the tenuity of Mr James' later novels on the international situation;
but there is also another element that irritates present-day readers and
makes the texture of the life represented seem poor. That element, which
is not peculiar to Mr James, but is a part of the social atmosphere of
his time, is the persistent presentation of woman not as a human, but as
a sexual being. One can learn nothing of the heroine's beliefs and
character for the hullabaloo that has been set up because she has come
in too late or gone out too early or omitted to provide herself with
that figure of questionable use--for the dove-like manners of the young
men forbid the thought that she was there to protect the girl from
assault, and the mild tongues of the young ladies make it unlikely that
the duel of the sexes was then so bitter that they required an
umpire--the chaperon. It appears that the young woman of that period
could get through the world only by perpetually jumping through hoops
held up to her by society, a method of progression which was more suited
to circus girls than to persons of dignity, and which sometimes caused
nasty falls. There is nothing more humiliating to women in all fiction
than the end of _A London Life_, where the heroine, appalled at having
been left in an opera box alone with a young man, turns to him and begs
him, although she knows well that he does not love her, to marry her and
save her good name. Purity and innocence are excellent things, but a
world in which they have to be guarded by such cramping contrivances of
conduct is as ridiculous as a heaven where the saints all go about with
their haloes protected by mackintosh covers.
III
TRANSITION
_Washington Square_ (1881), Mr James' first important work that does not
deal with the international situation, is a work of great genius. Into
the small mould of the story of how a plain and stupid girl was jilted
by a fortune-hunter when he discovered that she would be disinherited by
her contemptuous father on her marriage, Mr James concentrated all the
sense which he had absorbed throughout his childhood of the simple,
provincial life which went on behind the brown stone of old New York. It
has in it a wealth of feeling that does not seem to have originated with
Mr James, just as an old wives' tale told over and over again by the
fireside becomes charged with a synthetic emotion derived from the
comments and expressions of innumerable auditors; and one may surmise
that Catherine's tragedy was first presented to him as an item of local
gossip, sympathetically discussed by his charming New York cousins and
friends. Certainly the tale of this dull girl, who was "twenty years old
before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown
trimmed with gold fringe," and progressed by such clumsinesses through a
career of which the only remarkable facts were that "Morris Townsend had
trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring,"
is consecrated by an element of pity which was afterwards signally to
disappear from Mr James' work.
The book so beautifully expresses the woe of all those people to whom
nothing ever happens, who are aware of the gay challenge of life but are
prevented by something leaden in their substance from responding, that
one is not surprised to find that like most good stories about
inarticulate people--like _Une Vie_ and _Un Coeur Simple_--it is
written with the most deliberate cunning. The story is evoked according
to Turgeniev's method of calling his novels out of the inchoate real
world; and what that is had better, since Mr James had been using it
with increasing power since _Roderick Hudson_, be stated in his own
words.
"I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years
ago from the lips of Ivan Turgeniev in regard to his own experience
of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost
always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered
before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure,
interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what
they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as _disponibles_, 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. I seem to myself to have as
much as I need--to show my people, to exhibit their relations with
each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough
I see them come together, I see them _placed_, I see them engaged
in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look
and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found
for them, is my account of them--of which I dare say, alas, _que
cela manque souvent d'architecture_....'"
And as regards the statement in prose of the conception thus formed it
is plain that, although Mr James had formed his irrational dislike of
Flaubert many years before, it was that great master who had taught him
his art of rubbing down the too brilliant phrase to tone with the quiet
harmony of the whole, of obliterating the exotic effect that would
compromise the lorn simplicity of the subject. This masterly use of
technical resource to unfold an idea whose beauty would to a lesser
artist have seemed hopelessly sheathed in obscurity, makes _Washington
Square_ the perfect termination to Mr James' first period of genius.
It was unfortunately quite definitely a termination; for until ten years
had passed Mr James was doomed to produce no work which was not to have
the solidity of its characters and the beauty of its prose rendered
slightly ridiculous by its lack of purpose and unity. In those days,
when the international theme was slipping from Mr James' grasp and he
was looking round for another, one could no more expect him to produce
work completely and serenely formed by the imagination than one could
ask an author to continue his industry on a journey from Paris to
Madrid, with the jolting of the train destroying his physical calm and
the new land crying for his attention at the carriage window. For Mr
James was literally travelling all through the eighties; he was touring
either the countries of Europe with his body or the art of Europe with
his mind. It was his intention to find that intellectual basis without
which, his blood and upbringing assured him, he would be unable to use
his genius with noble or permanent results.
How difficult this search was to be, and yet how ultimately fruitful,
can be judged from _A Little Tour in France_ (1884). That is one of the
happiest and sunniest travel books in all literature. _Coelum non
animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_; but Mr James did, and it is as
pleasant to see his intelligence sunning itself on the hot Latin soil,
fresh and cool as though he had not years of the creative struggle
behind him and years more to come, as it is to see a lizard crawl from
the crevice of a Provencal rock and play among the tufts of rosemary.
Yet whenever Mr James has to note some detail in his description of
French towns which refers to the life which has formed them, the
reader's fury mounts. It is horrible that his references to the
Franco-Prussian War should be faintly jocular, and one burns with shame
for them until one comes to an amazing sentence about the French
Revolution, in which it is plainly implied that the rightness and
necessity of that declaration of the principle of freedom are still
debatable questions. One perceives with relief that he said these things
because, as one guessed in _The Passionate Pilgrim_, his strong sight of
the thing that is was accompanied by blindness to the thing that has
been. He did not know whether the Franco-Prussian War was horrible or
not, because he had been out of Europe when it raged; and because he had
not been born at the time he could no more speak well of the French
Revolution than he could propose for his club a person whom he had never
met. And for the same reason he failed to envisage the Roman Empire save
as a source of agreeable ruins which, since he did not understand the
spirit that built them, he imagined might have been made still more
agreeable. Their vastness did not impress him as the merging-point of
the geological record and history, but stirred in him that benevolence
which is often aroused by clumsy largeness. He patted the Roman Theatre
at Arles as though it were Jumbo at the Zoo, and remarked, quite in the
manner of Horace Walpole, that the pavement of coloured marble "gives an
idea of the _elegance_ of the interior"; but the arena at Nimes and that
vast, high, yellow aqueduct, whose three tiers appal the valley of the
Gardon, were too much for him, and he pronounced them "not at all
_exquisite_." The man who could write those phrases was incapable of
forming a philosophy, for no man can fully understand his kind unless he
have a revelation of old Rome and perceive in its works a record of the
pride men felt in serviceable labour for the State. And yet what, in
this particular case, did all that matter? What need was there for Mr
James to know anything but that ink makes black, expressive marks on
paper, when he could tell so exquisitely how the Chateau de Chenonceaux
sends out its white galleries across the clear water of the Cher, how
the crenellated ramparts of the Chateau d'Amboise look down over hanging
gardens to the far-shining Loire, and with what peculiar wonder
Carcassonne, Aigues-Mortes and all the other towns with lovely names,
glow in the clear bright light of France? It was enough that there was
no beauty on earth that could daunt his power of description.
The record of his mental wanderings is not quite so happy. Mr James has
an immense prestige as critic, but a certain sentence that occurred more
than once in his obituary notices made it doubtful whether this does not
merely mean that people have run their eyes over the titles of Mr James'
essays and have accepted the fact that he dealt with authors rarely read
by the British as a guarantee of their rareness of merit. That it should
be reverently remarked on that most solemn occasion that Flaubert was Mr
James' adored master, when he had written more than one exquisitely
feline essay to delicately convey what a fluke it was that this fellow
who panted under his phrase like a bricklayer under his hod should have
produced _Madame Bovary_, is just such an ironic happening as he would
have liked to be introduced into one of his humorous studies of the
literary life. Such intimations make one guess that the homage which
England loves to pay to the unread is responsible for half Mr James'
reputation as a critic; and probably he owed the other half to the
gratitude of his readers for a pleasure which is undoubtedly given by
his critical writings, but which nevertheless does not prove them great
criticism. It is true that _French Poets and Novelists_ are the best
reviews ever written, and that it is good to listen to the old author
gossiping in _Notes on Novelists_ (1914) about the authors he had known
long ago and to watch him tracing, with all his supreme genius for
detecting personality, the imprint of dead masters on the fading surface
of old work. But he is always entirely lacking in that necessary element
of great criticism, the capacity for universal reference. The eye that
judges a work of art should have surveyed the whole human field, so that
it can tell from what clay this precious thing was made, in what
craftsman's cot that trick of fashioning was learned, what natural
beauty suggested to the creative impulse this appropriate form, what
human institution helped or hindered its making. Of that general culture
Mr James was so deficient that he was capable of inserting in quite an
intelligent essay on Theophile Gautier this amazing sentence: "Even his
aesthetic principles are held with a good-humoured laxity that allows
him, for instance, to say in a hundred places the most delightfully
sympathetic and pictorial things about the romantic or Shakespearean
drama, and yet to describe a pedantically classical revival of the
_Antigone_ at Munich with the most ungrudging relish." And while this
ignorance was perpetually blinding him to the purpose of many fair
artistic structures his literary power was perpetually betraying him
into the graceful and forceful publication of his blindness. Long after
one has forgotten all the deliverances of critics with greater wisdom
but less craft of phrase, one remembers his extraordinary opinion that
Flaubert's _La Tentation de Saint Antoine_, that book which will appeal
in every generation to those who have been visited by the angel of
speculative thought, which is not only itself a beautiful growth but has
borne beautiful fruit in _Thais_, is merely "strange" and has no more
reference to life than the gimcrack Eastern Pavilion at an Exposition.
And he lacked, moreover, that necessary attribute of the good critic,
the power to bid bad authors to go to the devil. There are certain
Victorian works of art which, however much esteemed by the many, are no
more matter for criticism than a pair of elastic-sided boots; yet there
is a paper in _Essays in London_ (1893) in which Mr James talks of "the
numbers of sorts of distinction, the educated insight, the comprehensive
ardour of Mrs Humphry Ward...." It recalls that the art which he
privately cultivated was courtesy, but it suggests that his criticism
was bound to consist for the most part of just such pleasant footnotes
to the obvious as _Partial Portraits_ (1888) which, with the exception
of some interesting personal recollections of Turgeniev, tell us
nothing more startling than that de Maupassant wrote a hard prose and
that Daudet was a Provencal.
How greatly he needed the intellectual basis which he found in none of
these researches becomes increasingly plain in each novel that he
published during this period. _The Portrait of a Lady_ (1881) is given a
superficial unity by the beauty of its heroine; on the first reading one
cannot take one's eyes off the clear gaze that Isabel Archer levels at
life. As she moves forward to meet the world, holding her fortune in
hand without avarice yet very carefully, lest she should buy anything
gross with it, one thinks that there never was a heroine who deserved
better of life. "She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, and
bravery, and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the
world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible
action; she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She
had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong." One is
glad to see that the girl has the most wonderful friend, a woman who is
at once the most flexible _femme du monde_ and the freshest and most
candid soul; and among the kindnesses this friend does her is her
introduction to a certain Tuscan villa that looks down on the valley of
the Arno, where on a mossy stone bench tangled with wild roses there
sits Gilbert Osmond, a gentleman of great dignity who has been too fine
to partake in the common struggle and so lives in honest poverty, with
his daughter Pansy, a little girl from whose character conventual
training has removed every attribute save whiteness and sweetness, so
that she lies under life like a fine cloth on a sunny bleaching-green.
Here, of all places in the world, she is least likely to meet the
jealousy and falseness and cruelty which were the only things she
feared, and so she marries Osmond in the happy faith that henceforth
nothing will be admitted to her life save nobility. But all her marriage
brings the girl is evidence of increasing painfulness that her friend
is a squalid adventuress who has preserved her appearance of freshness
as carefully as a strolling musician his fiddle, in order that she might
charm such honest fools as Isabel; that Osmond has withdrawn from the
world, not because he is too fine for it, but because he is a hating
creature, and hates the world as he now hates his wife; that Pansy is
the illegitimate child of these two, and her need of a dowry the chief
reason why Osmond has married Isabel. It is a tale which would draw
tears from a reviewer, and yet the conduct invented for Isabel is so
inconsistent and so suggestive of the nincompoop, and so clearly
proceeding from a brain whose ethical world was but a chaos, that it is
a mistake to subject the book to the white light of a second reading.
When we are told that Isabel married Osmond because "there had been
nothing very delicate in inheriting seventy thousand pounds, and she
hoped he might use her fortune in a way that might make her think better
of it and would rub off a certain grossness attaching to the good luck
of an unexpected inheritance," we feel that this is mere simpering; for
there could be nothing less delicate than to marry a person for any
reason but the consciousness of passion. And the grand climax of her
conduct, her return to Osmond after the full revelation of his guilt has
come to augment her anguish at his unkindness, proves her not the very
paragon of ladies but merely very ladylike. If their marriage was to be
a reality it was to be a degradation of the will whose integrity the
whole book is an invitation to admire; if it was to be a sham it was
still a larger concession to society than should have been made by an
honest woman. Yet for all the poor quality of the motives which furnish
Isabel's moral stuffing, _The Portrait of a Lady_ is entirely n
successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too
radiantly good for this world.
While that novel reminds one, in the way it "comes off," of a sum in
which the right answer is got by wrong working, _The Bostonians_ (1886)
reminds one of a foolish song set to a good tune in the way it fails to
"come off." The beauty of the writing is so great that there are
descriptions of the shabby petticoats of a pioneer, or the vestibule in
a mean block of flats, that one would like to learn by heart, so that
one might turn the phrases over in the mind when one wants to hear the
clinking of pure gold. And the theme, the aptness of young persons
possessed of that capacity for contagious enthusiasm which makes the
good propagandist to be exploited by the mercenary and to deteriorate
under the strain of public life, is specially interesting to our
generation. Few of us there are who have not seen with our own eyes
elderly egoists building up profitable autocracies out of the ardour of
young girls, or fierce advocates of the brotherhood of man mellowing
into contemplative emptiers of pint-pots. But, just as the most
intellectual conversation may be broken up by the continued squeal of a
loose chimney-cowl, so this musical disclosure of fine material is
interrupted past any reader's patience by a nagging hostility to
political effort. This is not so disgraceful to Mr James as it might
seem, for it is simply the survival of an affectation which was forced
upon the cultured American of his youth. The pioneers who wanted to
raise the small silvery song of art had to tempt their audiences somehow
from the big brass band of America's political movements; and so
straining was this task that even Emerson, who vibrated to the chord of
reform as to no other, was sometimes vexed into such foolish inquiries
as "Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day in his own
garden than he who goes to the abolition meetings and makes a speech?"
It was just one of the results of Mr James' condition at this period
that he presented to the world so deliberately and so vividly, and with
such an air of feeling, what was no more than the misty reflection of
some dead men's transitory irritations.
Politics play a very great part, and in the same sense, in _The
Princess Casamassima_ (1886), but it is the peculiar magic of that
strange book which is at once able and distraught, wild and meticulous,
that in it all perversities are somehow transmuted into loveliness. It
is one of the big jokes in literature that it was the writer who among
all his contemporaries held the most sophisticated view of his art, who
prided himself that on him there gleamed no drop of the dew of naivete,
that brought back to fiction the last delicious breath of the time when
even the best books ran on like this: "It happened that one dark and
stormy night in March I, Sebastian Melmoth, was traversing the plain of
La Mancha.... 'Have at you!' cried the guard.... 'Seat yourself,' said
the stranger, signing to his Hindu attendant that the bodies should be
removed, and commencing to cleanse the blood from his sword with a
richly embroidered handkerchief, 'and I will tell you the story of my
life.'" There is always something doing in _The Princess Casamassima_,
and it is usually something great, and as a rule it is doing it quite
on its own. As a portal to the disordered tale there stands one of the
finest short stories in the world; how Miss Pynsent, the shabby little
dressmaker who has brought up Hyacinth, the bastard child of a French
work-girl now in Millbank for the murder of the peer who betrayed her,
is suddenly bidden to bring the boy to his mother's prison deathbed, and
how the poor woman drags him up to the brown, windowless walls, the vast
blank gate, the looming corridors infused with sallow light, is such a
study of the way the institutions devised by man in the interests of
justice and order make a child's soul scream, that the reader will for
ever after think a great deal less of Pip's adventures on the marshes in
_Great Expectations_. Dickens could never have suffused his story with
so exquisite and so relevant an emotional effect as the aching of poor
Miss Pynsent's heart over this rough introduction of her cherished lamb
to the horrible; nor could he have invented that wonderful moment when
the child turns from the ravenous embrace of the wasted and disfigured
stranger with, "I won't kiss her; Pinnie says she stole a watch!" at
which the murderess screams, "_Ah! quelle infamie!_ I never stole
anything!" and the wardress says with dignity: "I'm sure you needn't put
more on her than she has by rights," to which the poor virgin, quite
unable to understand the peculiar cachet attaching to a _crime
passionel_, cries contritely, "Mercy, more! I thought it so much less!"
And from this portal the book goes on to incidents and persons not less
exquisite but still disconcertingly mere portals. It is as though in a
mad dream one found oneself passing through the arch in the mellow
redness of Hampton Court and straightway emerged on the colonnade of St
Paul's, through whose little swing-doors one surprisingly stepped to the
prim front of Kensington Palace. There is M. Poupin, the exiled
Communist who cannot communicate with the world, or the moustached
female companion with whom he dwells in a scrupulously unmarried state,
save by platitudes concerning the social organisation: "I'm suffering
extremely, but we must all suffer so long as the social question is so
abominably, so iniquitously neglected," is his way of intimating a sore
throat. There is poor Lady Aurora Langrish, the aristocratic precursor
of the sad Miss Huxtables in _The Madras House_: "My father isn't rich,
and there's only one of us, Eva, married, and we're not at all
handsome.... They go into the country all the autumn, all the winter,
when there's no one here (except three or four millions) and the rain
drips, drips, drips from the trees in the big dull park where my people
live, and nothing to do but to go out with three or four others in
mackintoshes...." There is dry old Mr Vetch who plays the fiddle in the
orchestra at night and fills all the rest of the empty day with love for
Hyacinth; and there is Captain Sholto, the Piccadilly swell; and Miss
Hennings, the sales-lady, and half-a-dozen admirable others casually
affixed by the stretched string of circumstance or the glue of
coincidence. And quite the preciousest "piece" in the collection is the
account of how the Princess Casamassima, who is Christina Light of
_Roderick Hudson_, grown to perilous maturity of beauty and perversity,
calls young Hyacinth to her country house, and there in the beechy park
and flowery lanes makes him talk of the plots against the rich which
later are to cause his death, and brings him nearer to it by lifting a
face wonderfully pale and pure with enthusiasm. It is so like that
Titian in the Prado which shows, against a window looking on a park
where lovers walk in golden air under silver poplars, Venus lying on a
satin couch while a young man makes music for her at an organ; her eyes
are softly intent, and the youth thinks she is suspended over the world
in his music, but really she is brooding on the whiteness of his skin
beneath his black beard. That likeness suggests that _The Princess
Casamassima_ should be taken, not as a novel, but as the small, fine
picture gallery that Mr James thought fit to add to his mental palace,
already so rich in mere sane living rooms.