The Real Thing and Other Tales

The Real Thing (1892) was written at a time when James, distressed by the public's seeming indifference to his novels, courted a wider audience with stage plays, and set himself to ration his prose fiction. One aspect of the life-art antithesis that preoccupied him at this time is illustrated by this story, an engaging sermon of "the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real thing could be so much less precious than the unreal." The narrator is a painter who is unable to use a mode...