Henry James is an example of a writer who enjoyed immense fame but
little popularity. Some of his best books, I believe, never passed into
second editions. He was, above all novelists, an esoteric author. His
disciples had the pleasure of feeling like persons initiated into
mysteries. He was subject, like a religious teacher, to all kinds of
conflicting interpretations. He puzzled and exasperated even intelligent
people. They often wondered what he meant and whether it was worth
writing about. Mr. Wells, or whoever wrote _Boon_, compared him to a
hippopotamus picking up a pea.
Certainly he laboured over trifles as though he were trying to pile
Pelion on Ossa. He was capable, had he been a poet, of writing an epic
made up of incidents chosen from the gossip of an old maid in the upper
middle classes. He was the novelist of grains and scruples. I have heard
it urged that he was the supreme incarnation of the Nonconformist
conscience, perpetually concerned with infinitesimal details of conduct.
As a matter of fact, there was much more of the aesthete in him than of
the Nonconformist. He lived for his tastes. It is because he is a
novelist of tastes rather than of passions that he is unlikely ever to
be popular even to the degree to, which Meredith is popular.
One imagines him, from his childhood, as a perfect connoisseur, a
dilettante. He has told us how, as a child, in New York, Paris, London,
and Geneva, he enjoyed more than anything else the "far from showy
practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping." And, while giving us
this picture of the small boy that was himself, he comments:
There was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand:
just to _be_ somewhere--almost anywhere would do--and somehow
receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a
vibration.
That is the essential Henry James--the collector of impressions and
vibrations. "Almost anywhere would do": that is what makes some of his
stories just miss being as insipid as the verse in a magazine. On the
other hand, of few of his stories is this true. His personality was too
definitely marked to leave any of his work flavourless. His work
reflects him as the arrangement of a room may reflect a charming lady.
He brings into every little world that he enters the light of a new and
refined inquisitiveness. He is as watchful as a cat. Half his pleasure
seems to come from waiting for the extraordinary to peep and peer out of
the ordinary. That is his adventure. He prefers it to seas of bloodshed.
One may quarrel with it, if one demands that art shall be as violent as
war and shall not subdue itself to the level of a game. But those who
enjoy the spectacle of a game played with perfect skill will always find
reading Henry James an exciting experience.
It would be unfair, however, to suggest that the literature of Henry
James can be finally summed up as a game. He is unquestionably a
virtuoso: he uses his genius as an instrument upon which he loves to
reveal his dexterity, even when he is shy of revealing his immortal
soul. But he is not so inhuman in his art as some of his admirers have
held him to be. Mr. Hueffer, I think, has described him as pitiless, and
even cruel. But can one call _Daisy Miller_ pitiless? Or _What Maisie
Knew_? Certainly, those autobiographical volumes, _A Small Boy and
Others_ and _Notes of a Son and Brother_, which may be counted among the
most wonderful of the author's novels, are pervaded by exquisite
affections which to a pitiless nature would have been impossible.
Henry James is even sufficiently human to take sides with his
characters. He never does this to the point of lying about them. But he
is in his own still way passionately on the side of the finer types. In
_The Turn of the Screw_, which seems to me to be the greatest
ghost-story in the English language, he has dramatized the duel between
good and evil; and the effect of it, at the end of all its horrors, is
that of a hymn in praise of courage. One feels--though a more perverse
theory of the story has been put forward--that the governess, who fights
against the evil in the big house, has the author also fighting as her
ally and the children's. Similarly, Maisie has a friend in the author.
He is never more human, perhaps, than when he is writing, not about
human beings, but about books. It is not inconceivable that he will live
as a critic long after he is forgotten as a novelist. No book of
criticism to compare with his _Notes on Novelists_ has been published in
the present century. He brought his imagination to bear upon books as he
brought his critical and analytical faculty to bear upon human beings.
Here there was room for real heroes. He idolized his authors as he
idolized none of his characters. There is something of moral passion in
the reverence with which he writes of the labours of Flaubert and Balzac
and Stevenson and even of Zola.
He lied none of them into perfection, it is true. He accepted, and even
advertised their limitations. But in each of them he found an example of
the hero as artist. His characterization of Flaubert as the "operative
conscience or vicarious sacrifice" of a styleless literary age is the
pure gold of criticism. "The piety most real to her," Fleda says in _The
Spoils of Poynton_, "was to be on one's knees before one's high
standard." Henry James himself had that kind of piety. Above all recent
men of letters, he was on his knees to his high standard.
People may wonder whether his standard was not, to an excessive degree,
a standard of subtlety rather than of creative imagination--at least, in
his later period. And undoubtedly his subtlety was to some extent a
matter of make-believe. He loved to take a simple conversation, and, by
introducing a few subtle changes, to convert it into a sort of
hieroglyphics that need an interpreter. He grew more and more to believe
that it was not possible to tell the simple truth except in an involved
way. He would define a gesture with as much labour as Shakespeare would
devote to the entire portrait of a woman. He was a realist of civilized
society in which both speech and action have to be sifted with
scientific care before they will yield their grain of motive. The
humorous patience with which Henry James seeks for that grain is one of
the distinctive features of his genius.
But, it may be asked, are his people real? They certainly are real in
the relationships in which he exhibits them, but they are real like
people to whom one has been introduced in a foreign city rather than
like people who are one's friends. One does not remember them like the
characters in Meredith or Mr. Hardy. Henry James, indeed, is himself the
outstanding character in his books. That fine and humorous collector of
European ladies and gentlemen, that savourer of the little lives of the
Old World and the little adventures of those who have escaped from the
New, that artist who brooded over his fellows in the spirit less of a
poet than a man of science, that sober and fastidious trifler--this is
the image which presides over his books, and which gives them their
special character, and will attract tiny but enthusiastic companies of
readers to them for many years to come.