No More Learning

The laziness of an uncritical period can be nowhere more blatant than in the inherited habit of talking about authors as a whole. It is perhaps the sediment from an age daft over great figures or a way of displaying social gush, the desire for a celebrity at all costs, rather than a care of letters.
To talk in any other way demands an acquaintance with the work of an author, a price few conversation- alists care to pay, ma che! - It is the man with inherited opinions who talks about "Shelley," making no distinc- tion between the author of the Fifth Act of "The Cenci"
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andofthe"SensitivePlant. " Notbutwhattheremay be a personal virtu in an author--appraised, however, from the best of his work when, that is, it is correctly appraised. PeopleaskmewhatJamestoread. Heisa very uneven author; not all of his collected edition has marks of permanence.
One can but make one's own suggestion:
"The American," "French Poets and NoveHsts," "The Europeans," "Daisy Miller," "Eugene Pickering," "Washington Square," "A Bundle of Letters," "Portrait of a Lady," "Pandora," "The Pupil," "Brooksmith," "What Maisie Knew," and "The Awkward Age" (if one is "doing it all"), "Europe," "Four Meetings," "The Ambassadors," "The American Scene," "The Finer Grain" (all the volume, i. e. , "The Velvet Glove," "Mona Montravers," "Round of Visits," "Crapey Cornelia," "Bench of Desolation"), "The Middle Years" (post- humous) and "The Ivory Tower" (notes first).
I "go easy" on the more cobwebby volumes; the most Jamesian are indubitably "The Wings of a Dove" and "The Golden Bowl"; upon them devotees will fasten, but the potential devotee may as well find his aptitude in the stories of "The Finer Grain" volume where cer- tain exquisite titillations will come to him as readily as anywhere else. If he is to bask in Jamesian tickle, noth- ing will restrain him and no other author will to any such extent afford him equal gratifications.
If, however, the reader does not find delectation in the list given above, I think it fairly useless for him to embark on the rest.
Part of James is a caviare, part I must reject accord- ing to my lights as bad writing; another part is a spe- cialite, a pleasure for certain temperaments only; the part I have set together above seems to me maintain-
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able as literature. One can definitely say : "this is good" hold the argumentative field, suffer comparison with other writers; with, say, the De Goncourt, or De Mau- passant. Iamnotimpertinentlythrowingbooksonthe scrap-heap; there are certain valid objections to James; there are certain standards which one may believe in, and having stated them, one is free to state that any author does not comply with them; granting always that there may be other standards with which he complies, or over which he charmingly or brilliantly triumphs.
James does not. "feel" as solid as Flaubert; he does not give us "Everyman," but on the other hand, he was aware of things which Flaubert was not aware of, and in certain things supersedes the author of "Madame Bovary. "
He appears at times to write around and around a thing and not always to emerge from the "amorous plan" of what he wanted to present, into definite presentation.
He does not seem to me at all times evenly skillful in catching the intonations of speech. He recalls the New England "a" in the "Lady's" small brothers "Ha-ard" (Haahr-d) but only if one is familiar with the phonetics, described; but (vide the beginning of "The Birthplace") one is not convinced that he really knows (by any sure instinct) how people's voices would sound. Some re- marks are in key, some obviously factitious.
He gives us more of his characters by description than he can by any attribution of conversation, save perhaps by the isolated and discreet remarks of Brook- smith.
His emotional centre is in being sensitive to the feci of the place or to the tonality of the person.
It is with his own so beautiful talk, his ability to hear his own voice in the rounded paragraph, that he is aptest
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to charm one. I find it often though not universally hard to "hear" his characters spearking. I have noted various places where the character notably stops speak-
ing and the author interpolates words of his own; sen- tences that no one but Henry James could in any cir- cumstances have made use of. Beyond which state- ments I see no great concision or any clarity to be gained by rearranging my perhaps too elliptical comments on individual books.
Honest criticism, as I conceive it, cannot get much further than saying to one's reader exactly what one would say to the friend who approaches one's bookshelf asking: "What the deuce shall I read? " Beyond this there is the "parlor game," the polite essay, and there
is the official pronouncement, with neither of which we are concerned.
Of all exquisite writers James is the most colloquial, yet in the first edition of his "French Poets and Novel- ists," his style, save for a few scattered phrases, is so little unusual that most of the book seems, superficially, as if it might have been written by almost any one. It contahis some surprising lapses . . . as bad as any in Mr. Hueffer or even in Mr. Mencken. It is interesting largely in that it shows us what our subject had to escape from.
Let us grant at once that his novels show him, all through his life, possessed of the worst possible taste in pictures, of an almost unpunctured ignorance of painting, of almost as great a lack of taste as that which he attributes to the hack-work and newspaper critiques ofTheophileGautier. Letusadmitthat"painting"to Henry James probably meant, to the end of his life, the
worst possible late Renaissance conglomerations.
Let us admit that in 1876, or whenever it was, his
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taste in poetry inclined to the swish of De Musset, that it very likely never got any further. By "poetry" he very possibly meant the "high-falutin" and he eschewed it in certain forms; himself taking still higher falutes in a to-be-developed mode of his own.
I doubt if he ever wholly outgrew that conception of the (by him so often invoked) Daughters of Memory. He arrived truly at a point from which he could look back upon people who "besought the deep blue sea to roll. " Poetry to him began, perhaps, fuUfledged, spring- ing Minerva-like from the forehead of George Gordon, Lord Byron, and went pretty much to the bad in Charles Baudelaire; it did not require much divination by 1914
("The Middle Years") to note that he had found Tenny- son rather vacuous and that there "was something in" Browning.
James was so thoroughly a recorder of people, of their atmospheres, society, personality, setting; so wholly the artist of this particular genre, that it was impossible for him ever to hold a critical opinion of art out of key with the opinion about him--except possibly in so far as he might have ambitions for the novel, for his own partic- ular metier. His critical opinions were simply an ex- tension of his being in key with the nice people who "impressed" themselves on his gelatine "plate. " (This is a theoretical generalization and must be taken cum grano. )
We may, perhaps, take his adjectives on De Musset as a desperate attempt to do "justice" to a man with whom he knew it impossible for him to sympathize. There is, however, nothing to hinder our supposing that he saw in De Musset's "gush" something for him impossible and that he wished to acknowledge it. Side by side
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with this are the shreds of Back Bay or Buffalo, the mid-week-prayer-meeting point of view.
His most egregious sHp is in the essay on Baudelaire, thesentencequotedbyHueffer. * Notwithstandingthis, he does effectively put his nippers on Baudelaire's weak- ness :
"A good way to embrace Baudelaire at a glance is to say that he was, in his treatment of evil, exactly what Hawthorne was not--Hawthorne, who felt the thing at its source, deep in the human consciousness. Baude- laire's infinitely slighter volume of genius apart, he was a sort of Hawthorne reversed. It is the absence of
this metaphysical quality in his treatment of his favorite subjects (Poe was his metaphysician, and his devotion sustained him through a translation of 'Eureka! ') that exposes him to that class of accusations of which M. Edmond Scherer's accusation of feeding upon pourriture is an example; and, in fact, in his pages we never know withwhatwearedealing. Weencounteraninextricable confusion of sad emotions and vile things, and we are at a loss to know whether the subject pretends to appeal to our conscience or--we were going to say--to our olfac- tories. 'Le Mai ? ' we exclaim ; 'you do yourself too much honor. This is not Evil ; it is not the wrong ; it is simply thenasty! ' Ourimpatienceisofthesameorderasthat which we should feel if a poet, pretending to pluck 'the flowers of good,' should come and present us, as speci- mens, a rhapsody on plum-cake and eatt de Cologne. "
Here as elsewhere his perception, apart from the read- ability of the work, is worthy of notice.
* "For a poet to be realist is of course nonsense", and, as Hueffer says, such a sentence from such a source is enough to make one despair of human nature.
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Hueffer says * that James befauds Balzac. I cannot see it. I can but perceive Henry James wiping the floor with the author of "Eugenie Grandet," pointing out all his qualities, but almightily wiping the floor with him. He complains that Gautier is lacking in a concern about supernatural hocus-pocus and that Flaubert is lacking. If Balzac takes him to any great extent in, James with his inherited Swedenborgianism is perhaps thereby laid open to Balzac.
It was natural that James should write more about the bulky author of "La Comedie Humaine" than about the others; here was his richest quarry, here was there most to note and to emend and to apply so emended to processes of his own. From De Maupassant, De Gon- court or Baudelaire there was nothing for him to ac- quire.
His dam'd fuss about furniture is foreshadowed in Balzac, and all the paragraphs on Balzac's house-fur- nishing propensities are of interest in proportion to our interest in, or our^ boredom with, this part of Henry James's work.
What, indeed, could he have written of the De Gon- courts save that they were a little dull but tremendously right in their aim? Indeed, but for these almost auto- biographical details pointing to his growth out of Balzac, all James would seem but a corollary to one passage in a De Goncourt preface:
"Le jour ou I'analyse cruelle que mon ami, M. Zola, et peutetre moi-meme avons apportee dans la peinture du bas de la societe sera reprise par un ecrivain de talent, et employee a la reproduction des hommes et des femmes du monde, dans les milieux d' education et de distinction
* Ford Madox Hueflfer's volume on Henry James.
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--ce jour-la seulement le classicisme et sa queue seront tues. . . .
"Le Realisme n'a pas en eflfet I'unique mission de decrire ce qui est bas, ce qui est repugnant. . . .
"Nous avons commence, nous, par la canaille, parce que la femme et I'homme du peuple, plus rapproches de la nature et de la sauvagerie, sont des creatures simples et peu compliquees, tandis que le Parisien et la Parisienne
' de la societe, ces civilises excessifs, dont I'originalite tranchee est faite toute de nuances, toute de demi-teintes, toute de ces riens insaisissables, pareils aux riens coquets et neutres avec lesquels se fagonne le caractere d'une
' toilette distinguee de femme, demandant des annees pour qu'on les perce, pour qu'on les sache, pour qu'on les attrape--et le romancier du plus grand genie, croyez- le bien, ne les devinera jamais ces gens de salon, avec les racontars d'amis qui vont pour lui a la decouverte dans le monde. . . .
"Ce projet de roman qui devait se passer dans le grand monde, dans le monde le plus quintessencie, et dont nous rassemblions lentement et minutieusement les elements delicats et fugaces, je I'abandonnais apres la mort de men frere, convaincu de I'impossibilite de le reussir tout seul. "
But this particular paragraph could have had little to do with the matter. "French Poets and Novelists" was published in '78 and Edmond De Goncourt signed theprefaceto"LesFreresZemganno"in'79. Thepara- graphs quoted are interesting, however, as showing De Goncourt's state of mind in that year. He had prob- ably been preaching in this vein long before setting the words on paper, before getting them printed.
If ever one man's career was foreshadowed in a few
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sentences of another, Henry James's is to be found in this paragraph.
It is very much as if Ije said: I will not be a mega- therium botcher like Balzac ; there is nothing to be said about these De Goncourts, but one must try to be rather more interesting than they are in, let us say, "Madame Gervaisais. " *
Proceeding with the volume of criticism, we find that "LeJeuneH. "simplydidn't"get"Flaubert; thathewas much alive to the solid parts of Turgenev. He shows himself very apt, as we said above, to judge the merits of a novelist on the ground that the people portrayed by the said novelist are or are not suited to reception into the household of Henry James senior; whether, in short, Emma Bovary or Frederic or M. Arnoux would have spoiled the so delicate atmosphere, have juggled the so fine susceptibilities of a refined 23rd Street family at the time of the Philadelphia "Centennial. "
I find the book not so much a sign that Henry James was "disappointed," as HuefFer puts it, as that he was simply and horribly shocked by the literature of his con- tinental forebears and contemporaries.
It is only when he gets to the Theatre Franqais that he finds something which really suits him. Here there is order, tradition, perhaps a slight fustiness (biit a quite pardonable fustiness, an arranged and suitable fustiness having its recompense in a sort of spiritual quiet) ; here, at any rate, was something decorous, something not to be found in Concord or in Albany. And it is easy to imagine the young James, not illuminated by De
* It is my personal feeling at the moment that La Fille Elisa is worth so much more than all Balzac that the things are as out of scale as a sapphire and a plum pudding, and that Elisa, despite the dull section, is worth most of James's writing. This is, however, aside from the question we are discussing.
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Goncourt's possible conversation or writing, not even following the hint gvven in his essay on Balzac and Balzacian furniture, but sitting before Madame Nathalie in "Le Village" and resolving to be the Theatre Frangais of the novel.
A resolution which he may be said to have carried out to the great enrichment of letters.
II
Strictures on the work of this period are no great detraction. "French Poets and Novelists" gives us a point from which to measure Henry James's advance. Genius showed itself partly in the escape from some of his original limitations, partly in acquirements. His art at length became "second nature," became perhaps half unconscious; or in part wholly unconscious; in other partsperhapstoohighlyconscious. Atanyrateinsun- nier circumstances he talked exactly as he wrote, the same elaborate paragraph beautifully attaining its ? cli- max; the same sudden incision when a brief statement
could dispose of a matter.
Be it said for his style : he is seldom or never involved
when a direct bald statement will accurately convey his
Style apart, I take it that the hatred of tyrannies was as great a motive as any we can ascribe to Galileo or Leonardo or to any other great figure, to any other mythic Prometheus ; for this driving force we may well overlook personal foibles, the early Bostonese bias, the heritage from his father's concern in commenting Swedenborg,
He is not usually, for all his
own meaning, all of it.
wideleisure,verbose. Hemaybehighlyandbewilder- ingly figurative in his language (vide Mr. Hueffer's re- marks on this question).
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the later fusses about social caution and conservation of furniture. Hueffer rather boasts about Henry James's innocence of the classics. It is nothing to brag of, even if a man struggling against natural medievalism have entrenched himself in impressionist theory. If James had read his classics, the better Latins especially, he would not have so excessively cobwebbed, fussed, blath- ered,worriedaboutminormundanities. Wemaycon- spuer with all our vigor Henry James's concern with furniture, the Spoils of Poynton, connoisseurship, Mrs. Ward's tea-party atmosphere, the young Bostonian of theimmatureworks. Wemayrelegatethesethingsmen- tally to the same realm as the author's pyjamas and coIt lar buttons, to his intellectual instead of his physical valeting. There remains the capacious intelligence, the searching analysis of things that cannot be so relegated to the scrap-heap and to the wash-basket.
Let us say that English freedom legally and tradition- ally has its basis in property. Let us say, a la Balzac, that most modern existence is governed by, or at least interfered with by, the necessity to earn money; let us also say that a Frenchman is not an Englishman or a German or an American, and that despite the remark that the aristocracies of all people, the upper classes, are the same everywhere, racial differences are au fond dif- ferences; they are likewise major subjects.
Writing, as I am, for the reader of good-will, for the bewildered person who wants to know where to begin, I need not apologize for the following elliptical notes. James, in his prefaces, has written explanation to deafti
(with sometimes a very pleasant necrography) . Leav- ing the "French Poets and Novelists," I take the novels and stories as nearly as possible in their order of publi-
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cation (as distinct tr(jui their order as rearranged and partially weeded out m the collected edition).
1875. (U. S. A. ) "A Passionate Pilgrim and other Tales. " "Eugene Pickering" is the best of this lot and most indicative of the future James. Contains also the title story and "Madame de Mauves. " Other stories inferior.
1876. (U. S. A. ) "Roderick Hudson," prentice work. First novel not up to the level of "Pickering. "
1877. "The American"; essential James, part of the permanentwork. "WatchandWard,"discardedbythe author.
1878. "French Poets and Novelists," already dis- cussed.
1878. "Daisy Miller. " (The big hit and one of his best. ) "An International Episode," "Four Meetings," good work.
1870. Short stories first printed in England with additions, but no important ones.
1880. "Confidence," not important.
1881. "Washington Square," one of his best, "putting America on the map," giving us a real past, a real back- ground. "PensionBeaurepas"and"BundleofLetters," especially the girls' letters, excellent, already mentioned.
1881. "The Portrait of a Lady," one of his best. Charming Venetian preface in the collected edition.
1884. "Tales of Three Cities," stories dropped from the collected edition, save "Lady Barbarina. "
1884. "Lady Barbarina," a study in English blank- ness comparable to that exposed in the letters of the English young lady in "A Bundle of Letters. " There isalsoNewYorkoftheperiod. "Butiftherewasone thing Lady Barb disliked more than another it was de- scribing Pasterns. She had always lived with people
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who knew of themselves what such a place would be, without demanding t;hese pictorial effects, proper only, as she vaguely felt, to persons belonging to the classes whosetradewastheartsofexpression. LadyBarbof course had never gone into it ; but she knew that in her own class the business was not to express but to enjoy, not to represent but to be represented. "
"Mrs. Lemon's recognition of this river, I should say, was all it need have been; she held the Hudson existed for the purpose of supplying New Yorkers with poetical feelings, helping them to face comfortably occasions like the present, and in general, meet foreigners with confi- dence. . . . "
"He believed, or tried to believe, the salon now pos- sible in New York on condition of its being reserved en- tirely for adults; and in having taken a wife out of a country in which social traditions were rich and ancient he had done something toward qualifying his own house so splendidly qualified in all strictly material respects . . . to be the scene of such an effort. A charming woman accustomed only to the best on each side, as Lady Beau- chemin said, what mightn't she achieve by being at home --always to adults only--in an easy early inspiring com- prehensive way and on the evening of the seven, when worldly engagements were least numerous ? He laid this philosophy before Lady Barb in pursuance of a theory that if she disliked New York on a short acquaintance she couldn't fail to like it on a long. Jackson believed in the New York mind--not so much indeed in its lit- erary, artistic, philosophic or political achievements as in its general quickness and nascent adaptability. He clung to this belief, for it was an indispensable neat block in the structure he was attempting to rear. The New York mind would throw its glamour over Lady Barb if
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she would only give it a chance; for it was thoroughly bright, responsive and sympathetic. If she would only set up by the turn of her hand a blest social centre, a temple of interesting talk in which this charming organ might expand and where she might inhale its fragrance in the most convenient and luxurious way, without, as it was, getting up from her chair; if she would only just try this graceful . good-natured experiment--which would make every one like her so much too--he was sure all the wrinkles in the gilded scroll of his fate would be smoothed out. But Lady Barb didn't rise at all to his conception and hadn't the least curiosity about the New Yorkmind. Shethoughtitwouldbeextremelydisagree- able to have a lot of people tumbling in on Sunday eve- ning without being invited, and altogether her husband's sketch of the Anglo-American salon seemed to her to suggest crude familiarity, high vociferation--she had al- ready made a remark to him about 'screeching women'
--andrandomextravagantlaughter.
Shedidn'ttellhim --for this somehow it wasn't in her power to express and, strangely enough, he never completely guessed it that she was singularly deficient in any natural, or in- deed, acquired understanding of what a salon might be. She had never seen or dreamed of one--and for the most part was incapable of imagining a thing she hadn't seen. She had seen great dinners and balls and* meets and runs and races; she had seen garden-parties and
bunches of people, mainly women--who, however, didn't screech--at dull stuffy teas, and distinguished companies collected in splendid castles ; but all this gave her no clew to a train of conversation, to any idea of a social agree- ment that the interest of talk, its continuity, its accu- mulations from season to season shouldn't be lost. Con- versation, in Lady Barb's experience, had never been
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continuous; in such a case it would surely have been a bore. It had been occasional and fragmentary, a trifle jerky, with allusions that were never explained; it had a dread of detail--it seldom pursued anything very far or kept hold of it very long. "
1885. "Stories Revived," adding to earlier tales "The Author of Beltraffio," which opens with excess of thie treading-on-eggs manner, too much to be borne for twen- ty-four volumes. The pretense of extent of "people" in- terested in art and letters, sic : "It was the most complete presentation that had yet been made of the gospel of art it was a kind of aesthetic war cry. 'People' had endeav- ored to sail nearer "to truth,' etc. "
He implies too much of art smeared on limited multi- tudes. One wonders if the eighties did in any great aggregate gush up to this extent. Doesn't he try to spread the special case out too wide?
The thinking is magnificently done from this passage up to page sixteen or twenty, stated with great concision. Compare it with "Madame Gervaisais" and we find Henry James much more interesting when on the upper reaches. Comparehisexpressiveness,theexpressiveness of his indirectness with that of constatation. The two methods are curiously mixed in the opening of "Beltraf- fio. " Such sentences as (page 30) "He said the. most interesting and inspiring things" are, however, pure waste, pure "leaving the thing undone," unconcrete, un- imagined; just simply bad writing or bad novelisting. As for his special case he does say a deal about the au- thor or express a deal by him, but one is bothered by the
fact that Pater, Burton, Hardy, Meredith were not, in mere history, bundled into one ; that Burton had been to the East and the others had not; that no English novel- ist of that era would have taken the least notice of any-
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thing going on in foreign countries, presumably Euro- pean, as does the supreme author of "Beltraffio. "
Doubtless he is in many ways the author Henry James would have liked to meet and more illustrative of certain English tones and limitations than any historical portrait might have been. Still Henry James does lay it on . . . more, I think, than the story absolutely requires. In "Beltraffio" he certainly does present (not that he does not comment to advantage) the two damn'd women ap- pended to the gentlemanly hero of the tale. The most violent post-Strindbergian school would perhaps have called them bitches tout bonnement, but this word did not belong to Henry James's vocabulary and besides it is of too great an indistinctness. Author, same "bloody"
(in the English sense) author with his passion for "form" appears in "Lesson of Master," and most of H. J. 's stories of literary milieux. Perpetual Grandisonism or Grandisonizing of this author with the passion for form, all of 'em have it. Ma che! There is, however, great intensity in these same "be-deared" and be-"poor- old"-edpages. Hehasreallygotamaintheme,agreat theme, he chooses to do it in silver point rather than in the garish colors of,--well, of Cherbuliez, or the terms of a religious maniac with three-foot long carving knife.
Novel of the gilded pill, an aesthetic or artistic message, dogma, no better than a moral or ethic one, novel a (Cumbrous camouflage substitute not for "that parlor game" * the polite essay, but for the impolite essay or conveyance of ideas; novel to do this should completely
incarnate the abstraction.
Finish of "Beltraffio" not perhaps up to the rest of it.
Not that one at all knows how else . . . *T. S. Eliot.
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Gushonpage42*frombothconversationalists. Still an adumbration of the search for the just word emerges on pages 43-44, real cut at barbarism and bigotry on the bottom of page 45 (of course not labeled by these mon- strous and rhetorical brands, scorched on to their hides and rump sides). "Will it be a sin to make the most of that one too, so bad for the dear old novel? " Butler and James on the same side really chucking out the fake ; Butler focused on Church of England ; opposed to him the fakers booming the Bible "as literature" in a sort of last stand, a last ditch; seeing it pretty well had to go as history, cosmogony, etc. , or the old tribal Daddy- slap-'em-with-slab of the Jews as anything like an ideal :
"He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home, and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I'm afraid I must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the artistic temperament; adding,however,instantlythathitherto,to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out of the bag. 'She thinks me immoral--that's the long and short of it,' he said, as we paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his gate; while his conscious, expressive, perceptive eyes the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual Englishman--viewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took part in the declaration. 'It's very strange when one thinks it all over, and there's a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out. She's a very nice woman, extraordi- narily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a tre-
mendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her conception of a novel--she has explained it to
* Page numbers in Collected Edition.
135
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me once or twice, and she doesn't do it badly as exposi- tion--is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It's a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn. It's two different w^ays of looking at the whole affair,' he repeated, pushing open the gate. 'And they're irreconcilable ! ' he added with a sigh. We went forward to the house, but on the walk, halfway to the door, he stopped and said to me : 'If you're going into this kind of thing there's a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment. There's a hatred of art, there's a hatred of literature-- meanofthegenuinekinds. Oh,theshams thosethey'll swallow by the bucket ! ' I looked up at the charm- ing house, with its genial color and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there. 'Ah, it doesn't matter, after all,' he a bit nervously laughed ; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up. "
Really literature in the XlXth and the beginning of the XXth centuries is where science was in the days of Galileo and the Inquisition. Henry James not blinking it, neither can we. "Poor dears" and "dear olds" always a little too plentiful.
1885. (continued) "Pandora," of the best. Let it pass as a sop to America's virginal charm; as counter- weight to "Daisy Miller," or to the lady of "The Por- trait. " Henry James alert to the German.
"The process of enquiry had already begun for him, in spite of his having as yet spoken to none of his fellow passengers; the case being that Vogelstein enquired not only with his tongue, but with his eyes--that is with his spectacles--with his ears, with his nose, with his palate,
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withallhissensesandorgans. Hewasahighlyupright young man, whose only fault was that his sense of comedy, or of the humor of things, had never been spe- cifically disengaged, from his several other senses. He vaguely felt that something should be done about this, and in a general manner proposed to do it, for he was on his way to explore a society abounding in comic aspects. This consciousness of a missing measure gave him a certain mistrust of what might be said of him; and if circumspection is the essence of diplomacy our young aspirant promised well. His mind contained several millions of facts, packed too closely together for the light breeze of the imagination to draw through the mass. He was impatient to report himself to his superior in Washington, and the loss of time in an English port could only incommode him, inasmuch as the study of English institutions was no part of his mission. On the other hand the day was charming; the blue sea, in Southampton Water, pricked all over with light, had no movement but that of its infinite shimmer. Moreover, he was by no means sure that he should be happy in the United States, where doubtless he should find himself soon enough disembarked. He knew that this was not an important question and that happiness was an un- scientific term, such as a man of his education should be ashamed to use even in the silence of his thoughts. Lost none the less in the inconsiderate crowd and feeling himself neither in his own country nor in that to which he was in a manner accredited, he was reduced to his mere personality; so that during the hour, to save his importance, he cultivated such ground as lay in sight for a judgment of this delay to which the German steamer was subjected in English waters. Mightn't it be proved, facts, figures and documents--or at least
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watch--in hand, considerably greater than the occasion demanded ?
"Count Vogelstein, was still young enough in diplomacy to think it necessary to have opinions. He had a good many, indeed, which had been formed without difSculty; they had been received ready-made from a line of an- cestors who knew what they liked. This was of course --and under pressure, being candid, he would have ad- mitted it--an unscientific way of furnishing one's mind. Our young man was a stiff conservative, a Junker of Junkers; he thought modern democracy a temporary phase and expected to find many arguments against it in the great Republic. In regard to these things it was a pleasure to him to feel that, with his complete training, he had been taught thoroughly to appreciate the nature of evidence. The ship was heavily laden with German emigrants, whose mission in the United States differed considerably from Count Otto's. They hung over the bulwarks, densely grouped; they leaned forward on their elbows for hours, their shoulders kept on a level with their ears: the men in furred caps, smoking long- bowled pipes, the women with babies hidden in remark- ably ugly shawls. Some were yellow Germans and some were black, and all looked greasy and matted with the sea-damp. They were destined to swell still further the huge current of the Western democracy; and Count Vogelstein doubtless said to himself that they wouldn't improve its quality. Their numbers, however, were striking, and I know not what he thought of the nature of this particular evidence. "
For further style in vignette
"He could see for himself that Mr. and Mrs. Day had not at all her grand air. They were fat plain serious
? HENRY JAMES
"
people who sat side by side on the deck for hours and looked straight before them. Mrs. Day had a white face,largecheeksandsmalleyes; herforeheadwassur- rounded with a multitude of little tight black curls; her lips moved as if she had always a lozenge in her mouth. She wore entwined about her head an article which Mrs. Dangierfield spoke of as a 'nuby,' a knitted pink scarf concealing her hair, encircling her neck and having among its convolutions a hole for her perfectly expres- sionless face. Her hands were folded on her stomach, and in her still, swathed figure hier bead-like eyes, which occasionally changed their direction, alone represented life. Her husband had a stiff gray beard on his chin and a bare spacious upper lip, to which constant shaving had imparted a hard glaze. His eyebrows were thick and his nostrils wide, and when he was uncovered, in the saloon, it was visible that his grizzled hair was dense and perpendicular. He might have looked rather grim and truculent hadn't it been for the mild familiar ac- commodating gaze with which his large light-colored pupils--the leisurely eyes of a silent man--appeared to consider surrounding objects. He was evidently more friendly than fierce, but he was more diffident than friendly. He liked to have you in sight, but wouldn't have pretended to understand you much or to classify you, and would have been sorry it should put you under an obligation. He and his wife spoke sometimes, but seldom talked, and there was something vague and pa- tient about them as if they had become victims of a wrought spell. The spell, however, was of no sinister cast ; it was the fascination of prosperity, the confidence of security, which sometimes makes people arrogant, but which had had such a different effect on this simple
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satisfied pair, in whom further development of every kind appeared to have been happily arrested. "
Pandora's approach to her parents
"These little offices were usually performed deftly, rapidly, with the minimum of words, and when their daughter drew near them. Mr. and Mrs. Day closed their eyes after the fashion of a pair of household dogs who expect to be scratched. "
The tale is another synthesis of some of the million reasons why Germany will never conquer the world, why the Hun is impossible, wh}- ''boche"' is merely "bursch. " The imbecility of a certain Wellsian journalist in treat- ing this gem is again proof that it is written for the relatively-developed American, not for the island ecaillere. If Henry James, as Ford jMadox Hueffer says, set out to civilize the United States, it is at least an easier job than raising British Suburbia to a bearable level. From that milieu at least we have nothing of value to learn; we shall not take our tonality from that niveau.
In describing "Pandoras'' success as "purely personal,"' Henry James has hit on the secret of the Quattrocento, 1450 to 1550, the vital part of the Renaissance. Aris- tocracy decays when it ceases to be selective, when the basis of selection is not personal. It is a critical acute- ness, not a snobbism, which last is selection on some other principle than that of a personal quality. It is servility to rule-of-thumb criteria, and a dullness of per- ception, a timidity in acceptance. The whole force of the Renaissance was in the personality of its selection.
There is no faking the amount of perceptive energy concentrated in Henry James's vignettes in such phrases
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as that on the parents like domestic dogs waiting to be scratched, or in the ten thousand phrases of this sort which abound in his writings. If we were back in the time of Bruyere, we could easily make a whole book of "Characters" from Henry James's vignettes* The vein holds from beginning to end of his work; from this writing of the eighties to "The Ivory Tower. " As for example, Gussie Braddon:
"Rosanna waited facing her, noting her extraordinary perfection of neatness, of elegance, of arrangement, of which it couldn't be said whether they most handed over to you, as on some polished salver, the clear truth of her essential commonness or transposed it into an element that could please, that could even fascinate, as a supreme attestation of care. 'Take her as an advertisement of all
the latest knowledges of how to "treat" every inch of the human surface and where to "get" every scrap of the personal envelope, so far as she is enveloped, and she does achieve an effect sublime in itself and thereby
"
absolute in a wavering world. '
We note no inconsiderable progress in the actual writ-
ing, in maestria, when we reach the ultimate volumes. 1886. "Bostonians. " Other stories in this collection
mostly rejected from collected edition.
"Princess Casamassimaj" inferior continuation of
"Roderick Hudson. " His original subject matter is be- ginning to go thin.
* Since writing the above I find that some such compilation has been attempted; had indeed been planned by the anthologist, and, in plan, approved by H. J. : "Pictures and Passages from Henry James" selected by Ruth Head (Chatto and Windus, 1916), if not exactly the book to convince the rising generation of H. J. 's powers of survival, is at any rate a most charming tribute to our subject from one who had begun to read him in "the eighties".
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1888. "The Reverberator," process of fantasia begin- ning.
Fantasia of Americans vs. the '"old aristocracy," "The American"withthesexesreversed. Possiblythetheme shows as well in "Les Transatlantiques," the two meth- ods, give one at least a cenain pleasure of contrast.
1888. "Aspern Papers," inferior. "Louisa Pallant," a study in the maternal or abysmal relation, good James. "Modern Warning," rejected from collected edition.
1-889. "A London Life. " "The Patagonia. "
"ThePatagonia,"notamasterpiece. Slowinopening, excellent in parts, but the sense of the finale intrudes all along. It seems true but there is no alternative ending. One doubts whether a story is really constructed with any mastery when the end, for the purpose of making it a story, is so unescapable. The effect of reality is pro- duced, of course, by the reality of the people in the opening scene; there is no doubt about that part being "to the life. "
"The Liar" is superb in its way, perhaps the best of the allegories, of the plots invented purely to be an expo- sition of impression. It is magnificent in its presenta- tion of the people, both the old man and the Liar, who is masterly.
"Mrs. Temperly" is another such excellent delineation and shows James as an excellent hater, but G. S. Street expresses a concentration of annoyance with a greater polish and suavity in method ; and neither explains, theorizes, nor comments.
James never has De Maupassant's reality. His (H. J. 's) people almost always convince, i. e. , we believe implicitly that they exist. We also think that Henry
James has made up some sort of story as an excuse for writing his impression of the people.
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One sees the slight vacancy of the stories of this period, the short clear sentence, the dallying with jeu d'esprit, with epigram no better than, though not inferior to, the run of epigram in the nineties. It all explains James's need of opacity, his reaching out for a chiaro- scuro to distinguish himself from his contemporaries and in which he could put the whole of his much more com- plex apperception.
Then comes, roughly, the period of cobwebs and of excessive cobwebs and of furniture, finally justified in "The Finer Grain," a book of tales witli no mis-fire, and the style so vindicated in the triumphs of the various books of Memoirs and "The American Scene. "
Fantasias : "Dominic Ferrand," "Nona Vincent" (tales obviously aimed at the "Yellow Book," but seem to have missed it, a detour in James's career). All artists who discover anything make such detours and must, in the
course of things (as in the cobwebs), push certain ex- periments beyond the right curve of their art. This is not so much the doom as the function of all "revolu- tionary" or experimental art, and I think masterwork is usually the result of the return from such excess. One does not know, simply does not know, the true curve until one has pushed one's method beyond it. Until then it is merely a frontier, not a chosen route. It is an open question, and there is no dogmatic answer, whether an artist should write and rewrite the same story (a la Flaubert) or whether he should take a new canvas.
"The Papers," a fantasia, diverting; "The Birthplace," fairy-godmother element mentioned above, excellent. "Edmund Orme," inferior; "Yellow Book" tale, not ac- cepted by that periodical.
1889-1893. Period of this entoilment in the "Yellow
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Book," short sentences, the epigrammatic. He reacts from this into the allegorical. In general the work of. this period is not up to the mark. "The Chaperon," "The Real Thing," fantasias of "wit. " By fantasias I mean sketches in which the people are "real" or convince one of their verity, but where the story is utterly unconvinc- ing, is not intended to convince, is merely a sort of exag- geration of the fitting situation or the situation which ought to result in order to display some type at its apo- gee. "The Real Thing" rather better than other stories in this volume.
Thus the lady and gentleman model in "The Real Thing. " London society is finely ladled in "The Chape- ron," which is almost as a story, romanticism.
"Greville Fane" is a scandalous photograph from the life about which the great blagueur scandalously lies in hispreface(collectededition). Ihavebeentoodiverted comparing it with an original to give a sane view of its art.
1890. "The Tragic Muse," uneven, full of good things but showing Henry James in the didactic role a little too openly. He preaches, he also displays fine per- ception of the parochialism of the British political ca- reer. It is a readable novel with tracts interpolated.