Henry James, The Tragic Muse
James, Henry. The Tragic Music. New York: Library of America, 1989 (1890).
This one gave me a bad dream where I was running around the house screaming about the mediocrity of my own talent; but that's my problem and not the book's. Of all the meditations on art and life I've seen from James - or anyone, really - this is one of the best; it manages to treat the struggle and sacrifice of the vocation without lapsing into self-pity or cheesy Romantic notions of inner torment. The book contains both an aesthete and a working artist, but they aren't the same person; and at the end of the book, having served as a necessary goad, the aesthete vanishes ("like a symbolic personage"), leaving the artist his lot of daily work, not poetry but sober prose.
There are three or four other principal threads in the book, all done just as well - but I'm not such a pedant as to go through them all.
This one gave me a bad dream where I was running around the house screaming about the mediocrity of my own talent; but that's my problem and not the book's. Of all the meditations on art and life I've seen from James - or anyone, really - this is one of the best; it manages to treat the struggle and sacrifice of the vocation without lapsing into self-pity or cheesy Romantic notions of inner torment. The book contains both an aesthete and a working artist, but they aren't the same person; and at the end of the book, having served as a necessary goad, the aesthete vanishes ("like a symbolic personage"), leaving the artist his lot of daily work, not poetry but sober prose.
There are three or four other principal threads in the book, all done just as well - but I'm not such a pedant as to go through them all.
