13. The fourth character's "break into" things, or into a perception of
things,
(a) Actions of an auxiliary character, of what would 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 fascinating 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" of being full of life; convinces
the reader of an abundant 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,
relations "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 happen 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 determination of his hero. (In this case an absolute
non-producer, non-accumulator.)
(b) Care not to get an unmixed "bad" in his "villain," but to keep a
right balance, a dependency, in this case, on the main character's
weakness or easiness.
(c) Decision how the main "coup" or transfer shall slide through.
16. Effect upon C. Effect upon main characters' relations 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 consciousness displayed in it, gives us the measure of
this author's superiority, as conscious artist, over the "normal"
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 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 English. 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 distinct 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 embarking on
composition.
I take it rather as a sign of editorial woodenheadedness 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 perception of the author.
I dare say the snap and rattle of the fun, or much of it, will be only
half perceptible to 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 himself 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
going on, and in it is our major enjoyment. The Notes 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 temperament, 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," a much 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.
[1] This holds, despite anything that may be said of his fuss about
social order, social tone. I naturally do not drag in political
connotations, from which H.J. was, we believe, wholly exempt. What he
fights is "influence", the impinging of family pressure, the impinging
of one personality on another; all of them in highest degree damn'd,
loathsome and detestable. Respect for the peripheries of the individual
may be, however, a discovery of our generation; I doubt it, but it seems
to have been at low ebb in some districts (not rural) for some time.
[2] _Little Review_, Aug., 1918.
[3] I differ, beyond that point, with our author. I enjoy ascent as much
as I loathe descent in an elevator. I do not mind the click of brass
doors. I had indeed for, my earliest toy, if I was not brought up in it,
the rather slow and well-behaved elevator in a quiet and quietly bright
huge sanatorium. The height of high buildings, the chasms of New York
are delectable; but this is beside the point; one is not asked to share
the views and tastes of a writer.
[4] "For a poet to be realist is of course nonsense", and, as Hueffer
says, such a sentence from such a source is enough to make one despair
of human nature.
[5] Ford Madox Hueffer's volume on Henry James.
[6] It is my personal feeling at the moment that _La Fille Elisa_ is
worth so much more than all Balzac that the things are as out of scale
as a sapphire and a plum pudding, and that _Elisa,_ despite the dull
section, is worth most of James's writing. This is, however, aside from
the question we are discussing.
[7] T.S. Eliot.
[8] Page numbers in Collected Edition.
[9] Since writing the above I find that some such compilation has been
attempted; had indeed been planned by the anthologist, and, in plan,
approved by H.J.: "Pictures and Passages from Henry James" selected by
Ruth Head (Chatto and Windus, 1916), if not exactly the book to convince
the rising generation of H.J.'s powers of survival, is at any rate a
most charming tribute to our subject from one who had begun to read him
in "the eighties".
[10] Most good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of negation; is
the detailed, convincing analysis of something detestable; of something
which one wants to eliminate. Poetry is the assertion of a positive,
_i.e._, of desire, and endures for a longer period. Poetic satire is
only an assertion of this positive, inversely, _i.e._, as of an opposite
hatred.
This is a highly untechnical, unimpressionist, in fact almost
theological manner of statement; but is perhaps the root difference
between the two arts of literature.
Most good poetry asserts something to be worth while, or damns a
contrary; at any rate asserts emotional values. The best prose is, has
been a presentation (complicated and elaborate as you like) of
circumstances, of conditions, for the most part abominable, or at the
mildest, amendable. This assertion of the more or less objectionable
only becomes doctrinaire and rotten art when the narrator mis-states
from dogmatic bias, and when he suggests some quack remedy (prohibition,
Christianity, social theory of one sort or another), the only cure being
that humanity should display more intelligence and good-will than
humanity is capable of displaying.
Poetry = Emotional synthesis, quite as real, quite as realist as any
prose (or intellectual) analysis.
Neither prose nor drama can attain poetic intensity save by
construction, almost by scenario; by so arranging the circumstance that
some perfectly simple speech, perception, dogmatic statement appears in
abnormal vigor. Thus when Frederic in _L'Education_ observes Mme.
Arnoux's shoe-laces as she is descending the stair; or in Turgenev the
statement, quotation of a Russian proverb about the "heart of another",
or "Nothing but death is irrevocable" toward the end of _Nichée de
Gentils-hommes._
[11] Recast from an article in _The Future._