I have forgotten the moment of lunar imbecility in which I conceived the
idea of a "Henry James" number.[2] The pile of typescript on my floor
can but annoyingly and too palpably testify that the madness has raged
for some weeks.
Henry James was aware of the spherical form of the planet, and
susceptible to a given situation, and to the tone and tonality of
persons as perhaps no other author in all literature. The victim and the
votary of the "scene," he had no very great narrative sense, or at the
least, he attained the narrative faculty but _per aspera,_ through very
great striving.
It is impossible to speak accurately of "his style," for he passed
through several styles which differ greatly one from another; but in his
last, his most complicated and elaborate, he is capable of great
concision; and if, in it, the single sentence is apt to turn and perform
evolutions for almost pages at a time, he nevertheless manages to say on
one page more than many a more "direct" author would convey only in the
course of a chapter.
His plots and incidents are often but adumbrations or symbols of the
quality of his "people," illustrations invented, contrived, often
factitiously and almost transparently, to show what acts, what
situations, what contingencies would befit or display certain
characters. We are hardly asked to accept them as happening.
He did not begin his career with any theory of art for art's sake, and a
lack of this theory may have damaged his earlier work.
If we take "French Poets and Novelists" as indication of his then (1878)
opinions, and novels of the nineties showing a later bias, we might
contend that our subject began his career with a desire to square all
things to the ethical standards of a Salem mid-week Unitarian prayer
meeting, and that to almost the end of his course he greatly desired to
fit the world into the social exigencies of Mrs. Humphry Ward's
characters.
Out of the unfortunate cobwebs he emerged into his greatness, I think,
by two causes: first by reason of his hatred of personal intimate
tyrannies working at close range; and secondly, in later life, because
the actual mechanism of his scriptorial processes became so bulky,
became so huge a contrivance for record and depiction, that the old man
simply couldn't remember or keep his mind on or animadvert on anything
but the authenticity of his impression.
I take it as the supreme reward for an artist; the supreme return that
his artistic conscience can make him after years spent in its service,
that the momentum of his art, the sheer bulk of his processes, the (_si
licet_) size of his fly-wheel, should heave him out of himself, out of
his personal limitations, out of the tangles of heredity and of
environment, out of the bias of early training, of early predilections,
whether of Florence, A.D. 1300, or of Back Bay of 1872, and leave him
simply the great true recorder.
And this reward came to Henry James in the ripeness of his talents; even
further perhaps it entered his life and his conversation. The stages of
his emergence are marked quite clearly in his work. He displays himself
in _French Poets and Novelists_, constantly balancing over the question
of whether or no the characters presented in their works are, or are
not, fit persons to be received in the James family back-parlor.
In _The Tragic Muse_ he is still didactic quite openly. The things he
believes still leap out nakedly among the people and things he is
portraying; the parable is not yet wholly incarnate in the narrative.
To lay all his faults on the table, we may begin with his self-confessed
limitation, that "he never went down town." He displayed in fact a
passion for high life comparable only to that supposed to inhere in the
readers of a magazine called _Forget-me-not._
Hardy, with his eye on the Greek tragedians, has produced an epic
tonality, and _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ is perhaps more easily
comparable to the Grettir Saga than to the novels of Mr. Hardy's
contemporaries. Hardy is, on his other side, a contemporary of Sir
Walter Scott.
Balzac gains what force his crude writing permits him by representing
his people under the _ἀνάγκη_ of modernity, cash necessity; James, by
leaving cash necessity nearly always out of the story, sacrifices, or
rather fails to attain, certain intensities.
He never manages the classic, I mean as Flaubert gives us in each main
character: _Everyman_. One may conceivably be bored by certain pages in
Flaubert, but one takes from him a solid and concrete memory, a
property. Emma Bovary and Frederic and M. Arnoux are respectively every
woman and every man of their period. Maupassant's _Bel Ami_ is not.
Neither are Henry James's people. They are always, or nearly always, the
bibelots.
But he does, nevertheless, treat of major forces, even of epic forces,
and in a way all his own. If Balzac tried to give a whole civilization,
a whole humanity, James was not content with a rough sketch of one
country.
As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national qualities are the
great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the
beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals; trying to determine
from the given microscopic slide the nature of the Frenchness,
Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemicals too little
regarded, have in our time exploded for want of watching. They are the
permanent and fundamental hostilities and incompatibles. We may rest our
claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his protagonists, in the
magnitude of the forces he analyzed and portrayed. This is not the bare
matter of a number of titled people, a few duchesses and a few butlers.
Whatever Flaubert may have said about his _Education Sentimentale_ as a
potential preventive of the débâcle of 1870, _if people had_ read _it_,
and whatever Gautier's friend may have said about _Emaux et Camées_ as
the last resistance to the Prussians, from Dr. Rudolph Staub's paragraph
in _The Bundle of Letters_ to the last and almost only public act of his
life, James displayed a steady perception and a steady consideration of
the qualities of different western races, whose consequences none of us
can escape.
And these forces, in precisely that they are not political and executive
and therefore transient, factitious, but in precisely that they are the
forces of race temperaments, are major forces and are indeed as great
protagonists as any author could have chosen. They are firmer ground
than Flaubert's when he chooses public events as in the opening of the
third part of _Education Sentimentale_.
The portrayal of these forces, to seize a term from philology, may be
said to constitute "original research"--to be Henry James's own
addendum; not that this greatly matters. He saw, analyzed, and presented
them. He had most assuredly a greater awareness than was granted to
Balzac or to Mr. Charles Dickens or to M. Victor Hugo who composed the
_Légende des Siècles._
His statement that he never went down town has been urged greatly
against him. A butler is a servant, tempered with upper-class contacts.
Mr. Newman, the American, has emerged from the making of wash-tubs; the
family in _The Pupil_ can scarcely be termed upper-class, however, and
the factor of money, Balzac's, _ἀνάγκη_, scarcely enters his stories.
We may leave Hardy writing Sagas. We may admit that there is a greater
_robustezza_ in Balzac's messiness, simply because he is perpetually
concerned, inaccurately, with the factor of money, of earning one's
exiguous living.
We may admit the shadowy nature of some of James's writing, and agree
whimsically with R.H.C. (in the _New Age_) that James will be quite
comfortable after death, as he had been dealing with ghosts all his
life.
James's third donation is perhaps a less sweeping affair and of more
concern to his compatriots than to any one who might conceivably
translate him into an alien tongue, or even to those who publish his
writings in England.
He has written history of a personal sort, social history well
documented and incomplete, and he has put America on the map both in
memoir and fiction, giving to her a reality such as is attained only by
scenes recorded in the arts and in the writing of masters. Mr. Eliot has
written, and I daresay most other American admirers have written or will
write, that, whatever any one else thinks of Henry James, no one but an
American can ever know, really know, how good he is at the bottom, how
good his "America" is.
No Englishman can, and in less degree can any continental, or in fact
any one whose family was not living on, say, West 23rd Street in the old
set-back, two-story-porched red brick vine-covered houses, etc., when
Henry James was being a small boy on East 23rd Street; no one whose
ancestors had not been presidents or professors or founders of Ha'avwd
College or something of that sort, or had not heard of a time when
people lived on 14th Street, or had known of some one living in
Lexington or Newton "Old Place" or somewhere of that sort in New
England, or had heard of the New York that produced "Fanny," New York
the jocular and uncritical, or of people who danced with General Grant
or something of that sort, would quite know _Washington Square_ or _The
Europeans_ to be so autochthonous, so authentic to the conditions. They
might believe the things to be "real," but they would not know how
closely they corresponded to an external reality.
Perhaps only an exile from these things will get the range of the other
half of James's presentations! Europe to the Transpontine, New York of
brown stone that he detested, the old and the new New York in _Crapey
Cornelia_ and in _The American Scene_, which more than any other volumes
give us our peculiar heritage, an America with an interest, with a tone
of time not overstrained, not jejunely over-sentimentalized, which is
not a redoing of school histories or the laying out of a fabulous
period; and which is in relief, if you like, from Dickens or from Mark
Twain's _Mississippi._ He was not without sympathy for his compatriots
as is amply attested by Mr. and Mrs. B.D. Hayes of New York (vide _The
Birthplace_) with whom he succeeds, I think, rather better than with
most of his princely continentals. They are, at any rate, his bow to the
Happy Genius of his country--as distinct from the gentleman who
displayed the "back of a banker and a patriot," or the person whose
aggregate features could be designated only as a "mug."
In his presentation of America he is greatly attentive, and, save for
the people in _Cœur Simple_, I doubt if any writer has done more of
"this sort of thing" for his country, this portrayal of the typical
thing in timbre and quality--balanced, of course, by the array of
spittoons in the Capitol ("The Point of View").
Still if one is seeking a Spiritual Fatherland, if one feels the
exposure of what he would not have scrupled to call, two clauses later,
such a wind-shield, "The American Scene" greatly provides it. It has a
mermaid note, almost to outvie the warning, the sort of nickelplate
warning which is hurled at one in the saloon of any great transatlantic
boat; the awfulness that engulfs one when one comes, for the first time
unexpectedly on a pile of all the _Murkhn_ Magazines laid, shingle-wise
on a brass-studded, screwed-into-place, baize-covered steamer table. The
first glitter of the national weapons for driving off quiet and all
closer signs of intelligence.[3]
Attempting to view the jungle of the work as a whole, one notes that,
despite whatever cosmopolitan upbringing Henry James may have had, as
witness "A Small Boy's Memoirs" and "Notes of Son and Brother," he
nevertheless began in "French Poets and Novelists" with a provincial
attitude that it took him a long time to work free of. Secondly we see
various phases of the "style" of his presentation or circumambiance.
There is a small amount of prentice work. Let us say "Roderick Hudson,"
"Casamassima." There are lucky first steps in "The American" and
"Europeans," a precocity of result, for certainly some of his early work
is as permanent as some of the ripest, and more so than a deal of the
intervening. We find (for in the case before us criticism must be in
large part a weeding-out) that his first subject matter provides him
with a number of good books and stories: "The American," "The
Europeans," "Eugene Pickering," "Daisy Miller," "The Pupil,"
"Brooksmith," "A Bundle of Letters," "Washington Square," "The Portrait
of a Lady," before 1880, and rather later, "Pandora," "The Four
Meetings," perhaps "Louisa Pallant." He ran out of his first material.
We next note a contact with the "Yellow Book," a dip into "cleverness,"
into the epigrammatic genre, the bare epigrammatic style. It was no
better than other writers, not so successful as Wilde. We observe him to
be not so hard and fine a satirist as is George S. Street.
We come then to the period of allegories ("The Real Thing," "Dominick
Ferrand," "The Liar"). There ensues a growing discontent with the short
sentence, epigram, etc., in which he does not at this time attain
distinction; the clarity is not satisfactory, was not satisfactory to
the author, his _donné_ being radically different from that of his
contemporaries. The "story" not being really what he is after, he starts
to build up his medium; a thickening, a chiaroscuro is needed, the long
sentence; he wanders, seeks to add a needed opacity, he overdoes it,
produces the cobwebby novel, emerges or justifies himself in "Maisie"
and manages his long-sought form in "The Awkward Age." He comes out the
triumphant stylist in the "American Scene" and in all the items of "The
Finer Grain" collection and in the posthumous "Middle Years."
This is not to damn incontinent all that intervenes, but I think the
chief question addressed to me by people of good-will who do not, but
are yet ready and willing to, read James, is: Where the deuce shall I
begin? One cannot take even the twenty-four volumes, more or less
selected volumes of the Macmillan edition all at once, and it is, alas,
but too easy to get so started and entoiled as never to finish this
author or even come to the best of him.
The laziness of an uncritical period can be nowhere more blatant than in
the inherited habit of talking about authors as a whole. It is perhaps
the sediment from an age daft over great figures or a way of displaying
social gush, the desire for a celebrity at all costs, rather than a care
of letters.
To talk in any other way demands an acquaintance with the work of an
author, a price few conversationalists care to pay, _ma che_! It is the
man with inherited opinions who talks about "Shelley," making no
distinction between the author of the Fifth Act of "The Cenci" and of
the "Sensitive Plant." Not but what there may be a personal _virtu_ in
an author--appraised, however, from the best of his work when, that is,
it is correctly appraised. People ask me what James to read. He is a
very uneven author; not all of his collected edition has marks of
permanence.