James’s invocation of Turgenev’s authority in all these matters is significant. The two men knew one another in their Paris years, and while the American novelist owed a greater technical debt to other writers, Turgenev’s artistic example was vital to him as a novelist who put art above polemics without falling into the opposite trap of what James saw as sterile Flaubertian artifice. The trick was to maintain the balance between realism and formalism. Turgenev does this with consummate art, and James achieves it in The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, which followed The Portrait of a Lady in 1885 and 1886. In all these novels we are aware of the writer’s passionate detachment: his determination to see the case from all sides which produces the typically Jamesian sense of luminous sympathy.