The book also includes an interesting essay on Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who James read in a German translation.

He ripped into Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal for what he thought was a puerile conception of evil: "...evil for him begins outside and not inside, and consists primarily of a great deal of lurid landscape...an affair of blood and carrion and physical sickness—there must be stinking corpses and starving prostitutes and empty laudanum bottles in order that the poet shall be effectively inspired...Our impatience is of the same order as that which we should feel if a poet, pretending to pluck 'the flowers of good', should come and present us, as specimens, a rhapsody on plumcake and eau de Cologne."

In his essay on Turgenev, James proclaimed in stirring tones his own conception of reality and how the novelist had to face it: "Life is, in fact, a battle.

Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy.

The book also offered two long, instructive essays on the novelist James would always regard as his most important guide and mentor, Balzac: "He believed that he was about as creative as the Deity, and that if mankind and human history were swept away the Comédie Humaine would be a perfectly adequate substitute for them."