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<h2>CHAPTER V</h2> <h2>A NOTE ON HENRY JAMES</h2> <h3>I</h3> 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, [Pg 54] 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 [Pg 55] 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 [Pg 56] 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 [Pg 57] 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 Châteaubriand, 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, [Pg 58] 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 [Pg 59] 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. <h3>II</h3> 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 [Pg 60] 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 [Pg 61] 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 [Pg 62] 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 [Pg 63] 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 antennæ 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 [Pg 64] 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 [Pg 65] 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 [Pg 66] 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 dénouements, 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 <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Maurice Barres" id="tnote4">Maurice Barrès</ins>: "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. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 67] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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