Part 20 (1/2)

If ever one man's career was foreshadowed in a few sentences of another, Henry James's is to be found in this paragraph.

It is very much as if he said: I will not be a megatherium botcher like Balzac; there is nothing to be said about these De Goncourts, but one must try to be rather more interesting than they are in, let us say, ”Madame Gervaisais.”[6]

Proceeding with the volume of criticism, we find that ”Le Jeune H.”

simply didn't ”get” Flaubert; that he was much alive to the solid parts of Turgenev. He shows himself very apt, as we said above, to judge the merits of a novelist on the ground that the people portrayed by the said novelist are or are not suited to reception into the household of Henry James senior; whether, in short, Emma Bovary or Frederic or M. Arnoux would have spoiled the so delicate atmosphere, have juggled the so fine susceptibilities of a refined 23rd Street family it the time of the Philadelphia ”Centennial.”

I find the book not so much a sign that Henry James was ”disappointed,”

as Hueffer puts it, as that he was simply and horribly shocked by the literature of his continental forebears and contemporaries.

It is only when he gets to the Theatre Francais that he finds something which really suits him. Here there is order, tradition, perhaps a slight fustiness (but a quite pardonable fustiness, an arranged and suitable fustiness having its recompense in a sort of spiritual quiet); here, at any rate, was something decorous, something not to be found in Concord or in Albany. And it is easy to imagine the young James, not illuminated by De Goncourt's possible conversation or writing, not even following the hint given in his essay on Balzac and Balzacian furniture, but sitting before Madame Nathalie in ”Le Village” and resolving to be the Theatre Francais of the novel.

A resolution which he may be said to have carried out to the great enrichment of letters.

II

Strictures on the work of this period are no great detraction. ”French Poets and Novelists” gives us a point from which to measure Henry James's advance. Genius showed itself partly in the escape from some of his original limitations, partly in acquirements. His art at length became ”second nature,” became perhaps half unconscious; or in part wholly unconscious; in other parts perhaps too highly conscious. At any rate in sunnier circ.u.mstances he talked exactly as he wrote, the same elaborate paragraph beautifully attaining its climax; the same sudden incision when a brief statement could dispose of a matter.

Be it said for his style: he is seldom or never involved when a direct bald statement will accurately convey his own meaning, _all of it_. He is not usually, for all his wide leisure, verbose. He may be highly and bewilderingly figurative in his language (vide Mr. Hueffer's remarks on this question)

Style apart, I take it that the hatred of tyrannies was as great a motive as any we can ascribe to Galileo or Leonardo or to any other great figure, to any other mythic Prometheus; for this driving force we may well overlook personal foibles, the early Bostonese bias, the heritage from his father's concern in commenting Swedenborg, the later fusses about social caution and conservation of furniture. Hueffer rather boasts about Henry James's innocence of the cla.s.sics. It is nothing to brag of, even if a man struggling against natural medievalism have entrenched himself in impressionist theory. If James _had_ read his cla.s.sics, the better Latins especially, he would not have so excessively cobwebbed, fussed, blathered, worried about minor mundanities. We may _conspuer_ with all our vigor Henry James's concern with furniture, the Spoils of Poynton, connoisseurs.h.i.+p, Mrs. Ward's tea-party atmosphere, the young Bostonian of the immature works. We may relegate these things mentally to the same realm as the author's pyjamas and collar b.u.t.tons, to his intellectual instead of his physical valeting. There remains the capacious intelligence, the searching a.n.a.lysis of things that cannot be so relegated to the sc.r.a.p-heap and to the wash-basket.

Let us say that English freedom legally and traditionally has its basis in property. Let us say, a la Balzac, that most modern existence is governed by, or at least interfered with by, the necessity to earn money; let us also say that a Frenchman is not an Englishman or a German or an American, and that despite the remark that the aristocracies of all people, the upper cla.s.ses, are the same everywhere, racial differences are _au fond_ differences; they are likewise major subjects.

Writing, as I am, for the reader of good-will, for the bewildered person who wants to know where to begin, I need not apologize for the following elliptical notes. James, in his prefaces, has written explanation to death (with sometimes a very pleasant necrography). Leaving the ”French Poets and Novelists,” I take the novels and stories as nearly as possible in their order of publication (as distinct from their order as rearranged and partially weeded out in the collected edition).

1875. (U.S.A.) ”A Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim and other Tales.” ”Eugene Pickering” is the best of this lot and most indicative of the future James. Contains also the t.i.tle story and ”Madame de Mauves.” Other stories inferior.

1876. (U.S.A.) ”Roderick Hudson,” prentice work. First novel not up to the level of ”Pickering.”

1877. ”The American”; essential James, part of the permanent work.

”Watch and Ward,” discarded by the author.

1878. ”French Poets and Novelists,” already discussed.

1878. ”Daisy Miller.” (The big hit and one of his best.) ”An International Episode,” ”Four Meetings,” good work.

1879. Short stories first printed in England with additions, but no important ones.

1880. ”Confidence,” not important.

1881. ”Was.h.i.+ngton Square,” one of his best, ”putting America on the map,” giving us a real past, a real background. ”Pension Beaurepas” and ”Bundle of Letters,” especially the girls' letters, excellent, already mentioned.

1881. ”The Portrait of a Lady,” one of his best. Charming Venetian preface in the collected edition.

1884. ”Tales of Three Cities,” stories dropped from the collected edition, save ”Lady Barbarina.”

1884. ”Lady Barbarina,” a study in English blankness comparable to that exposed in the letters of the English young lady in ”A Bundle of Letters.” There is also New York of the period. ”But if there was one thing Lady Barb disliked more than another it was describing Pasterns.

She had always lived with people who knew of themselves what such a place would be, without demanding these pictorial effects, proper only, as she vaguely felt, to persons belonging to the cla.s.ses whose trade was the arts of expression. Lady Barb of course had never gone into it; but she knew that in her own cla.s.s the business was not to express but to enjoy, not to represent but to be represented.”

”Mrs. Lemon's recognition of this river, I should say, was all it need have been; she held the Hudson existed for the purpose of supplying New Yorkers with poetical feelings, helping them to face comfortably occasions like the present, and in general, meet foreigners with confidence....”