Henry James James says that the only reason for existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent

life. He compares the art of a novelist with the art of a painter. They have only a different quality of a vehicle. He describes a novel while insisting on the fact that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history. The novel should speak with tone of assurance, of the historian. He doesn't like the fact that Anthony Trollope wrote that what he wrote was making believe. James thinks that it's a terrible crime. It implies that a novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth than the historian. The task of either writer is to represent and illustrate the past. However, a novelist has more difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is not only literary. He has a lot in common with the philosopher and the painter, that's why he is more honourable than the historian. He believes that fiction is art, but that many people wouldn't agree. The Protestsant comunities assume that fiction is opposed to morality, amusement, instruction. It's different with painting... Literature should be either instructive or amusing, and there is an impression that the search for form intereferes with both. They would argue that a novel should be good, but there is no clear definition of good. They would agree that the artistic idea spoils the fun. There is a difference between a bad and a good novel. However it would be wrong to say what makes a good novel. Art which tries to reproduce life must be free. It lives upon exercise and the meaning of exercise is freedom. The only obligation to which we may hold a novel is that it is interesting. There are various ways of making it interesting, and they are succesful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind. A novel is a direct impression of life. The form should be appreciated after the fact, his standard has been indicated. The execution belongs to the author alone, it is what is most personal to him and we measure him by that. The value of different rules, which are so beautiful and so vague, is wholly in the meaning one attaches to them. The measure of reality is very difficult to fix. A sense of reality is needed to write a good novel, but it's difficult to give a recipe for calling that sense into being. There is a problem with saying that the novelist must write from his own experience. Experience is never limited and never complete. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are on a way of knowing every corner of it, this is all experience. If experience consists of impressions, we can say that impressions are experience. The advice that should be given is Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost However, exactness is important. The air of reality is the supreme virtue of a novel, it is a merit on which all its other merits depend. If there is no reality they are all as nothing, if they are there, they owe their effect to succes with which the author has produced the illusion of life. The study of this process forms the beginning and the and of the art of the novelist.

Taking notes is a good advice, but the novelist should take many and choose only a few. Characters must be clear n outline, but it's a secret how he will make them so. Description and dialogue should be melted and used together for expression. There is an old-fashioned distinction between a novel of character and a novel of incident. But what is character if not a determination of incident? James believes that the only classification of the novel he can understand is into that which has life and that which does not. These distinctions don't offer any reality or interest of the producer. Experiments with stories should be encouraged because every story is a contribution to our knowledge of what can or cannot be done. The author needs a capacity for receiving straight impressions. Discussing the problem of moral purpose, James says that there are certain things that are generally agreed not to discuss before young people. However, the absence of discussion is not a symptom of moral passion. James says that moral sense and the artistic sense are connected only because the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.