In the autumn of 1907, when I began to tap the Remington typewriter at
Henry James's dictation, he was engaged on the arduous task of preparing
his Novels and Tales for the definitive New York edition, published in
1909. Since it was only between breakfast and luncheon that he undertook
what he called "inventive" work, he gave the hours from half-past ten to
half-past one to the composition of the prefaces which are so
interesting a feature of the edition. In the evenings he read over again
the work of former years, treating the printed pages like so many
proof-sheets of extremely corrupt text. The revision was a task he had
seen in advance as formidable. He had cultivated the habit of forgetting
past achievements almost to the pitch of a sincere conviction that
nothing he had written before about 1890 could come with any shred of
credit through the ordeal of a critical inspection. On a morning when he
was obliged to give time to the selection of a set of tales for a
forthcoming volume, he confessed that the difficulty of selection was
mainly the difficulty of reading them at all. "They seem," he said, "so
bad until I _have_ read them that I can't force myself to go through
them except with a pen in my hand, altering as I go the crudities and
ineptitudes that to my sense deform each page." Unfamiliarity and
adverse prejudice are rare advantages for a writer to bring to the task
of choosing among his works. For Henry James the prejudice might give
way to half reluctant appreciation as the unfamiliarity passed into
recognition, but it must be clear to every reader of the prefaces that
he never lost the sense of being paternally responsible for two distinct
families. For the earlier brood, acknowledged fruit of his alliance with
Romance, he claimed indulgence on the ground of their youthful
spontaneity, their confident assurance, their rather touching good
faith. One catches echoes of a plea that these elderly youngsters may
not be too closely compared, to their inevitable disadvantage, with the
richly endowed, the carefully bred, the highly civilized and sensitized
children of his second marriage, contracted with that wealthy bride,
Experience. Attentive readers of the novels may perhaps find the
distinction between the two groups less remarkable than it seemed to
their writer. They may even wonder whether the second marriage was not
rather a silver wedding, with the old romantic mistress cleverly
disguised as a woman of the world. The different note was possibly due
more to the substitution of dictation for pen and ink than to any
profound change of heart. But whatever the reason, their author
certainly found it necessary to spend a good deal of time working on the
earlier tales before he considered them fit for appearance in the
company of those composed later. Some members of the elder family he
entirely cast off, not counting them worth the expense of completely new
clothes. Others he left in their place more from a necessary, though
deprecated, respect for the declared taste of the reading public than
because he loved them for their own sake. It would, for instance, have
been difficult to exclude _Daisy Miller_ from any representative
collection of his work, yet the popularity of the tale had become almost
a grievance. To be acclaimed as the author of _Daisy Miller_ by persons
blandly unconscious of _The Wings of the Dove_ or _The Golden Bowl_ was
a reason among many for Henry James's despair of intelligent
comprehension. Confronted repeatedly with Daisy, he felt himself rather
in the position of some _grande dame_ who, with a jewel-case of
sparkling diamonds, is constrained by her admirers always to appear in
the simple string of moonstones worn at her first dance.
From the moment he began to read over the earlier tales, he found
himself involved in a highly practical examination of the scope and
limits of permissible revision. Poets, as he pointed out, have often
revised their verse with good effect. Why should the novelist not have
equal license? The only sound reason for not altering anything is a
conviction that it cannot be improved. It was Henry James's profound
conviction that he could improve his early writing in nearly every
sentence. Not to revise would have been to confess to a loss of faith in
himself, and it was not likely that the writer who had fasted for forty
years in the wilderness of British and American misconceptions without
yielding a scrap of intellectual integrity to editorial or publishing
tempters should have lost faith in himself. But he was well aware that
the game of revision must be played with a due observance of the rules.
He knew that no novelist can safely afford to repudiate his fundamental
understanding with his readers that the tale he has to tell is at least
as true as history and the figures he has set in motion at least as
independently alive as the people we see in offices and motor-cars. He
allowed himself few freedoms with any recorded appearances or actions,
although occasionally the temptation to correct a false gesture, to make
it "right," was too strong to be resisted. We have a pleasant instance
of this correction in the second version of _The American._ At her first
appearance, the old Marquise de Bellegarde had acknowledged the
introduction of Newman by returning his handshake "with a sort of
British positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the
Earl of St. Dunstan's." In the later edition she behaves differently.
"Newman came sufficiently near to the old lady by the fire to take in
that she would offer him no handshake.... Madame de Bellegarde looked
hard at him and refused what she did refuse with a sort of British
positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the Earl of
St. Dunstan's." There were good reasons why the Marquise should have
denied Newman a welcoming handshake. Her attitude throughout the book
was to be consistently hostile and should never have been compromised by
the significantly British grip. Yet it is almost shocking to see her
snatching back her first card after playing it for so many years. She
was to perform less credible actions than shaking hands with an innocent
American, as her progenitor knew very well. He invited his readers, in
the preface to _The American_, to observe the impossible behaviour of
the noble Bellegarde family, but he realized that since they had been
begotten in absurdity the Bellegardes could under no stress of revision
achieve a very solid humanity. The best he could do for them was to let
a faint consciousness flush the mind of Valentin, the only detached
member of the family. In the first edition Valentin warned his friend of
the Bellegarde peculiarities with the easy good faith of the younger
Henry James under the spell of the magic word "Europe. My mother is
strange, my brother is strange, and I verily believe I am stranger than
either. Old trees have queer cracks, old races have odd secrets." To
this statement he added in the revised version: "We're fit for a museum
or a Balzac novel." A comparable growth of ironic perception was allowed
to Roderick Hudson, whose comment on Rowland's admission of his
heroically silent passion for Mary Garland, "It's like something in a
novel," was altered to: "It's like something in a bad novel."
V
But the legitimate business of revision was, for Henry James, neither
substitution nor re-arrangement. It was the demonstration of values
implicit in the earlier work, the retrieval of neglected opportunities
for adequate "renderings. It was," as he explained in his final
preface, "all sensibly, as if the clear matter being still there, even
as a shining expanse of snow spread over a plain, my exploring tread,
for application to it, had quite unlearned the old pace and found itself
naturally falling into another, which might sometimes more or less agree
with the original tracks, but might most often, or very nearly, break
the surface at other places. What was thus predominantly interesting to
note, at all events, was the high spontaneity of these deviations and
differences, which become thus things not of choice but of immediate and
perfect necessity: necessity to the end of dealing with the quantities
in question at all." On every page the act of re-reading became
automatically one with the act of re-writing, and the revised parts are
just "those rigid conditions of re-perusal, registered; so many close
notes, as who should say, on the particular vision of the matter itself
that experience had at last made the only possible one." These are words
written with the clear confidence of the artist who, in complete
possession of his "faculties," had no need to bother himself with doubts
as to his ability to write better at the end of a lifetime of hard work
and varied experience than at the beginning. He knew he could write
better. His readers have not always agreed with his own view. They have
denounced the multiplication of qualifying clauses, the imposition of a
system of punctuation which, although rigid and orderly, occasionally
fails to act as a guide to immediate comprehension of the writer's
intention, and the increasing passion for adverbial interpositions.
"Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt," was Henry
James's reply to a criticism which once came to his ears.
It must be admitted that the case for the revised version relies on
other merits than simplicity or elegance to make its claim good. It is
not so smooth, nor so easy, nor, on the whole, so pretty as the older
form. But it is nearly always richer and more alive. Abstractions give
place to sharp definite images, loose vague phrases to close-locked
significances. We can find a fair example of this in _The Madonna of the
Future_, a tale first published in 1879. In the original version one of
the sentences runs: "His professions, somehow, were all half
professions, and his allusions to his work and circumstances left
something dimly ambiguous in the background." In the New York Edition
this has become: "His professions were practically somehow, all masks
and screens, and his personal allusions as to his ambiguous background
mere wavings of the dim lantern." In some passages it would be hard to
deny a gain of beauty as well as of significance. There is, for
instance, a sentence in the earlier account of Newman's silent
renunciation of his meditated revenge, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame:
"He sat a long time; he heard far-away bells chiming off, at long
intervals, to the rest of the world." In the definitive edition of _The
American_ the passage has become: "He sat a long time; he heard far-away
bells chiming off into space, at long intervals, the big bronze
syllables of the Word."
A paragraph from _Four Meetings_, a tale worked over with extreme care,
will give a fair idea of the general effect of the revision. It records
a moment of the final Meeting, when the helplessly indignant narrator is
watching poor Caroline ministering to the vulgar French cocotte who has
imposed herself on the hospitality of the innocent little New Englander.
"At this moment," runs the passage of 1879, "Caroline Spencer came out
of the house bearing a coffee pot on a little tray. I noticed that on
her way from the door to the table she gave me a single quick vaguely
appealing glance. I wondered what it signified; I felt that it signified
a sort of half-frightened longing to know what, as a man of the world
who had been in France, I thought of the Countess. It made me extremely
uncomfortable. I could not tell her that the Countess was very possibly
the runaway wife of a little hairdresser. I tried, suddenly, on the
contrary, to show a high consideration for her."
The "particular vision" registered on re-perusal reveals states of mind
much more definite than these wonderings and longings and vague appeals.
"Our hostess moreover at this moment came out of the house, bearing a
coffee-pot and three cups on a neat little tray. I took from her eyes,
as she approached us, a brief but intense appeal--the mute expression,
as I felt, conveyed in the hardest little look she had yet addressed me,
of her longing to know what as a man of the world in general and of the
French world in particular, I thought of these allied forces now so
encamped on the stricken field of her life. I could only 'act,' however,
as they said at North Verona, quite impenetrably--only make no answering
sign. I couldn't intimate, much less could I frankly utter, my inward
sense of the Countess's probable past, with its measure of her virtue,
value and accomplishments, and of the limits of consideration to which
she could properly pretend. I couldn't give my friend a hint of how I
myself personally 'saw' her interesting pensioner--whether as the
runaway wife of a too-jealous hairdresser or of a too-morose
pastry-cook, say; whether as a very small bourgeoise, in fine, who had
vitiated her case beyond patching up, or even some character of the
nomadic sort, less edifying still. I couldn't let in, by the jog of a
shutter, as it were, a hard informing ray and then, washing my hands of
the business, turn my back for ever. I could on the contrary but save
the situation, my own at least, for the moment, by pulling myself
together with a master hand and appearing to ignore everything but that
the dreadful person between us _was_ a 'grande dame.'"
Anyone genuinely interested in "the how and the whence and the why these
intenser lights of experience come into being and insist on shining,"
will find it a profitable exercise to read and compare the old and the
new versions of any of the novels or tales first published during the
'seventies or 'eighties. Such a reader will be qualified to decide for
himself between the opinion of a bold young critic that "all the works
have been subjected to a revision which in several cases, notably _Daisy
Miller_ and _Four Meetings_, amounts to their ruin," and their writer's
confidence that "I shouldn't have breathed upon the old catastrophes and
accidents, the old wounds and mutilations and disfigurements wholly in
vain. . . . I have prayed that the finer air of the better form may
sufficiently seem to hang about them and gild them over--at least for
readers, however few, at all _curious_ of questions of air and form."