Henry James Henry James's prolific writing career spanned more than 50 years. During those years, he published novels, stories, plays, essays, and criticism. Below are excerpts from his writings on fiction as a craft, as well as an excerpt from one of his best known novels, Washington Square. Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind. One may make figures and figures without intending generalizations -- generalizations of which I have a horror. I make a couple of English ladies doing a disagreeable thing... and forthwith I find myself responsible for a representation of English manners! Nothing is my last word about anything -- I am interminably supersubtle and analytic.... The house of fiction has... not one window, but a million.... They have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from any other.... The spreading field, the human scene is the "choice of subject"; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the "literary form"; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher -- without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. -- "The Art of Fiction" (1884) I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York [Washington Square] appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honorable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare -- the look of having had something of a social history, It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority, that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal step, and sniffing up the strange odor of the ailanthus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the Square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that didn't match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and your sensations. -- Washington Square, Chapter III (1880)