The absence of penetralia
From “Boston,” in The American Scene, 1907. Visiting the Boston Public Library, James again complains of “the thinness of tone” of so many American cultural institutions.
The Boston institution then is a great and complete institution, with this reserve of its striking the restored absentee as practically without penetralia. A library without penetralia may affect him but as a temple without altars; it will at any rate exemplify the distinction between a benefit given and a benefit taken, a borrowed, a lent, and an owned, an appropriated convenience. The British Museum, the Louvre, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the treasures of South Kensington, are assuredly, under forms, at the disposal of the people; but it is to be observed, I think, that the people walk there more or less under the shadow of the right waited for and conceded. It remains as difficult as it is always interesting, however, to trace the detail (much of it obvious enough, but much more indefinable) of the personal port of a democracy that, unlike the English, is social as well as political. One of these denotements is that social democracies are unfriendly to the preservation of penetralia; so that when penetralia are of the essence, as in a place of study and meditation, they inevitably go to the wall.
New York power
From “New York Revisited,” in The American Scene, 1907. Although The American Scene repeatedly refers to New York as “the terrible town,” the apparently harsh adjective may suggest awe as well as revulsion in a place where James finds “all notes scattered about . . . joyously romping together.”
The aspect the power wears then is indescribable; it is the power of the most extravagant of cities, rejoicing, as with the voice of the morning, in its might, its fortune, its unsurpassable conditions, and imparting to every object and element, to the motion and expression of every floating, hurrying, panting thing, to the throb of ferries and tugs, to the plash of waves and the play of winds and the glint of lights and the shrill of whistles and the quality and authority of breeze-borne cries—all, practically, a diffused, wasted clamour of detonations—something of its sharp free accent and, above all, of its sovereign sense of being “backed” and able to back. The universal applied passion struck me as shining unprecedentedly out of the composition; in the bigness and bravery and insolence, especially, of everything that rushed and shrieked; in the air as of a great intricate frenzied dance, half merry, half desperate, or at least half defiant, performed on the huge watery floor. This appearance of the bold lacing-together, across the waters, of the scattered members of the monstrous organism—lacing as by the ceaseless play of an enormous system of steam-shuttles or electric bobbins (I scarce know what to call them), commensurate in form with their infinite work—does perhaps more than anything else to give the pitch of the vision of energy. One has the sense that the monster grows and grows, flinging abroad its loose limbs even as some unmannered young giant at his “larks,” and that the binding stitches must for ever fly further and faster and draw harder; the future complexity of the web, all under the sky and over the sea, becoming thus that of some colossal set of clockworks, some steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws. The immeasurable bridges are but as the horizontal sheaths of pistons working at high pressure, day and night, and subject, one apprehends with perhaps inconsistent gloom, to certain, to fantastic, to merciless multiplication. In the light of this apprehension indeed the breezy brightness of the Bay puts on the semblance of the vast white page that awaits beyond any other perhaps the black overscoring of science.
American teeth
From “New York: Social Notes,” in The American Scene, 1907. After long residence in England, James comprehends the main differences between his adopted home and his native land.
Why should the general “feeling” for the boot, in the United States, be so mature, so evolved, and the feeling for the hat lag at such a distance behind it? The standard as to that article of dress struck me as, everywhere, of the lowest; governed by no consensus of view, custom or instinct, no sense of its “vital importance” in the manly aspect. And yet the wearer of any loose improvisation in the way of a head-cover will testify as frankly, in his degree, to the extreme consideration given by the community at large, as I have intimated, to the dental question. The terms in which this evidence is presented are often, among the people, strikingly artless, but they are a marked advance on the omnipresent opposite signs, those of a systematic detachment from the chair of anguish, with which any promiscuous “European” exhibition is apt to bristle. I remember to have heard it remarked by a French friend, of a young woman who had returned to her native land after some years of domestic service in America, that she had acquired there, with other advantages, le sourire Californien, and the “Californian” smile, indeed, expressed, more or less copiously, in undissimulated cubes of the precious metal, plays between lips that render scant other tribute to civilization. The greater interest, in this connection, however, is that impression of the state and appearance of the teeth viewed among the “refined” as supremely important, which the restored absentee, long surrounded elsewhere with the strangest cynicisms of indifference on this article, makes the subject of one of his very first notes. Every one, in “society,” has good, handsome, pretty, has above all cherished and tended, teeth; so that the offered spectacle, frequent in other societies, of strange irregularities, protrusions, deficiencies, fangs and tusks and cavities, is quite refreshingly and consolingly absent. The consequences of care and forethought, from an early age, thus write themselves on the facial page distinctly and happily, and it is not too much to say that the total show is, among American aspects, cumulatively charming. One sees it sometimes balance, for charm, against a greater number of less fortunate items, in that totality, than one would quite know how to begin estimating.
A young priest apart from the Roman carnival
From “A Roman Holiday,” in Italian Hours, 1909. James has just reported that, while observing the noisy celebration of the Roman carnival, “I stood regardful, I suppose, but with a peculiarly tempting blankness of visage, for in a moment I received half a bushel of flour on my too-philosophic head.” With “ears full of flour,” he turns away from the crowd and seeks a quiet place in the city.
Beyond these stands a small church with a front so modest that you hardly recognise it till you see the leather curtain. I never see a leather curtain without lifting it; it is sure to cover a constituted scene of some sort—good, bad or indifferent. The scene this time was meagre—whitewash and tarnished candlesticks and mouldy muslin flowers being its principal features. I shouldn’t have remained if I hadn’t been struck with the attitude of the single worshipper—a young priest kneeling before one of the side-altars, who, as I entered, lifted his head and gave me a sidelong look so charged with the languor of devotion that he immediately became an object of interest. He was visiting each of the altars in turn and kissing the balustrade beneath them. He was alone in the church, and indeed in the whole region. There were no beggars even at the door; they were plying their trade on the skirts of the Carnival. In the entirely deserted place he alone knelt for religion, and as I sat respectfully by it seemed to me I could hear in the perfect silence the far-away uproar of the maskers. It was my late impression of these frivolous people, I suppose, joined with the extraordinary gravity of the young priest’s face—his pious fatigue, his droning prayer and his isolation—that gave me just then and there a supreme vision of the religious passion, its privations and resignations and exhaustions and its terribly small share of amusement. He was young and strong and evidently of not too refined a fibre to enjoy the Carnival; but, planted there with his face pale with fasting and his knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on it and on the crazy thousands who were preferring it to his way, that I half expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend come down and confirm his choice. Yet I confess that though I wasn’t enamoured of the Carnival myself, his seemed a gr
im preference and this forswearing of the world a terrible game—a gaining one only if your zeal never falters; a hard fight when it does. In such an hour, to a stout young fellow like the hero of my anecdote, the smell of incense must seem horribly stale and the muslin flowers and gilt candlesticks to figure no great bribe. And it wouldn’t have helped him much to think that not so very far away, just beyond the Forum, in the Corso, there was sport for the million, and for nothing. I doubt on the other hand whether my young priest had thought of this. He had made himself a temple out of the very elements of his innocence, and his prayers followed each other too fast for the tempter to slip in a whisper.
VIII
NAMES
The accustomed Jamesian forgets how strange it can seem that someone named Fleda Vetch is presented as an attractive heroine, or that two remarkable women fall in love with a young man named Merton Densher. If such Jamesian names generally lose their oddity after only a few pages, it is in part because of the magnificent idiosyncrasy of the entire Jamesian universe. Yet behind many of the names James considered or used for characters in his novels and tales, there surely remains a playful and often sly impulse.
FROM THE FICTION
Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton
Beale Farange in What Maisie Knew
Booby Manger in The Awkward Age
Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove
Urania Lendon and Goodwood Grindon in The Tragic Muse
Peregrine Midmore in The Sense of the Past
Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima
Henrietta Stackpole and Caspar Goodwood in The Portrait of a Lady
Baroness Eugenia-Camilla-Delores Young Münster of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein in The Europeans
Fanny Assingham in The Golden Bowl
Fanny Knocker in “The Wheel of Time”
Maggie Mangler in “The Chaperon”
Alfred Bonus in “Collaboration”
Dolcino Ambient in “The Author of Beltraffio”
Paul Overt in “The Lesson of the Master”
Remson Sturch in “The Special Type”
Newton Winch in “A Round of Visits”
Ulick Moreen in “The Pupil”
Cuthbert Frush in “The Third Person”
Lady Beadel-Muffet, the Misses Beadel-Muffet, Miranda Beadel-Muffet, and Sir A.B.C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., in “The Papers”
FROM THE NOTEBOOKS
Dexter Frere, Lucky Da Costa, Peregrine King, Lucy Curd, Oddsley Brasher, Tagus Shout, Wenty Hench, Cridge, Noad, Grunlus, Florimond, Frankenshaw, Olimpino, Lightbody, Busk, Squirl, Secretan, Oriel, Jump, Theory, Lupus, Maplethorpe, Fury, Trist, Croucher, Buttery, Ermelinda, Lonely, Trantum, Peachey, Pontifex, Suchbury, Gleed, Six, Gamage, Fluid, Quibbler, Chick, Lumb, Yeo, Void, Funnel, Ulic, Fade, Wharton, Bullet, Douce, Twentyman, Runting, Scruby, Keep, Vigors, Film, Jury, Cubit Gole, Yellowley, Farthing, Pudney, Taunt, Punchard, Dunderdale, Bygrave, Zambra, Negretti, Bing, Bing-Bing, Popkiss, Peckover, Alum, Pillow, Gracedew, Bounce, Smout, Daft, Buddle, Parm, Dainty, Slight, Cloak, Vizard, Overend, Balbeck, Maliphant, Sneath, Tocs, Bleat, Thanks, Pilbeam, Husk, Murkle, Mockbeggar, Osprey, Blint, Blay, Podd, Tant, Mant, Budgett, Smallpiece, Grabham, Crapp, Didcock, Putchin, Coxeter, Cockster, Dickwinter, Tester, Player, Hoy, Doy, Boys, and Polycarp.
IX
PARODY
Few of the many parodies of Henry James are successful. The following two are among the best—and James knew them both. Frank Moore Colby’s very brief imitation, imbedded as it was in a sly essay, disturbed him; in A Backward Glance Edith Wharton notes her regret at having been the one who had shown him the piece: “I shall never forget the misery, the mortification even, which tried to conceal itself behind an air of offended dignity.” Of course parody was not Colby’s main point, and his essay began with the following: “Some time ago, when Henry James wrote an essay on women that brought to my cheek the hot, rebellious blush, I said nothing about it, thinking that perhaps, after all, the man’s style was his sufficient fig leaf and that few would see how shocking he really was.” But Edmund Gosse reported that James read Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland “with the most extraordinary vivacity and appreciation.” As to James’s reaction to the specific parody itself, Gosse informed Beerbohm that their friend “desired me to let you know at once that no one can have read it with more wonder and delight than he.” But the James biographer Leon Edel asserted an unsettling effect: so acute was the little Beerbohm masterpiece that after James read it, he “felt that he was parodying himself.”
Frank Moore Colby
from IN DARKEST JAMES
In Imaginary Obligations, 1904
“If—” she sparkled.
“If!” he asked. He had lurched from the meaning for a moment.
“I might”—she replied abundantly.
His eye had eaten the meaning—“Me!” he gloriously burst. “Precisely,” she thrilled. “How splendidly you do understand.”
Max Beerbohm
THE MOTE IN THE MIDDLE DISTANCE BY H*NRY J*MES
In A Christmas Garland, 1912
It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it? The consciousness of dubiety was, for our friend, not, this morning, quite yet clean-cut enough to outline the figures on what she had called his “horizon,” between which and himself the twilight was indeed of a quality somewhat intimidating. He had run up, in the course of time, against a good number of “teasers”; and the function of teasing them back—of, as it were, giving them, every now and then, “what for”—was in him so much a habit that he would have been at a loss had there been, on the face of it, nothing to lose. Oh, he always had offered rewards, of course—had ever so liberally pasted the windows of his soul with staring appeals, minute descriptions, promises that knew no bounds. But the actual recovery of the article—the business of drawing and crossing the cheque, blotched though this were with tears of joy—had blankly appeared to him rather in the light of a sacrilege, casting, he sometimes felt, a palpable chill on the fervour of the next quest. It was just this fervour that was threatened as, raising himself on his elbow, he stared at the foot of his bed. That his eyes refused to rest there for more than the fraction of an instant, may be taken—was, even then, taken by Keith Tantalus—as a hint of his recollection that after all the phenomenon wasn’t to be singular. Thus the exact repetition, at the foot of Eva’s bed, of the shape pendulous at the foot of his was hardly enough to account for the fixity with which he envisaged it, and for which he was to find, some years later, a motive in the (as it turned out) hardly generous fear that Eva had already made the great investigation “on her own.” Her very regular breathing presently reassured him that, if she had peeped into “her” stocking, she must have done so in sleep. Whether he should wake her now, or wait for their nurse to wake them both in due course, was a problem presently solved by a new development. It was plain that his sister was now watching him between her eyelashes. He had half expected that. She really was—he had often told her that she really was—magnificent; and her magnificence was never more obvious than in the pause that elapsed before she all of a sudden remarked, “They so very indubitably are, you know!”
It occurred to him as befitting Eva’s remoteness, which was a part of Eva’s magnificence, that her voice emerged somewhat muffled by the bedclothes. She was ever, indeed, the most telephonic of her sex. In talking to Eva you always had, as it were, your lips to the receiver. If you didn’t try to meet her fine eyes, it was that you simply couldn’t hope to: there were too many dark, too many buzzing and bewildering and all frankly not negotiable leagues in between. Snatches of other voices seemed often to interlude themselves in the parley; and your loyal effort not to overhear these was complicated by your fear of missing what Eva might be twittering. “Oh, you certainly haven’t, my dear,
the trick of propinquity!” was a thrust she had once parried by saying that, in that case, he hadn’t—to which his unspoken rejoinder that she had caught her tone from the peevish young women at the Central seemed to him (if not perhaps in the last, certainly in the last but one, analysis) to lack finality. With Eva, he had found, it was always safest to “ring off.” It was with a certain sense of his rashness in the matter, therefore, that he now, with an air of feverishly “holding the line,” said, “Oh, as to that!”