This essay on James is a dull grind of an affair, a Baedecker to a
continent.
I set out to explain, not why Henry James is less read than formerly--I
do not know that he is. I tried to set down a few reasons why he ought
to be, or at least might be, more read.
Some may say that his work was over, well over, finely completed; there
is mass of that work, heavy for one man's shoulders to have borne up,
labor enough for two life-times; still we would have had a few more
years of his writing. Perhaps the grasp was relaxing, perhaps we should
have had no strongly-planned book; but we should have had paragraphs
here and there, and we should have had, at least, conversation,
wonderful conversation; even if we did not hear it ourselves, we should
have known that it was going on somewhere. The massive head, the slow
uplift of the hand, _gli occhi onesti e tardi_, the long sentences
piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lightning
incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with its
"wu-a-wait a little, wait a little, something will come;" blague and
benignity and the weight of so many years' careful, incessant labor of
minute observation always there to enrich the talk. I had heard it but
seldom, yet it was all unforgettable.
The man had this curious power of founding-affection in those who had
scarcely seen him and even in many who had not, who but knew him at
second hand.
No man who has not lived on both sides of the Atlantic can well appraise
Henry James; his death marks the end of a period. The _Times_ says: "The
Americans will understand his changing his nationality," or something of
that sort. The "Americans" will understand nothing whatsoever about it.
They have understood nothing about it. They do not even know what they
lost. They have not stopped for eight minutes to consider the meaning of
his last public act. After a year of ceaseless labor, of letter writing,
of argument, of striving in every way to bring in America on the side of
civilization, he died of apoplexy. On the side of
civilization--civilization against barbarism, civilization, not Utopia,
not a country or countries where the right always prevails in six weeks!
After a life-time spent in trying to make two continents understand each
other, in trying, and only his thoughtful readers can have any
conception of how he had tried, to make three nations intelligible one
to another. I am tired of hearing pettiness talked about Henry James's
style. The subject has been discussed enough in all conscience, along
with the minor James. Yet I have heard no word of the major James, of
the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against
all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of
modern life; not worked out in the diagrams of Greek tragedy, not
labeled "epos" or "Aeschylus." The outbursts in _The Tragic Muse_, the
whole of _The Turn of the Screw,_ human liberty, personal liberty, the
rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage![1] The
passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said,
didn't "feel." I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom
idiots didn't raise this cry.
And the great labor, this labor of translation, of making America
intelligible, of making it possible for individuals to meet across
national borders. I think half the American idiom is recorded in Henry
James's writing, and whole decades of American life that otherwise would
have been utterly lost, wasted, rotting in the unhermetic jars of bad
writing, of inaccurate writing. No English reader will ever know how
good are his New York and his New England; no one who does not see his
grandmother's friends in the pages of the American books. The whole
great assaying and weighing, the research for the significance of
nationality, French, English, American.
"An extraordinary old woman, one of the few people who is really doing
anything good." There were the cobwebs about connoisseurship, etc., but
what do they matter? Some yokel writes in the village paper, as Henley
had written before, "James's stuff was not worth doing." Henley has gone
pretty completely. America has not yet realized that never in history
had one of her great men abandoned his citizenship out of shame. It was
the last act--the last thing left. He had worked all his life for the
nation and for a year he had labored for the national honor. No other
American was of sufficient importance for his change of allegiance to
have constituted an international act; no other American would have been
welcome in the same public manner. America passes over these things, but
the thoughtful cannot pass over them.
Armageddon, the conflict? I turn to James's _A Bundle of Letters_; a
letter from "Dr. Rudolph Staub" in Paris, ending:
"You will, I think, hold me warranted in believing that between
precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the English-speaking family
is destined to consume itself and that with its decline the prospect of
general pervasiveness to which I alluded above, will brighten for the
deep-lunged children of the fatherland!"
We have heard a great deal of this sort of thing since; it sounds very
natural. My edition of the volume containing these letters was printed
in '83, and the imaginary letters were written somewhat before that. I
do not know that this calls for comment. Henry James's perception came
thirty years before Armageddon. That is all I wish to point out.
Flaubert said of the War of 1870: "If they had read my _Education
Sentimentale,_ this sort of thing wouldn't have happened." Artists are
the antennæ of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to
trust their great artists. If it is the business of the artist to make
humanity aware of itself; here the thing was done, the pages of
diagnosis. The multitude of wearisome fools will not learn their right
hand from their left or seek out a meaning.
It is always easy for people to object to what they have not tried to
understand.
I am not here to write a full volume of detailed criticism, but two
things I do claim which I have not seen in reviewers' essays. First,
that there was emotional greatness in Henry James's hatred of tyranny;
secondly, that there was titanic volume, weight, in the masses he sets
in opposition within his work. He uses forces no whit less specifically
powerful than the proverbial "doom of the house,"--Destiny, _Deus ex
machina_,--of great traditional art. His art was great art as opposed to
over-elaborate or over-refined art by virtue of the major conflicts
which he portrays. In his books he showed race against race, immutable;
the essential Americanness, or Englishness or Frenchness--in _The
American_, the difference between one nation and another; not
flag-waving and treaties, not the machinery of government, but "why"
there is always misunderstanding, why men of different race are not the
same.
We have ceased to believe that we conquer anything by having Alexander
the Great make a gigantic "joy-ride" through India. We know that
conquests are made in the laboratory, that Curie with his minute
fragments of things seen clearly in test tubes in curious apparatus,
makes conquests. So, too, in these novels, the essential qualities which
make up the national qualities, are found and set working, the
fundamental oppositions made clear. This is no contemptible labor. No
other writer had so essayed three great nations or even thought of
attempting it.
Peace comes of communication. No man of our time has so labored to
create means of communication as did the late Henry James. The whole of
great art is a struggle for communication. All things that oppose this
are evil, whether they be silly scoffing or obstructive tariffs.
And this communication is not a leveling, it is not an elimination of
differences. It is a recognition of differences, of the right of
differences to exist, of interest in finding things different. Kultur is
an abomination; philology is an abomination, all repressive uniforming
education is an evil.