This is the story of the young Henry James—age thirty-two—deciding to make a radical break with family, Cambridge, and his native land in order to go become a novelist in Paris. Jump, for a moment, nearly to the end of the story of James’s engagement with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. It’s Virginia Woolf, in her biography of the Bloomsbury artist, critic, and aesthetic theorist Roger Fry, who recounts James’s visit in 1912—he was now close to seventy—to the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition held at the Grafton Galleries, in London. Here, in what would be a landmark exhibit for Britain, were works by Gauguin, Seurat, Cézanne, Matisse, Rouault, Picasso. Fry took James to the basement for tea, over which James expressed “the disturbed hesitations which Matisse and Picasso aroused in him,” while Fry attempted to explain “that Cézanne and Flaubert were, in a manner of speaking, after the same thing.” Woolf’s anecdote captures a number of issues. It suggests that James by 1912 was himself considered by the artistic elite—what better representatives of that than Woolf and Fry?—to be an exemplar of the movement from Victorianism to modernism, in fact the person younger generations looked to, and now called the Master, because he led the way into a new kind of fiction. Yet, the comparison of Flaubert and Cézanne, which we may find entirely apt—especially when we think about the late work of these two restless innovators—was perhaps less reassuring to James than Fry intended, in that late Cézanne probably