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Aspects and Impressions
By
Edmund Gosse, C.B.
D.Litt. of Cambridge University; LL.D. of St. Andrews
Cassell and Company, Ltd
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1922
To
My Friend
JOHN C. SQUIRE
Poet, Editor, and Critic
These Essays are mainly reprinted from _The Edinburgh Review_, _The
London Mercury_, _The Modern Languages Review_, and _The Fortnightly
Review_. "Malherbe and the Classical Reaction" was the Taylorian Lecture
at Oxford for 1920, and is included here by the courtesy of the
authorities of the University.
Contents
PAGE
GEORGE ELIOT 1
HENRY JAMES 17
SAMUEL BUTLER 55
A NOTE ON CONGREVE 77
THE FIRST DRAFT OF SWINBURNE'S "ANACTORIA" 87
THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET 97
MALHERBE AND THE CLASSICAL REACTION 123
THE FOUNDATION OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY 145
ROUSSEAU IN ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 169
THE CENTENARY OF LECONTE DE LISLE 193
TWO FRENCH CRITICS: EMILE FAGUET--REMY DE GOURMONT 203
THE WRITINGS OF M. CLEMENCEAU 225
A VISIT TO THE FRIENDS OF IBSEN 247
FAIRYLAND AND A BELGIAN ARIOSTO 261
SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF LORD WOLSELEY 273
INDEX 291
Aspects and Impressions
GEORGE ELIOT
In and after 1876, when I was in the habit of walking from the
north-west of London towards Whitehall, I met several times, driven
slowly homewards, a victoria which contained a strange pair in whose
appearance I took a violent interest. The man, prematurely ageing, was
hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right; this
was George Henry Lewes. His companion was a large, thickset sybil,
dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in
profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of
the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense
ostrich feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the
solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the headgear had something
pathetic and provincial about it.
All this I mention, for what trifling value it may have, as a purely
external impression, since I never had the honour of speaking to the
lady or to Lewes. We had, my wife and I, common friends in the gifted
family of Simcox--Edith Simcox (who wrote ingeniously and learnedly
under the pen-name of H. Lawrenny) being an intimate in the household at
the Priory. Thither, indeed, I was vaguely invited, by word of mouth, to
make my appearance one Sunday, George Eliot having read some pages of
mine with indulgence. But I was shy, and yet should probably have obeyed
the summons but for an event which nobody foresaw. On the 18th of
December, 1880, I was present at a concert given, I think, in the
Langham Hall, where I sat just behind Mrs. Cross, as she had then
become. It was chilly in the concert-room, and I watched George Eliot,
in manifest discomfort, drawing up and tightening round her shoulders a
white wool shawl. Four days later she was dead, and I was sorry that I
had never made my bow to her.
Her death caused a great sensation, for she had ruled the wide and
flourishing province of English prose fiction for ten years, since the
death of Dickens. Though she had a vast company of competitors, she did
not suffer through that period from the rivalry of one writer of her own
class. If the Brontes had lived, or Mrs. Gaskell, the case might have
been different, for George Eliot had neither the passion of _Jane Eyre_
nor the perfection of _Cranford_, but they were gone before we lost
Dickens, and so was Thackeray, who died while _Romola_ was appearing.
Charles Kingsley, whose _Westward Ho!_ had just preceded her first
appearance, had unluckily turned into other and less congenial paths.
Charles Reade, whose _It is Never Too Late to Mend_ (1856) had been her
harbinger, scarcely maintained his position as her rival. Anthony
Trollope, excellent craftsman as he was, remained persistently and
sensibly at a lower intellectual level. Hence the field was free for
George Eliot, who, without haste or hesitation, built up slowly such a
reputation as no one in her own time could approach.
The gay world, which forgets everything, has forgotten what a solemn,
what a portentous thing was the contemporary fame of George Eliot. It
was supported by the serious thinkers of the day, by the people who
despised mere novels, but regarded her writings as contributions to
philosophical literature. On the solitary occasion when I sat in company
with Herbert Spencer on the committee of the London Library he expressed
a strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished that for the
London Library no novels should be bought, "except, of course, those of
George Eliot." While she lived, critics compared her with Goethe, but to
the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar. People who started controversies
about evolutionism, a favourite Victorian pastime, bowed low at the
mention of her name, and her own strong good sense alone prevented her
from being made the object of a sort of priggish idolatry. A big-wig of
that day remarked that "in problems of life and thought which baffled
Shakespeare her touch was unfailing." For Lord Acton at her death "the
sun had gone out," and that exceedingly dogmatic historian observed, _ex
cathedra_, that no writer had "ever lived who had anything like her
power of manifold but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles
or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had
prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival." It is very
dangerous to write like that. A reaction is sure to follow, and in the
case of this novelist, so modest and strenuous herself, but so
ridiculously overpraised by her friends, it came with remarkable
celerity.
The worship of an intellectual circle of admirers, reverberating upon a
dazzled and genuinely interested public, was not, however, even in its
palmiest days, quite unanimous. There were other strains of thought and
feeling making way, and other prophets were abroad. Robert Browning,
though an optimist, and too polite a man to oppose George Eliot
publicly, was impatient of her oracular manner. There was a struggle,
not much perceived on the surface of the reviews, between her faithful
worshippers and the new school of writers vaguely called pre-Raphaelite.
She loved Matthew Arnold's poetry, and in that, as in so much else, she
was wiser and more clairvoyant than most of the people who surrounded
her, but Arnold preserved an attitude of reserve with regard to her
later novels. She found nothing to praise or to attract her interest in
the books of George Meredith; on the other hand, Coventry Patmore, with
his customary amusing violence, voted her novels "sensational and
improper." To D. G. Rossetti they were "vulgarity personified," and his
brother defined them as "commonplace tempering the stuck-up." Swinburne
repudiated _Romola_ with vigour as "absolutely false." I dare say that
from several of these her great contemporaries less harsh estimates of
her work might be culled, but I quote these to show that even at the
height of her fame she was not quite unchallenged.
She was herself, it is impossible to deny, responsible for a good deal
of the tarnish which spread over the gold of her reputation. Her early
imaginative writings--in particular _Janet's Repentance_, _Adam Bede_,
the first two-thirds of _The Mill on the Floss_, and much of _Silas
Marner_--had a freshness, a bright vitality, which, if she could have
kept it burnished, would have preserved her from all effects of
contemporary want of sympathy. When we analyse the charm of the stories
just mentioned, we find that it consists very largely in their felicity
of expressed reminiscence. There is little evidence in them of the
inventive faculty, but a great deal of the reproductive. Now, we have to
remember that contemporaries are quite in the dark as to matters about
which, after the publication of memoirs and correspondence and
recollections, later readers are exactly informed. We may now know that
Sir Christopher Cheverel closely reproduces the features of a real Sir
Roger Newdigate, and that Dinah Morris is Mrs. Samuel Evans
photographed, but readers of 1860 did not know that, and were at liberty
to conceive the unknown magician in the act of calling up a noble
English gentleman and a saintly Methodist preacher from the depths of
her inner consciousness. Whether this was so or not would not matter to
anyone, if George Eliot could have continued the act of pictorial
reproduction without flagging. The world would have long gazed with
pleasure into the camera obscura of Warwickshire, as she reeled off one
dark picture after another, but unhappily she was not contented with her
success, and she aimed at things beyond her reach.
Her failure, which was, after all (let us not exaggerate), the partial
and accidental failure of a great genius, began when she turned from
passive acts of memory to a strenuous exercise of intellect. If I had
time and space, it would be very interesting to study George Eliot's
attitude towards that mighty woman, the full-bosomed caryatid of
romantic literature, who had by a few years preceded her. When George
Eliot was at the outset of her own literary career, which as we know was
much belated, George Sand had already bewitched and thrilled and
scandalized Europe for a generation. The impact of the Frenchwoman's
mind on that of her English contemporary produced sparks or flashes of
starry enthusiasm. George Eliot, in 1848, was "bowing before George Sand
in eternal gratitude to that great power of God manifested in her," and
her praise of the French peasant-idyls was unbounded. But when she
herself began to write novels she grew to be less and less in sympathy
with the French romantic school. A French critic of her own day laid
down the axiom that "il faut bien que le roman se rapproche de la poesie
ou de la science." George Sand had thrown herself unreservedly into the
poetic camp. She acknowledged "mon instinct m'eut poussee vers les
abimes," and she confessed, with that stalwart good sense which carried
her genius over so many marshy places, that her temperament had often
driven her, "au mepris de la raison ou de la verite morale," into pure
romantic extravagance.
But George Eliot, whatever may have been her preliminary enthusiasms,
was radically and permanently anti-romantic. This was the source of her
strength and of her weakness; this, carefully examined, explains the
soaring and the sinking of her fame. Unlike George Sand, she kept to the
facts; she found that all her power quitted her at once if she dealt
with imaginary events and the clash of ideal passions. She had been
drawn in her youth to sincere admiration of the Indianas and Lelias of
her florid French contemporary, and we become aware that in the humdrum
years at Coventry, when the surroundings of her own life were arduous
and dusty, she felt a longing to spread her wings and fly up and out to
some dim Cloud-Cuckoo Land the confines of which were utterly vague to
her. The romantic method of Dumas, for instance, and even of Walter
Scott, appealed to her as a mode of escaping to dreamland from the
flatness and vulgarity of life under the "miserable reign of Mammon."
But she could not achieve such flights; her literary character was of a
totally different formation. What was fabulous, what was artificial, did
not so much strike her with disgust as render her paralysed. Her only
escape from mediocrity, she found, was to give a philosophical interest
to common themes. In consequence, as she advanced in life, and came more
under the influence of George Henry Lewes, she became less and less well
disposed towards the French fiction of her day, rejecting even Balzac,
to whom she seems, strangely enough, to have preferred Lessing. That
Lessing and Balzac should be names pronounced in relation itself throws
a light on the temper of the speaker.
Most novelists seem to have begun to tell stories almost as early as
musicians begin to trifle with the piano. The child keeps other children
awake, after nurse has gone about her business, by reeling off
inventions in the dark. But George Eliot showed, so far as records
inform us, no such aptitude in infancy or even in early youth. The
history of her start as a novel-writer is worthy of study. It appears
that it was not until the autumn of 1856 that she, "in a dreamy mood,"
fancied herself writing a story. This was, I gather, immediately on her
return from Germany, where she had been touring about with Lewes, with
whom she had now been living for two years. Lewes said to her, "You have
wit, description, and philosophy--those go a good way towards the
production of a novel," and he encouraged her to write about the virtues
and vices of the clergy, as she had observed them at Griff and at
Coventry. _Amos Barton_ was the immediate result, and the stately line
of stories which was to close in _Daniel Deronda_ twenty years later was
started on its brilliant career. But what of the author? She was a
storm-tried matron of thirty-seven, who had sub-edited the _Westminster
Review_, who had spent years in translating Strauss's _Life of Jesus_
and had sunk exhausted in a still more strenuous wrestling with the
_Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ of Spinoza, who had worked with
Delarive at Experimental Physics in Geneva, and who had censured, as
superficial, John Stuart Mill's treatment of Whewell's _Moral
Philosophy_. This heavily-built Miss Marian Evans, now dubiously known
as Mrs. Lewes, whose features at that time are familiar to us by the
admirable paintings and drawings of Sir Frederick Burton, was in
training to be a social reformer, a moral philosopher, an apostle of the
creed of Christendom, an anti-theological professor, anything in the
world rather than a writer of idle tales.
But the tales proved to be a hundredfold more attractive to the general
public than articles upon taxation or translations from German sceptics.
We all must allow that at last, however tardily and surprisingly, George
Eliot had discovered her true vocation. Let us consider in what capacity
she entered this field of fiction. She entered it as an observer of life
more diligent and more meticulous perhaps than any other living person.
She entered it also with a store of emotional experience and with a
richness of moral sensibility which were almost as unique. She had
strong ethical prejudices, and a wealth of recollected examples by which
she could justify them. Her memory was accurate, minute, and well
arranged, and she had always enjoyed retrospection and encouraged
herself in the cultivation of it. She was very sympathetic, very
tolerant, and although she had lived in the very Temple of Priggishness
with her Brays and her Hennells and her Sibrees, she remained singularly
simple and unaffected. Rather sad, one pictures her in 1856, rather
dreamy, burdened with an excess of purely intellectual preoccupation,
wandering over Europe consumed by a constant, but unconfessed, nostalgia
for her own country, coming back to it with a sense that the Avon was
lovelier than the Arno. Suddenly, in that "dreamy mood," there comes
over her a desire to build up again the homes of her childhood, to
forget all about Rousseau and experimental physics, and to reconstruct
the "dear old quaintnesses" of the Arbury of twenty-five years before.
If we wish to see what it was which this mature philosopher and earnest
critic of behaviour had to produce for the surprise of her readers, we
may examine the description of the farm at Donnithorne in _Adam Bede_.
The solemn lady, who might seem such a terror to ill-doers, had yet a
packet of the most delicious fondants in the pocket of her bombazine
gown. The names of these sweetmeats, which were of a flavour and a
texture delicious to the tongue, might be Mrs. Poyser or Lizzie Jerome
or the sisters Dodson, but they all came from the Warwickshire factory
at Griff, and they were all manufactured with the sugar and spice of
memory. So long as George Eliot lived in the past, and extracted her
honey from those wonderful cottage gardens which fill her early pages
with their colour and their odour, the solidity and weight of her
intellectual methods in other fields did not interfere, or interfered in
a negligible way, with the power and intensity of the entertainment she
offered. We could wish for nothing better. English literature has, of
their own class, nothing better to offer than certain chapters of _Adam
Bede_ or than the beginning of _The Mill on the Floss_.
But, from the first, if we now examine coldly and inquisitively, there
was a moth sleeping in George Eliot's rich attire. This moth was
pedantry, the result, doubtless, of too much erudition encouraging a
natural tendency in her mind, which as we have seen was acquisitive
rather than inventive. It was unfortunate for her genius that after her
early enthusiasm for French culture she turned to Germany and became, in
measure, like so many powerful minds of her generation, Teutonized. This
fostered the very tendencies which it was desirable to eradicate. One
can but speculate what would have been the result on her genius of a
little more Paris and a little less Berlin. Her most successful
immediate rival in France was Octave Feuillet; the _Scenes of Clerical
Life_ answer in time to _Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_, and
_Monsieur de Camors to Felix Holt_. There could not be a stronger or
more instructive contrast than between the elegant fairyland of the one
and the robust realism of the other. But our admirable pastoral writer,
whose inward eye was stored with the harmonies and humours of
Shakespeare's country, was not content with her mastery of the past.
She looked forward to a literature of the future. She trusted to her
brain rather than to those tired servants, her senses, and more and more
her soul was invaded by the ambition to invent a new thing, the
scientific novel, dealing with the growth of institutions and the
analysis of individual character.
The critics of her own time were satisfied that she had done this, and
that she had founded the psychological novel. There was much to be said
in favour of such an opinion. In the later books it is an undeniable
fact that George Eliot displays a certain sense of the inevitable
progress of life which was new. It may seem paradoxical to see the
peculiar characteristics of Zola or of Mr. George Moore in
_Middlemarch_, but there is much to be said for the view that George
Eliot was the direct forerunner of those naturalistic novelists. Like
them, she sees life as an organism, or even as a progress. George Eliot
in her contemplation of the human beings she invents is a traveller, who
is provided with a map. No Norman church or ivied ruin takes her by
surprise, because she has seen that it was bound to come, and recognizes
it when it does come. Death, the final railway station, is ever in her
mind; she sees it on her map, and gathers her property around her to be
ready when the train shall stop. This psychological clairvoyance gives
her a great power when she does not abuse it, but unfortunately from the
very first there was in her a tendency, partly consequent on her mental
training, but also not a little on her natural constitution, to dwell in
a hard and pedagogic manner on it. She was not content to please, she
must explain and teach as well.
Her comparative failure to please made its definite appearance first in
the laboured and overcharged romance of _Romola_. But a careful reader
will detect it in her earliest writings. Quite early in _Amos Barton_,
for instance, when Mrs. Hackit observes of the local colliers that they
"passed their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and smoking, like
the beasts that perish," the author immediately spoils this delightful
remark by explaining, like a schoolmaster, that Mrs. Hackit was
"speaking, we may presume, in a remotely analogical sense." The laughter
dies upon our lips. Useless pedantry of this kind spoils many a happy
touch of humour, Mrs. Poyser alone perhaps having wholly escaped from
it. It would be entirely unjust to accuse George Eliot, at all events
until near the end of her life, of intellectual pride. She was, on the
contrary, of a very humble spirit, timorous and susceptible of
discouragement. But her humility made her work all the harder at her
task of subtle philosophical analysis. It would have been far better for
her if she had possessed less of the tenacity of Herbert Spencer and
more of the recklessness of George Sand. An amusing but painful example
of her Sisyphus temper, always rolling the stone uphill with groans and
sweat, is to be found in her own account of the way she "crammed up" for
the composition of _Romola_. She tells us of the wasting toil with which
she worked up innumerable facts about Florence, and in particular how
she laboured long over the terrible question whether Easter could have
been "retarded" in the year 1492. On this, Sir Leslie Stephen--one of
her best critics, and one of the most indulgent--aptly queries, "What
would have become of _Ivanhoe_ if Scott had bothered himself about the
possible retardation of Easter? The answer, indeed, is obvious, that
_Ivanhoe_ would not have been written."
The effect of all this on George Eliot's achievement was what must
always occur when an intellect which is purely acquisitive and
distributive insists on doing work that is appropriate only to
imagination. If we read very carefully the scene preceding Savonarola's
sermon to the Dominicans at San Marco, we perceive that it is built up
almost in Flaubert's manner, but without Flaubert's magic, touch by
touch, out of books. The author does not see what she describes in a
sort of luminous hallucination, but she dresses up in language of her
own what she has carefully read in Burlamacchi or in Villari. The most
conscientious labour, expended by the most powerful brain, is incapable
of producing an illusion of life by these means. George Eliot may even
possibly have been conscious of this, for she speaks again and again,
not of writing with ecstasy of tears and laughter, as Dickens did, but
of falling into "a state of so much wretchedness in attempting to
concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my novel" that nothing
but a tremendous and sustained effort of the will carried her on at all.
In this vain and terrible wrestling with incongruous elements she wore
out her strength and her joy, and it is heart-rending to watch so noble
a genius and so lofty a character as hers wasted in the whirlpool. One
fears that a sense of obscure failure added to her tortures, and one is
tempted to see a touch of autobiography in the melancholy of Mrs.
Transome (in _Felix Holt_), of whom we are told that "her knowledge and
accomplishments had become as valueless as old-fashioned stucco
ornaments, of which the substance was never worth anything, while the
form is no longer to the taste of any living mortal."
The notion that George Eliot was herself, in spite of all the laudation
showered upon her, consciously in want of some element essential for her
success is supported by the very curious fact that from 1864 to 1869,
that is to say through nearly one-quarter of her whole literary career,
she devoted herself entirely to various experiments in verse. She was so
preternaturally intelligent that there is nothing unlikely in the
supposition that she realized what was her chief want as a writer of
imaginative prose. She claims, and she will always be justified in
claiming, a place in the splendid roll of prominent English writers. But
she holds it in spite of a certain drawback which forbids her from ever
appearing in the front rank as a great writer. Her prose has fine
qualities of force and wit, it is pictorial and persuasive, but it
misses one prime but rather subtle merit, it never sings. The masters of
the finest English are those who have received the admonition _Cantate
Domino!_ They sing a new song unto the Lord. Among George Eliot's prose
contemporaries there were several who obeyed this command. Ruskin, for
instance, above all the Victorian prose-writers, shouts like the
morning-star. It is the peculiar gift of all great prosaists. Take so
rough an executant as Hazlitt: "Harmer Hill stooped with all its pines,
to listen to a poet, as he passed!" That is the chanting faculty in
prose, which all the greatest men possess; but George Eliot has no trace
of it, except sometimes, faintly, in the sheer fun of her peasants'
conversation. I do not question that she felt the lack herself, and that
it was this which, subconsciously, led her to make a profound study of
the art of verse.
She hoped, at the age of forty-four, to hammer herself into poetry by
dint of sheer labour and will-power. She read the great masters, and she
analysed them in the light of prosodical manuals. In 1871 she told
Tennyson that Professor Sylvester's "laws for verse-making had been
useful to her." Tennyson replied, "I can't understand that," and no
wonder. Sylvester was a facetious mathematician who undertook to teach
the art of poetry in so many lessons. George Eliot humbly working away
at Sylvester, and telling Tennyson that she was finding him "useful,"
and Tennyson, whose melodies pursued him, like bees in pursuit of a
bee-master, expressing a gruff good-natured scepticism--what a picture
it raises! But George Eliot persisted, with that astounding firmness of
application which she had, and she produced quite a large body of
various verse. She wrote a Comtist tragedy, _The Spanish Gypsy_, of
which I must speak softly, since, omnivorous as I am, I have never been
able to swallow it. But she wrote many other things, epics and sonnets
and dialogues and the rest of them, which are not so hard to read. She
actually printed privately for her friends two little garlands, _Agatha_
(1868) and _Brother and Sister_ (1869), which are the only "rare issues"
of hers sought after by collectors, for she was not given to
bibliographical curiosity. These verses and many others she polished and
re-wrote with untiring assiduity, and in 1874 she published a
substantial volume of them. I have been reading them over again, in the
intense wish to be pleased with them, but it is impossible--the root of
the matter is not in them. There is an Arion, which is stately in the
manner of Marvell. The end of this lyric is tense and decisive, but
there is the radical absence of song. George Eliot admired Wordsworth
very much: occasionally she reproduces very closely the duller parts of
_The Excursion_. In the long piece of blank verse called _A College
Breakfast Party_, which she wrote in 1874, almost all Tennyson's faults
are reconstructed on the plan of the Chinese tailor who carefully
imitates the rents in the English coat he is to copy. There is a
Goethe-like poem, of a gnomic order, called _Self and Life_, stuffed
with valuable thoughts as a turkey is stuffed with chestnuts.
And it is all so earnest and so intellectual, and it does so much credit
to Sylvester. After long consideration, I have come to the conclusion
that the following sonnet, from Brother and Sister, is the best piece of
sustained poetry that George Eliot achieved. It deals with the pathetic
and beautiful relations which existed between her and her elder brother
Isaac, the Tom Tulliver of _The Mill on the Floss:_
His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy
Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame;
My doll seemed lifeless, and no girlish toy
Had any reason when my brother came.
I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling,
Cut the ringed stem and made the apple drop,
Or watched him winding close the spiral string
That looped the orbits of the humming-top.
Grasped by such fellowship my vagrant thought
Ceased with dream-fruit dream-wishes to fulfil;
My aery-picturing fantasy was taught
Subjection to the harder, truer skill
That seeks with deeds to grave a thought-tracked line,
And by "What is" "What will be" to define.
How near this is to true poetry, and yet how many miles away!
At last George Eliot seems to have felt that she could never hope, with
all her intellect, to catch the unconsidered music which God lavishes
on the idle linnet and the frivolous chaffinch. She returned to her own
strenuous business of building up the psychological novel. She wrote
_Middlemarch_, which appeared periodically throughout 1872 and as a book
early the following year. It was received with great enthusiasm, as
marking the return of a popular favourite who had been absent for
several years. _Middlemarch_ is the history of three parallel lives of
women, who "with dim lights and tangled circumstances tried to shape
their thought and deed in noble agreement," although "to common eyes
their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness." The three
ineffectual St. Theresas, as their creator conceived them, were
Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary, and they "shaped the thought and deed" of
Casaubon and Ladislaw and Fred Vincy. _Middlemarch_ is constructed with
unfailing power, and the picture of commonplace English country life
which it gives is vivacious after a mechanical fashion, but all the
charm of the early stories has evaporated, and has left behind it merely
a residuum of unimaginative satire. The novel is a very remarkable
instance of elaborate mental resources misapplied, and genius revolving,
with tremendous machinery, like some great water-wheel, while no water
is flowing underneath it.
When a realist loses hold on reality all is lost, and I for one can find
not a word to say in favour of _Daniel Deronda_, her next and last
novel, which came out, with popularity at first more wonderful than
ever, in 1876. But her inner circle of admirers was beginning to ask one
another uneasily whether her method was not now too calculated, her
effects too plainly premeditated. The intensity of her early works was
gone. Readers began to resent her pedantry, her elaboration of
allusions, her loss of simplicity. They missed the vivid rural scenes
and the flashes of delicious humour which had starred the serious pages
of _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill_ like the lemon-yellow pansies and
potentillas on a dark Welsh moor. They regretted the ease of the
conversation in her early books, where it had always been natural,
lively, and brief; it was now heavy and doctrinaire. Tennyson rebelled
against the pompousness, and said, in his blunt way, that Jane Austen
knew her business better, a courageous thing to say in Victorian circles
fifty years ago. Then came _Theophrastus Such_, a collection of cumbrous
and didactic essays which defy perusal; and finally, soon after her
death, her _Correspondence_, a terrible disappointment to all her
admirers, and a blow from which even the worship of Lord Acton never
recovered. Of George Eliot might have been repeated Swift's epitaph on
Sir John Vanbrugh:
Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee.
It was the fatal error of George Eliot, so admirable, so elevated, so
disinterested, that for the last ten years of her brief literary life
she did practically nothing but lay heavy loads on literature.
On the whole, then, it is not possible to regard the place which George
Eliot holds in English literature as so prominent a one as was rather
rashly awarded her by her infatuated contemporaries. It is the
inevitable result of "tall talk" about likeness to Dante and Goethe that
the figure so unduly magnified fails to support such comparisons when
the perspective is lengthened. George Eliot is unduly neglected now, but
it is the revenge of time on her for the praise expended on her works in
her lifetime. Another matter which militates against her fame to-day is
her strenuous solemnity. One of the philosophers who knelt at the
footsteps of her throne said that she was "the emblem of a generation
distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of
belief." Well, we happen to live, fortunately or unfortunately for
ourselves, in a generation which is "distracted" by quite other
problems, and we are sheep that look up to George Eliot and are not fed
by her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical influence. Perhaps
another generation will follow us which will be more patient, and
students yet unborn will read her gladly. Let us never forget, however,
that she worked with all her heart in a spirit of perfect honesty, that
she brought a vast intelligence to the service of literature, and that
she aimed from first to last at the loftiest goal of intellectual
ambition. Where she failed, it was principally from an inborn lack of
charm, not from anything ignoble or impure in her mental disposition.
After all, to have added to the slender body of English fiction seven
novels the names of which are known to every cultivated person is not to
have failed, but to have signally, if only relatively, succeeded.
HENRY JAMES
I
Voluminous as had been the writings of Henry James since 1875, it was
not until he approached the end of his career that he began to throw any
light on the practical events and social adventures of his own career.
He had occasionally shown that he could turn from the psychology of
imaginary characters to the record of real lives without losing any part
of his delicate penetration or his charm of portraiture. He had, in
particular, written the _Life of Hawthorne_ in 1879, between _Daisy
Miller_ and _An International Episode_; and again in 1903, at the height
of his latest period, he had produced a specimen of that period in his
elusive and parenthetical but very beautiful so-called _Life of W. W.
Story_. But these biographies threw no more light upon his own
adventures than did his successive volumes of critical and topographical
essays, in which the reader may seek long before he detects the sparkle
of a crumb of personal fact. Henry James, at the age of seventy, had not
begun to reveal himself behind the mask which spoke in the tones of a
world of imaginary characters.
So saying, I do not forget that in the general edition of his collected,
or rather selected, novels and tales, published from 1908 onwards, Henry
James prefixed to each volume an introduction which assumed to be wholly
biographical. He yielded, he said, "to the pleasure of placing on record
the circumstances" in which each successive tale was written. I well
recollect the terms in which he spoke of these prefaces before he began
to write them. They were to be full and confidential, they were to throw
to the winds all restraints of conventional reticence, they were to
take us, with eyes unbandaged, into the inmost sanctum of his soul. They
appeared at last, in small print, and they were extremely extensive, but
truth obliges me to say that I found them highly disappointing.
Constitutionally fitted to take pleasure in the accent of almost
everything that Henry James ever wrote, I have to confess that these
prefaces constantly baffle my eagerness. Not for a moment would I deny
that they throw interesting light on the technical craft of a
self-respecting novelist, but they are dry, remote, and impersonal to a
strange degree. It is as though the author felt a burning desire to
confide in the reader, whom he positively button-holes in the endeavour,
but that the experience itself evades him, fails to find expression, and
falls stillborn, while other matters, less personal and less important,
press in and take their place against the author's wish. Henry James
proposed, in each instance, to disclose "the contributive value of the
accessory facts in a given artistic case." This is, indeed, what we
require in the history or the autobiography of an artist, whether
painter or musician or man of letters. But this includes the production
of anecdotes, of salient facts, of direct historical statements, which
Henry James seemed in 1908 to be completely incapacitated from giving,
so that really, in the introductions to some of these novels in the
Collected Edition, it is difficult to know what the beloved novelist is
endeavouring to divulge. He becomes almost chimaera bombinating in a
vacuum.
Had we lost him soon after the appearance of the latest of these
prefaces--that prefixed to _The Golden Bowl_, in which the effort to
reveal something which is not revealed amounts almost to an agony--it
would have been impossible to reconstruct the life of Henry James by the
closest examination of his published writings. Ingenious commentators
would have pieced together conjectures from such tales as _The Altar of
the Dead_ and _The Lesson of the Master_, and have insisted, more or
less plausibly, on their accordance with what the author _must_ have
thought or done, endured or attempted. But, after all, these would have
been "conjectures," not more definitely based than what bold spirits
use when they construct lives of Shakespeare, or, for that matter, of
Homer. Fortunately, in 1913, the desire to place some particulars of the
career of his marvellous brother William in the setting of his
"immediate native and domestic air," led Henry James to contemplate,
with minuteness, the fading memories of his own childhood. Starting with
a biographical study of William James, he found it impossible to treat
the family development at all adequately without extending the survey to
his own growth as well, and thus, at the age of seventy, Henry became
for the first time, and almost unconsciously, an autobiographer.
He had completed two large volumes of _Memories_, and was deep in a
third, when death took him from us. _A Small Boy and Others_ deals with
such extreme discursiveness as is suitable in a collection of the
fleeting impressions of infancy, from his birth in 1843 to his all but
fatal attack of typhus fever at Boulogne-sur-Mer in (perhaps) 1857. I
say "perhaps" because the wanton evasion of any sort of help in the way
of dates is characteristic of the narrative, as it would be of childish
memories. The next instalment was _Notes of a Son and Brother_, which
opens in 1860, a doubtful period of three years being leaped over
lightly, and closes--as I guess from an allusion to George Eliot's
_Spanish Gypsy_--in 1868. The third instalment, dictated in the autumn
of 1914 and laid aside unfinished, is the posthumous _The Middle Years_,
faultlessly edited by the piety of Mr. Percy Lubbock in 1917. Here the
tale is taken up in 1869, and is occupied, without much attempt at
chronological order, with memories of two years in London. As Henry
James did not revise, or perhaps even re-read, these pages, we are free
to form our conclusion as to whether he would or would not have
vouchsafed to put their disjected parts into some more anatomical order.
Probably he would not have done so. The tendency of his genius had never
been, and at the end was less than ever, in the direction of concinnity.
He repudiated arrangement, he wilfully neglected the precise adjustment
of parts. The three autobiographical volumes will always be documents
precious in the eyes of his admirers. They are full of beauty and
nobility, they exhibit with delicacy, and sometimes even with splendour,
the qualities of his character. But it would be absurd to speak of them
as easy to read, or as fulfilling what is demanded from an ordinary
biographer. They have the tone of Veronese, but nothing of his
definition. A broad canvas is spread before us, containing many figures
in social conjuncture. But the plot, the single "story" which is being
told, is drowned in misty radiance. Out of this _chiaroscuro_ there leap
suddenly to our vision a sumptuous head and throat, a handful of roses,
the glitter of a satin sleeve, but it is only when we shut our eyes and
think over what we have looked at that any coherent plan is revealed to
us, or that we detect any species of composition. It is a case which
calls for editorial help, and I hope that when the three fragments of
autobiography are reprinted as a single composition, no prudery of
hesitation to touch the sacred ark will prevent the editor from
prefixing a skeleton chronicle of actual dates and facts. It will take
nothing from the dignity of the luminous reveries in their original
shape.
Such a skeleton will tell us that Henry James was born at 2 Washington
Place, New York, on April 15th, 1843, and that he was the second child
of his parents, the elder by one year being William, who grew up to be
the most eminent philosopher whom America has produced. Their father,
Henry James the elder, was himself a philosopher, whose ideas, which the
younger Henry frankly admitted to be beyond his grasp, were expounded by
William James in 1884, in a preface to their father's posthumous papers.
Henry was only one year old when the family paid a long visit to Paris,
but his earliest recollections were of Albany, whence the Jameses
migrated to New York until 1855. They then transferred their home to
Europe for three years, during which time the child Henry imbibed what
he afterwards called "the European virus." In 1855 he was sent to Geneva
for purposes of education, which were soon abandoned, and the whole
family began an aimless wandering through London, Paris,
Boulogne-sur-Mer, Newport, Geneva, and America again, nothing but the
Civil War sufficing to root this fugitive household in one abiding home.
Henry James's health forced him to be a spectator of the war, in which
his younger brothers fought. He went to Harvard in 1862 to study law,
but was now beginning to feel a more and more irresistible call to take
up letters as a profession, and the Harvard Law School left little or no
direct impression upon him. He formed a close and valuable friendship
with William Dean Howells, seven years his senior, and the pages of the
_Atlantic Monthly_, of which Howells was then assistant editor, were
open to him from 1865. He lived for the next four years in very poor
health, and with no great encouragement from himself or others, always
excepting Howells, at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Early in 1869 he
ventured to return to Europe, where he spent fifteen months in elegant
but fruitful vagabondage. There was much literary work done, most of
which he carefully suppressed in later life. The reader will, however,
discover, tucked away in the thirteenth volume of the Collected Edition,
a single waif from this rejected epoch, the tale called _A Passionate
Pilgrim_, written on his return to America in 1870. This visit to Europe
absolutely determined his situation; his arrival in New York stimulated
and tortured his nostalgia for the old world, and in May, 1872, he flew
back here once more to the European enchantment.
Here, practically, the biographical information respecting Henry James
which has hitherto been given to the world ceases, for the fragment of
_The Middle Years_, so far as can be gathered, contains few
recollections which can be dated later than his thirtieth year. It was
said of Marivaux that he cultivated no faculty but that _de ne vivre que
pour voir et pour entendre_. In a similar spirit Henry James took up his
dwelling in fashionable London lodgings in March, 1869. He had come from
America with the settled design of making a profound study of English
manners, and there were two aspects of the subject which stood out for
him above all others. One of these was the rural beauty of ancient
country places, the other was the magnitude--"the inconceivable
immensity," as he put it--of London. He told his sister, "The place sits
on you, broods on you, stamps on you with the feet of its myriad bipeds
and quadrupeds." From his lodgings in Half Moon Street, quiet enough in
themselves, he had the turmoil of the West End at his elbow, Piccadilly,
Park Lane, St. James's Street, all within the range of a five minutes'
stroll. He plunged into the vortex with incredible gusto, "knocking
about in a quiet way and deeply enjoying my little adventures." This was
his first mature experience of London, of which he remained until the
end of his life perhaps the most infatuated student, the most
"passionate pilgrim," that America has ever sent us.
But his health was still poor, and for his constitution's sake he went
in the summer of 1869 to Great Malvern. He went alone, and it is to be
remarked of him that, social as he was, and inclined to a deep
indulgence in the company of his friends, his habit of life was always
in the main a solitary one. He had no constant associates, and he did
not shrink from long periods of isolation, which he spent in reading and
writing, but also in a concentrated contemplation of the passing scene,
whatever it might be. It was alone that he now made a tour of the
principal English cathedral and university towns, expatiating to himself
on the perfection of the weather--"the dozen exquisite days of the
English year, days stamped with a purity unknown in climates where fine
weather is cheap." It was alone that he made acquaintance with Oxford,
of which city he became at once the impassioned lover which he continued
to be to the end, raving from Boston in 1870 of the supreme
gratifications of Oxford as "the most dignified and most educated" of
the cradles of our race. It was alone that during these enchanting weeks
he made himself acquainted with the unimagined loveliness of English
hamlets buried in immemorial leafage and whispered to by meandering
rivulets in the warm recesses of antiquity. These, too, found in Henry
James a worshipper more ardent, it may almost be averred, than any
other who had crossed the Atlantic to their shrine.
Having formed his basis for the main construction of his English
studies, Henry James passed over to the Continent, and conducted a
similar pilgrimage of entranced obsession through Switzerland and Italy.
His wanderings, "rapturous and solitary," were, as in England, hampered
by no social engagement; "I see no people to speak of," he wrote, "or
for that matter to speak to." He returned to America in April, 1870, at
the close of a year which proved critical in his career, and which laid
its stamp on the whole of his future work. He had been kindly received
in artistic and literary circles in London; he had conversed with
Ruskin, with William Morris, with Aubrey de Vere, but it is plain that
while he observed the peculiarities of these eminent men with the
closest avidity, he made no impression whatever upon them. The time for
Henry James to "make an impression" on others was not come yet; he was
simply the well-bred, rather shy, young American invalid, with excellent
introductions, who crossed the path of English activities, almost
without casting a shadow. He had published no book; he had no distinct
calling; he was a deprecating and punctilious young stranger from
somewhere in Massachusetts, immature-looking for all his
seven-and-twenty years.