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!
Ezra-Pound-Instigations
.
Elle s'offre et le provoque, puis elle fuit
Vers ailleurs . . . si fidele encore au seul-aime, Mais elle est folle et je m'eplore dans la nuit.
Pour quelque amie aux delicatesses felines,
Elle glisse vers les caresses trop profondes.
. . . "Tu vas, folle, oublier mes rancoeurs orphelines. ' Mais sa levre pensive hesite aux toisons blondes.
--Jules Bois in "La Wcdlonie" Sept. , 'go. * Laforguef
95
!
96 INSTIGATIONS
In part we must take our reading of La Wallonie as a study of the state of symbolism from 1885 to '92.
Rodenbach displays the other leaf of the diptych: the genre, the homely Wallon landscape, more familiar to the outer world in Verhaeren, but not, I think, better painted.
PAYSAGES SOUFFRANTS II.
A Emilie Verhaeren. La-bas, tant de petits hameaux sous I'avalanche
De la neige qui tombe adoucissante et blanche, Tant de villages, tant de chaumines qui sont Pour le reste d'un soir doucement assoupies. Car le neige s'etend en de molles charpies
Sur les blessures des vieilles briques qui n'ont Rien senti d'une Soeur sur leur rongeur qui saigne Mais, 6 neige, c'est toi la Soeur au halo blanc Qui consoles les murs malades qu'on dedaigne
Et mats un peu d'ouate aux pierres s'eraflant.
Las! rien ne guerira les chaumines--aieules
Qui meurent de I'hiver et meurent d'etre seules. . . . Et leurs ames bientot, au gre des vents du nord. Dans la fumee aux lents departs, seront parties Cependant que la neige, a I'heure de leur mort,
Leur apporte ses refraichissantes hosties
--Georges Rodenbach in "La Wallonie," Jan. , '88.
Rodenbach is authentic.
A'iele-Griffin, who, as Stuart Merrill, has always been
!
? --
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 97
known in France as "an American," contributed largely toLaWallonie. His"AuTombeaud'Helene"ends:
HELENE
Me voici:
J'etais la des hier, et des sa veille,
Ailleurs, id;
Toute chair, a pare, un soir, mon ame vieille Comme I'etemite du desir que tu vets.
La nuit est claire au firmament . . .
Regarde avec tes yeux leves:
Voici--comme un tissu de pale feu fatal
Qui fait epanouir la fleur pour la fletrir
Mon voile ou transparait tout assouvissement Qui t'appelle a la vie et qui t'en fait mourir. La nuit est claire au firmament vital . . .
Mes mythes, tu les sais:
Je suis fille du Cygne,
Je suis la lune dont s'exuberent les mers Qui montent, tombent, se soulevent;
Et c'est le flot de vie exultante et prostree, le flot des reves,
le flot des chairs,
le flux et le reflux de la vaste maree.
Mon doute--on dit I'Espoir--fait Taction insigne: Je suis reine de Sparte et celle-la de Troie,
Par moi, la douloureuse existence guerroie
Je mens toute inertie aux leurres de ma joie, Helene, Selene, flottant de phase en phase,
Je suis Tlnaccedee et la tierce Hypostase Et si je rejetais, desir qui m'y convies,
--;
? 98
INSTIGATIONS
Mon voile qui promet et refuse I'extase,
Ma nudite de feu resorberait les Vies. . . . >>
--Viele-GriMn in "La IVallonie," Dec, '91. (Complete number devotgd to his poems. )
Meckel is represented by several poems rather too long to quote,--"Chantefable un peu naive," "L'Antithese," suggestive of the Gourmont litany; by prose comment, by work over various pseudonyms. "A Clair Matin" is a suitable length to quote, and it is better perhaps to represent him here by it than by fragments which I had first intended to cut from his longer poems.
A CLAIR MATIN
La nuit au loin s'est eflfacee
comme les lignes tremblantes d'un reve la nuit s'est fondue au courant du Passe et le jour attendu se leve.
Regardez! en les courbes molles des rideaux une heure attendue se revele
et ma fenetre enfin s'eclaire,
cristalline du givre ou se rit la lumiere.
Une parure enfantine de neiges
habille la-bas d'immobiles eaux
et c'est les corteges des fees nouvelles
a tire d'ailes, a tire d'ailes
du grand lointain qui toutes reviennent
aux flocons de ce jour en neiges qui s'epele.
Des courbes de mes rideaux clairs
--voici
!
c'est un parfum de ciel !
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 99
blanc des guirlandes de I'hiver le jeune matin m'est apparu avec un visage de fiancee.
Des fees
(ah je ne sais quelles mortelles fees)
jadis elles vinrent toucher la paupiere
d'un etre enfantin qui mourut.
Son ame, oti se jouait en songes la lumiere,
diaphane corolle epanouie au jour
son ame etait vive de toute lumiere
Lui, comme un frere il sufvait ma course
et nous allions en confiants de la montagne a la Vallee par les forets des chenes, des hetres
--car eux, les ancetres, ils ont le front grave
ils virent maints reves des autres ages
et nous parlent, tres doucement, comme nos Peres.
Mais voyez ! a mes rideaux pales le matin glisse des sourires;
car la Fiancee est venue
car la Fiancee est venue
avec un simple et tres doux visage,
avec des mots qu'on n'entend pas,
en silence la Fiancee est apparue
comme une grande soeur de I'enfant qui mourut; et les hetres, les chenes royaux des forets
par douce vocalise egrenant leur parure,
les voix ressuscitees en la plaine sonore
et toute la foret d'aurore
quand elle secoue du crepuscule sa chevelure. tout chante, bruit, petille et rayonne
car la celeste Joie que la clarte delivre
d'un hymne repercute aux miroirs du futur
:
? 100 INSTIGATIONS
le front pale ou scintille en etoiles le givre.
--Albert Mockel in "La Wallonie," Dernier fascicule,
92.
I have left Gide and Van Lerberghe unquoted, un- mentioned, but I have, I dare say, given poems enough to indicate the quality and the scope of the poetry in La Wallonie.
In prose their cousinage is perhaps more quickly ap- parent. Almost the first sentence I come upon (I sus- pect it is Mockel's) runs as follows:
"La Revue des deux Mondes publie un roman de Georges Ohnet ce qui ne surprendra personne. "
This is the proper tone to use when dealing with elderly muttonheads ; with the Harpers of yester year. La Wal- loniefounditoutintheeighties. Thesymbolistemove- ment flourished on it. American letters did not flour- ish, partly perhaps for the lack of it, and for the lack of unbridled uncompromising magazines run by young men who did not care for reputations surfaites, for elderly stodge and stupidity.
If we turn to Mockel's death notice for Jules Laforgue we will find La Wallonie in '87 awake to the value of contemporary achievement
JULES LAFORGUE
Nous apprenons avec une vive tristesse, la mort de Jules Laforgue, I'un des plus curieux poetes de la lit- terature aux visees nouvelles. Nous I'avons designe, ja deux mois : un Tristan Corbiere plus argentin, moins apre . . . Et telle est bien sa caracteristique. Sans le
--
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS loi
moindre soupgon d'imitation ou de reminiscences, Jules Laforgue a sauvegarde une originalite vivace. Seule- ment, cette originalite, par bien des saillies, touche a celledeTristanCorbiere. C'estunememerailleriedela Vie et du Monde; mais plus de sombre et virile amer- tume emouvait en I'auteur des Amours Jaunes, dont cette piece donnera quelque idee:
LE CRAPAUD
Un chant dans une nuit sans air . . . --La lune plaque en metal clair
Les decoupures du vert sombre.
. . . Un chant; comme un echo, tout vif Enterre, la, sous le massif . . .
--Qa. se tait ; viens, c'est la, dans I'ombre . . . Un crapaud!
--Pourquoi cette peur,
Pres de moi, ton soldat fidele!
Vois-le, poete tondu, sans aile,
Rossignol de la boue . . .
--Horreur !
. . . II chante. --Hoi-reur ! --Horreur pourquoi ?
!
Vois-tu pas son oeil de lumiere . . . Non, il s'en va, froid, sous sa pierre.
Bonsoir--ce crapaud-la c'est moi.
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
!
? I02 INSTIGATIONS
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
--;
? A STUDY IN jRE. nCH POETS 103
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.
:
? I04 INSTIGATIONS
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-
--:
? 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
io6
? HENRY JAMES 107
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,
? io8 INSTIGATIONS
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.
:
? HENRY JAMES lop
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.
? no INSTIGATIONS
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-
? HENRY JAMES iii
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.
? 112 INSTIGATIONS
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,
? HENRY JAMES 113
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-
? 114 INSTIGATIONS
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,
? HENRY JAMES 115
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.
? ii6 INSTIGATIONS
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-
? HENRY JAMES 117
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
? ii8 INSTIGATIONS
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.
? HENRY JAMES 119
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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? I20 INSTIGATIONS
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-
;
? HENRY JAMES 121
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
? 122 INSTIGATIONS
to charm one. I find it often though not universally hard to "hear" his characters spearking.
Vers ailleurs . . . si fidele encore au seul-aime, Mais elle est folle et je m'eplore dans la nuit.
Pour quelque amie aux delicatesses felines,
Elle glisse vers les caresses trop profondes.
. . . "Tu vas, folle, oublier mes rancoeurs orphelines. ' Mais sa levre pensive hesite aux toisons blondes.
--Jules Bois in "La Wcdlonie" Sept. , 'go. * Laforguef
95
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96 INSTIGATIONS
In part we must take our reading of La Wallonie as a study of the state of symbolism from 1885 to '92.
Rodenbach displays the other leaf of the diptych: the genre, the homely Wallon landscape, more familiar to the outer world in Verhaeren, but not, I think, better painted.
PAYSAGES SOUFFRANTS II.
A Emilie Verhaeren. La-bas, tant de petits hameaux sous I'avalanche
De la neige qui tombe adoucissante et blanche, Tant de villages, tant de chaumines qui sont Pour le reste d'un soir doucement assoupies. Car le neige s'etend en de molles charpies
Sur les blessures des vieilles briques qui n'ont Rien senti d'une Soeur sur leur rongeur qui saigne Mais, 6 neige, c'est toi la Soeur au halo blanc Qui consoles les murs malades qu'on dedaigne
Et mats un peu d'ouate aux pierres s'eraflant.
Las! rien ne guerira les chaumines--aieules
Qui meurent de I'hiver et meurent d'etre seules. . . . Et leurs ames bientot, au gre des vents du nord. Dans la fumee aux lents departs, seront parties Cependant que la neige, a I'heure de leur mort,
Leur apporte ses refraichissantes hosties
--Georges Rodenbach in "La Wallonie," Jan. , '88.
Rodenbach is authentic.
A'iele-Griffin, who, as Stuart Merrill, has always been
!
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? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 97
known in France as "an American," contributed largely toLaWallonie. His"AuTombeaud'Helene"ends:
HELENE
Me voici:
J'etais la des hier, et des sa veille,
Ailleurs, id;
Toute chair, a pare, un soir, mon ame vieille Comme I'etemite du desir que tu vets.
La nuit est claire au firmament . . .
Regarde avec tes yeux leves:
Voici--comme un tissu de pale feu fatal
Qui fait epanouir la fleur pour la fletrir
Mon voile ou transparait tout assouvissement Qui t'appelle a la vie et qui t'en fait mourir. La nuit est claire au firmament vital . . .
Mes mythes, tu les sais:
Je suis fille du Cygne,
Je suis la lune dont s'exuberent les mers Qui montent, tombent, se soulevent;
Et c'est le flot de vie exultante et prostree, le flot des reves,
le flot des chairs,
le flux et le reflux de la vaste maree.
Mon doute--on dit I'Espoir--fait Taction insigne: Je suis reine de Sparte et celle-la de Troie,
Par moi, la douloureuse existence guerroie
Je mens toute inertie aux leurres de ma joie, Helene, Selene, flottant de phase en phase,
Je suis Tlnaccedee et la tierce Hypostase Et si je rejetais, desir qui m'y convies,
--;
? 98
INSTIGATIONS
Mon voile qui promet et refuse I'extase,
Ma nudite de feu resorberait les Vies. . . . >>
--Viele-GriMn in "La IVallonie," Dec, '91. (Complete number devotgd to his poems. )
Meckel is represented by several poems rather too long to quote,--"Chantefable un peu naive," "L'Antithese," suggestive of the Gourmont litany; by prose comment, by work over various pseudonyms. "A Clair Matin" is a suitable length to quote, and it is better perhaps to represent him here by it than by fragments which I had first intended to cut from his longer poems.
A CLAIR MATIN
La nuit au loin s'est eflfacee
comme les lignes tremblantes d'un reve la nuit s'est fondue au courant du Passe et le jour attendu se leve.
Regardez! en les courbes molles des rideaux une heure attendue se revele
et ma fenetre enfin s'eclaire,
cristalline du givre ou se rit la lumiere.
Une parure enfantine de neiges
habille la-bas d'immobiles eaux
et c'est les corteges des fees nouvelles
a tire d'ailes, a tire d'ailes
du grand lointain qui toutes reviennent
aux flocons de ce jour en neiges qui s'epele.
Des courbes de mes rideaux clairs
--voici
!
c'est un parfum de ciel !
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS 99
blanc des guirlandes de I'hiver le jeune matin m'est apparu avec un visage de fiancee.
Des fees
(ah je ne sais quelles mortelles fees)
jadis elles vinrent toucher la paupiere
d'un etre enfantin qui mourut.
Son ame, oti se jouait en songes la lumiere,
diaphane corolle epanouie au jour
son ame etait vive de toute lumiere
Lui, comme un frere il sufvait ma course
et nous allions en confiants de la montagne a la Vallee par les forets des chenes, des hetres
--car eux, les ancetres, ils ont le front grave
ils virent maints reves des autres ages
et nous parlent, tres doucement, comme nos Peres.
Mais voyez ! a mes rideaux pales le matin glisse des sourires;
car la Fiancee est venue
car la Fiancee est venue
avec un simple et tres doux visage,
avec des mots qu'on n'entend pas,
en silence la Fiancee est apparue
comme une grande soeur de I'enfant qui mourut; et les hetres, les chenes royaux des forets
par douce vocalise egrenant leur parure,
les voix ressuscitees en la plaine sonore
et toute la foret d'aurore
quand elle secoue du crepuscule sa chevelure. tout chante, bruit, petille et rayonne
car la celeste Joie que la clarte delivre
d'un hymne repercute aux miroirs du futur
:
? 100 INSTIGATIONS
le front pale ou scintille en etoiles le givre.
--Albert Mockel in "La Wallonie," Dernier fascicule,
92.
I have left Gide and Van Lerberghe unquoted, un- mentioned, but I have, I dare say, given poems enough to indicate the quality and the scope of the poetry in La Wallonie.
In prose their cousinage is perhaps more quickly ap- parent. Almost the first sentence I come upon (I sus- pect it is Mockel's) runs as follows:
"La Revue des deux Mondes publie un roman de Georges Ohnet ce qui ne surprendra personne. "
This is the proper tone to use when dealing with elderly muttonheads ; with the Harpers of yester year. La Wal- loniefounditoutintheeighties. Thesymbolistemove- ment flourished on it. American letters did not flour- ish, partly perhaps for the lack of it, and for the lack of unbridled uncompromising magazines run by young men who did not care for reputations surfaites, for elderly stodge and stupidity.
If we turn to Mockel's death notice for Jules Laforgue we will find La Wallonie in '87 awake to the value of contemporary achievement
JULES LAFORGUE
Nous apprenons avec une vive tristesse, la mort de Jules Laforgue, I'un des plus curieux poetes de la lit- terature aux visees nouvelles. Nous I'avons designe, ja deux mois : un Tristan Corbiere plus argentin, moins apre . . . Et telle est bien sa caracteristique. Sans le
--
? A STUDY IN FRENCH POETS loi
moindre soupgon d'imitation ou de reminiscences, Jules Laforgue a sauvegarde une originalite vivace. Seule- ment, cette originalite, par bien des saillies, touche a celledeTristanCorbiere. C'estunememerailleriedela Vie et du Monde; mais plus de sombre et virile amer- tume emouvait en I'auteur des Amours Jaunes, dont cette piece donnera quelque idee:
LE CRAPAUD
Un chant dans une nuit sans air . . . --La lune plaque en metal clair
Les decoupures du vert sombre.
. . . Un chant; comme un echo, tout vif Enterre, la, sous le massif . . .
--Qa. se tait ; viens, c'est la, dans I'ombre . . . Un crapaud!
--Pourquoi cette peur,
Pres de moi, ton soldat fidele!
Vois-le, poete tondu, sans aile,
Rossignol de la boue . . .
--Horreur !
. . . II chante. --Hoi-reur ! --Horreur pourquoi ?
!
Vois-tu pas son oeil de lumiere . . . Non, il s'en va, froid, sous sa pierre.
Bonsoir--ce crapaud-la c'est moi.
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
!
? I02 INSTIGATIONS
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
--;
? A STUDY IN jRE. nCH POETS 103
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.
:
? I04 INSTIGATIONS
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
io6
? HENRY JAMES 107
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.
