing up of the “rich, ambiguous aesthetic air.”
    These prefaces discuss the practical problems the writer faces in making a novel. They are about craft. They talk of the “novelist’s process,” his “system of observation,” the “literary arrangement,” the “constructional game,” the “steps taken and obstacles mastered,” the “thousand lures and deceits,” the “points of view,” the tricks, mistakes, shortcuts, and inventions, and ultimately how the refining novelist must, hardheadedly, “boil down so many facts in the alembic, so that the distilled result, the produced appearance, should have intensity, lucidity, brevity, beauty.” As James elucidates fiction’s exacting requirements, he presents the novelist much like the painter who knows the laws of perspective: “I have ever failed,” he writes, “to see how a coherent picture of anything is producible save by a complex of fine measurements.” He judges his own fiction technically and artistically, which is to say aesthetically. And it is only incidental that, in the critical prefaces at least, James comments on anything political, psychological, biographical, or even moral. It is art and art alone that takes the field. It is art and art alone that sweeps the horizon.
    Some said that for James the real world had been replaced by a highly artificial one, a fascinating and complex architectonic structure, but one that existed apart, and was far removed from the heat of the day. When H. G. Wells led the “painful hippopotamus” through his parody, he suggested as much, but then he turned mean: “And the elaborate copious emptiness of the whole Henry James exploit is only redeemed and made endurable by the elaborate copious wit.” In a surprisingly courteous response, the seventy-two-year-old James defended his mix of art and life: “I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my kind of expression of that.” Then Wells wrote back, churlishly, about his own “horror of dignity, finish and perfection. . . . To you literature like painting is an end, to me literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. . . . I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.” At such apostasy James finally lost patience:
    Meanwhile I absolutely dissent from the claim that there are any differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of literature aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction between a form that is (like) painting and a form