No More Learning

Chez Laforgue, il y a plus de gai sans-soud, de coups de batte de pierrot donnes a toutes choses, plus de "vaille- que-vaille la vie," dit d'un air de moqueuse resignation. Sa rancoeur n'est pas qui encombrante. II etait un peu I'enfant indiscipline que rit a travers les gronderies, et faitlamoueasafantaisie; maissonhaussementd'epaules
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gamin, et ses "Apres tout? " qu'il jette comme une chiquenaude au visage du Temps, cachent toujours au fond de son coeur un lac melancolique, un lac de tristesse et d'amours fletris, oi! i vient se refleter sa claire imagina- tion. Temoins ces fragments pris aux Complamtes: Mon coeur est une urne ou j'ai mis certains defunts, Oh ! chut, refrains de leurs berceaux ! et vous, parfums.
Mon coeur est un Neron, enfant gate d'Asie,
Qui d'empires de reve en vain se rassasie.
Mon coeur est un noye vide d'ame et d'essors, Qu'etreint la pieuvre Spleen en ses ventouses d'or. C'est un feu d'artifice, helas! qu'avant la fete,
A noye sans retour I'averse qui s'embete.
Mon coeur est le terrestre Histoire-Corbillard
Que trainent au neant I'instinct et le hazard
Mon coeur est une horloge oubliee a demeure
Qui, me sachant defunt, s'obstine a marquer I'heure.
Et toujours mon coeur ayant ainsi declame. En revient a sa complainte: Aimer, etre aime!
Et cette piece, d'une ironie concentree:
COMPLAINTE DES BONS MENACES
L'Art sans poitrine m'a trop longtemps berce dupe. Si ses labours sont fiers, que ses bles decevants! Tiens, laisse-moi beler tout aux plis de ta jupe
Qui fleure le convent.
La Genie avec moi, serf, a fait des manieres;
Toi, jupe, fais frou-frou, sans t'inquieter pourquoi .
. .
Mais I'Art, c'est ITnconnu! qu'on y dorme et s'y vautre, On ne pent pas I'avoir constamment sur les bras
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Etbien,menageauvent! SoyonsLui,EUeetI'Autre. Et puis n'insistons pas.
Et puis? et puis encore un pied de nez melancolique a la destinee;
Quim'aimajamais? Jem'entete Sur ce refrain bien impuissant Sans songer que je suis bien bete De me faire du mauvais sang;
Jules Laforgue a public outre les Complaintes, un livret de vers degingandes, d'une raillerie splenetique, a froid,commecellequisiedauxhommesduNord. Mais il a su y aj outer ce sans-faqon de choses dites a I'aven- ture, et tout un parfum de lumiere argentine, comme les rayons de Notre-Dame la Lune qu'il celebre. Le manque de place nous prive d'en citer quelques pages. NousavonsluaussicetteetrangeNuitd'Etoiles: leCon- seil Feerique, un assez court poeme edite par la "Vogue"
divers articles de revue, entre lesquels cette page en- soleillee, parue dans la Revue Independante : Pan et la Syrinx. Enfin un nouveau livre etait annonce: de la Pitie, de la Pitie! , deja prepare par I'une des Invoca- tions du volume precedent, et dont nous croyons voir I'idee en ces vers des Complaintes:
Vendange chez les Arts enfantins; sois en fete D'une fugue, d'un mot, d'un ton, d'un air de tete.
Vivre et peser selon le Beau, le Bien, le Vrai? O parfums, 6 regards, 6 fois ! soit, j'essaierai.
. . . Va, que ta seule etude
Soit de vivre sans but, fou de mansuetude
--Albert Mockel in "La Wallonie," 1887.
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I have quoted but sparingly, and I have thought quo- tation better than comment, but despite the double mea- greness I think I have given evidence that La Wallonie was worth editing.
It began as L'Elan Litteraire with i6 pages, and an editionof200copies; itshouldconvinceanybutthemost stupid that size is not the criterion of permanent value, and that a small magazine may outlast much bulkier printings.
After turning the pages of La Wallonie, perhaps after reading even this so brief excerpt, one is ready to see some sense in even so lyric a phrase as "temps dore, de ferveur et de belle confiance. "
In their seven years' run these editors, one at least beginning in his "teens," had published a good deal of the best of Verhaeren, had published work by Elskamp, Merrill, Griffin, Louys, Maeterlinck, Verlaine Van Ler- berghe, Gustave Kahn, Moreas, Quillard, Andre Gide; had been joined in their editing board by De Regnier (remember that they edited in Liege, not in Paris; they were not at the hub of the universe, but in the heart of French Belgium) ; they had not made any compromise. Permanent literature, and the seeds of permanent litera- ture, had gone through proof-sheets in their office.
There is perhaps no greater pleasure in life, and there certainly can have been no greater enthusiasm than to have been young and to have been part of such a group of writers working in fellowship at the beginning of such a course, of such a series of courses as were impli- cated in La Wallonie.
If the date is insufficiently indicated by Mallarme's allusion to Whistler, we may turn to the art notes
"eaux-fortes de Mile Mary Cassatt . . . Lucien Pis-
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? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 105
saro, Sisley . . . lithographies de Fantin-Latour . . . Odillon Redon. "
"J'ai ete un peu a Paris, voir Bume Jones, Moreau, Delacroix . . . la danse du ventre, et les adorables Java- naises. C'est mon meilleur souvenir, ces filles 'tres parees' dans I'etrange demi-jour de leur case et qui tour- nent lentement dans la stridente musique avec de si enig- matique inflexions de mains et de si souriantes pour- suites les yeux dans les yeux. "
Prose poetry, that doubtful connection, appears at times even to advantage
"Selene, toi I'essence et le regard des infinis, ton mal nous serait la felicite supreme. O viens a nous; Tanit, Vierge Tanit, fleur metallique epanouie aux plaines celestes ! " Mockel.
? II
HENRY JAMES
This essay on James is a dull grind of an affair, a Baedecker to a continent.
I set out to explain, not why Henry James is less read than formerly--I do not know that he is. I tried to set down a few reasons why he ought to be, or at least might be, more read.
Some may say that his work was over, well over, finely completed; there is mass of that work, heavy for one man's shoulders to have borne up, labor enough for two life-times; still we would have had a few more years of his writing. Perhaps the grasp was relaxing, per- haps we should have had no strongly-planned book; but we should have had paragraphs here and there, and we should have had, at least, conversation, wonderful con- versation ; even if we did not hear it ourselves, we should have known that it was going on somewhere. The mas- sive head, the slow uplift of the hand, gli occhi onesti e tardi, the long sentences piling themselves up in elab- orate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with its
;"
"wu-a-wait a little, wait a little, something will come blague and benignity and the weight of so many years' careful, incessant labor of minute observation always
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there to enrich the talk. I had heard it but seldom, yet it was all unforgettable.
The man had this curious power of fouoding-affection in those who had scarcely seen him and even in many who had not, who but knew him at second hand.
No man who has not lived on both sides of the Atlan- tic can well appraise Henry James ; his death marks the end of a period. The Times says : "The Americans will understand his changing his nationality," or some- thing of that sort. The "Americans" will understand nothing whatsoever about it. They have understood nothing about it. They do not even know what they lost. They have not stopped for eight minutes to con- sider the meaning of his last public act. After a year of ceaseless labor, of letter writing, of argument, of striving in every way to bring in America on the side of civilization, he died of apoplexy. On the side of civilization--civilization against barbarism, civilization, not Utopia, not a country or countries where the right always prevails in six v^eeks! After a life-time spent in trying to make two continents understand each other, in trying, and only his thoughtful readers can have any conception of how he had tried, to make three '^fetions intelligible one to another. I am tired of hearing petti- ness talked about Henry James's style. The subject has been discussed enough in all conscience, along with the minor James. Yet I have heard no word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life; not worked out in the diagrams of Greek tragedy, hot labeled "epos" or "Aeschylus. " The outbursts in The Tragic Muse, the whole of The Turn of the Screw,
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human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the indi- vidual against all sorts of intangible bondage! * The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, didn't "feel. " I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom idiots didn't raise this cry.
And the great labor, this labor of translation, of mak- ing America intelligible, of making it possible for indi- viduals to meet across national borders. I think half the American idiom is recorded in Henry James's writ- ing, and whole decades of American life that otherwise would have been utterly lost, wasted, rotting in the un- hermeticjarsofbadwriting,ofinaccuratewriting. No English reader will ever know how good are his New York and his New England; no one who does not see his grandmother's friends in the pages of the American books. Thewholegreatassayingandweighing,there- search for the significance of nationality, French, Eng- lish, American.
"An extraordinary old woman, one of the few people who is really doing anything good. " There were the cobwebs about connoisseurship, etc. , but what do they matter ? Some yokel writes in the village paf>er, as Hen- ley had written before, "James's stuff was not worth doing. " Henley has gone pretty completely. America has not yet realized that never in history had one of her
* This holds, despite anything that may be said of his fuss about social order, social tone. I naturally do not drag in po- litical connotations, from which H. J. was, we believe, wholly exempt. What he fights is "influence", the impinging of family pressure, the impinging of one personality on another; all of them in highest degree damn'd, loathsome and detestable. Re- spect for the peripheries of the individual may be, however, a discovery of our generation; I doubt it, but it seems to have been at low ebb in some districts (not rural) for some time.
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great men abandoned his citizenship out of shame. It was the last act--the last thing left. He had worked all his life for the nation and for a year he had labored forthenationalhonor. NootherAmericanwasofsuffi- cient importance for his change of allegiance to have constituted an international act; no other American would have been welcome in the same public manner. America passes over these things, but the thoughtful cannot pass over them.
Armageddon, the conflict? I turn to James's A Bundle of Letters; a letter from "Dr. Rudolph Staub" in Paris, ending
"You will, I think, hold me warranted in believing that between precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the English-speaking family is destined to consume it- self and that with its decline the prospect of general pervasiveness to which I alluded above, will brighten
! " for the deep-lunged children of the fatherland
We have heard a great deal of this sort of thing since ; it sounds very natural. My edition of the volume containing these letters was printed in '83, and the imag- inary letters were written somewhat before that. I do not know that this calls for comment. Henry James's perception came thirty years before Armageddon. That is all I wish to point out. Flaubert said of the War of
1870: "If they had read my Education Sentimentaie, this sort of thing wouldn't have happened. " Artists are the antennse of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists. If it is the busi- ness of the artist to make humanity aware of itself; here the thing was done, the pages of diagnosis. The multitude of wearisome fools will not learn their right hand from their left or seek out a meaning.
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It is always easy for people to object to what they have not tried to understand.
I am not here to write a full volume of detailed criti- cism, but two things I do claim which I have not seen in reviewers'essays. First,thattherewasemotionalgreat- ness in Henry Jarnes's hatred of tyranny ; secondly, that there was titanic volume, weight, in the masses he sets in opposition within his work. He uses forces no whit less specifically powerful than the proverbial "doom of the house,"--Destiny, Deus ex machina,--of great tra- ditional art. His art was great art as opposed to over- elaborate or over-refined art by virtue of the major conflictswhichheportrays. Inhisbooksheshowedrace against race, immutable ; the essential Americanness, or Englishness or Frenchness--in The American, the dif- ferencebetweenonenationandanother; notflag-waving and treaties, not the machinery of government, but "why" there is always misunderstanding, why men of different race are not the same.
We have ceased to believe that we conquer an)rthing by having Alexander the Great make a gigantic "joy- ride"throughIndia. Weknowthatconquestsaremade in the laboratory, that Curie with his minute fragments of things seen clearly in test tubes in curious apparatus, makes conquests. So, too, in these novels, the essential qualities which make up the national qualities, are found and set working, the fundamental oppositions ttiade clear. This is no contemptible labor. No other writer had so essayed three great nations or even thought of attempt- ing it.
Peacecomesofcommunication. Nomanofourtime has so labored to create means of communication as did the late Henry James. The whole of great art is a strug-
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gle for communication. All things that oppose this are evil, whether they be silly scoffing or obstructive tariffs.
And this communication is not a leveling, it is not an elimination of differences. It is a recognition of differ- ences, of the right of differences to exist, of interest in finding things different. Kultur is an abomination phi-
;
lology is an abomination, all repressive uniforming edu- cation is an evil.
A SHAKE DOWN
I have forgotten the moment of lunar imbecility in which I 'conceived the idea of a "Henry James" num- ber. * Thepileoftypescriptonmyfloorcanbutannoy- ingly and too palpably testify that the madness has raged for some weeks.
Henry James was aware of the spherical form of the planet, and susceptible to a given situation, and to the tone and tonality of persons as perhaps no other author in all literature. The victim and the votary of the "scene," he had no very great narrative sense, or at the least, he attained the narrative faculty but per aspera, through very great striving.
It is impossible to speak accurately of "his style," for he passed through several styles which differ greatly one from another; but in his last, his most complicated and elaborate, he is capable of great concision; and if, in it, the single sentence is apt to turn and perform evolutions for almost pages at a time, he nevertheless manages to say on one page more than many a more "direct" author would convey only in the course of a chapter.
*Little Review, Aug. , 1918.
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His plots and incidents are often btit adumbrations or symbols of the quality of his "people," illustrations invented, contrived, often factitiously and almost trans- parently, to show what acts, what situations, what con-
tingencieswouldbefitordisplaycertaincharacters. We are hardly asked to accept them as happening.
He did not begin his career with any theory of art for art's sake, and a lack of this theory may have dam- aged his earlier work.
If we take "French Poets and Novelists" as indication of his then (1878) opinions, and novels of the nineties showing a later bias, we might contend that our sub- ject began his career with a desire to square all things to the ethical standards of a Salem mid-week Unitarian prayer meeting, and that to almost the end of his course he greatly desired to fit the world into the social exigen- cies of Mrs. Humphry Ward's characters.
Out of the unfortunate cobwebs he emerged into his greatness, I think, by two causes : first by reason of his hatred of personal intimate tyrannies working at close range ; and secondly, in later life, because the actual mechanism of his scriptorial processes became so bulky, became so huge a contrivance for record and depiction, that the old man simply couldn't remember or keep his mind on or animadvert on anything but the attthenticity of his impression.
I take it as the supreme reward for an artist; the supreme return that his artistic conscience can make him after years spent in its service, that the momentum of his art, the sheer bulk of his processes, the (si licet) size of his fly-wheel, should heave him out of himself, out of his personal limitations, out of the tangles of heredity and of environment, out of the bias of early training, of early predilections, whether of Florence,
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A. D. 1300, or of Back Bay of 1872, and leave him simply the great true recorder.
And this reward came to Henry James in the ripeness of his talents; even further perhaps it entered his life and his conversation. The stages of his emergence are marked quite clearly in his work. He displays himself in French Poets and Novelists, constantly balancing over the question of whether or no the characters presented in their works are, or are not, fit persons to be received in the James family back-parlor.
In The Tragic Muse he is still didactic quite openly. The things he believes still leap out nakedly among the people and things he is portraying; the parable is not yet wholly incarnate in the narrative.
To lay all his faults on the table, we may begin with his self-confessed limitation, that "he never went down town," He displayed in fact a passion for high life comparable only to that supposed to inhere in the read- ers of a magazine called Forget-me-not.
Hardy, with his eye on the Greek tragedians, has pro- duced an epic tonality, and The Mayor of Casterbridge is perhaps more easily comparable to the Grettir Saga than to the novels of Mr. Hardy's contemporaries. Hardy is, on his other side, a contemporary of Sir Wal- ter Scott.
Balzac gains what force his crude writing permits him by representing his people under the avayKti of modernity, cash necessity James, by leaving cash neces-
;
sity nearly always out of the story, sacrifices, or rather fails to attain, certain intensities.
He never manages the classic, I mean as Flaubert gives us in each main character: Everyman. One may con- ceivably be bored by certain pages in Flaubert, but one takes from him a solid and concrete memory, a prop-
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erty. Emma Bovary and Frederic and M. Arnoux are respectively every woman and every man of their period. Maupassant's Bel Ami is not. Neither are Henry James'speople. Theyarealways,ornearlyalways,the bibelots.
But he does, nevertheless, treat of major forces, even of epic forces, and in a way all his own. If Balzac tried to give a whole civilization, a whole humanity, James was not content with a rough sketch of one country.
As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national qualities are the great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals ; trying to determine from the given microscopic slide the nature of the Frenchness, Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemi- cals too little regarded, have in our time exploded for want of watching. They are the permanent and fun- damental hostilities and incbmpatibles. We may rest our claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his pro- tagonists, in the magnitude of the forces he analyzed andportrayed. Thisisnotthebarematterofanumber of titled people, a few duchesses and a few butlers.
Whatever Flaubert may have said about his Educa- tion Sentimentale as a potential preventive of the debacle of 1870, if people had read itj and whatever Gautier's friend may have said about Emaux et Camees as the last resistance to the Prussians, from Dr. Rudolph Staub's paragraph in The Bundle of Letters to the last and al- most only public act of his life, James displayed a steady perception and a steady consideration of the qualities of different western races, whose consequences none of us can escape.
And these forces, in precisely that they are not polit- ical and executive and therefore transient, factitious,
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but in precisely that they are the forces of race temper- aments, are major forces and are indeed as great pro- tagonists as any author could have chosen. They are firmer ground than Flaubert's when he chooses public events as in the opening of the third part of Education Sentimentale.
The portrayal of these forces, to seize a term from philology, may be said to constitute "original research'' --^to be Henry James's own addendum; not that this greatlymatters. Hesaw,analyzed,andpresentedthem. He had most assuredly a greater awareness than was granted to Balzac or to Mr. Charles Dickens or to M.
Victor Hugo who composed the Legende des Siecles.
His statement that he never went down town has been urged greatly against him. A butler is a servant, tem- pered with upper-class contacts. Mr. Newman, the American, has emerged from the making of wash-tubs; the family in The Pupil can scarcely be termed upper- class, however, and the factor of money, Balzac's, avayKTi, scarcely enters his stories.
WemayleaveHardywritingSagas. Wemayadmit that there is a greater rohustezza in Balzac's messiness, simply because he is perpetually concerned, inaccurately, with the factor of money, of earning one's exiguous living.
We may admit the shadowy nature of some of James's writing, and agree whimsically with R. H. C. (in the New Age) that James will be quite comfortable after death, as he had been dealing with ghosts all his life.
James's third donation is perhaps a less sweeping affair and of more concern to his compatriots than to any one who might conceivably translate him into an alien tongue, or even to those who publish his writings in England.
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He has written history of a personal sort, social his- tory well documented and incomplete, and he has put America on the map both in memoir and fiction, giving to her a reality such as is attained only by scenes re- corded in the arts and in the writing of masters. Mr. Eliot has written, and I daresay most other American admirers have written or will write, that, whatever any one else thinks of Henry James, no one but an American can ever know, really know, how good he is at the bot- tom, how good his "America" is.
No Englishman can, and in less degree can any con- tinental, or in fact any one whose family was not living on, say. West 23rd Street in the old set-back, two-story- porched red brick vine-covered houses, etc. , when Henry James was being a small boy on East 23rd Street; no one whose ancestors had not been presidents or profes- sors or founders of Ha'avwd College or something of that sort, or had not heard of a time when people lived on 14th Street, or had known of some one living in Lexington or Newton "Old Place" or somewhere of that sort in New England, or had heard of the New York that produced "Fanny," New York the jocular and un- critical, or of people who danced with General Grant or something of that sort, would quite know Washing-
ton Square or The Europeans to be so autochthonous, so authentic to the conditions. They might believe the things to be "real," but they would not know how closely they corresponded to an external reality.
Perhaps only an exile from these things will get the range of the other half of James's presentations! Europe to the Transpontine, New York of brown stone that he detested, the old and the new New York in Crapey Cornelia and in The American Scene, which more than any other volumes give us our peculiar heri-
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tage, an America with an interest, with a tone of time not overstrained, not jejunely over-sentimentalized, which is not a redoing of school histories or the laying out of a fabulous period; and which is in relief, if you like, from Dickens or from Mark Twain's Mississippi. He was not without sympathy for his compatriots as is amply attested by Mr. and Mrs. B. D. Hayes of New York (vide The Birthplace) with whom he succeeds, I think, rather better than with most of his princely con- tinentals. They are, at any rate, his bow to the Happy
Genius of his country--as distinct from the gentleman who displayed the "back of a banker and a patriot," or the person whose aggregate features could be designated only as a "mug. "
In his presentation of America he is greatly atten- tive, and, save for the people in Coeur Simple, I doubt if any writer has done more of "this sort of tning" for his country, this portrayal of the typical thing in timbre and quality--balanced, of course, by the array of spit- toons in the Capitol ("The Point of View").
Still if one is seeking a Spiritual Fatherland, if one feels the exposure of what he would not have scrupled to call, two clauses later, such a wind-shield, "The American Scene" greatly provides it. It has a mermaid note, almost to outvie the warning, the sort of nickel- plate warning which is hurled at one in the saloon of any great transatlantic boat; the awfulness that engulfs one when one comes, for the first time unexpectedly on a pile of all the Mtvrkhn Magazines laid, shingle-wise on a brass-studded, screwed-into-place, baize-covered steamer table. The first glitter of the national weapons for driving off quiet and all closer signs of intelligence. *
* I differ, beyond that point, with our author. I enjoy ascent as much as I loathe descent in an elevator. I do not mind the
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Attempting to view the jungle of the work as a whole, one notes that, despite whatever cosmopolitan upbringing Henry James may have had, as witness "A Small Boy's Memoirs" and "Notes of Son and Brother," he neverthe- less began in "French Poets and Novelists" with a pro- vincial attitude that it took him a long time to work free of. Secondly we see various phases of the "style" of his presentation or circumambiance.
There is a small amount of prentice work. Let us say "Roderick Hudson," "Casamassima. " There are lucky first steps in "The American" and "Europeans," a pre- cocity of result, for certainly some of his early work is as permanent as some of the ripest, and more so than adealoftheintervening. Wefind(forinthecasebe- fore us criticism must be in large part a weeding-out) that his first subject matter provides him with a number of good books and stories : "The American," "The Euro- peans," "Eugene Pickering," "Daisy Miller," "The Pu-
pil," "Brooksmith," "A Bundle of Letters," "Washing- ton Square," "The Portrait of a Lady," before 1880, and rather later, "Pandora," "The Four Meetings," perhaps "Louisa Pallant. " He ran out of his first material.
We next note a contact with the "Yellow Book," a dip into "cleverness," into the epigrammatic genre, the bare epigrammatic style. It was no better than other writers, not so successful as Wilde. We observe him to be not so hard and fine a satirist as is George S. Street.
We come then to the period of allegories ("The Real Thing,""DominickFerrand,""TheLiar"). Thereen-
click of brass doors. I had indeed for. my earliest toy, if I was not brought up in it, the rather slow and well-behaved elevator in a quiet and quietly bright huge sanatorium. The height of high buildings, the chasms of New York are delecta- ble; but this is beside the point; one is not asked to share the views and tastes of a writer.
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sues a growing discontent with the short sentence, epi- gram, etc. , in which he does not at this time attain dis- tinction; the clarity is not satisfactory, was not satisfac- tory to the author, his donne being radically different from that of his contemporaries. The "story" not be- ing really what he is after, he starts to build up his me- dium; a thickening, a chiaroscuro is needed, the long sentence; he wanders, seeks to add a needed opacity, he overdoes it, produces the cobwebby novel, emerges or justifies himself in "Maisie" and manages his long- sought form in "The Awkward Age. " He comes out the triumphant stylist in the "American Scene" and in all the items of "The Finer Grain" collection and in the posthumous "Middle Years. "
This is not to damn incontinent all that intervenes, but I think the chief question addressed to me by people of good-will who do not, but are yet ready and willing to, read James, is : Where the deuce shall I begin ? One cannot take even the twenty-four volumes, more or less selected volumes of the Macmillan edition all at once, and it is, alas, but too easy to get so started and entoiled as never to finish this author or even come to the best of him.
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.