Henry James

by Henry James

  It must be admitted that the case for the revised version relies on other merits than simplicity or elegance to make its claim good. It is not so smooth, nor so easy, nor, on the whole, so pretty as the older form. But it is nearly always richer and more alive. Abstractions give place to sharp definite images, loose vague phrases to close-locked significances. We can find a fair example of this in The Madonna of the Future, a tale first published in 1879. In the original version one of the sentences runs: “His professions, somehow, were all half professions, and his allusions to his work and circumstances left something dimly ambiguous in the background.” In the New York Edition this has become: “His professions were practically somehow, all masks and screens, and his personal allusions as to his ambiguous background mere wavings of the dim lantern.” In some passages it would be hard to deny a gain of beauty as well as of significance. There is, for instance, a sentence in the earlier account of Newman’s silent renunciation of his meditated revenge, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame: “He sat a long time; he heard far-away bells chiming off, at long intervals, to the rest of the world.” In the definitive edition of The American the passage has become: “He sat a long time; he heard far-away bells chiming off into space, at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word.”

  A paragraph from Four Meetings, a tale worked over with extreme care, will give a fair idea of the general effect of the revision. It records a moment of the final Meeting, when the helplessly indignant narrator is watching poor Caroline ministering to the vulgar French cocotte who has imposed herself on the hospitality of the innocent little New Englander.

  “At this moment,” runs the passage of 1879, “Caroline Spencer came out of the house bearing a coffee pot on a little tray. I noticed that on her way from the door to the table she gave me a single quick vaguely appealing glance. I wondered what it signified; I felt that it signified a sort of half-frightened longing to know what, as a man of the world who had been in France, I thought of the Countess. It made me extremely uncomfortable. I could not tell her that the Countess was very possibly the runaway wife of a little hairdresser. I tried, suddenly, on the contrary, to show a high consideration for her.”

  The “particular vision” registered on re-perusal reveals states of mind much more definite than these wonderings and longings and vague appeals.

  “Our hostess moreover at this moment came out of the house, bearing a coffee-pot and three cups on a neat little tray. I took from her eyes, as she approached us, a brief but intense appeal—the mute expression, as I felt, conveyed in the hardest little look she had yet addressed me, of her longing to know what as a man of the world in general and of the French world in particular, I thought of these allied forces now so encamped on the stricken field of her life. I could only ‘act,’ however, as they said at North Verona, quite impenetrably—only make no answering sign. I couldn’t intimate, much less could I frankly utter, my inward sense of the Countess’s probable past, with its measure of her virtue, value and accomplishments, and of the limits of consideration to which she could properly pretend. I couldn’t give my friend a hint of how I myself personally ‘saw’ her interesting pensioner—whether as the runaway wife of a too-jealous hair-dresser or of a too-morose pastry-cook, say; whether as a very small bourgeoise, in fine, who had vitiated her case beyond patching up, or even some character of the nomadic sort, less edifying still. I couldn’t let in, by the jog of a shutter, as it were, a hard informing ray and then, washing my hands of the business, turn my back for ever. I could on the contrary but save the situation, my own at least, for the moment, by pulling myself together with a master hand and appearing to ignore everything but that the dreadful person between us was a ‘grande dame.’”

  Anyone genuinely interested in “the how and the whence and the why these intenser lights of experience come into being and insist on shining,” will find it a profitable exercise to read and compare the old and the new versions of any of the novels or tales first published during the ’seventies or ’eighties. Such a reader will be qualified to decide for himself between the opinion of a bold young critic that “all the works have been subjected to a revision which in several cases, notably Daisy Miller and Four Meetings, amounts to their ruin,” and their writer’s confidence that “I shouldn’t have breathed upon the old catastrophes and accidents, the old wounds and mutilations and disfigurements wholly in vain. . . . I have prayed that the finer air of the better form may sufficiently seem to hang about them and gild them over—at least for readers, however few, at all curious of questions of air and form.”

  VI

  Explanatory prefaces and elaborate revisions, short stories and long memories, were far from being the complete tale of literary labour during the last eight years of Henry James’s life. A new era for English drama was prophesied in 1907. Led by Miss Horniman, advocates of the repertory system were marching forward, capturing one by one the intellectual centres of the provinces. In London, repertory seasons were announced in two West-end theatres. Actor-managers began to ask for “non-commercial” plays and when their appeal reached Henry James it met with a quick response. The theatre had both allured and repelled him for many years, and he had already been the victim of a theatrical misadventure. His assertions that he wrote plays solely in the hope of making money should not, I think, be taken as the complete explanation of his dramas. It is pretty clear that he wrote plays because he wanted to write them, because he was convinced that his instinct for dramatic situations could find a happy outlet in plays, because writing for the stage is a game rich in precise rules and he delighted in the multiplication of technical difficulties, and because he lived in circles more addicted to the intelligent criticism of plays than to the intelligent criticism of novels. The plays he wrote in the early ’nineties are very careful exercises in technique. They are derived straight from the light comedies of the Parisian stage, with the difference that in the ’nineties, for all their advertised naughtiness, there were even stricter limits to the free representation of Parisian situations on English stages than there are to-day. In The Reprobate, a play successfully produced a few years ago by the Stage Society, the lady whose hair has changed from black to red and from red to gold is the centre of the drama, she holds the key to the position, but all her complicating effect depends upon the past—pasts being allowed on every stage comparative license of reference. The compromising evidence is all a matter of old photographs and letters, and the play loses in vividness whatever it may gain in respectability. Nobody knew better than the author that The Reprobate was not a good play. Terror of being cut forbade him to work on a subject of intrinsic importance. With another hour guaranteed, a playwright might attempt anything, but “he does not get his hour, and he will probably begin by missing his subjects. He takes, in his dread of complication, a minor one, and it’s heavy odds that the minor one, with the habit of small natures, will prove thankless.”

  Other early plays had been converted into novels or tales and so published. One of these, written originally for Miss Ellen Terry but never produced by her, had appeared as an incongruous companion to The Turn of the Screw in the volume entitled The Two Magics. A few attentive readers had seen the dramatic possibilities of Covering End, and when it was suggested to Henry James that he should convert it into a three-act comedy for production by Mr. Forbes Robertson (as he was then) and Miss Gertrude Elliot, he willingly consented. Flying under a new flag, as The High Bid, the play was produced in London in February, 1909, but only for a series of matinées, the prodigious success of The Passing of the Third Floor Back precluding the possibility of an evening for any other production under the same management. Under the inspiration of the repertory movement, other material was re-cast for acting. The Other House was re-dictated as a tragedy. Owen Wingrave became The Saloon, a one-act play produced by Miss Gertrude Kingston in 1910. Finally an entirely new three-act comedy, The Outcry, was written round the highly topical subject of the sale of art treasures to rich Americans.
It was not produced during Henry James’s life. At the time when it should have been rehearsed he was ill and the production was postponed. On his recovery, he went to the United States for a year, and when he came back the day of repertory performances had died in a fresh night of stars.

  When The Outcry was given by the Stage Society in 1917, it was evident that the actors were embarrassed by their lines, for by 1909, when the play was written, the men and women of Henry James could talk only in the manner of their creator. His own speech, assisted by the practice of dictating, had by that time become so inveterately characteristic that his questions to a railway clerk about a ticket or to a fishmonger about a lobster, might easily be recognized as coined in the same mint as his addresses to the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature. Apart from this difficulty of enunciating the lines, The Outcry has all the advantages over the earlier plays. The characters are real and they act from adequate motives. The solution of the presented problem, which requires, like most of the author’s solutions, a change of heart, is worked out with admirable art, without any use of the mechanical shifts and stage properties needed in The Reprobate. It is not very difficult to believe that if Henry James had been encouraged twenty years earlier to go on writing plays he might have made a name as a dramatist, but the faithful may be forgiven for rejoicing that the playwright was sacrificed to the novelist and critic.

  VII

  Many men whose prime business is the art of writing find rest and refreshment in other occupations. They marry or they keep dogs, they play golf or bridge, they study Sanskrit or collect postage stamps. Except for a period of ownership of a dachshund, Henry James did none of these things. He lived a life consecrated to the service of a jealous, insatiable, and supremely rewarding goddess, and all his activities had essential reference to that service. He had a great belief in the virtues of air and exercise, and he was expert at making a walk of two or three miles last for as many hours by his habit of punctuating movement with frequent and prolonged halts for meditation or conversation. He liked the exhilaration of driving in a motor-car, which gave him, he said, “a sense of spiritual adventure.” He liked a communicative companion. Indeed the cultivation of friendships may be said to have been his sole recreation. To the very end of his life he was quick to recognize every chance of forming a friendly relation, swift to act on his recognition, and beautifully ready to protect and nourish the warm life of engendered affection. His letters, especially those written in his later years, are more than anything else great generous gestures of remembrance, gathering up and embracing his correspondents much as his talk would gather up his hearers and sweep them along on a rising flood of eloquence.

  But that fine capacity for forming and maintaining a “relation” worked, inevitably, within definite limits. He was obliged to create impassable barriers between himself and the rest of mankind before he could stretch out his eager hands over safe walls to beckon and to bless. He loved his friends, but he was condemned by the law of his being to keep clear of any really entangling net of human affection and exaction. His contacts had to be subordinate, or indeed ancillary, to the vocation he had followed with a single passion from the time when, as a small boy, he obtained a report from his tutor as showing no great aptitude for anything but a felicitous rendering of La Fontaine’s fables into English. Nothing could be allowed to interfere for long with the labour from which Henry James never rested, unless perhaps during sleep. When his “morning stint of inventive work” was over, he went forth to the renewed assault of the impressions that were always lying in wait for him. He was perpetually and mercilessly exposed, incessantly occupied with the task of assimilating his experience, freeing the pure workable metal from the base, remoulding it into new beauty with the aid of every device of his craft. He used his friends not, as some incompletely inspired artists do, as in themselves the material of his art, but as the sources of his material. He took everything they could give and he gave it back in his books. With this constant preoccupation, it was natural that the people least interesting to him were the comparatively dumb. To be “inarticulate” was for him the cardinal social sin. It amounted to a wilful withholding of treasures of alien experience. And if he could extract no satisfaction from contemplating the keepers of golden silence, he could gain little more from intercourse with the numerous persons he dismissed from his attention as “simple organisms.” These he held to be mere waste of any writer’s time, and it was characteristic that his constant appreciation of the works of Mrs. Wharton was baffled by the popularity of Ethan Frome, because he considered that the gifted author had spent her labour on creatures too easily comprehensible to be worth her pains. He greatly preferred The Reef, where, as he said, “she deals with persons really fine and complicated.”

  We might arrive at the same conclusion from a study of the prefaces to the New York Edition. More often than not, the initial idea for a tale came to Henry James through the medium of other people’s talk. From a welter of anecdote he could unerringly pick out the living nucleus for a reconstructed and balanced work of art. His instinct for selection was admirable, and he could afford to let it range freely among a profusion of proffered subjects, secure that it would alight on the most promising. But he liked to have the subjects presented with a little artful discrimination, even in the first instance. He was dependent on conversation, but it must be educated and up to a point intelligent conversation. There is an early letter written from Italy in 1874, in which he complains of having hardly spoken to an Italian creature in nearly a year’s sojourn, “save washerwomen and waiters. This, you’ll say, is my own stupidity,” he continues, “but granting this gladly, it proves that even a creature addicted as much to sentimentalizing as I am over the whole mise en scène of Italian life, doesn’t find an easy initiation into what lies behind it. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the pitifulness of this absurd want of reciprocity between Italy itself and all my rhapsodies about it.” Other wanderers might have found more of Italy in washerwomen and waiters, here guaranteed to be the true native article, than in all the nobility of Rome or the Anglo-Americans of Venice, but that was not Henry James’s way. For him neither pearls nor diamonds fell from the lips of waiters and washerwomen, and princesses never walked in his world disguised as goosegirls.

  Friendships are maintained by the communication of speech and letters. Henry James was a voluminous letter-writer and exhaustively communicative in his talk upon every subject but one, his own work, which was his own real life. It was not because he was indifferent to what people thought of his books that he evaded discussion about them. He was always touched and pleased by any evidence that he had been intelligently read, but he never went a step out of his way to seek this assurance. He found it safest to assume that nobody read him, and he liked his friends none the worse for their incapacity. Meanwhile, the volumes of his published works—visible, palpable, readable proof of that unceasing travail of the creative spirit which was always labouring behind the barrier of his silence—piled themselves up year after year, to be dropped on to the tables of booksellers and pushed on to the shelves of libraries, to be bought and cherished by the faithful, ignored by the multitude, and treated as a test of mental endurance by the kind of person who organized the Browning Society. Fortunately for literature, Henry James did not lend himself to exploitation by any Jacobean Society. Instead of inventing riddles for prize students, he scattered about his pages a number of pregnant passages containing all the clues that are needed for keeping up with him. It was his theory that if readers didn’t keep up with him—as they admittedly didn’t always—the fault was entirely in their failure of attention. There are revelations in his books, just as he declared them to be in the works of Neil Paraday. “Extract the opinion, disengage the answer—these are the real acts of homage.”

  VIII

  From his familiar correspondence we need not hope to extract as considered an opinion or as definite an answer as from the novels, but his letters are ext
raordinarily valuable as sidelights, helping us to see how it happened that any man was able to progress along so straight a path from one end of his life to another. The two volumes of memories are clear evidence of the kind of temperamental make-up with which Henry James was gifted, the two volumes of letters show how his life contributed to preserve and enhance his rare capacity for taking and keeping impressions. They show him too as unusually impervious to everything which is not an impression of visual images or a sense of a human situation. He was very little troubled by a number of ideas which press with an increasing weight upon the minds of most educated persons. Not until the outbreak of the Great War was he moved to utter a forcible “opinion” about affairs outside his personal range. He was delightfully free from the common delusion that by grouping individuals in arbitrary classes and by twisting harmless adjectives into abstract nouns it is possible for us to think of more than one thing at a time and to conceive of qualities apart from their manifestation. What he saw he possessed; what he understood he criticized, but he never reckoned it to be any part of his business to sit in judgment on the deeds of men working in alien material for inartistic ends, or to speculate about the nature of the universe or the conflict or reconciliation of science with religion. He could let Huxley and Gladstone, the combatant champions of Darwinism and orthodox theology, enrich the pages of a single letter without any reference to their respective beliefs. “Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being . . . But of course my talk with him is mere amiable generalities.” Of Gladstone there is a little more, but again the personal impression is the thing sought. “I was glad of a chance to feel the ‘personality’ of a great political leader—or as G. is now thought here even, I think, by his partisans, ex-leader. That of Gladstone is very fascinating—his urbanity extreme—his eye that of a man of genius—and his apparent self-surrender to what he is talking of without a flaw. He made a great impression on me.” One would like to know what the subject was to which Gladstone had surrendered himself in his talk with this entranced young American, who must surely, for his part, have been as much reduced conversationally to “mere amiable generalities” as on the occasion of his meeting Huxley. It is difficult to think of a single likely point of contact between the minds of Gladstone and Henry James. But that, for delicacy of registration, was an advantage. The recording instrument could perform its work without the hindrance of any distraction of attention from the man himself to the matter of his speech, which did not presumably contain any germ for cultivation into fiction.