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that is (like) architecture for wholly null and void. There is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically “for use” that doesn’t leave any other art whatever exactly as much so; and so far as literature being irrelevant to the literary report upon life, and to its being made as interesting as possible, I regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. 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.
    It is an astonishing claim. James does not suggest that art explores or deepens life, and neither does he say that art exists for its own sake. Art makes life and makes importance, and with such an assertion the ordinary way of the world—so rich and easy in its gorgeous formlessness—becomes a hazy, dubious, second-best thing. Here it is art and only art that might touch the world with a consecrated hand and make it live, while the world—as beautiful, languid, and as heavy as Michelangelo’s Adam—just waits.
    But James understood that when “life” moves onto a subordinate plain, there can be trouble—for the artist, for the writer, even for the reader—and so an elusive balance preoccupies the fiction. As far back as “The Madonna of the Future,” an equivocating painter wastes both all his life and all his art, and in Roderick Hudson a beautiful woman lures a sculptor away from his sacred rage—and everything collapses. When, in “The Lesson of the Master,” the acolyte asks if “the artist shouldn’t marry,” the Master says he “does so at his peril—he does so at his cost.” But then the Master himself marries and the lesson becomes uncertain.
    As he was about to grow old, James broadened the question and weighed the more general life of the mind against the more frankly active life, which in the late fiction often becomes the more frankly sexual life. Vaguely artistic but definitely contemplative people in The Ambassadors, in “The Beast in the Jungle,” and in “The Jolly Corner” eventually ask if they have failed “to live,” and late in life each has a moment of blasting regret. If, a year before he died and under biting attack from Wells, James denied any anxiety concerning the schism between art’s “sacred hardness” and the scramble of “real” life, he had in fact often troubled over the disquieting split: “Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection.” When, in the 1892 “The Real Thing,” a book illustrator of an “édition de luxe” uses a real gentleman and a real lady as models for images of the upper class, the sketches turn out “execrable.” But when an Italian orangemonger and a vulgar Cockney named Miss Churm (“She couldn’t spell, and she loved beer”) pose as such grand people, the “alchemy of art” succeeds, and the illustrations turn out fine. The real thing, whatever that is.
    Although there is no question about it—for Henry James art offered the best chance for some kind of supreme achievement—he would still question art itself. For centuries its myriad images had been dragged down every gleaming hall and then jammed up high on the altars right next to God, and so art had grown spoiled and soft. But things were different now and now art had to fight for its place. James provided his interrogation—in his fiction and in his criticism—just as the twentieth century was about to ask hard questions about art’s value and art’s claim to truth. James knew that if it was to remain important—and it may no longer be important today—art needed to be challenged and fostered, repelled and embraced, and made generally tougher, and that is what he did. Over a long career he grappled with it and tested it—aesthetically, morally, and pragmatically—with great intelligence and with something that became increasingly rare after his