1. A good approach to the work of Henry James is through the three
articles from the _Quarterly Review_ listed below. Mr. Fullerton sums up
the material scattered through the prefaces to the definitive edition of
1909. Mr. Percy Lubbock writes as the editor of the _Letters_. Mrs.
Wharton adds to criticism of the _Letters_ illuminating personal
reminiscences.
2. One of the important _Prefaces_ on James's theory of the novel and his
method of work is that to the _Portrait of a Lady_, from which the
extract below is taken. In speaking of Turgenev's attitude toward his
characters, James says:
He saw them, in that fashion, as disponible, saw them subject to the
chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly but
then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most
bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together
the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the
creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to
produce and to feel.
"To arrive at these things is to arrive at my 'story,' he said, "and
that's the way I look for it. The result is that I'm often accused
of not having 'story' enough...."
So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I
drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may
reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image _en
disponible_. It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have
met for just that blest habit of one's own imagination, the trick of
investing some conceived or encountered individual, some brace or
group of individuals, with the germinal property and authority. I
was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of
their setting--a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which
struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse.
I might envy, though I couldn't emulate, the imaginative writer so
constituted as to see his fable first and to make out his agents
afterwards: I could think so little of any situation that didn't
depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and
thereby on their way of taking it....
The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree
of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which
his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its
ability to "grow" with due freshness and straightness any vision of
life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality. That
element is but another name for the more or less close connexion of
the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some
sincere experience.
On one thing I was determined; that, though I should clearly have to
pile brick upon brick for the creation of an interest, I would leave
no pretext for saying that anything is out of line, scale or
perspective. I would build large--in fine embossed vaults and
painted arches, as who should say, and yet never let it appear that
the chequered pavement, the ground under the reader's feet, fails
to stretch at every point to the base of the walls....
The bricks, for the whole counting-over--putting for bricks little
touches and inventions and enhancements by the way--affect me in
truth as well-nigh innumerable and as ever so scrupulously fitted
together and packed-in. It is an effect of detail, of the minutest;
though, if one were in this connexion to say all, one would express
the hope that the general, the ampler part of the modest monument
still survives....
So early was to begin my tendency to _overtreat_, rather than
undertreat (when there was choice or danger) my subject. (Many
members of my craft, I gather, are far from agreeing with me, but I
have always held overtreating the minor disservice.) ... There was
the danger of the noted "thinness"--which was to be averted, tooth
and nail, by cultivation of the lively.... And then there was
another matter. I had, within the few preceding years, come to live
in London, and the "international" light lay, in those days, to my
sense, thick and rich upon the scene. It was the light in which so
much of the picture hung. But that _is_ another matter. There is
really too much to say.
3. Remember the following clues in reading James's, work: "His one
preoccupation was the criticism, for his own purpose, of the art of
life." The emphasis is on the word _art_. His _purpose_ is suggested by
his own claim to have "that tender appreciation of actuality which makes
even the application of a single coat of rose-color seem an act of
violence."
4. There is suggestion of Mr. James's limitations in the facts that he
was tone deaf and so could not appreciate music, and that he is said not
to have written a line of verse, and also in the fact that although his
method of presentation in the novels is dramatic throughout and he
strongly desired to write plays, the eight plays that he wrote (three of
which were presented) were failures.
5. Mr. James's place in the sequence of great European novelists is as a
follower of Balzac, Flaubert, De Maupassant, and Turgenev, and as a
predecessor of Conrad (whose study of him listed below should be read).
6. Early in the nineties, a great change in method came about in James's
work (cf. _Cambridge_, III, 98, 103). Judge separately typical books
written before this change and others written after; then read several
books of the period of change and decide what happened and whether or
not it enhanced the value of his work.
7. One of the remarkable facts about James's style is its influence upon
the critics who write about him. A close analysis of its
qualities--sentence length, the order and placing of the parts of the
sentence, punctuation, vocabulary, etc., might bring a more definite
understanding of the reasons for this influence.
8. A comparison of the work and qualities of Henry and William James
might be made a valuable contribution to criticism.
9. For a student familiar with Europe, a study of the reasons for James's
affinity with Europe and dislike for American life would make an
interesting study.
10. What different types of reasons can you bring to show that Henry
James is likely to be a permanent force in American literature?