"'The thought of a community is the life of that community, and if the
collective thought of a community is disconnected and fragmentary,
then the community is collectively vain and weak. That does not
constitute an incidental defect but essential failure. Though that
community have cities such as the world has never seen before, fleets
and hosts and glories, though it count its soldiers by the army corps
and its children by the million, yet if it hold not to the reality of
thought and formulated will beneath these outward things, it will
pass, and all its glories will pass, like smoke before the wind, like
mist beneath the sun; it will become at last only one more vague and
fading dream upon the scroll of time, a heap of mounds and pointless
history, even as are Babylon and Nineveh.'"
"I've heard that before somewhere," said Dodd.
"Most of this dialogue will have to be quotation," said Boon.
"He makes literature include philosophy?"
"Everything. It's all the central things. It's the larger Bible to
him, a thing about which all the conscious direction of life revolves.
It's alive with passion and will. Or if it isn't, then it ought to
be.... And then as the antagonist comes this artist, this man who
seems to regard the whole seething brew of life as a vat from which
you skim, with slow, dignified gestures, works of art. ... Works of
art whose only claim is their art.... Hallery is going to be very
impatient about art."
"Ought there to be such a thing as a literary artist?" some one said.
"Ought there, in fact, to be Henry James?" said Dodd.
"I don't think so. Hallery won't think so. You see, the discussion
will be very fundamental. There's contributory art, of course, and a
way of doing things better or worse. Just as there is in war, or
cooking. But the way of doing isn't the end. First the end must be
judged--and then if you like talk of how it is done. Get there as
splendidly as possible. But get there. James and George Moore, neither
of them take it like that. They leave out getting there, or the thing
they get to is so trivial as to amount to scarcely more than an
omission...."
Boon reflected. "In early life both these men poisoned their minds in
studios. Thought about pictures even might be less studio-ridden than
it is. But James has never discovered that a novel isn't a picture....
That life isn't a studio....
"He wants a novel to be simply and completely _done_. He wants it to
have a unity, he demands homogeneity.... Why _should_ a book have
that? For a picture it's reasonable, because you have to see it all at
once. But there's no need to see a book all at once. It's like wanting
to have a whole county done in one style and period of architecture.
It's like insisting that a walking tour must stick to one valley....
"But James _begins_ by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of
art that must be judged by its oneness. Judged first by its oneness.
Some one gave him that idea in the beginning of things and he has
never found it out. He doesn't find things out. He doesn't even seem
to want to find things out. You can see that in him; he is eager to
accept things--elaborately. You can see from his books that he accepts
etiquettes, precedences, associations, claims. That is his
peculiarity. He accepts very readily and then--elaborates. He has, I
am convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the
whole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no
penetration. He is the culmination of the Superficial type. Or else he
would have gone into philosophy and been greater even than his
wonderful brother.... But here he is, spinning about, like the most
tremendous of water-boatmen--you know those insects?--kept up by
surface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would
drown. It's incredible. A water-boatman as big as an elephant. I was
reading him only yesterday 'The Golden Bowl'; it's dazzling how never
for a moment does he go through."
"Recently he's been explaining himself," said Dodd.
"His 'Notes on Novelists.' It's one sustained demand for the picture
effect. Which is the denial of the sweet complexity of life, of the
pointing this way and that, of the spider on the throne. Philosophy
aims at a unity and never gets there.... That true unity which we all
suspect, and which no one attains, if it is to be got at all it is to
be got by penetrating, penetrating down and through. The picture, on
the other hand, is forced to a unity because it can see only one
aspect at a time. I am doubtful even about that. Think of Hogarth or
Carpaccio. But if the novel is to follow life it must be various and
discursive. Life is diversity and entertainment, not completeness and
satisfaction. All actions are half-hearted, shot delightfully with
wandering thoughts--about something else. All true stories are a felt
of irrelevances. But James sets out to make his novels with the
presupposition that they can be made continuously relevant. And
perceiving the discordant things, he tries to get rid of them. He sets
himself to pick the straws out of the hair of Life before he paints
her. But without the straws she is no longer the mad woman we love. He
talks of 'selection,' and of making all of a novel definitely _about_
a theme. He objects to a 'saturation' that isn't oriented. And he
objects, if you go into it, for no clear reason at all. Following up
his conception of selection, see what in his own practice he omits. In
practice James's selection becomes just omission and nothing more. He
omits everything that demands digressive treatment or collateral
statement. For example, he omits opinions. In all his novels you will
find no people with defined political opinions, no people with
religious opinions, none with clear partisanships or with lusts or
whims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing. There are
no poor people dominated by the imperatives of Saturday night and
Monday morning, no dreaming types--and don't we all more or less live
dreaming? And none are ever decently forgetful. All that much of
humanity he clears out before he begins his story. It's like cleaning
rabbits for the table.
"But you see how relentlessly it follows from the supposition that the
novel is a work of art aiming at pictorial unities!
"All art too acutely self-centred comes to this sort of thing. James's
denatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those
egg-faced, black-haired ladies, who sit and sit, in the Japanese
colour-prints, the unresisting stuff for an arrangement of blacks....
"Then with the eviscerated people he has invented he begins to make up
stories. What stories they are! Concentrated on suspicion, on a gift,
on possessing a 'piece' of old furniture, on what a little girl may or
may not have noted in an emotional situation. These people cleared for
artistic treatment never make lusty love, never go to angry war, never
shout at an election or perspire at poker; never in any way _date_....
And upon the petty residuum of human interest left to them they focus
minds of a Jamesian calibre....
"The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a
certain avidity, and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when
relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that
these are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of
attainment and over-perception begins.... His people nose out
suspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living
human beings do that? The thing his novel is _about_ is always there.
It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you,
with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar,
very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an
egg-shell, a bit of string.... Like his 'Altar of the Dead,' with
nothing to the dead at all.... For if there was they couldn't all be
candles and the effect would vanish.... And the elaborate, copious
emptiness of the whole Henry James exploit is only redeemed and made
endurable by the elaborate, copious wit. Upon the desert his selection
has made Henry James erects palatial metaphors.... The chief fun, the
only exercise, in reading Henry James is this clambering over vast
metaphors....
"Having first made sure that he has scarcely anything left to express,
he then sets to work to express it, with an industry, a wealth of
intellectual stuff that dwarfs Newton. He spares no resource in the
telling of his dead inventions. He brings up every device of language
to state and define. Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits his
infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the
passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphs sweat and
struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God
Himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come. And
all for tales of nothingness.... It is leviathan retrieving pebbles.
It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost,
even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got
into a corner of its den. Most things, it insists, are beyond it, but
it can, at any rate, modestly, and with an artistic singleness of
mind, pick up that pea...."