The eleven-year-old Conrad prepares his school work in the big old Cracow house where his father, the patriot Korzeniow-ski, lies dying:
There, in a large drawing room, panelled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk, I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all over till the task of my preparation was done. The table of my toil faced a tall white door, which was kept closed; now and then it would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through the crack, glide across the room, and disappear. There were two of these noiseless nursing nuns. Their voices were seldom heard. For, indeed, what could they have had to say? When they did speak to me it was with their lips hardly moving, in a cloistral clear whisper. Our domestic matters were ordered by the elderly housekeeper of our emergency. She, too, spoke but seldom. She wore a black dress with a cross hanging by a chain on her ample bosom. And though when she spoke she moved her lips more than the nuns, she never let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring note. The air around me was all piety, resignation and silence.
Stevenson is scared into Calvinism at three years old by his nurse Cummy: ‘I remember repeatedly awaking from a dream of Hell, clinging to the horizontal bar of my bed, with my knees and chin together, my soul shaken, my body convulsed with agony.’
The young James at thirteen finds himself ‘overwhelmed and bewildered’ in the Galerie d’Apollon with its frescoes by Lebrun and the great mythological paintings of Delacroix:
I shall never forget how – speaking, that is, for my own sense – they filled those vast halls with the influence rather of some complicated sound, diffused and reverberant, than of such visibilities as one could directly deal with. To distinguish among these, in the charged and coloured and confounding air, was difficult – it discouraged and defied; which was doubtless why my impression originally best entertained was that of those magnificent parts of the great gallery simply not inviting us to distinguish. They only arched over us in the wonder of their endless golden riot and relief, figured and flourished in perpetual revolution, breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of squandered picture, opening into deep outward embrasures that threw off the rest of monumental Paris somehow as a told story, a sort of wrought effect or bold ambiguity for a vista, and yet held it there, at every point, as a vast bright gage, even at moments a felt adventure, of experience.
It is impossible not to hear in such memories the opening of the door: in some such moment of ‘piety, resignation and silence’ Conrad’s brooding note of sombre dignity and laconic heroism was first struck; the Master of Ballantrae may have been buried alive in Stevenson’s nightmare as years later in the Canadian wastes, while the great wide air of glory and possessions and ‘bold ambiguity’ was breathed into James like a holy ghost at Pentecost in the great Paris gallery, where the spoils of Poynton gathered round the schoolboy and Madame Vionnet bloomed from the ceiling, a naked Venus.
It was just because the visible universe which he was so careful to treat with the highest kind of justice was determined for him at an early age that his family background is of such interest. There are two other odd gaps in his autobiographies; his two brothers, Wilky and Bob, play in them an infinitesimal part. To Miss Burr, the editor of Alice James’s Journal, we owe most of our knowledge of these almost commonplace, almost low-brow members of a family intellectual even to excess. To Wilky ‘the act of reading was inhuman and repugnant’; he wrote from his brigade, ‘Tell Harry that I am waiting anxiously for his “next”. I can find a large sale for any blood-and-thunder tale among the darks.’ From his brigade: that was the point. It was the two failures, Wilky and Bob, who at eighteen and seventeen represented the family on the battlefields of the Civil War. William’s eyesight was always bad, and Henry escaped because of an accident, the exact nature of which has always remained a mystery. One is glad, of course, that he escaped the obvious effects of war: Wilky was ruined physically, Bob nervously; both drifted in the manner of war-time heroes from fanning in Florida to petty business careers in Milwaukee; and it is not improbable that the presence of these ruined heroes helped to keep Henry James out of America.
It is possible that through Wilky and Bob we can trace the source of James’s main fantasy, the idea of treachery which was always attached to his sense of evil. James had not, so far as we know, been betrayed, like Monteith, like Gray, like Milly Theale and Maggie Verver and Isabel Archer, by his best friend, and it would have taken surely a very deep betrayal to explain an impulse which dictated The American in 1876 and The Golden Bowl in 1905, which attached itself to the family sense of supernatural evil and produced his great gallery of the damned. It takes some form of self-betrayal to dip so deep, and one need not go, like some modern critics, to a ‘castration complex’ to find the reason. There are psychological clues which point to James having evaded military service with insufficient excuse. A civil war is not a continental squabble; its motives are usually deeper, represent less superficial beliefs on the part of the ordinary combatant, and the James family at Concord were at the very spot where the motives of the North sounded at their noblest. His accident has an air of mystery about it (that is why some of his critics have imagined a literal castration), and one needs some explanation of his almost hysterical participation in the Great War on the side of a civilization about which he had no illusions, over whose corruption he had swapped amusing anecdotes with Alice. It will be remembered that in his magnificent study of treachery, A Round of Visits, Monteith’s Betrayer, like all the others, was a very near friend. ‘To live thus with his unremoved undestroyed, engaging, treacherous face, had been, as our traveller desired, to live with all of the felt pang.’ His unremoved face, the felt pang: it is not hard to believe that James suffered from a long subconscious uneasiness about a personal failure.
This, then, was his visible universe: visible indeed if it faced him daily in his glass: the treachery of friends, the meanest kind of lies, ‘the black and merciless things’, as he wrote in the scenario of The Ivory Tower, ‘that are behind great possessions’. But it is perhaps the measure of his greatness, of the wideness and justice of his view, that critics of an older generation, Mr Desmond MacCarthy among them, have seen him primarily as a friendly, rather covetous follower of the ‘best’ society. The sense of evil never obsessed him, as it obsessed Dostoevsky; he never ceased to be primarily an artist, unlike those driven geniuses, Lawrence and Tolstoy, and he could always throw off from the superfluity of his talent such exquisite amiable fragments as Daisy Miller and The Pension Beaurepas: satire so gentle, even while so witty, that it has the quality of nostalgia, a looking back towards a way of life simple and unreflecting, with a kind of innocence even in its greed. ‘Common she might be,’ he wrote of Daisy Miller, ‘yet what provision was made by that epithet for her queer little native grace.’ It is in these diversions, these lovely little marginalia, that the Marxist critic, just as much as Mr MacCarthy, finds his material. He was a social critic only when he was not a religious one. No writer was more conscious that he was at the end of a period, at the end of the society he knew. It was a revolution he quite explicitly foresaw; he spoke of
the class, as I seemed to see it, that had had the longest and happiest innings in history . . . and for whom the future wasn’t going to be, by most signs, anything like so bland and benedictory as the past . . . I cannot say how vivid I felt the drama so preparing might become – that of the lapse of immemorial protection, that of the finally complete exposure of the immemorially protected.
But the Marxists, just as much as the older critics, are dwelling on the marginalia. Wealth may have been almost invariably connected with the treacheries he described, but so was passion. When he was floating on his fullest tide, ‘listening’ as he put it, ‘at the chamber of the soul’, the evil of capitalist society is an altogether inadequate explanation of his theme. It was not the desire for money alone which united Densher and Kate, and the auth
or of The Spoils of Poynton would no more have condemned passion than the author of The Ambassadors would have condemned private wealth. His lot and his experience happened to lie among the great possessions, but ‘the black and merciless things’ were no more intrinsically part of a capitalist than of a socialist system: they belonged to human nature. They amounted really to this: an egotism so complete that you could believe that something inhuman, supernatural, was working there through the poor devils it had chosen.
In The Jolly Corner Brydon, the cultured American expatriate, returned to his New York home and found it haunted. He hunted the ghost down. It was afraid of him (the origin of that twist is known to us. In A Small Boy James had described the childish dream he built his story on). He drove it to bay in its evening dress under the skylight in the hall, discovered in the ‘evil, odious, blatant, vulgar’ features the reflection of himself. This is what he would have been if he had stayed and joined the Wall Street racket and prospered. It is easy to take the mere social criticism implied, but I have yet to find socialist or conservative who can feel any pity for the evil he denounces, and the final beauty of James’s stories lies in their pity: ‘The poetry is in the pity.’ His egotists, poor souls, are as pitiable as Lucifer. The woman Brydon loved had also seen the ghost; he had not appeared less blatant, less vulgar to her with his ruined sight and maimed hand and his million a year, but the emotion she chiefly felt was pity.
‘He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged,’ she said.
‘And haven’t I been unhappy? Am not I – you’ve only to look at me! – ravaged?’
‘Ah, I don’t say I like him better.’ she granted after a thought ‘But he’s grim, he’s worn – and things have happened to him. He doesn’t make shift, for sight, with your charming monocle.’
James wasn’t a prophet, he hadn’t a didactic purpose; he wished only to render the highest kind of justice, and you cannot render the highest kind of justice if you hate. He was a realist: he had to show the triumphs of egotism; he was a realist: he had to show that a damned soul has its chains. Milly Theale, Maggie Verver, these ‘good’ people had their escapes, they were lucky in that they loved, could sacrifice themselves like Wilky and Bob, they were never quite alone on the bench of desolation. But the egotists had no escape, there was no tenderness in their passion, and their pursuit of money was often no more than an interest, a hobby: they were, inescapably, themselves. Kate and Merton Densher get the money for which they’d schemed: they don’t get each other. Charlotte Stant and the Prince satisfy their passion at the expense of a lifetime of separation.
This is not ‘poetic justice’; it was not as a moralist that James designed his stories, but as a realist. His family background, his personal failure, determined his view of the visible universe when he first began to write, and there was nothing in the society of his time to make him reconsider his view. He had always been strictly just to the truth as he saw it, and all that his deepening experience had done for him was to alter a murder to an adultery, but while in The American he had not pitied the murderer, in The Golden Bowl he had certainly learned to pity the adulterers. There was no victory for human beings, that was his conclusion; you were punished in your own way, whether you were of God’s or the Devil’s party. James believed in the supernatural, but he saw evil as an equal force with good. Humanity was cannon fodder in a war too balanced ever to be concluded. If he had been guilty himself of the supreme egotism of preserving his own existence, he left the material, in his profound unsparing analysis, for rendering even egotism the highest kind of justice, of giving the devil his due.
It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet. ‘You “like” that horror –?’
‘I could have liked him. And to me,’ she said, ‘he was no horror, I had accepted him.’
‘I had accepted him.’ James, who had never taken a great interest in his father’s Swedenborgianism, had gathered enough to strengthen his own older more traditional heresy. For his father believed, in his own words, that ‘the evil or hellish element in our nature, even when out of divine order . . . is yet not only no less vigorous than the latter, but on the contrary much more vigorous, sagacious, and productive of eminent earthly uses’ (so one might describe the acquisition of Milly Theale’s money). The difference, of course, was greater than the resemblance. The son was not an optimist, he didn’t share his father’s hopes of the hellish element, he only pitied those who were immersed in it; and it is in the final justice of his pity, the completeness of an analysis which enabled him to pity the most shabby, the most corrupt, of his human actors, that he ranks with the greatest of creative writers. He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.
1936
HENRY JAMES: THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT
IT is possible for an author’s friends to know him too well. His books are hidden behind the façade of his public life, and his friends remember his conversations when they have forgotten his characters. It is a situation which by its irony appealed to Henry James. At the time of his own siege of London, he took note of Robert Browning, the veteran victor seen at every dinner table.
I have never ceased to ask myself [James wrote], in this particular loud, sound, normal hearty presence, all so assertive and so whole, all bristling with prompt responses and expected opinions and usual views . . . I never ceased, I say, to ask myself what lodgement, on such premises, the rich proud genius one adored could ever have contrived, what domestic commerce the subtlety that was its prime ornament and the world’s wonder have enjoyed, under what shelter the obscurity that was its luckless drawback and the world’s despair have flourished.
It is a double irony that James himself should have so disappeared behind the public life. There are times when those who met him at Grosvenor House, those who dined with him at Chelsea, even the favoured few who visited him at Rye, seem, while they have remembered his presence (that great bald brow, those soothing and reassuring gestures) and the curiosity of his conversation (the voice ponderously refining and refining on his meaning), to have forgotten his books. This, at any rate, is a possible explanation of Mr MacCarthy’s statement in a delightful and deceptive essay on ‘The World of Henry James’: ‘The universe and religion are so completely excluded from his books as if he had been an eighteenth-century writer. The sky above his people, the earth beneath them, contain no mysteries for them’, and in the same essay that the religious sense ‘is singularly absent from his work’.
It would indeed be singular if the religious sense were absent Consider the father, the son of a Presbyterian and intended for the ministry, who travelling in England was possessed (during a nervous disorder) by the teaching of Swedenborg and devoted the rest of his life to writing theological books which no one read. His inspiration was the same as William Blake’s and it was not less strong because its expression was chilled within the icy limits of Boston. It is difficult to believe that a child brought up by Henry James senior did not inherit a few of his father’s perplexities if not his beliefs. Certainly he inherited a suspicion of organized religion, although that suspicion conflicted with his deepest instinct, his passion for Europe and tradition.
It is a platitude that in all his novels one is aware of James’s deep love of age; not one generation had tended the lawns of his country houses, but centuries of taste had smoothed the grass and weathered the stone, ‘the warm, weary brickwork’. This love of age and tradition, even without his love of Italy, was enough to draw him towards the Catholic Church as, in his own words, ‘the most impressive convention in all history’. As early as 1869, in a letter from Rome, he noted its aesthetic appeal.
In St Peter’s I stayed some time. It’s even beyond its reputation. It was filled with foreign ecclesiastics – great armies encamped in prayer on the marble plains of its pavement – an inexhaustible physiognomical study. To crown my day, on my way home, I met his Holiness in person – driving in prodigious purple state – sitting dim within the shadows of his c
oach with two uplifted benedictory fingers – like some dusky Hindoo idol in the depths of its shrine. . . . From the high tribune of a great chapel of St Peter’s I have heard in the Papul choir a strange old man sing in a shrill unpleasant soprano. I’ve seen troops of little tortured neophytes clad in scarlet, marching and counter-marching and ducking and flopping, like poor little raw recruits for tine heavenly host.
But no one can long fail to discover how superficial is the purely aesthetic appeal of Catholicism; it is more accidental than the closeness of turf. The pageantry may be well done and excite the cultured visitor or it may be ill done and repel him. The Catholic Church has never hesitated to indulge in the lowest forms of popular ‘art’; it has never used beauty for the sake of beauty. Any little junk shop of statues and holy pictures beside a cathedral is an example of what I mean. ‘The Catholic Church, as churches go today,’ James wrote in A Little Tour in France, ‘is certainly the most spectacular; but it must feel that it has a great fund of impressiveness to draw upon when it opens such sordid little shops of sanctity as this.’ If it had been true that Henry James had no religious sense and that Catholicism spoke only to his aesthetic sense, Catholicism and Henry James at this point would finally have parted company; or if his religious sense had been sufficiently vague and ‘numinous’, he would then surely have approached the Anglican Church to discover whether he could find there satisfaction for the sense of awe and reverence, whether he could build within it his system of ‘make-believe’. If the Anglican Church did not offer to his love of age so unbroken a tradition, it offered to an Englishman or an American a purer literary appeal. Crashaw’s style, if it occasionally has the beauty of those ‘marble plains’, is more often the poetical equivalent of the shop for holy statues; it has neither the purity nor the emotional integrity of Herbert’s and Vaughan’s; nor as literature can the Douai Bible be compared with the Authorized Version. And yet the Anglican Church never gained the least hold on James’s interest, while the Catholic Church seems to have retained its appeal to the end. He never even felt the possibility of choice; it was membership of the Catholic Church or nothing. Rowland Mallet wondered ‘whether it be that one tacitly concedes to the Roman Church the monopoly of a guarantee of immortality, so that if one is indisposed to bargain with her for the precious gift one must do without it altogether’.