Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 261the ‘moral’ sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing
it.” To create that “felt life,” an imaginative experience for the reader, James experi-
mented with narrative structure and texture, developing patterns of character or
imagery and moments of epiphany – and, above all, with point of view. “The house
of fiction,” James insisted, “has ... not one window, but a million – a number of pos-
sible windows ... every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable ... by the
need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.” It mattered
hugely, James knew, which window or windows the novelist chose to tell his tale
because, in a variation of the theory of relativity or the indeterminacy or uncertainty
principle of Werner Heisenberg (both of which were becoming current at the time
James was still writing), what you saw depended on where you stood. James was not
a moral relativist, by any means, but he became increasingly a psychological one. His
constant experiments with narrative viewpoint, which were perhaps to be his major
contribution to the developing aesthetics of the novel, sprang ultimately from the
sense he shared with many of his contemporaries in science as well as art that our
knowledge of reality is contingent on perspective.
Howells might have been more interested in social justice and the simplicities of
realism than James; James might have been more concerned with a kind of secular
mysticism of consciousness and the indeterminate, contingent character of the
real. But it is to Howells’s credit that, as critic and editor, he was among the first to
recognize James’s talent. “You showed me the way and opened me the door,” James
wrote to Howells in gratitude in 1912; “you wrote to me, and confessed yourself
struck with me – I have never forgotten the beautiful thrill of that.” Credit is due to
Howells all the more, perhaps, because as they knew, the two men came from very
different backgrounds. James was born in New York City to a wealthy, patrician
family, the grandson of an Irish immigrant who had amassed a large fortune. His
father, Henry James, Sr. (1811–1882), acquired a reputation as a moral and social
philosopher, developing his own form of liberal Christianity and ideas for social
reform in books like Christianity the Logic of Creation (1857) and Substance and
Shadow; or Morality and Religion in Their Relation to Life (1863). Henry James,
Sr. encouraged intellectual experiment in his sons and gave them the freedom to
develop their own systems of morality and discipline. The results were positive.
While Henry was to grow up and into a dedication to literature, the eldest son
William James (1842–1910) was to become the foremost American philosopher of
his day, developing his ideas about psychology and religion and his view that an
idea has meaning only in relation to its consequences in feeling and action in,
respectively, The Principles of Psychology (1890), The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902), and Pragmatism (1907). These enlightened principles did not extend to
women, however. On the contrary, Henry James, Sr. argued that “Woman” was not
truly a person but “a form of personal affection,” whose mission it was to redeem
man from his natural egotism and brutality. Such views, not untypical for the time,
meant that Alice James (1848–1892), the youngest child and only daughter, was
denied the formal education given to her brothers. Her family, while respecting
her abilities – she was, among other things, an astute critic of both her famousGGray_c03.indd 261ray_c 03 .indd 261 8 8/1/2011 7:54:20 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 20 AM