BOOKS
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a play of Oscar Wilde's, which he thought immensely inferior–
though it was immensely superior-was a London success.
But if his response
to
Wilde was inadequate, he showed an abil–
ity in this period to come to terms with the literary examples set by
other writers. He had not liked Ibsen at first, but grew to appreciate
his combination of naturalism and symbolism, finding in it some–
thing to instruct his own writing not for the stage but for the printed
page. In his renewed contact with the "sons" of Flaubert and
Turgenev-the de Goncourts, Daudet, de Maupassant, and Zola–
he moved beyond the dismissive estimations he had given their work
in the seventies. He spent an evening with the group in 1884 and
was impressed by their seriousness, detecting" the torment of style,
the high standard of it, the effort to say something in a language in
which
everything
has been said and resaid" till the language "is all
one trampled slosh-one has to look forever to see where one can put
down his step." Daudet, he reported, "wished to know how it was in
English." "What do you think I ought to have told him?" he asked
a friend. He wrote of his own admiration for their efforts. "They do
the only kind of work, today, that I respect; and in spite of their fero–
cious pessimism and their handling of unclean things they are at
least serious and honest" while, he added, "the floods of tepid soap
and water which under the name of novels are being vomited forth
in England seem to me, by contrast, to do little honor to our race."
It was the French example that he assimilated, though still deviating
from it, in the two great novels of society that were written in this
period-
The Bostonians
and
The Princess Casamassima.
James's interest in the nature of modern society has always
been underestimated. These letters give repeated indication of his
awareness of the drift of public life. The Victorian world, like a great
liner with its ordered decks and classes, was suddenly, in the
eighties, revealed as a decrepit vessel threatened with fire in the
hold, and mutiny. English upper-class life, which had once seemed
properly represented by the exemplary Lord Warburton in
The
Portrait oj a Lady,
was now seething with scandals of every kind, and
J ames now knew personally the individuals concerned. Politics was
as "putrid" and disorderly as the private life of these rulers:
"Gladstone is ill and bewildered, the mess in the Soudan unspeak–
able, London is full of wailing widows and weeping mothers, the
hostility of Bismarck extreme, the danger of complications with
