II

Strictures on the work of this period are no great detraction. "French

Poets and Novelists" gives us a point from which to measure Henry

James's advance. Genius showed itself partly in the escape from some of

his original limitations, partly in acquirements. His art at length

became "second nature," became perhaps half unconscious; or in part

wholly unconscious; in other parts perhaps too highly conscious. At any

rate in sunnier circumstances he talked exactly as he wrote, the same

elaborate paragraph beautifully attaining its climax; the same sudden

incision when a brief statement could dispose of a matter.

Be it said for his style: he is seldom or never involved when a direct

bald statement will accurately convey his own meaning, _all of it_. He

is not usually, for all his wide leisure, verbose. He may be highly and

bewilderingly figurative in his language (vide Mr. Hueffer's remarks on

this question)

Style apart, I take it that the hatred of tyrannies was as great a

motive as any we can ascribe to Galileo or Leonardo or to any other

great figure, to any other mythic Prometheus; for this driving force we

may well overlook personal foibles, the early Bostonese bias, the

heritage from his father's concern in commenting Swedenborg, the later

fusses about social caution and conservation of furniture. Hueffer

rather boasts about Henry James's innocence of the classics. It is

nothing to brag of, even if a man struggling against natural medievalism

have entrenched himself in impressionist theory. If James _had_ read his

classics, the better Latins especially, he would not have so excessively

cobwebbed, fussed, blathered, worried about minor mundanities. We may

_conspuer_ with all our vigor Henry James's concern with furniture, the

Spoils of Poynton, connoisseurship, Mrs. Ward's tea-party atmosphere,

the young Bostonian of the immature works. We may relegate these things

mentally to the same realm as the author's pyjamas and collar buttons,

to his intellectual instead of his physical valeting. There remains the

capacious intelligence, the searching analysis of things that cannot be

so relegated to the scrap-heap and to the wash-basket.

Let us say that English freedom legally and traditionally has its basis

in property. Let us say, à la Balzac, that most modern existence is

governed by, or at least interfered with by, the necessity to earn

money; let us also say that a Frenchman is not an Englishman or a German

or an American, and that despite the remark that the aristocracies of

all people, the upper classes, are the same everywhere, racial

differences are _au fond_ differences; they are likewise major subjects.

Writing, as I am, for the reader of good-will, for the bewildered person

who wants to know where to begin, I need not apologize for the following

elliptical notes. James, in his prefaces, has written explanation to

death (with sometimes a very pleasant necrography). Leaving the "French

Poets and Novelists," I take the novels and stories as nearly as

possible in their order of publication (as distinct from their order as

rearranged and partially weeded out in the collected edition).

1875. (U.S.A.) "A Passionate Pilgrim and other Tales." "Eugene

Pickering" is the best of this lot and most indicative of the future

James. Contains also the title story and "Madame de Mauves." Other

stories inferior.

1876. (U.S.A.) "Roderick Hudson," prentice work. First novel not up to

the level of "Pickering."

1877. "The American"; essential James, part of the permanent work.

"Watch and Ward," discarded by the author.

1878. "French Poets and Novelists," already discussed.

1878. "Daisy Miller." (The big hit and one of his best.) "An

International Episode," "Four Meetings," good work.

1879. Short stories first printed in England with additions, but no

important ones.

1880. "Confidence," not important.

1881. "Washington Square," one of his best, "putting America on the

map," giving us a real past, a real background. "Pension Beaurepas" and

"Bundle of Letters," especially the girls' letters, excellent, already

mentioned.

1881. "The Portrait of a Lady," one of his best. Charming Venetian

preface in the collected edition.

1884. "Tales of Three Cities," stories dropped from the collected

edition, save "Lady Barbarina."

1884. "Lady Barbarina," a study in English blankness comparable to that

exposed in the letters of the English young lady in "A Bundle of

Letters." There is also New York of the period. "But if there was one

thing Lady Barb disliked more than another it was describing Pasterns.

She had always lived with people who knew of themselves what such a

place would be, without demanding these pictorial effects, proper only,

as she vaguely felt, to persons belonging to the classes whose trade was

the arts of expression. Lady Barb of course had never gone into it; but

she knew that in her own class the business was not to express but to

enjoy, not to represent but to be represented."

"Mrs. Lemon's recognition of this river, I should say, was all it need

have been; she held the Hudson existed for the purpose of supplying New

Yorkers with poetical feelings, helping them to face comfortably

occasions like the present, and in general, meet foreigners with

confidence...."

"He believed, or tried to believe, the _salon_ now possible in New York

on condition of its being reserved entirely for adults; and in having

taken a wife out of a country in which social traditions were rich and

ancient he had done something toward qualifying his own house--so

splendidly qualified in all strictly material respects.... to be the

scene of such an effort. A charming woman accustomed only to the best on

each side, as Lady Beauchemin said, what mightn't she achieve by being

at home--always to adults only--in an easy early inspiring

comprehensive way and on the evening of the seven, when worldly

engagements were least numerous? He laid this philosophy before Lady

Barb in pursuance of a theory that if she disliked New York on a short

acquaintance she couldn't fail to like it on a long. Jackson believed in

the New York mind--not so much indeed in its literary, artistic,

philosophic or political achievements as in its general quickness and

nascent adaptability. He clung to this belief, for it was an

indispensable neat block in the structure he was attempting to rear. The

New York mind would throw its glamour over Lady Barb if she would only

give it a chance; for it was thoroughly bright, responsive and

sympathetic. If she would only set up by the turn of her hand a blest

social centre, a temple of interesting talk in which this charming organ

might expand and where she might inhale its fragrance in the most

convenient and luxurious way, without, as it was, getting up from her

chair; if she would only just try this graceful good-natured

experiment--which would make every one like her so much too--he was sure

all the wrinkles in the gilded scroll of his fate would be smoothed out.

But Lady Barb didn't rise at all to his conception and hadn't the least

curiosity about the New York mind. She thought it would be extremely

disagreeable to have a lot of people tumbling in on Sunday evening

without being invited, and altogether her husband's sketch of the

Anglo-American salon seemed to her to suggest crude familiarity, high

vociferation--she had already made a remark to him about 'screeching

women'--and random extravagant laughter. She didn't tell him --for this

somehow it wasn't in her power to express and, strangely enough, he

never completely guessed it--that she was singularly deficient in any

natural, or indeed, acquired understanding of what a salon might be. She

had never seen or dreamed of one--and for the most part was incapable of

imagining a thing she hadn't seen. She had seen great dinners and balls

and meets and runs and races; she had seen garden-parties and bunches of

people, mainly women--who, however, didn't screech--at dull stuffy teas,

and distinguished companies collected in splendid castles; but all this

gave her no clew to a train of conversation, to any idea of a social

agreement that the interest of talk, its continuity, its accumulations

from season to season shouldn't be lost. Conversation, in Lady Barb's

experience, had never been continuous; in such a case it would surely

have been a bore. It had been occasional and fragmentary, a trifle

jerky, with allusions that were never explained; it had a dread of

detail--it seldom pursued anything very far or kept hold of it very

long."

1885. "Stories Revived," adding to earlier tales "The Author of

Beltraffio," which opens with excess of the treading-on-eggs manner, too

much to be borne for twenty-four volumes. The pretense of extent of

"people" interested in art and letters, sic: "It was the most complete

presentation that had yet been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind

of æsthetic war cry. 'People' had endeavored to sail nearer "to truth,"

etc."

He implies too much of art smeared on limited multitudes. One wonders if

the eighties did in any great aggregate gush up to this extent. Doesn't

he try to spread the special case out too wide?

The thinking is magnificently done from this passage up to page sixteen

or twenty, stated with great concision. Compare it with "Madame

Gervaisais" and we find Henry James much more interesting when on the

upper reaches. Compare his expressiveness, the expressiveness of his

indirectness with that of constatation. The two methods are curiously

mixed in the opening of "Beltraffio." Such sentences as (page 30) "He

said the most interesting and inspiring things" are, however, pure

waste, pure "leaving the thing undone," unconcrete, unimagined; just

simply bad writing or bad novelisting. As for his special case he does

say a deal about the author or express a deal by him, but one is

bothered by the fact that Pater, Burton, Hardy, Meredith were not, in

mere history, bundled into one; that Burton had been to the East and the

others had not; that no English novelist of that era would have taken

the least notice of anything going on in foreign countries, presumably

European, as does the supreme author of "Beltraffio."

Doubtless he is in many ways the author Henry James would have liked to

meet and more illustrative of certain English tones and limitations than

any historical portrait might have been. Still Henry James does lay it

on ... more, I think, than the story absolutely requires. In

"Beltraffio" he certainly does present (not that he does not comment to

advantage) the two damn'd women appended to the gentlemanly hero of the

tale. The most violent post-Strindbergian school would perhaps have

called them bitches _tout bonnement_, but this word did not belong to

Henry James's vocabulary and besides it is of too great an

indistinctness. Author, same "bloody" (in the English sense) author with

his passion for "form" appears in "Lesson of Master," and most of H.J.'s

stories of literary _milieux_. Perpetual Grandisonism or Grandisonizing

of this author with the passion for form, all of 'em have it. _Ma ché!_

There is, however, great intensity in these same "be-deared" and

be-"poor-old"-ed pages. He has really got a main theme, a great theme,

he chooses to do it in silver point rather than in the garish colors

of,--well, of Cherbuliez, or the terms of a religious maniac with

three-foot long carving knife.

Novel of the gilded pill, an æsthetic or artistic message, dogma, no

better than a moral or ethic one, novel a cumbrous camouflage substitute

not for "that parlor game"[7] the polite essay, but for the impolite

essay or conveyance of ideas; novel to do this should completely

incarnate the abstraction.

Finish of "Beltraffio" not perhaps up to the rest of it. Not that one at

all knows how else....

Gush on page 42[8] from both conversationalists. Still an adumbration of

the search for the just word emerges on pages 43-44, real cut at

barbarism and bigotry on the bottom of page 45 (of course not labeled by

these monstrous and rhetorical brands, scorched on to their hides and

rump sides). "Will it be a sin to make the most of that one too, so bad

for the dear old novel?" Butler and James on the same side really

chucking out the fake; Butler focused on Church of England; opposed to

him the fakers booming the Bible "as literature" in a sort of last

stand, a last ditch; seeing it pretty well had to go as history,

cosmogony, etc., or the old tribal Daddy-slap-'em-with-slab of the Jews

as anything like an ideal:--

"He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home,

and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I'm afraid I

must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the

artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto, to the

best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out of the bag.

'She thinks me immoral--that's the long and short of it,' he said, as we

paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his

gate; while his conscious, expressive, perceptive eyes--the eyes of a

foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual

Englishman--viewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took

part in the declaration. 'It's very strange when one thinks it all over,

and there's a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out.

She's a very nice woman, extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and

clever and with a tremendous lot of good sense about a good many

matters. Yet her conception of a novel--she has explained it to me once

or twice, and she doesn't do it badly as exposition--is a thing so false

that it makes me blush. It's a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying,

in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that

it makes my ears burn. It's two different ways of looking at the whole

affair,' he repeated, pushing open the gate. 'And they're

irreconcilable!' he added with a sigh. We went forward to the house, but

on the walk, half-way to the door, he stopped and said to me: 'If you're

going into this kind of thing there's a fact you should know beforehand;

it may save you some disappointment. There's a hatred of art, there's a

hatred of literature--I mean of the genuine kinds. Oh, the

shams--_those_ they'll swallow by the bucket!' I looked up at the

charming house, with its genial color and crookedness, and I answered

with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I should

never have expected to find them there. 'Ah, it doesn't matter, after

all,' he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to hear, for I was

reproaching myself with having worked him up."

Really literature in the XIXth and the beginning of the XXth centuries

is where science was in the days of Galileo and the Inquisition. Henry

James not blinking it, neither can we. "Poor dears" and "dear olds"

always a little too plentiful.

1885. (continued) "Pandora," of the best. Let it pass as a sop to

America's virginal charm; as counter-weight to "Daisy Miller," or to the

lady of "The Portrait." Henry James alert to the German.

"The process of enquiry had already begun for him, in spite of his

having as yet spoken to none of his fellow passengers; the case being

that Vogelstein enquired not only with his tongue, but with his

eyes--that is with his spectacles--with his ears, with his nose, with

his palate, with all his senses and organs. He was a highly upright

young man, whose only fault was that his sense of comedy, or of the

humor of things, had never been specifically disengaged, from his

several other senses. He vaguely felt that something should be done

about this, and in a general manner proposed to do it, for he was on his

way to explore a society abounding in comic aspects. This consciousness

of a missing measure gave him a certain mistrust of what might be said

of him; and if circumspection is the essence of diplomacy our young

aspirant promised well. His mind contained several millions of facts,

packed too closely together for the light breeze of the imagination to

draw through the mass. He was impatient to report himself to his

superior in Washington, and the loss of time in an English port could

only incommode him, inasmuch as the study of English institutions was no

part of his mission. On the other hand the day was charming; the blue

sea, in Southampton Water, pricked all over with light, had no movement

but that of its infinite shimmer. Moreover, he was by no means sure that

he should be happy in the United States, where doubtless he should find

himself soon enough disembarked. He knew that this was not an important

question and that happiness was an unscientific term, such as a man of

his education should be ashamed to use even in the silence of his

thoughts. Lost none the less in the inconsiderate crowd and feeling

himself neither in his own country nor in that to which he was in a

manner accredited, he was reduced to his mere personality; so that

during the hour, to save his importance, he cultivated such ground as

lay in sight for a judgment of this delay to which the German steamer

was subjected in English waters. Mightn't it be proved, facts, figures

and documents--or at least watch--in hand, considerably greater than

the occasion demanded?

"Count Vogelstein was still young enough in diplomacy to think it

necessary to have opinions. He had a good many, indeed, which had been

formed without difficulty; they had been received ready-made from a line

of ancestors who knew what they liked. This was of course--and under

pressure, being candid, he would have admitted it--an unscientific way

of furnishing one's mind. Our young man was a stiff conservative, a

Junker of Junkers; he thought modern democracy a temporary phase and

expected to find many arguments against it in the great Republic. In

regard to these things it was a pleasure to him to feel that, with his

complete training, he had been taught thoroughly to appreciate the

nature of evidence. The ship was heavily laden with German emigrants,

whose mission in the United States differed considerably from Count

Otto's. They hung over the bulwarks, densely grouped; they leaned

forward on their elbows for hours, their shoulders kept on a level with

their ears: the men in furred caps, smoking long-bowled pipes, the women

with babies hidden in remarkably ugly shawls. Some were yellow Germans

and some were black, and all looked greasy and matted with the sea-damp.

They were destined to swell still further the huge current of the

Western democracy; and Count Vogelstein doubtless said to himself that

they wouldn't improve its quality. Their numbers, however, were

striking, and I know not what he thought of the nature of this

particular evidence."

For further style in vignette:

"He could see for himself that Mr. and Mrs. Day had not at all her grand

air. They were fat plain serious people who sat side by side on the

deck for hours and looked straight before them. Mrs. Day had a white

face, large cheeks and small eyes; her forehead was surrounded with a

multitude of little tight black curls; her lips moved as if she had

always a lozenge in her mouth. She wore entwined about her head an

article which Mrs. Dangërfield spoke of as a "nuby," a knitted pink

scarf concealing her hair, encircling her neck and having among its

convolutions a hole for her perfectly expressionless face. Her hands

were folded on her stomach, and in her still, swathed figure her

bead-like eyes, which occasionally changed their direction, alone

represented life. Her husband had a stiff gray beard on his chin and a

bare spacious upper lip, to which constant shaving had imparted a hard

glaze. His eyebrows were thick and his nostrils wide, and when he was

uncovered, in the saloon, it was visible that his grizzled hair was

dense and perpendicular. He might have looked rather grim and truculent

hadn't it been for the mild familiar accommodating gaze with which his

large light-colored pupils--the leisurely eyes of a silent man--appeared

to consider surrounding objects. He was evidently more friendly than

fierce, but he was more diffident than friendly. He liked to have you in

sight, but wouldn't have pretended to understand you much or to classify

you, and would have been sorry it should put you under an obligation. He

and his wife spoke sometimes, but seldom talked, and there was something

vague and patient about them as if they had become victims of a wrought

spell. The spell, however, was of no sinister cast; it was the

fascination of prosperity, the confidence of security, which sometimes

makes people arrogant, but which had had such a different effect on this

simple satisfied pair, in whom further development of every kind

appeared to have been happily arrested."

Pandora's approach to her parents:

"These little offices were usually performed deftly, rapidly, with the

minimum of words, and when their daughter drew near them, Mr. and Mrs.

Day closed their eyes after the fashion of a pair of household dogs who

expect to be scratched."

The tale is another synthesis of some of the million reasons why Germany

will never conquer the world, why the Hun is impossible, why "boche" is

merely "bursch." The imbecility of a certain Wellsian journalist in

treating this gem is again proof that it is written for the

relatively-developed American, not for the island écaillère. If Henry

James, as Ford Madox Hueffer says, set out to civilize the United

States, it is at least an easier job than raising British Suburbia to a

bearable level. From that milieu at least we have nothing of value to

learn; we shall not take our tonality from that _niveau._

In describing "Pandora's" success as "purely personal," Henry James has

hit on the secret of the Quattrocento. 1450 to 1550, the vital part of

the Renaissance. Aristocracy decays when it ceases to be selective, when

the basis of selection is not personal. It is a critical acuteness, not

a snobbism, which last is selection on some other principle than that of

a personal quality. It is servility to rule-of-thumb criteria, and a

dullness of perception, a timidity in acceptance. The whole force of the

Renaissance was in the personality of its selection.

There is no faking the amount of perceptive energy concentrated in Henry

James's vignettes in such phrases as that on the parents like domestic

dogs waiting to be scratched, or in the ten thousand phrases of this

sort which abound in his writings. If we were back in the time of

Bruyère, we could easily make a whole book of "Characters" from Henry

James's vignettes.[9] The vein holds from beginning to end of his work;

from this writing of the eighties to "The Ivory Tower." As for example,

Gussie Braddon:

"Rosanna waited facing her, noting her extraordinary perfection of

neatness, of elegance, of arrangement, of which it couldn't be said

whether they most handed over to you, as on some polished salver, the

clear truth of her essential commonness or transposed it into an element

that could please, that could even fascinate, as a supreme attestation

of care. 'Take her as an advertisement of all the latest knowledges of

how to "treat" every inch of the human surface and where to "get" every

scrap of the personal envelope, so far as she _is_ enveloped, and she

does achieve an effect sublime in itself and thereby absolute in a

wavering world.'"

We note no inconsiderable progress in the actual writing, in _mîstria_,

when we reach the ultimate volumes.

1886. "Bostonians." Other stories in this collection mostly rejected

from collected edition.

"Princess Casamassima" inferior continuation of "Roderick Hudson." His

original subject matter is beginning to go thin.

1888. "The Reverberator," process of fantasia beginning.

Fantasia of Americans vs. the "old aristocracy," "The American" with the

sexes reversed. Possibly the theme shows as well in "Les

Transatlantiques," the two methods, give one at least a certain pleasure

of contrast.

1888. "Aspern Papers," inferior. "Louisa Pallant," a study in the

maternal or abysmal relation, good James. "Modern Warning," rejected

from collected edition.