The Tragic Muse [antikvár]

The Tragic Muse is one of Henry James's longest and most leisurely novels, a great cheerful murai of English life and art and talk, of the haute monde Bohemia and the artist-life as it existed on both sides of the Channel in the period just before Ibsen, the Yellow Book and the Fabians. From the opening scenes at the Paris sálon to the final moments in the stúdiós and on the stage in London, we are in a world of painters and sculptors, politicians and diplomats, ambitious actresses, complacent aesthetes and beautiful and imperative women. The növel ran through seventeen issues of the Atlantic Monthly during 1889 and 1890 and was James's "busiest" canvas and perhaps his wittiest. The Tragic Muse is vivid- and vividly talkative: for what do artists, diplomats, politicians, actresses, imperative women and complacent aesthetes in a Jamesian növel do if not talk? We are almost surfeited with sophistication and epigrams. But after we catch our breath, we recognize that the novelist has grave things to say-the grave and wise things of an artist approaching his fifties who has lived and worked and looked with the honest eyes of reality upon the humán scene. In writing the növel James tried for the first time to create a sustained picture of English life. He felt, after a long expatriation, that America was slipping away from him as a subject: and he felt, alsó, that he had by now grasped if not the English character at least the quality of the English mind. And so he embarked on The Tragic Muse as an allEnglish növel; "the name of the U.S. won't even occur," he • • Vll