Part 9

"Count Vogelstein was still young enough in diplomacy to think it necessary to have opinions. He had a good many, indeed, which had been formed without difficulty; they had been received ready-made from a line of ancestors who knew what they liked. This was of course--and under pressure, being candid, he would have admitted it--an unscientific way of furnishing one's mind. Our young man was a stiff conservative, a Junker of Junkers; he thought modern democracy a temporary phase and expected to find many arguments against it in the great Republic. In regard to these things it was a pleasure to him to feel that, with his complete training, he had been taught thoroughly to appreciate the nature of evidence. The ship was heavily laden with German emigrants, whose mission in the United States differed considerably from Count Otto's. They hung over the bulwarks, densely grouped; they leaned forward on their elbows for hours, their shoulders kept on a level with their ears: the men in furred caps, smoking long-bowled pipes, the women with babies hidden in remarkably ugly shawls. Some were yellow Germans and some were black, and all looked greasy and matted with the sea-damp. They were destined to swell still further the huge current of the Western democracy; and Count Vogelstein doubtless said to himself that they wouldn't improve its quality. Their numbers, however, were striking, and I know not what he thought of the nature of this particular evidence."

For further style in vignette:

"He could see for himself that Mr. and Mrs. Day had not at all her grand air. They were fat plain serious people who sat side by side on the deck for hours and looked straight before them. Mrs. Day had a white face, large cheeks and small eyes; her forehead was surrounded with a multitude of little tight black curls; her lips moved as if she had always a lozenge in her mouth. She wore entwined about her head an article which Mrs. Dangërfield spoke of as a "nuby," a knitted pink scarf concealing her hair, encircling her neck and having among its convolutions a hole for her perfectly expressionless face. Her hands were folded on her stomach, and in her still, swathed figure her bead-like eyes, which occasionally changed their direction, alone represented life. Her husband had a stiff gray beard on his chin and a bare spacious upper lip, to which constant shaving had imparted a hard glaze. His eyebrows were thick and his nostrils wide, and when he was uncovered, in the saloon, it was visible that his grizzled hair was dense and perpendicular. He might have looked rather grim and truculent hadn't it been for the mild familiar accommodating gaze with which his large light-colored pupils--the leisurely eyes of a silent man--appeared to consider surrounding objects. He was evidently more friendly than fierce, but he was more diffident than friendly. He liked to have you in sight, but wouldn't have pretended to understand you much or to classify you, and would have been sorry it should put you under an obligation. He and his wife spoke sometimes, but seldom talked, and there was something vague and patient about them as if they had become victims of a wrought spell. The spell, however, was of no sinister cast; it was the fascination of prosperity, the confidence of security, which sometimes makes people arrogant, but which had had such a different effect on this simple satisfied pair, in whom further development of every kind appeared to have been happily arrested."

Pandora's approach to her parents:

"These little offices were usually performed deftly, rapidly, with the minimum of words, and when their daughter drew near them, Mr. and Mrs. Day closed their eyes after the fashion of a pair of household dogs who expect to be scratched."

The tale is another synthesis of some of the million reasons why Germany will never conquer the world, why the Hun is impossible, why "boche" is merely "bursch." The imbecility of a certain Wellsian journalist in treating this gem is again proof that it is written for the relatively-developed American, not for the island écaillère. If Henry James, as Ford Madox Hueffer says, set out to civilize the United States, it is at least an easier job than raising British Suburbia to a bearable level. From that milieu at least we have nothing of value to learn; we shall not take our tonality from that _niveau._

In describing "Pandora's" success as "purely personal," Henry James has hit on the secret of the Quattrocento. 1450 to 1550, the vital part of the Renaissance. Aristocracy decays when it ceases to be selective, when the basis of selection is not personal. It is a critical acuteness, not a snobbism, which last is selection on some other principle than that of a personal quality. It is servility to rule-of-thumb criteria, and a dullness of perception, a timidity in acceptance. The whole force of the Renaissance was in the personality of its selection.

There is no faking the amount of perceptive energy concentrated in Henry James's vignettes in such phrases as that on the parents like domestic dogs waiting to be scratched, or in the ten thousand phrases of this sort which abound in his writings. If we were back in the time of Bruyère, we could easily make a whole book of "Characters" from Henry James's vignettes.[9] The vein holds from beginning to end of his work; from this writing of the eighties to "The Ivory Tower." As for example, Gussie Braddon:

"Rosanna waited facing her, noting her extraordinary perfection of neatness, of elegance, of arrangement, of which it couldn't be said whether they most handed over to you, as on some polished salver, the clear truth of her essential commonness or transposed it into an element that could please, that could even fascinate, as a supreme attestation of care. 'Take her as an advertisement of all the latest knowledges of how to "treat" every inch of the human surface and where to "get" every scrap of the personal envelope, so far as she _is_ enveloped, and she does achieve an effect sublime in itself and thereby absolute in a wavering world.'"

We note no inconsiderable progress in the actual writing, in _mîstria_, when we reach the ultimate volumes.

1886. "Bostonians." Other stories in this collection mostly rejected from collected edition.

"Princess Casamassima" inferior continuation of "Roderick Hudson." His original subject matter is beginning to go thin.

1888. "The Reverberator," process of fantasia beginning.

Fantasia of Americans vs. the "old aristocracy," "The American" with the sexes reversed. Possibly the theme shows as well in "Les Transatlantiques," the two methods, give one at least a certain pleasure of contrast.

1888. "Aspern Papers," inferior. "Louisa Pallant," a study in the maternal or abysmal relation, good James. "Modern Warning," rejected from collected edition.

1889. "A London Life." "The Patagonia."

"The Patagonia," not a masterpiece. Slow in opening, excellent in parts, but the sense of the finale intrudes all along. It seems true but there is no alternative ending. One doubts whether a story is really constructed with any mastery when the end, for the purpose of making it a story, is so unescapable. The effect of reality is produced, of course, by the reality of the people in the opening scene; there is no doubt about that part being "to the life."

"The Liar" is superb in its way, perhaps the best of the allegories, of the plots invented purely to be an exposition of impression. It is magnificent in its presentation of the people, both the old man and the Liar, who is masterly.

"Mrs. Temperly" is another such excellent delineation and shows James as an excellent hater, but G.S. Street expresses a concentration of annoyance with a greater polish and suavity in method; and neither explains, theorizes, nor comments.

James never has De Maupassant's reality. His (H.J.'s) people almost always convince, i.e., we believe implicitly that they exist. We also think that Henry James has made up some sort of story as an excuse for writing his impression of the people.

One sees the slight vacancy of the stories of this period, the short clear sentence, the dallying with _jeu d'esprit_, with epigram no better than, though not inferior to, the run of epigram in the nineties. It all explains James's need of opacity, his reaching out for a chiaroscuro to distinguish himself from his contemporaries and in which he could put the whole of his much more complex apperception.

Then comes, roughly, the period of cobwebs and of excessive cobwebs and of furniture, finally justified in "The Finer Grain," a book of tales with no mis-fire, and the style so vindicated in the triumphs of the various books of Memoirs and "The American Scene."

Fantasias: "Dominic Ferrand," "Nona Vincent" (tales obviously aimed at the "Yellow Book," but seem to have missed it, a detour in James's career). All artists who discover anything make such detours and must, in the course of things (as in the cobwebs), push certain experiments beyond the right curve of their art. This is not so much the doom as the function of all "revolutionary" or experimental art, and I think masterwork is usually the result of the return from such excess. One does not know, simply does not know, the true curve until one has pushed one's method beyond it. Until then it is merely a frontier, not a chosen route. It is an open question, and there is no dogmatic answer, whether an artist should write and rewrite the same story (à la Flaubert) or whether he should take a new canvas.

"The Papers," a fantasia, diverting; "The Birthplace," fairy-godmother element mentioned above, excellent. "Edmund Orme," inferior; "Yellow Book" tale, not accepted by that periodical.

1889-1893. Period of this entoilment in the "Yellow Book," short sentences, the epigrammatic. He reacts from this into the allegorical. In general the work of this period is not up to the mark. "The Chaperon," "The Real Thing," fantasias of "wit." By fantasias I mean sketches in which the people are "real" or convince one of their verity, but where the story is utterly unconvincing, is not intended to convince, is merely a sort of exaggeration of the fitting situation or the situation which ought to result in order to display some type at its apogee. "The Real Thing" rather better than other stories in this volume.

Thus the lady and gentleman model in "The Real Thing." London society is finely ladled in "The Chaperon," which is almost as a story, romanticism.

"Greville Fane" is a scandalous photograph from the life about which the great blagueur scandalously lies in his preface (collected edition). I have been too diverted comparing it with _an_ original to give a sane view of its art.

1890. "The Tragic Muse," uneven, full of good things but showing Henry James in the didactic role a little too openly. He preaches, he also displays fine perception of the parochialism of the British political career. It is a readable novel with tracts interpolated. (Excellent and commendable tracts arguing certainly for the right thing, enjoyable, etc.) Excellent text-book for young men with ambitions, etc.

1892. "Lesson of the Master" (cobweb). "The Pupil," a masterpiece, one of his best and keenest studies. "Brooksmith" of the best.

1893. "The Private Life." Title story, waste verbiage at the start, ridiculous to put all this camouflage over something au fond merely an idea. Not life, not people, allegory, dated to "Yellow Book" era. Won't hold against "Candide." H.J.'s tilting against the vacuity of the public figure is, naturally, pleasing, i.e., it is pleasing that he should tilt, but the amusement partakes of the nature of seeing cocoanuts hurled at an aunt sally.

There are other stories, good enough to be carried by H.J.'s best work, not detrimental, but not enough to have "made him": "Europe" (Hawthorny), "Paste," "The Middle Years," "Broken Wings," etc. Part of the great man's work can perhaps only be criticized as "etc."

1895. "Terminations, Coxon Fund," perhaps best of this lot, a disquisition, but entertaining, perhaps the germ of Galsworthy to be found in it (to no glory of either author) as perhaps a residuum of Dickens in Maisie's Mrs. Wix. Verbalism, but delightful verbalism in Coxon affair, sic:

"Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular,"

or

"a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproachable and insufferable person"

or (for the whole type)

"put such ignorance into her cleverness?"

Miss Anvoy's echo concerning "a crystal" is excellently introduced, but is possibly in the nature of a sleight of hand trick (contemporary with "Lady Windemere's Fan"). Does H.J.'s "politics" remind one of Dizzy's scribbling, just a little?" Confidence, under the new Ministry, was understood to be reviving," etc.

Perhaps one covers the ground by saying that the James of this period is "light literature," entertaining if one have nothing better to do. Neither "Terminations" nor (1896) "Embarrassments" would have founded a reputation.

1896-97. Improvement through "Other House" and "Spoils of Poynton." I leave the appreciation of these, to me, detestable works to Mr. Hueffer. They seem to me full of a good deal of needless fuss, though I do not mean to deny any art that may be in them.

1897. The emergence in "What Maisie Knew." Problem of the adolescent female. Carried on in:

1899. "The Awkward Age," fairy godmother and spotless lamb and all the rest of it. Only real thing the impression of people, not observation or real knowledge. Action only to give reader the tone, symbolizing the tone of the people. Opening _tour de force_, a study in punks, a cheese _soufflé_ of the leprous crust of society done to a turn and a niceness save where he puts on the _dulcissimo, vox humana_, stop. James was the dispassionate observer. He started with the moral obsession; before he had worked clear of it he was entoiled in the obsession of social tone. He has pages of clear depiction, even of satire, but the sentimentalist is always lurking just round the corner. This softens his edges. He has not the clear hardness, the cold satiric justness that G.S. Street has displayed in treating situations, certain struggles between certain idiocies and certain vulgarities. This book is a spécialité of local interest. It is an étude in ephemera. If it contained any revelation in 1899, it no longer contains it. His characters are reduced to the status of _voyeurs_, elaborate analysis of the much too special cases, a bundle of swine and asses who cannot mind their own business, who do not know enough to mind their own business. James's lamentable lack of the classics is perhaps responsible for his absorption in bagatelles.... He has no real series of backgrounds of _mœurs du passé_, only the "sweet dim faded lavender" tune and in opposition to modernity, plush nickel-plated, to the disparagement, naturally, of the latter.

Kipling's "Bigod, now-I-know-all-about-this manner," is an annoyance, but one wonders if parts of Kipling by the sheer force of content, of tale to tell, will not outlast most of James's cobwebs. There is no substitute for narrative-sense, however many different and entrancing charms may be spread before us.

"The Awkward Age" might have been done, from one point of view, as satire, in one-fourth the space. On the other hand, James does give us the subtly graded atmospheres of his different houses most excellently. And indeed, this may be regarded as _his_ subject.

If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, impressions of personal tone and quality _are his subject;_ that in these he gets certain things that almost no one else had done before him. These timbres and tonalities are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc., but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc., etc., life would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it.[10]

The main feeling in "The Awkward Age" is satiric. The dashes of sentiment do not help the work as literature. The acute observer is often referred to:

Page 131. "The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have detected...."

Page 133. "And it might have been apparent still to our sharp spectator...."

Page 310. "But the acute observer we are constantly taking for granted would perhaps have detected...."

Page 323. "A supposititious spectator would certainly have imagined...." (This also occurs in "Ivory Tower." Page 196.)

This scrutinous person wastes a great deal of time in pretending to conceal his contempt for Mrs. Brook, Vanderbank, the other punks, and lays it on so _thick_ when presenting his old sentimentalist Longdon, who at the one critical moment behaves _with a stupidity,_ with a lack of delicacy, since we are dealing with these refinements. Of course neither this stupidity of his action nor the tone of the other characters has anything to do with the question of _mæstria_, if they _were_ dispassionately or impartially rendered. The book is weak because all through it James is so manifestly carrying on a long _tenzone_ so fiercely and loudly, a long argument _for_ the old lavender. There is also the constant implication that Vanderbank ought to want Nanda, though why the devil he should be supposed to be even mildly under this obligation, is not made clear. A basis in the classics, castor oil, even Stevenson's "Virginibus Puerisque" might have helped matters. One's complaint is not that people of this sort don't exist, that they aren't like everything else a subject for literature, but that James doesn't anywhere in the book get down to bed-rock. It is too much as if he were depicting stage scenery not _as_ stage scenery, but as nature.

All this critique is very possibly an exaggeration. Take it at half its strength; I do not intend to defend it.

Epigrammatic manner in opening, compare Kipling; compare De Maupassant, superb ideas, verity, fantasia, fantasia group, reality, charming stories, poppycock. "Yellow Book" touches in "The Real Thing," general statements about their souls, near to bad writing, perfectly lucid.

"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 sex 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 Abasement 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 circumstances 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 Maupassant'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 Ambassadors," 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," "Washington Square," etc., bulk large in the very small amount of writing which can be counted as history of _mœurs 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 Constitution" 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), "Crapey 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 titillate 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, unclassic attraction of the author he may or may not enjoy the uncanonical books.

1911. "The Outcry," a relapse. Connoisseurship fad again, inferior work.