The Lesson of the Master

The Lesson of the Master is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Universal Review in two parts during 1888 and collected in the volume that takes its title in 1892. It is one of the central stories in James’s running argument about literary life and one of the most quoted of his shorter fictions.

The young writer Paul Overt has just published a successful first novel and arrives at an English country house party where one of his literary heroes, the established novelist Henry St George, is among the guests. St George is famous, comfortable, well married, and produces popular novels that everyone reads and that Paul Overt secretly believes are not as good as they should be. The two writers have a series of long conversations during the country house weekend. St George tells the young writer that a serious novelist cannot have a wife and family without compromising the work, that domestic comfort destroys the necessary austerity of art, and that he himself has chosen the comfortable life over the great work he might have done.

The story turns when Paul Overt, having taken the lesson seriously, leaves England to spend several years writing in solitude in continental Europe, while St George’s first wife conveniently dies. Paul returns to discover that St George has married Marian Fancourt, the young woman Paul had himself loved and given up on the basis of the master’s lesson about domestic compromise. The story ends with the question of whether St George’s lesson was sincere advice or whether it was something else, and whether Paul Overt has been outmaneuvered in his own life.

The story is funny and bitter in equal measure. James is making fun of the artistic vocation taken too seriously and also taking it seriously enough to feel the weight of the question. The lesson of the master, whatever it is, is left for the reader to interpret. The story runs about a hundred pages and is one of the most enjoyable of his middle period pieces. It pairs naturally with The Death of the Lion and The Figure in the Carpet, two other stories about literary life from the same general period.