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94 The Henry James Review than we know. They would banish forever, I am certain, the wishful thinking and sentimentalities of the earlier historians who sought a family romance out of their own fancies. The Jamesian triangles nearly always redouble the Walsh connection. The other questions might then be more easily answered—how a family, gifted in the extreme, could produce on the one hand two great American geniuses and alongside them the broken lives of the other siblings. We would pass perhaps from early gossip and speculation into family anthropology, sociology and psychoanalytical psychology—into backgrounds of conditioned but violated puritanism, The Blithedale Romance, the vogue of Fourier, the utopias of communes and rearranged families. Papa James seemed to be always wanting to rearrange marriage and love and divine intervention. And when a novelist produces a whole series of gubernatorial mothers in his fiction, and cultivates old ladies in London, we may pause, in the light of Mama James's letters, and the sameness of these mothers, to recognize that this too is a distinct form of evidence. The failure to produce variant mothers is in itself eloquent. Perhaps that is all I should say at this point. Bonney MacDonald—Acts of Life: The Family Vision of William and Henry James For many readers, the personal and philosophical differences between William and Henry James are well known and accepted. William, whose boyhood pleasures included drawing, science and sports, is often considered the more adventuresome and outgoing of the two brothers. The younger Henry, however, as T. S. Perry observed at Newport, was more inclined to keep his distance. "He couldn't draw like William," Perry commented, "but he could read books about art and artists. He couldn't act... but he could invent stories about himself doing some of the things his brother did." In contrast to William, Henry is often posed as the more aesthetic and passive of the two Jameses. But this interpretation can too easily eclipse the many philosophical and artistic similarities between the brothers. "Their central kinship," as F. O. Matthiessen writes, "transcend[s] all contrasts," so that we recognize not only an enduring affection but a distinctly Jamesian spirit In a word, both men were Jameses, and thus shared a "complex" and always interesting fate. Setting aside the differences between the two brothers, then, I shall explore a shared passion for art and philosophy through a wide selection of writings. My paper, therefore, is thematic, comparative, and—because of the time factor— something akin to a "sampler": from a variety of sources, I trace a vision held by William and Henry James that transcends their apparent differences and reveals their participation in a Jamesian heritage. In their respective works, each displays, first, an informed belief in subjective experience and "felt life," second, a faith in the mind's ability to influence reality, and, third, a Jamesian passion for action and courage in the face of potential defeat. For William the psychologist and Henry the writer, the subjective point of view constituted the starting point for all acts of thought. "Our judgements concerning the worth of things," as William wrote in 1899, "depend on the feelings the things arouse in us." Philosophy, as he insisted throughout Pragmatism, is thus determined by individual need and subjective experience. "Our passional Selected Papers on Henry James 95 nature" operates in our daily decisions, and it operates, though we may not acknowledge its role, in our philosophical truths. Echoing his brother, Henry emphasized the role of subjective experience in both the reading and the creating of fiction. In "The Art of Fiction," he suggested with delightful candor that nothing "will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art ... the most improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate test." With a "personal, [and] direct impression of life," the artist proceeds, as Henry wrote in his preface to "The Figure in the Carpet," according "to a bias and logic of his own." One cannot speak of the perceiver as independent from the perceived because subjective consciousness is always the point of departure. The author's choice of subject and form is thus...

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