The ethical aspect of Henry James's major period

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Content THE ETHICAL ASPECT OP HENRY JAMES1S MAJOR PERIOD
A Thesis
Presented to
the Faculty of the Department of English
The University of Southern Califoraia
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
Gladys Stewart
June 1949
UMI Number: EP44255
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DEAN
May 25 f 1949_____
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' V d l u j i j L )
PREFACE
Henry James prophesied that some ctay, very likely,
all his buried prose would kick off its varied tombstones
at once. Anyone aware of the long decline in his fame may
note, then, with a sense of poetic justice that both criti
cal and public interest in his work have increased markedly
since 1943, the year of the centenary of his birth. While
F. 0. Matthiessen of Harvard has contributed most to the
James ”revival,t r earlier studies of enduring value were made
by such devoted expositors of James as Percy Lubbock, Joseph
Warren Beach, Pelham Edgar, and Richard P. Blackmur. These
men have also done much in recent years to secure James his
proper place in the scale of literary values as one of the
great masters of modern literature.
In fixing James's stature as a writer, his critics have
very largely dwelt upon his skill in the craft of fiction.
This aspect of his merit, inspired as it was by his devotion
to an exacting Ideal of art, has been paid the highest tribute,
not only by professional Jamesians, but also by poets of the
order of Eliot, Auden, and Spender. What recognition has been
extended from the aesthetic to the moral sphere either fain ■
to go beyond mere mention of ethical significance or falls
into error through superficial thought and subjective bias.
The highest morality is most commonly observed not so much
li
in James*s stories as in his exercise of the creative prin
ciples behind them, or else it is defined by some simple
formula of American innocence opposed to European duplicity
in an "international situation." Matthiessen and Beach, it
is true, have attended somewhat more searchingly to James*s
ethical concerns, but for the most part their treatment of
these is designed only to subserve a technical or biographical
emphasis.
Mot attempting to appraise its final value, I approach
James's work with the view that its ethical import remains to
be carefully studied. With such an object, then, as the kind
of center of composition upon which James always insisted,
my paper will seek to make out the peculiar character and
operation of his ethical intention, to remove certain of the
misapprehensions it has suffered, and finally, after a con
sideration of selected works, to present his especial vision
of human excellence.
Ideally, a detailed analysis of all his work would be
necessary, but its very amplitude requires the setting of
limits. This paper will confine itself to an examination of
everything pertinent to the general subject which Henry James
wrote from 1896 through 1904, the date of The Golden Bowl.
It should be noted in respect to such delimitation that his
writing falls into two main periods: the earlier one, a time
of much experiment, ends with the publication in 1889 of
iii
The Tragic Muse, after which James struggled unsuccessfully
for five years to become a popular playwright; the period
distinguished by the final refinement of his method no less
than of his content begins in 1896, after he left London for
the seclusion of Rye. Here he wrote the novels and tales in
which he was able to make artistic capital of his dramatic
experience; and in Jamesian criticism this later fiction is
usually held to be his most notable, with the three great
novels, The Wings of the Dove. The Ambassadors, and The
Qolden Bowl, fixing the high mark of his genius. These eight
years of James's finest production will, it is believed,
most richly reward study.
His prefaces, letters, notebooks, and miscellaneous
critical and autobiographical writings are also needed to
throw their invaluable light on any chosen aspect of his
creative writing in whatever period. These will accordingly
be put to use in generalizing both before and after the
fictional data.
TABLE OP CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE ETHICAL NATURE OP HENRY JAMES'S
APPROACH TO FICTION..................... 1
II. THE SHORT STORIES ...........................27
Embarr as ament3 (1896).................. 28
The Soft Side (1900).............. 35
!
The Better Sort (1903). .........43
III. THE STORIES OP 'NOUVELLE* LENGTH
AND THE MINOR NOVELS.............................57
The Spoil a of Povnton (1897)............ 57
The Other House (1896)........*• 61
What Malaie Knew (1897) ... 64
In the Cage (1898). .......... 68
The Turn of the Screw (1898). ...... 69
Covering End (1898).................... 77
The Awkward Age (1899).................. 78
The Sacred Fount (1901) ......... 85
IV. THE MAJOR NOVELS......................... 91
The Wing a of the Dove (1902)............. 92
The Ambassadors (1903). .............. 102
The Golden Bowl (1904). ........ .111
V. HENRY JAMES'S ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY..................123
BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................153
CHAPTER ONE
THE ETHICAL NATURE OP HENRY JAMES’S APPROACH TO FICTION
I
Henry James’s supreme concern as a novelist was to
represent human relations in a given situation; and to con
centrate on human relations is to he engaged at once with the
problems of value on which they depend. For the present it
will he enough to say that hy the moral order to which these
problems have reference, James understood some body of ’ ’ felt
values" existing through one or another process of absorption
in an individual’s mind. These values may be defined in
large as criteria of personality and moral quality, which
give the individual’s life an ethical significance Illumining
all his thought and action. In almost every story, surely
in every major story of James, at least one of the principals
is devoted before all else to what one critic has called
"the fine art of living on the ethical plane.
The art of the novelist, accordingly, was to mirror
this activity and the conditions governing it. An instance
of how much of so large a subject can be put into a single
1 Joseph Warren Beach, "The Sacred and Solitary Refuge,
Furioso. 3:29, Winter, 1947.
2
magnificent phrase has been provided by Joseph Conrad,
Conrad was the first to observe that Henry James was nthe
historian of finer consciences,” that is to say, consciences
troubled by the nice discrimination of shades of conduct.2
Moral discrimination, in short, is both the duty and the
passion of his most typical characters. Indeed, much of
James's famous complexity derives just from the multiplica
tion of scruples besetting some sensitive nature or fine
mind. He insisted again and again that his characters be
highly conscious individuals, since they could be "interest
ing" only in proportion as they "felt" their respective
situations. As he said:
. . . there are degrees of feeling— the muffled,
the faint, the just sufficient, the barely intelli
gent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the
complete, in a word—‘the power to be finely aware
and richly responsible. It is those moved in this
latter fashion who 'get most* out of all that happens
to them and who in so doing enable us, as readers of
their record, as participators by a fond attention,
also to get most. Their being aware--as Hamlet and
Lear, say, are finely aware— makes absolutely the
intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of
sense to what befalls them.3
James’s fictional plots, then, in their essential
substance, involve the moral drama enacted in the mind or
2 Joseph Conrad, "Henry James: An Appreciation,"
Horth American Review. 205:589. April, 1916.
3 Henry James, The Art of the Hovel (Richard P.
Blackmur, editor; Hew York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934),
p. 62. First group of italics not in the original.
conscience of a character. And by the term "conscience," it
should be noted, James intended no more than that region of
the mind which is reserved for the recognition and solution
of moral conflicts. A man or woman was worthy of extended
analysis by virtue of a reaction to some moral problem, or
struggle with it. The question for James was simply ’ ’ What
will he do? What will she do? when confronted with a given
predicament^^^ust exactly what they do is always more or
less what James called in the case of The Ambassadors a
"process of vision." Referring to the enlightenment of the
main character, he said:
The business of toy tale and the march of my action,
not to say the precious moral of everything, is Just
my demonstration of this process of vision.4
The vision, the action, or whatever, will of course express
itself in various forms and degrees of moral reaction, de
pending on the quality of the mind involved; but James saw
the leading interest in any human hazard only in
... a consciousness (on the part of the moved
and moving creature) subject to fine intensifica
tion and wide enlargement. . . . This means, exactly,
that the person capable of feeling in the given case
more than another of what is to be felt for it, and
so serving in the highest degree to record it
dramatically and objectively, is the only sort of
person on whom we can count not to betray, to cheap
en or, as we say, give away, the value and the
beauty of the thing. By so much as the affair
matters for some such individual, by so much do we
get the best there is of it. . . .5
4 Ibid.. p. 308.
5 Ibid.. p. 67.
4
The "value and the "beauty" are further enhanced in
James’s more serious work by his arrangement of the material
circumstances of his stories so as to give, in Beach’s words,
the freest play to the characters1 "penchant for spiritual
intrigue."® Controlled no more by social compulsions than
they are by unconscious psychological drives, his people are
acutely aware of the demands of their ideal natures; and
since they possess intelligence and imagination, as well as
the greatest possible freedom of the material world, their
problem in life is almost exclusively one of ethical choice.
Now a moral sense dependent on individual perception
under nearly perfect circumstances is hardly a matter of
dogmatic ethics. Obviously the important thing will be human
character, not ideas; or, as T. S. Eliot has described him,
James was "a critic who preyed not upon ideas, but upon
human beings.James himself confessed his interest in
personal character and in the "*nature1" of a mind to be
"irrepressible and insatiable."® When moral issues were in
volved, as they usually were, James was concerned with them
as they emerged in social behavior. The experience of life
necessary for testing human worth he defined as "our appre-
ft
Beach, op. cit.. p. 28.
^ P. W. Dupee, editor, The Question of Henry James
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1945), pp. 110-111^
® James, The Art of the Novel. p. 156.
hension and our measure of what happens to us as social
creatures"; and, he added, any intelligent report of ex
perience must he based on that apprehension.®
Because he believed in the all but supreme importance
of personal relationships, the proper interpretation of them
became a highly important matter too. Caring nothing for any
abstract speculation or inquiry, James was a thinker only on
the theory of fiction. Unfortunately, his devoted researches
in the craft of the novel have fostered a general impression
that aesthetic experience was primary for him. To combat such
a view, one may preface James*s own pertinent statements with
the testimony of Edith Wharton, who knew him first in the
late eighties and learned from him as her chief master:
For him every great novel must first of all be
based on a profound sense of moral values (*impor
tance of subject*), and then constructed with a
classical unity and economy of means.I®
Mrs. Wharton further protested the fact that James was looked
upon by so many as a super-subtle carver of cherry-stones,
when actually the vital matter for him was always subject,
and "the criterion of subject the extent of its moral regis
ter."^ James was, none the less, incisive in his objections
to any insistence on a conscious moral purpose. In 1884, in
9 Ibid.. pp. 64-65.
10 Edith Wharton, "Henry James in His Letters,"
Quarterly Review (London), 234:197, July, 1920.
11 Ibid. - . p. 198.
his reply to Sir Walter Besant’s lecture on "Fiction as One
of the Fine Arts," he maintained the right of the novelist
to choose his subject and deal with it according to his
own ideas, free from the obligation to insinuate any sort
I P
of lesson. Some twenty-five years later, in his preface
to The Portrait of a Lady. James took up anew the vexed
point of "morality" of theme, after glancing with impatience
at "the dull dispute over the ’ immoral1 subject and the
moral." The question about any subject that disposed of all
others he saw as simply this:
Is it valid, in a word, is it genuine, is it sin
cere, the result of some direct impression or per
ception of life? • . . There is, I think, no more
nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion
than that of the perfect dependence of the ’moral*
sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life
concerned in producing it.
The element that varied from one sincere work of art to
another was the comparative richness of medium, the medium
being, in James’s figure, the "enveloping air of the
artist's humanity." The question thus came back to the
artist himself and to his way of viewing the facts, or, as
James continued In the same passage:
12 Henry James, The Art of Fiction and Other Essays
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 3-23.
13
James, The Art of the Novel, p. 45.
... to the kind and the degree of the artist’s
prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which
his subject springs. The quality and capacity of
that soil, its ability to ’grow1 with due fresh
ness and straightness any vision of life, repre
sents strongly or weakly, the projected m o r a l i t y . ^
One may sum up the subject, then, as the outcome of the
author’s sensibility; and it has already been indicated that
by Henry James’s “moral sensibility1 ' is meant simply his
sense that the decisions made by individuals placed in cer
tain testing circumstances reveal significant truths about
human character. These truths in the last analysis imply
the success or failure of the personality concerned. This
success or failure, as will be shown, is measured largely by
a standard personal to James and communicated to the reader
by devices of style and method. So form is in the last
resort the outcome of subject, while the “story" is depen
dent for its existence on the technique. James’s own comment
on the "grave distinction" between substance and form is con
clusive t
They are separate before the fact, but the sacra
ment of execution indissolubly marries them, and
the marriage, like any other marriage, has only to
be a ’true* one for the scandal of a breach not to
show. The thing ’done,’ artistically, is a fusion,
or it has not been done. . . .^5
As James saw it, moral and aesthetic values were not only
James, loc. cit.
15 » PP« 115-116.
8
interdependent but virtually inseparable; and that this most
general truth should not be regarded as the measure of every
work of fiction worth measuring was -unintelligible to him.
II
Some works may show aesthetic values without
moral values, and other works very clearly have no
aesthetic values and yet shriek to heaven with
their moral values, but where you have both orders
of value as they are created, together, so they
must be felt together, at least so long as the
work being enjoyed is enjoyed as art.lo
Mr. Blackmur's words are specially relevant to a dis
cussion of James's practise of the art of fiction, because
James managed to integrate morality and art in a doctrine
of ethics and aesthetics peculiarly his own, a doctrine
which demonstrates how moral value can get into works of
art without leaving the critic to shudder for the fate of
the art. Yet full justice has not been accorded James as
a writer whose technical skill enabled him to make convincing
a personal moral Interpretation of human behavior.
The case constituted against James by the purblind
criticism he suffered during his lifetime may well serve as
a point of departure, since it can easily be proved invalid
in the light of his intention and technique. In fact, the
most eminent modern critics of James— -Percy Lubbock, Joseph
Warren Beach, Richard P. Blackmur, and P. 0. Matthiessen—
Richard P. Blackmur, "In the Country of the Blue,"
The Kenyon Review. 5:605, Autumn, 1943.
have of late exercised their critical acumen in this direc
tion. However, their appraisals seem to the present writer
to emphasize James*s artistic insight at the expense of his
moral sensibility. Consequently, the remainder of this chap
ter will confine itself to those aspects of James’s practise
of fiction which may aid in clarifying its ethical quality.
Until very recent years, with very little exception,
Jamesian criticism fell into two classes, the derisive and
the indifferent. And the attitudes of both can be quickly
resolved into the general complaint that James is unreadable.
How the causes to which this unreadability has been attri
buted make the responsible critics seem remarkably superficial
and wanting in discernment. Much condensed, they may be given
as (1) James’s snobbishness and prudery, (2) his failure to
convey the sense of life and a full report of human nature,
and (3) his sacrifice of content to form, which is seen as a
failing tied up with the elaboration of his later style.
For a long time the general conception of James was
that of a semi-ridiculous, semi-tragic figure, characterized
in about equal parts of snobbery, aestheticism, and Anglo-
philism. A generation of nationalist critics saw his expatri
ation as the most significant fact of his career and subscribed
to generalizations without point or depth built around his
relation to the country of his birth. Only within the last
decade has there taken place a notable change in the character
10
of the criticism devoted to James. Though even his more
perceptive critics have not heen noted for their agreement
ahout his merits, they at least are of one mind in conceding
that James's residence in England need not monopolize their
attention.
If one attempts to dwell principally on the character
of James's work, one must nevertheless face the problem of
the man's somewhat special and isolated experience of life*
It is a truism that, however earnest a person's cultivation
of objectivity, his view of life is circumscribed by the
nature of his experience, his interests, and his tastes* If
the person be a writer, the logic by which his stories are
evolved from his ideas can only be a logic dependent upon his
imagination and experience. The truth in this whole connec
tion, as James himself realized, is that one can never really
choose any general range of visIon--the experience from which
Ideas and themes and suggestions spring:
... this proves ever what it has had to be, this
is one with the very turn one's life has taken; so
that whatever It 'gives,* whatever it makes us feel
and think of, we regard very much as imposed and In
evitable. The subject thus pressed upon the artist
is the necessity of his case and the fruit of his
consciousness; which truth makes and has ever made of
any quarrel with his subject, any stupid attempt to
go behind that, the true stultification of criticism.1”
^ James, The Art of the Hovel, p. 201.
11
But because his genius was so undeniably specialized, even
rarefied, James has usually been accused either of using the
novel as a "vehicle of obscurantism,"1® or else, when he is
credited with moral feeling, his values are seen as only
quite acceptable to a person whose isolation of experience is
identical with his own.1^ It seems to me, however, that a
reader of James can be willing to grant the circumstances which
caused him to involve his characters in relations, situations,
or patterns so complex, and even tenuous, as to make it diffi
cult often to enter imaginatively into his subject and point
of view, without being at all obliged to accept the values
which determine the solution of his delicately attenuated
problems: he has only to accept their reality in the minds
of James’s characters.
We don't know what people might give us that
they don’t--the only thing is to take them on what
they do and to allow them absolutely and utterly
their conditions.20
To complain then that his subjects are too narrow, too special,
or too refined, is to decline to play what James himself
called "the fair critical game with an author," which is to
grant him his postulates: "We must grant the artist his
1® Harry Hartwick, The Foreground of American Fiction
(New York: The American Book Company, 19347, p. 367.
Stephen Spender, "A Modern Writer in Search of a
Moral Subject," London Mercury. 31:131, December, 1934.
20 Henry James, The Letters of Henry James (Fercy
Lubbock, editor; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920),
I, 164.
12
subject, his idea, his 'donnee': our criticism is applied
only to what he makes of it. ”21 The question, again, is not
simply whether the artist's logic impresses us as “the way
things happen, " but whether his imaginative means convince
us of the reality of fictive problems, which are not
necessarily our own.
It should be enough to admit in passing that James was
likely to overestimate the patience of his readers, not to
mention their intelligence. Most of us, I think, wish not
infrequently that Henry James's muse, as Swinburne said of
William Morris's, would "tuck up her skirts and step out."
The mannerisms usually found so irritating can be set down
to personal idiosyncracy, if you like, but certainly not to
affectation. The really important thing is that they trouble
only the surface of his art, not Its depths.
Failure to give the sense of life is, of course, the
unpardonable fault in fiction. On this score James has been
commonly rejected by critics who refuse to grant him his
point of view. This may be easily approached through a re
mark he made to Howells that the novelist is a "particular
window" and "of worth so far as he is one," a figure implying
that to his mind the purpose of fiction was to convey the
light of truth not about all life but about certain Important
21 James, The Art of Fiction and Other Essays, p. 14.
13
aspects of life a3 it is experienced*22 Now Stendhal's
conception of the novel as l f a mirror dawdling down a road,"
though involving his own requisites of detachment and obser
vation, James could never have accepted, any more than he
could the formless "fluid puddings" of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.2®
His great concern was not with reproducing life but with im
posing a design upon the materials of life. Life was all
inclusion and confusion, while art was for him all a matter
of discrimination and selection; but if life itself was form
less and wasteful, in art it could be imaginatively repre
sented, and there, by a "finer doing." through form and ex
pression, given beauty and meaning.2^
The first suggestion for a story, he noted in his
prefaces, was often a fragment of life taken from a conversa
tion, an anecdote, or a casual remark. This "mere floating
particle in the stream of talk" communicated the "virus of
suggestion" which set his imagination to work on large develop
ments. 26 His first thought was always to shield his subject,
"the speck of truth, of beauty, of reality,"26 from any
22 James, Letters. I, 165.
23 Ibid., II, 237.
24 Ibid.*# II, 324.
2® Janies, The Art of the Novel, p. 119.
26 Lqc. cit.
14
specific details making it a particular case rather than a
general problem in human nature.
The incident from life, then, serving to disclose some
mere problem in human relations, the interest of any imagina
tive situation constructed upon it must necessarily depend
upon the ”way" in which the people situated meet the problem.
Such an approach is basically psychological of course; and
James, calling himself a "fond analyst,”2,7 chose to specialize
in the spiritual and intellectual and emotional behavior of
individuals who chiefly gauge their lives in terms of their
relations to one another.
Selection being the artist’s privilege, James wanted
to represent what life as he knew it was capable of at its
finest. Consequently, his characters belong to a select
order of human beings, immensely articulate, allusive in
mind, and subtle in spirit. Par advanced beyond the mere
rudiments of thought and feeling, like his specter of Mr.
Cuthbert Frush, they are never "just anybody in from outside."28
Referring to their exposed condition in his world of theorems
and problems as the state of bewilderment, James felt that
everything depended upon ”the quality of bewilderment
2 , 7 Henry James. The Middle Years (Hew York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1917), p. 114.
22 In "The Third Person” from The Soft Side.
15
characteristic of one's creature,” whether it was the vague
or the critical;®® for if bewilderment constituted the subject,
then in someone's intelligent feeling of it the story would
be found. In order to make the experience of his creatures
a highly luminous register of "values,” he considered it as
essential to allow them the freedom of the mental world as
of the material. It is, accordingly, by tbe complicated
play of mind upon mind that the novel of Henry James is ulti
mately directed.
Most novel writers prefer to present the feelings and
let their readers imagine the thoughts; but this was the re
verse of James's method. He delighted in the opportunity to
show "what an 'exciting* Inward life may do for the person lead
ing it" even while in its outward aspects it remains perfectly
normal.His preference was for the "life" of the intelli
gence and of the consciousness, not for life as lived in the
world of accident and circumstance, Meredith has written in
the first chapter of Diana of the Crossways that "the brain-
stuff of fiction Is internal history, and to suppose it dull
Is the profoundest of errors," To suppose it untrue to life,
he might have added, is an error just as profound. James,
however, anticipated the dismissal of his novels for being
®® James, The Art of the Novel, p, 67,
3° Ibid., pp. 56-57.
16
all cerebration, for being too remote from “the life we lead”:
The picture of an intelligence appears for the
most part, it is true, a dead weight for the reader
of the English novel, this reader having so often
the wondrous property of caring for the displayed
tangle of human relations without caring for its
intelligibility.
James’s preclusive concern for intelligibility has
caused many doubts to spring up as to the vitality of his
fiction. In this respect the usual indictment is that his
report of human nature Is defective, being without reference
to the passions. To Andre Gride, for Instance, the heroes of
his books seem never to exist except in the functioning of
their intellects.^2 Rebecca West, some fifteen years before
Gide, decided that James had forgotten both the heart and the
intellect of his heroes in his elaboration of their social en
velope.^® Yet another critic, writing still earlier, accused
James of out-and-out immorality no less, and summed up In four
words the difficulty of exposing him: ”No flesh, no frailty*J*34
It will help balance the record to cite Stephen
Spender, one of James’s more patient and sympathetic critics.
Spender has declared that James made his greatest contribution
31 Ibid.. p. 63.
32 Dupee, op. cit•, p. 251.
33 Rebecca West, Henry James (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1916), p. 108.
* 2 ^
Prank Moore Colby, ’ ’ The Queerness of Henry James,”
Bookman (New York). 15:397, June, 1902.
17
to the novel by realizing that “passionate activity is in
tellectual activity,” for "the effect of passion is not a
momentary display, but a stimulus to thought, which is at
once dazzling and intricate."3® N© more striking illustra
tion of the tragedy to be found in passionless living could
be offered than the story called "The Beast in the Jungle";
but the passion of James’s characters must be sought in
their mental development, in their need to weigh all possi
bilities, to elaborate all the implications, as well as
carefully to scrutinize all emotions. This desire to refine
an issue rather than put it in glaring capitals bears no
connection to the urgency or the intensity with which it may
be felt. Those who cannot understand James’s refusal to
indulge his people in violent actions and emotional explo
sions should reread the following lines from the Preface to
the Lyrical Ballads:
For the human mind is capable of being excited
without the application f gross and violent stimu
lants; and he must have a very faint perception of
its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and
who does not further know that one being is ele
vated above another in proportion as he possesses
this capability.
If so-called primal passion did not interest James,
the strong, though none the less restrained, feeling which
arose out of the complex relations of cultivated people
33 Spender, op. clt., p. ISO.
18
inspired him to searching analysis. If he confined himself
to a limited social class, it was not because he was the
’ 'laureate of leisure," as someone has called him,36 but
because he had to have people whose wealth, culture, and in
tellectual quality kept them from being bothered with any be
side purely ethical matters. It should be observed, too, that
his characters rarely concern themselves with anything of
general significance, even though the ethical problem be In
volved— in business, in politics, or even in the realm of
religious and philosophical Ideas. They are only "wonderfully"
interested in one another.
The human interest In James's novels, therefore, lies
in his near-metaphysical probing of the personal relations
of characters capable of the subtlest perceptions and respon
sible for their choices. The plane of conscious judgment
constituting, for him, the real domain of character, character
in turn could only be understood by an imaginative recon
struction of the motives that precede action in the mind.
But in order to extract the last drop of human significance
from the values Inherent In a situation Jame3 Insisted that
the people in his stories analyze their own j»otives. So it
is only as a result of constant self-examination and self-
control that these individuals arrive at self-knowledge and
3® Carl Van Doren, The American Hovel (Hew York: The
Macmillan Company, 1921), p. 219.
19
the attendant confidence to make their decisions, James*s
major concern, therefore, explains the dominance of ethical
issues in his fiction, since it was with the most "finely
contrlbutive" element— the conscience, which he virtually
equated with the fine intelligence*
In fictions representing the moral evolution of finely
discriminating individuals, whatever there is of "subject"
will depend on the essential nature of a person and the
quality of his sensibility, and whatever there is of "action"
will be almost entirely mental in nature,
A subject residing in somebody’s excited and con
centrated feeling about something--both the some
thing and the somebody being of course as important
as possible--has more beauty to give out than under
any other style of pressure, . , , The thing is to
lodge somewhere at the heart of one's complexity an
irrepressible appreciation.37
To record the "inward life," then, it was necessary to create
for the subject, and put into it as chief observer and actor,
the personality or point of view through which the operation
of the subject would become most significant. Believing that
the author’s omniscience was not a matter of scope but of
insight, James disposed of the function of the omniscient
author and replaced it with the point of view of first one of
the major characters and then another. In this way the
narrative came to exist in someone's perception of the facts
or events rather than in the novelist’s account of them. It
37 James, The Art of the Hovel. pp. 128-129.
amounts to the same thing to say that James, by interposing
a character's consciousness between the reader and the felt
experience, presented, not life, but in Blackmur's words,
"someone's apprehension of the experience of it."s® It was
useless, James said, for a writer to offer us his "mere
poor word of honour" that things happened so or appeared
thus; he must simply represent them, and let us see for our
selves. In addition, clearness and concreteness, he felt,
depended upon "some concentrated individual notation of them,
which, as he went on to say of the case of a certain figure,
was "immensely quickened by the fact of its so mattering to
his very life what he does make of things: which passion of
intelligence is . . . precisely his highest value for our
curiosity and our sympathy."39 A single reflector like
Strether in The Ambassadors was both a technical and a moral
triumph beeause he was capable not only of bearing the whole
narrative burden without shifting it to the shoulders of the
author, but also of giving the clue to the other characters
and to the issues and values in the situation without re
quiring the aid of any other intelligence in the story.
38 Blackmur, Preface to The Art of the Hovel, p. xv.
39 James, The Art of the Hovel, p. 69.
21
Matthiessen has noted that James’s novels are strictly
"novels of intelligence rather than of full consciousness,"4^
which is pretty much what Gide meant in criticizing James for
only extracting from his brain "what he knows to be there, and
« 4 1
what his intelligence alone has put there. Henry James did
not subscribe to William James’s conception of the "stream of
consciousness," at least in the practice of fiction. While
struggling to do justice to the subjectivity of experience,
the novelist yet objected to "the terrible fluidity of self-
revelation.1,42 The method of his later fiction may therefore
be said to represent a sort of compromise in that its main
principle is the use of the consciousness as the medium of ex
position. That this technique was given a very practical im
petus by his dramatic interests must also be taken into account.
The technical lessons derived from his experience as
a playwright directly inspired him to abandon the conventional
method of narrative,— the "two-and-two-make-four system on
which all the awful truck that surrounds us is p r o d u c e d ."455
The failure of Guy Domville in 1895 is usually given as the
4 0
P. 0. Matthiessen, Henry James; The Major Phase
(New York: Oxford University Press, 19441, p. 23.
4 1
Dupee, op. cit., p. 251.
42 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 321.
4® James, Letters, II, 43.
22
great turning point of his c a r e e r .44 Thoroughly disappointed
in his theatrical hopes, James put the case to his brother
when he wrote:
The whole odiousness of the thing lies in the
connection between the drama and the theatre. The
one is admirable in its interest and difficulty,
the other loathsome in its c o n d i t i o n s .45
Determined to return to prose fiction and to "produce better
than e v e r ,”46 was concerned at first with redeeming what
he could from the five years of his "sawdust and orange-peel
phase":47
IP there has lurked in the central core of it
this exquisite truth— I almost hold my breath with
suspense as I try to formulate it; so much, so
much, hangs radiantly there as depending on Tt—
this exquisite truth that what I call the divine
principle in question is a key that, working in
the same general way fits the complicated chambers
of both the dramatic and the narrative lock: IP,
I say, I have crept round through long apparent
barrenness, through suffering and sadness intoler
able to that rare perception— why my infinite
little loss is converted into an almost infinite
little g a i n .48
What he had gained from his stage experiment, in short, was
a confidence in his ability to make fiction dramatic In
44 Matthiessen, The Ma.ior Phase, p. 1.
45 James, Letters. I, 211.
46 ibid.. I, 231.
47 15id.. I, 181.
48 Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James (P. 0.
Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, editors; New York:
Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 188.
23
essence by conceiving it "in the dramatic way."49
In adjusting the method of drama to the form of narra
tive, James dramatized, not the actions of people, but the
movement of thought within a mind, that is, the intellectual
and imaginative processes which led to action. By presenting
in natural sequence the thoughts as well as'the reflected
perceptions and comments of the principals, this "subjective
drama," as Beach calls it,50 involves concurrently the
reader's and the actors' developing awareness of the true
values In a situation. And only In the final relations of
the actors, just as in the final comprehension of the reader,
may the drama be said to have been worked out.
With his adoption of this dramatic "second manner,"
James increasingly refined and subtilized his style. His more
enlightened critics generally concede now that in both
respects of style and method the later fiction carries greater
distinction than the earlier. It follows of course, for such
a conscientious artist, that only the growth in his command
of his instrument should lead him to the more complicated
themes and characters of the later period. Else, he might
have said, one risked one's intellectual self-respect. On
the other side, to name but one among many who have made this
^ Matthiessen, Preface to the Notebooks. p. xix.
50 Joseph Warren Beach, "The Novel from James to Joyce,"
Nation. 132:634, June 10, 1931.
24
criticism, Gamaliel Bradford felt that to James the expression
was more than the thing expressed.51 Supremely conscious that
a work of art must make some small effort to he one, James
considered that it had to sacrifice somehow and somewhere to
the exquisite, "or he an aslninity altogether." So—
. . . we open the door to the Devil himself—
who is nothing hut the sense of heauty, of mystery,
of relations, of appearance, of abysses of the
whole— and of EXPRESSION^2
Those who see the ever more complex effects of his later work
as the consequence purely of technical and stylistic vir
tuosity, to my mind, completely misread James*s purpose.
He believed that the more developed and complicated the
people, the more important became the need of system and per
sistence in making out their relations. Par from wilfully
cultivating a difficult and obscure style, as his insight
into human relations grew more penetrating, he sought to ren
der in an ever more penetrating way all the complexities of
a mental problem or moral experience. While his latter-day
euphuism grew in part from a hatred of the banal and obvious
and stale, principally it arose from this eagerness to ex
plore a subject in its most subtle associations, to pursue
"suggestion to her inmost cell,"— hence the gigantic envelop-
Gamaliel Bradford, "Portrait of Henry James," North
■American Review. 213:212, February, 1921.
52 James, Letters. I, 347.
25
ment of suggestive atmosphere which swathed, to William
James's dismay, a reader's "own poor little initial percep
tion.’ 1^ Surely Henry’s gift for figurative expression
grew to almost alarming proportions. By ingeniously forcing
metaphors to carry on his thought, he often appears to circle
tirelessly about a point without any intention of approaching
it. At the same time, his "super-subtle fry, f 54 preoccupy
themselves with shades of discrimination that can be but half
expressed in their actual speech; and the hints of secret,
serious comprehension between them prevail in a manner entire
ly James's own. Nor did he fail to recognize his difficulty,
but as he said:
Mo two men in the world have the same idea, image
and measure of presentation. Each of us, from the
moment we are worth our salt, writes as he can and
only as he can, and his writing at all is condition
ed upon the very things that from the standpoint of
another method most lend themselves to criticism.
And we each know better than anyone else can what
the defect of our inevitable form may appear.55
The two-fold paradox of his form is that it actually
perplexes through precision and that it often, unfortunately,
as W. C. Brownell has remarked, is so elusive as perfectly
to express without in the least communicating the thought.56
56 P. 0. Matthiessen, The James Family (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1947), p. 341. Cited from a letter of William James,
written in 1907.
54 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 221.
55 James, Letters. I, 288-289.
55 W. C. Brownell, American Prose Masters (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), p. 330.
26
Even the most devoted Jamesian would probably confess that
in first approaching the great man he experienced something
like the thrill with which one is used in childhood to read
phrases like "as soon as his eyes grew accustomed to the
darkness."
Mr. Blaekmur, just such a devotee, has perfectly
summed up the whole problems
His intention and all his labor was to repre
sent dramatically intelligence at its most diffi
cult, its most lucid, its most beautiful point.57
Without ever losing sight of the end in the means, James
simply considered technical efficiency an affair of his own
conscience, which insisted that his material be given the
finest treatment his art could contrive.
Blaekmur, Preface to The Art of the Hovel, p. xiii.
CHAPTER TWO
THE SHORT STORIES
The assertions that have been made in defense of
Henry James's ethical intention may be proved by a roll-call
of his novels and tales. There being little essential
difference in technique between his short and his long
stories of the later period, the most convenient classifi
cation that offers itself is one of length, In which case
it is advisable to make certain precautionary remarks, even
at the risk of a negative beginning.
James established the basis for many of his really
brief things when he professed himself to be the “votary and
victim of the single impression and the imperceptible ad
venture.”1 Subjects so narrowly confined depend for their
interest wholly on the inward view, yet he found it scarcely
possible for the real "Inwardness” of a situation to be devel
oped in any but the longest of tales. Beach has further
commented on his difficulty as one of time, ”of time to get
up momentum in the subjective world, to achieve the effect
of weight and depth of feeling."2 Thus It is that by com
parison with the better novels, James's short stories often
1 James, Letters. I, 359.
2 Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (New
Havens Yale University Press, 1918), p. 70.
seem no more than agitations of the mere surface of his art,
while the experiences they convey sometimes bear the pallor
of triviality* Nevertheless, with the significance of a
James story dependent on the gradual discovery of the values
in a situation, whatever their weight, any attempt to extract
its essence is bound to be perilous. One can only state the
peculiar conditions and problems, accept their reality in
the mind of a character, and indicate that Individual’s
nature through his final perception of the predicament and
his choice of alternatives. In this manner risking what the
observer in "The Special Type” calls the ’ ’ danger of defini
tion, ” one may call attention to James’s recurrent and Insis
tent reference to ethical issues and hope In some measure to
determine the substance of his moral vision.
I
The short stories James wrote between 1896 and 1904
are included in three volumes: Embarrassments (1896), The
Soft Side (1900), and The Better Sort (1903).
The very first story in Bmbarras aments may be taken
to authorize just such an investigation as this paper has
proposed. In the preface to “The Figure In the Carpet”
James tells us that he designed this fable as a plea for
analytic appreciation, building It around the case of an
eminent novelist, Hugh Vereker, who is to be seen as wholly
dependent “for the sake of being understood and enjoyed, on
some responsive reach of critical perception*”3 The aspir
ing young analyst whose report we read strives to get "at"
Vereker*s mystery. The only clue the novelist will give him
is that there is an idea in his work, "the finest, fullest
intention of the lotexpressed arid implied in the very
order, form, and texture of his books, and that this is the
thing for a critic to look for, The baffled reviewer in the
story wonders if a critic might not be given a more specific
clue, only to receive for answer:
"My whole lucid effort gives him a clue— every
page and line and letter. ... It governs every
line, it chooses every word, it dots every i, it
places every comma. What I contend that nobody has
ever mentioned in my work is the organ of life."
The clue becomes an obsession with the unhappy young
man, who, like James’s own admirers, tries to find what
Vereker can only liken to a complex pattern in a Persian
carpet--a pattern of v/hich the eye can make nothing intelli
gible until, looked at from a certain point of view, it all
at once reveals itself, Vereker’s critic fails to find the
pattern, and his story ends on the note of his chagrin? James’s
meaning would appear not yet to have been precisely formu
lated either, since his critics have found so many distinct—
and"contradictory— interpretations of his special pattern.4
3 James, The Art of the Novel, pp. 228-229.
4 Dupee's The Question of Henry James represents criti
cal thought from 1880 until the present. This collection of
essays and reviews affords a perfect, example of how many differ
ent things have been seen in James.
Therefore, his present reviewer, following Vereker*s advice
to look into the work itself, may at least feel free to con
tribute one more.
In the slight little piece entitled ’ ’ Glasses,*1 James
uses his method of indirect presentation at yet one more
remove by means of a device typical only of his shorter
stories, which is to employ as narrator a non-interested
observer to whose notice the situation has come In a com
pletely natural manner. For the case In point, an artist who
has painted her portrait describes the predicament of a
beautiful and vain young girl, whose face is her fortune in
a very literal sense. Since she has been left money enough,
upon the death of her parents, to keep her afloat in society
for only a limited time, her life is wholly directed toward
making a great marriage. The artist is vaguely aware of a
curious compassion for her, in excess of any visible motive,
"coloured by the vision of the dire exposure of a being whom
vanity had put so off her guard." A motive Is eventually
supplied by an obscure disease which has long threatened the
girl’s eyesight and which now menaces a suitable engagement
as well. This affliction at last forces the issue. Condemned
to wear disfiguring glasses, the girl resolves to keep them
secret until after her marriage, but at the eleventh hour
breaks down and undeceives her fianc^, who, as she has expect
ed, immediately deserts her. Vftien the artist sees Flora again,
31
some years later, she appears to him to he transfigured hy
recovery, although she is now totally blind. When the
choice had been narrowed to one of her beauty or her sight,
the question was "only of her beauty and of her being seen
and marvelled at.” And through her suffering, her face has
gained a fineness, for the artist, of a value infinitely
beyond its former smooth perfection. By marrying a young man
willing to have her on any conditions, despite having once
been refused as dreary, ugly, and of no importance, she has
protected herself forever from all change and doubt and from
even the need of a reference to her Infirmity. One is left,
naturally, with a sense of the girl's fatuity and folly; yet,
like the artist and the husband, one feels for her a certain
amount of pity, which is somehow raised to respect because
of the courage governing her decisions.
"The Way it Game," James informs us in the preface,
would never have existed but for that love of "a story as
story,” which had always beset and beguiled him.^ The situa
tion is presented by a young woman who has had the happy
thought of bringing together two of her friends on the basis
of a remarkable identity in their tastes, interests, ideas,
even in their features, and more remarkably in their each
having experienced a supernatural vision of a parent at the
5 James, The Art of the Hovel, p. 253.
32
moment of death. The happy thought proves not to be a
success, however, for the projected meeting is repeatedly
hindered by some accident or some caprice of chance. Con
siderably later, the narrator’s engagement to the young man
in question coincides with the announcement of the death of
her other friend’s husband. That woman’s expression of an
obscure fear, once the long-postponed meeting is arranged for
a surety, spreads like a contagion to the narrator, taking
the form, not of jealousy, but the ”dread of jealousy,” on
which she acts by deliberately preventing the meeting. The
other woman’s death, which follows shortly afterward, brings
upon her such pangs of responsibility that she can be conscious
of nothing but a sense of fraud, until, like Flora, she breaks
down and confesses "her iniquity and her miserable reason for
it. ” Her fiancd is much mystified, for the dead woman had
actually come to see him, in order that they ”should, after
all, at last meet,” at what must have been the very time of
her death. In the mind of the narrator this miracle assumes
the proportions of an obsession, which she defines as her
unextinguished jealousy--’ ’ That was the Medusa-mask." That
the dead woman’s spirit comes to him habitually, as she sus
pects, he will neither affirm nor deny; and she feels con
strained to make her decision rest upon her sense of the bond
between the two.
33
They had enjoyed a rare extension of being and
they had caught me up in their flight; only I
couldn’t breathe in such an air and I promptly
asked to be set down. Everything in the facts was
monstrous, and most of all my lucid perception of
them; the only thing allied to nature and truth
was my having to act on that perception.
So she declares to the man she was to have married, 1 1 1 can
renounce you, but I can’t share you; the best of you is hers.”
These are the facts of the story: whether they are to be
taken as the mental aberration of the narrator or accepted on
the strength of their supernatural conviction, James does not
indicate. He merely presents the woman’s perception and her
felt necessity of renunciation.
To "’do something about art,’" as a "human complica
tion and a social stumbling-block," that is to say, the con
flict between art and "the world," said James, struck him as
one of the half-dozen great primary motives.® One of his
most ironic parables of this problem of the artist’s integrity
is the story of luckless Ralph Limbert in "The Next Time." -
Here the narrator, a critle-friend of Limbert's, considers
himself well qualified, "if it takes a failure to catch a
failure," to tell his story. Limbert’s failure is just that
he cannot capture the "tone" of the best-seller in an "age
of trash triumphant," that he cannot stifle his intelligence
and good taste enough to write something which will support
6 Ibid.. p. 79
34
his family. The vividness of the parable is heightened by
the presence of a lady, a relative, who yearns to be, like
Limbert, though of course only once, "an exquisite failure."
Her fancy "to do something artistic" produces only the usual
faithful rush for her article, while poor Limbert, for whom
it becomes imperative that he work only for money, cultivates
the market in vain. He can write nothing but masterpiecesi
Although his friends are eager to relieve the economic
pressure weighing upon him, his stiffness with respect to
loans is invincible. The narrator has his own explanation
of Limbert's obduracy:
He had sacrificed honor and pride, and he had
sacrificed them precisely to the question of money.
He would evidently, should he be able to go on,
have to continue to sacrifice them, but it must be
all in the way to which he had now, as he consider
ed, hardened himself. He had spent years in plotting
for favor, and since on favor he must live it could
only be as a bargain and a price.
*
Building his hopes always on "the next time," he cannot be a
'bommon" writer for trying. The perversity of his effort, even
though heroic, is simply frustrated by the purity of his gift.
Just before death releases him from the hopeless struggle, his
friend feels a sense of marked change in Limbert. He seemed
near the end so full of his subject, it was as if
The voice of the market had suddenly grown faint
and far: he had come back at the last, as people so
often do, to one of the moods, the sincerities of his
prime. ... What had happened, I was afterwards
satisfied, was that he had quite forgotten whether he
generally sold or not. He had merely waked up one
morning in the country of the blue and had stayed
35
there with a good conscience and a great idea. . . .
Derogation is a splendid fragment; it evidently would
have been one of his high successes. I am not pre
pared to say it would have waked up the libraries.
A companion-piece for Limbert's story at once suggests itself
in "The Lesson of the Master,” an earlier chronicle of a
novelist who, possessing genius together with the ability to
write popular novels, chooses to sacrifice his talent for a
life of luxury. But, like Limbert, he is finely aware of
the price he must pay. As he tells his protege, he has got
everything in fact but the "great thing":
"The sense of having done the best— the sense which
is the real life of the artist and the absence of
which is his death, of having drawn from his intellec
tual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden
in it, of having played it as it should be played."
In black and white terms, James thus stated the artist's
dilemma: he must choose either to debase his talent or be
refused a living. And the "superior” cases, the Limberts,
are invariably doomed to failure because they cannot meet the
conditions society imposes upon them or because society will
have none of them no matter how hard they try*
II
The Soft Side is a collection of twelve stories, not
at all strenuous in their "psychology." It will suffice, I
think, to represent half their number in some detail and the
rest by a very brief description.
36
The twist of a famous Maupassant story is reversed in
"Paste,” in that James's pearls, supposed by the giver to be
only paste, turn out to be real, A young man, the son of a
vicar, bestows on his cousin as a memento of his mother the
gift of a necklace of large pearls. Since she had been an
obscure actress before her marriage, he has supposed her
jewels to be "things of the theatre" and without value, but
the lady of the house in which the niece is employed as a
governess recognizes the pearls to be "the real thing." If
they are real, the niece feels she cannot keep them, even
though her cousin, in making the gift, had pronounced her
welcome to any possible gain from it. Knowing the shabbiness
of his character, however, the niece realizes that he is inno
cent of any generosity, the worthlessness of the necklace be
ing the only conclusion that would square with his mother's
"virtue." As her employer puts it, "Where's the difficulty,
if he has such sentiments that he would rather sacrifice the
necklace than admit it, with the presumption it carries with
it, to be genuine? You've only to be silent." But, her
conscience uneasy, the girl feels she must impart her convic
tion of the pearls' value to her cousin. Rather than accept
any unpleasant imputations, he refuses to believe her, keeping
the pearls nevertheless, in order to secure a better opinion
than her own. A letter follows, declaring that the pearls are
"utter paste" and that she has Insulted his mother. When the
necklace turns up again, it is in the hands of the employer,
who, as the little governess remembers "almost luridly," had
had her cousin1s address.
"The Real Right Thing” is a study of the posthumous
influence, again in the form of a ghostly presence which is
not rationalized, of a great artist on his widow and his
biographer. The biographer, an unknown journalist, has
eagerly accepted his commission, swayed more by his intense
admiration of the artist than by the publishers* generous
terms. At first, he regards his sense of Doyne’s personal
presence as the consecration of his work; then, as difficul
ties arise, he begins to question himself: What warrant had
he ever received from Ashton Doyne for so direct and so
familiar an approach? and he recalls how Doyne had always in
sisted that "the artist was what he did— he was nothing else.
When he sees a vision of Doyne on the threshold of his study,
"guarding it," he takes this as a sign that "He*s there to
save his Life. He’s there to be let alone." But it is for
the widow to decide whether the work must be continued or not
Now it is inferred at the outset that Doyne’s relations with
his wife had been a very special chapter, which would present
itself as a delicate one for the biographer. Implying that
the work has been undertaken on her part as a gesture of ex
piation, of atonement, she perceives through the biographer’s
conviction that it is a gesture her husband won’t take, and
consents to do "the real right thing" by giving up the Life.
The triangle in , ! The Great Condition” involves an
American lady of shadowy origins, Mrs. Damerel, and two English
men, Braddle and Chilver by name, both of whom have fallen in
love with her. Chilver leaves the field in favor of his
friend, who has more to offer her, but Braddle develops an
obstructive ’ ‘fixed idea" that there may be something “'off
colour'” about her past. Chilver, who cannot grasp his “liking
her so much as to 'mind' so much, without by the same stroke
liking her enough not to mind at all," advises Braddle to
clear the matter up by proposing. Mrs. Damerel accepts her
hedging suitor, but tells him nothing, though admitting there
Is something. Her condition is that six months after their
marriage she will give him the information he desires, if he
still wants it. Braddle's subsequent disappearance in search
of “invidious 'references'" brings Chilver to feel that his
"point of honour,” not to put himself forward, need be observed
no longer. Some fifteen months after the marriage of Mrs.
Damerel to Chilver, who in his turn did not hesitate to meet
her condition, the suspicious Braddle returns, still "yearn
ing for justification." Mrs. Chilver assures him that he
has simply invented her past, and while Chilver had believed
what he had suggested, nevertheless, she knows her husband's
sacrifice to be his idea: "And his idea is his happiness . ••
which is above all his vision of his own attitude."
"The Given Case" offers a contrast of the ways in which
39
two women work out their respective entanglements* One is
married to a man she cannot respect, the other engaged to a
man she does not love. Each is loved in turn hy another man
who refuses to endure the unstable situation. The married
woman, realizing she had not meant to get in so deep, re
nounces her lover with these words:
"We must do our duty— when once we see it. I
didn’t know--I didn’t understand. But now I do.
It’s when one’s eyes are opened— that the wrong is
wrong. ... I can only follow the highest line.”
But the second woman, who had not meant to become really in
volved either, chooses her lover, "in spite of her fiance*is
trust, her sense of her own baseness.1 1 The last words of the
woman who “pays*’ are simply ’ ’I’m all right,” while the other,
whose fiance must be the loser, says, as she goes to her
lover, ’ ’ Pity me— pity me 1"
’ ’John Delavoy" presents another contrast, this time in
two attitudes toward a dead man of genius, the attitude of
vulgar curiosity and sentimentality and the attitude of
reverent appreciation for his work. The story opposes the
novelist’s sister and a devoted critic to the editor of a
popular magazine, which has a body of subscribers “vast as a
conscript army." The editor at first agrees to publish an
article about John Delavoy, written by the critic, together
with a drawing the sister had done of him, the only one ever
made. After a series of delays, the editor at last tells the
writer that his article won’t do because It happens to deal
40
with the novelist’s special topic, which was sex; and he
urges the girl to contribute instead a "personal” article--
"anecdotes, glimpses, gossip, chat; a picture of his 'home
life,’ domestic habits, diet, dress, arrangements--all his
little ways and little secrets." But Miss Delavoy, consider
ing the criticfs article "fine and true," insists that it be
printed or she will withdraw her picture.
"It’s the only one that tells, about its subject,
anything that's anyone’s business. If you really
want John Delavoy, there he Is. If you don’t want
him, don’t insult him with an evasion and a pretense."
A further complication In the matter is that she and the
editor are supposed to be in love. When he continues adamant
in his refusal to jeopardize his circulation, she takes an
unequivocal stand:
"This Is a metter In which I now care for no
one but my brother--for nothing but his honour.
I stand only on that."
In the end both she and the writer are in a measure defeated,
for the editor prints a reproduction of the drawing, accom
panied "by a page or two, from an anonymous hand, of the
pleasantest, liveliest comment . . . and it was universally
felt that the handsome thing had been done."
No one of the other stories in The Soft Side can be
regarded as more typically Jamesian than "The Abasement of
the Northmores,” which rests on the emotional experience of
a desolate widow, who progresses from a sore rebellion against
circumstances to a calm renunciation of her sense of injury.
Lord Horthmore, a great political figure who had passed
away in mid-career, was shortly followed in death by his old
friend, Warren Hope, on whose ability Northmore's success had
really rested. Hope’s widow, tormented by the injustice of a
situation which in his life had wasted her husband’s genius
and ruined his health and now even denied him any recognition
after death, reflects how John Horthmore had known her first
and wanted to marry her and how he had introduced Warren Hope
to her, the one thing of value he had done for them. In Mrs.
Horthmore * s announced intention to gather in and publish his
late lordship's letters, Mrs. Hope sees only a fresh occasion
for invidious comparisons to the detriment of her husband’s
memory. She finds that Hope had carefully preserved all his
correspondence with Horthmore; and, confronting the pile which
seemed to her simply to ' ’square Itself with insolence,” has
for an hour her temptation to destroy it.
What good it would do her?— was that the question?
It would do her the good that it would make poor
Warren seem tb have been just a little less used and
duped. . . . Well, the temptation was real; but so,
she after a while felt, were other things.
And she at once dispatches the accumulation of letters to
Lady Horthmore. Mrs. Hope in turn conceives the idea of
publishing the letters of her hero, who had been a correspon
dent of wit and genius; but in answer to all her requests,
she receives the three lines of regret she herself had once
thought of conveying to Lady Northmore. Then, the long-
awaited appearance of the great man's correspondence serves
42
chiefly to awaken the derision of intelligent London, De
clared an "abyss of inanity," its failure provides Mrs, Hope
the unhoped-for triumph of her justice; and to cap Northmorefs
exposure she considers for "a terrible week" putting forth
the vapid love-letters he had long ago written to herself.
But before pursuing this revenge, she resolves on a visit to
Lady Horthmore, meaning to ask lightly if she might not have
her turn at editing—
She remained half an hour. . . . She had taken in
what she desired, had sounded what she saw; only, un
expectedly, something had overtaken her more abso
lutely than the hard need she had obeyed or the vin
dictive advantage she had cherished. She had counted
on herself for almost anything but for pity of these
people, yet it was in pity that, at the end of ten
minutes, she felt everything else dissolve. . . . She
neither made nor encountered an allusion to volumes
published or frustrated; and so let her arranged in
quiry die away that when, on separation, she kissed
her wan sister in widowhood, it was not with the kiss
of Judas.
The remaining six stories in The Soft Side involve
alike some form of loss or rejection or renunciation. "Europe"
is a study of three daughters who are kept from a long-planned
visit to Europe by their sense of duty to an old and infirm,
but apparently immortal mother. Although one daughter rebels
and goes, the other two delay until they themselves have
grown too old. "The Tree of knowledge" concerns the "noble
duplicity" of a wife and best friend who devote their lives
to protecting a fatuous artist from knowledge of his own
mediocrity. "The Third Person" follows the efforts of two
43
ancient spinsters to lay the ghost of an ancestor of notorious
reputation; the ladies choose to sacrifice their one tie to
the romantic past in order to gain hack their peace of mind,
"Maud-Evelyn" presents a hero whose obsession with the past
leads him to reject a living fiancee for the ghost of a dead
girl, with whom he "realizes" his courtship, wedding, and
married life. "Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie" has for its hero
ine a silly American rich-girl who refuses a titled suitor
simply because she cannot understand why the European "family
sense" should prevent his mother from making "advances" to
"welcome" her. "The Great Good Place" refers to the Utopian
vision of an artist who dreams of exchanging his "success"
for refuge from the pressures of materialism. This story will
be discussed further in connection with the final statement of
James’s philosophy.
XII
The eleven stories which appeared in 1903 under the
title of The Better Sort were, each one, James explicitly told
Edmund Gosse, the exhibition of a case of experience or con
duct.7 Again a selection of six will be presented with a
measure of fullness. The other five stories may first be
7 Edmund Gosse, Aspects and Impressions (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), p. 45.
44
briefly characterized as representing the point of view ex
pressed by the painter in "The Beldonald Holbein," which was
essentially that of Janies himself: "It’s not my fault If I’m
so put together as often to find more life in situations
obscure and subject to Interpretation than in the gross rattle
of the foreground." The story named above is a study in dis
crimination. Lady Beldonald chooses as companion a woman
whose plainness is meant to serve as a foil to her own beauty.
To her chagrin the artist she had wished to paint her own
portrait prefers for his subject this homely companion, who
has a "character" which distinguishes her as a "living Holbein."
"Broken Wings" is the story of a man and woman who realize late
in life that they have sacrificed their personal happiness to
an illusion of success In art. Admitting their "long game of
bluff," they reconcile their differences and determine to make
the most, together, of whatever time they may have left. "The
Tone of Time" involves a coincidence with James's "sense of
the past" in the tale of a woman artist haunted by the memory
of a man who had deserted her; she unwittingly paints his
portrait for the woman who had been her successful rival.
"Mrs. Medwin" portrays an American pair, socially agreeable
parasites, who, for a price, exert their charm and cleverness
4
to the end of introducing the newly rich into English society.
"The Story in It," a slight piece which James described as
"a picture of life founded on the mere reserves and omissions
45
and suppressions of life,"® simply poses the question of
whether an unrequited love for a person not even aware of the
attachment fulfills "the requirements of a relation.”
If "The Abasement of the Northmores” was concerned
with the renunciation of revenge, "The Two Paces" offers a
perfect companion study in the last refinement of revenge
which a baffled and jealous woman can inflict on her success
ful rival. A jilted woman is asked by the man who has jilted
her to introduce his bride into society. He considers such
a move wise, as well as bold, by assuming her generosity and
placing himself publicly under an obligation to her. With
every display of affection the woman welcomes the bride and
commits her to her own dressmaker. The dressmaker is, of
course, merciless, arraying the young wife in "feathers, frills,
excrescences of silk and lace," while turning out her sponsor
"with a splendour of taste and a sense of effect" calculated
to enhance her revenge. The bride is "lost"; for, as one of
the observers remarks, "Here, you know, that sort of thing's
grave." But the perpetrator of her social ruin is no less
lost, since the situation is presented as the impression of
the man who is interested enough in her to care whether or not
she is a "safe nature"; and the atrocity of her behavior
causes him to betake himself away forever, "for he has 'seen.,M
® James, The Art of the Hovel, p. 286.
46
A rich American, desiring to get rid of an odious
wife and yet desiring also to keep her intended successor
from being besmirched by any part of the business, in order
to provide his wife with grounds for divorce, must needs take
up publicly with someone or other, “The Special Type,*1 that
is, "someone who could easily be squared." He singles out
for the purpose a model, introduced to him by the artist-
narrator. This woman, who falls in love with him "for him
self," is to be "sacrificed," as the artist puts it, "remun
erated," as the American sees it. The real "other woman" in
the case, it becomes clear, is decidedly the model’s inferior
in character. She is conscious only of personal triumph in
keeping her reputation untouched; and, for all her confidence,
hits upon the idea of requesting a portrait of her lover,
that it may provide her with the strongest possible appearance
of holding "his supreme pledge." The divorce finally secured,
the model comes to the artist's studio: she is to ask of the
American whatever she most desires, and she desires a portrait
of him, for remembrance, nothing more. In the way of service
and sacrifice for love, the artist feels, he has known nothing
go beyond her heroism; and because he has been distressed from
the first that her sort should minister to the purely selfish
convenience of such another, he takes it upon himself to offer
the model the very portrait commissioned by the other woman,
despite that lady's indignation, since "'it will seem to make up*
for her having never seen him alone."
47
"Flickerbridge" takes its title from the ancestral
home of an old English family, the American branch of which
has produced a young lady novelist named Addie. When her
fianc^, an artist again, has occasion to be in London, Addie
sends him on a visit to the spinster cousin who still sur
vives in the English backwater. The great note of both
Flickerbridge and its ageing relic, for the artist, is their
time-mellowed charm, their traditional distinction. He
conveys his impression to the old lady thust
"You're in the deep doze of the spell that has
held you for long years, and it would be a shame,
a crime, to wake you up."
His immediate concern is to keep Addie off the scent of her
quaintness, because for Addie she would be "too exactly the
real thing," and for all Addie's friends and editors, con
tributors and readers, as well. Convinced that all the charm
must succumb to her flair for publicity, that the sanctity
of the place will be violated and Miss Wenham brought to "self-
consciousness," the artist, when he can no longer prevent her
joining him there, decides to leave, both Flickerbridge and
Addie. Miss Wenham has made him "see" Addie as never before,
as one who could never understand what he now "knows."
"The Birthplace" deals with another of James's "poor
sensitive gentlemen," an honest and cultivated man "too fine
for his rough fate,"9 who finds himself in the false position
9 Ibid*. P« 248
48
of being a skeptical curator. Appointed caretaker of a
national shrine described as the Mecca of the English-speaking
race, Gedge prepares himself for his office by a tireless,
even pious, study of everything connected with the subject.
The truth he arrives at is that nothing at all is really
known about "Him" of a certainty, which does not, however,
alter the attitude of the public. As Gedge tells his wife,
"It isn't about Him— nothing's about Him. None
of Them care tuppence about Him. The only thing
They care about is this empty shell— or rather, for
it isn’t empty, the extraneous, preposterous stuff
ing of it."
The immense assumption of the soundness of the overgrown
legend exposes Gedge to the ravages of his critical sense,
while his obligation to insist to the uncritical public that
everything was 11'just as it was’” brings the poor man to won
der if he is not about to split into halves, one public and
one private:
One of the halves, or perhaps even, since the
split promised to be rather unequal, one of the quar
ters, was the keeper, the showman, the priest of the
idol; the other piece was the poor unsuccessful honest
man he had always been.
Hedge’s attitude--in a sense rather unusual for a James charac
ter— has nothing to do with degrees and shades: he wants all
or nothing. To assuage the travail of his spirit, he ceases
to retail the groundless legend and tries to impose on his
customers his personal solution:, "’The play’s the thing.*
Let the author alone." But that is just what "They" won’t
49
do, nor let him do. The patron who had secured the position
for Gedge warns him that, if he desires to keep it, he must
absolutely stop giving away the show. Paced with the choice,
his intellectual honesty or his livelihood, the doubter sees
only one way out: he must embrace another, a calculated per
versity; the public does not want the truth, so he will merely
give them the look of it.
There would be more than one fashion of giving
away the show, and wasn’t this perhaps a question
of giving it away by excess? He could dish them
by too much romance as well as by too little. . . .
It was a way like another, at any rate, of reducing
the place to the absurd.
And the dunderheads of pilgrims comprehend not, the show
flourishes as never before, and admiration for Gedge so
abounds that his stipend is doubled; but most important of
all, he has eased his torment by giving up all pretense, that
is, by telling everything but the truth.
In ’ ’ The Papers” James descends to the lower levels of
Fleet Street, where two struggling free-lance journalists,
Maud Blandy and Howard Bight, hawk publicity in the London
phase of the universal notoriety-hunt. These particular two
members of the Daily Press live by catering to ’ ’ the greed,
the great one, the eagerness to figure, the snap at the bait
of publicity”; and their story is a piece of satire on the
manner in which non-entities manage to keep themselves before
the public eye. Take, for instance, the case of Sir A. B. C.
Beadel-Muffet, K. C. B., M. P.—
50
He was universal and ubiquitous, commemorated,
under some rank rubric, on every page of every pub
lic print every day in every year, and as inveterate
.a feature of each issue of any self-respecting sheet
as the name, the date, the tariffed advertisements.
Bight had originally been the agent of this much-paragraphed
personage; and when a situation develops involving Beadel-
Muffet’ s intended marriage to a woman with money he urgently
needs, the sardonic Bight is determined that the irony of
Beadel-Muffetfs fate must be to die as he has lived— "the
Principal Public Person of his time," even though the condi
tion of the marriage be his keeping out of the papers.
Beadel-Muffet has hopes of achieving the unpublicized state
by a disappearance; but when this stratagem utterly fails of
its purpose, his despair apparently drives him to suicide.
Since Bight had inspired most of the suggestion, supposition,
speculation, surrounding Beadel-Muffet’s disappearance, Maud
Blandy considers him responsible for having destroyed that
individual. The logic of her situation, she feels, demands
an immediate rupture with Bight; for she had wanted out of
pity to save what Bight out of irony had been resolved to
ruin. However, perceiving that Bight is really frightened
by what he has done and convinced of his own responsibility
for Beadel-Muffet1s death, she decides to wait, to watch
what may come of his Inward dismay. The wretched Bight con
siders that he has the man’s blood on his hands, morally
speaking, but he nevertheless urges Maud to'follow up her own
51
advantage In the case and seize what publicity value she can
from the woman Beadel-Muffet was to have married, Maud
reflects;
It was beautiful, if she would, but it was odd—
this pressure for her to push at the very hour he
himself had renounced pushing, A part of the whole
sublimity of his attitude, so far as she was con
cerned, it clearly wasj since obviously, he was not
now to profit by anything she might do. She seemed
to see that, as the last service he could render, he
wished to launch her and leave her.
Although the fiancee, when tested, succumbs to “the greed."
Maud refuses to hawk her revelations to the highest bidder;
and, at just the psychological moment, Beadel-Muffet miracu
lously returns. The triumph is hiss he, more than they, Maud
and Bight, proves to have understood the tricks of publicity-
getting. But the moral victory is theirs. "Spiritually
reunited,” they renounce the Papers for something that will
require less cleverness— or less cheapness.
"The Beast in the Jungle" is, at least to my mind, the
most impressive of all these stories. It presents the life
of a man, John Marcher, who from the beginning of his career
has had a prevision of some rare and strange fate reserved
for him:
Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the
twists and turns of the months and years, like a
crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little
whether the crouching beast were destined to slay
him or to be slain. The definite point was the in
evitable spring of the creature. ...
52
The only person to whom Marcher confides his obsession is a
woman, May Bartram, curious and sympathetic and content to
spend her life watching with him; for it is not a matter as
to which he feels he can chooses
One’s in the hands of one’s law— there one is.
As to the form the law will take, the way it will
operate, that’s its own affair.
None of the usual., the normal human experiences appears to
answer his conviction, not even the love of May Bartram; for
as a "man of feeling" he cannot compromise another, he cannot
allow himself "to he accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt."
As they both grow older, she sees that he will never take any
positive step, that he has condemned himself to inaction; and
although herself recognizing the identity of the beast, she
yet draws the line at telling him outright, in order to pre
serve whatever there is of a relationship between them. When
she dies, assuring him that the beast has sprung and begging
him not to seek further illumination, he ceases to feel any
longer in his life the element of suspense, or of a question
of anything still to come. At last, over May Bartram’s grave,
he recognizes his fate— "he had been the man of his time, the
man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened." He
finds himself looking after an unknown mourner with envy; and
thus he comes to read his riddle, for the glimpsed face of the
stranger has revealed the marks of an inconsolable grief.
Then is Marcher's self-absorbed soul overwhelmed, not by what
53
tie has lost, but by all that he has blindly passed by, in
sum, by the tragic futility of his life.
Ho passion had ever touched him, for this was
what passion meant; he had survived and maundered
and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?
With horror he realizes how he has had to see outside of his
life, not learn it within, ’ ’the way a woman was mourned when
she had been loved for herself." May Bartram had offered
him an opportunity to recognize and respond to her love and
thereby the chance to escape his doom.
The escape would have been to love her; then,
then he would have lived. She had lived— who could
say now with what passion?— since she had loved him
for himself; whereas he had never thought of her. . .
but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her
use.
The beast, which he had valued more than anything else in
life, at its hour had sprung, and all to sound the void of
Marcher *s life•
# #
In essence, then, as the occasion for saying again
offers itself, it is not the thing seen in these short
stories that is important, but the attitude of the person
who sees. This does not for a moment reduce him to being a
mere spectator of life. The desire to see everything as in
telligible is by itself not enough; it assumes value only in
bringing experience most lucidly to the touchstone of the
54
person's ideals, or moral vision.
The thing of profit is to have your experience—
to recognize and understand it, and for this almost
any will do, there being surely no absolute ideal
about it beyond getting from it all it has to give.10
John Marcher, by his sterilizing habit of failing to find
any experience good enough, lets everything go. His arid end
discloses the irony of a man who waits for something and
finds that his waiting has made that something nothing, where
as the beauty of May Bartram is just that she gives herself
so to his case. If the motives of the people who figure in
some of the other stories seem inscrutable to us and not even
wholly crystalline to themselves, there is yet never, for them,
a doubt of having had an experience, or, to put it in another
way, the question of refusing experience, which, to use
James's phrase, made the career of John Marcher "a great nega
tive adventure.M ^
The pathetic spectacle of Marcher’s waiting, most un
like Micawber, for something to turn up, represents in these
three volumes of stories James’s one really notable departure
from situations on the hither side of tragedy. The constant
in every case is undeniably the ironic spirit, which asserts
itself as the inevitable accompaniment to the observer’s
10 Ibid., p. 201.
11 Ibid.. p. 247.
impression of whatever fragments of experience or glimpses
of life are offered. And however insubstantial these may
appear, the refinements and hesitations composing them are
none the less intensely felt. James maintained that a human,
a personal "adventure” is not a positive or absolute or in
elastic thing, but just a matter of relation and appreciation,
or as he expressed it, "a name we conveniently give, after
the fact, to any passage, to any situation, that has added
the sharp taste of uncertainty to a quickened sense of life.”
But without a sympathetic view of the particular conditions,
he continued, some of the most "’prodigious *” adventures
“may vulgarly show for nothing."!2 If one is conscious only
of how the ruthless assault of life ignores all fine scruples,
the small, starved subjective satisfactions of James's charac
ters quickly “show for nothing." If, however, the sympathetic
view can be adopted, then James's adventures of integrity
take on heroic proportions quite as impressive as any assumed
by the active triumphs of force and vigor. Nor did James
fail himself to point in this respect the subjective distinc
tion to be made:
The panting pursuit of danger is the pursuit of
life itself, in which danger awaits us possibly at
every step and faces us at every turn. . . . There
are immense and flagrant dangers that are but sordid
12 Ibid.. p. 286
and squalid ones, as we feel, tainting with their
quality the very defiances they provoke; while
there are common and covert ones, that ’look like
nothing1 and that can he hut inwardly and occultly
dealt with, which involve the sharpest hazards to
life and honour and the highest instant decisions
and intrepidities of action. It is an arbitrary
stamp that keeps these latter prosaic and makes the
former heroic. . . .13
15 Ibid.. pp. 32-33.
CHAPTER THREE
THE STORIES OF ’NOUVELLE‘ LENGTH AND THE MINOR NOVELS
I
Through with play-writing in 1895 and reconciled to
the Indifference of the general public, James determined to
concentrate upon fiction for the rest of his life. After
finishing the four short stories in Embarrassments. he began
The Spoils of Poynton, which is the first important example
of his later manner. Cast as a ’nouvelle' — the long short-
story or the short novel--which was his favorite form for the
next five years, it revealed more distinctly than any previ
ous single work the “figure” in his carpet.
He designed this tale to bring out the varying quality
of subjective experience through the attitudes of different
people toward a valuable collection of antiques, the "spoils,”
the "things" of Poynton. It is the struggle to dispose of
this heritage that makes the story and the "things” them
selves that become the touchstone of character. For his In
terpreter, James chose a young girl, FledA Vetch, as the
person in the drama with the finest insight; and he kept
within the limits of her "intenser consciousness" as he had
1 Published first as "The Old Things" in the Atlantic
Monthly. April-October, 1896, it was republished in book
form the next year.
58
never before In bis earlier writings
Fleda's ingratiating stroke, for importance, on
the threshold, had been that she would understand;
and positively, from that moment, the progress and
march of my tale became and remained that of her
understanding.2
The problem reflected through Fleda’s mind is that of a ‘ ’ row1 ’
between Mrs. Gereth and her son Owen over the fine furniture
she has collected during her husband’s lifetime, which, by
English law, upon the husband’s death, passes into the
possession of her son. The mistress of Poynton is ready to
commit any treachery to protect her things from the ugliness
"fundamental and systematic" of her son's fiancee, Mona
Brigstock, "from whose composition the principle of taste
had been extravagantly omitted." Instead of the vulgar Mona,
she desires Owen to marry the discerning Fleda, whose appre
ciation of beauty is on a plane with her own. Divining that
his marriage to Mona will depend on Mona's possessing the
antiques, Mrs. uereth carts them off to a cottage in another
country, informing Fleda that they will be returned to
Poynton when she consents to accept Owen for her husband; for
the scheming mother guesses that her son, alienated by Mona's
bad-tempered obstinacy, has fallen in love with unselfish
Fleda. Fleda's dilemma is four-fold; she has a duty to
Mrs. Gereth, who has given her a home, and whom she pities
2 James, The Art of the Hovel, p. 128.
59
even while she Is shocked by her unscrupulous behavior; she
has promised Owen to do what she can to reinstate him in his
rights; she has resolved that Mona, despite her unfeeling
demand for complete restitution, must not be wronged; and she
has herself fallen in love with Owen. All she need do is tell
Owen to have his solicitor act and Mrs. Gereth would fight
1 1 an heroic defense." Although the case would go against her,
the proceedings would outlast Mona’s patience or Owen's
righteousness. With a formal rupture he would be hers. But
Fleda’s harried conscience puts away the temptation:
She herself, at any rate--it was her own case that
was in question— couldn1t dream of assisting him save
in the sense of their common honor. She could never
lift her finger against Mona. There was something in
her that would make it a shame to her forever to have
owed her happiness to an interference.
Mona must "freely" give him up; and Fleda makes it a point of
honor that Owen keep his pledged word:
"Everything must come from Mona." /Wleda. said to
him/. . . "The great thing is to keep faith. Where
is a man if he doesn't? If he doesn't he may be so
cruel. ... I couldn’t have a hand in that, you
know. . . .” .
Mrs. Gereth, meanwhile, jumps to the conclusion that Mona
has broken off the engagement; and with a false sense of secur
ity based on Fleda’s tacit admission of her love for Owen and
with a fixed idea of inciting her to "go after" him, that
impulsive lady sends all the treasures back to Poynton.
Fleda Is unmoved and insists still that Owen, to be without
reproach, must keep his word, and he submits to the rigid
60
honesty she prescribes; while for the balked Mrs, Gereth the
two of them represent merely "systematic, idiotic perversity,"
and not high honor at all. As Pleda has foreseen, Poynton
restored means Mona's charm and good humor restored, with the
result that the artless Owen forgets Pleda and reverts to his
former infatuated density. After his marriage to Mona, Pleda
gently explains to Mrs. Gereth, "It shows that he was bound
to her by an obligation that, however much he may have wanted
to, he couldn't in any sort of honor break."
Although he does not judge the value of her attitude,
it is clear that James saw Pleda as possessed of a fineness of
sensibility and a beauty of character which the others lacked.
In his preface he granted that every one and every thing in
the story was sterile but the "so thriftily constructed Mona,"
the "awful" Mona, stupid and "all will, without the smallest
leak of force Into taste or tenderness or vision"; Mrs. Gereth
was, with her pride and pluck, "of an admirable fine paste,"
but she "was not intelligent, was only clever"; while Pleda
alone was Intelligent, but "only intelligent, not distinctive
ly able."3 Pleda is the one who "both sees and feels"; the
others "but feel without seeing."^ Her scruples may seem to
the reader quixotic at best, if not unintelligible, or simply
neurotic; but this is really beside James's point, which he
3 Ibid., P. 131.
4 Ibid., p. 129.
61
described as his "well-nigh extravagant insistence on the
free spirit,"® Fleda’s kind of heroism James wanted to pre
sent as the success of "the free spirit" whose moral imagina
tion goes beyond the single-minded practicality of.a Mrs.
Gereth or the insensitive aggressiveness of a Mona Brigstock.
XI
The day after Christmas in 1893 an idea came to James
of a scene between two women, both in love with the same man,
both kept from him by the existence of a child.6 One woman
he designated as his "Good Heroine," later Jean Martel; the
other as his "Bad Heroine," or Rose Armiger. Originally set
down as a three-act play scenario under the title of The
Promise, this material was reworked into a novel in 1896,
immediately after The Spoils of Poynton had been completed;
and James contributed it serially to the Illustrated London
Hews as The Other House.
The story, in briefest outline, has to do with the
predicament of Tony Bream, whose wife on her deathbed, mind
ful of her unhappy experience with a stepmother, binds him to
a promise not to re-marry during the lifetime of their child.
Then he is left, a rather florid man, easily pleasing to
women and easily pleased by them, who has already guilelessly
5 Ibid-.. p. 130.
6 James, notebooks. pp. 138-143.
committed, himself to the interest of two in particular, the
heroines James sketched in his notebooks* In their opposing
attitudes to the child, these two women embody a dramatic
contrast which points up the essential quality in each of
their natures: Jean Martel, the type of goodness, loves the
child because it belongs to the man she cannot marry; Hose
Armiger, the type of potential evil, hates the child for
standing between her and the possibility of marriage with the
father. Losing faith in the strength of Tony’s honor as
against his emotion when she realizes that he is deeply in
love with Jean and feels only compassion for herself, Rose
deliberately murders the child in a way designed to incrimin
ate her rival and remove her from the scene. Tony, however,
assumes the guilt, both to shield Jean and to salve his bad
conscience for having casually encouraged Rose. The truth
is made clear through the agency of Dennis Vidal, a former
fiancd’ with whom Rose has announced a second engagement in
order to avert suspicion from herself. A man whose veracity
Tony had felt 1 1 to be almost incompatible with the flow of
conversation,” Dennis considers himself in honor bound, now,
to do "everything but marry" Rose, apparently for the reason
that he has chosen to reveal the crime of a lady whom he has
sought to marry, even though he is in no way implicated. He
accordingly agrees to take Rose away, to accept full respon
sibility for her, if the family doctor will only hush up the
63
ugly matter of murder, which solution that individual eagerly
invites as protecting Tony and Jean from unfortunate publicity.
Ho decorous intellectual tragedy, The Other House is
unique among James’s works as a violent melodrama of jealousy
and crime. Pelham Edgar’s apt comment that it reads like an
Ibsen play with Jamesian amplifications7 should be enlarged
by the observation that 1893 was the year of a special Ibsen
season in London and that James’s account of Hedda Gabler as
interpreted by Elizabeth Robins precisely fits his conception
of Rose:
Her motives are just her passions. . . . She is
infinitely perverse . • . one isn’t so sure she is
wicked and by no means sure . . . that she is dis
agreeable. She is various and sinuous ... compli
cated and natural; she suffers, she struggles, she
is human, and by that fact exposed to a dozen
different interpretations.8
If James began with the moral crisis of the hero and the
problem of an irksome vow to a dying wife, he quickly shifted
his emphasis to the sinister figure of his "Bad Heroine,1 '
whose strong compulsions set her entirely apart from his
other villainesses, although she may be said to foreshadow
the infinitely more complex Kate Croy of The Wings of the Dova»
The tragic note in the character of this woman of charm and
intelligence is struck by a figure in the drama, who says of
7 Pelham Edgar, Henry James: Man and Author (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927), p. 197.
®' Cited by Leon Edel in his introduction to The Other
House (Hew lork: New Directions, 1947), p. xv.
64
her,
’ ’Life is somehow becoming to her. Everyone’s
immensely struck with her. She only needs to get
what she wants.”
And when her passion for Tony Bream becomes practically a
mania, she is incapable of meeting its frustration, of recog
nizing any obstacle as final. After her crime, however, the
force of the Jamesian insight catches up with her, as well
as the law of retribution her creator firmly believed in,
though not in the form of any penalty administered by a
court of justice so much as in the abyss of despair suffered
by the spirit. Rose’s last words are theses
"I’ve failed, but I did what I could. It was all
that I saw— it was all that was left me. It took
hold of me, it possessed me: it was the last gleam
of a chance. . . . But I don't defend myself— I’m
face to face with it forever. ..."
Ill
lighat Maisie Knew (1897) is the lamentable history of
a sadly-wronged little girl, whose parents have been separ
ated after resounding proceedings in the divorce court. The
result of litigation to determine the custody of the child
is an agreement that she shall divide her year between her
mother and father. Ida and Beale Farange are impossible
persons of incredibly abandoned conduct, who want their
daughter solely "for the harm they could, with her uncon
scious aid, do each other"; and alternately assured of the
evil of the one by the other, Maisie is used by the selfish
pair, capriciously fondled or neglected, as the instrument of
their mutual spite* Perceiving herself, at no more than the
age of six or seven, to be Ma centre of hatred and messenger
of insult,” Maisie's sense of her own career early takes refuge
in an "unformulated fatalism,” She receives affection for
the first time in her life from a beautiful governess, Miss
Overmore, employed by her mother. Unfortunately, Miss Over-
more follows Maisie to the home of her father, who returns
the favor bestowed on his child, establishes the young woman
as his mistress, and ultimately marries her, Maisie’s mother,
in the meanwhile, unites herself to the good-natured Sir
Claude, a man with a vocation for the family life which his
wife does not encourage. He becomes more attached to the
forlorn Maisie than either of her real parents, so completely
won over is he by the child's "extraordinary character"; and
Maisie adores him. Unfortunately, also, just because of her
defaulting parents, Sir Claude and the new Mrs, Farange are
forced to assume responsibility for her,.with the result that
the child becomes a center and pretext for a fresh system of
misbehavior on their part. Eventually, Farange "bolts" tb
America with a third woman; Ida "bolts” to South Africa with
a third man; and Mrs, Farange and Sir Claude find themselves
with the problem of having the girl between them in their
adulterous relation, A third person involved at this stage
66
is Maisie1s illiterate, frumpy, "but devoted and absolutely
respectable old governess, Mrs. Wix, who labors heroically
to save Sir Claude’s soul and inspire Maisie with a ’ ’ moral
sense." Since the English law condemns Sir Claude’s connec
tion with the former Miss Overmore to remain irregular, it
is his contention that they must either cease to be irregular
or cease to be parental; but unable himself to make a sacri
fice, he can only offer Maisie a choice— her wonderful step
parents, as they are, or the shabby Mrs. Wix. After some
amazing conversations in which the child and the scandalized
adult follow by ingenious and decorous indirection the crude
and indecorous turnings of the intrigue, Maisie weighs her
obscure grasp of Mrs. Wix’s indignation with her vague sense
of Sir Claude's weakness, and with wrenching of the heart
strings chooses to go with Mrs. Wix.
The one register of the whole complexity of Maisie*s
history, as James has pointed out, is the confused and obscure
notation of it made by her "small expanding consciousness."9
It was part of the essence of the thing, he stressed in capi
tals, that EVERYTHING TAKES PLACE BEFORE MAISIE;10 but he
also recognized, despite her poignant belief in her own
knowingness, that Maisie’s harrowing experience must be a
9 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 142.
10 James, Notebooks, p. 283.
67
matter of what she saw, not of what she might he conceived
to have understood. Her young imagination and intelligence
are constantly directed to study the meaning of the tawdry
arrangements of which she is the ironic center, although she
is obviously not old enough, however precocious, to under
stand passions which are too much even for her elders* James
was captivated by his vision of the child1s charm and inno
cence. He saw her as saved froipfche unlovely total of what
she knew by her naivete and simplicity; he saw as the very
principle of Maisie’s appeal an undestroyed freshness that
he described as a “vivacity of intelligence by which she in
deed does vibrate in the infected air, indeed does flourish
in her immoral world,1 1 H
Loyal to the good-hearted and the disreputable alike,
she has, like a true Jamesian child, early learned the com
plexity of duty. For instance, when Sir Claude surprises
her in an expression of dread at going to her father, she
feels “the full hot rush of an emotion more mature than any
she had yet known. It consisted of an odd unexpected sname
at placing in an inferior light, to so perfect a gentleman
and so charming a person as Sir Claude, so very near a rela
tive as Mr. Farange“; and she makes a brave effort to cover
up her slip by insisting that she can manage him! As for Sir
11 James, The Art of the Hovel, p. 149.
68
Claude, "It was as if he had caught his first glimpse of her
sense of responsibility.” Nevertheless, Maisie's is the
mind of a child, who apprehends neither morality nor immoral
ity, but only kindness or cruelty, vulgarity or refinement.
In view of her essential Innocence, even if it is “so satur
ated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy," hers is
hardly the ’ ’ moral sense" of Mrs. Wix and Sir Claude. Having
grown up among things as to which her foremost knowledge is
that she must never asx about them, she is expected to know,
by inspiration It would seem, that the conventions of which
she has heard only in their transgression, are necessary to
the moral life. Rather is her good will and her conception
of duty to be taken as the answer of the responsible child
in her to the irresponsible child in each of her parents and
their various connections.
XV
The action of the minor story called In the Cage (1898)
is another ’ ’subjective adventure," this time of a little
telegraphist employed in a Mayfair grocery store. The
questlbn James posed himself was
... what it might 'mean, ' wherever the admirable
service was installed, for the confined and cramped
and yet considerably tutored young officials of
either sex to be made so free, intellectually, of a
range of experience otherwise quite closed to t h e m .12
12 ibid.. p. 154.
69
The post-office cleric of his story employs her curiosity on
the lives of her customers, using as clues the telegrams they
convey to her; for it is in the imagined love affairs of the
leisure class that she finds escape from her poverty, the
monotony of her work, and her dull engagement to Mr. Mudge,
a grocer's assistant;. Her memory of a telegram sent weeks
before saves the dimly outlined situation of the favored
subject of her fantasies, a patron who, it appears, is in
volved with a married woman in an unsavory scandal. This
episode destroys for her the romance of her position and brings
her to an explicit acceptance of her own bleak reality:
... what our heroine saw and felt for in the
whole business was the vivid reflexion of her own
dreams and delusions and her own return to reality.
Reality, for the poor things they both were, /she and
her grocerj could only be ugliness and obscurity,
could never be the escape, the rise.
And her indecision at an end, she proceeds to exchange leisured
Mayfair for Mr. Mudge*a prosaic, commercial Chalk Farm.
V
In his notebooks under the date of January 12, 1895,
James recorded the origin of The Turn of the Screw in an
anecdote told him by Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of
Canterbury.1^ * It was a story of young children left to the
^ James, notebooks. pp. 178-179. The tale appeared
first in Collier* s Weekly. February 5-April 16, 1898 and was
reprinted In The Two Magics. 1898.
70
care of servants who had corrupted them in life and who had
returned after death with a design of "getting hold" of them.
The details were obscure, but from this sinister sketch James
built the most famous of his supernatural stories, in a sense
an extension of the theme of What Maisie Knew. James wished
to give the impression of the communication to the children
of the most infernal imaginable evil, taking his influences
from the realm of the ghostly rather than from the realm of
the living and factual.14
In his version of the anecdote, a young sund untried
governess, (who is the narrator), is engaged by the uncle cf
two orphaned children to take up her duties at his remote
country-house in Essex, with the understanding that she must
never trouble him by any complaints or difficulties. Quite
succumbing to his charm, she secretly hopes to please him by
her discretion and good sense, though she feels herself even
more moved by the loveliness and innocence of the children
and by the appeal of their helplessness. The information
that immediately shocks her is that Miles, a boy of scarce
ten, has been expelled from his school, for the reason only
that he is "an injury to others," a reason he later supple
ments with a confession that he had "said things" of a nature
to bring the authorities to turn him out. There follows for
14 James, Letters. I, 301.
71
the governess a series of gruesome spectral visitations,
which are identified by the housekeeper as the ghosts of a
dead valet, Feter Quint, and a former governess, Miss Jessel,
also dead. The housekeeper testifies from experience to the
depravity of the pair in life and hints that they had con
taminated the children. The governess, inspired by "a sudden
vibration of duty and courage," even at first by "a joy in
the flight of heroism" the occasion seems to demand, thinks
she can protect her charges by exposing herself as a screen
against the two sinister figures. When, however, she develops
a suspicion that the children communicate with the ghosts of
the dead as a matter of habit, she despairs of "their more
than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness" as
a game and a fraud. On the verge of flight, she sees her
terror dissolve before a sense of duty, which convinces her
that the ordeal, after all, requires "only another turn of the
screw of ordinary human virtue." Although failing to save
the girl, she considers herself to have won the battle for
Miles; but at the very moment of her victory, when the shadow
of Quint appears for the last time, the boy dies of terror.
In 1924 Edna Kenton expressed her belief that James’s
main concern in The Turn of the Screw was the characteriza
tion of the governess and that the ghosts and the children
were "only exquisite dramatizations of her little personal
mystery."15 This, mere suggestion inspired Edmund Wilson,
three years later, to develop a Freudian hypothesis, which
regarded the tale as primarily a study of hallucination
arising from sexual repression.16 The tragic close was taken
as proof of the governess's complete loss of reason to a
dementia which made the children her innocent victims.
Wilson's theory was first questioned in 1941 by Nathan
Bryllion Fagin in the light of internal evidence and James's
own critical comments on the story.1,7 Xn more recent years
a number of literary critics, notably A. J. A. Waldock,
Robert B. Heilman, E. E. Stoll, and Glenn A. Reed, have
followed Mr. B'agin's lead in showing the Freudian case to be
15 Edna Renton, "Henry James to the Ruminant Reader:
The Turn of the Screw.1 1 The Arts. 6:245-255, November, 1924.
Edmund Wilson, ’ ’ The Exploration of James,1 ' New
Republic. 50:112-113, March 16, 1927. A further study was
made by Wilson in a later essay, "The Ambiguity of Henry
James,1 ' appearing in Hound and Horn. 7:385-406, April-May,
1934; and this essay was elaborated still again in The Triple
Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Fress, 1938;, pp. 122-
164. Wilson has since retracted to some extent, but without
going into any detail: "There are, however, points in the
story which are difficult to explain on this theory, and it
is probable that James . . . was unconscious of having raised
something more frightening than the ghosts he had contemplated.
See "A Treatise on Horror," The New Yorker. 20:72-77, May 27,
1944.
1? Nathan Bryllion Fagin, "Another Reading of The Turn
of the Screw." Modern Language Notes. 56:196-202, March, 1941.
73
quite untenable.-1 -®
These critics are agreed that the evil in The Turn of
the Screw is objective in nature, existing outside the mind
of the governess. To support this contention, two main facts
of internal evidence are invariably cited: from the governess's
description of the ghosts, Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper, in
stantly recognizes and names Peter Quint and Miss Jessel,
neither of whom the governess has ever seen or heard of before;
and Mrs. Grose, although she does not herself see the ghosts,
verifies from experience the governess's intuitions with
respect to the depraved character of the pair in life and their
corrupting influence on the children. Heilman, who has given
us the most thorough study of the tale, makes a special point
of the children’s conduct as proving their exposure to evil.
He recalls the vulgarity of Flora's language, I"horrors” Mrs.
Grose calls what she has heard), the fact of the dismissal of
Miles from school, and the refusal of both to acknowledge the
ghosts, which suggests “a sinisterly mature concealment of evil.*’ !®
1® A. J. A. Waldock, "Mr. Edmund Wilson and The Turn of
the Screw." Modern Language Notes. 62:331-334, May, 1947; .Robert
B. Heilman, nThe Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw. ”
Modern Language Notes. 62:433-445, November, 1947; E. E. Stoll,
* ’Symbol ism in Coleridge.1 ’ PMLA. 63:214-233, March, 1948; Glenn
A. Reed, "Another Turn of James's ’The Turn of the Screw,'"
American Literature. 20:413-423, January, 1949. (Mr. Reed’s
article was actually written, he tells us, before the papers
by Waldock, Heilman, and Stoll appeared.)
19 Heilman, Ibid.. pp. 438-441.
74
The Freudian reading of The Turn of the Screw, in
Heilman's words, “does violence not only to the story hut
also to the Preface,"20 where James speaks continually of the
ghosts as if they were objective manifestations. He refers
to them as entities, as “agents in fact,*1 whose villainy of
motive is of the essence; and he makes it quite clear that
they are intended to haunt the children, not the governess;
What, in the last analysis, had I to give the
sense of? Of their being, the haunting pair, capa
ble, as the phrase is, of everything— that is of
exerting, in respect to the children, the very worst
action small victims so conditioned might be con
ceived as subject to.21
James also explains the strategy behind the way in which he
chose to present this evil to the reader's imagination;
Only make the reader‘s general vision of evil
intense enough. . . and his own experience, his own
imagination, his own sympathy (with the children)
and horror (of their false friends) will supply him
quite sufficiently with the particulars. Make him
think the evil, make him think it for himself, and
you are released from weak specifications.22
The role of the governess in the story is another of the
artistic problems James examines in his preface. It was
enough of an aesthetic task, he says, to present the "young
woman's keeping crystalline her record of so many intense
2° Ibid., p. 435.
21 James, The Art of the Hovel, pp. 175-176.
22 Ibid.. p. 176.
75
anomalies and obscurities--by which X don’t mean of course
her explanation of them, a different matter”; and he adds
flatly that he saw no way "to exhibit her in relations other
than those; one of which, precisely, would have been her
relation to her own nature*"*® This comment, as Heilman
emphasizes, serves to distinguish two phases of the material
presented through the governess--the phenomena she has ob
served, and her commentary upon them.2^ When the story first
appeared, one might also add, James explicitly wrote to H. (*.
Wells that singleness of effect being imperative in the
grotesque business, he had had to rule out "subjective com
plications" of her own and keep her impersonal "save for the
most obvious and indispensable little note of neatness, firm
ness, and courage— without which she wouldn't have had her
data."2® Both Heilman and Reed consider that James intro
duced her devotion to the children’s uncle for a purely techni
cal reason, that is, to motivate her acceptance of the posi
tion and to explain her refusal to consult him in emergency.26
Of the critics who seek an interpretation to replace
23 Ibid.. pp. 173-174.
2^ Heilman, oj>. eit.. p. 434.
25 James, Letters. I, 299.
26 Heilman, o£. cit.. p. 436; Reed, op. cit.. p. 418.
the Freudian theory, Fagin sees The Turn of the Screw as "a
simple allegory of the type which fascinated Hawthorne” and
’ ’ which dramatizes the conflict between Good and E v i l ."27
Stoll and Reed are both willing to accept Jamesfs own classi
fication of the story as "a fairy-tale pure and simple,”2®
containing, Reed explains, "objective, pictorial evil— evil
that is in the world for no good reason and that lures inno
cent victims to their doom,”29 Heilman, in a later study
of "'The Turn of the Screw' as Poem" finds beneath its action-
surface, much as Fagin did, the oldest of themes— the struggle
of evil to possess the human soul. The children are sym
bolic just as the ghosts are symbolics "Man and woman . , .
caught even before the first hint of maturity • . . and shown
to have within them all the seeds— possible of full growth
even now— of their own destruction."^l Heilman adds that the
evil is presented by James both as agent (the demons) and as
effect (the transformation in the once fresh and beautiful and
innocent children).32 The subject, in short, as this critic
interprets it, is the Christian dualism of good and evil. By
27 Fagin, og. cit.. pp. 199-200,
2® James, The Art of the Hovel, p. 171.
29
Stoll, og. cit.. p. 229; Reed, og. cit., p. 422.
30 Robert B. Heilman, 1 1 'The Turn of the Screw' as Poem,"
University of Kansas City Review. 14:277-289, Summer, 1948.
51 Ibid.. p. 280.
32 Ibid., p. 284.
77
way of summary it is difficult to say more than that The Turn
of the Screw has meant many things to many men. What appears
to he unmistakable is that James has hit upon some fundamen
tal truth of human experience which each generation of critics
wishes to restate in its own terms.
VI
Originally written as a one-act play, Covering End
was first printed as a story in The Two Magics in 1898. Of
far less merit than The Turn of the Screw, it is a slight
romantic comedy, in which certain peculiarly Jamesian motives
are all mixed up with the exigencies of drama. The heroine
is a rich American widow, Mrs. Gracedew, whose imagination
has been kindled by the history attached to an old English
country-house she has crossed the Atlantic to see. Covering
End, she finds, is heavily mortgaged to a "vulgar" and
"dreadful" Mr. Prodmore. The heir, a radical democrat with
out money, must either lose his estate or meet Frodmore's
conditions, which are that he turn his political coat, stand
for Parliament as a Tory, and make Frodmore’s daughter his
wife, that is, give her his old and valued name. The fire
brand, Captain Yule, is not inclined long to deliberate the
choice offered him, for it is his conviction that "One's
'human home' is all very well, but the rest of one's humanity
is betterJ1 1 He has not reckoned, however, with the inter
ference of Mrs. Graeedew, whose passion for tradition is as
strong as his for reform. She argues that he has a more
imperative duty for looking "backward than for looking forward,
since the beauty that the ages have slowly wrought is a
precious trust, one not to be sacrificed to parties and pro
grams of uncertain issue and merely transient significance.
Yule, described as a young man "in whom sensibility had been
recklessly cultivated,” succumbs about equally to her view
point and her charm, and she herself is as captivated by him
as by his home; but the dominating consideration must be their
”power to preserve,” now become a mutual responsibility and a
question of honor,--and "one1s honour is everything in life.”
Yule accordingly agrees to accept Prodmore’s odious conditions
Mrs. Graeedew prepares to leave him to his "ancient glory”
and his “strict duty.1 1 But the situation, at this point, is
happily resolved (if after a flimsily contrived fashion) when
Prodmore’s dilatory daughter refuses to marry Yule because,
simply enough, she cares for someone else. With this know
ledge the charming widow succeeds in buying off the father
and winning for herself both Covering End and its heir, while
Yule presumably may now look forward to performing his duty
without abjuring his principles.
VII
The Awkward Age (1899) has In a sense the Jane Austen
motif, the problem of getting married. Its heroine is a
young girl of twenty, Nanda Brookenham, whose age entitles
her to “come downstairs” from the schoolroom to her mother’s
drawing-room. Mrs. Brookenham is the-presiding genius of a
sophisticated social group accustomed to a perfect freedom of
talk, in which moral tone is conspicuous by its absence and
which the conventional world therefore looks upon as unde
sirable for the unformed mind. The question, then, becomes
one of whether conversation shall be sacrificed to the young
girl, or the young girl to the conversation, at least until
an early and advantageous marriage can be arranged. Now
Nanda cannot be said to have led the sheltered life; in such
a house as her mother’s she has been "exposed” to all kinds
of information and has long since arrived at a state of en
lightenment concerning the miasmal society on which her mother
thrives. Consequently, no one is really discomfited by her
intrusion or makes much of an effort to adapt his style to ner
inexperience, with tne one exception of Mr. Longdon, a gentle
man of the old school of manners, who once loved Nanda*s grand
mother. Learning that Nanda is in love with Vanderbank, an
habitud of the Brookenham drawing-room, and that she attracts
him, Mr. Longdon discreetly proposes to settle a large sum
of money on the girl, in the hope of moving Vanderbank to
marry her and take her out of her mother’s sphere of influence
Vanderbank, however, scruples to accept his terms, not be
cause they are in the nature of a bribe, but because he sees
80
Nanda as "spoiled" for him by her exposure. Another young
man, the wealthy Mitchett, who has neither family nor looks
but a character both fine and generous, is Mrs. Brookenham*s
choice for her daughter, a choice intended to keep Vanderbank
as her own admirer. Since Nanda cannot return Mitchett*s
love, in spite of her motner’s pressure, he is capaole of
removing himself from the field so as not to represent, for
the girl, any real alternative to the hesitating Vanderbank.
Gn Nanda*s appeal, he marries a young friend, known as little
Aggie, who has been conventionally reared and who, after her
marriage, turns into a vulgar little trollop. Nanda had hoped
that Mitchett could "save" little Aggie from the realities of
their world, that is, from being sacrificed in the marriage
market to a ruinous situation. As it develops, only Mitchett*s
happiness is sacrificed, and the responsible Nanda is left
with his case on her hands. Leaving her mother's drawing-room
much a3 she found it, she decides to give up her family, and
all hope of Vanderbank, and go with Mr. Longdon, presumably
to be adopted by him; and the last we hear of them, they are
"anxious about Mitehy," who is simply not provided for in the
scheme of things.
The like of Mitchett is rarely seen in James. In his
make-up goodness and vulgarity are combined, but his goodness
quite overrides his lack of taste; and beside him Vanderbank,
for all his charm and cleverness, shows for little more than
a superior variety of cad. Nanda is her mother's daughter in
her complete self-possession and her social intelligence, yet,
despite her training, she is essentially hign-minded and out
of place in Mrs. Brookenham's circle of philanderers and
cheats. It is, no doubt, just because of her clear-sighted
perception that James describes her as being "almost un
naturally grave.” Mrs. Brookenham, of course, is the figure
who underscores the moral ugliness of this corner of society.
Her really immense possession of charm and grace Is utterly
darkened by a misapplied intelligence. It is enough to learn
of her that “the great business she does Is in husbands and
wives," that her great amusement is to consult with her
friends about their marital troubles and to prescribe suitable
affairs and liaisons for them. (Her own husband, as someone
in the story observes, "figures in her drawing-room only as
one of those queer extinguishers of fire in the corridors of
hotels.")
The subtlety with which these various characters scru
tinize each other often loses itself In excess, considering
the motives in question; and James granted himself that the
elements of The Aw&ward Age were none of the largest, nor
hardly strong enough to bear the weight of a moral tragedy.33
He had in view simply "a certain special social (highly
'modern' and actual) London group and type and tone" which
33 James, Letters. I, 293.
82
seemed to him to lend themselves "to an ironic--lightly and
simply ironic{--treatment";34 an£ this treatment took the
form of an experiment with direct dramatic technique. r fhus
the novel progresses through a series of scenes and dialogues
without the aid of any unifying consciousness. Its subject
is the behavior of the members of the London group, who are
to be judged solely by appearances, with no access given to
their inner intention. As James knew, their appearances
would speak sufficiently for them.
Besides offering a general picture of behavior in a
special social scene, the novel also presents a focal con
trast in two policies with regard to the "question of bringing
girls forward or not." Nanda herself realizes that her
mother is literally throwing her into the world, though she
admits that there never was a time when she did not know
"something or other." Mrs. Brookenham argues that men want
"smart, safe, sensible Inglish girls," not "mechanical dolls";
her affair is the modern girl, "the product of our hard London
facts, and of her inevitable consciousness of them, just; as
they are." Opposed to this line is little Aggie‘s aunt, the
Duchess, whose charge has been "deliberately prepared for
consumption," ostensibly by being kept a "little girl" until
married. Mr. Longdon's observation of the two unfortunates
34 Ibid.. I, 333.
83
i s illuminating s
Both the girls struck him as lambs with the great
shambles of life in their future; but while one, with
its neck In a pink ribbon, had no consciousness but
that of being fed from the hand with the small sweet
biscuit of unobjectionable knowledge, the other
struggled with instincts and forebodings, with uhe
suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent, in
the flowery fields, of blood.
As we watch little Aggie meet the hard London facts by changing
overnight from a child of six to a harridan of forty, Mrs.
Brookenham easily wins the decision by virtue of Nanda's ex
pert handling of various social problems, (with the excep
tion of Mltchy's case, which was nobly enough prefigured).
But If the Duchess is to be blamed for her mercenary policy,
Mrs. Brookenham deserves little credit for an attitude chief
ly based upon "intellectual habits'* of indifference and cyni
cism. Nanda anyway has the edge on little Aggie in that
Henry James, and not her mother at all, fashioned her with
loving care as one of his "pure in heart."
VIII
In August of 1900, Janies wrote to William Dean Howells
that he had just finished a fine flight into the high fan
tastic.3^ Two years later he wrote again to Howells that The
Sacred Fount was, more than anything else, a monument to his
35 Ibid.. I, 356.
84
superstition about not finishing— "for finishing's and for
the precedent's sake*— what he began.3® If he thus depre
cated the novel after the fact, and to the extent of refusing
it a place in the New York edition, The Sacred Fount remains
a work in which an important aspect of James’s philosophy
of fiction may be examined.
The novel develops the thesis that youth and cleverness
may be transmitted from one person to another through the
sacred fount of love.®^ The problem of the narrator, a novel
ist, is to discover, during the course of a weekend house-
party, by observing in the light of his theory who has had to
"pay" for another's extra allowance of time and wit, what
liaisons exist among his fellow guests; and the novel becomes
the record of the writer1s inquiry into the relations of two
couples. He has no personal interest in either of the love
affairs; he is concerned only with proving the verity of his
hypothesis. Just as he has sorted out the people who gain and
the people who lose by his theory, one of the ladies involved,
a married woman, in the interest of her own security devises
56 Ibid.. I, 409.
3V James, Notebooks. pp. 150-151. The story is based
on an idea suggested by Stopford Brooke "of the young man who
marries an older woman and who has the effect on her of mak
ing her younger and still younger, while he himself becomes
her age." And James enlarged the notion: "Mightn't this be
altered (perhaps) to the idea of cleverness and stupidity?
A clever woman marries a deadly dull man,and loses and loses
her wit as he shows more and more* Or the idea of a liaison,
suspected, but of which there is no proof but this transfusion
of some idiosyncracy of one narty to the being of the other—
this exchange or conversion?
85
a protective hypothesis, which inculpates another woman.
Considering himself "morally responsible” for the exposure
of an innocent person, he sacrifices his supposition, or
rather his convictions now, to an agreement with Mrs.
Brissenden to pursue the matter no further. His intention,
of course, never had been to interfere, but merely to bring
her who had questioned his theory to recognize and grant his
astuteness. He has, however, as Blackmur observes, come too
close to perfecting life in his fiction for the peace of
Mrs. Brissenden*s nerves.*5® She therefore resorts to a
subterfuge supported by a lie: she protests that she is at
one with her husband and has never been anything else, and
she admits no longer to believe the other woman "in it.”
The writer believes none of this, but nevertheless declares
himself vanquished and his elaborate "palace of thought"
destroyed. According to Blackmur, he “can do no more with
*ZQ
these monsters he has created; life has taken them over.
Thus far, Blackmur follows Wilson Follett, who wrote
an article in 1936 which he called "Henry James's Portrait
of Henry James."40 Follett interpreted The Sacred Fount as
38 Richard P. Blackmur, "The Sacred Fount.u Kenyon
Review, 4:349, Autumn, 1942.
■£££• elt.
40 ifjiison Follett, "Henry James's Portrait of Henry
James," Hew York Times Book Review, 41:2, August 23, 1936.
James's parable of the novelist who works at his vision only
to find that at the moment of its clarification, life in
trudes to shatter his palace of thought.4^ Blackmur, at this
point, extends his analysis to consider that what James has
stood for all along has been the sense of conscience. Mrs.
Brissenden, confronted with his findings, declares that he is
mad; she will have no more to do with him. But even in her
insistence, she acts under his influence; even in denying him,
and all he stands for, Blackmur stresses, "she has at least
to pretend to modify her life according to his word": "he has
forced her to make at least the sign of reparation for tne
actually irreparable injury done to Mrs. Server and to her
own husband.*'42 The principle of the story, as Blackmur then
states it, is "the projected image of conscience, either good
conscience, or bad conscience, either succeeding or failing
to join imagination and life at a focal moment."4®
41 Adeline R. TIntner in "The Spoils of Henry James,"
PMLA. 61:239-251, March, 1946, agrees in essence with Follett1
conclusions, the moral being, in her words, that "only through
the consciousness of one of the participants of the intrigue
itself can the writer reach the springs, 'the sacred fount,*
of human behavior. Edward Sackville-West in "The Sacred Fount
Mew Statesman and Nation. 34:273, October 4, 1947, proceeding
along somewhat the same lines, sums up the story as an inquiry
into the cost of the tensions resulting from the struggle of
the mind "to conceal--and yet preserve--emotion below the un
broken urbanity of the social surface."
42 Blackmur, op. cit.. p. 351.
43 IBid., P« 352.
87
On the level of "action” alope, The Sacred Fount
embodies a defense of the novelist's method which will re
ward the reader's attention, Mrs. Brissenden does not see
that the narrator's only end is disinterested understanding,
that the revel of curiosity in which he indulges is not meant
to be offensive. In an early conversation with an artist-
friend the principles which are to govern his analytical
procedure are made clear:
”We ought to remember * • .that success in such
an inquiry may perhaps be more embarrassing than
failure. To nose about for a relation that a lady
has her reasons for keeping secret— "
”Is made not only quite inoffensive, I hold,"— he
immediately took me up— "but positively honorable, by
being confined to psychologic evidence,”
I wondered a little. "Honorable to whom?”
"Why, to the investigator. Resting on the kind
of signs that the game takes account of when fairly
played— resting on psychologic signs alone, it's a
high application of intelligence. What's Ignoble is
the detective and the keyhole."
James, then, felt that the artist was justified in applying
his intelligence and imagination to the psychological signs
available to any observer. Hypotheses could be set-up, and
by observation partly verified, partly discarded; yet they
could not be expected to lead to any absolute formula for
human relationships. The Sacred Fount is ambiguous with an
ambiguity calculated to leave just the baffled impression
such a method would give rise to in real life. William Lyon
88
Phelps believed that James meant this novel as an Apologia,
with its text summed up in a single sentences "For real
excitement there are no such adventures as intellectual ones."44
* 4 5 -
If one were given to intellectual adventures, like the
observer in The Sacred Fount. it was through a common fault
of minds "for which the vision of life is an obsession. " As
he said, echoing his creator, the impulse to analysis came
always from having the question put to one, with an irresisti
ble intensity, of what had happened to human beings under some
observed pressure.
In the fiction James wrote between 1896 and 1901, it
is most frequently someone’s experience of evil that forms
the basis for a study of character. The interest of What
Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age derives from the power of
the young heroines to resist the assault of their ugly en
vironment. "Keeping the torch of virtue alive in an air
tending infinitely to smother it," he said of Maisie, (or he
might have said of Kanda), she draws "some stray fragranee of
an Ideal across the scent of selfishness, by sowing on barren
strands, through the mere fact of presence, the seed of the
44 william Lyon Phelps, "Henry James," Yale Review,
n.s. 5:797, July, 1916.
89
moral life.Botn girls are bestowed upon parents who
have the gift, if any ever had it, of touching nothing but
to make it vulgar, yet amidst the scandals of Mrs. Brookenham1s
circle and through the series of divorces and liaisons of
the Faranges, as worthless a crew as James ever brought to
gether, Nanda and Maisie somehow remain unscathed, a fact
that is eloquent as to the quality of the stuff of which they
are so illogically made. Saved by a “sense of freedom to
make things out for herself,” each of these young persons in
the end chooses to leave her disreputable relations. For the
altogether destructive nature of the evil in The Turn of the
Screw. James did not attempt a rational explanation. The
story is still profoundly moral, involving as it does the
moral welfare of the young. Referring to the long-neglected
state of Miles and Flora, James wrote of "the exposure indeed,
the helpless plasticity of childhood that isn't dear or
A £S
sacred to somebody. That was my little tragedy. ..."
From this remark alone it may be inferred that the children
were lost simply because the governess, the one person who
perceived and tried to ward off evil, did not appear on the
scene until it was too late.
James, The Art of the Novel, p. 143.
4® James, Betters. I, 297.
Human behavior, when not controlled by the problem of
evil, deserved analysis, in James's view, in so far as it
was motivated by a sense of moral obligation. Fleda Vetch
may be taken as one of his most extreme embodiments of the
good conscience which judges every thought and action in the
light of honor and duty and dreads nothing so much as any
kind of disloyalty or cruelty. The "high brutality” of Mrs.
Gereth's good intentions consists in their being directed
toward a few favored persons, unlike Fleda*s rare sympathy
and understanding, which are extended to everyone alike; and
because she sees the claims of principle to be higher than
those of personal convenience, Fleda is regarded by such as
Mrs. Gereth as wof quite another race and another flesh” than
the practical mind comprehends. Fleda is the outstanding
product of James's conviction that 1 1 the free spirit, always
much tormented, and by no means always triumphant, is heroic,
ironic, pathetic, or whatever, and . . . 'successful,’ only
through having remained free”;47 but her record is no more
than typical of his constant reference of the question of
moral fineness to the one motive the free spirit recognizes,
that is, a high ideal of responsibility.
48 James, The Art of the Novel. pp. 129-130.
CHAPTER POUR
THE MAJOR NOVELS
The three crowning works of James’s maturity, The
Wings of the Dove. The Ambassadors. The golden Bowl, are
each concerned with the impact of experience upon a mind.
Holding the belief that experience was richly significant
only in terms of the appearance and behavior of the thought
of those who were capable of discovering the true values in
a given situation, James refused to do anything t f so foul
and abject as to ’state' he desired rather to dramatize
his records of moral and emotional evolution by presenting
them through a consciousness different from his own,— the
developing consciousness of one or more of the persons di
rectly involved in the situation. In this way, he felt, he
assured an unconditioned respect for the freedom and vitality,
the absoluteness, of the creatures he invoked. James's three
great novels were governed by this dramatic method to an
extent unmatched in any of his previous work, with the con
sequence that they received a more intricate treatment of
ethical motives while gaining a lucidity beyond the virtue
of the cruder moralist.
^ James, Letters. II, 245.
92
I
Mr. Matthiessen, with, many reservations about The
Qolden Bowl and a few about The Ambassadors, believes that
The Win&s of the Dove is James's masterpiece, "that single
work where his characteristic emotional vibration seems
deepest"s2
... in Milly Theale he gave his fullest ex
pression to the emotional qualities he understood
bqst, to the innocent eagerness for life, and,
none the less, to his deeply interfused conscious
ness of suffering and evil.3
This assertion takes on a special added value in the light
of James's own personal experience, for the tragic figure of
Milly Theale is admittedly a reminiscence of his cousin,
Minny Temple, a brilliant girl who had died of tuberculosis
at twenty-four. In the last chapter of his Notes of a Son and
Brother he was to say that in her death both he and William
had—felt the end of their youth.4 She remained in his memory
as "the supreme case of a taste for life as life, as personal
living"; and he recalled that "she was absolutely afraid of
nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and
* -vT
enough wonder. n£) f Because he saw her launched on that adven-
2 Matthiessen, The Ma.jor Phase. p. 43.
Matthiessen, Preface to the Notebooks, p. xvi.
4 Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914), p. 515.
5 P» 462.
93
ture in\such compromised conditions, lie was caught by her
title to^the heroic and pathetic mark.”® He remembered
most intensely of all how
. . . death* at the last, was dreadful to her;
she would have given anything to live— and the image
of this, which was long to remain with me, appeared
so of the essence of tragedy that I was in the far-
off after-time to/seek to lay the ghost by wrapping
it, a particular/occasion aiding, in the beauty and
dignity of art/7
Borne thirty years later, the occasion offered itself in the
drama of Milly Theale*s "inspired resistance” and compassion-
/ Q
ate understanding.®
^Jarnes began The Wings of the Dove with the idea "of a
young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but
early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite,
while also enamoured of the world. The essence of her
story is that life shall elude her, although she has at her
command all the possibilities that life can offer. The
heiress of all the ages, with "liberty of action, of choice,
of appreciation, of contact," her "supremely touching value,"
in the sight of all she has, lies Just in what she must give
* 7
up. w f The ordeal of his heroine's consciousness, however,
6 Loc. cit.
7 Ibid.. p. 515.
® James, The Art of the Hovel, p. 289.
9 Ibid., p. 288.
10 Ibid., pp. 291-292.
94
is but half the case, with the correlative half being the
consciousness of others as affected by her, since her
struggle is to be founded on particular human interests.
James also felt that Milly’s predicament was best dealt with
through the human relations that were to reflect her influ
ence; for he had decided that she should not be fully and
constantly presented in the foreground, but approached from
a distance with “some kinder, some merciful indirection" as
the rule to be followed whenever possible.' "One began,"
he said in the preface, "with the outer ring, approaching
q
the centre thus by narrowing circumvallations. Before
Milly is allowed to appear on the scene, then, Kate Croy and
Merton Densher are presented in the outer ring, sympatheti
cally, in the view each takes of himself, of the other, and
of the network of relationships in London in which each is
involved.
Kate Croy is introduced first, a handsome young woman,
pestered by her family to make a rich marriage and wanting
wealth and position by the bent of her own nature. Because
she supports her scamp of a father and her widowed drudge of
a sister with a small inheritance, she is dependent upon an
aunt, Mrs. Lowder, who lives in splendor at Lancaster Q-ate.
11 Ibid.. p. 306.
12 Ibid., p. 294.
95
Mrs. Lowder, recognizing Kate as a valuable social asset, has
determined tnat she shall become the wife of "a great man.”
Kate, however, happens to be in love with an almost penniless
journalist, Merton Densher, and engaged to marry him. Elect
ing to conceal this complication, since she is prepared to
resign neither Densher nor her ambitions, Kate trusts to her
wits to secure both, as well as to "square" her relatives.
Densher, more in love with Kate them she is with him and
conscious of her "talent for life" as opposed to his own less
impressive "talent for thought," is presented next as an
amiable young man of rather an easily influenced nature, who
becomes for the guidance of their affair a pliable instrument
in Kate’s capable hands.
Milly appears on the London horizon only after her
character and her case have first been reflected by the
consciousness of her companion, Susan Stringham, that "fairly
choral Bostonian," who is moved by the "harrowing pathos" of
her pale, angular princess— only twenty-two, all alone in
the world, the "last fine flower of an old lew York stem,"
and marked almost certainly for early death. The question
for her, as her doctor has put It, is one of "'living1 by
option, by volition"; and the deep agitation this challenge
produces in her mind becomes first apparent on an occasion
when she is glimpsed by Susan, sitting enthroned on an alpine
mountain-ledge, with a blue plain spread out beneath her like
96
the kingdoms of the world. As she seems to measure the
promises and threats of her condition, the scene is eloquent
of hope mingled with despair. In any event, Susan's con
viction is that Milly will not try any quick escape "from the
human predicament": "she knew herself unmistakably reserved
for some more complicated passage. ... It would be a question
of taking full in the face the whole assault of life." Be
cause the story will turn on what sort of person Milly is,
she is given nothing to do in the course of the novel; she has
only to be with great intensity. Susan Stringham, to increase
the effect beyond the range of Milly‘s freedom and the cruel
ty of her fate, must in time picture the girl's beauty and
charm, her light grace, her eagerness for experience and her
almost feverish sensitivity, as well as the fierce pride which
forbids compassion and the innocence of mind which leaves her
quite defenceless. Through a former connection of Susan’s
with Mrs. Lowder, Milly is brought to London, where, at last
within all the circumvallations, we are allowed briefly to
see through Milly’s eyes a world that is at once stimula-cing
and subtly evil: “There were clearly more dangers roundabout
Lancaster Gate than one suspected in New York or could dream
of in Boston"; and Milly cries out, “I want abyssesl" And
with the abyss Kate Croy prepares for her— she has been in
love with Densher since meeting him in New York— the elements
are all present amid which Milly is to draw her breath in
such pain.
97
Kate Croy bas perceived in Milly1s condition and in
Milly*s love of Densher a situation to be ’ ’ worked.1 * Toward
the end of solving her own problem, she devises a bold and
ugly scheme whereby Densher is to gratify Milly by his atten
tions, to the point even of marrying her, out of the know
ledge that her disease is mortal and that he will in the
natural course inherit her fortune, which in turn will enable
him to marry Kate.
It is difficult to see how Densher can tolerate Kate1s
plan, or Kate for her plan; but, granting that his conscious
mind found It ’ ’something so extraordinarily special to Kate
that he felt himself shrink from the complication involved
In judging it," he may be taken on the footing of a person,
straight and honorable, yet weak and irresolute, so that if
he is repelled by her calculations, he is dominated by her
will and by his own desire. Hot alone caught in Kate's
"wondrous silken web," he soon finds himself in the middle
of "a circle of petticoats," for it is to the Interest of
Susan Stringham and Mrs. Lowder, as well as Kate, that he
shall "make up to a sick girl." Moreover, his is an honest
impulse of kindness to Milly, whom he deeply pities. For a
time he is able to placate his uneasy mind by describing him
self as the kind of man intelligent enough to recognize the
cases in which "’chucking* " might be the minor evil and the
least cruelty. Actually, he reasons, he has done nothing
98
deceptive: ‘ 'it was his pure passivity that had to represent
his honour." The sharp point, however, that makes the case
of conscience, is the difference between acting and not acting;
and his abject state of indecision on this score keeps him
from feeling "right with himself." His full position only
comes home to him slowly, la bit too slowly to be credible,
considering his talent for thought); he does not clearly per
ceive Kate's scheme until the end of the eighth book, (there
are ten in all), when he puts it to her abruptly: "Since she's
to die I'm to marry her?" And refusing to go on without
realities, Densher must know "by putting the matter to the
test" how genuine is Kate's love for him: if she will come
to him in his lodgings, he will be irrevocably committed to
her program. Kate consents and goes, and the compact is
sealed. Then, left alone to carry out his agreement, Densher
is entirely bewildered; after what has passed, if he is not to
cheat Kate, it is more than ever necessary for him to pursue
Milly; yet, as he sees the Dove for the noble person she is,
as his sense of "her disconcerting poetry" grows, it becomes
less than ever possible for him to mislead her. With the
"weight, on his heart, of conscious responsibility" to both
women, Densher simply cannot act, but delays until it is too
late.
Milly, borne up only by her Immense will to live, is,
for a while, deceived, at least as to the nature of the rela
tion existing betwen Kate and Densher; until a rejected suitor,
out of malice, informs her that she has "been lied to by the
pair, whom he knows to be pledged to each other. With her
vision of hope destroyed, Milly ‘ ’turns her face to the wall.”
Conscience-stricken for a surety now, Densher is presented
with a forced choice by Susan Stringham, who begs him to save
Milly by further deception, if nothing else. When the dying
woman grants him a final interview in her rented Venetian
palace, she receives him with her invincible style, as he is
to tell Kate later, showing nothing but "her beauty and her
strength”; "She believed, I suppose, that I might deny; and
what, to my mind, was before me in going to her, was the cer
tainty that she would put me to my test." Densher"s bid for
decency, for moral freedom, is his refusal to practise a
final disloyalty; and for this Milly honors and forgives him.
He takes his leave of her, impressed by the heroic front she
has assumed "in light of her unapproachable terror of the end,
keep it down though she would." His aftersense of her courage
now his greatest reality, Densher has reached the stage of
rebellion which will bring him to transcend his complicity and
which is prefigured by this reflection;
Milly was indeed a dove; this was the figure,
though it most applied to her spirit. . • . Kate
was • . . under the impression of that element of
wealth in her which was a power, and which was
dove-like only so far as one remembered that doves
have wings and wondrous flights, have them as well
as tender tints and soft sounds. It even came to
Densher dimly that such wings could in a given
case--had, in fact, in the case in which he was con
cerned— spread themselves for protection. JG
100
For Milly, pardoning Densher, does after all leave him her
fortune. Kate, however, only appears to have gained her end,
since a new and strange feeling, out of her reckoning alto
gether, has possessed him: he has fallen in love with Milly*s
memory. How, in expiation, as it were, Densher states new
terms: he will not touch the money for himself; either Kate
must have him without it, or he will make it over to her, hut
in that case he will not marry her. When she challenges him
with being in love with the dead, he makes no answer, saying
only,
"I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour."
1 1 As we were?”
"As we were."
But she turned to the door, and her headshake
was now the end. "We shall never be again as we
wereJ" fh
Thus, if Milly prevails, Kate is strong to the last.
Prepared to see Densher marry Milly without love, she cannot
bear to see him in love with Milly dead, whether or not they
try to patch up the old alliance, the subject of the story is
unaffected either way. Nothing can restore their old associa
tion, and all because Milly, in ways unforeseen, has proved
too rare a creature to be made use of.
If Densher*s consciousness dominates the foreground,
James at the outset has allowed us to share Kate * s feeling of
the sharp pinch of her state as compelling her to play for
high stakes. A complex mixture of good and evil, strong and
101
positive-minded, this arch-conspirator, in any case, comes
near to supplanting her victim in intellectual, if not in
tragic, interest. Kate is a moral agent because she is fully
conscious of her motives; and if hers are the wings of the
hawk, if she is essentially a predatory creature, if her moral
code permits of treating Milly as a convenience, she.is still
not altogether ruthless. When the Dove first nestles up to
her, for instance, Kate warns Milly: s , We're of no use to you—
it's decent to tell you. iou’d he of use to us, hut that's
a different matter. My honest advice to you would he . . .
to drop us while you can." And when she enters her lover in
the race with death for Milly"s money, determined in her
treachery, she has the imagination to devise a certain poetic
logic to cover its enormity: no one will he the worse for the
fraud; Milly will have had her brief happiness; her two friends,
in helping her, will have helped themselves. Finally, with
the note of discord sounded in her very triumph, Kate has
the insight to see that the image of Milly and the memory of
her forgiveness have come between her and Densher. "In the
light of how exauisite the dead girl was he sees how little
exquisite is the living and Kate, fully aware of Densher*s
knowledge, is no coward about facing it. With a fine dignity
she freely tells him at the end that things can never again
be as they were, the moral of which, as Henry James would
1 3
James, Notebooks, p. 173,
tfabereHy of Southern Gallfornta UbrtSff
102
have it, Is her perception that truth and goodness have con
founded both the wicked and the weak. ✓
&
XI
"Nowhere can a composition of this sort," James wrote
of The Ambassadors. "have sprung straighter from a dropped
grain of suggestion, and never can that grain, developed, over
grown and smothered, have yet lurked more in the mass as an
independent particle."14 ^n autumn of 1895 he had been
struck by a remark William Dean Howells made during a short
and interrupted visit to Haris;15 and it was to provide the
substance of Lambert Strether's outburst to little Bilham in
the fifth book of The Ambassadors, when Strether is moved to
an unwonted eloquence by the sensation of all the life for
which his own opportunity has passed:
"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It
doesn't so much matter what you do In particular, so
long as you have had your life. . . . . one has the
illusion of freedom; therefore, don't be, like me,
without the memory of that illusion. I was either,
at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to
have it, I don't know which. Of course, at present,
I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. . . •
Do what you like so long as you don't make my
mistake. . . . Live I"
Once James had conceived his figure of the elderly man
who becomes thus "sorrowfully aware" that "it Is too late,
James, The Art of the Novel, p. 307.
15 James, Notebooks. pp. 225-226.
103
too late now, for HIM to live,'*1® tie had to account for his
peculiar tone, which obviously indicates that Strether is a
man in a false position.. This rueful worthy would have
issued from the very heart of Hew England, James declared, with
a definite view of life which Paris at once assaulted;and
the conflict resulting would consist in "the revolution that
takes place in the poor aian."-*-®
To win the hand of an imperious Hew England widow, and,
It is Implied, her fortune, Lambert Strether is dispatched
to Paris to rescue her son from the wicked woman who is be
lieved to have ensnared him and bring him home, prodigal but
repentant. The mission is undertaken in all good faith; and
Strether, eminently respectable, and a man of the finest reso
lution, descends upon Paris as an ambassador representing
principle and duty— as these virtues are understood in Woollett,
Massachusetts. The fifty-five-year-old editor is at once taken
in hand in Europe by Maria Gostrey, a "subtly civilized" ex
patriate, who, as his friend and counsellor, will receive the
progress-reports of the strange embassy. Hot at all disturbed
by the impropriety of Chad's situation, a matter as to which
16 113« PP- 226-228.
^ James, The Art of the Hovel, pp. 313-314.
3-® James, Hotebooxs. p. 227.
Strether had. been reduced with Mrs. Newsome, the New England
dame, “to the last intensity of silence," Miss v*ostrey poses
a curious and portentous question; 1 1 Are you quite sure she's
very bad for him? . . . She may be charming— his life!" And
Strether, the kind of man who receives "an amount of experi
ence out of all proportion to his adventures," quickly senses
that the situation is likely to run away with him, for he has
reckoned without an imagination he had before been scarcely
aware of possessing.
Recognizing that wherever one paused in Haris "the
imagination reacted before one could stop it," Strether sets
forth to investigate how Chad Newsome is living, and at the
outset is persuaded from the very look of Chad’s house, with
"its cold fair grey, warmed and polished a little by life,"
that the life which goes on behind its windows will offer a
challenge to Woollett's crude prejudices and narrow views.
He duly discovers that his countryman is enjoying the larger
latitude of the artistic life and rounding things off in a
love affair with a truly charming French countess. When he
sees Chad for the first time on the foreign scene, it is for
him as if the young man had been made over or transformed, as
if he had miraculously acquired the refinement and polish that
had been a good deal wanted. When Strether meets Madame de
Vionnet, he is struck by a sense of "her rare unlikeness to
the women he had known, ... her distinction of every sort."
Before this double revelation his mission fades to nothing;
nevertheless he conveys his message from Woollett, in the
105
frankest way, as a question of an immediate rupture and an
immediate return. He then abruptly drops his original motive
and lingers.on in Paris, slowly rebelling against all that
Woollett represents. Strether faces his crisis in the old
Parisian garden when he admits that he has made the mistake
of not living and entreats Chad's artist-friend to "live all
he can"; while the hope of his youth of what life might mean
has been suddenly revived! l } Buried for long years in dark
corners, at any rate, these few germs had sprouted again pnder
forty-eight hours of Paris.” Beguiled by a way of life offer
ing such a large chance for personal freedom in its broadest
sense, Strether explains to Maria u-ostrey that his purpose has
been actually inverted: "I came out to find myself in presence
of new facts— facts that have kept striking me as less and less
met by our old reasons.”
Convinced that Woollett*s blunt statement of the case
does poor justice to Chad's situation, and wishing himself that
the fellow will refuse to be “saved,” Strether is unable to
meet Mrs. Hewsome's ultimatum, whereupon that importunate lady,
the "moral swell” that Miss Dostrey tags her, condemns him for
his dereliction from duty and appoints successors in the
persons of her daughter and son-in-law, the Pococks, who arrive
In Paris to save both Chad and Strether from the insidious
siren. Disgraced at home, Strether now perceives the rull
measure of his responsibility; and consoling himself with the
thought that one might as well perish by the sword as by famine,
106
this outgoing ambassador entirely deserts the mother's cause
and becomes Madame de Vionnet’s ally, joining with her in
the effort to prevent Chad's return to American big business
and virtue. The question is no longer one of saving a mis
guided young man from disaster, but of whether the young man
is capable of grasping his opportunity. Strether, working now
against “repudiation and ingratitude," openly opposes the new
deputies, who are characterized as almost comically vulgar
when they insist that Marie de Vioimet is not a "decent" woman.
Strether realizes that if even the like of Chad’s exquisite
friend fails to compass the ravishment of the Pococks, it is
because they simply cannot understand, they can "see" nothing,
they are only "extravagantly common."
At this point, in a highly ironic incident, Strether,
having flouted the ambassadors from Woollett, discovers that
Chad and Marie are lovers. Although he had at the beginning
faced the fact that Chad’s tie to Paris was a woman, Strether
proceeded to quibble (for 400 pages) over whether the relation
ship between them was "virtuous," and he at last devised a fine
spun theory of platonie friendship, the untruth of which, it
turns out, everyone has been indulgently concealing from him
out of anxiety over a moral revulsion that would send him
swinging back to Mrs. Newsome. And after he has chanced upon
the pair during a compromising excursion in the country, the
belated yet none the less deep shock with which "the lie in
the charming affair" is revealed to him rather justifies the
107
general solicitude: "He knew he had been, at bottom, neither
prepared nor proof. . . .He recognized at last that he had
really been trying, all along, to suppose nothing. Verily,
verily, his labor had been lost. He found himself supposing
everything." Strether’s standards of morality, however, have,
like Chad's manner, undergone a startling transformation; and
he takes the stand that the relation between Chad and Marie
has something of beauty and truth in it. His next move is
to impress the young man with the debt he owes her and to
plead against disloyalty, only to realize, from his careless
assurance that he is not "tired” of her, that Don Juan Chad,
shallow and unworthy for all his smooth social veneer, has
grown restive and will with an ironic certainty go home after
all. Yet, with the wind-up of his own career in Woollett
another certainty, to say nothing of his loss of the "strenuous
widow," Strether clings to one last scruple. When Maria
Dostrey virtually proposes to him, attractive as her offer is,
he refuses to that extent to betray his trust; for only by
returning as he came, he explains to that mystified lady, can
he “be right": "That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of
the whole affair, to have got anything for myself."
Because Strether chooses to return to no prospect at
all through a desire not to profit personally from his adven
ture, his needless sacrifice, (which recalls the strained and
quixotic renunciation of Fleda Vetch), surely approaches the
108
ultimate in scrupulosity. Matthiessen feels that "because he
is supposed to have awakened to a wholly new sense of life,
it merely signifies his relative emptiness. 3-9 The meaning of
Strether*s history, however, is not a question of any action
on his part; he has missed the chance of his youth and it is
by this time too late to make up arrears. The business of
the tale and the march of its action, not to say the precious
moral of everything, James observed in the preface, is just
the demonstration of his "process of vision."**0 Tii© novel,
which never passes outside the circle of his thought, is
Stretherls vision of what he has lost, and out of his vision
he takes the side of those whom he imagines to be "living."
The incidents of the apparent situation between the lady in
New England and the son in Paris merely determine the direc
tion of his experience, just as Paris, the most likely place
for such a drama, merely symbolizes the world other than
Woollett, Massachusetts. The subject is Strether*s vision of
freedom, a vision which stirs in him "the sense that he may
have a little supersensual hour in the vicarious freedom of
another."21 it is of no importance whether Chad elects to
stay in Paris or go home; it is. equally of no importance that
Chad so little deserves the moral heroism Strether wastes
19 Matthiessen, The Major Phase, p. 39.
29 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 308.
21 James, Notebooks. p. 228.
109
upon him. What does matter is that Strether changes his
mind, or rather, he makes up his mind to leave things as he
found them.
In the preface we are told that he came to Paris
Hprimed with a moral scheme of the most approved pattern
which was yet framed to break down on any approach to vivid
facts; that is to say, any at all liberal appreciation of
them."22 Granted that Strether finds in Europe the savor of
life that charms and enchants him and brings him to rebel against
the narrow code of Woollett, it must not be construed that under
the influence of the "vast bright Babylon" he at all loses
his strong moral sense. His ingrained New England conscience
decrees that out of the whole affair he must not get anything
for himself; but because it has awakened to "more things than
had been dreamt of in the philosophy of Woollett," his moral
values undergo a readjustment, involving the surrender of his
Puritanism according to his acceptance'of the situation as
immoral but "beautiful." He clearly sees, through the whole
course of his experience, that he loses everything by his
sacrifice to Chad and gains nothing; and he is fully aware
that Mrs. Newsome, with her finger on the pulse of Massachu
setts, will only regard his behavior as a lapse from good
faith and a crime of moral obliquity. What sees Strether
22 James, The Art of the Novel. p. 515.
110
through his crisis is a nblest imagination," the very element
that gave his creator "so much of the pleasure of . . .
cutting thick . . . into his moral s u b s t a n c e ."2*5
In pursuing further the relation between James and
Strether, Beach*s comments may be aptly quoted:
He and his creature both seem to feel that, if the
intelligence is to be used for the eventual benefit
of the moral passion, it must not be warped by any
moral pressure; it must be left absolutely free to
reach its own conclusions. And for both of tnem the
greatest of pleasures is that extended rumination
over life by which its true values may come to be
appreciated. The tone of The Ambassadors ... is
accordingly the nearest we ever come to the very
tone of Henry James. It is the tone of large and
sociable speculation upon human nature.24
One imagines, as an afterthought, that The Ambassadors also
carries the note of something like the author‘s sense, not
alone his hero’s, of having failed to take full possession
of life. With no purpose of identifying Henry James himself
with Strether, one may yet point out a remark he once made to
Hugh Walpole: "I think I don't regret a single 'excess* of
my responsive youth— 1 only regret, in my chilled age, certain
occasions and possibilities I didn't e m b r a c e " ; 25 one may
note also his urging a young friend, daillard T. hapsley, as
Strether did Chad, "to let himself utterly go and cultivate
the day-to-day and the hand-to-mouth and the auestions-be-
damned, even as an exquisite fine a r t . ."26
23 Ibid., p. 316.
24 Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (Hew
Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), p. 270.
25 James, Letters. II, 323.
26 Ibid.. II, 93.
Ill
III
In The (lolden Bowl James dealt again with a ease of
disloyalty and treachery, hut on somewhat grander terms than
in either of the two preceding novels. His heroine, Maggie
Verver, the daughter of a retired American millionaire, has
married an impoverished Italian prince of illustrious back-_
ground. A complete European, Prince Amerigo has felt a
certain uneasiness about the incongruity of this union in
the light of his own sophistication and worldliness as opposed
to his wife's baffling candor and innocence. Desiring to
conform to her standards if he can, and above all eager to be
worthy of his good fortune, the Prince resolves on a policy
of Infinite kindness and consideration. Since Maggie deeply
loves her husband, the marriage promises to be a complete
success.
The controlling factor in Maggie's life, unaltered by
her new tie, Is her intense devotion to her father. In order
not to appear to have forsaken him and to "make up" for being
herself so happily married, she begins to devote more and
more time to him. recognizing that her anxiety involves the
neglect of her husband, Mr. Verver, to ease his daughter's
mind, allows himself to be persuaded to marry again. The
wife he and Maggie select between them is a close friend of
hers, Charlotte Stant, an American girl of European education,
whom Mr. Verver genuinely admires.
112
With this second, marriage, the drama really "beginsj
for Maggie, with full knowledge of Jier prince’s historical
past, is ignorant of his personal past, which has included
an affair with Charlotte, brought to an end by mutual agree
ment because neither had the means to marry. For a time the
four dwell together in luxurious idleness with all outward
harmony. Maggie continues to be with her father a good deal;
in fact, they appear to draw even closer together, an effect
quite the opposite to that which the new arrangement was in-
\
tended to produce. Inevitably, the Prince and Charlotte,
thrown constantly into each other’s company, resume their old
connection, now of course become doubly illicit.
In time Maggie divines the truth from their careful,
tender way of treating her, yet so far from wanting proof,
she genuinely wishes disproof; by an accidental discovery, how
ever, full knowledge of the relationship formerly existing be
tween her husband and her father's wife comes to her. The
antique dealer from whom she purchases a golden bowl unwitting
ly lets fall certain details which reveal that the gilded
crystal had once been examined by Amerigo and Charlotte as a
wedding gift for herself. The Prince, significantly, had re
jected it because of a hidden flaw, when Maggie tells her con
clusions to Mrs. Assingham, the original matchmaker, who, with
her husband, acts as ’ ’chorus” throughout, Mrs. Assingham*a
reaction is to smash the tell-tale bowl to the floor as if
113
to show Maggie that her whole idea “has a crack" in it. The
Prince, observing this gesture, learna from his wife that her
suspicions have been aroused, but exactly what she knows
Maggie declines to tell; and he neither denies nor confesses.
As these two talk about the actual bowl, its'symbolical mean
ing governs their thoughts:
"And what, pray, was the price?"
She paused again a little. “It was high certain-
ly--for those fragments. I think I feel as I look
at them there rather ashamed to say."
The Prince then again looked at them; he might
have been growing used to the sight. "But shall you
at least get your money back?"
With superb control Maggie forestalls'the need of an
immediate answer; and quietly and subtly maneuvering for ad
vantage, she hopes, psychologically, to keep the upper hand
and in the end to win back her husband, while she is at the
same time resolved to protect her father from any knowledge
at all. Mr. Verver, in his turn, confident of the guilt of
both parties, desires only to shield his daughter. Everyone
involved feels his way with the greatest caution; for con
siderate of one another's dignity, each wishes last of all
to cause humiliation or to force the issue to the point of a
violent outbreak. Charlotte is left In the dark as to
MaggieSs discovery; for what the Prince, as Maggie begins to
understand, is “growing under cover of" his reserve Is a
decision to Join forces with his wife. And without any ex
planation, without ever betraying their loyalty to their
114
marriages, Maggie and Mr. Verver understand finally the
identity of their motive--that of saving for all four what
ever can he saved of honor; and they agree on a separation.
Mr. Verver and his wife announce a departure for America, with
Charlotte, seeing that her game is up hut hopelessly committed
to a policy of hluff, pretending to the last to go of her own
desire. Maggie*s victory has heen won hy sheer power of
character; and the Prince, finally understanding her goodness
and forbearance, really loves her for the first time.
The situation in outline reveals nothing of the intri
cate treatment James lavished on the exceptionally difficult
relations holding among the figures in The Golden Bowl. The
complexities of their moral problem, given the basic elements
as sketched, can only be focused through the point of view
of each of the principals. First, however, one may note in
a general way that the irregular relationships in the novel
are never given with their accompanying physical experiences,
a deficiency which has caused Gide to complain that "all the
weight of the flesh is absent, and all the shaggy, tangled
undergrowth, all the wild darkness."2* ? Matthiessen's comment,
if less poetic than Gide’s, comes closer to the marks James,
he declares, commanded his own kind of darkness, “not the
darkness of passion, but the darkness of moral evil."2® The
27 Dupee, 0£. cit.. p. 251.
28 Matthiessen, The Ma.lor Phase. p. 94.
115
adulterous atmosphere in the novel is fully as expressive as
would be a juridical account of the lovers* every meeting.
If, as Pelham Edgar justly asserts, James minimized the
sensual appeal, he did so not from squeamishness, but from
the desire to gain the reader's attention on more reasoned
grounds•^9
Although James did not gloss over Amerigo's infidelity,
he obviously considered the Prince as worth saving, whether
or not he was the "pure and perfect crystalu Mr. Verver had
been happy to pay a big price for. The problem for .Amerigo,
as James saw it, was whether he could recognize that his
wife was superior to his mistress; and by his appreciation
of Maggie's fineness at the last, he is supposed to have
proved his value.3° Like everyone except Maggie *s father,
the Prince does not at first understand her'character, though
he does recognize that she lives by a moral code very differ
ent from his own. Wary in the world of American innocence,
he figures it as "a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as
Edgar, o£. cit.. p. 331.
30 Matthiessen (The Major Phase, p. 96) sees the Prince
as the extreme case of a man who is expected to be rather
than do, "a shining exhibit of conspicuous waste." And the
same criticism extends to all the people In The Golden Bowl:
but If James was aware of the futility of their sort of
existence, as Matthiessen goes on to say, he nevertheless
found enough positive content in his heroine's drama to
absorb him wholly.
116
darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow."
*
When Mrs. Assingham tells the Prince in their earliest inter
view that she would like to see some sense he did not possess,
"he produced one on the spot"; "The moral, dear Mrs. Assing-
hamj" Yet he insists upon his good faith, assuring Maggie
he does not "lie nor dissemble nor deceive," and breaking with
his past in all honesty. None the less, his is at best a
pretty worldly code of ethics, "a question of doing the best
for one's self one can— without injury to others,” to which
may be added a considerable regard for the usages of polite
society. It is Mrs. Assingham who voices the code of both
Amerigo and Charlotte when she observes that’"the forms ...
are two-thirds conduct," and then asks, "lBhat is morality
but high intelligence?"
James took great pains to emphasise* the main reason
for the Prince's lapse from his good faith. The necessary
basis for the novel, as he first outlined it^ was "an intense
and exceptional degree of attachment between the father and
31
daughter— he peculiarly paternal, she passionately filial";
he saw the mutual devotion of the Ververs', however, without
a trace of the abnormality that would todaybe read Into It.
For all their cleverness, they are a simple ingenuous pair,
who agree that their life is too selfish and closed-in and
that marriage will provide a corrective. "I don't think we
3- * - James, Notebooks, p. 131.
117
lead, as regards other people, any life at all," Maggie says
when she begins to understand herself; "Free as air— great if
we act on it. Not if we don11.1 1 Still, they remain undivid
ed by the marriage of each, in which fact of course lies the
injury done to the Prince and Charlotte. By the delight taken,
in his ancestry, he is clearly considered a valuable ''piece"
for Mr. Verver1s collection of art treasures; while she is
asked to marry a man in order to be useful about his daughter.
Yet both accept the roles offered them with'their eyes open
and undertake, as responsible human beings, to meet the condi
tions of their respective bargains, conditions which are im
plicit for the Prince, explicit for Charlotte. A well-meaning
pair, James thus presents them, largely forced against their
will into the close contact they have hoped to avoid. Theirs
becomes the business of social representation for the Ververs,
and being pre-eminently social creatures, they do the “worldly"
for them with genius. Thereby left to the seclusion they
cherish, the father and daughter remain absorbed in their own
private life, with the result that while they are "beatifi-
cally happy," their " 1 sposi*" are "immensely alone." The
situation where the husband of the daughter vows with the
wife of the father that they will always protect the father and
daughter— and then they break down— -has “the stain of evil in
it which one finds sometimes in the Elizabethans."32 They
52 Spender, op. cit.. p. 151.
118
then approach the ultimate in overpassing accepted values
by phrasing as nothing less than ’ ‘sacred" their obligation
to conceal adultery; the law of their intimacy "would be the
vigilance of 'care,‘ would be never rashly to forget and
never consciously to wound"; and in this conscious care they
see their honor and their virtue.
Charlotte, like all Janies!s other "bad heroines," wears
her vices with an air. Hers is the grand style, the effec
tiveness which is the result of considerable"experience of
the world. Strong and confident, admirably composed, she is
adept in the art of "keeping it up"; but in the end she fails--
and it is this failure that produces the crisis--by under
estimating Maggie's intelligence. Maggie, gaining full know
ledge of the intrigue, realizes that to tike the way usually
open to "innocence outraged and generosity betrayed" would
be to give them up; and, before the possibility of her hus
band’s needing her for the first time in their whole connection,
this is not to be thought of. Therefore she simply chooses
to leave the crisis on his hands. By her understanding
Maggie changes for her husoand from the idea he has had of
her all along. He himself understands now what she wants,
as she tells Mrs. Assingham; "I want a happiness without a
hole in it big enough for you to poke in your finger . . •
the golden bowl— as it was to have been. ... The bowl with
all our happiness in it. Hie bowl without a crack." Because
119
she has taken upon herself the task of dissolving the intrigue
without a single protesting or accusing word, on the strength
of her devotion to all concerned, the Prince, not heretofore
conscious of evil so long as the outward decencies are ob
served, feels a new respect for his wife, which gives a sight
to his eyes. Just as his vision of Milly Theale brings
Densher to see Kate Groy, just as Strether comes to see Mrs.
Newsome, so the Prince begins to see Charlotte, although he
expresses this to his wife as, "I see only you." And Charlotte,
aware of his choice, and by MaggieSs denial of any felt wrong
forced to act as if she were enjoying a serenity without a
cloud, is unable to speak or to resisti "To be doomed was, in
her situation, to have extravagantly incurred a doom, so. that
to confers to wretchedness was, by the same stroke, to confess
to falsity." Her torture is just that she can never break
down, though her intellect be driven half-mad by solitude;
her only resort is pride. Thus she takes the line of desiring
to leave Europe in order to "keep the man she married," that
is by taking him away from his daughter; and Maggie, "power
less for vindictive flights," pitying hSr distress while ad
miring her manner, admits her own failure--a'last deceit in
tended entirely for Charlotte‘a peace of mind.
The evil of the situation, for Maggie as for Henry James,
consists less in the adultery than in the ugliness of stealth
and duplicity— "the horror of finding evil seated, all at ease,
120
where one had only dreamed of good." The subject, whieh
James first noted as the pathetic simplicity and good faith
of the father and daughter in their abandonment,33 becomes
in the second half of his novel essentially Maggie*s sense
of the relations in which she stands, hut unlike most of
James’s characters, she is concerned not only to understand
her situation, but to act, and to act successfully. Repre
sented as being entirely unacquainted with evil or falsity
of any kind, Maggie is explained by Mrs. Assingham as the
person in the world to whom a wrong thing could least be
communicated:
"It was as if her imagination had been closed to
it, her sense altogether sealed. . . . Her sense
will have to open. . . . To what’s called Evil—
with a very big E: for the first time in her life.
... It will make her, by way of a change, under
stand one or two things in the world. . ♦ . They'll
have had to be disagreeable--to show her a little
where she is. They'll have had to be disagreeable
to make her sit up. They’ll have had to be disa
greeable to make her decide to live.”
A further colloquy between the Assinghams would seem to in
dicate Henry James's position: the Colonel speaks first,
"The state of things existing hasn’t grown, like
a field of mushrooms, in a night. Whatever they,
all round, may be in for now is at least the conse
quence of what they have done. Are they' mere help
less victims of fate?”
Well, kanny at last had the courage of it. "Yes—
they are. To be so abjectly innocent— that iis to be
victims of fate."
33 James, Notebooks, pp. 130-131.
121
And it is part of the initiation into evil which James pre
pares for Maggie for her to discover that merely ato he right**
does not meet all contingencies. She realizes to the full
that she and her father are responsible for throwing the other
two so intimately together. Finding a challenge in her pic
ture of Amerigo and Charlotte as pulling the family coach with
the Ververs hot so much as pushing, she sees herself as jump
ing from the coach, as taking a decision,, with the question
only remaining of how the decision is to be applied. The
answer comes to her in the great scene wherein she observes
the others through the lighted window of a card-room. As she
paces up and down on the terrace, looking in on their bridge-
game, she wonders why it is that she has been able to give
herself so little "to the vulgar heat of her wrong":
She might fairly, as she watched them, have missed
it as a lost thing; have yearned for it, for the
straight vindictive view, the rights of resentment,
the rages of jealousy, the protests of passion, as
for something she had been cheated of not least: a
range of feeling which for many women would have
meant so'much, but which for her husband's wife, for
her father's daughter, figured nothing nearer to
experience than a wild eastern caravan, looming into
view with crude colours in the sun, fierce pipes in
the air, high’spears against the sky, all a thrill,
a natural joy to mingle with, but turning off short
before it reached her and plunging into other defiles.
Hence her resolve to defeat Charlotte without breaking the
peace, even at the cost of parting from her father. Moved
by the impulse of charity and patience, asking efforts only
of herself, Maggie is able to save her marriage; and her
132
husband, though himself one of those who have lived solely
in the "forms," is convinced by her behavior that love may
inspire a morality higher than that of "high intelligence,"
and thus he takes the full measure of Maggie*s value.
Finally, through her experience of suffering, she can meet
him now on the level of his own mature judgment: "Every
thing* s terrible, ‘eara,•— in the heart of man."
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION: HENRY JAMES'S ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY
I
The design stamped on every piece of Henry James's
later fiction as by its most impelling force is the conscious
use of a medium of art for inquiry into human experience and
behavior. Indifferent to general Ideas, unattached to any
open philosophical motive, absorbed only In studying the
minds and emotions of his characters, James"resolved that in
his pages their experience should speak for Itself. He saw
the high value of the novel as a literary form in its power
to range through all the differences of the individual rela
tion to its general subject matter and through all the
varieties of outlook on life ereated by conditions that are
never the same from man to man. This is not to argue, however,
that James himself made the Inartistic error of working from
shifting bases without a vision of life peculiarly his own.
As he replied to H. G-. Wells, after Wells had parodied his
work as a thing futile and void, his appeal to experience
rested upon his measure of fullness— fullness of life and of
the projection of it:1
I live, live intensely, and am fed by life, and
my value, whatever It be, is in my own kind of ex
pression of that. . . .2
1 James, Letters. II, 485-486.
2 I*>id.« H, 489 .
124
This feeling is both clarified, and enlarged by James‘s atti
tude toward the profession of the artist, nowhere better
stated than in the following passage from his prefaces:
I am afraid that after all even his best excuse
for it must remain the highly personal plea— the
joy of living over, as a chapter of experience, the
particular intellectual adventure. Here lurks an
immense homage to the general privilege of the artist,
to that constructive, that creative passion— porten
tous words, but they are convenient— the exercise of
which finds so many an occasion for appearing to him
the highest of human fortunes, the rarest boon of
the gods. He values it all sublimely and perhaps a
little fatuously, for itself--as the great extension,
great beyond all others, of experience and of con
sciousness; with the toil and trouble, a mere sun-cast
shadow that falls, shifts, and vanishes, the result of
his living in so large a light.3
Surely we can account for nothing in a great novelist*s
work that has not been exposed to a richly subjective alchemy.
However objective his approach, he cannot avoid resembling
the disinterested narrator in "The Special Type," who admits
that he never was out of the situation really, since "a man
habitually ridden by the twin demons of imagination and obser
vation is never— enough for his peace--out of anything."
James, speaking in his own person, in the early part of his
career, realized also that the artist inescapably commits his
material, wherever drawn, to his own sensibility. In "The
Art of Pictibn," it will be remembered,' he gave as the broad
est definition of the novel its representing "a personal, a
® James, The Art of the Novel, p. 29.
125
direct impression of life,“ adding that ■ "the characters, the
situations that strike one as real will he those that touch
and interest one most,1 ’ 4 Later, when he wrote specifically
of his own novels and tales in the prefaces, he did so in
autobiographical fashion, explaining how he came to write in
such a way and what considerations and emotions had been
intense for him in the long ferment of an artistic experience.
While it is not the artist's business to stand in for
the philosopher, nevertheless his work must bear traces of a
moral attitude as well as express an aesthetic personality.
The artistic process itself imposes a necessity of selection,
which at once introduces the artist’s bias, or at least
certain prepossessions in his mind. It therefore becomes
possible to adduce, in James !s case, by noting what he put in
or left out, a personal scheme of values; foi* his preferences
and aversions inevitably thrust themselves forward in the
very choice of material he deemed worthy of treatment, made
themselves felt in just the general direction his subject
came to face.
Actually, the central emphasis in his fiction quite
speaks for itself. James expended his immSnse analytical
energy on moral motives and subtle questions of conduct; in
fact, in his maturity the desire to scrutinize mental and
emotional reaction to circumstance appears to have become so
^ James, The Art of Fiction and Other Essays. pp. 8, 10.
compulsive that he very nearly lost all interest in the
outward aspects of the world. But the very essence of his
achievement is that there is nothing explicit, everything
implicit. It is in the issues which set his imagination in
motion, in his treatment of the values embodied in his fic
tion, and in the perspective from which he reviews the rela
tionships existing among his characters that the essential
substance of his ethical philosophy may be discovered.
II
James's temperament was so instinctively high-minded,
his imagination so impressionable, It seems curious that
he should have been able to keep his own emotional reac-i
tions under control. Yet control them he did, never for a
moment forgetting his resolution to be "intensely objective,
a resolution, it should be added, easily consonant with the
ironic and critical cast of his disposition; In fact, he
was given to assert with unwonted vehemence the prevalence
of the critical spirit In his make-ups f , I am damned critical
for It*s the only thing to be, and all else is damned humbug
In any case, he successfully preserved an attitude of moral
5 James, Notebooks, p. xvii.
® James, Letters. II, 131.
127
detachment, based at most, as far as one can detect, on a
certain subconscious fastidiousness, ugly and coarse as were
the motives he frequently dealt with, he yet managed to avoid
being censorious; for he was the wfond analyst,*' not the fond
moralist; and here, I think, he revealed both his artistic
greatness and his moral penetration. "
By devising special techniques of presentation, he did
all he could, in the first place, to take the author out of
the story, together with the author's subjectivity, intru
sive as long a3 it was unavoidable. His work, James play
fully wrote a friend, insisted upon unfolding itself wholly
from its own "1 innards♦1 T l He could square his artistic
conscience only by submitting to the interior logic of a
subject while at the same time giving it the form, the com
position, in which it could be seen and measured; and being
a great imaginative artist, he had the power"to observe and
record, to observe and create, with strict impersonality.
Both the resolute artist and the determined non-partisan
wrote in the prefaces in this connection that
... if it persists /any piece of work^ as
impression not artistically dealt with, it shames
the honour offered it and can only be"spoken of as
having ceased to be a thing of fact and yet not be
come a thing of truth.®
7 Ibid., I, 408.
® James, The Art of the Hovel, pp. 230-231.
128
An artistic conviction, however, only begins to explain
James's detachment. There are quite other reasons which de
pend upon the nature of his discriminating mind and, again,
its critical passion. He Intruded no labelled statement of
explicit morality, he passed no judgment bn. his characters;
because, with his acute sense of the intricacy of human rela
tions, his sensitiveness to shades and half-tones, he rarely
found it possible to draw a clear distinction between “good”
and "bad.'1 When the "germ" of a story would be disclosed to
him, as we know, he refused to attend to any shoddy or sordid
details; but, unconcerned with the rightness of either side in
a given case, he would ponder the essential relationships,
seeking always the implications beneath the surface. The
result was a keen appreciation of values usually on both sides.
Consequently, he seldom could bring himself to indicate of a
person, who took a particular course of action, that he did
right or that he ought to have acted otherwise. More accurate
ly, James could indicate such certitude neither on his own or
his character's part. For the entanglements1 and embarrassments
of life there was never any completely clear answer; and the
most recurrent phrase in a novel of James— it appears almost
as a "leit-motiv" of composition— is the one marking his
amused and ironic halt before each new complication in human
affairs: "There you areI” James's peculiar dualism, in short,
developed from his view of the irreducible complexity of
129
human affairs and human beings. To ease himself out of
this equivocal tension of mind by assuming a definite posi
tion on questions of right and wrong action he regarded as
unthinkable, what he said of Turgenev applied to himself:
“He under stands so much that we almost wonder he can express
anything; and his expression is indeed wholly in absolute
projection, in illustration, in giving of everything the un
explained specimen.For his apparent reticence, therefore,
and his refusal to mete out praise and blame to his charac
ters, James has been unjustly looked upon by many as a barren
analyst. But those who share his persuasion that truth cannot
yet be isolated do not see his "failure: i in this respect— and
the real cause of his detachment— as at all reprehensible.
If James could not absolutely measure his characters
by their good or bad actions or their good or bad traits, he
could and did establish his impression of them in terms of
their understanding of a situation, that is, of what was happen
ing to them and to those around them. Hence the emphasis on
consciousness. James5s scale of values allowed more weight
to fineness and largeness of consciousness than to any other
quality, it is true, but it will still not suffice to let his
demonstration of consciousness stand on its ethical import
alone. Matthiessen is content to state that James clearly
9 James, The Art of Fiction and Other kssays. p. 122.
judged his characters by their degree of awareness and that
the "good1 * character for him was always the one who was the
most sensitive, who saw the greatest variety of moral possi
bilities, and who desired to give them free play in others;
the "bad" character, if not simply obtuse; was wilfully blind
to such possibilities, and, at his worst; tried to stifle the
free spirit of others.^ But this "religidn of consciousness,
as Matthiessen tags it,H should not be taken as definitive
for James1s concept of character, nor should it lead one to
minimize the critical balance behind thb neveiist's prefer
ence in character.
How a delicate relation or a difficult issue reacted
on the substance of anyone's mental property, and how the
ensuing doubt or question or triumph was assayed for moral
weight and value cannot be separated from James's aesthetic
approach. What he did, in his development of the "religion
of consciousness,1 1 he did with the utmost capacity of art;
for unless a piece of work could be shown as governed by
aesthetic principles, any prate of its morality he consider
ed merely impudent-. It was the beauty of the constructional
game, he declared, to preserve the interest of everything as
someone * 3 vision; the values involved were of Importance
Matthiessen, The Ma.1or Phase, p. 146
11 Ibid.. p. 131.
131
only as someone felt and interpreted them.3-2 ge observed
further that the truth for "a young man in a book” by no
means entirely resided in his being “either exquisitely sen
sitive or shiningly clever."13 Any measure of these things
was involved in his feeling enough and "knowing” enough for
his maximum dramatic value without feeling and knowing too
much for his minimum verisimilitude, in short, for his "proper
fusion with the fable. "3.4 This was the matter which had
always to be made right if the reader was to be convinced of
the reality of the young man's problems, when the artist
insisted on intelligence and lucidity of the highest order,
and placed "right in the middle of the light'the most polished
of possible mirrors of the subject," he was simply attempt
ing to secure an ideal vision, ideal in the sense of being
limited only by the character of the observer. Whether the
observer would show what befell him as beautiful and dignified
or as base and sordid is another question, and one beside the
point being made here, which is the use of the consciousness
for dramatizing and unifying experience. The fine conscious
ness, then, for James, was not an end but a means, an instru
ment of central importance to a story whose function was to
3-2 James, The Art of the Hovel, pp. 16, 37.
3-3. Ibid.. p. 69.
3-^ Loe. cit.
132
present the human emotion, the human vibration to the ironies
of experience; the emotion and vibration really made the
story.
This somewhat digressive, if necessary, reiteration of
James's artistic use of the consciousness brings one right to
the essential point that, as a medium for exhibiting some
difficulty felt by his principals, it forms for the reader at
the same time their.link of connection with any conflict or
complication as moral beings. That is to say, the conscious
ness as a register of perceptions must automatically convey
whatever values govern an individual's appraisal of a situa
tion. How the obvious truth involved is that those who re
ceive the fullest impression of life are likely to react most
valuably to it. With intelligence, imagination, taste as the
primary requisites in the make-up of his characters, James
noted their capacity for being "intense perceivers." all, of
their respective predicaments .3-5 Hence the record of their
experience, invariably a matter of their perception, establishes
itself as a record of success or failure, not through an end
ing in either triumph or tragedy, but according to the depth
and acuity of the insight brought to bear on any situation.
The faculty for grasping its values controls at once the ex
tent of their development and their mastery of a situation.
15 Ibid., p. 71.
153
The determining ethical values James never repre
sents in religious any more than in conventional or utili
tarian terms. Always of the most immaterial, they are
founded on what may perhaps best be described as a morality
of sensibility. The central clue to such an interpretation
James himself gave us when he declared that the agents in a
drama are interesting in so far as they have the power to
be "finely aware and richly responsible.Truth becomes
simply a question of discernment, a purely personal thing
to which one is guided by the reaction of his sensibility to
the nature of events and which one is obliged to acknowledge
in a beautiful "rightness1 1 of conduct. The person who is
free from moral embarrassment, the Rose Armiger, Kate Croy,
or Charlotte Stant, may refuse a course of ideally right
conduct for one of questionable merit, but there is never
any doubt about the complete lucidity of the choice nor any
escape from accountability for it.
Through the whole series of James*a novels and tales
the ever-recurring theme is the dilemma of a fine conscience
faced with circumstances that make a choice unavoidable.
Almost without exception, in fact, James confronted his people
with problems of moral choice, so obsessed does he appear to
have been with ethical judgment in its relation to character.
16 Ibid.. p. 62.
134
Por the purpose of isolating the moral issue, James usually
gave his figures an unrestricted freedom of action, which in
turn imposed on them the fullest responsibility for their
decisions. He felt, moreover, that human action can no maore
be considered in the relative terms of cause and effect than
each item of conduct can be referred to an absolute standard
of right and wrong. The results of decision in action being
incalculable, James would have us understand that behavior
is to be estimated largely by the kind of existence it has
in an individual's consciousness. He accordingly placed
people in situations designed to test their powers of inward
analysis: Maisie amid the squalid intrigues of her parents
and step-parent; Strether in the free and aesthetic life of
Paris, whither he has been sent to reclaim an erring son;
Densher between the woman he loves and the stricken Milly
whose fortune they both covet; Maggie between her husband and
the woman who menaces her marriage. Forcing them to exercise
the fullest capacity of their exceedingly receptive and re
flective minds in the play of subjective consciousness over
the specific circumstances, he causes them; behind one lifted
curtain after another, to reveal the ways and motives of their -
inner natures. The fascination of the story of Milly Theale
and Merton Densher, of Lambert Strether, of Maggie Verver,
even of little Maisie, consists in learning of what essential
stuff their characters are made. Por James this never means
135
merely the Imaginative embodiment of personality, but the
establishment of character on the plane of moral awareness
and activity.
James sought to isolate the ethical consciousness of
human beings, but not the ethical problem, that is, in so far
as it could be removed to a region of transcendent beauty and
goodness. He did not blink the fact that good and evil are
permanent factors in the world, and that evil triumphs over
good as often as not. Morality, therefore, does not imply
innocence of evil. However masked by artful social veneer,
evil is acutely felt to be ever-present, even by James's
“purest” figures. It is sensed by Maggie Verver, for instance,
as “the horror of the thing hideously behind« behind so much
trusted, so much pretended nobleness, cleverness, tenderness."
The world of Henry James's later fiction is-far from being a
pretty one; indeed, notwithstanding its high culture and
civilization, it is morally as ugly a world as any in the
English novel up to that point. The pathetic and ill-starred
figures of Maisie, Nanda, and Milly Theale, are only too
luminous against the background of a festering society. It
is enough to recall the atmosphere of intrigue which pervades
What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age or the hard worldliness
of Mrs. Iiowder's circle In The Wings of the Dove.
Treachery, cruelty, covetousness, hypocrisy, and tyranny
are all basic vices in James's “morality." Because they are
136
not set forth In any simple and fundamental state, because
this novelist dealt with, their expression in complex rather
than in simply and instinctive people, has, It is frequently
argued, specialized his work and weakened its general appeal.
If this be so, a case can be made for its'increased validity
on the same grounds, since moral perversity becomes really
more gross, If less obvious, when it assumes the refinements
which develop in a world of elaborate soc141 rules and subtle
modes of communication. James's mind was engrossed by the
beast in the drawing-room, if one may adjust his own figure;
and in this sense, he may be said to count for morality on
Its sturdiest side, on the side assailed by'the excesses of
sophistication, self-indulgence, and privilege.
James liked breeding, culture, taste; he perceived that
these were the products (even if not the Inevitable products)
of leisure, and leisure in turn of money. The lack of money
may be sufficiently great to be a temptation to some of his
characters; it is never sufficiently great to be compelling;
while the possession of it is most correctly to be regarded
as a fictive convention, employed to free the moral issue
from economic necessity. Along the same lines, a popular
error has been to consider that for James manners and intelli
gence were a valid index of inner fineness, and to suspect
that he over-valued "subtlety" and "charm" in the formation
of character. From youth to age, he gave unpleasant pictures
of the merely intelligent and cultivated--of the older
137
Bellegardes, of Osmond and Madame Merle, of Mrs. Gereth,
Mrs. Hewsome, Mrs. Brookenham. Villainesses like Charlotte
Stant and Kate Croy are alert to the least flicker of grace,
of taste, of good form, and those who suffer most at their
hands can only describe them as handsome and wonderful* Yet
the defect of character which spurs them on their predatory
way is not for a moment disguised by theif1 "style" and brilliant
ease. The levels of James *s hierarchy of standards are quite
clearly adjusted according to the differences in the moral
paste of individuals. Exalted high above the merely clever
and cultivated, the handsome and wonderful, are the good, the
sensitive, the people with conscience--Fleda Vetch and Strether,
who happen to be poor; Milly Theale and the Ververs, who are
fabulously rich.
James had in large measure the pasiion of the Greeks
for truth, beauty, and goodness: he unfailingly selected
models of singular moral beauty to play thd leading roles in
his books, and always one person at least is sure to typify
invincible goodness. Struggling to act from the purest of
motives, these individuals are concerned ahove all with work
ing out a private system of conduct that makes it possible
for them to shape their relationships to some correspondence
with their ideals and to live morally in spite of the world
around them. Hot one is described as at all weak-willed, or
of dependent nature, but, on the contrary, as rather strong-
willed and of independent, not to say, self-dependent nature*
What James stood for was an inmost integrity of mind and
character that endures, however beset by difficulty or dis- •
appointment. The ‘suramum bonum* for his creatures is not a
beatific happiness, but “a way of being that is almost all
inner heroics."^ James*s rigorous sense of moral responsi
bility imposed on his men and women a scrupulousness of
behavior which they express as a supreme need for being "right
with themselves. In bringing their struggles of conscience
to a dramatic focus, he was from first to last preoccupied
with the quality of their experience, not its substance*
The interest itself is the freedom of the individ
ual will, not to deny the field of fated facts within
which it operates, but to create with them and in
spite of them, a human character. 18
Auden1s statement is of the essence. The final test of worth
of a character is simply what he chooses to give up and what
to cling to— thus renunciation becomes the crux of James‘s
greatest stories. Strether, though deeply tempted by a view
of the aesthetic life, refuses it for himself in order to
keep his judgment disinterested; Densher, having deceived a
woman whose fortune he desires, at last refuses to lie fur
ther to her, indifferent to the consequences of his plans;
17
Glenway Westcott, "A Sentimental Contribution,"
Hound and Horn. 7:527, April-May, 1934.
18 W. H. Auden, “Henry James and the Artist In America,
Harper1s Magazine. 197:37, July, 1948.
139
and. Maggie, acquiring the power to ruin her rival, dismisses
all feelings of resentment and vindictiveness.
Such a passion for fine scruples and heroic renuncia
tions suggests a danger of missing out on emotional experience,
a danger James illustrated in “The Beast in the Jungle.”
>
John Marcher‘s failure, his spiritual emptiness, is just his
indulgence in the kind of ethical thinking that amounts to
no more than legalistic quibbling since it blinds him to the
necessity for aetion. Certainly Maggie and Densher and
Strether meet their problems with an extreme self-consciousness
about action which would strike us as equally intelleetualized
and sterile if we failed to see that all their patience and
subtlety is exercised in behalf of something they profoundly
feel as worthwhile. Conrad, before anyone else, recognized
the essential difficulty:
To most of us, living willingly in'a sort of in
tellectual moonlight, in the faintly reflected lignt
of truth, the shadows so firmly renounced by Mr.
Henry James’s men and women stand out endowed with
extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary
that their rejection offends, by its uncalled-for
scrupulousness, those business-like instincts which
a careful Providence has implanted in our breasts,^
The values precious to these people cannot be appraised by
the world’s thumb and finger. Their moral sense, in tne
last analysis, is what James referred to as ”the individual
vision of decency, the critical as well as the passionate
- 1 * 9 Conrad, op. cit., p. 590
140
judgment of it tinder sharp stress.One remembers James*s
numerous "poor sensitive gentlemen1 1 to whom nothing in life
matters compared with this rarefied sense of decency, and all
the others who prize the austere kind of triumph that can be
weighed only on scales balancing subjective victory against
practical defeat. For their like, renunciation is both a
necessity and a privilege, resting upon the consciousness of
personal worth inherent in human character at its best. A
figure in The Tragic Muse sums up the whole attitude when he
declares, "One is oness self a fine consequence."
Ill
The great question as to a poet or a novelist is,
How does he feel about life? what, In the last analysis,
is his philosophy? When vigorous writers have reached
maturity, we are at liberty to gather from their works
some expression of a total view of the world they have
been so actively observing. This is the most interest
ing thing their works offer us. (Bssay on Turgenev, 1874)21
James never formed anything so pretentious as an ethi
cal system, seemingly because, with his view of the complexity
of life, he could not be either reassuring or skeptical, hope
ful or ominous, but only critical of all dogmatic certainties.
His philosophy, what he thought about life; was primarily a
matter of the assumptions about human character which were for
20 James, The Art of the Novel. pp. 92-93.
21 Lyon N. Richardson, Henry James (New Yorks American
Book Company, 1941), p. 34.
141
him the source of so much eloquence. Although he reported
honestly what he saw, never exploiting his personal feelings,
nor intruding to moralize, in just the sort of individuals he
chose for their eaqpressive value, he gave us by plain impli
cation his vision of human excellence.
It is true that James chose for his field of observa
tion a limited social world very largely composed, as one
critic has put it, of “personal relations, aesthetic emotions,
and historic associations.1,22 It is true that he exercised
his best gifts in the portrayal of "intellefctual types," who
touch life at one remove, so to speak, with the imagination
and by "appreciation," Their like surely appear too numerous
ly in his novels for ordinary reality, while the fine motives
that govern their conduct, Beach points out, are a luxury
beyond the command of common men and women‘ s who have a more
desperate grip on material values.25
But James was not interested in creating in his fiction
the illusion of everyday life. Believing that literature was
above all "our sum of intelligent life,"^4 he became the
avowed novelist of the free spirit. Throughout his career his
writings were a plea for freedom, for the right to live, In
22 Desmond MacGarthy, "The World of Henry James,"
Saturday Review of Literature. 8:82, August 29, 1931.
23 Beach, The Method of Henry James, p. 149.
24
James, Letters, II, 342.
one’s own light, as full a life as possible; and his great
effort was to discover, to portray, the integrity of the
individual. In his insistence upon man as a responsible agent,
not an irresponsible victim, the social sense of James’s view
expresses itself . He repeatedly . offered the- case of the sen
sitive conscience which i's influenced more than anything else
by the personal relationships in which it stands. . His lesson
becomes thereby one not alone of individual integrity, but
one also of conduct reasoned in terms of social responsibility.
The moral sense, and the social sense, which James en
trusted to the care of the remarkable people in his novels—
the fine, but very delicate perception, unsupported by any
clear set of ideas— was in a pronounced degree his own.
Already measured through his preference in character, it can
be distinctly accounted for in the sum of his personal ex
perience.
First of all, in his choice of background and situation,
James was unquestionably effected, for better or worse, by
the particular foreign milieu in which he happened to pass the
greater part of his life. If certain subjects repeatedly
engaged his attention— like that of the naive American con
sciousness exposed to complex European standards and traditions
they were merely the most familiar patterns of reality for him.
By middle life he had grown altogether weary of being classi
fied as an international novelist, insisting that he looked
143
upon the English-Amerlean world only as "a big Anglo-Saxon
total.”25 Believing that an old civilization was necessary
to set a novelist in motion, and an atmosphere distinguished
for sophistication of thought and of living, he chose for him
self the environment which squared with his education and his
temperament. His deepest sense of life, however, transcended
national boundaries altogether; the nature of his genius was
such that he must have reached the same conclusions wnerever
he had lived and whatever human interests" he had noted. His
amanuensis for many years, Theodora Bosanauet, has emphasized
that his victims might equally well be innocent Americans
maltreated by odious Europeans, refined Europeans deceived
by unscrupulous Americans, or young children of any race
exposed to evil influences:
The cardinal fact is that everywhere Henry James
saw fineness apparently sacrificed to grossness,
beauty to avarice, truth to a bold front. ... His
novels are over and over again an exposure of this
wickedness, a sustained and passionate plea for the
fullest freedom of the individual development that
he saw continually imperiled by barbarous stupidity*25
Although James was inclined to be quite positive in
declaring that he was not of Hew England origin, thinking of
that condition as “a danger after all escaped,it cannot
25 Ibid.. I, 141.
25 Theodora Bosanauet, “The Record of Henry James,”
Yale Review, n.s. 10:156, October, 1920.
pn
James, Notes of a Son and Brother. p. 117.
to© overlooked tliat his moral sense was compounded in part
of the Hew England puritanism and transcendental idealism.
These essentially American elements are clearly present in a
set of values untouched toy material or practical considera
tions, in an estimate of character stressing a fine moral
integrity and a highly active conscience, and in a penchant ,
for introspective analysis and discrimination in ethical
thought. But, unlike the representatives of vvoollett,
Massachusetts, in The Ambassadors. James did not apply "a
moral scheme of the most approved pattern," that is, the
morality of New England, as a universal yardstick. The be
havior of the leading figures in the later hovels goes rather
beyond the reaches of the Puritan imagination: the Ververs
cannot bring themselves to hate or condemn "the unfaithful
partners who form so unnatural an alliance; Densher requires
Kate to prove her sincerity toy giving herself to him; Strether,
the very incarnation of the New England conscience, favors the
continuance of an adulterous relation. James was led to sanc
tion a highly elastic code of social relationships by his
response to the values that are broadly social rather than
merely individual, the values of civilization and culture. His
escape from the narrowness of Puritan rectitude, his charity
of opinion, may toe explained partly of course toy his cosmo
politan experience, tout more toy a mind of a sensibility and
acuteness great enough to carry his moral sense beyond its
American context.
145
Behind, and above everything elae was the special
quality and direction Henry James’s mind received from his
remarkable background* When William James visited him in
London in 1889, he wrote in a letter to their sister Alice
that,
His anglicisms are but ‘protective resemblances,'—
and he's really, I won’t say a Yankee, but a native
of the.James family, and has no other country.28
The novelist himself never doubted that his upbringing large
ly determined the "particular window" through which he came
to look upon the human scene. His autobiographical A Small
Bov and others and Notes of a Son and Brother throw a light
backward over the education and training that were to be as
happy for his career as possible? and, as nowhere else, these
two volumes of James’s ehildhood reveal the atmosphere of
mental and spiritual freedom in which his ethical convictions
took form. * *
Significantly, matthiessen has introduced the recently
published family portrait, based on the Writings of Henry,
Senior, and his children, as "a biography of"minds in action."2®
If ever anyone grew up in a world of thought, Henry James did;
In the most formative years of his youth he never breathed any
but the purest intellectual air. The paternal grandfather,
28 Matthiessen, The James Family, p. 503.
29 Ibid., p. v.
146
having made a fortune in Albany, freed his heirs from all
practical obligations in the American business world* The
novelist observed that the great consequence of their finan
cial independence was to turn them from the outward to the
inward life, in his view, such “felicities of destitution
which kept us, collectively, so genially interested in almost
nothing but each other ... come over me now as one of the
famous blessings in disguise. Thus was his father, a
philosopher-clergyman, able to devote his'life to the study
of theology, the pursuit of culture, and the education of
his sons.
In bringing up his children, he desired for them, above
all else, a “spiritual decency," as Henry described it,31 and
this he proposed to instill in them, not by filling their
minds with “dry husks," to use Alice's phrase,52 but by
leaving them to receive the stamp of their own individual
experience.
I desire my child ^rote Henry, SeniorjT" to become
an upright man, a man in whom goodness shall be in
duced not by mercenary motives as brute goodness Is
induced, but by love of it or a sympathetic delight
in it. And inasmuch as I Know that this character
or disposition cannot be forcibly imposed upon him,
but must be freely assumed, I surround him as far as
possible with an atmosphere of freedom.55
. 50 Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (Hew Yorks
Charles Scribner‘a Sons, 1914}, p. 59.
31 Ifcld.. p. 219.
52 Matthiessen, The James Family, p. 71.
55 Ibid., p. 70.
147
And seeing that his family were exposed to all varieties of
aesthetic and religious experience, he never ceased to in
sist upon their freedom to choose among them.
Henry James began his Notes of a Son and Brother on the
theme of the "incorrigible vagueness of current in our edu
cational drift,1 1 which carried him from France to Geneva,
Geneva to Bonn, and back again to Newport and Harvard.34 His
father had designed this seemingly desultory educational
plan to cover the range of possibilities; ahd chiefly it gave
the novelist a training which sharpened his perception of
social differences and values. Before he was out of boyhood,
he felt himself vowed to cultivate discrimination and constant
ly to exercise a fine "taste,” all toward the end of achieving
"the liberated mind and the really more curious culture.”*^
The religious education of the James children consist
ed largely in an exposure to the ideas of their metaphysical
Swedenborgian father, although they had the freedom of all
churches, that they might appreciate and judge for themselves.
But since they had as well the freedom to ignore them all
equally, this was what, Henry recorded, they mainly did.36
Of the atmosphere of his home, however, Henry wrote that it
34 James, Notes of a Son and Brother, p. 1.
36 Ibid.. p. 116.
James, A Small Boy and Others. p. 232.
148
would not have "been possible to breathe more the air of
"that reference to an order of goodness and power . • . which
we understand as the religious spirit”; at the same time he
found it “wondrous” that his father's possession of this
spirit should have been unaccompanied "with a single one of
the outward or formal, the theological, devotional, ritual,
or even implicitly pietistic signs by which we usually know
57
it." Henry, Senior, was a cosmic optimist with a stout
belief in the goodness of human nature and a firm conviction
that evil was a part of God's beneficent plan for the universe.
He felt “so vast a rightness close at hand or lurking immedi
ately behind actual arrangements that a single turn of the
inward wheel, one real response to pressure of the spiritual
spring," would assure its revelation.38 *• j
The good life, as he saw it or wllhed to see it, was a
matter of living happily and freely by spiritual, ethical,
and intellectual values; it consisted in being, not in doing.
He preached against “success" in its tangible, popular mean
ing and positively feared for his sons to decide on any fixed
career, which might prematurely limit the development of
their inner life. Of this dread Henry was to say:
3,7 James, Motes of a Son and Brother, p. 164.
38 Ibid.. p. 225.
149
What was marked in our father's prime uneasiness
in presence of any particular form of success we
might, according to our lights as then glimmering,
propose to invoke was that it bravely, or with such
inward assurance, dispensed with any suggestion of
an alternative. What we were to do instead was just
to he something, something unconnected with specific
doing, something free and uncommitted, something
finer in short than being that, whatever it was,
might consist of.39
Yet his father did not fail, despite appearances, to direct
the family‘s attention away from their own privileged group
to wider social implications:
The presence of paradox was so bright among us—
though fluttering ever with as light a wing and as
short a flight as need have been— that we fairly grew
used to allow, from Nan: early "time, for the so many and
odd declarations we heard launched, to the extent of
happily "discounting1 them; the moral of all which was
that we need never fear not to be good enough if we
were only social enough: a splendid meaning indeed
being attached to the latter term. Thus we had ever
the amusement, since I can really call it nothing less,
of hearing morality, or moral!sm, as it was more in
vidiously worded, made hay of in the very interest of
character and conduct; these things suffering much, it
seemed, by their association with the conscience— that '
is the conscious conscience— the very home of the
literal, the haunt of so many pedantries.40
Indeed, their father's objection to self-conscious virtue be
came a family joke. He taught them a horror of priggishness,
and as Henry said, guarded them, by precept and example, from
that vulgarity he dismissed as "flagrant morality" s^l “He only
42
cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself.”
39 Ibid.. pp. 50-51.
James, A Small Boy and Others. p. 216.
41 Ifrid.. P- 68.
42 Ibid.. p. 216.
150
Henry later considered it a luxury to have had all the
benefit of his father's intellectual and spiritual, his
religious, his philosophic and his social passion, without
.ever feeling the pressure of it to his irritation or discom
fort. Henry, Senior's ideas were "to be ‘taken1 or not
according to our sense and delicacy, that is our felt need
and felt honour”; and his “saving imagination,” to his son’s
mature vision, set for them the example of living as much as
they might in some such light of their own; for even if they
could not always grant his premises, they never failed to
appreciate his spirit and his feeling.4^
Henry James first summed up his own spiritual attitude
in a letter he wrote the year after the death of his parents:
I don't know why we live— the gift of life comes
to us from I don't know what source or for what purpose;
but I believe we can go on living for the reason that
(always of course up to a certain point) life is the
most valuable thing we know anything about, and it is
therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender
it while there is any yet left in the cup. In other
words consciousness is an illimitable power, and
though at times it may seem to be all consciousness
of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from
wave to wave, so that we never cease to feel, and
though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to,
there is something that holds one in one's place,
makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is
probably good not to forsake.44
More than a quarter of a century later, towards the end of his
45 James, flotes of a Son and brother, pp. 156-157.
44 James, Letters. I, 100-101.
151
life, James made an explicit statement of philosophical
belief. In 1910 he contributed to a symposium on Immortality
an essay, which Matthiessen reprinted for the first time in
1947: "Is There a Life after Death?"45 His essay voices
doctrines which supported his own thought and which at the
same time he reflected in the behavior of s6 many of his
characters. Believing that it took one'whble life, for most
people at least, to learn how to live at all, he considered
it almost absurd that there should not be another in which to
apply the lesson. Yet, looking around him at "all the ugli
ness, the grossness, the stupidity, the cruelty, the vast
extent to which the score in question is a record of brutality
and vulgarity," he read therein "the so easy non-existence of
consciousness" that dishonored "the beauty and the opportunity
even of this world."46 This, the same problem to be found
everywhere in his fiction, struck him as reason enough for
disbelief in "life on the enlarged chance." But, for himself,
he argued that it was not a question of belief, it was a
question of desire, so confirmed as to leave belief a compara
tively J.rrelevant affair, and of desire based on a sense of
increasing fitness to live from "the accumulation of the very
treasure itself of consciousness."4,7 Thus James's preoccu-
45 Matthiessen, The James Family, pp. 602-614.
46 Ibid.. p. 605.
47 P* 610‘
152
pation with personality throughout his life and his work was
not to he less strongly represented in his concept of
immortality: ' ’It is to the personality that the idea of re
newed being attaches itself.“48 This position recalls that
of his hero in "The Great Good Place,"49 who, dreaming of
another world, declares, ”1 don’t speak of the putting off
of one’s self; I speak only— if one has a'self worth sixpence
of the getting it back." For James’s elite, the matter was
of moment because it was “my or your sensibility" at stake
and because “that sensibility and its tasted fruits, as we
owe them to life, are remunerative enough and sweet enough or
too barren and too bitter.“5q In his view, if any sort of
justice held in the next world, grace would be assured to
all those who had been intensely sensitive"to this.life.
His last word on the subject may be taken from a letter of
advice to a young friend:
If there be a wisdom in not feeling— to the last
throb— the great things that happen to us, it is a
wisdom I shall never either know or esteem. Let
your soul live— it‘s the only life that isn’t, on
the whole, a sell.51
48 Ibid.. p. 605.
4® A story in The Soft Side.
50 Matthiessen, The James Family, p. 604.
James, Letters. I, 252.
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University of S outhern Cafffornfa U M iF

Asset Metadata

Creator Stewart, Gladys Jean (author)

Core Title The ethical aspect of Henry James's major period

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, American,literature, English,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Advisor McElderry, Bruce R. (committee chair), Davenport, William H. (committee member), Greever, Garland (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c20-404798

Unique identifier UC11265140

Identifier EP44255.pdf (filename),usctheses-c20-404798 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier EP44255.pdf

Dmrecord 404798

Document Type Thesis

Rights Stewart, Gladys Jean

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA