A NOTE ON HENRY JAMES
I
In company with other distinguished men who have passed away during
the progress of the war, the loss of Henry James was passably
chronicled. News from the various battle-fields took precedence over
the death of a mere man of literary genius. This was to be expected.
Nor need the fact be disguised that his secession from American
citizenship may have increased the coolness which prevailed, still
prevails, when the name of Mr. James is mentioned in print. More
English than the English, he only practised what he preached, though
tardily in the matter of his British naturalisation. That he did not
find all the perfections in his native land is a personal matter;
but that he should be neglected in favour of mediocrity is simply
the penalty a great artist pays for his devotion to art. There is no
need of indignation in the matter. Time rights such critical wrongs.
Consider the case of Stendhal. The fiction of Henry James is for the
future.
James seceded years ago from the English traditions, from Fielding,
Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. The Wings of a Dove, The
Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl are fictions that will influence future
novelists. In our own days we see what a power James has been; a
subtle breath on the waters of creation; Paul Bourget, Edith
Wharton, even Joseph Conrad, and many minor English novelists. His
later work, say, beginning with The Tragic Muse, is the prose
equivalent of the seven arts in a revolutionary ferment. A marked
tendency in the new movements is to throw overboard superfluous
technical baggage. The James novel is one of grand simplifications.
As the symphony was modified by Liszt into the symphonic poem and
later emerged in the shape of the tone-poem by Richard Strauss, so
the novel of manners evolved from Flaubert's Sentimental Education,
which, despite its "heavenly length," contains in solution all that
the newer men have accomplished. Zola patterned after it in the
prodigious Rougon-Macquart series; Daudet found therein the
impressionism of his Sapho anticipated; Maupassant and Huysmans
delved patiently and practised characteristic variations. Flaubert
is the father of realism as he is part parent of symbolism. His
excessive preoccupation with style and his attaching esoteric
significance to words sound the note of symbolism. Now Henry James
disliked Sentimental Education--like other great critics he had his
blind side--yet he did not fail to benefit by the radical formal
changes introduced by Flaubert, changes as revolutionary as those of
Wagner in the music-drama. I call the later James novel a
simplification. All the conventional chapter endings are dispensed
with; many are suspended cadences. The accustomed and thrice-barren
modulations from event to event are swept away; unprepared
dissonances are of continual occurrence. There is no descriptive
padding--that bane of second-class writers; nor are we informed at
every speech of the name of a character. This elliptical method
James absorbed from Flaubert, while his sometime oblique psychology
is partly derived from Stendhal; indeed, without Stendhal both
Meredith and James would have been sadly shorn of their
psychological splendour. Nor is the shadow of Turgenev missing, not
to mention that of Jane Austen.
Possibly the famous "third manner" of James was the result of his
resorting to dictation; the pen inhibits where speech does not.
These things make difficult reading for a public accustomed to the
hypnotic passes of successful fiction-mongers. In James nothing is
forestalled, nothing is obvious, one is for ever turning the curve
of the unexpected. The actual story may be discouraging in its
bareness, yet the situations are seldom fantastic. (The Turn of the
Screw is an exception.) You rub your eyes as you finish; for with
all your credulity, painful in its intensity, you have assisted at a
pictorial evocation; both picture and evocation reveal magic in
their misty attenuations. And there is ever the triumph of poetic
feeling over banal sentiment. The portraiture in Milly Theale
and Maggie Verver is clairvoyant. Milly's life is a miracle, her
ending, art superlative. The Wings of a Dove is filled with the
faintly audible tread of destiny behind the arras of life. The
reverberations are almost microphonic with here and there a
crescendo or a climax. The spiritual string music of Henry James is
more thrilling to the educated ear than the sound of the big drum
and the blaring of trumpets. The implacable curiosity of the
novelist concerning causes that do not seem final has been amply
dealt with by Mr. Brownell. The question whether his story is worth
the telling is a critical impertinence too often uttered; what most
concerns us now in the James case is his manner, not his matter. All
the rest is life.
As far as his middle period his manner is limpidity itself; the
later style is a jungle of inversions, suspensions, elisions,
repetitions, echoes, transpositions, transformations, neologisms, in
which the heads of young adjectives despairingly gaze from afar at
the verbs which come thundering at the close of sentences leagues
long. It is bewildering, but more bewildering is this peculiarly
individual style when draughted into smooth journalistic prose.
Nothing remains. Henry James has not spoken. His dissonances cannot
be resolved except in the terms of his own matchless art. His
meanings evaporate when phrased in our vernacular. This may prove a
lot of negating things, or it may not. Why prose should lag behind
its sister arts I can't say; possibly because every pothouse
politician is supposed to speak it. For that matter any one who has
dipped into the well of English undefiled, seventeenth-century
literature, must realise that nowadays we write a parlous prose.
However, it is not a stately prose that James essayed. The son of a
metaphysician and moralist--the writings of Henry James, the elder,
are far from negligible--the brother of the greatest American
psychologist, the late William James of brilliant memory, it need
hardly be added that character problems are of more interest to this
novelist than the external qualities of rhetorical sonority, or the
fascination of glowing surfaces. You can no more read aloud a page
of James than you can read aloud De Goncourt. For Flaubert, who
modelled his magnificent prose harmonies on the Old Testament,
Shakespeare, Bossuet, and Chateaubriand, the final test of noble
prose is the audible reading thereof. Flaubert called it "spouting."
The James prose appeals rather to the inner ear. Nuance and
overtones not dazzling tropical hues or rhythmical variety. Henry
James is a law unto himself. His novels may be a precursor of the
books our grandchildren will enjoy when the hurly-burly of noisy
adventure, cheap historical vapidities, and still cheaper
drawing-room struttings shall have vanished. (But, like the poor,
the stupid reader we shall always have with us.) In the fiction of
the future a more complete synthesis will be attained. An
illuminating essay by Arthur Symons places George Meredith among the
decadents, the murderers of their mother tongue, the men who shatter
syntax to serve their artistic ends. Henry James belonged to this
group for a longer time than the majority of his critics suspected.
In his ruthless disregard of the niceties and conventionalities of
sentence-structure I see the outcome of his dictation. Yet no matter
how crabbed and involved is his page, a character always emerges
from the smoke of his muttered enchantments. The chief fault is not
his obscurity (his prose, like the prose in Browning's Sordello, is
packed with too many meanings), but that his character always speaks
in purest Jacobean. So do the people in Balzac's crowded, electric
world. So the men and women of Dickens and Meredith. It is the
fault--or virtue--of all subjective genius; however, not a fault or
virtue of Flaubert or Turgenev or Tolstoy. All in all, Henry James
is a distinctly American novelist, a psychologist of extraordinary
power and divination. He has pinned to paper the soul of the
cosmopolitan. The obsession of the moral problem that we feel in
Hawthorne is not missing. Be his manner never so cryptic, his
deep-veined humanity may be felt by those who read him aright. His
Americans abroad suffer a deep-sea change; a complete gamut of
achieved sensibility divides Daisy Miller from Maggie Verver. Henry
James is a faithful Secretary to Society--the phrase is Balzac's--to
the American afloat from his native mooring as well as at home. And
his exquisite notations are the glory of English fiction.
II
Before me lies an autograph letter from Henry James to his friend
Doctor Rice. It is dated December 26, 1904, and the address 21 East
Eleventh Street. It thus concludes: "I am not one of 'The
Bostonians,' but was born in this city April 15, 1843. Believe me,
truly yours, Henry James." Although he died a naturalised
Englishman, there seems to be some confusion as to his birthplace in
the minds of his English critics. In Ford Madox Hueffer's critical
study, Henry James, we read on page 95 that the life of James "began
in New England in 1843." He was born in America in 1843, then a land
where culture was rare! That delightful condescension in foreigners
is still extant. Now this isn't such a serious matter, for Henry
James was a citizen of the world; but the imputation of a New
England birthplace does matter, because it allows the English
critic--and how many others?--to perform variations on the theme of
Puritanism, the Puritanism of his art. James as a temperamental
Puritan--one is forced to capitalise the unhappy word! Apart from
the fact that there is less Puritanism in New England than in the
Middle West, James is not a Puritan. He does not possess the famous
New England conscience. He would have been the first to repudiate
the notion. For him the Puritan temperament has a "faintly acrid
perfume." To ascribe to Puritanism the seven deadly virtues and
refinement, sensibility, intellectuality, is a common enough
mistake. James never made that mistake. He knew that all the good
things of life are not in the exclusive possession of the Puritans.
He must not be identified with the case he studies. Strictly
speaking, while he was on the side of the angels, like all great
artists, he is not a moralist; indeed, he is our first great
"immoralist," a term that has supplanted the old-fashioned
amoralist. And he wrote the most unmoral short story in the English
language, one that also sets the spine trilling because of its
supernatural element as never did Poe, or De Maupassant.
Another venerable witticism, which has achieved the pathos of
distance, was made a quarter of a century ago by George Moore. Mr.
Moore said: "Henry James went to France and read Turgenev. W. D.
Howells stayed at home and read Henry James." To lend poignancy to
this mild epigram Mr. Hueffer misquotes it, substituting the name of
De Maupassant for Turgenev's. A rather uncanny combination--Henry
and Guy. A still more aged "wheeze" bobs up in the pages of Mr.
Hueffer. Need we say that it recites the ancient saw about William
James, the fictionist, and his brother Henry, the psychologist. None
of these things is in the least true. With the prudishness and
peanut piety of puritanism Henry James has nothing in common. He did
not alone read Turgenev, he met him and wrote of him with more
sympathy and understanding than he did of Flaubert or Baudelaire;
and Mr. Howells never wrote a page that resembled either the
Russian's or the American's fiction. Furthermore, James is a
masterly psychologist and a tale-teller. To the credit of his latest
English critics this is acknowledged, and generously.
Mr. Hueffer is an accomplished craftsman in many literary fields, he
writes with authority, though too often in a superlative key. But
how James would have winced when he read in Mr. Hueffer's book that
he is or was "the greatest of living men." This surely is a
planet-struck phrase. The Hueffer study is stuffed with startling
things. He bangs Balzac over the head. He tells the truth about
Flaubert, whose Sentimental Education is an entire Human Comedy. He
thinks ill of "big business," that "business and whatever takes
place 'down-town' or in the city is simply not worth the attention
of any intelligent being. It is a manner of dirty little affairs
incompetently handled by men of the lowest class of intelligence."
But all this in a volume about the most serene and luminous
intelligence of our times. Mr. Hueffer also "goes for" James as
critic. He once dared to couple the name of the "odious" George
Eliot with Flaubert's. It does rather take the breath away, but,
after all, didn't the tolerant and catholic critic who was Henry
James say that no one is constrained to like any particular kind of
writing? As to the "cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats--all human
life is there," of The Madonna of the Future, we need not take the
words as a final message; nor are the other phrases quoted: "The
soul is immortal certainly--if you've got one, but most people
haven't! Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure right through,
but it never is." Mr. Hueffer says that James "found English people
who were just people singularly nasty," and who can say him nay
after reading The Sacred Fount? But he ends on the right note: "And
for a man to have attained to international rank with phrases
intimately national is the supreme achievement of writers--a glory
that is reserved only for the Dantes, the Goethes, and the
Shakespeares, who none the less remain supremely national." Neither
Mr. Hueffer nor Miss West is in doubt as to the essential
Americanism of Henry James. He is almost as American as Howells, who
is our Anthony Trollope, plus style and vision. And Trollope, by the
way, will loom larger in the future despite his impersonality and
microscopic manner.
The James art is Cerebral Comedy, par excellence. To alter his own
words, he plays his intellectual instrument to perfection. He is a
portraitist doubled by a psychologist. His soul is not a solitary
pool in a midnight forest, but an unruffled lake, sun-smitten or
cloud-shadowed; yet in whose depths there is a moving mass of
exquisite living things. His pages reverberate with the under hum of
humanity. We may not exactly say of him as Hazlitt said of Walter
Scott: "His works, taken altogether, are almost like a new edition
of human nature." But we can follow with the coda of that same
dictum: "This is indeed to be an author." Many more than the dozen
superior persons mentioned by Huysmans enjoy the James novels. His
swans are not always immaculate, but they are not "swans of the
cesspool," to quote Landor. There is never an odour of leaking gas
in his premises, as he once remarked of the D'Annunzio fiction. He
has the cosmopolitan soul. There is no slouch in his spiritual gait.
Like Renan, he abhorred the "horrible mania of certitude" to be
found in the writing of his realistic contemporaries. He does not
always dot the "i's" of his irony, a subrisive irony. But the
spiritual antennae which he puts forth so tentatively always touch
real things, not conjectural. And what tactile sense he boasts. He
peeps into the glowing core of emotion, but seldom describes it.
His ears are for overtones, not the brassy harmonies of the obvious,
of truths, flat and flexible. Yet what novelist has kept his ear so
close to quotidian happenings, and with what dignity and charm in
his crumbling cadences? Not even that virtuoso of the ugly,
Huysmans, than whom no writer of the past century ever "rendered"
surfaces into such impeccable truth, with such implacable ferocity,
is as clairvoyant as James.
Fustian and thunder form no part of the James stories, which are
like a vast whispering gallery, the dim reverberations of which fill
the listening ear. He is an "auditive" as well as a "visualist," to
employ the precious classification of the psychiatrists. His astute
senses tell him of a world which we are only beginning to
comprehend. He is never obscure, never recondite; but, like
Browning, he sends a veritable multiplex of ideas along a single
wire. Mr. Howells has rightly said of him that it is not well to
pursue the meanings of an author to the very heart of darkness.
However, readers as a rule like their fiction served on a shiny
plate; above all, they don't like a story to begin in one key and
end in another. If it's to be pork and molasses or "hog and hominy"
(George Meredith's words), then let it be these delectable dishes
through every course. But James is ever in modulation. He tosses his
theme ballwise in the air, and while its spirals spin and bathe in
the blue he weaves a web of gold and lace, and it is marvellously
spun. He is more atmospheric than linear. His theme is shown from a
variety of angles, but the result is synthetic. Elizabeth Luther
Cary has pointed out that he is not a remorseless analyst. He does
not take the mechanism of his marionette apart, but lets us examine
it in completeness. As a psychologist he stands midway between
Stendhal and Turgenev. He interprets feeling, rather than fact.
Like our sister planet, the moon, he has his rhythmic moments of
libration; he then reveals his other side, a profoundly human,
emotional one. He is not all frosty intellect. But he holds in
horror the facile expression of the sentiments. It's only too easy
to write for those avid of sentimentalism, or to express what Thomas
Huxley calls "sensualistic caterwauling." In the large, generous
curve of his temperament there is room for all life, but not for a
lean or lush statement of life. You may read him in a state of
mellow exasperation, but you cannot deny his ultimate sincerity.
There is no lack of substance in his densely woven patterns, for
patterns there are, though the figure be difficult to piece out. His
route of emerald is elliptical; follow him who dare! A "wingy
mystery." He is all vision. He does not always avoid naked issues.
His thousand and one characters are significantly vital. His is not
"the shadow land of American fiction"; simply his supreme tact of
omission has dispensed with the entire banal apparatus of fiction
as commonly practised. To use a musical example: his prose is like
the complicated score of some latter-day composer, and his art, like
music, is a solvent. He discards lumbering descriptions, antique
melodramatics, set developments and denouements, mastodonic
structures. The sharp savour of character is omnipresent. His very
pauses are eloquent. He evokes. His harmonic tissue melts into
remoter harmonic perspectives. He composes in every tonality.
Continuity of impression is unfailing. When reading him
sympathetically one recalls the saying of Maurice Barres: "For an
accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue, that between our two
egos--the momentary ego that we are and the ideal one toward which
we strive." For Jacobeans this interior dialogue, with its
"secondary intention" marches like muted music through the pages of
the latter period. Henry James will always be a touchstone for the
tasteless.