I remember reading Washington Square by Henry James just last year. It's crazy how long it takes to think back on stuff which seems clearer the longer it resonates in the brain. James' prose it surprisingly quirky in that old proper sort of way. I'll just say the book ends not how one would think it to end. I'm not very knowledgeable about " the madness of art." I have found that it relates to a psychotherapy- "the need to transform and metamorphose personal experience by means of prose, poetry, or other artistic expression" as in the artist using their depression/rage of life to control the experience of aging without the experiences they wanted to have. That's according to the American Psychiatric Association so it might be a little removed from the "goals" of thinking about it for English 300's purposes. To think about art (literature) as expressions of personal experience surely promotes and endless forum for "transforming" what life is and turns it into everything that's it's not. What I mean by this is expressing life experience in literary works changes what the experience actually was into the experience of feeling the life in the experience. James may allude that the madness about art perhaps might be the irony that art produces more feeling about life that life itself. Sure, this notion can used to psychoanalyze the person producing the experience but in no way can it summarize the feeling of the expression in art.
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