"The American," "French Poets and Novelists," "The Europeans," "Daisy
Miller," "Eugene Pickering," "Washington Square," "A Bundle of Letters,"
"Portrait of a Lady," "Pandora," "The Pupil," "Brooksmith," "What Maisie
Knew," and "The Awkward Age" (if one is "doing it all"), "Europe," "Four
Meetings," "The Ambassadors," "The American Scene," "The Finer Grain"
(all the volume, i.e., "The Velvet Glove," "Mona Montravers," "Round of
Visits," "Crapey Cornelia," "Bench of Desolation"), "The Middle Years"
(posthumous) and "The Ivory Tower" (notes first).
I "go easy" on the more cobwebby volumes; the most Jamesian are
indubitably "The Wings of a Dove" and "The Golden Bowl"; upon them
devotees will fasten, but the potential devotee may as well find his
aptitude in the stories of "The Finer Grain" volume where certain
exquisite titillations will come to him as readily as anywhere else. If
he is to bask in Jamesian tickle, nothing will restrain him and no other
author will to any such extent afford him equal gratifications.
If, however, the reader does not find delectation in the list given
above, I think it fairly useless for him to embark on the rest.
Part of James is a caviare, part I must reject according to my lights as
bad writing; another part is a spécialité, a pleasure for certain
temperaments only; the part I have set together above seems to me
maintainable as literature. One can definitely say: "this is good";
hold the argumentative field, suffer comparison with other writers;
with, say, the De Goncourt, or De Maupassant. I am not impertinently
throwing books on the scrap-heap; there are certain valid objections to
James; there are certain standards which one may believe in, and having
stated them, one is free to state that any author does not comply with
them; granting always that there may be other standards with which he
complies, or over which he charmingly or brilliantly triumphs.
James does not "feel" as solid as Flaubert; he does not give us
"Everyman," but on the other hand, he was aware of things which Flaubert
was not aware of, and in certain things supersedes the author of "Madame
Bovary."
He appears at times to write around and around a thing and not always to
emerge from the "amorous plan" of what he wanted to present, into
definite presentation.
He does not seem to me at all times evenly skillful in catching the
intonations of speech. He recalls the New England "a" in the "Lady's"
small brothers "Ha-ard" (Haahr-d) but only if one is familiar with the
phonetics described; but (vide the beginning of "The Birthplace") one is
not convinced that he really knows (by any sure instinct) how people's
voices would sound. Some remarks are in key, some obviously factitious.
He gives us more of his characters by description than he can by any
attribution of conversation, save perhaps by the isolated and discreet
remarks of Brooksmith.
His emotional centre is in being sensitive to the feel of the place or
to the tonality of the person.
It is with his own so beautiful talk, his ability to hear his own voice
in the rounded paragraph, that he is aptest to charm one. I find it
often though not universally hard to "hear" his characters speaking. I
have noted various places where the character notably stops speaking and
the author interpolates words of his own; sentences that no one but
Henry James could in any circumstances have made use of. Beyond which
statements I see no great concision or any clarity to be gained by
rearranging my perhaps too elliptical comments on individual books.
Honest criticism, as I conceive it, cannot get much further than saying
to one's reader exactly what one would say to the friend who approaches
one's bookshelf asking: "What the deuce shall I read?" Beyond this there
is the "parlor game," the polite essay, and there is the official
pronouncement, with neither of which we are concerned.
Of all exquisite writers James is the most colloquial, yet in the first
edition of his "French Poets and Novelists," his style, save for a few
scattered phrases, is so little unusual that most of the book seems,
superficially, as if it might have been written by almost any one. It
contains some surprising lapses ... as bad as any in Mr. Hueffer or even
in Mr. Mencken. It is interesting largely in that it shows us what our
subject had to escape from.
Let us grant at once that his novels show him, all through his life,
possessed of the worst possible taste in pictures, of an almost
unpunctured ignorance of painting, of almost as great a lack of taste as
that which he attributes to the hack-work and newspaper critiques of
Théophile Gautier. Let us admit that "painting" to Henry James probably
meant, to the end of his life, the worst possible late Renaissance
conglomerations.
Let us admit that in 1876, or whenever it was, his taste in poetry
inclined to the swish of De Musset, that it very likely never got any
further. By "poetry" he very possibly meant the "high-falutin" and he
eschewed it in certain forms; himself taking still higher falutes in a
to-be-developed mode of his own.
I doubt if he ever wholly outgrew that conception of the (by him so
often invoked) Daughters of Memory. He arrived truly at a point from
which he could look back upon people who "besought the deep blue sea to
roll." Poetry to him began, perhaps, fullfledged, springing Minerva-like
from the forehead of George Gordon, Lord Byron, and went pretty much to
the bad in Charles Baudelaire; it did not require much divination by
1914 ("The Middle Years") to note that he had found Tennyson rather
vacuous and that there "was something in" Browning.
James was so thoroughly a recorder of people, of their atmospheres,
society, personality, setting; so wholly the artist of this particular
genre, that it was impossible for him ever to hold a critical opinion of
art out of key with the opinion about him--except possibly in so far as
he might have ambitions for the novel, for his own particular métier.
His critical opinions were simply an extension of his being in key with
the nice people who "impressed" themselves on his gelatine "plate."
(This is a theoretical generalization and must be taken _cum grano._)
We may, perhaps, take his adjectives on De Musset as a desperate attempt
to do "justice" to a man with whom he knew it impossible for him to
sympathize. There is, however, nothing to hinder our supposing that he
saw in De Musset's "gush" something for him impossible and that he
wished to acknowledge it. Side by side with this are the shreds of Back
Bay or Buffalo, the mid-week-prayer-meeting point of view.
His most egregious slip is in the essay on Baudelaire, the sentence
quoted by Hueffer.[4] Notwithstanding this, he does effectively put his
nippers on Baudelaire's weakness:--
"A good way to embrace Baudelaire at a glance is to say that he was, in
his treatment of evil, exactly what Hawthorne was not--Hawthorne, who
felt the thing at its source, deep in the human consciousness.
Baudelaire's infinitely slighter volume of genius apart, he was a sort
of Hawthorne reversed. It is the absence of this metaphysical quality in
his treatment of his favorite subjects (Poe was his metaphysician, and
his devotion sustained him through a translation of 'Eureka!') that
exposes him to that class of accusations of which M. Edmond Scherer's
accusation of feeding upon _pourriture_ is an example; and, in fact, in
his pages we never know with what we are dealing. We encounter an
inextricable confusion of sad emotions and vile things, and we are at a
loss to know whether the subject pretends to appeal to our conscience
or--we were going to say--to our olfactories. 'Le Mal?' we exclaim; 'you
do yourself too much honor. This is not Evil; it is not the wrong; it is
simply the nasty!' Our impatience is of the same order as that which we
should feel if a poet, pretending to pluck 'the flowers of good,' should
come and present us, as specimens, a rhapsody on plum-cake and _eau de
Cologne_."
Here as elsewhere his perception, apart from the readability of the
work, is worthy of notice.
Hueffer says[5] that James belauds Balzac. I cannot see it. I can but
perceive Henry James wiping the floor with the author of "Eugénie
Grandet," pointing out all his qualities, but almightily wiping the
floor with him. He complains that Gautier is lacking in a concern about
supernatural hocus-pocus and that Flaubert is lacking. If Balzac takes
him to any great extent in, James with his inherited Swedenborgianism is
perhaps thereby laid open to Balzac.
It was natural that James should write more about the bulky author of
"La Comédie Humaine" than about the others; here was his richest quarry,
here was there most to note and to emend and to apply so emended to
processes of his own. From De Maupassant, De Goncourt or Baudelaire
there was nothing for him to acquire.
His dam'd fuss about furniture is foreshadowed in Balzac, and all the
paragraphs on Balzac's house-furnishing propensities are of interest in
proportion to our interest in, or our boredom with, this part of Henry
James's work.
What, indeed, could he have written of the De Goncourts save that they
were a little dull but tremendously right in their aim? Indeed, but for
these almost autobiographical details pointing to his growth out of
Balzac, all James would seem but a corollary to one passage in a De
Goncourt preface:--
"Le jour où l'analyse cruelle que mon ami, M. Zola, et peut-être
moi-même avons apportée dans la peinture du bas de la société sera
reprise par un écrivain de talent, et employée à la reproduction des
hommes et des femmes du monde, dans les milieux d'éducation et de
distinction--ce jour-là seulement le classicisme et sa queue seront
tués....
"Le Réalisme n'a pas en effet l'unique mission de décrire ce qui est
bas, ce qui est répugnant....
"Nous avons commencé, nous, par la canaille, parce que la femme et
l'homme du peuple, plus rapprochés de la nature et de la sauvagerie,
sont des créatures simples et peu compliquées, tandis que le Parisien et
la Parisienne de la société, ces civilisés excessifs, dont l'originalité
tranchée est faite toute de nuances, toute de demi-teintes, toute de ces
riens insaisissables, pareils aux riens coquets et neutres avec lesquels
se façonne le caractère d'une toilette distinguée de femme, demandent
des années pour qu'on les perce, pour qu'on les sache, pour qu'on les
_attrape_--et le romancier du plus grand génie, croyez-le bien, ne les
devinera jamais ces gens de salon, avec les _racontars_ d'amis qui vont
pour lui à la découverte dans le monde....
"Ce projet de roman qui devait se passer dans le grand monde, dans le
monde le plus quintessencié, et dont nous rassemblions lentement et
minutieusement les éléments délicats et fugaces, je l'abandonnais après
la mort de mon frère, convaincu de l'impossibilité de le réussir tout
seul."
But this particular paragraph could have had little to do with the
matter. "French Poets and Novelists" was published in '78 and Edmond De
Goncourt signed the preface to "Les Frères Zemganno" in '79. The
paragraphs quoted are interesting, however, as showing De Goncourt's
state of mind in that year. He had probably been preaching in this vein
long before setting the words on paper, before getting them printed.
If ever one man's career was foreshadowed in a few sentences of
another, Henry James's is to be found in this paragraph.
It is very much as if he said: I will not be a megatherium botcher like
Balzac; there is nothing to be said about these De Goncourts, but one
must try to be rather more interesting than they are in, let us say,
"Madame Gervaisais."[6]
Proceeding with the volume of criticism, we find that "Le Jeune H."
simply didn't "get" Flaubert; that he was much alive to the solid parts
of Turgenev. He shows himself very apt, as we said above, to judge the
merits of a novelist on the ground that the people portrayed by the said
novelist are or are not suited to reception into the household of Henry
James senior; whether, in short, Emma Bovary or Frederic or M. Arnoux
would have spoiled the so delicate atmosphere, have juggled the so fine
susceptibilities of a refined 23rd Street family it the time of the
Philadelphia "Centennial."
I find the book not so much a sign that Henry James was "disappointed,"
as Hueffer puts it, as that he was simply and horribly shocked by the
literature of his continental forebears and contemporaries.
It is only when he gets to the Théâtre Français that he finds something
which really suits him. Here there is order, tradition, perhaps a slight
fustiness (but a quite pardonable fustiness, an arranged and suitable
fustiness having its recompense in a sort of spiritual quiet); here, at
any rate, was something decorous, something not to be found in Concord
or in Albany. And it is easy to imagine the young James, not illuminated
by De Goncourt's possible conversation or writing, not even following
the hint given in his essay on Balzac and Balzacian furniture, but
sitting before Madame Nathalie in "Le Village" and resolving to be the
Théâtre Français of the novel.
A resolution which he may be said to have carried out to the great
enrichment of letters.