_Washington Square_ (1881), Mr James' first important work that does not deal with the international situation, is a work of great genius. Into the small mould of the story of how a plain and stupid girl was jilted by a fortune-hunter when he discovered that she would be disinherited by her contemptuous father on her marriage, Mr James concentrated all the sense which he had absorbed throughout his childhood of the simple, provincial life which went on behind the brown stone of old New York. It has in it a wealth of feeling that does not seem to have originated with Mr James, just as an old wives' tale told over and over again by the fireside becomes charged with a synthetic emotion derived from the comments and expressions of innumerable auditors; and one may surmise that Catherine's tragedy was first presented to him as an item of local gossip, sympathetically discussed by his charming New York cousins and friends. Certainly the tale of this dull girl, who was "twenty years old before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe," and progressed by such clumsinesses through a career of which the only remarkable facts were that "Morris Townsend had trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring," is consecrated by an element of pity which was afterwards signally to disappear from Mr James' work. The book so beautifully expresses the woe of all those people to whom nothing ever happens, who are aware of the gay challenge of life but are prevented by something leaden in their substance from responding, that one is not surprised to find that like most good stories about inarticulate people--like _Une Vie_ and _Un Coeur Simple_--it is written with the most deliberate cunning. The story is evoked according to Turgeniev's method of calling his novels out of the inchoate real world; and what that is had better, since Mr James had been using it with increasing power since _Roderick Hudson_, be stated in his own words. "I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgeniev in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as _disponibles_, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel.