“In Search of a ‘Third Manner’: Henry James’s Reception of Late Nineteenth-Century Realists”

There are few authors besides Henry James who have been as prolific in their literary criticism as in their remarkably substantial production of fiction, and few if any who have provided a better window on the prevailing literary movements of their era and of the development of those movements, for better or worse, over the course of a lifetime. In his attempts to steer the novel forward, and to counter what he saw as inadvisable and dangerous paths chosen by the weighty schools of French and English realism, James’s critical pen would never tire, with two thirds of his reviews and critical works devoted to those two schools alone, and praise for later realists would rarely come without a substantial dose of harsh criticism. It is important to remember that James saw successive novelists in both the French and English schools in distinctively genealogical terms: with Honoré de Balzac and Walter Scott as the patriarchs, followed by the second generation (Flaubert and Georges Sand to the south, Dickens and Thackeray to the north), succeeded in turn by the ‘grandsons of Balzac’ and of Scott (among others, Zola, Goncourt and Maupassant in France, Trollope and Eliot in England). And it would be this third generation whom James would most often take to task for leading the novel astray, and for either neglecting the key lessons of their wiser elders or for instead exacerbating some of the few artistic flaws that James felt their ‘grandfathers’ had committed. A closer look at James’s critical reception of these two dominant realist strains of the nineteenth century, and at his equally pointed remarks and advice given to other, younger national schools of realism that were trying to steer a path between the weighty influence of the French and the English, provides a unique perspective on one of the most diverse and decidedly international literary movements that has ever come about. We discover what James saw as the distinct yet occasionally shared shortcomings of the two rival schools, and how he attempted to carefully guide younger, more ‘provincial’ schools of realism in the U.S. and on the periphery of Europe down some preferred middle path or ‘third manner’ (HJLL, 226)—which will provide the double focus of this study. Significantly, through these often vituperative remarks and calls to order, we also discover how James endeavoured to develop his own fiction in reaction to those supposed flaws, so as to personally drive the realist novel toward some more felicitous and meritorious hybrid, and how strongly his call to move forward inherently involved a need to look backward.