The greatness of a writer can be estimated by the gap which would
yawn in our interpretation of life if we conceived for a moment the
expurgation of his whole body of work from our minds.
And what a hole there would be, what a jagged, bleeding, horrible
hole, if the books of Henry James--and it is a continuous satisfaction
to a lover of literature to think how many of them there are--were
flung upon oblivion.
How often as the days of our life drift by, growing constantly more
crowded and difficult, do we find ourselves exclaiming, "Only
Henry James could describe this! What a situation for Henry
James!"
The man has come to get himself associated more--oh, far more
--than any other writer of our day, with the actual stir and pressure of
environment in which we habitually move. I say "we." By this I
mean the great mass of educated people in Europe, England and
America. Of the "Masses," as they are called; of the persons by
whose labours our middle-class and upper-class life, with its
comparative leisure and comfort, is made possible, Henry James has
little to say.
He never or very rarely deals, as Balzac and de Maupassant and
Hardy do, with the farmers and farm labourers on the land. He never
or very rarely deals with the slums of our great cities, as did Dickens
and Victor Hugo. He confines himself more rigorously than any
other novelist of equal power to the ways and manners and
entanglements of people who are "in society," or who could be in
society if they wanted to, or are on the verge and edge of society.
When the "lower classes"--I use the convenient term; doubtless in
the eyes of celestial hierarchies the situation is reversed--enter at all
into the circle of Mr. James' consciousness, they enter, either as
interesting anarchists, like young Hyacinth, or as servants.
Servants--especially butlers and valets--play a considerable part, and so
do poor relations and impecunious dependents. For these latter of both
sexes the great urbane author has a peculiar and tender consideration.
It is not in the least that he is snobbish. Of that personal uneasiness
in the presence of worldly greatness so unpleasantly prominent in
Thackeray there is absolutely nothing. It is only that, conscientious
artist as he is, he is unwilling to risk any sort of aesthetic "faux pas"
by adventuring outside his natural sphere, the sphere to which he
was born. Of gentlefolk who are poor and of artists and writers who
are poor there are innumerable types strewn throughout his works.
It were quite unfair to say that he only writes of the idle rich. What
he actually does is--as I have said--to write of our upper middle
class life, with its aristocrats at the top and its luckless governesses
and tutors and journalists at the bottom; as we, who are in it, know it
and feel it and suffer from it, every day of our existence.
And, curiously enough, this is a very rare achievement. Of course
there is a horde of second-rate writers, cheap hucksters of glittering
sentimental wares for the half-educated, who write voluminously of
the life of which I am speaking. There are others, more cultivated
but endowed with less vivacity, who crowd their pages with grave
personages from what are called "liberal professions." But the more
imaginative writers of our day are not to be looked for in the
drawing-rooms of their wives and daughters.
Mr. Hardy confines himself to the meadows of Blackmoor and the
highways and hedges of Dorset Uplands. Mr. Conrad sails down
tropical rivers and among the islands of Southern seas. The
American Mr. Dreiser ploughs his earth-upheaving path through the
workshops of Chicago and the warehouses of Manhattan.
It is Henry James and Henry James alone, who unravels for us the
tangled skein of our actual normal-abnormal life, as the destinies
twist and knot it in the civilised chambers of our natural sojourning.
The curious thing is that even among our younger and most modern
writers, no one, except John Galsworthy, really deals with the sort of
life that I have in mind when I speak of the European "upper
classes"; and one knows how Mr. Galsworthy's noble and chivalrous
interest in social questions militates against the intellectual
detachment of his curiosity.
The cleverer authors among our younger school almost invariably
restrict their scope to what one feels are autobiographical histories
of their own wanderings through the pseudo-Latin quarters of
London and Paris. They flood their pages with struggling artists,
emancipated seamstresses, demi-mondaine actresses, social
reformers, and all the rag-tag and bob-tail of suburban semi-culture;
whereas in some mysterious way--probably by reason of their not
possessing imaginations strong enough to sweep them out of the
circle of their own experiences--the more normal tide of ordinary
"upper-class" civilisation passes them untouched.
It is imagination which is lacking, imagination which, as in the case
of Balzac and Dostoievsky, can carry a writer beyond the sphere of
his own personal adventures, into the great tides and currents of the
human comedy, and into the larger air of the permanent life-forces.
It is the universal element which one misses in these clever and
interesting books, that universal element which in the work of Henry
James is never absent, however slight and frivolous his immediate
subject or however commonplace and conventional his characters.
Is it, after all, not they,--these younger philosophical realists--but he,
the great urbane humanist, who restricts his scope, narrowing it
down to oft-repeated types and familiar scenes, which, as the world
swings forward, seem to present themselves over and over again as
an integral and classic embodiment of the permanent forces of life?
It might seem so sometimes; especially when one considers how
little new or startling "action" there is in Henry James, how few
romantic or outstanding figures there are to arrest us with the shock
of sensational surprise. Or is it, when we get to the bottom of the
difference--this difference which separates Henry James from the
bulk of our younger novelists--not a matter of subject at all, but
purely a matter of method and mental atmosphere?
May it not, perhaps, turn out that all those younger men are
preoccupied with some purely personal philosophy of life, some
definite scheme of things--like the pattern idea in "Human
Bondage"--to which they are anxious to sacrifice their experiences
and subordinate their imaginations? Are they not all, as a matter of
fact, interested more deeply in hitting home some original
philosophical nail, than in letting the vast human tragedy strike them
out of a clear sky? But it matters little which way it is. The fact that
concerns us now is to note that Henry James has still no rival, nor
anything approaching a rival, in his universal treatment of European
Society. None, even among our most cynical and disillusioned
younger writers, are able to get as completely rid as he of any "a
priori" system or able to envisage, as he did, in passionate colourless
curiosity, the panorama of human characters drawn out along the
common road of ordinary civilised life.
Putting Flaubert aside, Henry James is the only one of the great
modern novelists to be absolutely free from any philosophical
system. Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Balzac, Hardy, de Maupassant,
D'Annunzio--they all have their metaphysical or anti-metaphysical
bias, their gesture of faith or denial.
Even Flaubert himself makes a kind of philosophic attitude out of
his loathing for the common-place. Henry James alone confronts the
universe with only one passion, with only one purpose, with only
one obsession--the passion and the purpose of satisfying his
insatiable curiosity upon the procession of human motives and the
stream of human psychological reactions, which pass him by in their
eternal flux.
This cold, calm, detached intellectual curiosity, free from any moral
alloy, renders him an extraordinary and unique figure; a figure that
would be almost inhuman, if it were not that the fury of his research
is softened and mitigated by a deep and tender pity for every sort
and condition of frail human creature subjected to his unwearied
scrutiny.
This is one of the basic contradictions of Mr. James' fascinating
personality, that he is able to retain the clear and Olympian
detachment of his purely aesthetic curiosity and yet to betray a
tenderness--why should one not say, in the best meaning of that
excellent word, a goodness of heart?--in his relations with his
characters, and with us, his unknown readers, who so easily might
be his characters.
It is one of the profoundest secrets of art itself, this contradiction,
and it reveals the fact that however carefully a great spirit may
divest itself of philosophy and system there is a residuum of
personal character left behind--of personal predilection and
taste--which all the artistic objectivity in the world cannot overcome.
I am myself inclined to think that it is this very tenderness and
friendliness in Henry James, this natural amiability of disposition
which all his detachment and curiosity cannot kill, that makes him
so much more attractive a figure than the sombre Flaubert whose
passion for literary objectivism is touched by no such charm.
It is a matter of great interest to watch the little tricks and devices of
a genius of this kind preparing the ground, as one might put it, for
the peculiar harvest of impressions.
What Henry James aims at is a clear field for the psychological
emotions of people who have, so to speak, time and leisure to
indulge themselves in all the secondary reactions and subtle
ramifications of their peculiar feelings.
The crude and intrusive details of any business or profession, the
energy-absorbing toil of manual or otherwise exhausting labour,
prevent, quite naturally, any constant preoccupation with one's
emotional experiences. A Maxim Gorky or a Thomas Hardy will
turn the technical labours of his emotionally-stricken people into
tragic accomplices of the human drama, making field or factory, as
it may happen, dumb but significant participators in the fatal issue.
But in their case, and in the case of so many other powerful modern
writers, the emotions required are simple and direct, such as
harmonise well with the work of men's hands and the old eternal
struggle with the elements.
It may be said, and with a great deal of plausibility, that this natural
and simple toil adds a dignity and a grandeur to human emotions
which must necessarily vanish with the vanishing of its heavy
burdens. It may be said that the mere existence of an upper class
more or less liberated from such labours and permitted the leisure to
make so much of its passing sensations, is itself a grievous
indictment of our present system. This also is a contention full of
convincing force.
Oscar Wilde himself--the most sophisticated of hedonists--declares
in his "Soul of Man" that the inequality of the present system, when
one considers aesthetic values alone, is as injurious to the rich as it
is pernicious to the poor. Almost every one of the great modern
writers, not excluding even the courtly Turgenief, utters bitter and
eloquent protests against the injustice of this difference.
Nietzsche alone maintains the necessity of a slave caste in order that
the masters of civilisation may live largely, freely, nobly, as did the
ancient aristocracies of the classic ages, without contact with the
burden and tediousness of labour. And in this--in his habitual and
arbitrary neglect of the toiling masses--Henry James is more in
harmony with the Nietzschean doctrine than any other great novelist
of our age. He is indeed, the only one--except perhaps Paul Bourget,
and Bourget cannot in any sense be regarded as his intellectual
equal--who relentlessly and unscrupulously rules out of his work
every aspect of "the spirit of the revolution."
There is something almost terrifying and inhuman about this
imperturbable stolidity of indifference to the sufferings and
aspirations of the many too many. One could imagine any
intellectual proletarian rising up from his perusal of these
voluminous books with a howl of indignation against their urbane
and incorrigible author.
I do not blush to confess that I have myself sometimes shared this
righteous astonishment. Is it possible that the aloofness of this
tenderhearted man from the burden of his age, is due to his
American antecedents?
Rich people in America are far less responsible in their attitude
towards the working classes, and far less troubled by pricks of
conscience than in older countries, where some remote traces of the
feudal system still do something towards bridging the gulf between
class and class.
One must remember too that, after all, Henry James is a great
_déraciné,_ a passionate pilgrim from the new world making
amorous advances toward the old. It is always difficult, in a country
which is not one's own, to feel the sting of conscience with regard to
social injustices as sharply as one feels it at home. Travelling in
Egypt or Morocco, one seems to take it carelessly for granted that
there should be scenes of miserable poverty sprinkled around the
picturesque objects of our aesthetic tour.
Well! England and France and Italy are to Henry James like Egypt
and Morocco; and as long as he finds us picturesquely and
charmingly ourselves; set that is, in our proper setting, and with the
picturesque background of local colour behind us--he naturally does
not feel it incumbent upon him to worry himself very greatly over
our social inequalities.
But there is probably more in it than that. These things--the presence
or the absence of the revolutionary conscience--are matters, when
one gets to the bottom of it, of individual temperament, and James,
the kindest and most charitable of men in his personal life, was
simply untouched by that particular spark of "saeva indignatio."
It was not out of stupidity or any lack of sensitiveness that he let it
alone. Perhaps--who can tell?--he, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra,
overcame "the temptation of pity," and deliberately turned aside
from the "ugliest man's" cries.
One feels in one's more ardent moments, when the wish to smite this
accursed economic system some shattering blow becomes red-hot, a
little chilled, it must be confessed, when one recalls that immense
brow, heavy with brooding intellect, and those dreamy, full-orbed
Shakespearian eyes. Was the man, one is tempted to wonder then,
too great, too lonely, too wise, to believe in any beautiful desperate
change in the tragic "pathos of distance" between man and man?
Was indeed the whole mortal business of human life a sort of grand
tour of "Egypt and Morocco" to him; a mere long-drawn-out search
after aesthetic sensations and a patient satisfying of Olympian
curiosity?
No novelist that has ever lived "shows his hand" so little, in the
sense of coming before the foot-lights and making gestures to the
crowd; but in a deeper implication, none shows it more constantly.
To have a style so marked and sealed, so stamped and dyed for one's
own in the integral way James has it, a style so personal and unique
that its peculiar flavour rises from every single sentence on the page,
is indeed, in a deep sense, to betray one's hidden soul to the world.
This, at any rate, is the only kind of betrayal that we--the general
public--are permitted to surprise him in; unless one counts as a
personal revelation the grave portentous solemnity of his technical
prefaces. Like that amiable girl in Wilhelm Meister who, when
asked whether she had ever loved, replied "Never--or always!"
Henry James may be said to have never "coined his soul" or always
to have coined it.
This style of his--so dyed and ingrained with personality--becomes
in his later books, a stumbling-block to many readers; to the readers
who want their "story" and have no wish to be teased and distracted
"en route." Certainly his style thickens and gathers in fuller intensity
as well as diffuses itself in wider atmospheric attenuation as his later
manner grows upon him. The thing becomes at once richer and more
evasive. But this implies no violent or sudden change, such as might
excite suspicion of any arbitrary "tour-de-force." The characteristic
elements are there from the beginning. They are only emphasized
and drawn out to their logical issues by the process of his
development.
From the very start he possesses a style which has its own flavour. It
is only that the perfume of it diffuses itself more insidiously, in
proportion as its petals, so to speak, warmed by the sun of maturer
experience and subtler imagination, open to the air.
The result of this natural and organic development is precisely what
one would have anticipated. Lovers of simple story-telling prefer the
earlier work with its Daisy Miller, Roderick Hudson, and The
Portrait of a Lady.
Virtuosos of rare psychological achievements and of strange
aesthetic experiments prefer his very latest writings, including such
a difficult and complicated book as "The Golden Bowl" or the short
stories in "The Finer Grain."
On the other hand, those among us who are concerned with sheer
beauty of form apart both from exciting subjects and psychological
curiosities, hold by the intermediate period--the period extending, let
us say, from the beginning of the last five years of the Nineteenth to
the end of the first five years of the Twentieth century.
As a matter of fact, "The Golden Bowl," one of his most elaborate
and exhaustive masterpieces, was published in November, 1904; and
"The Sacred Fount," perhaps the most difficult as it is certainly one
of the most characteristic of all his stories, appeared very much
earlier. But taking his works as a whole, that epoch--from 1895 to
1905--may be regarded as his apogee, as his "Great Noon."
"The Awkward Age," for instance, the book of all others for which
initiated admirers have an insistent devotion, appeared in 1899,
while the collection of stories entitled "The Better Sort," which
includes that masterpiece of tenderhearted malice "The Beldonald
Holbein," came out in 1903.
As I have hinted, the whole question of selecting the period of a
great artist's manner which contains his most significant work is
largely a matter of taste; and the thing--as we have seen--is
complicated by all sorts of overlappings, reversions, anticipations;
but if I were myself pressed to suggest a brief list of books, which
might be found to contain the quintessential qualities both of Henry
James' attitude and his method, I should certainly include "The
Tragic Muse," "The Spoils of Poynton," "What Maisie Knew," "The
Ambassadors," "The Private Life" and "The Soft Side," whatever
else it were difficult to omit.
Putting everything he wrote together, and letting these
many-coloured opals and amethysts of intellectual imagination slide
through our passionate fingers, I would perhaps select "The Great
Good Place" as the best of all his short stories, and "The Tragic
Muse" as the best of all his longer ones.
One sometimes, at unfortunately rare intervals, comes across a
person who has really "collected" Henry James from the very
beginning. Such persons are greatly to be envied. I think perhaps,
they are the only bibliophiles for whom I have a tenderness; for they
prove themselves so much more than bibliophiles; they prove
themselves wise and prudent anticipators of the verdict of posterity.
It is impossible to enjoy the reprinted editions, in their tiresome
monotony of luxurious bindings, as delicately as one enjoyed these
first flowers of the author's genius, dewy with his authentic blessing.
I am myself proud to recall the fact that, before the nineteenth
century closed, I had secured a whole shelf of these sibylline
volumes; buying most of them--I can recall the occasion--in one
huge derelict pile from a certain friendly book-shop in Brighton; and
leaving the precious parcel, promise of more than royal delights, in
some little waiting-room on the sun-bathed Georgian front, while I
walked the beach like a Grand Vizier who has received a present
from the Sultan.
The only people who are to be more envied than those who have
collected Henry James from the beginning--and these alas! are most
of them grey-headed now--are the people who, possessed of the true
interior unction, have by some accident of obstructing circumstance
been debarred from this voluptuous pleasure until late in their
experience. What ecstasies such persons have in store for them,
what "linked sweetness long-drawn out" of sybaritish enjoyment!
But I was speaking of those secret and interesting preparations that
every great artist makes before he gets to work; those clearings of
his selected field of operations from the alien and irrelevant growths.
What Henry James requires before he can set his psychological
machinery in motion is uninterrupted leisure for the persons of his
emotional dramas. Leisure first, and after leisure a certain pleasant
congruity of background.
Henry James is indeed the author "par excellence" of a leisured
upper class who have time to think and feel, and to dwell at large
upon their thoughts and feelings, undisturbed by the spade, the
plough, the sword, the counter, the wheels of factories or the roar of
traffic. It is amusing to watch the thousand and one devices by
which he disentangles his people from the intrusive irrelevancy of
work. They are either rich themselves--and it cannot be concealed
that money, though not over-emphasised, is never quite eliminated
from the field of action--or they are dependent upon rich relatives
and friends.
It is for this reason perhaps that there are so few professional people
in his books. The absence of lawyers is quite striking; so is the
absence of doctors,--though a charming example of the latter
profession does certainly appear in "The Wings of a Dove" as the
medical attendant upon the dying girl in Venice. I cannot at this
moment recall a single clergyman or priest. Is this because these
spiritual guides of our race are too poor or too over-worked to serve
his purpose, or do we perhaps,--in this regrettable "lacuna"--stumble
upon one of the little smiling prejudices of our great conformist? He
must have met some black coats, we are compelled to suppose, in
the drawing-rooms of his country houses. Did he perhaps, like so
many of his discreet and cautious young men, "conform" without
"committing himself," in these high places?
If I were asked what types of character--among men I mean--emerge
as most characteristic of his interest and as best lending themselves
to his method, I should put my finger upon those pathetic
middle-aged persons, like Mr. Verver in "The Golden Bowl," or Mr.
Longdon in "The Awkward Age," who, full of riches and sad
experience, have retired completely from active life, only to exercise
from the depths of their sumptuous houses and secluded gardens, a
sort of fairy influence upon the fortunes of their younger friends.
In the second place, I would indicate, as characteristic of this author,
those wealthy and amiable young men who, as a general rule from
America, but sometimes from the country-houses of England,
wander at large and with genial "artistic" sympathies through the
picturesque cities of Europe, carrying their susceptible hearts and
sound moral principles into "pension" and "studio" where they are
permitted to encounter those other favourite "subjects" of this
cosmopolitan author, the wandering poverty-stricken gentlewoman
with her engaging daughters, or the ambiguous adventuress with her
shadowy past. The only persons who seem allowed to work at their
trade in Henry James, are the writers and artists. These labour
continually and with most interesting results. Indeed no great
novelist, not even Balzac himself, has written so well about authors
and painters. Paul Bourget attempts it, but there is a certain pedantic
air of a craftsman writing about craftsmen, a connoisseur writing
about connoisseurs, in his treatment of such things, which detracts
from the human interest. Paul Bourget lacks, too, that fine malice,
that sly arch humour, which saves Henry James from ever making
his artists "professional" or his writers prolix.
But if he describes fellow-labourers thus sympathetically, it must
not be forgotten that by far the most fascinating "artistic" person in
all his books, is that astonishing Gabriel Nash in "The Tragic Muse."
And the rôle of Gabriel Nash is to do nothing at all. To do nothing;
but to be perpetually and insidiously enticing others, out of the
sphere of all practical duties, responsibilities and undertakings,
to renounce everything for art. Anything more charming or
characteristic than Gabriel Nash's final departure from the scene, it
would be impossible to find. He does not depart. He "goes up"--and
"out." He melts into thin air. He dissolves like an iridescent vapour.
He is--and then again, he is not.
I sometimes seem to see the portentous Henry James himself, with
his soft plump hands, heavy forehead and drooping-lidded eyes,
flitting to and fro through the drawing-rooms of our fantastic
civilisation, like some huge feathery-winged moth-owl, murmuring,
just as Gabriel Nash used to do, wistful and whimsical protests
against all this tiresome "business of life" which distracts people
from psychology and beauty and amiable conversation!
Alas! he too has now "passed away"; vanishing as lightly and
swiftly as this other, leaving behind him as the one drastic and
spectacular action in a life of pure aesthetic creation, his definite
renunciation of the world of his engendering and his formal
reception into the more leisured atmosphere of the traditions of his
adoption.
That he--of all men the most peaceful--should have taken such a step
in the mid-torrent of the war, is a clinching proof of the value which
he placed upon the sacred shrines of his passionate pilgrimage.
When we come to take up the actual threads of his peculiar style,
and to examine them one by one, we cannot fail to note certain
marked characteristics, which separate him entirely from other
writers of our age.
One of the most interesting of these is his way of handling those
innumerable colloquialisms and light "short-cuts" of speech,
which--especially in their use by super-refined people--have a grace and
charm quite their own. The literary value of the colloquialisms of
upper-class people has never, except here and there in the plays of
Oscar Wilde, been exploited as delightfully and effectively as in
Henry James.
Just as Charles Lamb will make use of Milton or Sir Thomas
Browne or the "Anatomy of Melancholy"; and endow his thefts with
an originality all his own, making them seem different in the
transposition, and in some mysterious way richer, so Henry James
will take the airy levities of his aristocratic youths and the little
provocative ejaculations of his well-bred maidens, and out of these
weave a filmy, evasive, delicate essence, light as a gossamer-seed
and bitter as coloquintida, which, mingled with his own graver and
mellower tones, becomes an absolutely new medium in the history
of human style.
The interesting thing to observe about all this is that the argot that he
makes use of is not the slang of his own America, far less is it the
more fantastic colloquialism of the English Public Schools. It is
really a sort of sublimated and apotheosized "argot," an "argot" of a
kind of platonic archetypal drawing-room; such a drawing-room as
has never existed perhaps, but to which all drawing-rooms or salons,
if you will, of elegant conversation, perpetually approximate. It is
indeed the light and airy speech, eminently natural and spontaneous,
but at the same time profoundly sophisticated, of a sort of Utopian
aristocracy, that will, in some such delicious hesitations, innuendoes
and stammerings, express their "superficiality out of profundity," in
the gay, subtle, epicurean days which are to come.
It is only offensive to tiresome realistic people, void of humour as
they are void of imagination, this sweet psychological persiflage. To
such persons it may even seem a little ridiculous that _everybody_
--from retired American Millionaires down to the quaintest of
Hertfordshire old maids--should utter their sentiments in this same
manner. But such objectors are too pig-headed and stupid to
understand the rudimentary conventions of art, or those felicitous
"illusions," which, as Charles Lamb reminds us in speaking of some
sophisticated old English actors, are a kind of pleasant challenge
from the intelligent comedian to his intelligent audience.
One very delicate and dainty device of Henry James is his trick of
placing "inverted commas" round even the most harmless of
colloquialisms. This has a curiously distinguished and refined effect.
It seems constantly to say to his readers.--"one knows very well,
_we_ know very well, how ridiculous and vulgar all this is; but there
are certain things that cannot be otherwise expressed!" It creates a
sort of scholarly "rapport"--this use of commas--between the
gentility of the author and the assumed gentility of the reader, taking
the latter into a kind of amiable partnership in ironic superiority.
I say "gentility"--but that is not exactly the word; for there is not the
remotest trace of snobbishness in Henry James. It is rather that he
indicates to a small inner circle of intellectually detached persons,
his recognition of their fastidiousness and their prejudices, and his
sly humorous consciousness of the gulf between their classical mode
of speech and the casual lapses of ordinary human conversation.
In spite of all his detachment no novelist diffuses his personal
temperament so completely through his work as Henry James does.
In this sense--in the sense of temperamental style--he is far more
personal than Balzac and incomparably more so than Turgenief.
One does not, in reading these great authors, savour the actual style
on every page, in every sentence. We have large blank spaces, so to
speak, of straightforward colourless narrative. But there are no
"blank spaces" in Henry James. Every sentence is penetrated and
heavy with the fragrance of his peculiar grace. One might almost
say--so strong is this subjective element in the great objective
aesthete--that James writes novels like an essayist, like some
epicurean Walter Pater, suddenly grown interested in common
humanity, and finding in the psychology of ordinary people a
provocation and a stimulus as insidious and suggestive as in the
lines and colours of mediaeval art. This _essayist attitude_ accounts
largely for those superior "inverted commas" which throw such a
clear space of ironic detachment round his characters and his scenes.
On the other hand, what a man he is for concealing his _opinions!_
Who can lay his finger on a single formal announcement of moral or
philosophical partizanship in Henry James? Who can catch him for a
moment declaring himself a conservative, a liberal, a Christian, a
pagan, a pantheist, a pluralist, a socialist, a reactionary, a single
taxer, a realist, a symbolist, an empiricist, a believer in ideals, a
materialist, an advocate of New Thought, an esoteric Buddhist, an
Hegelian, a Pragmatist, a Free Lover?
It would be possible to go over this formidable list of angles of
human vision, and find evidence somewhere in his books sufficient
to make him out an adherent of every one of them. Consider his use
of the supernatural for instance. Hardly any modern writer makes so
constant, so artistic a use of the machinery of the invisible world;
and yet who would have the temerity to say that Henry James
believed even so much as in ghosts?
I know nothing of Mr. James' formal religious views, or to what
pious communion, if any, that brooding forehead and disillusioned
eyes were wont to drift on days of devotion. But I cannot resist a
secret fancy that it was to some old-fashioned and not too ritualistic
Anglican church that he sometimes may have been met proceeding,
in silk hat and well-polished shoes, at the close of a long Autumn
afternoon, across the fallen leaves of Hyde Park!
There is an unction, a dreamy thrill about some of those descriptions
of town and country churches in conventional England which would
suggest that he had no secularistic aversion to these modest usages.
Perhaps, like Charles Darwin, he would have answered impertinent
questions about his faith by pointing to just such patient unexcluding
shrines of drowsy controversy-hating piety.
I cannot see him listening to modernistic rhetoric. I cannot see him
prostrated before ritualistic revivals. But I can see him sitting placid
and still, like a great well-groomed visitor in "Egypt and Morocco,"
listening pensively to some old-fashioned clergyman, whose
goodness of heart redeems the innocence of his brain; while the
mellow sunshine falls through the high windows upon the fair hair
of Nanda or Aggie, or Mamie or Nina or Maud, thinking quiet
thoughts in front of him.
It is strange how difficult it is to forget the personal appearance of
this great man when one reads his works. What a head he had; what
weight of massive brooding bulk! When one thinks of the head of
Henry James and the head of Oscar Wilde--both of them with
something that suggests the classical ages in their flesh-heavy
contours--one is inclined to agree with Shakespeare's Caesar in his
suspicion of "lean men."
Think of the harassed and rat-like physiognomy of nearly all the
younger writers of our day! Do their countenances suggest, as these
of James and Wilde, that their pens will "drop fatness"? Can one not
discern the envious eye, the serpent's tongue, the scowl of the
aggressive dissenter, the leer of the street urchin?
How excellent it is, in this modern world, to come upon the
"equinimitas" of the great ages! After all, in the confused noises of
our human arena, it is something to encounter an author who
preserves restraint and dignity and urbanity. It is something more to
encounter one who has, in the very depths of his soul, the ancient
virtue of magnanimity.
This American visitor to Europe brings back to us those "good
manners of the soul" which we were in danger of forgetting; and the
more we read the writings of Henry James, the more fully we
become aware that there is only one origin of this spiritual charm,
this aristocratic grace; and that is a sensitive and noble heart.
The movement of literature at the present time is all towards action
and adventure. This is right and proper in its place, and a good
antidote to the tedious moralising of the past generation.
The influence of Nietzsche upon the spiritual plane, and that of the
war upon the emotional plane, have thrown us violently out of the
sphere of aesthetic receptivity into the sphere of heroic and laconic
wrestling.
Short stories, short poems, short speeches, short questions, short
answers, short pity and short shrift, are the order of the day. Far and
far have we been tossed from the dreamy purlieus of his "great good
place," with its long sunny hours under misty trees, and its
interminable conversations upon smooth-cut lawns! The sweet
psychology of terrace-walks is scattered, and the noise of the
chariots and the horsemen breaks the magical stillness where lovers
philosophised and philosophers loved.
But let none of the strenuous gentlemen, whose abrupt ways seem
encouraged by this earthquake, congratulate themselves that
refinement and beauty and distinction and toleration have left the
world forever, for them to "bustle in." It is not for long. The sun
does not stop shining or the dew cease falling or the fountains of
rain dry up because of the cruelty of men. It is not for long. The
"humanism" of Henry James, with its "still small voice," is bound to
return. The stars in their courses fight for it. It is the pleasure of the
consciousness of life itself; of the life that, whether with Washington
Square, or Kensington Park, or the rosy campaniles of the Giudecca,
or the minarets of Sacré-Coeur, or the roofs of Montmartre, or the
herbaceous borders and shadowy terraces of English gardens, as its
background, must flow and flow and flow, with its tender
equivocations and its suppliance of wistful mystery, as long as men
and women have any leisure to love or any intelligence to analyse
their love!
He is an aristocrat, and he writes--better than any--of the aristocracy;
and yet, in the long result, is it of his well-bred levities and of his
pleasantly-housed, lightly-living people, that one comes to think? Is
it not rather of those tragic and faded figures, figures of sensitive
men and sensitive women for whom the world has no place, and of
whom few--even among artists--speak or care to speak, with
sympathy and understanding?
He has, just here, and in his own way, something of that sheer
human pity for desolate and derelict spirits which breaks forth so
savagely sometimes, and with so unexpected a passion, from amid
the brutalities and sensualities of Guy de Maupassant.
No one who has ever lived has written more tenderly or beautifully
of what Charles Lamb would call "superannuated people." Old
bachelors, living in a sort of romantic exile, among mementoes of a
remote past; old maids, living in an attenuated dream of "what might
have been," and playing heart-breaking tricks with their forlorn
fancies; no one has dealt more generously, more imaginatively with
such as these. He is a little cruel to them sometimes, but with a fine
caressing cruelty which is a far greater tribute than indifference; and
is there not, after all, a certain element of cruelty in every species of
tender love?
Though more than any one capable of discerning rare and
complicated issues, where to the vulgar mind all would seem grey
and dull and profitless, Henry James has, and it is absurd not to
admit it, a "penchant" for the abnormal and the bizarre. This element
appears more often in the short stories than the longer ones, but it is
never very far away.
I sometimes think that many of the gentle and pure-souled people
who read this amiable writer go on their way through his pages
without discerning this quiver, this ripple, this vibration, of "miching
mallecho." On softly-stepping feline feet, the great sleek panther of
psychological curiosity glides into very perverse, very dubious paths.
The exquisite tenuity and flexibility of his style, light as the flutter
of a feather through the air, enable him to wander freely and at large
where almost every other writer would trip and stumble in the mud.
It is one of the most interesting phenomena in literature, this sly,
quiet, half ironic dalliance with equivocal matters.
Henry James can say things that no one else could say, and approach
subjects that no one else could approach, simply by reason of the
grave whimsical playfulness of his manner and the extraordinary
malleableness of his evasive style. It is because his style can be as
simple and clear as sunlight, and yet as airy and impalpable as the
invisible wind, that he manages to achieve these results. He uses
little words, little harmless innocent words, but by the connotation
he gives them, and the way in which he softly flings them out, one
by one, like dandelion seeds upon swiftly-sliding water, one is being
continually startled into sharp arrested attention, as if--in the silence
that follows their utterance--somebody, as the phrase goes, "stepped
over one's grave."
How dearly one grows to love all his dainty tricks of speech! That
constant repetition of the word "wonderful"--of the word
"beautiful"--how beautifully and wonderfully he works it up into a
sort of tender chorus of little caressing cries over the astounding
tapestry woven by the invisible fates! The charming way his people
"drop" their little equivocal innocent-wicked retorts; "drop" them
and "fling them out," and "sweetly hazard" them and "wonderfully
wail" them, produces the same effect of balanced expectancy and
suspended judgment that one derives from those ambiguous "so it
might seems" of the wavering Platonic Dialogue.
The final impression left upon the mind after one closes one of these
fascinating volumes is, it must be confessed, a little sad. So much
ambiguity in human life--so much unnecessary suffering--so many
mad, blind, wilful misunderstandings! A little sad--and yet, on the
other hand, we remain fortified and sustained with a certain interior
detachment.
After all, it is soon over--the whole motley farce--and, while it lasts,
nothing in it matters so very greatly, or at any rate matters enough to
disturb our amusement, our good-temper, our toleration. Nothing
matters so very greatly. And yet everything--each of us, as we try to
make our difficult meanings clear, the meanings of our hidden souls,
and each of these meanings themselves as we stammer them forth to
one another--matters so "wonderfully," so "beautifully"!
The tangled thread of our days may be knotted and twisted; but,
after all, if we have the magnanimity to let off lightly those "who
trespass against us" we have not learnt our aesthetic lesson of
regarding the whole business of life as a complicated Henry James
story, altogether in vain.
We have come to regard the world as a more or less amusing
Spectacle, without forgetting to be decently considerate of the other
shadows in the gilt-framed mirror!
Perhaps, in our final estimate of him, what emerges most definitely
as Henry James' _doctrine_ is the height and depth and breadth of
the gulf which separates those who have taste and sensitiveness
from those who have none. That is the "motif" of the "Spoils of
Poynton," and I do not know any one of all his books more instinct
with his peculiar spiritual essence.
Below every other controversy and struggle in the world is the
controversy between those who possess this secret of "The Finer
Grain" and those who have it not. There can be no reconciliation, no
truce, no "rapport" between these. At best there can be only
mitigated hostility on the one side, and ironical submission on the
other. The world is made after this fashion and after no other, and
the best policy is to follow our great artists and turn the contrast
between the two into a cause of aesthetic entertainment.
Duality rules the universe. If it were not for the fools there would be
no wisdom. If it were not for those who could never understand him,
there could be no Henry James.
One comes at any rate to see, from the exquisite success upon us of
this author's method, how futile it is, in this world whereof the
beginning and the end are dreams, to bind an artist down to tedious
and photographic reality.
People do not and perhaps never will--even in archetypal Platonic
drawing-rooms--converse with one another quite so goldenly; or tell
the amber-coloured beads of their secret psychology with quite so
felicitous an unction. What matter? It is the prerogative of fine and
great art to create, by its shaping and formative imagination, new
and impossible worlds for our enjoyment.
And the world created by Henry James is like some classic Arcadia
of psychological beauty--some universal Garden of Versailles
unprofaned by the noises of the crowd--where among the terraces
and fountains delicate Watteau-like figures move and whisper and
make love in a soft artificial fairy moonlight dimmed and tinted with
the shadows of passions and misty with the rain of tender regrets;
human figures without name or place. For who remembers the
names of these sweet phantoms or the titles of their "great good
places" in this hospitable fairy-land of the harassed sensitive ones of
the earth; where courtesy is the only law of existence and good taste
the only moral code?