Improvement
through "Other House" and
?
?
Ezra-Pound-Instigations
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.
----
? HENRY JAMES
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
--I
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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,
? HENRY JAMES
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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:
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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
? HENRY JAMES 141
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.
(Excellent and commendable tracts arguing certainly for the right thing, enjoyable, etc. ) Excellent text-book for young men with ambitions, etc.
1892. "Lesson of the Master" (cobweb). "The Pu- pil," a masterpiece, one of his best and keenest studies. "Brooksmith" of the best.
1893. "ThePrivateLife. "Titlestory,wasteverbiage at the start, ridiculous to put all this camouflage over something au fond merely an idea. Not life, not peo- ple, allegory, dated to 'Yellow Book" era. Won't hold
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against "Candide. " H. J. 's tilting against the vacuity of the public figure is, naturally, pleasing, i. e. , it is pleasing that he should tilt, but the amusement partakes of the nature of seeing cocoanuts hurled at an aunt sally.
There are other stories, good enough to be carried by H. J. 's best work, not detrimental, but not enough to have "made him": "Europe" (Hawthorny), "Paste," "The Middle Years," "Broken Wings," etc. Part of the great man's work can perhaps only be criticized as "etc. "
1895. "Terminations, Coxon Fund," perhaps best of this lot, a disquisition, but entertaining, perhaps the germ of Galsworthy to be found in it (to no glory of either author) as perhaps a residuum of Dickens in Maisie's Mrs. Wix. Verbalism, but delightful verbalism in Coxon affair, sic:
"Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular,"
or
"a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproach-
able and insufferable person" 1 or (for the whole type)
"put such ignorance into her cleverness? "
Miss Anvoy's echo concerning "a crystal" is excel- lently introduced, but is possibly in the nature of a sleight of hand trick (contemporary with "Lady Windemere's Fan"). Does H. J. 's "politics" remind one of Dizzy's scribbling, just a little? "Confidence, under the new Ministry, was understood to be reviving," etc.
Perhaps one covers the ground by saying that the James of this period is "light literature," entertaining if onehavenothingbettertodo. Neither"Terminations" nor (1896) "Embarrassments" would have founded a reputation.
1896-97.
Improvement through "Other House" and
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"Spoils of Poynton. " I leave the appreciation of these, tome,detestableworkstoMr. Hueffer. Theyseemto me full of a good deal of needless fuss, though I do not mean to deny any art that may be in them.
1897. Theemergencein"WhatMaisieKnew. "Prob- lem of the adolescent female. Carried on in:
1899. "The Awkward Age," fairy godmother and spot- less lamb and all the rest of it. Only real thing the im- pression of people, not observation or real knowledge. Action only to give reader the tone, symbolizing the tone of the people. Opening tour de force, a study in punks, a cheese souMe of the leprous crust of society done to a turn and a niceness save where he puts on the dulcis- simo, vox humana, stop. James was the dispassionate observer. He started with the moral obsession ; before he had worked clear of it he was entoiled in the ob- session of social tone. He has pages of clear depiction, even of satire, but the sentimentalist is always lurking just round the corner. This softens his edges. He has not the clear hardness, the cold satiric justness that G. S. Street has displayed in treating situations, certain struggles between certain idiocies and certain vulgarities. This book is a specialite of local interest. It is an etude in ephemera. If it contained any revelation in 1899, it no longer contains it. His characters are reduced to the status of voyeurs, elaborate analysis of the much too
special cases, a bundle of swine and asses who cannot mind their own business, who do not know enough to mind their own business. James's lamentable lack of the classics is perhaps responsible for his absorption in bagatelles. . . . He has no real series of backgrounds of moeurs du passe, only the "sweet dim faded lavender" tune and in opposition to modernity, plush nickel-plated, to the disparagement, naturally, of the latter.
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Kipling's "Bigod, now-I-know-all-about-this manner," is an annoyance, but one wonders if parts of Kipling by the sheer force of content, of tale to tell, will not outlastmostofJames'scobwebs. Thereisnosubstitute for narrative-sense, however many diiferent and en- trancing charms may be spread before us.
"The Awkward Age" might have been done, from one point of view, as satire, in one-fourth the space. On the other hand, James does give us the subtly graded atmos- pheres of his different houses most excellently. And indeed, this may be regarded as his subject.
If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, im- pressions of personal tone and quality are his subject; that in these he gets certain things that almost no one elsehaddonebeforehim. Thesetimbresandtonalities are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc. , but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc. , etc. , life would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it. *
* Most good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of nega- tion ; is the detailed, convincing analysis of something detesta- ble; of something which one wants to eliminate. Poetry is the assertion of a positive, i. e. , of desire, and endures for a longer period. Poetic satire is only an assertion of this positive, in- versely, i. e. , as of an opposite hatred.
This is a highly untechnical, unimpressionist, in fact almost theological manner of statement; but is perhaps the root differ- ence between the two arts of literature.
Most good poetry asserts something to be worth while, or
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The main feeling in "The Awkward Age" is satiric. The dashes of sentiment do n9t help the work as liter- ature. The acute observer is often referred to:
Page 131. "The ingenious observer just now sug- gested might even have detected . . . "
Page 133. "And it might have been apparent still to our sharp spectator . . . "
Page 310. "But the acute observer we are constantly taking for granted would perhaps have detected . . . "
Page 323. "A supposititious spectator would cer- tainly have imagined . . . " (This also occurs in "Ivory Tower. " Page 196. )
This scrutinous person wastes a great deal of time in pretending to conceal his contempt for Mrs. Brook, Vanderbank, the other punks, and lays it on so thick when presenting his old sentimentalist Longdon, who at the one critical moment behaves with a stupidity,
damns a contrary; at any rate asserts emotional values. The best prose is, has been a presentation (complicated and elabo- rate as you like) of circumstances, of conditions, for the most part abominable, or at the mildest, amendable. This assertion of the more or less -objectionable only becomes doctrinaire and rotten art when the narrator mis-states from dogmatic bias, and when he suggests some quack remedy (prohibition, Chris- tianity, social theory of one sort or another), the only cure being that humanity should display more intelligence and good- will than humanity is capable of displaying.
Poetry = Emotional synthesis, quite as real, quite as realist as any prose (or intellectual) analysis.
Neither prose nor drama can attain poetic intensity save by construction, almost by scenario; by so arranging the circum- stance that some perfectly simple speech, perception, dogmatic statement appears in abnormal vigor. Thus when Frederic in L'Education observes Mme. Arnoux's shoe-laces as she is de- scending the stair; or in Turgenev the statement, quotation of a Russian proverb about the "heart of another", or "Nothing but death is irrevocable" toward the end of Nichee de Gentils- hotnmes.
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with a lack of delicacy, since we are dealing with these refinements. Of course neither this stupidity of his action nor the tone of the other characters has anything to do with the question of maestria, if they were dis- passionatelyorimpartiallyrendered. Thebookisweak because all through it James is so manifestly carrying on a long tenzone so fiercely and loudly, a long argument for the old lavender. There is also the constant impli- cation that Vanderbank ought to want Nanda, though why the devil he should be supposed to be even mildly under this obligation, is not made clear. A basis in the classics, castor oil, even Stevenson's "Virginibus Puerisque"mighthavehelpedmatters. One'scomplaint is not that people of this sort don't exist, that they aren't like everything else a subject for literature, but that
James doesn't anywhere in the book get down to bed- rock. It is too much as if he were depicting stage scenery not as stage scenery, but as nature.
All this critique is very possibly an exaggeration. Take it at half its strength ; I do not intend to defend it. Epigrammatic manner in opening, compare Kipling; compare De Maupassant, superb ideas, verity, fantasia, fantasia group, reality, charming stories, poppycock. "Yellow Book" touches in "The Real Thing," general statements about their souls, near to bad writing, per-
fectly lucid.
"Nona Vincent," he writes like an adolescent, might
be a person of eighteen doing first story.
Page 201. "Public interest in spiritual life of the
army. " ("The Real Thing. ")
Page 201. German Invasion.
Loathsome prigs, stiflF conventions, editor of cheap
magazines ladled in Sir Wots-his-name.
1893. In the interim he had brought out "In the
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Cage," excellent opening sentence, Aiatter too much talked around and around, and "The Two Magics. " This last a Freudian affair which seems to me to have attract- ed undue interest, i. e. , interest out of proportion to the importance as literature and as part of Henry James's own work, because of this subject matter. The obscen- ity of "The Turn of the Screw" has given it undue prom- inence. People now "drawn" to obscene as were people of Milton's period by an equally disgusting bigotry; one unconscious on author's part; the other, a surgical treat- ment of a disease. Thus much for progress on part of authorsifpublichasnotprogressed. Thepointofmy remarks is that an extraneous criterion comes in. One must keep to the question of literature, not of irrelevan- cies. Galdos' "Lo Prohibido" does Freud long before the sex crank got to it. Kipling really does the psychic, ghosts, etc. , to say nothing of his having the "sense of story. "
1900. "The Soft Side," collection containing: "The Abasement of the Northmores," good ; again the motif of the vacuity of the public man, the "figure" ; he has tried it again in "The Private Life," which, however, falls into the allegorical. A rotten fall it is too, and Henry James at his worst in it, -i. e. , the allegorical. "Fordham's Castle" appears in the collected edition only--it may be- long to this period but is probably earlier, comedietta, excellently, perhaps flawlessly done. Here, as so often, the circumstances are mostly a description of the char- acter of the personal tone of the "sitters" ; for his people are so much more, or so much more often, "sitters" than actors. Protagonists it may be. When they act, they are apt to stage-act, which reduces their action again to being a mere attempt at description. ("The Liar," for
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example. ) Compare Maupassant's "Toine" for treat- ment of case similar to "Fordham Castle. "
1902-05. "The Sacred Fount," "Wings of a' Dove," "Golden Bowl" period.
"Dove" and "Bowl" certainly not models for other writers, a caviare not part of the canon (metaphors be hanged for the moment).
Henry James is certainly not a model for narrative
novelists,foryoungwritersoffiction perhapsnoteven ;
a subject of study till they have attained some sublimity of the critical sense or are at least ready to be constantly alert, constantly on guard.
I cannot see that he will harm a critic or a describer of places, a recorder of impressions, whether they be people, places, music.
1903. "Better Sort," mildish.
1903. "The Ambassadors," rather clearer than the other work. Etude of Paris vs. Woollett. Exhortation to the idle, well-to-do, to leave home.
1907. "TheAmericanScene/'triumphoftheauthor's long practice. A creation of America. A book no "serious American" will neglect. How many Americans make any attempt toward a realization of that country is of course beyond our power to compute. The desire to see the national face in a mirror may be in itself an exotic. I know of no such grave record, of no such attempt at faithful portrayal, as "The American Scene. '' Thus America is to the careful observer; this volume and the American scenes in the fiction and memoirs, in "The Europeans," "The Patagonia," "Washington Square," etc. , bulk large in the very small amount of writing which can be counted as history of moeurs con- temporaines, of national habit of our time and of the
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two or three generations preceding us. Newport, the standardized face, the Capitol, Independence Hall, the absence of penetralia, innocence, essential vagueness, etc. , language "only definable as not in intention Yid- dish," the tabernacle of Grant's ashes, the public collapse oftheindividual,theSt. Gaudensstatue. Thereisnoth- ingtobegainedbymakingexcerpts; thevolumeislarge, but one should in time drift through it. I mean any American with pretenses to an intellectual life should drift through it. It is not enough to have perused "The Constitution" and to have "heerd tell" of the national founders.
1910. "The Finer Grain," collection of short stories without a slip. "The Velvet Glove," "Mona Mon- travers," "A Round of Visits" (the old New York versus the new), "Crapey Cornelia," "The Bench of Desolation. "
It is by beginning on this collection, or perhaps taking it after such stories as "The Pupil" and "Brooksmith," that the general literate reader will best come to James, must in brief be convinced of him and can tell whether ornotthe"marginal"Jamesisforhim. Whetherorno the involutions of the "Golden Bowl" will titillate his ar- cane sensibilities. If the reader does not "get" "The Finer Grain" there is no sense in his trying the more elaborate "Wings of a Dove," "Sacred Fount," "Golden Bowl. " If, on the contrary, he does feel the peculiar, unclassic attraction of the author he may or may not enjoy the uncanonical books.
191 1. "The Outcry," a relapse. Connoisseurship fad again, inferior work.
1913. "A Small Boy and Others," the beginning of the memoirs. Beginning of this volume disgusting. First three pages enough to put one ofif Henry James once and for all, damn badly written, atrocious vocabu-
:
? HENRY JAMES 153
lary. Page 33, a few lines of good writing. Reader might start about here, any reader, that is, to whom New York of that period is of interest. New York of the fifties is significant, in so far as it is typical of what a hundred smaller American cities have been since. The tone of the work shows in excerpts
"The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not conscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or was conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having borne to their surrounding medium--^the fact that their
. "
Or later, when dealing with a pre-Y. -M. -C. -A.
America.
"Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously
droll, the sense somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after meeting in J;he hall a most amiable and irreproach- able gentleman, all but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I anticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent that I thought he must be tipsy. And I was to recall per- fectly afterwards the impression I so made on her--in which the general proposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on occasion be best
described by the term I had used, sought to destroy the particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary measure, show himself for one of these. He didn't to all appearance, for I was afterwards disap- pointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that memory
unconsciousnes could be so preserved
. .
--
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remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent . "
. .
wonder at my having leaped to so baseless a view
"The grim little generalization remained, none the less, and I may speak of it--since I speak of everything--as still standing : the striking evidence that scarce aught but disaster could, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least ex- posed. Nottohavebeenimmediatelylaunchedinbusi- ness of a rigorous sort was to be exposed-- in the ab- sence, I mean, of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready, even when the moderate, possession of
gold that determined, that hurried on disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were 'sympathetic,' though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to recognize or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that is, of transmitted ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly to the bad with it which meant even then going as often as possible to
Paris . "
"The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster. . . . "
"It has carried me far from my rather evident propo- sition that if we saw the 'natural' so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, or comparative ma- turity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this was
because the artificial, or in other words the complicated,
. "
. .
was so little there to threaten it. . .
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.
----
? HENRY JAMES
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
--I
? 136 INSTIGATIONS
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,
? HENRY JAMES
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
137
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? 138 INSTIGATIONS
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
139
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? I40 INSTIGATIONS
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
? HENRY JAMES 141
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.
? HENRY JAMES 143
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
? 144 INSTIGATIONS
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.
(Excellent and commendable tracts arguing certainly for the right thing, enjoyable, etc. ) Excellent text-book for young men with ambitions, etc.
1892. "Lesson of the Master" (cobweb). "The Pu- pil," a masterpiece, one of his best and keenest studies. "Brooksmith" of the best.
1893. "ThePrivateLife. "Titlestory,wasteverbiage at the start, ridiculous to put all this camouflage over something au fond merely an idea. Not life, not peo- ple, allegory, dated to 'Yellow Book" era. Won't hold
? HENRY JAMES 145
against "Candide. " H. J. 's tilting against the vacuity of the public figure is, naturally, pleasing, i. e. , it is pleasing that he should tilt, but the amusement partakes of the nature of seeing cocoanuts hurled at an aunt sally.
There are other stories, good enough to be carried by H. J. 's best work, not detrimental, but not enough to have "made him": "Europe" (Hawthorny), "Paste," "The Middle Years," "Broken Wings," etc. Part of the great man's work can perhaps only be criticized as "etc. "
1895. "Terminations, Coxon Fund," perhaps best of this lot, a disquisition, but entertaining, perhaps the germ of Galsworthy to be found in it (to no glory of either author) as perhaps a residuum of Dickens in Maisie's Mrs. Wix. Verbalism, but delightful verbalism in Coxon affair, sic:
"Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular,"
or
"a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproach-
able and insufferable person" 1 or (for the whole type)
"put such ignorance into her cleverness? "
Miss Anvoy's echo concerning "a crystal" is excel- lently introduced, but is possibly in the nature of a sleight of hand trick (contemporary with "Lady Windemere's Fan"). Does H. J. 's "politics" remind one of Dizzy's scribbling, just a little? "Confidence, under the new Ministry, was understood to be reviving," etc.
Perhaps one covers the ground by saying that the James of this period is "light literature," entertaining if onehavenothingbettertodo. Neither"Terminations" nor (1896) "Embarrassments" would have founded a reputation.
1896-97.
Improvement through "Other House" and
? 146 INSTIGATIONS
"Spoils of Poynton. " I leave the appreciation of these, tome,detestableworkstoMr. Hueffer. Theyseemto me full of a good deal of needless fuss, though I do not mean to deny any art that may be in them.
1897. Theemergencein"WhatMaisieKnew. "Prob- lem of the adolescent female. Carried on in:
1899. "The Awkward Age," fairy godmother and spot- less lamb and all the rest of it. Only real thing the im- pression of people, not observation or real knowledge. Action only to give reader the tone, symbolizing the tone of the people. Opening tour de force, a study in punks, a cheese souMe of the leprous crust of society done to a turn and a niceness save where he puts on the dulcis- simo, vox humana, stop. James was the dispassionate observer. He started with the moral obsession ; before he had worked clear of it he was entoiled in the ob- session of social tone. He has pages of clear depiction, even of satire, but the sentimentalist is always lurking just round the corner. This softens his edges. He has not the clear hardness, the cold satiric justness that G. S. Street has displayed in treating situations, certain struggles between certain idiocies and certain vulgarities. This book is a specialite of local interest. It is an etude in ephemera. If it contained any revelation in 1899, it no longer contains it. His characters are reduced to the status of voyeurs, elaborate analysis of the much too
special cases, a bundle of swine and asses who cannot mind their own business, who do not know enough to mind their own business. James's lamentable lack of the classics is perhaps responsible for his absorption in bagatelles. . . . He has no real series of backgrounds of moeurs du passe, only the "sweet dim faded lavender" tune and in opposition to modernity, plush nickel-plated, to the disparagement, naturally, of the latter.
? HENRY JAMES 147
Kipling's "Bigod, now-I-know-all-about-this manner," is an annoyance, but one wonders if parts of Kipling by the sheer force of content, of tale to tell, will not outlastmostofJames'scobwebs. Thereisnosubstitute for narrative-sense, however many diiferent and en- trancing charms may be spread before us.
"The Awkward Age" might have been done, from one point of view, as satire, in one-fourth the space. On the other hand, James does give us the subtly graded atmos- pheres of his different houses most excellently. And indeed, this may be regarded as his subject.
If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, im- pressions of personal tone and quality are his subject; that in these he gets certain things that almost no one elsehaddonebeforehim. Thesetimbresandtonalities are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc. , but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc. , etc. , life would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it. *
* Most good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of nega- tion ; is the detailed, convincing analysis of something detesta- ble; of something which one wants to eliminate. Poetry is the assertion of a positive, i. e. , of desire, and endures for a longer period. Poetic satire is only an assertion of this positive, in- versely, i. e. , as of an opposite hatred.
This is a highly untechnical, unimpressionist, in fact almost theological manner of statement; but is perhaps the root differ- ence between the two arts of literature.
Most good poetry asserts something to be worth while, or
? 148 ? INSTIGATIONS
The main feeling in "The Awkward Age" is satiric. The dashes of sentiment do n9t help the work as liter- ature. The acute observer is often referred to:
Page 131. "The ingenious observer just now sug- gested might even have detected . . . "
Page 133. "And it might have been apparent still to our sharp spectator . . . "
Page 310. "But the acute observer we are constantly taking for granted would perhaps have detected . . . "
Page 323. "A supposititious spectator would cer- tainly have imagined . . . " (This also occurs in "Ivory Tower. " Page 196. )
This scrutinous person wastes a great deal of time in pretending to conceal his contempt for Mrs. Brook, Vanderbank, the other punks, and lays it on so thick when presenting his old sentimentalist Longdon, who at the one critical moment behaves with a stupidity,
damns a contrary; at any rate asserts emotional values. The best prose is, has been a presentation (complicated and elabo- rate as you like) of circumstances, of conditions, for the most part abominable, or at the mildest, amendable. This assertion of the more or less -objectionable only becomes doctrinaire and rotten art when the narrator mis-states from dogmatic bias, and when he suggests some quack remedy (prohibition, Chris- tianity, social theory of one sort or another), the only cure being that humanity should display more intelligence and good- will than humanity is capable of displaying.
Poetry = Emotional synthesis, quite as real, quite as realist as any prose (or intellectual) analysis.
Neither prose nor drama can attain poetic intensity save by construction, almost by scenario; by so arranging the circum- stance that some perfectly simple speech, perception, dogmatic statement appears in abnormal vigor. Thus when Frederic in L'Education observes Mme. Arnoux's shoe-laces as she is de- scending the stair; or in Turgenev the statement, quotation of a Russian proverb about the "heart of another", or "Nothing but death is irrevocable" toward the end of Nichee de Gentils- hotnmes.
? HENRY JAMES 149
with a lack of delicacy, since we are dealing with these refinements. Of course neither this stupidity of his action nor the tone of the other characters has anything to do with the question of maestria, if they were dis- passionatelyorimpartiallyrendered. Thebookisweak because all through it James is so manifestly carrying on a long tenzone so fiercely and loudly, a long argument for the old lavender. There is also the constant impli- cation that Vanderbank ought to want Nanda, though why the devil he should be supposed to be even mildly under this obligation, is not made clear. A basis in the classics, castor oil, even Stevenson's "Virginibus Puerisque"mighthavehelpedmatters. One'scomplaint is not that people of this sort don't exist, that they aren't like everything else a subject for literature, but that
James doesn't anywhere in the book get down to bed- rock. It is too much as if he were depicting stage scenery not as stage scenery, but as nature.
All this critique is very possibly an exaggeration. Take it at half its strength ; I do not intend to defend it. Epigrammatic manner in opening, compare Kipling; compare De Maupassant, superb ideas, verity, fantasia, fantasia group, reality, charming stories, poppycock. "Yellow Book" touches in "The Real Thing," general statements about their souls, near to bad writing, per-
fectly lucid.
"Nona Vincent," he writes like an adolescent, might
be a person of eighteen doing first story.
Page 201. "Public interest in spiritual life of the
army. " ("The Real Thing. ")
Page 201. German Invasion.
Loathsome prigs, stiflF conventions, editor of cheap
magazines ladled in Sir Wots-his-name.
1893. In the interim he had brought out "In the
? T50 INSTIGATIONS
Cage," excellent opening sentence, Aiatter too much talked around and around, and "The Two Magics. " This last a Freudian affair which seems to me to have attract- ed undue interest, i. e. , interest out of proportion to the importance as literature and as part of Henry James's own work, because of this subject matter. The obscen- ity of "The Turn of the Screw" has given it undue prom- inence. People now "drawn" to obscene as were people of Milton's period by an equally disgusting bigotry; one unconscious on author's part; the other, a surgical treat- ment of a disease. Thus much for progress on part of authorsifpublichasnotprogressed. Thepointofmy remarks is that an extraneous criterion comes in. One must keep to the question of literature, not of irrelevan- cies. Galdos' "Lo Prohibido" does Freud long before the sex crank got to it. Kipling really does the psychic, ghosts, etc. , to say nothing of his having the "sense of story. "
1900. "The Soft Side," collection containing: "The Abasement of the Northmores," good ; again the motif of the vacuity of the public man, the "figure" ; he has tried it again in "The Private Life," which, however, falls into the allegorical. A rotten fall it is too, and Henry James at his worst in it, -i. e. , the allegorical. "Fordham's Castle" appears in the collected edition only--it may be- long to this period but is probably earlier, comedietta, excellently, perhaps flawlessly done. Here, as so often, the circumstances are mostly a description of the char- acter of the personal tone of the "sitters" ; for his people are so much more, or so much more often, "sitters" than actors. Protagonists it may be. When they act, they are apt to stage-act, which reduces their action again to being a mere attempt at description. ("The Liar," for
? HENRY JAMES 151
example. ) Compare Maupassant's "Toine" for treat- ment of case similar to "Fordham Castle. "
1902-05. "The Sacred Fount," "Wings of a' Dove," "Golden Bowl" period.
"Dove" and "Bowl" certainly not models for other writers, a caviare not part of the canon (metaphors be hanged for the moment).
Henry James is certainly not a model for narrative
novelists,foryoungwritersoffiction perhapsnoteven ;
a subject of study till they have attained some sublimity of the critical sense or are at least ready to be constantly alert, constantly on guard.
I cannot see that he will harm a critic or a describer of places, a recorder of impressions, whether they be people, places, music.
1903. "Better Sort," mildish.
1903. "The Ambassadors," rather clearer than the other work. Etude of Paris vs. Woollett. Exhortation to the idle, well-to-do, to leave home.
1907. "TheAmericanScene/'triumphoftheauthor's long practice. A creation of America. A book no "serious American" will neglect. How many Americans make any attempt toward a realization of that country is of course beyond our power to compute. The desire to see the national face in a mirror may be in itself an exotic. I know of no such grave record, of no such attempt at faithful portrayal, as "The American Scene. '' Thus America is to the careful observer; this volume and the American scenes in the fiction and memoirs, in "The Europeans," "The Patagonia," "Washington Square," etc. , bulk large in the very small amount of writing which can be counted as history of moeurs con- temporaines, of national habit of our time and of the
? 152 INSTIGATIONS
two or three generations preceding us. Newport, the standardized face, the Capitol, Independence Hall, the absence of penetralia, innocence, essential vagueness, etc. , language "only definable as not in intention Yid- dish," the tabernacle of Grant's ashes, the public collapse oftheindividual,theSt. Gaudensstatue. Thereisnoth- ingtobegainedbymakingexcerpts; thevolumeislarge, but one should in time drift through it. I mean any American with pretenses to an intellectual life should drift through it. It is not enough to have perused "The Constitution" and to have "heerd tell" of the national founders.
1910. "The Finer Grain," collection of short stories without a slip. "The Velvet Glove," "Mona Mon- travers," "A Round of Visits" (the old New York versus the new), "Crapey Cornelia," "The Bench of Desolation. "
It is by beginning on this collection, or perhaps taking it after such stories as "The Pupil" and "Brooksmith," that the general literate reader will best come to James, must in brief be convinced of him and can tell whether ornotthe"marginal"Jamesisforhim. Whetherorno the involutions of the "Golden Bowl" will titillate his ar- cane sensibilities. If the reader does not "get" "The Finer Grain" there is no sense in his trying the more elaborate "Wings of a Dove," "Sacred Fount," "Golden Bowl. " If, on the contrary, he does feel the peculiar, unclassic attraction of the author he may or may not enjoy the uncanonical books.
191 1. "The Outcry," a relapse. Connoisseurship fad again, inferior work.
1913. "A Small Boy and Others," the beginning of the memoirs. Beginning of this volume disgusting. First three pages enough to put one ofif Henry James once and for all, damn badly written, atrocious vocabu-
:
? HENRY JAMES 153
lary. Page 33, a few lines of good writing. Reader might start about here, any reader, that is, to whom New York of that period is of interest. New York of the fifties is significant, in so far as it is typical of what a hundred smaller American cities have been since. The tone of the work shows in excerpts
"The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not conscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or was conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having borne to their surrounding medium--^the fact that their
. "
Or later, when dealing with a pre-Y. -M. -C. -A.
America.
"Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously
droll, the sense somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after meeting in J;he hall a most amiable and irreproach- able gentleman, all but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I anticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent that I thought he must be tipsy. And I was to recall per- fectly afterwards the impression I so made on her--in which the general proposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on occasion be best
described by the term I had used, sought to destroy the particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary measure, show himself for one of these. He didn't to all appearance, for I was afterwards disap- pointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that memory
unconsciousnes could be so preserved
. .
--
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remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent . "
. .
wonder at my having leaped to so baseless a view
"The grim little generalization remained, none the less, and I may speak of it--since I speak of everything--as still standing : the striking evidence that scarce aught but disaster could, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least ex- posed. Nottohavebeenimmediatelylaunchedinbusi- ness of a rigorous sort was to be exposed-- in the ab- sence, I mean, of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready, even when the moderate, possession of
gold that determined, that hurried on disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were 'sympathetic,' though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to recognize or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that is, of transmitted ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly to the bad with it which meant even then going as often as possible to
Paris . "
"The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster. . . . "
"It has carried me far from my rather evident propo- sition that if we saw the 'natural' so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, or comparative ma- turity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this was
because the artificial, or in other words the complicated,
. "
. .
was so little there to threaten it. . .
