In regard to æsthetics, Henry James won the day for the tactics of the new writers. He anticipated Marcel Proust in his method of journeying at random, wherever it pleased his fancy, through the maze of psychology. He substituted what he called _appreciation for_ the old-fashioned process of dramatization. He could not dramatize and he proved a failure on the stage. He preferred to ramble and to meander. Modern fiction, thanks to him, cut loose from superficial realism. He originated the _monologue intérieur_. He did not rely on episodes to build up a novel. He had enough imagination to do without reality. Sharp and keen as he was in analysis, he was artistic in a synthetic way. His ambition was to display beautifully _the whole thing_ before our eyes. He prospected the depth of our hearts without ever losing his artistic control and his presence of mind. In this respect the distance is slight between the disquisitions of “The Wings of the Dove,” “The Golden Bowl” or “The Ambassadors,” and the modern effusions of either Sherwood Anderson or James Joyce. Both are the products of similar intellectual and artistic tactics. Immediate data of his conscience James projected into the pages of his books through an original kaleidoscope. His process was oblique and centrifugal. He composed _from the center outward_, in order to give his writings their dreamlike effect. At the end of his life he used to rave aloud, Hamlet fashion, while dictating his novels. With such a method we are not surprised to hear him condemn the realistic French writers who followed Flaubert, and whom nevertheless he admired greatly, at a time when he had not yet been able to make up his mind as to whether he could do his work in Paris or in London. How could his atavistic Puritanism allow him to swallow Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Loti, without qualifications?[15] According to him the French had only “a sensuous conscience.”