Part 22 (1/2)
”Nona Vincent,” he writes like an adolescent, might be a person of eighteen doing first story.
Page 201. ”Public interest in spiritual life of the army.” (”The Real Thing.”)
Page 201. German Invasion.
Loathsome prigs, stiff conventions, editor of cheap magazines ladled in Sir Wots-his-name.
1893. In the interim he had brought out ”In the Cage,” excellent opening sentence, matter too much talked around and around, and ”The Two Magics.” This last a Freudian affair which seems to me to have attracted undue interest, i.e., interest out of proportion to the importance as literature and _as part of_ Henry James's own work, because of this subject matter. The obscenity of ”The Turn of the Screw” has given it undue prominence. People now ”drawn” to obscene as were people of Milton's period by an equally disgusting bigotry; one unconscious on author's part; the other, a surgical treatment of a disease. Thus much for progress on part of authors if public has not progressed. The point of my remarks is that an extraneous criterion comes in. One must keep to the question of literature, not of irrelevancies. Galdos' ”Lo Prohibido”
does Freud long before the s.e.x crank got to it. Kipling really does the psychic, ghosts, etc., to say nothing of his having the ”sense of story.”
1900. ”The Soft Side,” collection containing: ”The Abas.e.m.e.nt of the Northmores,” good; again the motif of the vacuity of the public man, the ”figure”; he has tried it again in ”The Private Life,” which, however, falls into the allegorical. A rotten fall it is too, and Henry James at his worst in it, i.e., the allegorical. ”Fordham's Castle” appears in the collected edition only--it may belong to this period but is probably earlier, comedietta, excellently, perhaps flawlessly done. Here, as so often, the circ.u.mstances are mostly a description of the character of the personal tone of the ”sitters”; for his people are so much more, or so much more often, ”sitters” than actors. Protagonists it may be. When they act, they are apt to stage-act, which reduces their action again to being a mere attempt at description. (”The Liar,” for example.) Compare Maupa.s.sant's ”Toine” for treatment of case similar to ”Fordham Castle.”
1902-05. ”The Sacred Fount,” ”Wings of a Dove,” ”Golden Bowl” period.
”Dove” and ”Bowl” certainly not models for other writers, a caviare not part of the canon (metaphors be hanged for the moment).
Henry James is certainly not a model for narrative novelists, for young writers of fiction; perhaps not even a subject of study till they have attained some sublimity of the critical sense or are at least ready to be constantly alert, constantly on guard.
I cannot see that he will harm a critic or a describer of places, a recorder of impressions, whether they be people, places, music.
1903. ”Better Sort,” mildish.
1903. ”The Amba.s.sadors,” rather clearer than the other work. Etude of Paris vs. Woollett. Exhortation to the idle, well-to-do, to leave home.
1907. ”The American Scene,” triumph of the author's long practice. A creation of America. A book no ”serious American” will neglect. How many Americans make any attempt toward a realization of that country is of course beyond our power to compute. The desire to see the national face in a mirror may be in itself an exotic. I know of no such grave record, of no such attempt at faithful portrayal, as ”The American Scene.” Thus America is to the careful observer; this volume and the American scenes in the fiction and memoirs, in ”The Europeans,” ”The Patagonia,”
”Was.h.i.+ngton Square,” etc., bulk large in the very small amount of writing which can be counted as history of _murs contemporaines,_ of national habit of our time and of the two or three generations preceding us. Newport, the standardized face, the Capitol, Independence Hall, the absence of penetralia, innocence, essential vagueness, etc., language ”only definable as not in _intention_ Yiddish,” the tabernacle of Grant's ashes, the public collapse of the individual, the St. Gaudens statue. There is nothing to be gained by making excerpts; the volume is large, but one should in time drift through it. I mean any American with pretenses to an intellectual life should drift through it. It is not enough to have perused ”The Const.i.tution” and to have ”heerd tell” of the national founders.
1910. ”The Finer Grain,” collection of short stories without a slip.
”The Velvet Glove,” ”Mona Montravers,” ”A Round of Visits” (the old New York versus the new), ”c.r.a.pey Cornelia,” ”The Bench of Desolation.”
It is by beginning on this collection, or perhaps taking it after such stories as ”The Pupil” and ”Brooksmith,” that the general literate reader will best come to James, must in brief be convinced of him and can tell whether or not the ”marginal” James is for him. Whether or no the involutions of the ”Golden Bowl” will t.i.tillate his arcane sensibilities. If the reader does not ”get” ”The Finer Grain” there is no sense in his trying the more elaborate ”Wings of a Dove,” ”Sacred Fount,” ”Golden Bowl.” If, on the contrary, he does feel the peculiar, uncla.s.sic attraction of the author he may or may not enjoy the uncanonical books.
1911. ”The Outcry,” a relapse. Connoisseurs.h.i.+p fad again, inferior work.
1913. ”A Small Boy and Others,” the beginning of the memoirs. Beginning of this volume disgusting. First three pages enough to put one off Henry James once and for all, d.a.m.n badly written, atrocious vocabulary. Page 33, a few lines of good writing. Reader might start about here, any reader, that is, to whom New York of that period is of interest. New York of the fifties is significant, in so far as it is typical of what a hundred smaller American cities have been since. The tone of the work shows in excerpts:
”The special shade of its ident.i.ty was thus that it was not conscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or was conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having borne to their surrounding medium--the fact that their unconsciousnes could be so preserved....”
Or later, when dealing with a pre-Y.-M.-C.-A. America.
”Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman, all but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I antic.i.p.ated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent that I thought _he_ must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectly afterwards the impression I so made on her--in which the general proposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on occasion be best described by the term I had used, sought to destroy the particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary measure, show himself for one of these. He didn't to all appearance, for I was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that memory remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at my having leaped to so baseless a view....”
”The grim little generalization remained, none the less, and I may speak of it--since I speak of everything--as still standing: the striking evidence that scarce aught but disaster _could_, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed.
Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort was to _be_ exposed--in the absence, I mean, of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply const.i.tuted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a ”store,” places in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready, even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried on disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were 'sympathetic,'
though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to recognize or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that is, of transmitted ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly to the bad with it--which meant even then going as often as possible to Paris....”
”The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three cla.s.ses, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster....”