It is inconceivable that Fielding or Richardson should have left, or that Thomas Hardy should leave, such
testimony
to a comprehension of the novel as a "form.
Ezra-Pound-Instigations
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.
--
? i6o INSTIGATIONS
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. Various reviewers have hinted obscurely that some such treatise is either adum-
^ brated or concealed in the Notes for "The Ivory Tower" and for "The Sense of the Past"; they have said, in- deed, that novelists will "profit greatly," etc. , but no one has set forth the gist or the generalities which are to be found in these notes.
Divested of its fine verbiage, of its cliches, of its pro- vincialisms of American phrase, and of the special de- tails relating to the particular book in his mind, the formula for building a novel (any novel, not merely any "psychological" novel) ; the things to have clearly in mind before starting to write it are enumerated in "The Ivory Tower" notes somewhat as follows :
1. Choice of names for characters; names that will "fit" their owners, and that will not "joggle" or be cacophonic when in juxtaposition on the page.
2. Exposition of one group of characters and of the "situation. " (In "The Ivory Tower" this was to be done in three subdivisions. "Book I" was to give the "Im- mediate Facts. ")
3. One character at least is hitched to his "character- istic. " We are to have one character's impression on another.
4. (Book III. ) Various reactions and interactions of characters.
5. The character, i. e. , the main character, is "faced with the situation. "
6. For"TheIvoryTower"andprobablyforanynovel, there is now need to show clearly and definitely the "antecedents," i. e. , anything that had happened before
? HENRY JAMES i6i
the story started. And we find Henry James making up his mind which characters have interacted before this story opens, and which things are to be due to fresh impacts of one character on another.
7. Particular consideration of the special case in hand. The working-free from incongruities inherent in the first vague preconceptions of the plot. Thus:
(a) The hinge of the thing is not to be the effect of A. onB. orofB. onA. ; norofA. onC. or ofC. onB. ; butistobeduetoaneffectall round, of A. and. B. and C. working on each other.
(b) James's care not to repeat figures from earlier novels. Not a categoric prohibition, but a cau- tion not to sail too near the wind in this matter.
(c) A care not to get too many "personally remark- able" people, and not enough stupid ones into the story.
(d) Care for the relative "weight" as well as the varied "tone" of the characters.
(We observe, in all this, the peculiarly American pas- sion for "art"; for having a system in things, cf. Whistler. )
(e) Consideration how far one character "faces" the problem of another character's "character. "
(This and section "d" continue the preoccupation with "moral values" shown in James's early criticism in "French Poets and Novelists. ")
8. Definite "joints"; or relations of one character to another finally fitted and settled.
This brings us again to point 5. The character, i. e. , the main character definitely "faced" with the situation.
9. The consequences.
? i62 INSTIGATIONS
10. (a) Further consideration of the state of char- acter C. before contact with B. , etc.
(b) The effect of further characters on the. mind, and thence on the action of A.
(c) Considerations of the effect of a fourth main character; of introducing a subsidiary char- acter, and its effect, i. e. , that of having an extra character for a particular function.
11. The great "coup" foreshadowed.
(In this case the mild Othello, more and more drifting consciously into the grip of the mild lago--I use the terms "Othello" and "lago" merely to avoid, if not "hero," at least "villain" ; the sensitive temperament al- lowing the rapacious temperament to become effective. )
(a) The main character in perplexity as to how far he shall combat the drift of things.
(b) The opposed character's perception of this.
(These sub-sections are, of course, sub-sections for a psychological novel; one would have different but equivalent "joints" in a novel of action. )
(c) Effect of all this on third character. (In this case female, attracted to "man-of-action" qual- ity).
(d) A. 's general perception of these things and his weighing of values, a phase solely for the psy- chological novel.
(e) Weighing of how much A. 's perception of the relations between B. and C. is to be denouement, and how much, more or less, known.
12. Main character's "solution" or vision of what course he will take.
13. The fourth character's "break into" things, or into a perception of things,
(a) Actions of an auxiliary character, of what would
? HENRY JAMES 163
have been low life in old Spanish or Elizabethan drama. This character affects the main action (as sometimes a "gracioso" [servant, buffoon, Sancho Panza] affects the main action in a play, for example, of Lope de Vega's),
(b) Caution not to let author's interest in fascinat- ing auxiliary character run away with his whole plan and design.
(This kind of restraint is precisely what leaves a reader "wanting more" ; which gives a novel the "feel" ofbeingfulloflife; convincesthereaderofanabundant energy, an abundant sense of life in an author. )
14. Effects of course of the action on fourth main character and on the others. The scale being kept by the relation here not being between main character and one antagonist, but with a group of three people, rela- tions "different" though their "point" is the same; cf. a main character vs. a Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, or "attendant lords. " James always has half an eye on play construction; the scene. ,
(a) The second auxiliary character brought out more definitely. (This is accidental. It might hap- pen at any suitable point in a story wherever needed. )
(b) Act of this auxiliary person reaches through to main action.
15. We see the author determining just how bad a case he is going to make his villain.
(a) Further detei-mination of his hero. (In this case an absolute non-producer, non-accumu- lator. )
(b) Care not to get an unmixed "bad" in his "villain," but to keep a right balance, a dependency, in
? i64 INSTIGATIONS
this case, on the main character's weakness or
easiness,
(c) Decision how the main "coup" or transfer shall
slide through.
i6. Effect upon C. Effect upon main characters' re-
lations to D. , E. and F.
At this point, in the consideration of eight of the ten
"books" of his novel, we see the author most intent on his composition or architecture, most anxious to get all the sections fitted in with the greatest economy, a sort "of crux of his excitement and anxiety, a fullness of his perception that the thing must be so tightly packed that no sentence can afford to be out of place.
17. Climax. - The Deus or, in this case, Dea, ex machina. Devices for prolonging climax. The fourth main character having been, as it were, held back for a sort of weight or balance here, and as a "resolution" of the tangles.
Finis.
18. Author's final considerations of time scheme, i. e. , fitting the action into time not too great for unity, and great enough to allow for needed complexity. Slighter consideration of place scheme; where final scenes shall be laid, etc.
Here in a few paragraphs are the bare bones of the plan described in eighty of Henry James's pages. The detailed thoroughness of this plan, the complicated con- sciousness displayed in it, gives us the measure of this author's superiority, as conscious artist, over the "nor- mal" British novelist, i. e. , over the sort of person who tells you that when he did his first book he "just sat down and wrote the first paragraph," and then found he "couldn't stop. " This he tells you in a manner clearly implying that, from that humble beginning to the shining
? HENRY JAMES 165
hour of the present, he has given the matter no further thought, and that his succeeding works were all knocked off with equal simplicity.
I give this outline with such fullness because it is a landmark in the history of the novel, as written in Eng- lish.
It is inconceivable that Fielding or Richardson should have left, or that Thomas Hardy should leave, such testimony to a comprehension of the novel as a "form. " The Notes are, on the other hand, quite dis- tinct from the voluminous, prefaces which so many French poets write before they have done anything else. James, we note, wrote no prefaces until there were twenty-four volumes of his novels and stories waiting to be collected and republished. The Notes are simply the accumulation of his craftsman's knowledge, they are,
in all their length, the summary of the things he would have, as a matter of habit, in his mind before embark- ing on composition.
I take it rather as a sign of editorial woodenheaded- ness that these Notes are printed at the end of "The Ivory Tower" ; if one have sense enough to suspect that the typical mentality of the elderly heavy reviewer has been shown, one will for oneself reverse the order ; read the notes with interest and turn to the text already with the excitement of the sport or with the zest to see if, with this chance of creating the masterpiece so outlined, the distinguished author is going to make good. If on the other hand one reads the unfinished text, there is no escaping the boredom of re-reading in skeleton, with tentative and confusing names, the bare statement of what has been, in the text, more fully set before us.
The text is attestation of the rich, banked-up per- ception of the author. I dare say the snap and rattle of the fun, or much of it, will be only half perceptible to
? i66 INSTIGATIONS
those who do not know both banks of the Atlantic; but enough remains to show the author at his best; despite the fact that occasionally he puts in the mouths of his characters sentences or phrases that no one but he hira? self could have used. I cannot attribute this to the unfinished state of the manuscript. These oversights are few, but they are the kind of slip which occurs in his earlier work. We note also that his novel is a descriptive novel, not a novel that simply depicts people speaking and moving. There is a constant dissertation goingon,andinitisourmajorenjoyment. TheNotes
to "The Sense of the Past" are not so fine a specimen of method, as they are the plan not of a whole book, but only of the latter section. The editor is quite right to print them at the end of the volume.
Of the actual writing in the three posthumous books, far the most charming is to be found in "The Middle Years. " Here again one is not much concerned with Mr. James's mildly ironic reminiscences of Tennyson and the Victorians, but rather with James's own tempera- ment, and with his recording of inn-rooms, breakfasts, butlers, etc. , very much as he had done in his fiction. There is no need for its being "memoirs" at all; call the protagonist Mr. Ponsonby or Mr. Hampton, obliterate the known names of celebrities and half celebrities, and
the whole thing becomes a James novel, and, so far as it goes, a mate to the best of them.
Retaining the name of the author, any faithful reader of James, or at any rate the attentive student, finds a good deal of amusement in deciphering the young James, his temperament as mellowed by recollection and here recorded forty years later, and then in contrasting it with the young James as revealed or even "betrayed" in his own early criticisms, "French Poets and Novelists,"
? HENRY JAMES 167
a mueh cruder and more savagely puritanical and plainly New England product with, however, certain permanent traits of his character already in evidence, and with a critical faculty keen enough to hit on certain weaknesses in the authors analyzed, often with profundity, and with often a "rightness" in his mistakes. I mean that apparent errors are at times only an excess of zeal and overshooting of his mark, which was to make for an improvement, by him, of certain defects.
? Ill
REMY DE GOURMONT
A DISTINCTION followed by notes
The mind of Remy de Gourmont was less like the mind of Henry James than any contemporary mind I can think of. James' drawing of nueurs contemporaines was so circumstantial, so concerned with the setting, with detail, nuance, social aroma, that his transcripts were "out of date" almost before his books had gone into a second edition; out of date that is, in the sense that his interpretations of society could never serve as a guide to such supposititious utilitarian members of the next gen- eration as might so desire to use them.
He has left his scene and his characters, unalterable as the little paper flowers permanently visible inside the lumpy glass paperweights. He was a great man of letters, a great artist in portrayal ; he was concerned with mental temperatures, circumvolvulous social pressures, the clash of contending conventions, as Hogarth with the cut of contemporary coats.
On no occasion would any man of my generation have broached an intimate idea to H. J. , or to Thomas Hardy, O. M. , or, years since, to Swinburne, or even to Mr. Yeats with any feeling that the said idea was likely to be received, grasped, comprehended. However much
168
? REMY DE GOURMONT 169
onemayhaveadmiredYeats'poetry; howevermuchone may have been admonished by Henry' James' prose works, one has never thought of agreeing with either.
You could, on the other hand, have said to De Gour-
mont anything that came into your head you could have ;
sent him anything you had written with a reasonable assurance that he would have known what you were driving at. If this distinction is purely my own, and subjective, and even if it be wholly untrue, one will be very hard pressed to find any other man born in the "fifties" of whom it is even suggestible.
De Gourmont prepared our era; behind him there stretches a limitless darkness; there was the counter- reformation, still extant in the English printer; there was the restoration of the Inquisition by the Catholic Roman Church, holy and apostolic, in the year of grace 1824; there was the Mephistopheles period, morals of the opera left over from the Spanish XVIIth century plays of "capa y espada"; Don Juan for subject mat- ter, etc. ; there was the period of English Christian big- otry, Saml. Smiles, exhibition of '51 ("Centennial of '76"), machine-made building "ornament," etc. , enduring in the people who did not read Saml. Butler; there was the Emerson-Tennysonian plus optimism period; there was the "aesthetic" era during which pieople "wrought" as the impeccable Beerbohm has noted; there was the period of funny symboliste trappings, "sin," satanism, rosy cross, heavy lilies, Jersey Lilies, etc. ,
"Ch'hanno perduto il ben del intelletto"
all these periods had mislaid the light of the XVIIIth century; though in the symbolistes Gourmont had his beginning.
? 170 INSTIGATIONS II.
In contradiction to, in wholly antipodal distinction from, Henry James, De Gourmont was an artist of the nude. Hewasanintelligencealmostmorethananar- tist; whenheportrays,heisconcernedwithhardlymore than the permanent human elements. His people are only by accident of any particular era. He is poet, more by possessing a certain quality of mind than by virtue of having written fine poems; you could scarcely con- tend that he was a novelist.
He was intensely aware of the differences of emo- tional timbre; and as a man's message is precisely his fagon de voir, his modality of apperception, this particu- lar awareness was his "message. "
Where James is concerned with the social tone of his subjects, with their entourage, with their superstes of dogmatized "form," ethic, etc. , De Gourmont is con- cerned with their modality and resonance in emotion.
Mauve, Fanette, Neobelle, La Vierge aux Platres, are all studies in different permanent kinds of people; they are not the results of environments or of "social causes," their circumstance is an accident and is on the whole scarcely alluded to. Gourmont differentiates his charac- ters by the modes of their sensibility, not by sub-degrees of their state of civilization.
He recognizes the right of individuals to feel differ- ently. Confucian, Epicurean, a considerer and enter- tainer of ideas, this complicated sensuous wisdom is al- most the one ubiquitous element, the "self" which keeps his superficially heterogeneous work vaguely "unified. "
The study of emotion does not follow a set chrono- logical arc; it extends from the "Physique de 1'Amour"
? REMY DE GOURMONT/ 171
to "Le Latin Mystique"; from the condensation of Fabre's knowledge of insects to
"Amas ut facias pulchram"
in the Seqttaire of Goddeschalk
(in "Le Latin Mystique").
He had passed the point where people take abstract
statementofdogmafor"enlightenment. " An"idea"has little value apart from the modality of the mind which receives it. It is a railway from one state to another, and as dull as steel rails in a desert.
The emotions are equal before the aesthetic judgment. He does not grant the duality of body and soul, or at least suggests that this mediaeval duality is unsatisfac- tory; there is an interpenetration, an osmosis of body andsoul,atleastforhypothesis. "Mywordsaretheun- spoken words of my body. "
And in all his exquisite treatment of all emotion he will satisfy many whom August Strindberg, for egre- gious example, will not. From the studies of insects to Christine evoked from the thoughts of Diomede, sex is not a monstrosity or an exclusively German study. * And the entire race is not bound to the habits of the mantis orofotherinsectsequallymelodramatic. Sex,insofar as it is not a purely physiological reproductive mechan- ism, lies in the domain of aesthetics, the junction of tactile and magnetic senses ; as some people have accurate ears both for rhythm and for pitch, and as some are tone deaf, some impervious to rhythmic subtlety and variety, so in this other field of the senses some desire the trivial, some the processional, the stately, the master-work.
As some people are good judges of music, and insen- sible to painting and sculpture, so the fineness ot one
* "A German study," Hobson ; "A German study," Tarr.
? 172 INSTIGATIONS
sense entails no corresponding fineness in another, or at least no corresponding critical perception of differences.
III.
Emotions to Henry James were more or less things that other people had and that one didn't go into ; at any rate not in drawing rooms. The gods had not visited James, and the Muse, whom he so frequently mentions, appeared doubtless in corsage, the narrow waist, the sleeves puffed at the shoulders, a la mode 1890-2.
De Gourmont is interested in hardly anything save emotions, and the ideas that will go into them, or take life in emotional application. (Apperceptive rather than active. )
One reads Les Chevaux de Diomede (1897) as one would have listened to incense in the old Imperial court. There are many spirits incapable. De Gourmont calls it a "romance of possible adventures" ; it might be called equally an ai'oma, the fragrance of roses and poplars, the savor of wisdoms, not part of the canon of literature, a book like "Daphnis and Chloe" or like Marcel Schwob's"LivredeMonelle"; notasolidaritylikeFlau- bert; but an osmosis, a pervasion.
"My true life is in the unspoken words of my body. "
In "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," the characters talk at more length, and the movement is less convincing. "Diomede" was De Gourmont's own favorite and we may take it as the best of his art, as the most complete expression of his particular "faQon d'apercevoir"; if, even in it, the characters do little but talk philosophy, or rather drift into philosophic expression out of a haze of images, they are for all that very real. It is the climax
? REMY DE GOURMONT 173
of his method of presenting characters differentiated by emotional timbre, a process which had begun in "His- ToiRES Magiques" (1895); and in "D'un Pays Loin- tain" (published 1898, in reprint from periodicals of 1892-4).
"SoNGE d'une Femme" (1899) is a novel of modern life, De Gourmont's sexual intelligence, as contrasted to Strindberg'ssexualstupiditywellinevidence. Thework is untranslatable into English, but should be used before 30 by young men who have been during their undergrad- uate days too deeply inebriated with the Vita Nuova.
"Tout ce qui se passe dans la vie, c'est de la mauvaise litterature. "
"La vraie terre natale est celle ou on a eu sa premiere emotion forte. "
"La virginite n'est pas une vertu, c'est un etat; c'est une sous-division des couleurs. "
Livres de chevet for those whom the Strindbergian school will always leave aloof.
"Les imbeciles ont choisi le beau comme les oiseaux choisissentcequiestgras. Labetiseleursertdecornes. " "CoEUR Virginal" (1907) is a light novel, amusing,
and accurate in its psychology.
I do not think it possible to overemphasize Gourmont's
sense of beauty. The mist clings to the lacquer. His spirit was the spirit of Omakitsu; his pays natal was near to the peach-blossom-fountain of the untranslatable poem. If the Ufe of Diomede is overdone and done badly in modern Paris, the wisdom of the book is not thereby invalidated. It may be that Paris has need of some more Spartan corrective, but for the descendants of witch-burners Diomede is a needful communication.
? 174 INSTIGATIONS IV.
As Voltaire was a needed light in the i8th cen- tury, so in our time Fabre and Frazer have been essen- tials in the mental furnishings of any contemporary mind qualified to . write of ethics or philosophy or that mixed molasses religion. "The Golden Bough" has supplied the data which Voltaire's incisions had shown to be lack- ing. It has been a positive succeeding his negative. It is not necessary perhaps to read Fabre and Frazer en- tire, but one must be aware of them; people unaware of them invalidate all their own writing by simple igno- rance, and their work goes ultimately to the scrap heap.
"Physique de l'Amour" (1903) should be used as a text book of biology. Between this biological basis in instinct, and the "Sequaire of Goddeschalk" in "Le Latin Mystique" (1892) stretch Gourmont's studies of amour and aesthetics. If in Diomede we find an Epicurean receptivity, a certain aloofness, an observation of con- tacts and auditions, in contrast to the Propertian atti- tude:
Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit,
this is perhaps balanced by
"Sans vous, je crois bien que je n'aimerais plus beau- coup et que je n'aurais plus une extreme confiance ni dans la vie ni moi-meme. " (In "Lettres a I'Ama- zone. ")
But there is nothing more unsatisfactory than saying that De Gourmont "had such and such ideas" or held "such and such views," the thing is that he held ideas, in-
;;
? REMY DE GOURMONT 175
tuitions, perceptions in a certain personal exquisite man- ner. In a criticism of him, "criticism" being an over violent word, in, let us say, an indication of him, one wants merely to show that one has oneself made certain dissociations; as here, between the aesthetic receptivity of tactile and magnetic values, of the perception of beauty in these relationships, and the conception of love, passion, emotion as an intellectual instigation; such as Propertius claims it; such as we find it declared in the King of Navarre's
"De fine amor vient science et beaute"
and constantly in the troubadours.
(I cannot repeat too often that there was a profound
psychological knowledge in mediaeval Provence, how- ever Gothic its expression ; that men, concentrated on certain validities, attaining an exact and diversified ter- minology, have there displayed considerable penetration that this was carried into early Italian poetry ; and faded from it when metaphors became decorative instead of interpretative; and that the age of Aquinas would not have tolerated sloppy expression of psychology concur- rent with the exact expression of "mysticism. " There is also great wisdom in Ovid. Passons! )
De Gourmont's wisdom is not wholly unlike the wis- dom which those ignorant of Latin may, if the gods favor their understanding, derive from Gelding's "Met- amorphoses. "
Barbarian ethics proceed by general taboos. Gour- mont's essays collected into various volumes, "Prome- nades," "Epilogues," etc. , are perhaps the. best ihtro-
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duction to the ideas of our time that any unfortunate, suddenly emerging from Peru, Peoria, Oshkosh, Ice- land, Kochin, or other out-of-the-way lost continent could desire. A set of Landor's collected works will go fur- ther towards civilizing a man than any university educa- tion now on the market. Montaigne condensed Renais- sance awareness. Even so small a collection as Lionel Johnson's "Post Liminium" might save a man from utter barbarity.
But if, for example, a raw graduate were contemplat- ing a burst into intellectual company, he would be less likely to utter unutterable betisses, gaffes, etc. , after read- ing Gourmont than before. One cannot of course cre- ate intelligence in a numbskull.
Needless to say, Gourmont's essays are of uneven value as the necessary subject matter is of uneven value. Taken together, proportionately placed in his work, they are a portrait of the civilized mind. I incline to think them the best portrait available, the best record that is, of the civilized mind from 1885-1915.
There are plenty of people who do not know what the civilized mind is like, just as there were plenty of mules in England who did not read Landor contemporaneously, orwhodidnotinhisdayreadMontaigne. Civilization is individual.
Gourmont arouses the senses of the imagination, pre- paring the mind for receptivities. His wisdom, if not of the senses, is at any rate via the senses. We base our "science" on perceptions, but our ethics have not yet at- tained this palpable basis.
In 1898, "Pays Lointain" (reprinted from magazine publication of 1892-4), De Gourmont was beginning his method
? REMY DE GOURMONT
177
"Douze crimes pour I'honneur de I'iniini. "
He treats the special case, cases as special as any of
James', but segregated on different demarcative lines. His style had attained the vividness of
"Sa vocation etait de paraitre malheureuse, de passer dans la vie comme une ombre gemissante, d'inspirer de la pitie, du doute et de I'inquietude. Elle avait toujours I'air de porter des jfleurs vers une torabe abandonnee. " La Femme en Noir.
In "HisToiEES Magiques" (1894):
Blanche," "Yeux d'eau," "Marguerite Rouge," "Soeur de Sylvie," "Danaette," are slW of them special cases, already showing his perception of nevrosis, of hyperaesthesia.
His mind is still running on tonal variations in "Les Litanies de la Rose. "
"Pourtant il y a des yeux au bout des doigts. " "Femmes, conservatrices des traditions milesiennes. "
"Epilogues" (1895-98). Pleasant rereading, a book to leave lying about, to look back into at odd half hours. A book of accumulations. Full of meat as a good walnut.
Heterogeneous as the following paragraphs:
"Ni la croyance en un seul Dieu, ni la morale ne sont les fondements vrais de la religion. Une religion, meme le Christianisme, n'eut jamais sur les moeurs qu'une in- fluence dilatoire, I'influence d'un bras leve; elle doit re- commencer son preche, non pas seulement avec chaque generation humaine, mais avec chaque phase d'une vie individuelle. N'apportant pas des verites evidentes en soi, son enseignement oublie, elle ne laisse rien dans les
"La Robe
? 178 INSTIGATIONS
ames que I'effroi du peut-etre et la honte d'etre asservi a une peur ou a une esperance dont les chaines fantomales entravent non pas nos actes mais nos desirs.
"L'essence d'une religion, c'est sa litterature. Or la litterature religieuse est morte. " Religions.
"Je veux bien que Ton me protege centre des ennemis inconnus, I'escarpe ou le cambrioleur,--mais centre moi- meme, vices ou passions, non. '' Madame B'oulton.
"Si le cosmopolitisme litteraire g^nait encore et qu'il reussit a eteindre ce que les differences de race ont allume de haine de sang parmi les hommes, j'y verrais un gain pour la civilisation et pour I'humanite tout entiere. " Cosmopolitisme.
"Augier! Tous les lucratifs reves de la bourgeoise econome; touslessoupirsdesviergesconfortables; toutes les reticences des consciences soignees ; toutes les joies permises aux ventres prudents; toutes les veuleries des bourses craintives; tous les siphons conjugaux; toutes les enviesdelarobemontantecontrelesepaulesnues; toutes les haines du waterproof contre la grace et contre la beaute ! Augier, crinoline, parapluie, bec-de-corbin, bon- net grec . . . " Augier.
"Dieu aime la melodic gregorienne, mais avec modera- tion. II a soin de varier le programme quotidien des con- certs celestes, dont le fond reste le plain-chant lithur- gique, par des auditions de Bach, Mozart, Haendel, Haydn, 'et meme Gounod. ' Dieu ignore Wagner, mais il aime la variete. " Le Dieu des Beiges.
"La propriete n'est pas sacree ; elle n'est qu'un fait ac- ceptable comme necessaire au developpement de la liberte individuelle . . .
"L'abominable loi des cinquantes ans--contre laquelle
? REMY DE GOURMONT 179
Proudhon lutta en vain si courageusement--commence a faire sentir sa tyrannic. La veuve de M. Dumas a fait interdire la reprise d'Antony. Motif: son bon plaisir. Des caprices d'heritiers peuvent d'un jour a I'autre nous priver pendant cinquante ans de toute une oeuvre.
"Demain les oeuvres de Renan, de Taine, de Verlaine, de Villiers peuvent appartenir a un cure fanatique ou a une devote stupide. " La Propriete LittSraire.
"M. Desjardins, plus modeste, inaugure la morale ar- tistique et murale, seconde par I'excellent M. Puvis de Chavannes qui n'y comprend rien, mais s'avoue tout de memebiencontentdefigurersurlesmurs. " U. P. A. M.
"Les auteurs, 'avertis par le Public . . . ' II y a dans ces mots toute une esthetique, non seulement dramatique, mais democratique; Plus d'insucces. Plus de fours. Ad- mirable invention par laquelle, sans doute, le peuple trou- vera enfin I'art quilui convient etles auteurs qu'il merite. " Conscience Litteraire.
"Le citoyen est une variete de I'homme ; variete degen- eree ou primitive il est a I'homme ce que le chat de gou- tiere est au chat sauvage.
"Comma toutes les creations vraiment belles et noble- ment utiles, la sociologie fut I'oeuvre d'un homme de genie, M.
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.
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
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? ? 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. Various reviewers have hinted obscurely that some such treatise is either adum-
^ brated or concealed in the Notes for "The Ivory Tower" and for "The Sense of the Past"; they have said, in- deed, that novelists will "profit greatly," etc. , but no one has set forth the gist or the generalities which are to be found in these notes.
Divested of its fine verbiage, of its cliches, of its pro- vincialisms of American phrase, and of the special de- tails relating to the particular book in his mind, the formula for building a novel (any novel, not merely any "psychological" novel) ; the things to have clearly in mind before starting to write it are enumerated in "The Ivory Tower" notes somewhat as follows :
1. Choice of names for characters; names that will "fit" their owners, and that will not "joggle" or be cacophonic when in juxtaposition on the page.
2. Exposition of one group of characters and of the "situation. " (In "The Ivory Tower" this was to be done in three subdivisions. "Book I" was to give the "Im- mediate Facts. ")
3. One character at least is hitched to his "character- istic. " We are to have one character's impression on another.
4. (Book III. ) Various reactions and interactions of characters.
5. The character, i. e. , the main character, is "faced with the situation. "
6. For"TheIvoryTower"andprobablyforanynovel, there is now need to show clearly and definitely the "antecedents," i. e. , anything that had happened before
? HENRY JAMES i6i
the story started. And we find Henry James making up his mind which characters have interacted before this story opens, and which things are to be due to fresh impacts of one character on another.
7. Particular consideration of the special case in hand. The working-free from incongruities inherent in the first vague preconceptions of the plot. Thus:
(a) The hinge of the thing is not to be the effect of A. onB. orofB. onA. ; norofA. onC. or ofC. onB. ; butistobeduetoaneffectall round, of A. and. B. and C. working on each other.
(b) James's care not to repeat figures from earlier novels. Not a categoric prohibition, but a cau- tion not to sail too near the wind in this matter.
(c) A care not to get too many "personally remark- able" people, and not enough stupid ones into the story.
(d) Care for the relative "weight" as well as the varied "tone" of the characters.
(We observe, in all this, the peculiarly American pas- sion for "art"; for having a system in things, cf. Whistler. )
(e) Consideration how far one character "faces" the problem of another character's "character. "
(This and section "d" continue the preoccupation with "moral values" shown in James's early criticism in "French Poets and Novelists. ")
8. Definite "joints"; or relations of one character to another finally fitted and settled.
This brings us again to point 5. The character, i. e. , the main character definitely "faced" with the situation.
9. The consequences.
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10. (a) Further consideration of the state of char- acter C. before contact with B. , etc.
(b) The effect of further characters on the. mind, and thence on the action of A.
(c) Considerations of the effect of a fourth main character; of introducing a subsidiary char- acter, and its effect, i. e. , that of having an extra character for a particular function.
11. The great "coup" foreshadowed.
(In this case the mild Othello, more and more drifting consciously into the grip of the mild lago--I use the terms "Othello" and "lago" merely to avoid, if not "hero," at least "villain" ; the sensitive temperament al- lowing the rapacious temperament to become effective. )
(a) The main character in perplexity as to how far he shall combat the drift of things.
(b) The opposed character's perception of this.
(These sub-sections are, of course, sub-sections for a psychological novel; one would have different but equivalent "joints" in a novel of action. )
(c) Effect of all this on third character. (In this case female, attracted to "man-of-action" qual- ity).
(d) A. 's general perception of these things and his weighing of values, a phase solely for the psy- chological novel.
(e) Weighing of how much A. 's perception of the relations between B. and C. is to be denouement, and how much, more or less, known.
12. Main character's "solution" or vision of what course he will take.
13. The fourth character's "break into" things, or into a perception of things,
(a) Actions of an auxiliary character, of what would
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have been low life in old Spanish or Elizabethan drama. This character affects the main action (as sometimes a "gracioso" [servant, buffoon, Sancho Panza] affects the main action in a play, for example, of Lope de Vega's),
(b) Caution not to let author's interest in fascinat- ing auxiliary character run away with his whole plan and design.
(This kind of restraint is precisely what leaves a reader "wanting more" ; which gives a novel the "feel" ofbeingfulloflife; convincesthereaderofanabundant energy, an abundant sense of life in an author. )
14. Effects of course of the action on fourth main character and on the others. The scale being kept by the relation here not being between main character and one antagonist, but with a group of three people, rela- tions "different" though their "point" is the same; cf. a main character vs. a Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, or "attendant lords. " James always has half an eye on play construction; the scene. ,
(a) The second auxiliary character brought out more definitely. (This is accidental. It might hap- pen at any suitable point in a story wherever needed. )
(b) Act of this auxiliary person reaches through to main action.
15. We see the author determining just how bad a case he is going to make his villain.
(a) Further detei-mination of his hero. (In this case an absolute non-producer, non-accumu- lator. )
(b) Care not to get an unmixed "bad" in his "villain," but to keep a right balance, a dependency, in
? i64 INSTIGATIONS
this case, on the main character's weakness or
easiness,
(c) Decision how the main "coup" or transfer shall
slide through.
i6. Effect upon C. Effect upon main characters' re-
lations to D. , E. and F.
At this point, in the consideration of eight of the ten
"books" of his novel, we see the author most intent on his composition or architecture, most anxious to get all the sections fitted in with the greatest economy, a sort "of crux of his excitement and anxiety, a fullness of his perception that the thing must be so tightly packed that no sentence can afford to be out of place.
17. Climax. - The Deus or, in this case, Dea, ex machina. Devices for prolonging climax. The fourth main character having been, as it were, held back for a sort of weight or balance here, and as a "resolution" of the tangles.
Finis.
18. Author's final considerations of time scheme, i. e. , fitting the action into time not too great for unity, and great enough to allow for needed complexity. Slighter consideration of place scheme; where final scenes shall be laid, etc.
Here in a few paragraphs are the bare bones of the plan described in eighty of Henry James's pages. The detailed thoroughness of this plan, the complicated con- sciousness displayed in it, gives us the measure of this author's superiority, as conscious artist, over the "nor- mal" British novelist, i. e. , over the sort of person who tells you that when he did his first book he "just sat down and wrote the first paragraph," and then found he "couldn't stop. " This he tells you in a manner clearly implying that, from that humble beginning to the shining
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hour of the present, he has given the matter no further thought, and that his succeeding works were all knocked off with equal simplicity.
I give this outline with such fullness because it is a landmark in the history of the novel, as written in Eng- lish.
It is inconceivable that Fielding or Richardson should have left, or that Thomas Hardy should leave, such testimony to a comprehension of the novel as a "form. " The Notes are, on the other hand, quite dis- tinct from the voluminous, prefaces which so many French poets write before they have done anything else. James, we note, wrote no prefaces until there were twenty-four volumes of his novels and stories waiting to be collected and republished. The Notes are simply the accumulation of his craftsman's knowledge, they are,
in all their length, the summary of the things he would have, as a matter of habit, in his mind before embark- ing on composition.
I take it rather as a sign of editorial woodenheaded- ness that these Notes are printed at the end of "The Ivory Tower" ; if one have sense enough to suspect that the typical mentality of the elderly heavy reviewer has been shown, one will for oneself reverse the order ; read the notes with interest and turn to the text already with the excitement of the sport or with the zest to see if, with this chance of creating the masterpiece so outlined, the distinguished author is going to make good. If on the other hand one reads the unfinished text, there is no escaping the boredom of re-reading in skeleton, with tentative and confusing names, the bare statement of what has been, in the text, more fully set before us.
The text is attestation of the rich, banked-up per- ception of the author. I dare say the snap and rattle of the fun, or much of it, will be only half perceptible to
? i66 INSTIGATIONS
those who do not know both banks of the Atlantic; but enough remains to show the author at his best; despite the fact that occasionally he puts in the mouths of his characters sentences or phrases that no one but he hira? self could have used. I cannot attribute this to the unfinished state of the manuscript. These oversights are few, but they are the kind of slip which occurs in his earlier work. We note also that his novel is a descriptive novel, not a novel that simply depicts people speaking and moving. There is a constant dissertation goingon,andinitisourmajorenjoyment. TheNotes
to "The Sense of the Past" are not so fine a specimen of method, as they are the plan not of a whole book, but only of the latter section. The editor is quite right to print them at the end of the volume.
Of the actual writing in the three posthumous books, far the most charming is to be found in "The Middle Years. " Here again one is not much concerned with Mr. James's mildly ironic reminiscences of Tennyson and the Victorians, but rather with James's own tempera- ment, and with his recording of inn-rooms, breakfasts, butlers, etc. , very much as he had done in his fiction. There is no need for its being "memoirs" at all; call the protagonist Mr. Ponsonby or Mr. Hampton, obliterate the known names of celebrities and half celebrities, and
the whole thing becomes a James novel, and, so far as it goes, a mate to the best of them.
Retaining the name of the author, any faithful reader of James, or at any rate the attentive student, finds a good deal of amusement in deciphering the young James, his temperament as mellowed by recollection and here recorded forty years later, and then in contrasting it with the young James as revealed or even "betrayed" in his own early criticisms, "French Poets and Novelists,"
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a mueh cruder and more savagely puritanical and plainly New England product with, however, certain permanent traits of his character already in evidence, and with a critical faculty keen enough to hit on certain weaknesses in the authors analyzed, often with profundity, and with often a "rightness" in his mistakes. I mean that apparent errors are at times only an excess of zeal and overshooting of his mark, which was to make for an improvement, by him, of certain defects.
? Ill
REMY DE GOURMONT
A DISTINCTION followed by notes
The mind of Remy de Gourmont was less like the mind of Henry James than any contemporary mind I can think of. James' drawing of nueurs contemporaines was so circumstantial, so concerned with the setting, with detail, nuance, social aroma, that his transcripts were "out of date" almost before his books had gone into a second edition; out of date that is, in the sense that his interpretations of society could never serve as a guide to such supposititious utilitarian members of the next gen- eration as might so desire to use them.
He has left his scene and his characters, unalterable as the little paper flowers permanently visible inside the lumpy glass paperweights. He was a great man of letters, a great artist in portrayal ; he was concerned with mental temperatures, circumvolvulous social pressures, the clash of contending conventions, as Hogarth with the cut of contemporary coats.
On no occasion would any man of my generation have broached an intimate idea to H. J. , or to Thomas Hardy, O. M. , or, years since, to Swinburne, or even to Mr. Yeats with any feeling that the said idea was likely to be received, grasped, comprehended. However much
168
? REMY DE GOURMONT 169
onemayhaveadmiredYeats'poetry; howevermuchone may have been admonished by Henry' James' prose works, one has never thought of agreeing with either.
You could, on the other hand, have said to De Gour-
mont anything that came into your head you could have ;
sent him anything you had written with a reasonable assurance that he would have known what you were driving at. If this distinction is purely my own, and subjective, and even if it be wholly untrue, one will be very hard pressed to find any other man born in the "fifties" of whom it is even suggestible.
De Gourmont prepared our era; behind him there stretches a limitless darkness; there was the counter- reformation, still extant in the English printer; there was the restoration of the Inquisition by the Catholic Roman Church, holy and apostolic, in the year of grace 1824; there was the Mephistopheles period, morals of the opera left over from the Spanish XVIIth century plays of "capa y espada"; Don Juan for subject mat- ter, etc. ; there was the period of English Christian big- otry, Saml. Smiles, exhibition of '51 ("Centennial of '76"), machine-made building "ornament," etc. , enduring in the people who did not read Saml. Butler; there was the Emerson-Tennysonian plus optimism period; there was the "aesthetic" era during which pieople "wrought" as the impeccable Beerbohm has noted; there was the period of funny symboliste trappings, "sin," satanism, rosy cross, heavy lilies, Jersey Lilies, etc. ,
"Ch'hanno perduto il ben del intelletto"
all these periods had mislaid the light of the XVIIIth century; though in the symbolistes Gourmont had his beginning.
? 170 INSTIGATIONS II.
In contradiction to, in wholly antipodal distinction from, Henry James, De Gourmont was an artist of the nude. Hewasanintelligencealmostmorethananar- tist; whenheportrays,heisconcernedwithhardlymore than the permanent human elements. His people are only by accident of any particular era. He is poet, more by possessing a certain quality of mind than by virtue of having written fine poems; you could scarcely con- tend that he was a novelist.
He was intensely aware of the differences of emo- tional timbre; and as a man's message is precisely his fagon de voir, his modality of apperception, this particu- lar awareness was his "message. "
Where James is concerned with the social tone of his subjects, with their entourage, with their superstes of dogmatized "form," ethic, etc. , De Gourmont is con- cerned with their modality and resonance in emotion.
Mauve, Fanette, Neobelle, La Vierge aux Platres, are all studies in different permanent kinds of people; they are not the results of environments or of "social causes," their circumstance is an accident and is on the whole scarcely alluded to. Gourmont differentiates his charac- ters by the modes of their sensibility, not by sub-degrees of their state of civilization.
He recognizes the right of individuals to feel differ- ently. Confucian, Epicurean, a considerer and enter- tainer of ideas, this complicated sensuous wisdom is al- most the one ubiquitous element, the "self" which keeps his superficially heterogeneous work vaguely "unified. "
The study of emotion does not follow a set chrono- logical arc; it extends from the "Physique de 1'Amour"
? REMY DE GOURMONT/ 171
to "Le Latin Mystique"; from the condensation of Fabre's knowledge of insects to
"Amas ut facias pulchram"
in the Seqttaire of Goddeschalk
(in "Le Latin Mystique").
He had passed the point where people take abstract
statementofdogmafor"enlightenment. " An"idea"has little value apart from the modality of the mind which receives it. It is a railway from one state to another, and as dull as steel rails in a desert.
The emotions are equal before the aesthetic judgment. He does not grant the duality of body and soul, or at least suggests that this mediaeval duality is unsatisfac- tory; there is an interpenetration, an osmosis of body andsoul,atleastforhypothesis. "Mywordsaretheun- spoken words of my body. "
And in all his exquisite treatment of all emotion he will satisfy many whom August Strindberg, for egre- gious example, will not. From the studies of insects to Christine evoked from the thoughts of Diomede, sex is not a monstrosity or an exclusively German study. * And the entire race is not bound to the habits of the mantis orofotherinsectsequallymelodramatic. Sex,insofar as it is not a purely physiological reproductive mechan- ism, lies in the domain of aesthetics, the junction of tactile and magnetic senses ; as some people have accurate ears both for rhythm and for pitch, and as some are tone deaf, some impervious to rhythmic subtlety and variety, so in this other field of the senses some desire the trivial, some the processional, the stately, the master-work.
As some people are good judges of music, and insen- sible to painting and sculpture, so the fineness ot one
* "A German study," Hobson ; "A German study," Tarr.
? 172 INSTIGATIONS
sense entails no corresponding fineness in another, or at least no corresponding critical perception of differences.
III.
Emotions to Henry James were more or less things that other people had and that one didn't go into ; at any rate not in drawing rooms. The gods had not visited James, and the Muse, whom he so frequently mentions, appeared doubtless in corsage, the narrow waist, the sleeves puffed at the shoulders, a la mode 1890-2.
De Gourmont is interested in hardly anything save emotions, and the ideas that will go into them, or take life in emotional application. (Apperceptive rather than active. )
One reads Les Chevaux de Diomede (1897) as one would have listened to incense in the old Imperial court. There are many spirits incapable. De Gourmont calls it a "romance of possible adventures" ; it might be called equally an ai'oma, the fragrance of roses and poplars, the savor of wisdoms, not part of the canon of literature, a book like "Daphnis and Chloe" or like Marcel Schwob's"LivredeMonelle"; notasolidaritylikeFlau- bert; but an osmosis, a pervasion.
"My true life is in the unspoken words of my body. "
In "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," the characters talk at more length, and the movement is less convincing. "Diomede" was De Gourmont's own favorite and we may take it as the best of his art, as the most complete expression of his particular "faQon d'apercevoir"; if, even in it, the characters do little but talk philosophy, or rather drift into philosophic expression out of a haze of images, they are for all that very real. It is the climax
? REMY DE GOURMONT 173
of his method of presenting characters differentiated by emotional timbre, a process which had begun in "His- ToiRES Magiques" (1895); and in "D'un Pays Loin- tain" (published 1898, in reprint from periodicals of 1892-4).
"SoNGE d'une Femme" (1899) is a novel of modern life, De Gourmont's sexual intelligence, as contrasted to Strindberg'ssexualstupiditywellinevidence. Thework is untranslatable into English, but should be used before 30 by young men who have been during their undergrad- uate days too deeply inebriated with the Vita Nuova.
"Tout ce qui se passe dans la vie, c'est de la mauvaise litterature. "
"La vraie terre natale est celle ou on a eu sa premiere emotion forte. "
"La virginite n'est pas une vertu, c'est un etat; c'est une sous-division des couleurs. "
Livres de chevet for those whom the Strindbergian school will always leave aloof.
"Les imbeciles ont choisi le beau comme les oiseaux choisissentcequiestgras. Labetiseleursertdecornes. " "CoEUR Virginal" (1907) is a light novel, amusing,
and accurate in its psychology.
I do not think it possible to overemphasize Gourmont's
sense of beauty. The mist clings to the lacquer. His spirit was the spirit of Omakitsu; his pays natal was near to the peach-blossom-fountain of the untranslatable poem. If the Ufe of Diomede is overdone and done badly in modern Paris, the wisdom of the book is not thereby invalidated. It may be that Paris has need of some more Spartan corrective, but for the descendants of witch-burners Diomede is a needful communication.
? 174 INSTIGATIONS IV.
As Voltaire was a needed light in the i8th cen- tury, so in our time Fabre and Frazer have been essen- tials in the mental furnishings of any contemporary mind qualified to . write of ethics or philosophy or that mixed molasses religion. "The Golden Bough" has supplied the data which Voltaire's incisions had shown to be lack- ing. It has been a positive succeeding his negative. It is not necessary perhaps to read Fabre and Frazer en- tire, but one must be aware of them; people unaware of them invalidate all their own writing by simple igno- rance, and their work goes ultimately to the scrap heap.
"Physique de l'Amour" (1903) should be used as a text book of biology. Between this biological basis in instinct, and the "Sequaire of Goddeschalk" in "Le Latin Mystique" (1892) stretch Gourmont's studies of amour and aesthetics. If in Diomede we find an Epicurean receptivity, a certain aloofness, an observation of con- tacts and auditions, in contrast to the Propertian atti- tude:
Ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit,
this is perhaps balanced by
"Sans vous, je crois bien que je n'aimerais plus beau- coup et que je n'aurais plus une extreme confiance ni dans la vie ni moi-meme. " (In "Lettres a I'Ama- zone. ")
But there is nothing more unsatisfactory than saying that De Gourmont "had such and such ideas" or held "such and such views," the thing is that he held ideas, in-
;;
? REMY DE GOURMONT 175
tuitions, perceptions in a certain personal exquisite man- ner. In a criticism of him, "criticism" being an over violent word, in, let us say, an indication of him, one wants merely to show that one has oneself made certain dissociations; as here, between the aesthetic receptivity of tactile and magnetic values, of the perception of beauty in these relationships, and the conception of love, passion, emotion as an intellectual instigation; such as Propertius claims it; such as we find it declared in the King of Navarre's
"De fine amor vient science et beaute"
and constantly in the troubadours.
(I cannot repeat too often that there was a profound
psychological knowledge in mediaeval Provence, how- ever Gothic its expression ; that men, concentrated on certain validities, attaining an exact and diversified ter- minology, have there displayed considerable penetration that this was carried into early Italian poetry ; and faded from it when metaphors became decorative instead of interpretative; and that the age of Aquinas would not have tolerated sloppy expression of psychology concur- rent with the exact expression of "mysticism. " There is also great wisdom in Ovid. Passons! )
De Gourmont's wisdom is not wholly unlike the wis- dom which those ignorant of Latin may, if the gods favor their understanding, derive from Gelding's "Met- amorphoses. "
Barbarian ethics proceed by general taboos. Gour- mont's essays collected into various volumes, "Prome- nades," "Epilogues," etc. , are perhaps the. best ihtro-
:
? 176 INSTIGATIONS
duction to the ideas of our time that any unfortunate, suddenly emerging from Peru, Peoria, Oshkosh, Ice- land, Kochin, or other out-of-the-way lost continent could desire. A set of Landor's collected works will go fur- ther towards civilizing a man than any university educa- tion now on the market. Montaigne condensed Renais- sance awareness. Even so small a collection as Lionel Johnson's "Post Liminium" might save a man from utter barbarity.
But if, for example, a raw graduate were contemplat- ing a burst into intellectual company, he would be less likely to utter unutterable betisses, gaffes, etc. , after read- ing Gourmont than before. One cannot of course cre- ate intelligence in a numbskull.
Needless to say, Gourmont's essays are of uneven value as the necessary subject matter is of uneven value. Taken together, proportionately placed in his work, they are a portrait of the civilized mind. I incline to think them the best portrait available, the best record that is, of the civilized mind from 1885-1915.
There are plenty of people who do not know what the civilized mind is like, just as there were plenty of mules in England who did not read Landor contemporaneously, orwhodidnotinhisdayreadMontaigne. Civilization is individual.
Gourmont arouses the senses of the imagination, pre- paring the mind for receptivities. His wisdom, if not of the senses, is at any rate via the senses. We base our "science" on perceptions, but our ethics have not yet at- tained this palpable basis.
In 1898, "Pays Lointain" (reprinted from magazine publication of 1892-4), De Gourmont was beginning his method
? REMY DE GOURMONT
177
"Douze crimes pour I'honneur de I'iniini. "
He treats the special case, cases as special as any of
James', but segregated on different demarcative lines. His style had attained the vividness of
"Sa vocation etait de paraitre malheureuse, de passer dans la vie comme une ombre gemissante, d'inspirer de la pitie, du doute et de I'inquietude. Elle avait toujours I'air de porter des jfleurs vers une torabe abandonnee. " La Femme en Noir.
In "HisToiEES Magiques" (1894):
Blanche," "Yeux d'eau," "Marguerite Rouge," "Soeur de Sylvie," "Danaette," are slW of them special cases, already showing his perception of nevrosis, of hyperaesthesia.
His mind is still running on tonal variations in "Les Litanies de la Rose. "
"Pourtant il y a des yeux au bout des doigts. " "Femmes, conservatrices des traditions milesiennes. "
"Epilogues" (1895-98). Pleasant rereading, a book to leave lying about, to look back into at odd half hours. A book of accumulations. Full of meat as a good walnut.
Heterogeneous as the following paragraphs:
"Ni la croyance en un seul Dieu, ni la morale ne sont les fondements vrais de la religion. Une religion, meme le Christianisme, n'eut jamais sur les moeurs qu'une in- fluence dilatoire, I'influence d'un bras leve; elle doit re- commencer son preche, non pas seulement avec chaque generation humaine, mais avec chaque phase d'une vie individuelle. N'apportant pas des verites evidentes en soi, son enseignement oublie, elle ne laisse rien dans les
"La Robe
? 178 INSTIGATIONS
ames que I'effroi du peut-etre et la honte d'etre asservi a une peur ou a une esperance dont les chaines fantomales entravent non pas nos actes mais nos desirs.
"L'essence d'une religion, c'est sa litterature. Or la litterature religieuse est morte. " Religions.
"Je veux bien que Ton me protege centre des ennemis inconnus, I'escarpe ou le cambrioleur,--mais centre moi- meme, vices ou passions, non. '' Madame B'oulton.
"Si le cosmopolitisme litteraire g^nait encore et qu'il reussit a eteindre ce que les differences de race ont allume de haine de sang parmi les hommes, j'y verrais un gain pour la civilisation et pour I'humanite tout entiere. " Cosmopolitisme.
"Augier! Tous les lucratifs reves de la bourgeoise econome; touslessoupirsdesviergesconfortables; toutes les reticences des consciences soignees ; toutes les joies permises aux ventres prudents; toutes les veuleries des bourses craintives; tous les siphons conjugaux; toutes les enviesdelarobemontantecontrelesepaulesnues; toutes les haines du waterproof contre la grace et contre la beaute ! Augier, crinoline, parapluie, bec-de-corbin, bon- net grec . . . " Augier.
"Dieu aime la melodic gregorienne, mais avec modera- tion. II a soin de varier le programme quotidien des con- certs celestes, dont le fond reste le plain-chant lithur- gique, par des auditions de Bach, Mozart, Haendel, Haydn, 'et meme Gounod. ' Dieu ignore Wagner, mais il aime la variete. " Le Dieu des Beiges.
"La propriete n'est pas sacree ; elle n'est qu'un fait ac- ceptable comme necessaire au developpement de la liberte individuelle . . .
"L'abominable loi des cinquantes ans--contre laquelle
? REMY DE GOURMONT 179
Proudhon lutta en vain si courageusement--commence a faire sentir sa tyrannic. La veuve de M. Dumas a fait interdire la reprise d'Antony. Motif: son bon plaisir. Des caprices d'heritiers peuvent d'un jour a I'autre nous priver pendant cinquante ans de toute une oeuvre.
"Demain les oeuvres de Renan, de Taine, de Verlaine, de Villiers peuvent appartenir a un cure fanatique ou a une devote stupide. " La Propriete LittSraire.
"M. Desjardins, plus modeste, inaugure la morale ar- tistique et murale, seconde par I'excellent M. Puvis de Chavannes qui n'y comprend rien, mais s'avoue tout de memebiencontentdefigurersurlesmurs. " U. P. A. M.
"Les auteurs, 'avertis par le Public . . . ' II y a dans ces mots toute une esthetique, non seulement dramatique, mais democratique; Plus d'insucces. Plus de fours. Ad- mirable invention par laquelle, sans doute, le peuple trou- vera enfin I'art quilui convient etles auteurs qu'il merite. " Conscience Litteraire.
"Le citoyen est une variete de I'homme ; variete degen- eree ou primitive il est a I'homme ce que le chat de gou- tiere est au chat sauvage.
"Comma toutes les creations vraiment belles et noble- ment utiles, la sociologie fut I'oeuvre d'un homme de genie, M.
