Part 19 (1/2)

We may leave Hardy writing Sagas. We may admit that there is a greater _robustezza_ in Balzac's messiness, simply because he is perpetually concerned, inaccurately, with the factor of money, of earning one's exiguous living.

We may admit the shadowy nature of some of James's writing, and agree whimsically with R.H.C. (in the _New Age_) that James will be quite comfortable after death, as he had been dealing with ghosts all his life.

James's third donation is perhaps a less sweeping affair and of more concern to his compatriots than to any one who might conceivably translate him into an alien tongue, or even to those who publish his writings in England.

He has written history of a personal sort, social history well doc.u.mented and incomplete, and he has put America on the map both in memoir and fiction, giving to her a reality such as is attained only by scenes recorded in the arts and in the writing of masters. Mr. Eliot has written, and I daresay most other American admirers have written or will write, that, whatever any one else thinks of Henry James, no one but an American can ever know, really know, how good he is at the bottom, how good his ”America” is.

No Englishman can, and in less degree can any continental, or in fact any one whose family was not living on, say, West 23rd Street in the old set-back, two-story-porched red brick vine-covered houses, etc., when Henry James was being a small boy on East 23rd Street; no one whose ancestors had not been presidents or professors or founders of Ha'avwd College or something of that sort, or had not heard of a time when people lived on 14th Street, or had known of some one living in Lexington or Newton ”Old Place” or somewhere of that sort in New England, or had heard of the New York that produced ”f.a.n.n.y,” New York the jocular and uncritical, or of people who danced with General Grant or something of that sort, would quite know _Was.h.i.+ngton Square_ or _The Europeans_ to be so autochthonous, so authentic to the conditions. They might believe the things to be ”real,” but they would not know how closely they corresponded to an external reality.

Perhaps only an exile from these things will get the range of the other half of James's presentations! Europe to the Transpontine, New York of brown stone that he detested, the old and the new New York in _c.r.a.pey Cornelia_ and in _The American Scene_, which more than any other volumes give us our peculiar heritage, an America with an interest, with a tone of time not overstrained, not jejunely over-sentimentalized, which is not a redoing of school histories or the laying out of a fabulous period; and which is in relief, if you like, from d.i.c.kens or from Mark Twain's _Mississippi._ He was not without sympathy for his compatriots as is amply attested by Mr. and Mrs. B.D. Hayes of New York (vide _The Birthplace_) with whom he succeeds, I think, rather better than with most of his princely continentals. They are, at any rate, his bow to the Happy Genius of his country--as distinct from the gentleman who displayed the ”back of a banker and a patriot,” or the person whose aggregate features could be designated only as a ”mug.”

In his presentation of America he is greatly attentive, and, save for the people in _Cur Simple_, I doubt if any writer has done more of ”this sort of thing” for his country, this portrayal of the typical thing in timbre and quality--balanced, of course, by the array of spittoons in the Capitol (”The Point of View”).

Still if one is seeking a Spiritual Fatherland, if one feels the exposure of what he would not have scrupled to call, two clauses later, such a wind-s.h.i.+eld, ”The American Scene” greatly provides it. It has a mermaid note, almost to outvie the warning, the sort of nickelplate warning which is hurled at one in the saloon of any great transatlantic boat; the awfulness that engulfs one when one comes, for the first time unexpectedly on a pile of all the _Murkhn_ Magazines laid, s.h.i.+ngle-wise on a bra.s.s-studded, screwed-into-place, baize-covered steamer table. The first glitter of the national weapons for driving off quiet and all closer signs of intelligence.[3]

Attempting to view the jungle of the work as a whole, one notes that, despite whatever cosmopolitan upbringing Henry James may have had, as witness ”A Small Boy's Memoirs” and ”Notes of Son and Brother,” he nevertheless began in ”French Poets and Novelists” with a provincial att.i.tude that it took him a long time to work free of. Secondly we see various phases of the ”style” of his presentation or circ.u.mambiance.

There is a small amount of prentice work. Let us say ”Roderick Hudson,”

”Casama.s.sima.” There are lucky first steps in ”The American” and ”Europeans,” a precocity of result, for certainly some of his early work is as permanent as some of the ripest, and more so than a deal of the intervening. We find (for in the case before us criticism must be in large part a weeding-out) that his first subject matter provides him with a number of good books and stories: ”The American,” ”The Europeans,” ”Eugene Pickering,” ”Daisy Miller,” ”The Pupil,”

”Brooksmith,” ”A Bundle of Letters,” ”Was.h.i.+ngton Square,” ”The Portrait of a Lady,” before 1880, and rather later, ”Pandora,” ”The Four Meetings,” perhaps ”Louisa Pallant.” He ran out of his first material.

We next note a contact with the ”Yellow Book,” a dip into ”cleverness,”

into the epigrammatic genre, the bare epigrammatic style. It was no better than other writers, not so successful as Wilde. We observe him to be not so hard and fine a satirist as is George S. Street.

We come then to the period of allegories (”The Real Thing,” ”Dominick Ferrand,” ”The Liar”). There ensues a growing discontent with the short sentence, epigram, etc., in which he does not at this time attain distinction; the clarity is not satisfactory, was not satisfactory to the author, his _donne_ being radically different from that of his contemporaries. The ”story” not being really what he is after, he starts to build up his medium; a thickening, a chiaroscuro is needed, the long sentence; he wanders, seeks to add a needed opacity, he overdoes it, produces the cobwebby novel, emerges or justifies himself in ”Maisie”

and manages his long-sought form in ”The Awkward Age.” He comes out the triumphant stylist in the ”American Scene” and in all the items of ”The Finer Grain” collection and in the posthumous ”Middle Years.”

This is not to d.a.m.n incontinent all that intervenes, but I think the chief question addressed to me by people of good-will who do not, but are yet ready and willing to, read James, is: Where the deuce shall I begin? One cannot take even the twenty-four volumes, more or less selected volumes of the Macmillan edition all at once, and it is, alas, but too easy to get so started and entoiled as never to finish this author or even come to the best of him.

The laziness of an uncritical period can be nowhere more blatant than in the inherited habit of talking about authors as a whole. It is perhaps the sediment from an age daft over great figures or a way of displaying social gush, the desire for a celebrity at all costs, rather than a care of letters.

To talk in any other way demands an acquaintance with the work of an author, a price few conversationalists care to pay, _ma che_! It is the man with inherited opinions who talks about ”Sh.e.l.ley,” making no distinction between the author of the Fifth Act of ”The Cenci” and of the ”Sensitive Plant.” Not but what there may be a personal _virtu_ in an author--appraised, however, from the best of his work when, that is, it is correctly appraised. People ask me what James to read. He is a very uneven author; not all of his collected edition has marks of permanence.

One can but make one's own suggestion:--

”The American,” ”French Poets and Novelists,” ”The Europeans,” ”Daisy Miller,” ”Eugene Pickering,” ”Was.h.i.+ngton Square,” ”A Bundle of Letters,”

”Portrait of a Lady,” ”Pandora,” ”The Pupil,” ”Brooksmith,” ”What Maisie Knew,” and ”The Awkward Age” (if one is ”doing it all”), ”Europe,” ”Four Meetings,” ”The Amba.s.sadors,” ”The American Scene,” ”The Finer Grain”

(all the volume, i.e., ”The Velvet Glove,” ”Mona Montravers,” ”Round of Visits,” ”c.r.a.pey Cornelia,” ”Bench of Desolation”), ”The Middle Years”

(posthumous) and ”The Ivory Tower” (notes first).

I ”go easy” on the more cobwebby volumes; the most Jamesian are indubitably ”The Wings of a Dove” and ”The Golden Bowl”; upon them devotees will fasten, but the potential devotee may as well find his apt.i.tude in the stories of ”The Finer Grain” volume where certain exquisite t.i.tillations will come to him as readily as anywhere else. If he is to bask in Jamesian tickle, nothing will restrain him and no other author will to any such extent afford him equal gratifications.

If, however, the reader does not find delectation in the list given above, I think it fairly useless for him to embark on the rest.

Part of James is a caviare, part I must reject according to my lights as bad writing; another part is a specialite, a pleasure for certain temperaments only; the part I have set together above seems to me maintainable as literature. One can definitely say: ”this is good”; hold the argumentative field, suffer comparison with other writers; with, say, the De Goncourt, or De Maupa.s.sant. I am not impertinently throwing books on the sc.r.a.p-heap; there are certain valid objections to James; there are certain standards which one may believe in, and having stated them, one is free to state that any author does not comply with them; granting always that there may be other standards with which he complies, or over which he charmingly or brilliantly triumphs.

James does not ”feel” as solid as Flaubert; he does not give us ”Everyman,” but on the other hand, he was aware of things which Flaubert was not aware of, and in certain things supersedes the author of ”Madame Bovary.”

He appears at times to write around and around a thing and not always to emerge from the ”amorous plan” of what he wanted to present, into definite presentation.