Henry James's amanuensis, Miss Theodora Bosanquet, wrote an article a
year or two ago in the _Fortnightly Review_, describing how the great
man wrote his novels. Since 1895 or 1896 he dictated them, and they were
taken down, not in shorthand, but directly on the typewriter. He was
particular even about the sort of typewriter. It must be a Remington.
"Other kinds sounded different notes, and it was almost impossibly
disconcerting for him to dictate to something that made no responsive
sound at all." He did not, however, pour himself out to his amanuensis
without having made a preliminary survey of the ground. "He liked to
'break ground' by talking to himself day by day about the characters and
the construction until the whole thing was clearly before his mind's
eye. This preliminary talking out the scheme was, of course, duly
recorded by the typewriter. "It is not that he made rough drafts of his
novels-sketches to be afterwards amplified. "His method might better be
compared with Zola's habit of writing long letters to himself about
characters in his next book until they became alive enough for him to
begin a novel about them." Henry James has himself, as Miss Bosanquet
points out, described his method of work in _The Death of a Lion_, in
which it is attributed to his hero, Neil Paraday. "Loose, liberal,
confident," he declares of Faraday's "scenario," as one might call it,
"it might be passed for a great, gossiping, eloquent letter--the
overflow into talk of an artist's amorous plan."
Almost the chief interest of Henry James's two posthumous novels is the
fact that we are given not only the novels themselves--or, rather, the
fragments of them that the author had written--but the "great,
gossiping, eloquent letters" in which he soliloquized about them. As a
rule, these preliminary soliloquies ran to about thirty thousand words,
and were destroyed as soon as the novel in hand was finished. So
delightful are they--such thrilling revelations of the workings of an
artist's mind--that one does not quite know whether or not to
congratulate oneself on the fact that the last books have been left mere
torsos. Which would one rather have--a complete novel or the torso of a
novel with the artist's dream of how to make it perfect? It is not easy
to decide. What makes it all the more difficult to decide in the present
instance is one's feeling that _The Sense of the Past_, had it been
completed, would have been very nearly a masterpiece. In it Henry James
hoped to get what he called a "kind of quasi-turn-of-screw effect."
Here, as in _The Turn of the Screw_, he was dealing with a sort of
ghosts--whether subjective or objective in their reality does not
matter. His hero is a young American who had never been to Europe till
he was about thirty, and yet was possessed by that almost sensual sense
of the past which made Henry James, as a small boy, put his nose into
English books and try to sniff in and smell from their pages the older
world from which they came. The inheritance of an old house in a London
square--a house in which the clocks had stopped, as it were, in
1820--brings the young man over to England, though the lady with whom he
is in love seeks to keep him in America and watch him developing as a
new species--a rich, sensitive, and civilized American, untouched and
unsubdued by Europe. This young man's emotions in London, amid old
things in an atmosphere that also somehow seemed mellow and old, may, I
fancy, be taken as a record of the author's own spiritual experiences as
he drew in long breaths of appreciation during his almost lifelong
wanderings in this hemisphere. For it is important to remember that
Henry James never ceased to be a foreigner. He was enchanted by England
as by a strange land. He saw it always, like the hero of _The Sense of
the Past_, under the charm ... of the queer, incomparable London
light--unless one frankly loved it rather as London shade--which he had
repeatedly noted as so strange as to be at its finest sinister."
However else this air might have been described it was signally not
the light of freshness, and suggested as little as possible the
element in which the first children of nature might have begun to
take notice. Ages, generations, inventions, corruptions, had
produced it, and it seemed, wherever it rested, to be filtered
through the bed of history. It made the objects about show for the
time as in something "turned on"--something highly successful that
he might have seen at the theatre.
Henry James saw old-world objects in exactly that sort of light. He knew
in his own nerves how Ralph Pendrel felt on going over his London house.
"There wasn't," he says, "... an old hinge or an old brass lock that he
couldn't work with love of the act." He could observe the inanimate
things of the Old World almost as if they were living things. No
naturalist spying for patient hours upon birds in the hope of
discovering their secrets could have had a more curious, more hopeful,
and more loitering eye. He found even fairly common things in Europe, as
Pendrel found the things in the house he inherited, "all smoothed with
service and charged with accumulated messages."
He was like the worshipper in a Spanish church, who watches for the
tear on the cheek or the blood-drop from the wound of some
wonder-working effigy of Mother and Son.
In _The Sense of the Past_, Henry James conceived a fantastic romance,
in which his hero steps not only into the inheritance of an old house,
but into 1820, exchanging personalities with a young man in one of the
family portraits, and even wooing the young man's betrothed. It is a
story of "queer" happenings, like the story of a dream or a delusion in
which the ruling passion has reached the point of mania. It is the kind
of story that has often been written in a gross, mechanical way. Here it
is all delicate--a study of nuances and subtle relationships. For Ralph,
though perfect in the 1820 manner, has something of the changeling
about him--something that gradually makes people think him "queer," and
in the end arouses in him the dim beginnings of nostalgia for his own
time. It is a fascinating theme as Henry James works it out--doubly
fascinating as he talks about it to himself in the "scenario" that is
published along with the story. In the latter we see the author groping
for his story, almost like a medium in a trance. Like a medium, he one
moment hesitates and is vague, and the next, as he himself would say,
fairly pounces on a certainty. No artist ever cried with louder joy at
the sight of things coming absolutely right under his hand. Thus, at one
moment, the author announces:--
The more I get into my drama the more magnificent upon my word I
seem to see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of
possibilities in it that I positively quake in dread of the
muchness with which they threaten me.