THE CULTURED-CLASS HISTORIAN
We are getting down to modern times, and have come to the first great
artist of whom I can say that with my own eyes I saw him. Shortly before
the war, coming out of the dining-room of the New Reform Club in
London, my host, H. G. Wells, stopped me and whispered: “There sits the
Great Cham.” He may have said “Great Buddha” or “Great Jupiter”; anyhow,
I looked, and seated at a table in solitary state was a large elderly
gentleman, with large bald head shining whitely, and jaws moving
meditatively. I knew him from his pictures; and besides, there was at
that time only one Great Cham, or Great Buddha, or Great Jupiter of
international letters.
I did not ask to meet him, because, having read him, I understood the
aesthetic proprieties, and did not wish to surprise a Great Master with
his mouth full of lunch. Also, the days of my discipleship had long
since passed, and I was not sure if I would be able to think of just the
proper delicate subtlety with which to convey my attitude to one whom I
had once revered, and now regarded with affection because of reverence
remembered. That sentence is a little longer and more subtle than I
usually write--such being the effect upon one’s style of merely thinking
about Henry James.
In my youth I wanted to know the great world, and who could tell me with
such compelling authority? I read everything he had written up to that
time--no small task, some forty volumes, many of them fat. I stuck to it
day and night for a couple of months, and then wrote an essay, “The
Leisure-Class Historian,” which, alas, no editor could be found to
publish, and which was consumed, with all the rest of my belongings
except one night-shirt, in the Helicon Hall fire.
Coming back to the task at this interval, I realize that I gave Henry
James too broad a title; he is “the cultured-class historian.” He knows
of the existence of the uncultivated mob of idle rich, the
“high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, orchid-arranging,” as he describes
them; but his theme is that small section of the rich who possess
aesthetic sensibilities, and withdraw in haughty aloofness from
high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, and orchid-arranging, and live
fastidious lives devoted to the cultivation of beauty. The word “beauty”
Henry James understands in the broadest sense; it covers not merely the
things you look at, but the things you do and the things you think. You
recognize it by its being elegant, dignified and restrained.
To an outsider it might appear cold, but the Master admits you to the
inside, and you discover that it is passionate, quivering with feeling.
But it sternly checks its impulses, and seldom permits itself to do
anything except to think about the problems confronting it, to analyze
these problems in minute detail, to pile up subtlety and complication
concerning them--literally whole mountains of complication; or perhaps
(since, when you are reading or writing or discussing Henry James, you
anticipate many variations of metaphor, and endless subtle shadings of
metaphor, and parenthetical disquisitions interpreting and qualifying,
and still further, as it were, intensifying metaphor--each separate
complication, you will note, set apart from other complications by a
comma) it would convey a more accurate impression of the authentic
Jamesian manner, if I were to say that he builds towering structures of
subtle sophistication, which structures you, with joy and excitement of
the mind, see rising, unexpectedly splendid, before you, revealing new
possibilities of penetration into the refinements of sensibility, as
well as new possibilities of sentence structure, which convey, by
infinite variation of shadings, a sense, or, as it were, almost a
sensation, of the actuality of exceptional mental experience.
Such are the great rambling sentences, through which you stagger and
gasp your way. You keep on, because you find that the old boy is really
saying something. He is not delighting in intricacy and smartness for
their own sake, as you so often feel to your annoyance with Meredith; he
is not deliberately confusing you with useless obscure detail like
Browning; he is really making a heroic effort to convey some complicated
intricacy in the mental processes of people who not merely think, but
who think about thinking, and think about thinking about thinking.
Henry James was born in New York in 1843, his father being a theological
writer. His elder brother, William, became a popular professor of
psychology at Harvard, thus giving rise to the jest that “William is a
psychologist who writes like a novelist, and Henry is a novelist who
writes like a psychologist.” Henry was taken abroad and educated in
England, France and Switzerland, which had the effect of cutting his
roots from under him. At the age of twenty-six he moved permanently to
England, and from that time made his home there, with occasional trips
to the Continent.
He was a sensitive youth, quiet and shy; he suffered from spinal
trouble, and liked to sit quietly in drawing-rooms and listen to other
people talk. Then he would go apart for long periods, and reflect upon
what he had heard, and weave it into stories. He was grateful to his
friends if they would tell him their troubles, because that provided him
with copy; but he never told anyone his own troubles, and his friends
lost sight of the possibility that anything might ever have happened to
him personally. Edmund Gosse, who became his intimate, tells how in his
old age James, walking up and down in a garden one evening, was suddenly
moved to open his heart. Looking up at a light in the house, he was
reminded of a scene long, long ago, when he had stood in a street one
rainy night, looking up thus to a lighted window, expecting to see a
face, but the face had not come. That was all of the story; but Mr.
Gosse was thrilled, even appalled. Actually, once upon a time, something
had happened to the Master!
It would perhaps not be indelicate of us to feel warranted in assuming
that this something had to do with the relation of the sexes. We note
that this relation is, like everything else in the Henry James world,
fastidious, reserved, and governed by the aesthetic sensibilities. These
people do not love, they talk about loving; and as years pass, and the
later manner grows, their talk comes more and more to deal with the
condition of having been loved.
In “Daisy Miller,” an early story which made the young author famous, we
see an innocent American girl in Rome, who to her horror receives an
improper advance from a young Italian. In “Madame de Mauves” we see an
American lady, unhappily married to a Frenchman in Paris, tempted by
passion for a true young American. But when we come to the great long
novels with the great long sentences of the “third manner,” we find
ourselves dealing with the fact that once upon a time, long, long ago, a
man and a woman committed an impropriety, and now somebody else is
slowly finding out about it, to the general horror and dismay. Thus “The
Golden Bowl,” seven hundred and eighty-nine closely printed pages,
dealing with the mental and emotional reactions of a woman who has an
intimate woman friend, and discovers that her husband has at some past
period been the lover of this friend. Or “What Maisie Knew,” in which we
discover an ancient intrigue through the eyes of the little daughter of
the intriguing woman. Perhaps you think you know what obscenity is, but
you get a new revelation of its possibilities when you proceed through
the mind of a child to pick up hints and allusions of the elders, and
piece them into a pattern of fornication.
Henry James, the son of an American theological writer, acquired, like
Hawthorne, an inside knowledge of Puritanism, and in his early novels he
took the New England point of view toward intrigues and improprieties.
Thus Daisy Miller is innocent and free, and the dark, wicked Italian
misunderstands her freedom, and thinks she is what a girl with such
manners would be in Europe. Madame de Mauves, a loyal wife, is married
to a Frenchman of no morals, and when she loves a true and good
American, she scorns to sin, for the reason that she would be imitating
the Frenchman, she would be doing what the Frenchman expects her to do.
“The American” is a novel about a “man from home,” who has made money,
and seeks a cultured wife among the French nobility, and gradually finds
that he is in a nest of murders. All regulation hundred percent
patriotic stuff!
But Europe grew upon Henry James, and America faded, and the aesthetic
sensibilities became less Puritanical and more cosmopolitan. So we have
“The Ambassadors,” the world’s great international novel. Something over
twenty years ago I went with a friend on a canoeing trip in the far
Northern wilds, and for six weeks we saw only one white man, the keeper
of a Hudson Bay trading post. Baggage had to be limited on such a trip,
and I took only one book. Evening after evening I would read it, a few
pages at a time, lying in a tent by candle light. So I had plenty of
time to note every subtlety, and before I got through I was talking
Henry James in my sleep. Now the twenty years are as a day, and the
characters and their story are as vivid as ever in my mind.
A young New Englander, son of a wealthy family, has come to Paris and
settled there, refusing to go home. His family send an elderly friend as
ambassador to bring back the prodigal. This ambassador, whose name is
Strether, discovers that a crude young barbarian has been changed by his
Parisian life into a cultured and self-possessed man of the world.
Strether is duly impressed by the change, and attributes it to the
influence of a middle-aged French lady, who has been the young man’s
good angel.
He writes about the situation, but the family is not satisfied, and
another ambassador comes, this time the young man’s elder sister, the
incarnation of the acidulous propriety of New England. This sister is
not in the least impressed by the French lady, but on the contrary
suspects the very worst between the lady and her brother. Strether is
shocked by her crude ideas; but then comes the climax of the drama--a
scene wherein it is accidentally revealed to Strether that the acidulous
sister is right; a part of the process whereby the charming French lady
has civilized the young barbarian has been to take him as her lover. So
two civilizations meet, and in the clash between them we see the hearts
of both revealed.
You note that in all these stories we are dealing with well-to-do
people. No other kind of people exist in the world of Henry James. Such
highly complicated and subtle aesthetic sensibilities are only possible
in connection with large sums of money, freely furnished to the
characters without effort on their part. It is impossible to imagine any
person in the “third manner” being so vulgar as to make, or even to take
money. What they do is to spend money elegantly, and when they meet
persons who spend it inelegantly, they turn away in dignified disdain.
There are only a few passages in which the novelist condescends to be
aware of the existence of the lower orders, who by their toil produce
the wealth which makes the aesthetic sensibilities possible. We get one
such glimpse in “The Princess Casamassima”; the hero glances at the
women and girls of the working classes, and then:
“What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?” he
asked himself as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there
could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown
with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball
of consuming fire.
This cultured-class hero fails to ask himself what would happen to his
cultured self if the working-class vermin were to be wiped out.
Manifestly, these vermin have to be allowed to go on working, in order
that elegant illuminati from America and England and Italy and France
may gather in the great capitals to listen to beautiful music and attend
the newest art exhibitions and discuss the newest books. It is necessary
that hundreds of millions of peasants should drudge on the rack-rented
soil of Europe, it is necessary that mill slaves in New England and
sweat-shop slaves in New York and mine slaves in Pennsylvania should
wear out their bodies, in order that culture ambassadors may acquire old
world subtlety and understanding; may watch the “European scene” and, by
reporting it for us, enable us, at least in imagination, to escape the
crudity and provinciality of our home lives.
Henry James wrote a biography of Hawthorne, who as a fellow sufferer
under Puritanism he greatly admired; and in the course of that biography
he drew a picture of the “American scene,” which enables us to
understand why a cultured-class novelist fled from it at the age of
twenty-six, and came back for only one visit in a long lifetime. Read
the list of our deficiencies--and do not read it hurriedly, but stop
and, as Henry James would say, “savour” each phrase, realizing the mass
of content it has to the aesthetically sensitive mind:
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no
church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country
gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old
country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied
ruins; no cathedrals, no abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no
great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor
Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no
political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot!