[Footnote 1: _A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales_. By Henry James, Jr.
Boston: J.R. Osgood & Co.
_Transatlantic Sketches_. By the same author.]
Whoever takes an interest, whether of mere curiosity or of critical
foreboding, in the product and tendency of our younger literature, must
have had his attention awakened and detained by the writings of Mr.
James. Whatever else they may be, they are not common, and have that air
of good breeding which is the token of whatever is properly called
literature. They are not the overflow of a shallow talent for
improvisation too full of self to be contained, but show everywhere the
marks of intelligent purpose and of the graceful ease that comes only of
conscientious training. Undoubtedly there was a large capital of native
endowment to start from--a mind of singular subtlety and refinement; a
faculty of rapid observation, yet patient of rectifying afterthought;
senses daintily alive to every aesthetic suggestion; and a frank
enthusiasm, kept within due bounds by the double-consciousness of humor.
But it is plain that Mr. James is fortunate enough to possess, or to be
possessed by, that finer sixth sense which we call the artistic, and
which controls, corrects, and discontents. His felicities, therefore,
are not due to a lucky turn of the dice, but to forethought and
afterthought. Accordingly, he is capable of progress, and gives renewed
evidence of it from time to time, while too many of our authors show
premature marks of arrested development. They strike a happy vein of
starting, perhaps, and keep on grubbing at it, with the rude helps of
primitive mining, seemingly unaware that it is daily growing more and
more slender. Even should it wholly vanish, they persist in the vain
hope of recovering it further on, as if in literature two successes of
precisely the same kind were possible Nay, most of them have hit upon no
vein at all, but picked up a nugget rather, and persevere in raking the
surface of things, if haply they may chance upon another. The moral of
one of Hawthorne's stories is that there is no element of treasure-trove
in success, but that true luck lies in the deep and assiduous
cultivation of our own plot of ground, be it larger or smaller. For
indeed the only estate of man that savors of the realty is in his mind.
Mr. James seems to have arrived early at an understanding of this, and
to have profited by the best modern appliances of self-culture. In
conception and expression is he essentially an artist and not an
irresponsible _trouvère_. If he allow himself an occasional
carelessness, it is not from incaution, but because he knows perfectly
well what he is about. He is quite at home in the usages of the best
literary society. In his writing there is none of that hit-or-miss
playing at snapdragon with language, of that clownish bearing-on in what
should be the light strokes, as if mere emphasis were meaning, and
naturally none of the slovenliness that offends a trained judgment in
the work of so many of our writers later, unmistakably clever as they
are. In short, he has _tone_, the last result and surest evidence of an
intellect reclaimed from the rudeness of nature, for it means
self-restraint. The story of Handel's composing always in full dress
conveys at least the useful lesson of a gentlemanlike deference for the
art a man professes and for the public whose attention he claims. Mr.
James, as we see in his sketches of travel, is not averse to the
lounging ease of a shooting-jacket, but he respects the usages of
convention, and at the canonical hours is sure to be found in the
required toilet. He does not expect the company to pardon his own
indolence as one of the necessary appendages of originality. Always
considerate himself, his readers soon find reason to treat him with
consideration. For they soon come to see that literature may be light
and at the same time thoughtful; that lightness, indeed, results much
more surely from serious study than from the neglect of it.
We have said that Mr. James was emphatically a man of culture, and we
are old-fashioned enough to look upon him with the more interest as a
specimen of exclusively _modern_ culture. Of any classical training we
have failed to detect the traces in him. His allusions, his citations,
are in the strictest sense contemporary, and indicate, if we may trust
our divination, a preference for French models, Balzac, De Musset,
Feuillet, Taine, Gautier, Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve, especially the three
latter. He emulates successfully their suavity, their urbanity, their
clever knack of conveying a fuller meaning by innuendo than by direct
bluntness of statement. If not the best school for substance, it is an
admirable one for method, and for so much of style as is attainable by
example. It is the same school in which the writers of what used to be
called our classical period learned the superior efficacy of the French
small-sword as compared with the English cudgel, and Mr. James shows the
graceful suppleness of that excellent academy of fence in which a man
distinguishes by effacing himself. He has the dexterous art of letting
us feel the point of his individuality without making us obtrusively
aware of his presence. We arrive at an intimate knowledge of his
character by confidences that escape egotism by seeming to be made
always in the interest of the reader. That we know all his tastes and
prejudices appears rather a compliment to our penetration than a proof
of indiscreetness on his part. If we were disposed to find any fault
with Mr. James's style, which is generally of conspicuous elegance, it
would be for his occasional choice of a French word or phrase (like
_bouder, se reconnaît, banal_, and the like), where our English, without
being driven to search her coffers round, would furnish one quite as
good and surer of coming home to the ordinary reader. We could grow as
near surly with him as would be possible for us with a writer who so
generally endears himself to our taste, when he foists upon us a
disagreeable alien like _abandon_ (used as a noun), as if it could show
an honest baptismal certificate in the registers of Johnson or Webster.
Perhaps Mr. James finds, or fancies, in such words a significance that
escapes our obtuser sense, a sweetness, it may be, of early association,
for he tells us somewhere that in his boyhood he was put to school in
Geneva. In this way only can we account for his once slipping into the
rusticism that "remembers of" a thing.
But beyond any advantage which he may have derived from an intelligent
study of French models, it is plain that a much larger share of Mr.
James's education has been acquired by travel and through the eyes of a
thoughtful observer of men and things. He has seen more cities and
manners of men than was possible in the slower days of Ulysses, and if
with less gain of worldly wisdom, yet with an enlargement of his
artistic apprehensiveness and scope that is of far greater value to him.
We do not mean to imply that Mr. James lacks what is called knowledge of
the world. On the contrary, he has a great deal of it, but it has not in
him degenerated into worldliness, and a mellowing haze of imagination
ransoms the edges of things from the hardness of over-near familiarity.
He shows on analysis that rare combination of qualities which results in
a man of the world, whose contact with it kindles instead of dampening
the ardor of his fancy. He is thus excellently fitted for the line he
has chosen as a story-teller who deals mainly with problems of character
and psychology which spring out of the artificial complexities of
society, and as a translator of the impressions received from nature and
art into language that often lacks only verse to make it poetry. Mr.
James does not see things with his eyes alone. His vision is always
modified by his imaginative temperament. He is the last man we should
consult for statistics, but his sketches give us the very marrow of
sensitive impression, and are positively better than the actual
pilgrimage. We are tolerably familiar with the scenes he describes, but
hardly knew before how much we had to be grateful for. _Et ego in
Arcadia_, we murmur to ourselves as we read, but surely this was not the
name we found in our guide-book. It is always _Dichtung und Wahrheit_
(Goethe knew very well what he was about when he gave precedence to the
giddier sister)--it is always fact seen through imagination and
transfigured by it. A single example will best show what we mean. "It is
partly, doubtless, because their mighty outlines are still unsoftened
that the aqueducts are so impressive. _They seem the very source of the
solitude in which they stand_; they look like architectural spectres,
and loom through the light mists of their grassy desert, as you recede
along the line, with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out
of Egyptian sands." Such happy touches are frequent in Mr. James's
pages, like flecks of sunshine that steal softened through every chance
crevice in the leaves, as where he calls the lark a "disembodied voice,"
or says of an English country-church that "it made a Sunday where it
stood." A light-fingered poet would find many a temptation in his prose.
But it is not merely our fancies that are pleased. Mr. James tempts us
into many byways of serious and fruitful thought. Especially valuable
and helpful have we found his _obiter dicta_ on the arts of painting,
sculpture, and architecture; for example, when he says of the Tuscan
palaces that "in their large dependence on pure symmetry for beauty of
effect, [they] reproduce more than other modern styles the simple
nobleness of Greek architecture." And we would note also what he says of
the Albani Antinoüs. It must be a nimble wit that can keep pace with Mr.
James's logic in his aesthetic criticism. It is apt to spring airily
over the middle term to the conclusion, leaving something in the
likeness of a ditch across the path of our slower intelligences, which
look about them and think twice before taking the leap. Courage! there
are always fresh woods and pastures new on the other side. A curious
reflection has more than once flashed upon our minds as we lingered with
Mr. James over his complex and refined sensations: we mean the very
striking contrast between the ancient and modern traveller. The former
saw with his bodily eyes, and reported accordingly, catering for the
curiosity of homely wits as to the outsides and appearances of things.
Even Montaigne, habitually introspective as he was, sticks to the old
method in his travels. The modern traveller, on the other hand,
superseded by the guide-book, travels in himself, and records for us the
scenery of his own mind as it is affected by change of sky and the
various weather of temperament.
Mr. James, in his sketches, frankly acknowledges his preference of the
Old World. Life--which here seems all drab to him, without due lights
and shades of social contrast, without that indefinable suggestion of
immemorial antiquity which has so large a share in picturesque
impression--is there a dome of many-colored glass irradiating both
senses and imagination. We shall not blame him too gravely for this, as
if an American had not as good a right as any ancient of them all to
say, _Ubi libertas, ibi patria_. It is no real paradox to affirm that a
man's love of his country may often be gauged by his disgust at it. But
we think it might fairly be argued against him that the very absence of
that distracting complexity of associations might help to produce that
solitude which is the main feeder of imagination. Certainly, Hawthorne,
with whom no modern European can be matched for the subtlety and power
of this marvellous quality, is a strong case on the American side of the
question.
Mr. James's tales, if without any obvious moral, are sure to have a
clearly defined artistic purpose. They are careful studies of character
thrown into dramatic action, and the undercurrent of motive is, as it
should be, not in the circumstances but in the characters themselves. It
is by delicate touches and hints that his effects are produced. The
reader is called upon to do his share, and will find his reward in it,
for Mr. James, as we cannot too often insist, is first and always an
artist. Nowhere does he show his fine instinct more to the purpose than
in leaving the tragic element of tales (dealing as they do with
contemporary life, and that mainly in the drawing-room) to take care of
itself, and in confining the outward expression of passion within the
limits of a decorous amenity. Those who must have their intellectual
gullets tingled with the fiery draught of coarse sensation must go
elsewhere for their dram; but whoever is capable of the aroma of the
more delicate vintages will find it here. In the volume before us
"Madame de Mauves" will illustrate what we mean. There is no space for
detailed analysis, even if that were ever adequate to give the true
impression of stories so carefully worked out and depending so much for
their effect on a gradual cumulation of particulars each in itself
unemphatic. We have said that Mr. James shows promise as well as
accomplishment, gaining always in mastery of his material. It is but a
natural inference from this that his "Roderick Hudson" is the fullest
and most finished proof of his power as a story-teller. Indeed, we may
say frankly that it pleases us the more because the characters are drawn
with a bolder hand and in more determined outline, for if Mr. James need
any friendly caution, it is against over-delicacy of handling.