I have read The Wings of the Dove (for which all thanks!) but what shall I say of a book constructed on a method which so belies everything that I acknowledge as law? You’ve reversed every traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid) and have created a new genre littéraire which I can’t help thinking perverse, but in which you nevertheless succeed.

—from a letter to Henry James (Fall 1902)

In trying to form anything like a comprehensive estimate of Mr. James’s mature work, the effeminacy of it has to be counted with. One cannot call it virile, and—with the best examples still with us—hardly Saxon. —from Critic (November 1902)

—from Critic (November 1902)

[The Wings of the Dove] consists of 576 closely printed pages. We were curious to know the average number of dashes, commas and semi-colons on a page; and we found the calculation entirely beyond our powers. Suffice it to say it is enormous; and most of these interruptions serve no purpose save that of making the reading more difficult. The effect is irritating: what might have been clean prose is broken, finicked, piffled away. Yet we see plainly enough that such lame writing is essential to the effect Mr. James wished to get. He wanted to make us feel all those artificial, subtle, trifling or meaningless changes of mood; and the more he makes us feel them the more artificial, trifling, meaningless we find them, and the less inclined we are to read on. We even suggest that the achievement of such a prose has become with Mr. James somewhat of an end in itself. The incessant ‘perhaps’ -es, and ‘consciousness of something deeper still,’ and ‘clearly, as yet, seeing nothing’—these not only give that effect of blurred vision and lack of definite intention, but weave into a word-tissue which Mr. James seems to like and which we heartily dislike. It is a word-tissue that hides the author’s thought—that gives one a sense of his reserve, aloofness. There is no energy, passion, color, and because there is no motion, there is no rhythm in this prose. The prose becomes as trivial as the trivial moods aroused by trivial middle-class things it is meant to express; and not from Mr. Henry James nor another do we require 576 pages of such prose fine-spun out with such an object.

—January 1903

One is never set at rest by Mr. Henry James’s novels. His books end as an episode in life ends. You remain with the sense of the life still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is felt in that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word has been read. It is eminently satisfying, but it is not final. Mr. Henry James, great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the impossible.

—from North American Review (January 1905)

I’ve read nothing of Henry James’s that didn’t suggest a scholar; so there shall be none of the old taunts—why does he not write complicated stories? Why does he always avoid decisive action? In his stories a woman never leaves the house with her lover, nor does a man ever kill another man or himself. Why is nothing ever accomplished ? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide are of common occurrence; but Mr. James’s people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery has happened before the story begins, suicide or adultery happens some years after the characters have left the stage, but in front of the reader nothing happens.... Is there really much to say about people who live in stately houses and eat and drink their fill every day of the year? The lady, it is true, may have a lover, but the pen finds scanty pasturage of the fact; and in James’s novels the lady only considers the question on the last page, and the gentleman looks at her questioningly.

—from Confessions of a Young Man (1916)

How consciously Henry James set himself to look for the weak place in our amour of insensibility it is not necessary to decide. Let us turn to another story, The Friends of Friends, and judge whether he succeeded. This is the story of a man and woman who have been trying for years to meet but only accomplish their meeting on the night of the woman’s death. After her death the meetings are continued, and when this is divined by the woman he is engaged to marry she refuses to go on with the marriage. The relationship is altered. Another person, she says, has come between them. ‘You see her—you see her; you see her every night!’ It is what we have come to call a typically Henry James situation. It is the same theme that was treated with enormous elaboration in The Wings of the Dove. Only there, when Milly has come between Kate and Densher and altered their relationship for ever, she has ceased to exist; here the anonymous lady goes on with her work after death. And yet—does it make very much difference? Henry James has only to take the smallest steps and he is over the border. His characters with their extreme fineness of perception are already half way out of the body. There is nothing violent in their release. They seem rather to have achieved at last what they have long been attempting—communication without obstacle. But Henry James, after all, kept his ghosts for his ghost stories. Obstacles are essential to The Wings of the Dove.

—from Times Literary Supplement (December 22, 1921 )

Henry James had turned his back on one of the great events in the world’s history, the rise of the United States, in order to report tittle-tattle at tea parties in English country houses.

—from Cakes and Ale: or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930)