The Letters of William James, Vol. 1 · William James
WM. JAMES.
_To Henry James._ CAMBRIDGE, _May 9, 1886_. MY DEAR HARRY,--I seize my pen the first leisure moment I have had for a week to tell you that I have read "The Bostonians" in the full flamingness of its bulk, and consider it an exquisite production. My growling letter was written to you before the end of Book I had appeared in the "Atlantic"; and the suspense of narrative in that region, to let the relation of Olive and Verena grow, was enlarged by the vacant months between the numbers of the magazine, so that it seemed to me so slow a thing had ne'er been writ. Never again shall I attack one of your novels in the magazine. I've only read one number of the "Princess Casamassima"--though I hear all the people about me saying it is the best thing you've done yet. To return to "The Bostonians"; the two last books are simply sweet. There isn't a hair wrong in Verena, you've made her neither too little nor too much--but absolutely _liebenswürdig_. It would have been so easy to spoil her picture by some little excess or false note. Her moral situation, between Woman's rights and Ransom, is of course deep, and her discovery of the truth on the Central Park day, etc., inimitably given.
Ransom's character, which at first did not become alive to me, does so, handsomely, at last. In Washington, Hay told me that Secretary Lamar was delighted with it; Hay himself ditto, but especially with "Casamassima." I enclose a sheet from a letter of Gurney's but just received. You see how seriously he takes it. And I suppose he's right from a profoundly serious point of view,--_i.e._, he would be right if the characters were real,--but as the story stands, I don't feel his objection. The _fancy_ is more tickled by R.'s victory being complete. I hear very little said of the book, and I imagine it is being less read than its predecessors. The truth about it, combining what I said in my previous letter with what I have just written, seems to be this, that it is superlatively well done, provided one admits that method of doing such a thing at all. Really the _datum_ seems to me to belong rather to the region of fancy, but the treatment to that of the most elaborate realism. One can easily imagine the story cut out and made into a bright, short, sparkling thing of a hundred pages, which would have been an absolute success.
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