Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry James

James is doing that very Jamesian thing: turning the machinery of fiction into a moral proposition. "Character" and "incident" are the two engines most readers think of as separate - people on one side, plot on the other. He collapses them into a single circuit. Character is not a stable essence you carry around like luggage; it is what hardens, over time, out of what happens to you. And incident is not a bolt from the authorial blue; it is the visible proof of who someone is when pressure arrives.

The elegance is in the reciprocal framing. Each question answers the other, creating a closed system that quietly rebukes melodrama, coincidence, and the kind of plot that treats people as chess pieces. James is insisting that events are ethically legible: the world "illustrates" character the way a case study reveals a diagnosis. At the same time, he's warning writers that if an event doesn't grow from a person's nature, it will read as fake - not just technically flawed, but psychologically dishonest.

Context matters: late-19th-century realism, the novel trying to compete with photography, journalism, and the new authority of "the facts". James doesn't reject incident; he demands it earn its keep. His subtext is polemical and professional: craft is conscience. If you want to depict consciousness - his great obsession - you can't outsource drama to accidents. You have to stage the moment where desire, restraint, and self-deception become action.