T. S. Eliot
from IN MEMORY
The Little Review, August 1918
He was a critic who preyed not upon ideas, but upon living beings. It is criticism which is in a very high sense creative. The characters, the best of them, are each a distinct success of creation: Daisy Miller’s small brother is one of these. Done in a clean flat drawing, each is extracted out of a reality of its own, substantial enough: everything given is true for that individual; but what is given is chosen with great art for its place in a general scheme. The general scheme is not one character, nor a group of characters in a plot or merely in a crowd. The focus is a situation, a relation, an atmosphere, to which the characters pay tribute, but being allowed to give only what the writer wants. The real hero, in any of James’s stories, is a social entity of which men and women are constituents. It is, in The Europeans, that particular conjunction of people at the Wentworth house, a situation in which several memorable scenes are merely timeless parts, only occurring necessarily in succession. In this aspect, you can say that James is dramatic; as what Pinero and Mr. Jones used to do for a large public, James does for the intelligent. It is the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that James is unequalled. Compared with James’s, other novelists’ characters seem to be only accidentally in the same book. Naturally, there is something terrible, as disconcerting as a quicksand, in this discovery, though it only becomes absolutely dominant in such stories as The Turn of the Screw. It is partly foretold in Hawthorne, but James carried it much farther. And it makes the reader, as well as the personae, uneasily the victim of a merciless clairvoyance.
James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. Englishmen, with their uncritical admiration (in the present age) for France, like to refer to France as the Home of Ideas; a phrase which, if we could twist it into truth, or at least a compliment, ought to mean that in France ideas are very severely looked after; not allowed to stray, but preserved for the inspection of civic pride in a Jardin des Plantes, and frugally dispatched on occasions of public necessity. England, on the other hand, if it is not the Home of Ideas, has at least become infested with them in about the space of time within which Australia has been overrun by rabbits. In England ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. George Meredith (a disciple of Carlyle) was fertile in ideas; his epigrams are a facile substitute for observation and inference. Mr. Chesterton’s brain swarms with ideas; I see no evidence that it thinks. James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation.
Graham Greene
from HENRY JAMES: THE PRIVATE UNIVERSE
The Lost Childhood and Other Essays, 1951
“Art itself,” Conrad wrote, “may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe,” and no definition in his own prefaces better describes the object Henry James so passionately pursued, if the word visible does not exclude the private vision. If there are times when we feel, in The Sacred Fount, even in the exquisite Golden Bowl, that the judge is taking too much into consideration, that he could have passed his sentence on less evidence, we have always to admit, as the long record of human corruption unrolls, that he has never allowed us to lose sight of the main case; and because his mind is bent on rendering even evil “the highest kind of justice,” the symmetry of his thought lends the whole body of his work the importance of a system.
. . . 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.
Ezra Pound
from HENRY JAMES
The Little Review, August 1918
I am tired of hearing pettiness talked about Henry James’s style. The subject has been discussed enough in all conscience, along with the minor James. Yet I have heard no word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life; not worked out in diagrams of Greek tragedy, not labelled “epos” or “Aeschylus.” The outbursts in The Tragic Muse, the whole of The Turn of the Screw, human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage! The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, didn’t “feel.” I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom idiots didn’t raise this cry.
And the great labour, this labour of translation, of making America intelligible, of making it possible for individuals to meet across national borders. I think half the American idiom is recorded in Henry James’ writing, and whole decades of American life that otherwise would have been utterly lost, wasted, rotting in unhermetic jars of bad writing, of inaccurate writing. No English reader will ever know how good are his New York and his New England; no one who does not see his grandmother’s friends in the pages of the American books. The whole great assaying and weighing, the research for the significance of nationality, French, English, American.
Edith Wharton
from A BACKWARD GLANCE 1934
Once again—and again unintentionally—I was guilty of a similar blunder. I was naturally much interested in James’s technical theories and experiments, though I thought, and still think, that he tended to sacrifice to them that spontaneity which is the life of fiction. Everything, in the latest novels, had to be fitted into a predestined design, and design, in his strict geometrical sense, is to me one of the least important things in fiction. Therefore, though I greatly admired some of the principles he had formulated, such as that of always letting the tale, as it unfolded, be seen through the mind most capable of reaching to its periphery, I thought it was paying too dear even for such a principle to subordinate to it the irregular and irrelevant movements of life. And one result of the application of his theories puzzled and troubled me. His latest novels, for all their profound moral beauty, seemed to me more and more lacking in atmosphere, more and more severed from that thick nourishing human air in which we all live and move. The characters in “The Wings of the Dove” and “The Golden Bowl” seem isolated in a Crookes tube for our inspection: his stage was cleared like that of the Théâtre Français in the good old days when no chair or table was introduced that was not relevant to the action (a good rule for the stage, but an unnecessary embarrassment to fiction). Preoccupied by this, I one day said to him: “What was your idea in suspending the four principal characters in ‘The Golden Bowl’ in the void? What sort of life did they lead when they were not watching each other, and fencing with each other? Why have you stripped them of all the human fringes we necessarily trail after us through life?”
He looked at me in surprise, and I saw at once that the surprise was painful, and wished I had not spoken. I had assumed that his system was a deliberate one, carefully thought out, and had been genuinely anxious to hear his reasons. But after a pause of reflection
he answered in a disturbed voice: “My dear—I didn’t know I had!”
Virginia Woolf
from REVIEW OF THE LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES 1920
And so on and so on. There, portentous and prodigious, we hear unmistakably the voice of Henry James. There, to our thinking, we have exploded in our ears the report of his enormous, sustained, increasing, and overwhelming love for life. It issues from whatever tortuous channels and dark tunnels like a flood at its fullest. There is nothing too little, too large, too remote, too queer for it not to flow round, float off, and make its own. Nothing in the end has chilled or repressed him; everything has fed and filled him; the saturation is complete. The labours of the morning might be elaborate and austere. There remained an irrepressible fund of vitality which the flying hand at midnight addressed fully and affectionately to friend after friend, each sentence, from the whole fling of his person to the last snap of his fingers, firmly fashioned and throwing out at its swiftest well-nigh incredible felicities of phrase.
The only difficulty, perhaps, was to find an envelope that would contain the bulky product, or any reason, when two sheets were blackened, for not filling a third. Truly, Lamb House was not sanctuary, but rather a “small, crammed, and wholly unlucrative hotel,” and the hermit no meagre solitary but a tough and even stoical man of the world, English in his humour, Johnsonian in his sanity, who lived every second with insatiable gusto and in the flux and fury of his impressions obeyed his own injunction to remain “as solid and fixed and dense as you can.” For to be as subtle as Henry James one must also be as robust; to enjoy his power of exquisite selection, one must have “lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered,” and, with the appetite of a giant, have swallowed the whole.
Yet, if he shared with magnanimity, if he enjoyed hugely, there remained something incommunicable, something reserved, as if in the last resort, it was not to us that he turned, nor from us that he received, nor into our hands that he placed his offerings. There they stand, the many books, products of “an inexhaustible sensibility,” all with the final seal upon them of artistic form, which, as it imposes its stamp, sets apart the object thus consecrated and makes it no longer part of ourselves. In this impersonality the maker himself desired to share—“to take it,” as he said, “wholly, exclusively with the pen (the style, the genius) and absolutely not at all with the person,” to be “the mask without the face,” the alien in our midst, the worker who when his work is done turns even from that and reserves his confidence for the solitary hour, like that at midnight when, alone on the threshold of creation, Henry James speaks aloud to himself “and the prospect clears and flushes, and my poor blest old genius pats me so admirably and lovingly on the back that I turn, I screw round, and bend my lips to passionately, in my gratitude, kiss its hands.” So that is why, perhaps, as life swings and clangs, booms and reverberates, we have the sense of an altar of service, of sacrifice, to which, as we pass out, we bend the knee.
Suggestions for Further Reading
FICTION
In 1913 Mrs. G. W. Prothero asked James which five of his novels he would recommend to an uninitiated reader. He supplied two lists, the second being the “more ‘advanced.’ ” The first named Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady, The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. The second named The American, The Tragic Muse, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. Perhaps James was being playful (he promised to suggest shorter works at a later time, but “you shall have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and potatoes”). Today The Portrait of a Lady would rank at the top of many lists. The American might be the novel to read next (or perhaps first, for some readers find it is less challenging than Portrait, and, with its emphatic “international theme,” it provides a good introduction to representative concerns). Then, if the reader is still willing, The Bostonians, with its strange sexual tension, generally stirs excitement. The revolutionaries and anarchists in The Princess Casamassima today strike many false notes, and Roderick Hudson has sometimes been judged a heavy-handed story of a troubled young artist. Although James himself recognized structural flaws in The Tragic Muse, it has many admirers. The short novel Washington Square continues to draw interest; it has been the subject of over a dozen film or television productions (see Susan M. Griffin, ed., Henry James Goes to the Movies). The Spoils of Poynton is witty, fast, and engaging; the great James biographer Leon Edel once noted that What Maisie Knew was his favorite James novel.
Those who would enter into deep James will arrive at the great novels of “the major phase,” even if good people sometimes admit to being baffled by the extraordinary exercise of consciousness that marks these masterpieces. Even that defender Ezra Pound judged them as “cobwebby,” and in A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton would concede that the late novels, “for all their profound moral beauty, seemed to me more and more lacking in atmosphere, more and more severed from that thick nourishing air in which we all live and move.” With its brilliant fin-de-siècle setting in Paris, The Ambassadors, “quite the best, ‘all around,’ of my productions,” is often judged the most accessible. With its aesthetic pitch, high moral ambiguity, and Venetian climax, The Wings of the Dove is a favorite of many readers. The magnificent The Golden Bowl is the only novel James included on both lists for Mrs. Prothero.
James’s twenty-two novels are listed here. Of his 114 tales—some of considerable length and some categorized as “nouvelles”—the sixteen listed here are of particular interest. (Those marked with an asterisk [*] are included in this edition.)
Novels
Watch and Ward (serially published, 1871; book publication, 1878)
Roderick Hudson (1875)
The American (1877)
The Europeans (1878)
Confidence (1879)
Washington Square (1881)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Bostonians (1886)
The Princess Casamassima (1886)
The Reverberator (1888)
The Other House (1896; first written as a play and then turned into
a novel)
The Spoils of Poynton (1897)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
The Awkward Age (1899)
The Tragic Muse (1900)
The Sacred Fount (1901)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Ambassadors (1903)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
The Outcry (1911; first written as a play and then turned into a
novel)
The IvoryTower (1917; posthumous and incomplete)
The Sense of the Past (1917; posthumous and incomplete)
Selected Tales
*Daisy Miller: A Study (1879)
“Pandora” (1884)
“The Aspern Papers” (1888)
“The Pupil” (1891)
*“Brooksmith” (1891)
*“The Real Thing” (1892)
*“The Middle Years” (1893)
“The Altar of the Dead” (1895)
“The Figure in the Carpet” (1896)
“In the Cage” (1898)
*The Turn of the Screw (1898)
“The Great Good Place” (1900)
“Maud Evelyn” (1900)
*“The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)
*“The Jolly Corner” (1908)
“The Bench of Desolation” (1910)
TRAVEL
James’s finest travel book, the 1907 The American Scene, provides brilliant impressions of his American tour of 1904-1905. Although Italian Hours was published two years after The American Scene, it collects essays written from 1872 to 1909; a comparison of the early and late essays on Venice, Rome, and Naples is particularly rewarding. Neither English Hours (published 1905 but with most essays from the 1870s), nor A Little Tour in France (1884) is as richly analytical as the American and the Italian travel books.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY
As noted in the introduction to the
Autobiography section of this book (and fully cited in the Selected Bibliography), a one-volume edition collects James’s work in this genre. James’s 1903 biography, William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, was a commissioned work that holds interest mainly for its evocation of life in the Anglo-American community in Rome.
LITERARY CRITICISM
In a fine two-volume edition, the Library of America publishes over 3,000 pages of literary criticism by James; there are helpful notes and an extensive index (edited by Leon Edel, with the assistance of Mark Wilson, Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition; and Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, New York: Library of America, 1984); the edition offers 120 pages on Balzac alone, 100 on George Sand (“As a man Madame Sand was admirable. . . .”), and, reprinting James’s entire 1879 Hawthorne volume as well as some additional later commentary, over 150 pages on Nathaniel Hawthorne. In all, James discusses several hundred writers. Among its many features, the edition also reprints the complete prefaces to the New York Edition. Judiciously selected and well edited is Roger Gard, ed., Henry James: The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, London and New York: Penguin, 1984.