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.
Ezra-Pound-Instigations
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
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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
? 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
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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.
? 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
. .
--
? 154 INSTIGATIONS
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. . .
? HENRY JAMES
On page 72 he quotes his father on "flagrant morality. " In Chapter X we have a remarkable portrayal of a character by almost nothing save vacuimis, "timorous philistineinaworldofdangers. " Ourauthornotesthe "finer civility" but does not see that it is a thing of no period. It is the property of a few individuals, per- sonally transmitted. Henry James had a mania for setting these things in an era or a "faubourg," despite the continued testimony that the worst manners have constantly impinged upon the most briUiant societies; that decent detail of conduct is a personal talent.
The production of "II Corteggiano" proves perhaps nothing more than the degree in which Castiglione's contemporaries "needed to be told. " On page 236
("Small Boy and Others") the phrase "presence without type. " On page 286, the people "who cultivated for years the highest instructional, social and moral possi- bilities of Geneva. " Page 283, "discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those days on that issue of the pi'oducible name. " Page 304, "For even in those days some Americans were rich and several sophisticated. " Page 313, The real give away of W. J. Page 341, Scarification of Ste-Beuve. Page 179, Crystal Palace. Page 214, Social relativity.
One is impatient for Henry James to do people.
ALittleTourinFrance. Thedisadvantageofgiv- ing impressions of real instead of imaginary places is that they conflict with other people's impressions. I do not see Angouleme via Balzac, nor do I feel Henry James's contacts with the places where our tracks have crossedveryremarkable. Idaresayitisagoodenough guide for people more meagrely furnished with asso- ciationsorperceptions. AllowmemypiSton'sshrugfor the man who has gone only by train.
'
i55
? 156 INSTIGATIONS
Henry James is not very deep in ancient associations. The American's enjoyment of England in "The Passion- ate Pilgrim" is more searching than anything continental. Windy generality in "Tour in France," and perhaps indi- cation of how little Henry James's tentacles penetrated into any era before 1600, or perhaps before 1780.
Vignette bottom of page 337-8 ("Passionate Pilgrim")' "full of glimpses a. nd responses, of deserts and desola-^ tions. " "His perceptions would be fine and his opinions pathetic. " Commiseration of Searle vs. detachment, in "Four Meetings. "
Of the posthumous work, "The Middle Years" is per- haps the most charming. "The Ivory Tower," full of accumulated perceptions, swift illuminating phrases, perhapspartofamasterpiece. "TheSenseofthePast," less important. I leave my comment of "The Middle Years" as I wrote it, but have recast the analysis of notes to "The Ivory Tower. "
Flaubert is in six volumes, four or five of which every literate man must at one time or another assault. James is strewn over about forty^--part of which must go into desuetude, have perhaps done so already.
I have not in these notes attempted the Paterine art of appreciation, e. g. , as in taking the perhaps sole read- able paragraph of Pico Mirandola and writing an em- purpled descant.
The problem--discussion of which is about as "artis- tic" as a street map--is: can we conceive a five or six volume edition of James so selected as to hold its own internationally? My contention is for this possibility.
My notes are no more than a tentative suggestion, to wit: that some such compact edition might be, to ad- vantage, tried on the less patient public. I have been, alas, no more fortunate than our subject in keeping out
:;
? HENRY JAMES 157
irrelevant, non-esthetic, non-literary, non-technical vistas and strictures.
"THE MIDDLE YEARS"
The Middle Years is a tale of the great adventure for, putting aside a few simple adventures, sentimental, phallic, Nimrodic, the remaining great adventure is pre- cisely the approach to the Metropolis ; for the provincial of our race the specific approach to London, and no subject surely could more heighten the pitch of writing than that the treated approach should be that of the greatest writer of our time and own particular language. We may, I think, set aside Thomas Hardy as of an age not our own ; of perhaps Walter Scott's or of L'Abbe Prevost's, but remote from us and things familiarly under our hand ; and we skip over the next few crops of writers as lacking in any comparative interest, interest in a writer being primarily in his degree of sensitiza- tion; and on this count we may throw out the whole Wells-Bennett period, for what interest can we take in instruments which must of nature miss two-thirds of the vibrations in any conceivable situation? In James the maximum sensibility compatible with efficient writ- ing was present. Indeed, in reading these pages one can but despair over the inadequacy of one's own literary sensitization, one's so utterly inferior state of aware- ness ; even allowing for what the author himself allows his not really, perhaps, having felt at twenty-six, all that at seventy he more or less read into the memory of his feeling. The point is that with the exception of excep- tional moments in Hueffer, we find no trace of such degree of awareness in the next lot of writers, or until the first novels of Lewis and Joyce, whose awareness is, without saying, of a nature greatly different in kind.
158 INSTIGATIOIS^S
It is not the book for any reader to tackle who has not read a good deal of James, or who has not, in default of that reading, been endowed with a natural Jamesian sensibility (a case almost negligible by any likelihood) ; neither is it a book of memoirs, I mean one does not turn to it seeking information about Vic- torian worthies ; any more than one did, when the old man himself was talking, want to be told anything ; there are encyclopedias in sufficiency, and statistics, and human mines of information, boring sufficiency; one asked and asks only that the slow voice should continue--evaluat- ing, or perhaps only tying up the strands of a sentence "Andhowmyold friend . . . Howells . . . " etc
The effects of H. J. 's first breakfasts in Liverpool, invited upstairs at Half Moon Street, are of infinitely more value than any anecdotes of the Laureate (even though H. J. 's inability not to see all through the Laure- ate is compensated by a quip melting one's personal objection to anything Tennyson touched, by making him merely an old gentleman whatsoever with a gleam of fun in his make-up).
All comers to the contrary, and the proportionate sale of his works, and statistics whatsoever to the contrary, only an American who has come abroad will ever draw all the succulence from Henry James's writings; the denizen of Manchester or Wellington may know what it feels like to reach London, the Londoner bom will not be able quite to reconstruct even this part of the book; and if for intimacy H. J. might have stayed at the same hotel on the same day as one's grandfather; and if the same American names had part in one's own inceptions in London, one's own so wholly different and less padded inceptions; one has perhaps a purely per- sonal, selfish, unliterary sense of intimacy: with, in my
:
? ? HENRY JAMES 159
own case, the vast unbridgeable diiiference of settling-in and escape.
The essence of James is that he is always "settling-in," it is the ground-tone of his genius.
Apart from the state of James's sensibility on arrival nothing else matters, the "mildness of the critical air," the fatuity of George Eliot's husband, the illustrational and accomplished lady, even the faculty for a portrait in a paragraph, not to be matched by contemporary effects in half-metric, are indeed all subordinate to one's curiosity as to what Henry James knew, and what he didnotknowonlanding. Theportraitoftheauthoron the cover showing him bearded, and looking rather like a cross between a bishop and a Cape Cod longshoreman, is an incident gratuitous, interesting, but in no way con- nected with the young man of the text.
The England of a still rather whiskered age, never looking inward, in short, the Victorian, is exquisitely em- balmed, and "niounted," as is, I think, the term for microscopy. The book is just the right length as a volume, but one mourns there not being twenty more, for here is the unfinished work . . . not in "The Sense of the Past," for there the pen was weary, as it had been in "The Outcry," and the talent that was never most worth its own while when gone off on connoisseurship, was, conceivably, finished; but here in his depiction of his earlier self the verve returned in full vigor.
THE NOTES TO "THE IVORY TOWER" *
The great artists among men of letters have occasion- ally and by tradition burst into an Ars Poetica or an Arte nuevo de hacer Comedias, and it should come as no
* Recast from an article in The Future.
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surprise that Henry James has left us some sort of treatise on novel-writing--no siirprise, that is, to the discriminating reader who is not, for the most part, a writer of English novels.
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.
? 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
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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
? 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
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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-
:
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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. . .
? HENRY JAMES
On page 72 he quotes his father on "flagrant morality. " In Chapter X we have a remarkable portrayal of a character by almost nothing save vacuimis, "timorous philistineinaworldofdangers. " Ourauthornotesthe "finer civility" but does not see that it is a thing of no period. It is the property of a few individuals, per- sonally transmitted. Henry James had a mania for setting these things in an era or a "faubourg," despite the continued testimony that the worst manners have constantly impinged upon the most briUiant societies; that decent detail of conduct is a personal talent.
The production of "II Corteggiano" proves perhaps nothing more than the degree in which Castiglione's contemporaries "needed to be told. " On page 236
("Small Boy and Others") the phrase "presence without type. " On page 286, the people "who cultivated for years the highest instructional, social and moral possi- bilities of Geneva. " Page 283, "discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those days on that issue of the pi'oducible name. " Page 304, "For even in those days some Americans were rich and several sophisticated. " Page 313, The real give away of W. J. Page 341, Scarification of Ste-Beuve. Page 179, Crystal Palace. Page 214, Social relativity.
One is impatient for Henry James to do people.
ALittleTourinFrance. Thedisadvantageofgiv- ing impressions of real instead of imaginary places is that they conflict with other people's impressions. I do not see Angouleme via Balzac, nor do I feel Henry James's contacts with the places where our tracks have crossedveryremarkable. Idaresayitisagoodenough guide for people more meagrely furnished with asso- ciationsorperceptions. AllowmemypiSton'sshrugfor the man who has gone only by train.
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Henry James is not very deep in ancient associations. The American's enjoyment of England in "The Passion- ate Pilgrim" is more searching than anything continental. Windy generality in "Tour in France," and perhaps indi- cation of how little Henry James's tentacles penetrated into any era before 1600, or perhaps before 1780.
Vignette bottom of page 337-8 ("Passionate Pilgrim")' "full of glimpses a. nd responses, of deserts and desola-^ tions. " "His perceptions would be fine and his opinions pathetic. " Commiseration of Searle vs. detachment, in "Four Meetings. "
Of the posthumous work, "The Middle Years" is per- haps the most charming. "The Ivory Tower," full of accumulated perceptions, swift illuminating phrases, perhapspartofamasterpiece. "TheSenseofthePast," less important. I leave my comment of "The Middle Years" as I wrote it, but have recast the analysis of notes to "The Ivory Tower. "
Flaubert is in six volumes, four or five of which every literate man must at one time or another assault. James is strewn over about forty^--part of which must go into desuetude, have perhaps done so already.
I have not in these notes attempted the Paterine art of appreciation, e. g. , as in taking the perhaps sole read- able paragraph of Pico Mirandola and writing an em- purpled descant.
The problem--discussion of which is about as "artis- tic" as a street map--is: can we conceive a five or six volume edition of James so selected as to hold its own internationally? My contention is for this possibility.
My notes are no more than a tentative suggestion, to wit: that some such compact edition might be, to ad- vantage, tried on the less patient public. I have been, alas, no more fortunate than our subject in keeping out
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irrelevant, non-esthetic, non-literary, non-technical vistas and strictures.
"THE MIDDLE YEARS"
The Middle Years is a tale of the great adventure for, putting aside a few simple adventures, sentimental, phallic, Nimrodic, the remaining great adventure is pre- cisely the approach to the Metropolis ; for the provincial of our race the specific approach to London, and no subject surely could more heighten the pitch of writing than that the treated approach should be that of the greatest writer of our time and own particular language. We may, I think, set aside Thomas Hardy as of an age not our own ; of perhaps Walter Scott's or of L'Abbe Prevost's, but remote from us and things familiarly under our hand ; and we skip over the next few crops of writers as lacking in any comparative interest, interest in a writer being primarily in his degree of sensitiza- tion; and on this count we may throw out the whole Wells-Bennett period, for what interest can we take in instruments which must of nature miss two-thirds of the vibrations in any conceivable situation? In James the maximum sensibility compatible with efficient writ- ing was present. Indeed, in reading these pages one can but despair over the inadequacy of one's own literary sensitization, one's so utterly inferior state of aware- ness ; even allowing for what the author himself allows his not really, perhaps, having felt at twenty-six, all that at seventy he more or less read into the memory of his feeling. The point is that with the exception of excep- tional moments in Hueffer, we find no trace of such degree of awareness in the next lot of writers, or until the first novels of Lewis and Joyce, whose awareness is, without saying, of a nature greatly different in kind.
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It is not the book for any reader to tackle who has not read a good deal of James, or who has not, in default of that reading, been endowed with a natural Jamesian sensibility (a case almost negligible by any likelihood) ; neither is it a book of memoirs, I mean one does not turn to it seeking information about Vic- torian worthies ; any more than one did, when the old man himself was talking, want to be told anything ; there are encyclopedias in sufficiency, and statistics, and human mines of information, boring sufficiency; one asked and asks only that the slow voice should continue--evaluat- ing, or perhaps only tying up the strands of a sentence "Andhowmyold friend . . . Howells . . . " etc
The effects of H. J. 's first breakfasts in Liverpool, invited upstairs at Half Moon Street, are of infinitely more value than any anecdotes of the Laureate (even though H. J. 's inability not to see all through the Laure- ate is compensated by a quip melting one's personal objection to anything Tennyson touched, by making him merely an old gentleman whatsoever with a gleam of fun in his make-up).
All comers to the contrary, and the proportionate sale of his works, and statistics whatsoever to the contrary, only an American who has come abroad will ever draw all the succulence from Henry James's writings; the denizen of Manchester or Wellington may know what it feels like to reach London, the Londoner bom will not be able quite to reconstruct even this part of the book; and if for intimacy H. J. might have stayed at the same hotel on the same day as one's grandfather; and if the same American names had part in one's own inceptions in London, one's own so wholly different and less padded inceptions; one has perhaps a purely per- sonal, selfish, unliterary sense of intimacy: with, in my
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own case, the vast unbridgeable diiiference of settling-in and escape.
The essence of James is that he is always "settling-in," it is the ground-tone of his genius.
Apart from the state of James's sensibility on arrival nothing else matters, the "mildness of the critical air," the fatuity of George Eliot's husband, the illustrational and accomplished lady, even the faculty for a portrait in a paragraph, not to be matched by contemporary effects in half-metric, are indeed all subordinate to one's curiosity as to what Henry James knew, and what he didnotknowonlanding. Theportraitoftheauthoron the cover showing him bearded, and looking rather like a cross between a bishop and a Cape Cod longshoreman, is an incident gratuitous, interesting, but in no way con- nected with the young man of the text.
The England of a still rather whiskered age, never looking inward, in short, the Victorian, is exquisitely em- balmed, and "niounted," as is, I think, the term for microscopy. The book is just the right length as a volume, but one mourns there not being twenty more, for here is the unfinished work . . . not in "The Sense of the Past," for there the pen was weary, as it had been in "The Outcry," and the talent that was never most worth its own while when gone off on connoisseurship, was, conceivably, finished; but here in his depiction of his earlier self the verve returned in full vigor.
THE NOTES TO "THE IVORY TOWER" *
The great artists among men of letters have occasion- ally and by tradition burst into an Ars Poetica or an Arte nuevo de hacer Comedias, and it should come as no
* Recast from an article in The Future.
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surprise that Henry James has left us some sort of treatise on novel-writing--no siirprise, that is, to the discriminating reader who is not, for the most part, a writer of English novels.
