II.
_A Emilie Verhaeren._
Là-bas, tant de petits hameaux sous l'avalanche De la neige qui tombe adoucissante et blanche, Tant de villages, tant de chaumines qui sont Pour le reste d'un soir doucement assoupies, Car le neige s'étend en de molles charpies Sur les blessures des vieilles briques qui n'ont Rien senti d'une Sœur sur leur rougeur qui saigne! Mais, ô neige, c'est toi la Sœur au halo blanc Qui consoles les murs malades qu'on dédaigne Et mets un peu d'ouate aux pierres s'éraflant.
Las! rien ne guérira les chaumines--aïeules Qui meurent de l'hiver et meurent d'être seules.... Et leurs âmes bientôt, au gré des vents du nord. Dans la fumée aux lents départs, seront parties Cependant que la neige, à l'heure de leur mort, Leur apporte ses refraîchissantes hosties!
_--Georges Rodenbach in "La Wallonie," Jan_.,'88.
Rodenbach is authentic.
Vielé-Griffin, who, as Stuart Merrill, has always been known in France as "an American," contributed largely to _La Wallonie_. His "Au Tombeau d'Hélène" ends:
HELENE
Me voici: J'étais là dès hier, et dès sa veille, Ailleurs, ici; Toute chair, a paré, un soir, mon âme vieille Comme l'éternité du désir que tu vêts. La nuit est claire au firmament.... Regarde avec tes yeux levés: Voici--comme un tissu de pâle feu fatal Qui fait épanouir la fleur pour la flétrir-- Monvoile où transparaît tout assouvissement Qui t'appelle à la vie et qui t'en fait mourir. La nuit est claire au firmament vital....
Mes mythes, tu les sais: Je suis fille du Cygne, Je suis la lune dont s'exubèrent les mers Qui montent, tombent, se soulèvent; Et c'est le flot de vie exultante et prostrée, le flot des rêves, le flot des chairs, le flux et le reflux de la vaste marée.
Mon doute--on dit l'Espoir--fait l'action insigne: Je suis reine de Sparte et celle-là de Troie, Par moi, la douloureuse existence guerroie Je meus toute inertie aux leurres de ma joie, Hélène, Séléné, flottant de phase en phase, Je suis l'Inaccédée et la tierce Hypostase Et si je rejetais, désir qui m'y convies, Mon voile qui promet et refuse l'extase, Ma nudité de feu résorberait les Vies....
_--Vielé-Griffin in "La Wallonie," Dec._, '91. _(Complete number devoted to his poems.)_
Mockel is represented by several poems rather too long to quote,--"Chantefable un peu naive," "L'Antithèse," suggestive of the Gourmont litany; by prose comment, by work over various pseudonyms. "A Clair Matin" is a suitable length to quote, and it is better perhaps to represent him here by it than by fragments which I had first intended to cut from his longer poems.
A CLAIR MATIN
La nuit au loin s'est effacée comme les lignes tremblantes d'un rêve; la nuit s'est fondue au courant du Passé et le jour attendu se lève.
Regardez! en les courbes molles des rideaux une heure attendue se révèle et ma fenêtre enfin s'éclaire, cristalline du gîvre où se rit la lumière.
Une parure enfantine de neiges habille là-bas d'immobiles eaux et c'est les cortèges des fées nouvelles à tire d'ailes, à tire d'ailes du grand lointain qui toutes reviennent aux flocons de ce jour en neiges qui s'épèle.
Des courbes de mes rideaux clairs --voici! c'est un parfum de ciel!-- blanc des guirlandes de l'hiver le jeune matin m'est apparu avec un visage de fiancée.
Des fées (ah je ne sais quelles mortelles fées) jadis elles vinrent toucher la paupière d'un être enfantin qui mourut. Son âme, où se jouait en songes la lumière, diaphane corolle épanouie au jour son âme était vive de toute lumière! Lui, comme un frère il suivait ma course et nous allions en confiants de la montagne à la vallée par les forêts des chênes, des hêtres --car eux, les ancêtres, ils ont le front grave ils virent maints rêves des autres âges et nous parlent, très doucement, comme nos Pères.
Mais voyez! à mes rideaux pâles le matin glisse des sourires; car la Fiancée est venue car la Fiancée est venue avec un simple et très doux visage, avec des mots qu'on n'entend pas, en silence la Fiancée est apparue comme une grande sœur de l'enfant qui mourut; et les hêtres, les chênes royaux des forêts par douce vocalise égrenant leur parure, les voix ressuscitées en la plaine sonore et toute la forêt d'aurore quand elle secoue du crépuscule sa chevelure, tout chante, bruit, pétille et rayonne car la céleste Joie que la clarté délivre d'un hymne répercute aux miroirs du futur le front pâle où scintille en étoiles le givre.
_--Albert Mockel in "La Wallonie," Dernier fascicule, '92._
I have left Gide and Van Lerberghe unquoted, unmentioned, but I have, I dare say, given poems enough to indicate the quality and the scope of the poetry in _La Wallonie_.
In prose their cousinage is perhaps more quickly apparent. Almost the first sentence I come upon (I suspect it is Mockel's) runs as follows:
"_La Revue des deux Mondes_ publie un roman de Georges Ohnet ce qui ne surprendra personne."
This is the proper tone to use when dealing with elderly muttonheads; with the _Harpers_ of yester year. _La Wallonie_ found it out in the eighties. The symboliste movement flourished on it. American letters did not flourish, partly perhaps for the lack of it, and for the lack of unbridled uncompromising magazines run by young men who did not care for _reputations surfaites_, for elderly stodge and stupidity.
If we turn to Mockel's death notice for Jules Laforgue we will find _La Wallonie_ in '87 awake to the value of contemporary achievement:
JULES LAFORGUE
Nous apprenons avec une vive tristesse, la mort de Jules Laforgue, l'un des plus curieux poètes de la littérature aux visées nouvelles. Nous l'avons désigné, jà deux mois: un Tristan Corbière plus argentin, moins âpre.... Et telle est bien sa caractéristique. Sans le moindre soupçon d'imitation ou de réminiscences, Jules Laforgue a sauvegardé une originalité vivace. Seulement, cette originalité, par bien des saillies, touche à celle de Tristan Corbière. C'est une même raillerie de la Vie et du Monde; mais plus de sombre et virile amertume émouvait en l'auteur des Amours Jaunes, dont cette pièce donnera quelque idée:
LE CRAPAUD
Un chant dans une nuit sans air.... --La lune plaque en métal clair Les découpures du vert sombre. ... Un chant; comme un écho, tout vif Enterré, là, sous le massif.... --Ça se tait; viens, c'est là, dans l'ombre.... Un crapaud! --Pourquoi cette peur, Près de moi, ton soldat fidèle! Vois-le, poète tondu, sans aile, Rossignol de la boue.... --Horreur!-- ...Il chante.--Horreur!!--Horreur pourquoi? _Vois-tu pas son œil de lumière...._ Non, il s'en va, froid, sous sa pierre. * * * * * * Bonsoir--ce crapaud-là c'est moi.
Chez Laforgue, il y a plus de gai sans-souci, de coups de batte de pierrot donnés à toutes choses, plus de "vaille-que-vaille la vie," dit d'un air de moqueuse résignation. Sa rancœur n'est pas qui encombrante. Il était un peu l'enfant indiscipliné que rit à travers les gronderies, et fait la moue à sa fantaisie; mais son haussement d'épaules gamin, et ses "Après tout?" qu'il jette comme une chiquenaude au visage du Temps, cachent toujours au fond de son cœur un lac mélancolique, un lac de tristesse et d'amours flétris, où vient se refléter sa claire imagination. Témoins ces fragments pris aux _Complaintes:_ Mon cœur est une urne où j'ai mis certains défunts, Oh! chut, refrains de leurs berceaux! et vous, parfums.
* * * * * * * Mon cœur est un Néron, enfant gâté d'Asie, Qui d'empires de rêve en vain se rassasie. Mon cœur est un noyé vidé d'âme et d'essors, Qu'étreint la pieuvre Spleen en ses ventouses d'or. C'est un feu d'artifice, hélas! qu'avant la fête, A noyé sans retour l'averse qui s'embête. Mon cœur est le terrestre Histoire-Corbillard Que traînent au néant l'instinct et le hazard Mon cœur est une horloge oubliée à demeure Qui, me sachant défunt, s'obstine à marquer l'heure. * * * * * * * Et toujours mon cœur ayant ainsi déclamé, En revient à sa complainte: Aimer, être aimé!
Et cette pièce, d'une ironie concentrée:
COMPLAINTE DES BONS MENAGES
L'Art sans poitrine m'a trop longtemps bercé dupe. Si ses labours sont fiers, que ses bles décevants! Tiens, laisse-moi bêler tout aux plis de ta jupe Qui fleure le couvent. La Génie avec moi, serf, a fait des manières; Toi, jupe, fais frou-frou, sans t'inquièter pourquoi.... * * * * * * * Mais l'Art, c'est l'Inconnu! qu'on y dorme et s'y vautre, On ne peut pas l'avoir constamment sur les bras! Et bien, ménage au vent! Soyons Lui, Elle et l'Autre. Et puis n'insistons pas.
Et puis? et puis encore un pied de nez mélancolique à la destinée:
Qui m'aima jamais? Je m'entête Sur ce refrain bien impuissant Sans songer que je suis bien bête De me faire du mauvais sang:
Jules Laforgue a publié outre les _Complaintes_, un livret de vers dégingandés, d'une raillerie splénétique, à froid, comme celle qui sied aux hommes du Nord. Mais il a su y ajouter ce sans-façon de choses dites à l'aventure, et tout un parfum de lumière argentine, comme les rayons de _Notre-Dame la Lune_ qu'il célèbre. Le manque de place nous prive d'en citer quelques pages. Nous avons lu aussi cette étrange Nuit d'Etoiles: le _Conseil Féerique_, un assez court poème édité par la "Vogue"; divers articles de revue, entre lesquels cette page ensoleillée, parue dans la Revue Indépendante: _Pan et la Syrinx_. Enfin un nouveau livre était annoncé: _de la Pitié, de la Pitié_!, déjà préparé par l'une des Invocations du volume précédent, et dont nous croyons voir l'idée en ces vers des _Complaintes_:
Vendange chez les Arts enfantins; sois en fête D'une fugue, d'un mot, d'un ton, d'un air de tête. * * * * * * Vivre et peser selon le Beau, le Bien, le Vrai? O parfums, ô regards, ô fois! soit, j'essaierai. * * * * * * ... Va, que ta seule étude Soit de vivre sans but, fou de mansuétude--
_--Albert Mockel in "La Wallonie"_, 1887.
I have quoted but sparingly, and I have thought quotation better than comment, but despite the double meagreness I think I have given evidence that _La Wallonie_ was worth editing.
It began as _L'Elan Littéraire_ with 16 pages, and an edition of 200 copies; it should convince any but the most stupid that size is not the criterion of permanent value, and that a small magazine may outlast much bulkier printings.
After turning the pages of _La Wallonie_, perhaps after reading even this so brief excerpt, one is ready to see some sense in even so lyric a phrase as "temps doré, de ferveur et de belle confiance."
In their seven years' run these editors, one at least beginning in his "teens," had published a good deal of the best of Verhaeren, had published work by Elskamp, Merrill, Griffin, Louys, Maeterlinck, Verlaine Van Lerberghe, Gustave Kahn, Moréas, Quillard, André Gide; had been joined in their editing board by De Régnier (remember that they edited in Liège, not in Paris; they were not at the hub of the universe, but in the heart of French Belgium); they had not made any compromise. Permanent literature, and the seeds of permanent literature, had gone through proof-sheets in their office.
There is perhaps no greater pleasure in life, and there certainly can have been no greater enthusiasm than to have been young and to have been part of such a group of writers working in fellowship at the beginning of such a course, of such a series of courses as were implicated in _La Wallonie._
If the date is insufficiently indicated by Mallarmé's allusion to Whistler, we may turn to the art notes:
"eaux-fortes de Mlle Mary Cassatt ... Lucien Pissaro, Sisley ... lithographies de Fantin-Latour ... Odillon Redon."
"J'ai été un peu à Paris, voir Burne Jones, Moreau, Delacroix ... la danse du ventre, et les adorables Javanaises. C'est mon meilleur souvenir, ces filles "très parées" dans l'étrange demi-jour de leur case et qui tournent lentement dans la stridente musique avec de si énigmatique inflexions de mains et de si souriantes poursuites les yeux dans les yeux."
Prose poetry, that doubtful connection, appears at times even to advantage:
"Séléné, toi l'essence et le regard des infinis, ton mal nous serait la félicité suprême. O viens à nous; Tanit, Vierge Tanit, fleur métallique épanouie aux plaines célestes!"--_Mockel._
[1] _The Little Review_, February, 1918.
[2] A testimony to the effect of anthologies, and to the prestige of Van Bever and Léautaud in forming French taste, and at the same time the most amazing response to my French number of the _Little Review_, was contained in a letter from one of the very poets I had chosen to praise:
"Je vous remercie de m'avoir révélé Laforgue que je connaissais seulement par les extraits publiés dans la première Anthologie en I volume par Van Bever et Léautaud."
This is also a reply to those who solemnly assured me that any foreigner attempting to criticize French poetry would meet nothing but ridicule from French authors.
I am free to say that Van B. and L.'s selections would have led me neither to Laforgue nor to Rimbaud. They were, however, my approach to many of the other poets, and their two volume anthology is invaluable.
[3] Statement dated Feb., 1918.
[4] _"Max Elskamp"; essai par Jean De Bosschère. Bibliothèque de l'Occident, 17 rue Eblé, Paris, fr_. 3.50.
[5] _Little Review_, Oct., 1918.
[6] _Laforgue!_
II
HENRY JAMES
This essay on James is a dull grind of an affair, a Baedecker to a continent.
I set out to explain, not why Henry James is less read than formerly--I do not know that he is. I tried to set down a few reasons why he ought to be, or at least might be, more read.
Some may say that his work was over, well over, finely completed; there is mass of that work, heavy for one man's shoulders to have borne up, labor enough for two life-times; still we would have had a few more years of his writing. Perhaps the grasp was relaxing, perhaps we should have had no strongly-planned book; but we should have had paragraphs here and there, and we should have had, at least, conversation, wonderful conversation; even if we did not hear it ourselves, we should have known that it was going on somewhere. The massive head, the slow uplift of the hand, _gli occhi onesti e tardi_, the long sentences piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with its "wu-a-wait a little, wait a little, something will come;" blague and benignity and the weight of so many years' careful, incessant labor of minute observation always there to enrich the talk. I had heard it but seldom, yet it was all unforgettable.
The man had this curious power of founding-affection in those who had scarcely seen him and even in many who had not, who but knew him at second hand.
No man who has not lived on both sides of the Atlantic can well appraise Henry James; his death marks the end of a period. The _Times_ says: "The Americans will understand his changing his nationality," or something of that sort. The "Americans" will understand nothing whatsoever about it. They have understood nothing about it. They do not even know what they lost. They have not stopped for eight minutes to consider the meaning of his last public act. After a year of ceaseless labor, of letter writing, of argument, of striving in every way to bring in America on the side of civilization, he died of apoplexy. On the side of civilization--civilization against barbarism, civilization, not Utopia, not a country or countries where the right always prevails in six weeks! After a life-time spent in trying to make two continents understand each other, in trying, and only his thoughtful readers can have any conception of how he had tried, to make three nations intelligible one to another. 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 the diagrams of Greek tragedy, not labeled "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![1] 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 labor, this labor 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's writing, and whole decades of American life that otherwise would have been utterly lost, wasted, rotting in the 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.
"An extraordinary old woman, one of the few people who is really doing anything good." There were the cobwebs about connoisseurship, etc., but what do they matter? Some yokel writes in the village paper, as Henley had written before, "James's stuff was not worth doing." Henley has gone pretty completely. America has not yet realized that never in history had one of her great men abandoned his citizenship out of shame. It was the last act--the last thing left. He had worked all his life for the nation and for a year he had labored for the national honor. No other American was of sufficient importance for his change of allegiance to have constituted an international act; no other American would have been welcome in the same public manner. America passes over these things, but the thoughtful cannot pass over them.
Armageddon, the conflict? I turn to James's _A Bundle of Letters_; a letter from "Dr. Rudolph Staub" in Paris, ending:
"You will, I think, hold me warranted in believing that between precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the English-speaking family is destined to consume itself and that with its decline the prospect of general pervasiveness to which I alluded above, will brighten for the deep-lunged children of the fatherland!"
We have heard a great deal of this sort of thing since; it sounds very natural. My edition of the volume containing these letters was printed in '83, and the imaginary letters were written somewhat before that. I do not know that this calls for comment. Henry James's perception came thirty years before Armageddon. That is all I wish to point out. Flaubert said of the War of 1870: "If they had read my _Education Sentimentale,_ this sort of thing wouldn't have happened." Artists are the antennæ of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists. If it is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself; here the thing was done, the pages of diagnosis. The multitude of wearisome fools will not learn their right hand from their left or seek out a meaning.
It is always easy for people to object to what they have not tried to understand.
I am not here to write a full volume of detailed criticism, but two things I do claim which I have not seen in reviewers' essays. First, that there was emotional greatness in Henry James's hatred of tyranny; secondly, that there was titanic volume, weight, in the masses he sets in opposition within his work. He uses forces no whit less specifically powerful than the proverbial "doom of the house,"--Destiny, _Deus ex machina_,--of great traditional art. His art was great art as opposed to over-elaborate or over-refined art by virtue of the major conflicts which he portrays. In his books he showed race against race, immutable; the essential Americanness, or Englishness or Frenchness--in _The American_, the difference between one nation and another; not flag-waving and treaties, not the machinery of government, but "why" there is always misunderstanding, why men of different race are not the same.
We have ceased to believe that we conquer anything by having Alexander the Great make a gigantic "joy-ride" through India. We know that conquests are made in the laboratory, that Curie with his minute fragments of things seen clearly in test tubes in curious apparatus, makes conquests. So, too, in these novels, the essential qualities which make up the national qualities, are found and set working, the fundamental oppositions made clear. This is no contemptible labor. No other writer had so essayed three great nations or even thought of attempting it.
Peace comes of communication. No man of our time has so labored to create means of communication as did the late Henry James. The whole of great art is a struggle for communication. All things that oppose this are evil, whether they be silly scoffing or obstructive tariffs.
And this communication is not a leveling, it is not an elimination of differences. It is a recognition of differences, of the right of differences to exist, of interest in finding things different. Kultur is an abomination; philology is an abomination, all repressive uniforming education is an evil.
A SHAKE DOWN
I have forgotten the moment of lunar imbecility in which I conceived the idea of a "Henry James" number.[2] The pile of typescript on my floor can but annoyingly and too palpably testify that the madness has raged for some weeks.
Henry James was aware of the spherical form of the planet, and susceptible to a given situation, and to the tone and tonality of persons as perhaps no other author in all literature. The victim and the votary of the "scene," he had no very great narrative sense, or at the least, he attained the narrative faculty but _per aspera,_ through very great striving.
It is impossible to speak accurately of "his style," for he passed through several styles which differ greatly one from another; but in his last, his most complicated and elaborate, he is capable of great concision; and if, in it, the single sentence is apt to turn and perform evolutions for almost pages at a time, he nevertheless manages to say on one page more than many a more "direct" author would convey only in the course of a chapter.
His plots and incidents are often but adumbrations or symbols of the quality of his "people," illustrations invented, contrived, often factitiously and almost transparently, to show what acts, what situations, what contingencies would befit or display certain characters. We are hardly asked to accept them as happening.
He did not begin his career with any theory of art for art's sake, and a lack of this theory may have damaged his earlier work.
If we take "French Poets and Novelists" as indication of his then (1878) opinions, and novels of the nineties showing a later bias, we might contend that our subject began his career with a desire to square all things to the ethical standards of a Salem mid-week Unitarian prayer meeting, and that to almost the end of his course he greatly desired to fit the world into the social exigencies of Mrs. Humphry Ward's characters.
Out of the unfortunate cobwebs he emerged into his greatness, I think, by two causes: first by reason of his hatred of personal intimate tyrannies working at close range; and secondly, in later life, because the actual mechanism of his scriptorial processes became so bulky, became so huge a contrivance for record and depiction, that the old man simply couldn't remember or keep his mind on or animadvert on anything but the authenticity of his impression.
I take it as the supreme reward for an artist; the supreme return that his artistic conscience can make him after years spent in its service, that the momentum of his art, the sheer bulk of his processes, the (_si licet_) size of his fly-wheel, should heave him out of himself, out of his personal limitations, out of the tangles of heredity and of environment, out of the bias of early training, of early predilections, whether of Florence, A.D. 1300, or of Back Bay of 1872, and leave him simply the great true recorder.
And this reward came to Henry James in the ripeness of his talents; even further perhaps it entered his life and his conversation. The stages of his emergence are marked quite clearly in his work. He displays himself in _French Poets and Novelists_, constantly balancing over the question of whether or no the characters presented in their works are, or are not, fit persons to be received in the James family back-parlor.
In _The Tragic Muse_ he is still didactic quite openly. The things he believes still leap out nakedly among the people and things he is portraying; the parable is not yet wholly incarnate in the narrative.
To lay all his faults on the table, we may begin with his self-confessed limitation, that "he never went down town." He displayed in fact a passion for high life comparable only to that supposed to inhere in the readers of a magazine called _Forget-me-not._
Hardy, with his eye on the Greek tragedians, has produced an epic tonality, and _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ is perhaps more easily comparable to the Grettir Saga than to the novels of Mr. Hardy's contemporaries. Hardy is, on his other side, a contemporary of Sir Walter Scott.
Balzac gains what force his crude writing permits him by representing his people under the _ἀνάγκη_ of modernity, cash necessity; James, by leaving cash necessity nearly always out of the story, sacrifices, or rather fails to attain, certain intensities.
He never manages the classic, I mean as Flaubert gives us in each main character: _Everyman_. One may conceivably be bored by certain pages in Flaubert, but one takes from him a solid and concrete memory, a property. Emma Bovary and Frederic and M. Arnoux are respectively every woman and every man of their period. Maupassant's _Bel Ami_ is not. Neither are Henry James's people. They are always, or nearly always, the bibelots.
But he does, nevertheless, treat of major forces, even of epic forces, and in a way all his own. If Balzac tried to give a whole civilization, a whole humanity, James was not content with a rough sketch of one country.
As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national qualities are the great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals; trying to determine from the given microscopic slide the nature of the Frenchness, Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemicals too little regarded, have in our time exploded for want of watching. They are the permanent and fundamental hostilities and incompatibles. We may rest our claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his protagonists, in the magnitude of the forces he analyzed and portrayed. This is not the bare matter of a number of titled people, a few duchesses and a few butlers.
Whatever Flaubert may have said about his _Education Sentimentale_ as a potential preventive of the débâcle of 1870, _if people had_ read _it_, and whatever Gautier's friend may have said about _Emaux et Camées_ as the last resistance to the Prussians, from Dr. Rudolph Staub's paragraph in _The Bundle of Letters_ to the last and almost only public act of his life, James displayed a steady perception and a steady consideration of the qualities of different western races, whose consequences none of us can escape.
And these forces, in precisely that they are not political and executive and therefore transient, factitious, but in precisely that they are the forces of race temperaments, are major forces and are indeed as great protagonists as any author could have chosen. They are firmer ground than Flaubert's when he chooses public events as in the opening of the third part of _Education Sentimentale_.
The portrayal of these forces, to seize a term from philology, may be said to constitute "original research"--to be Henry James's own addendum; not that this greatly matters. He saw, analyzed, and presented them. He had most assuredly a greater awareness than was granted to Balzac or to Mr. Charles Dickens or to M. Victor Hugo who composed the _Légende des Siècles._
His statement that he never went down town has been urged greatly against him. A butler is a servant, tempered with upper-class contacts. Mr. Newman, the American, has emerged from the making of wash-tubs; the family in _The Pupil_ can scarcely be termed upper-class, however, and the factor of money, Balzac's, _ἀνάγκη_, scarcely enters his stories.
We may leave Hardy writing Sagas. We may admit that there is a greater _robustezza_ in Balzac's messiness, simply because he is perpetually concerned, inaccurately, with the factor of money, of earning one's exiguous living.
We may admit the shadowy nature of some of James's writing, and agree whimsically with R.H.C. (in the _New Age_) that James will be quite comfortable after death, as he had been dealing with ghosts all his life.
James's third donation is perhaps a less sweeping affair and of more concern to his compatriots than to any one who might conceivably translate him into an alien tongue, or even to those who publish his writings in England.
He has written history of a personal sort, social history well documented and incomplete, and he has put America on the map both in memoir and fiction, giving to her a reality such as is attained only by scenes recorded in the arts and in the writing of masters. Mr. Eliot has written, and I daresay most other American admirers have written or will write, that, whatever any one else thinks of Henry James, no one but an American can ever know, really know, how good he is at the bottom, how good his "America" is.
No Englishman can, and in less degree can any continental, or in fact any one whose family was not living on, say, West 23rd Street in the old set-back, two-story-porched red brick vine-covered houses, etc., when Henry James was being a small boy on East 23rd Street; no one whose ancestors had not been presidents or professors or founders of Ha'avwd College or something of that sort, or had not heard of a time when people lived on 14th Street, or had known of some one living in Lexington or Newton "Old Place" or somewhere of that sort in New England, or had heard of the New York that produced "Fanny," New York the jocular and uncritical, or of people who danced with General Grant or something of that sort, would quite know _Washington Square_ or _The Europeans_ to be so autochthonous, so authentic to the conditions. They might believe the things to be "real," but they would not know how closely they corresponded to an external reality.
Perhaps only an exile from these things will get the range of the other half of James's presentations! Europe to the Transpontine, New York of brown stone that he detested, the old and the new New York in _Crapey Cornelia_ and in _The American Scene_, which more than any other volumes give us our peculiar heritage, an America with an interest, with a tone of time not overstrained, not jejunely over-sentimentalized, which is not a redoing of school histories or the laying out of a fabulous period; and which is in relief, if you like, from Dickens or from Mark Twain's _Mississippi._ He was not without sympathy for his compatriots as is amply attested by Mr. and Mrs. B.D. Hayes of New York (vide _The Birthplace_) with whom he succeeds, I think, rather better than with most of his princely continentals. They are, at any rate, his bow to the Happy Genius of his country--as distinct from the gentleman who displayed the "back of a banker and a patriot," or the person whose aggregate features could be designated only as a "mug."
In his presentation of America he is greatly attentive, and, save for the people in _Cœur Simple_, I doubt if any writer has done more of "this sort of thing" for his country, this portrayal of the typical thing in timbre and quality--balanced, of course, by the array of spittoons in the Capitol ("The Point of View").
Still if one is seeking a Spiritual Fatherland, if one feels the exposure of what he would not have scrupled to call, two clauses later, such a wind-shield, "The American Scene" greatly provides it. It has a mermaid note, almost to outvie the warning, the sort of nickelplate warning which is hurled at one in the saloon of any great transatlantic boat; the awfulness that engulfs one when one comes, for the first time unexpectedly on a pile of all the _Murkhn_ Magazines laid, shingle-wise on a brass-studded, screwed-into-place, baize-covered steamer table. The first glitter of the national weapons for driving off quiet and all closer signs of intelligence.[3]
Attempting to view the jungle of the work as a whole, one notes that, despite whatever cosmopolitan upbringing Henry James may have had, as witness "A Small Boy's Memoirs" and "Notes of Son and Brother," he nevertheless began in "French Poets and Novelists" with a provincial attitude that it took him a long time to work free of. Secondly we see various phases of the "style" of his presentation or circumambiance.
There is a small amount of prentice work. Let us say "Roderick Hudson," "Casamassima." There are lucky first steps in "The American" and "Europeans," a precocity of result, for certainly some of his early work is as permanent as some of the ripest, and more so than a deal of the intervening. We find (for in the case before us criticism must be in large part a weeding-out) that his first subject matter provides him with a number of good books and stories: "The American," "The Europeans," "Eugene Pickering," "Daisy Miller," "The Pupil," "Brooksmith," "A Bundle of Letters," "Washington Square," "The Portrait of a Lady," before 1880, and rather later, "Pandora," "The Four Meetings," perhaps "Louisa Pallant." He ran out of his first material.
We next note a contact with the "Yellow Book," a dip into "cleverness," into the epigrammatic genre, the bare epigrammatic style. It was no better than other writers, not so successful as Wilde. We observe him to be not so hard and fine a satirist as is George S. Street.
We come then to the period of allegories ("The Real Thing," "Dominick Ferrand," "The Liar"). There ensues a growing discontent with the short sentence, epigram, etc., in which he does not at this time attain distinction; the clarity is not satisfactory, was not satisfactory to the author, his _donné_ being radically different from that of his contemporaries. The "story" not being really what he is after, he starts to build up his medium; a thickening, a chiaroscuro is needed, the long sentence; he wanders, seeks to add a needed opacity, he overdoes it, produces the cobwebby novel, emerges or justifies himself in "Maisie" and manages his long-sought form in "The Awkward Age." He comes out the triumphant stylist in the "American Scene" and in all the items of "The Finer Grain" collection and in the posthumous "Middle Years."
This is not to damn incontinent all that intervenes, but I think the chief question addressed to me by people of good-will who do not, but are yet ready and willing to, read James, is: Where the deuce shall I begin? One cannot take even the twenty-four volumes, more or less selected volumes of the Macmillan edition all at once, and it is, alas, but too easy to get so started and entoiled as never to finish this author or even come to the best of him.
The laziness of an uncritical period can be nowhere more blatant than in the inherited habit of talking about authors as a whole. It is perhaps the sediment from an age daft over great figures or a way of displaying social gush, the desire for a celebrity at all costs, rather than a care of letters.
To talk in any other way demands an acquaintance with the work of an author, a price few conversationalists care to pay, _ma che_! It is the man with inherited opinions who talks about "Shelley," making no distinction between the author of the Fifth Act of "The Cenci" and of the "Sensitive Plant." Not but what there may be a personal _virtu_ in an author--appraised, however, from the best of his work when, that is, it is correctly appraised. People ask me what James to read. He is a very uneven author; not all of his collected edition has marks of permanence.
One can but make one's own suggestion:--
"The American," "French Poets and Novelists," "The Europeans," "Daisy Miller," "Eugene Pickering," "Washington Square," "A Bundle of Letters," "Portrait of a Lady," "Pandora," "The Pupil," "Brooksmith," "What Maisie Knew," and "The Awkward Age" (if one is "doing it all"), "Europe," "Four Meetings," "The Ambassadors," "The American Scene," "The Finer Grain" (all the volume, i.e., "The Velvet Glove," "Mona Montravers," "Round of Visits," "Crapey Cornelia," "Bench of Desolation"), "The Middle Years" (posthumous) and "The Ivory Tower" (notes first).
I "go easy" on the more cobwebby volumes; the most Jamesian are indubitably "The Wings of a Dove" and "The Golden Bowl"; upon them devotees will fasten, but the potential devotee may as well find his aptitude in the stories of "The Finer Grain" volume where certain exquisite titillations will come to him as readily as anywhere else. If he is to bask in Jamesian tickle, nothing will restrain him and no other author will to any such extent afford him equal gratifications.
If, however, the reader does not find delectation in the list given above, I think it fairly useless for him to embark on the rest.
Part of James is a caviare, part I must reject according to my lights as bad writing; another part is a spécialité, a pleasure for certain temperaments only; the part I have set together above seems to me maintainable as literature. One can definitely say: "this is good"; hold the argumentative field, suffer comparison with other writers; with, say, the De Goncourt, or De Maupassant. I am not impertinently throwing books on the scrap-heap; there are certain valid objections to James; there are certain standards which one may believe in, and having stated them, one is free to state that any author does not comply with them; granting always that there may be other standards with which he complies, or over which he charmingly or brilliantly triumphs.
James does not "feel" as solid as Flaubert; he does not give us "Everyman," but on the other hand, he was aware of things which Flaubert was not aware of, and in certain things supersedes the author of "Madame Bovary."
He appears at times to write around and around a thing and not always to emerge from the "amorous plan" of what he wanted to present, into definite presentation.
He does not seem to me at all times evenly skillful in catching the intonations of speech. He recalls the New England "a" in the "Lady's" small brothers "Ha-ard" (Haahr-d) but only if one is familiar with the phonetics described; but (vide the beginning of "The Birthplace") one is not convinced that he really knows (by any sure instinct) how people's voices would sound. Some remarks are in key, some obviously factitious.
He gives us more of his characters by description than he can by any attribution of conversation, save perhaps by the isolated and discreet remarks of Brooksmith.
His emotional centre is in being sensitive to the feel of the place or to the tonality of the person.
It is with his own so beautiful talk, his ability to hear his own voice in the rounded paragraph, that he is aptest to charm one. I find it often though not universally hard to "hear" his characters speaking. I have noted various places where the character notably stops speaking and the author interpolates words of his own; sentences that no one but Henry James could in any circumstances have made use of. Beyond which statements I see no great concision or any clarity to be gained by rearranging my perhaps too elliptical comments on individual books.
Honest criticism, as I conceive it, cannot get much further than saying to one's reader exactly what one would say to the friend who approaches one's bookshelf asking: "What the deuce shall I read?" Beyond this there is the "parlor game," the polite essay, and there is the official pronouncement, with neither of which we are concerned.
Of all exquisite writers James is the most colloquial, yet in the first edition of his "French Poets and Novelists," his style, save for a few scattered phrases, is so little unusual that most of the book seems, superficially, as if it might have been written by almost any one. It contains some surprising lapses ... as bad as any in Mr. Hueffer or even in Mr. Mencken. It is interesting largely in that it shows us what our subject had to escape from.
Let us grant at once that his novels show him, all through his life, possessed of the worst possible taste in pictures, of an almost unpunctured ignorance of painting, of almost as great a lack of taste as that which he attributes to the hack-work and newspaper critiques of Théophile Gautier. Let us admit that "painting" to Henry James probably meant, to the end of his life, the worst possible late Renaissance conglomerations.
Let us admit that in 1876, or whenever it was, his taste in poetry inclined to the swish of De Musset, that it very likely never got any further. By "poetry" he very possibly meant the "high-falutin" and he eschewed it in certain forms; himself taking still higher falutes in a to-be-developed mode of his own.
I doubt if he ever wholly outgrew that conception of the (by him so often invoked) Daughters of Memory. He arrived truly at a point from which he could look back upon people who "besought the deep blue sea to roll." Poetry to him began, perhaps, fullfledged, springing Minerva-like from the forehead of George Gordon, Lord Byron, and went pretty much to the bad in Charles Baudelaire; it did not require much divination by 1914 ("The Middle Years") to note that he had found Tennyson rather vacuous and that there "was something in" Browning.
James was so thoroughly a recorder of people, of their atmospheres, society, personality, setting; so wholly the artist of this particular genre, that it was impossible for him ever to hold a critical opinion of art out of key with the opinion about him--except possibly in so far as he might have ambitions for the novel, for his own particular métier. His critical opinions were simply an extension of his being in key with the nice people who "impressed" themselves on his gelatine "plate." (This is a theoretical generalization and must be taken _cum grano._)
We may, perhaps, take his adjectives on De Musset as a desperate attempt to do "justice" to a man with whom he knew it impossible for him to sympathize. There is, however, nothing to hinder our supposing that he saw in De Musset's "gush" something for him impossible and that he wished to acknowledge it. Side by side with this are the shreds of Back Bay or Buffalo, the mid-week-prayer-meeting point of view.
His most egregious slip is in the essay on Baudelaire, the sentence quoted by Hueffer.[4] Notwithstanding this, he does effectively put his nippers on Baudelaire's weakness:--
"A good way to embrace Baudelaire at a glance is to say that he was, in his treatment of evil, exactly what Hawthorne was not--Hawthorne, who felt the thing at its source, deep in the human consciousness. Baudelaire's infinitely slighter volume of genius apart, he was a sort of Hawthorne reversed. It is the absence of this metaphysical quality in his treatment of his favorite subjects (Poe was his metaphysician, and his devotion sustained him through a translation of 'Eureka!') that exposes him to that class of accusations of which M. Edmond Scherer's accusation of feeding upon _pourriture_ is an example; and, in fact, in his pages we never know with what we are dealing. We encounter an inextricable confusion of sad emotions and vile things, and we are at a loss to know whether the subject pretends to appeal to our conscience or--we were going to say--to our olfactories. 'Le Mal?' we exclaim; 'you do yourself too much honor. This is not Evil; it is not the wrong; it is simply the nasty!' Our impatience is of the same order as that which we should feel if a poet, pretending to pluck 'the flowers of good,' should come and present us, as specimens, a rhapsody on plum-cake and _eau de Cologne_."
Here as elsewhere his perception, apart from the readability of the work, is worthy of notice.
Hueffer says[5] that James belauds Balzac. I cannot see it. I can but perceive Henry James wiping the floor with the author of "Eugénie Grandet," pointing out all his qualities, but almightily wiping the floor with him. He complains that Gautier is lacking in a concern about supernatural hocus-pocus and that Flaubert is lacking. If Balzac takes him to any great extent in, James with his inherited Swedenborgianism is perhaps thereby laid open to Balzac.
It was natural that James should write more about the bulky author of "La Comédie Humaine" than about the others; here was his richest quarry, here was there most to note and to emend and to apply so emended to processes of his own. From De Maupassant, De Goncourt or Baudelaire there was nothing for him to acquire.
His dam'd fuss about furniture is foreshadowed in Balzac, and all the paragraphs on Balzac's house-furnishing propensities are of interest in proportion to our interest in, or our boredom with, this part of Henry James's work.
What, indeed, could he have written of the De Goncourts save that they were a little dull but tremendously right in their aim? Indeed, but for these almost autobiographical details pointing to his growth out of Balzac, all James would seem but a corollary to one passage in a De Goncourt preface:--
"Le jour où l'analyse cruelle que mon ami, M. Zola, et peut-être moi-même avons apportée dans la peinture du bas de la société sera reprise par un écrivain de talent, et employée à la reproduction des hommes et des femmes du monde, dans les milieux d'éducation et de distinction--ce jour-là seulement le classicisme et sa queue seront tués....
"Le Réalisme n'a pas en effet l'unique mission de décrire ce qui est bas, ce qui est répugnant....
"Nous avons commencé, nous, par la canaille, parce que la femme et l'homme du peuple, plus rapprochés de la nature et de la sauvagerie, sont des créatures simples et peu compliquées, tandis que le Parisien et la Parisienne de la société, ces civilisés excessifs, dont l'originalité tranchée est faite toute de nuances, toute de demi-teintes, toute de ces riens insaisissables, pareils aux riens coquets et neutres avec lesquels se façonne le caractère d'une toilette distinguée de femme, demandent des années pour qu'on les perce, pour qu'on les sache, pour qu'on les _attrape_--et le romancier du plus grand génie, croyez-le bien, ne les devinera jamais ces gens de salon, avec les _racontars_ d'amis qui vont pour lui à la découverte dans le monde....
"Ce projet de roman qui devait se passer dans le grand monde, dans le monde le plus quintessencié, et dont nous rassemblions lentement et minutieusement les éléments délicats et fugaces, je l'abandonnais après la mort de mon frère, convaincu de l'impossibilité de le réussir tout seul."
But this particular paragraph could have had little to do with the matter. "French Poets and Novelists" was published in '78 and Edmond De Goncourt signed the preface to "Les Frères Zemganno" in '79. The paragraphs quoted are interesting, however, as showing De Goncourt's state of mind in that year. He had probably been preaching in this vein long before setting the words on paper, before getting them printed.
If ever one man's career was foreshadowed in a few sentences of another, Henry James's is to be found in this paragraph.
It is very much as if he said: I will not be a megatherium botcher like Balzac; there is nothing to be said about these De Goncourts, but one must try to be rather more interesting than they are in, let us say, "Madame Gervaisais."[6]
Proceeding with the volume of criticism, we find that "Le Jeune H." simply didn't "get" Flaubert; that he was much alive to the solid parts of Turgenev. He shows himself very apt, as we said above, to judge the merits of a novelist on the ground that the people portrayed by the said novelist are or are not suited to reception into the household of Henry James senior; whether, in short, Emma Bovary or Frederic or M. Arnoux would have spoiled the so delicate atmosphere, have juggled the so fine susceptibilities of a refined 23rd Street family it the time of the Philadelphia "Centennial."
I find the book not so much a sign that Henry James was "disappointed," as Hueffer puts it, as that he was simply and horribly shocked by the literature of his continental forebears and contemporaries.
It is only when he gets to the Théâtre Français that he finds something which really suits him. Here there is order, tradition, perhaps a slight fustiness (but a quite pardonable fustiness, an arranged and suitable fustiness having its recompense in a sort of spiritual quiet); here, at any rate, was something decorous, something not to be found in Concord or in Albany. And it is easy to imagine the young James, not illuminated by De Goncourt's possible conversation or writing, not even following the hint given in his essay on Balzac and Balzacian furniture, but sitting before Madame Nathalie in "Le Village" and resolving to be the Théâtre Français of the novel.
A resolution which he may be said to have carried out to the great enrichment of letters.
II
Strictures on the work of this period are no great detraction. "French Poets and Novelists" gives us a point from which to measure Henry James's advance. Genius showed itself partly in the escape from some of his original limitations, partly in acquirements. His art at length became "second nature," became perhaps half unconscious; or in part wholly unconscious; in other parts perhaps too highly conscious. At any rate in sunnier circumstances he talked exactly as he wrote, the same elaborate paragraph beautifully attaining its climax; the same sudden incision when a brief statement could dispose of a matter.
Be it said for his style: he is seldom or never involved when a direct bald statement will accurately convey his own meaning, _all of it_. He is not usually, for all his wide leisure, verbose. He may be highly and bewilderingly figurative in his language (vide Mr. Hueffer's remarks on this question)
Style apart, I take it that the hatred of tyrannies was as great a motive as any we can ascribe to Galileo or Leonardo or to any other great figure, to any other mythic Prometheus; for this driving force we may well overlook personal foibles, the early Bostonese bias, the heritage from his father's concern in commenting Swedenborg, the later fusses about social caution and conservation of furniture. Hueffer rather boasts about Henry James's innocence of the classics. It is nothing to brag of, even if a man struggling against natural medievalism have entrenched himself in impressionist theory. If James _had_ read his classics, the better Latins especially, he would not have so excessively cobwebbed, fussed, blathered, worried about minor mundanities. We may _conspuer_ with all our vigor Henry James's concern with furniture, the Spoils of Poynton, connoisseurship, Mrs. Ward's tea-party atmosphere, the young Bostonian of the immature works. We may relegate these things mentally to the same realm as the author's pyjamas and collar buttons, to his intellectual instead of his physical valeting. There remains the capacious intelligence, the searching analysis of things that cannot be so relegated to the scrap-heap and to the wash-basket.
Let us say that English freedom legally and traditionally has its basis in property. Let us say, à la Balzac, that most modern existence is governed by, or at least interfered with by, the necessity to earn money; let us also say that a Frenchman is not an Englishman or a German or an American, and that despite the remark that the aristocracies of all people, the upper classes, are the same everywhere, racial differences are _au fond_ differences; they are likewise major subjects.
Writing, as I am, for the reader of good-will, for the bewildered person who wants to know where to begin, I need not apologize for the following elliptical notes. James, in his prefaces, has written explanation to death (with sometimes a very pleasant necrography). Leaving the "French Poets and Novelists," I take the novels and stories as nearly as possible in their order of publication (as distinct from their order as rearranged and partially weeded out in the collected edition).
1875. (U.S.A.) "A Passionate Pilgrim and other Tales." "Eugene Pickering" is the best of this lot and most indicative of the future James. Contains also the title story and "Madame de Mauves." Other stories inferior.
1876. (U.S.A.) "Roderick Hudson," prentice work. First novel not up to the level of "Pickering."
1877. "The American"; essential James, part of the permanent work. "Watch and Ward," discarded by the author.
1878. "French Poets and Novelists," already discussed.
1878. "Daisy Miller." (The big hit and one of his best.) "An International Episode," "Four Meetings," good work.
1879. Short stories first printed in England with additions, but no important ones.
1880. "Confidence," not important.
1881. "Washington Square," one of his best, "putting America on the map," giving us a real past, a real background. "Pension Beaurepas" and "Bundle of Letters," especially the girls' letters, excellent, already mentioned.
1881. "The Portrait of a Lady," one of his best. Charming Venetian preface in the collected edition.
1884. "Tales of Three Cities," stories dropped from the collected edition, save "Lady Barbarina."
1884. "Lady Barbarina," a study in English blankness comparable to that exposed in the letters of the English young lady in "A Bundle of Letters." There is also New York of the period. "But if there was one thing Lady Barb disliked more than another it was describing Pasterns. She had always lived with people who knew of themselves what such a place would be, without demanding these pictorial effects, proper only, as she vaguely felt, to persons belonging to the classes whose trade was the arts of expression. Lady Barb of course had never gone into it; but she knew that in her own class the business was not to express but to enjoy, not to represent but to be represented."
"Mrs. Lemon's recognition of this river, I should say, was all it need have been; she held the Hudson existed for the purpose of supplying New Yorkers with poetical feelings, helping them to face comfortably occasions like the present, and in general, meet foreigners with confidence...."
"He believed, or tried to believe, the _salon_ now possible in New York on condition of its being reserved entirely for adults; and in having taken a wife out of a country in which social traditions were rich and ancient he had done something toward qualifying his own house--so splendidly qualified in all strictly material respects.... to be the scene of such an effort. A charming woman accustomed only to the best on each side, as Lady Beauchemin said, what mightn't she achieve by being at home--always to adults only--in an easy early inspiring comprehensive way and on the evening of the seven, when worldly engagements were least numerous? He laid this philosophy before Lady Barb in pursuance of a theory that if she disliked New York on a short acquaintance she couldn't fail to like it on a long. Jackson believed in the New York mind--not so much indeed in its literary, artistic, philosophic or political achievements as in its general quickness and nascent adaptability. He clung to this belief, for it was an indispensable neat block in the structure he was attempting to rear. The New York mind would throw its glamour over Lady Barb if she would only give it a chance; for it was thoroughly bright, responsive and sympathetic. If she would only set up by the turn of her hand a blest social centre, a temple of interesting talk in which this charming organ might expand and where she might inhale its fragrance in the most convenient and luxurious way, without, as it was, getting up from her chair; if she would only just try this graceful good-natured experiment--which would make every one like her so much too--he was sure all the wrinkles in the gilded scroll of his fate would be smoothed out. But Lady Barb didn't rise at all to his conception and hadn't the least curiosity about the New York mind. She thought it would be extremely disagreeable to have a lot of people tumbling in on Sunday evening without being invited, and altogether her husband's sketch of the Anglo-American salon seemed to her to suggest crude familiarity, high vociferation--she had already made a remark to him about 'screeching women'--and random extravagant laughter. She didn't tell him --for this somehow it wasn't in her power to express and, strangely enough, he never completely guessed it--that she was singularly deficient in any natural, or indeed, acquired understanding of what a salon might be. She had never seen or dreamed of one--and for the most part was incapable of imagining a thing she hadn't seen. She had seen great dinners and balls and meets and runs and races; she had seen garden-parties and bunches of people, mainly women--who, however, didn't screech--at dull stuffy teas, and distinguished companies collected in splendid castles; but all this gave her no clew to a train of conversation, to any idea of a social agreement that the interest of talk, its continuity, its accumulations from season to season shouldn't be lost. Conversation, in Lady Barb's experience, had never been continuous; in such a case it would surely have been a bore. It had been occasional and fragmentary, a trifle jerky, with allusions that were never explained; it had a dread of detail--it seldom pursued anything very far or kept hold of it very long."
1885. "Stories Revived," adding to earlier tales "The Author of Beltraffio," which opens with excess of the treading-on-eggs manner, too much to be borne for twenty-four volumes. The pretense of extent of "people" interested in art and letters, sic: "It was the most complete presentation that had yet been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of æsthetic war cry. 'People' had endeavored to sail nearer "to truth," etc."
He implies too much of art smeared on limited multitudes. One wonders if the eighties did in any great aggregate gush up to this extent. Doesn't he try to spread the special case out too wide?
The thinking is magnificently done from this passage up to page sixteen or twenty, stated with great concision. Compare it with "Madame Gervaisais" and we find Henry James much more interesting when on the upper reaches. Compare his expressiveness, the expressiveness of his indirectness with that of constatation. The two methods are curiously mixed in the opening of "Beltraffio." Such sentences as (page 30) "He said the most interesting and inspiring things" are, however, pure waste, pure "leaving the thing undone," unconcrete, unimagined; just simply bad writing or bad novelisting. As for his special case he does say a deal about the author or express a deal by him, but one is bothered by the fact that Pater, Burton, Hardy, Meredith were not, in mere history, bundled into one; that Burton had been to the East and the others had not; that no English novelist of that era would have taken the least notice of anything going on in foreign countries, presumably European, as does the supreme author of "Beltraffio."
Doubtless he is in many ways the author Henry James would have liked to meet and more illustrative of certain English tones and limitations than any historical portrait might have been. Still Henry James does lay it on ... more, I think, than the story absolutely requires. In "Beltraffio" he certainly does present (not that he does not comment to advantage) the two damn'd women appended to the gentlemanly hero of the tale. The most violent post-Strindbergian school would perhaps have called them bitches _tout bonnement_, but this word did not belong to Henry James's vocabulary and besides it is of too great an indistinctness. Author, same "bloody" (in the English sense) author with his passion for "form" appears in "Lesson of Master," and most of H.J.'s stories of literary _milieux_. Perpetual Grandisonism or Grandisonizing of this author with the passion for form, all of 'em have it. _Ma ché!_ There is, however, great intensity in these same "be-deared" and be-"poor-old"-ed pages. He has really got a main theme, a great theme, he chooses to do it in silver point rather than in the garish colors of,--well, of Cherbuliez, or the terms of a religious maniac with three-foot long carving knife.
Novel of the gilded pill, an æsthetic or artistic message, dogma, no better than a moral or ethic one, novel a cumbrous camouflage substitute not for "that parlor game"[7] the polite essay, but for the impolite essay or conveyance of ideas; novel to do this should completely incarnate the abstraction.
Finish of "Beltraffio" not perhaps up to the rest of it. Not that one at all knows how else....
Gush on page 42[8] from both conversationalists. Still an adumbration of the search for the just word emerges on pages 43-44, real cut at barbarism and bigotry on the bottom of page 45 (of course not labeled by these monstrous and rhetorical brands, scorched on to their hides and rump sides). "Will it be a sin to make the most of that one too, so bad for the dear old novel?" Butler and James on the same side really chucking out the fake; Butler focused on Church of England; opposed to him the fakers booming the Bible "as literature" in a sort of last stand, a last ditch; seeing it pretty well had to go as history, cosmogony, etc., or the old tribal Daddy-slap-'em-with-slab of the Jews as anything like an ideal:--
"He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home, and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I'm afraid I must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto, to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out of the bag. 'She thinks me immoral--that's the long and short of it,' he said, as we paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his gate; while his conscious, expressive, perceptive eyes--the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual Englishman--viewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took
## part in the declaration. 'It's very strange when one thinks it all over,
and there's a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out. She's a very nice woman, extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her conception of a novel--she has explained it to me once or twice, and she doesn't do it badly as exposition--is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It's a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn. It's two different ways of looking at the whole affair,' he repeated, pushing open the gate. 'And they're irreconcilable!' he added with a sigh. We went forward to the house, but on the walk, half-way to the door, he stopped and said to me: 'If you're going into this kind of thing there's a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment. There's a hatred of art, there's a hatred of literature--I mean of the genuine kinds. Oh, the shams--_those_ they'll swallow by the bucket!' I looked up at the charming house, with its genial color and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there. 'Ah, it doesn't matter, after all,' he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having worked him up."
Really literature in the XIXth and the beginning of the XXth centuries is where science was in the days of Galileo and the Inquisition. Henry James not blinking it, neither can we. "Poor dears" and "dear olds" always a little too plentiful.
1885. (continued) "Pandora," of the best. Let it pass as a sop to America's virginal charm; as counter-weight to "Daisy Miller," or to the lady of "The Portrait." Henry James alert to the German.
"The process of enquiry had already begun for him, in spite of his having as yet spoken to none of his fellow passengers; the case being that Vogelstein enquired not only with his tongue, but with his eyes--that is with his spectacles--with his ears, with his nose, with his palate, with all his senses and organs. He was a highly upright young man, whose only fault was that his sense of comedy, or of the humor of things, had never been specifically disengaged, from his several other senses. He vaguely felt that something should be done about this, and in a general manner proposed to do it, for he was on his way to explore a society abounding in comic aspects. This consciousness of a missing measure gave him a certain mistrust of what might be said of him; and if circumspection is the essence of diplomacy our young aspirant promised well. His mind contained several millions of facts, packed too closely together for the light breeze of the imagination to draw through the mass. He was impatient to report himself to his superior in Washington, and the loss of time in an English port could only incommode him, inasmuch as the study of English institutions was no part of his mission. On the other hand the day was charming; the blue sea, in Southampton Water, pricked all over with light, had no movement but that of its infinite shimmer. Moreover, he was by no means sure that he should be happy in the United States, where doubtless he should find himself soon enough disembarked. He knew that this was not an important question and that happiness was an unscientific term, such as a man of his education should be ashamed to use even in the silence of his thoughts. Lost none the less in the inconsiderate crowd and feeling himself neither in his own country nor in that to which he was in a manner accredited, he was reduced to his mere personality; so that during the hour, to save his importance, he cultivated such ground as lay in sight for a judgment of this delay to which the German steamer was subjected in English waters. Mightn't it be proved, facts, figures and documents--or at least watch--in hand, considerably greater than the occasion demanded?
"Count Vogelstein was still young enough in diplomacy to think it necessary to have opinions. He had a good many, indeed, which had been formed without difficulty; they had been received ready-made from a line of ancestors who knew what they liked. This was of course--and under pressure, being candid, he would have admitted it--an unscientific way of furnishing one's mind. Our young man was a stiff conservative, a Junker of Junkers; he thought modern democracy a temporary phase and expected to find many arguments against it in the great Republic. In regard to these things it was a pleasure to him to feel that, with his complete training, he had been taught thoroughly to appreciate the nature of evidence. The ship was heavily laden with German emigrants, whose mission in the United States differed considerably from Count Otto's. They hung over the bulwarks, densely grouped; they leaned forward on their elbows for hours, their shoulders kept on a level with their ears: the men in furred caps, smoking long-bowled pipes, the women with babies hidden in remarkably ugly shawls. Some were yellow Germans and some were black, and all looked greasy and matted with the sea-damp. They were destined to swell still further the huge current of the Western democracy; and Count Vogelstein doubtless said to himself that they wouldn't improve its quality. Their numbers, however, were striking, and I know not what he thought of the nature of this
## particular evidence."
For further style in vignette:
"He could see for himself that Mr. and Mrs. Day had not at all her grand air. They were fat plain serious people who sat side by side on the deck for hours and looked straight before them. Mrs. Day had a white face, large cheeks and small eyes; her forehead was surrounded with a multitude of little tight black curls; her lips moved as if she had always a lozenge in her mouth. She wore entwined about her head an article which Mrs. Dangërfield spoke of as a "nuby," a knitted pink scarf concealing her hair, encircling her neck and having among its convolutions a hole for her perfectly expressionless face. Her hands were folded on her stomach, and in her still, swathed figure her bead-like eyes, which occasionally changed their direction, alone represented life. Her husband had a stiff gray beard on his chin and a bare spacious upper lip, to which constant shaving had imparted a hard glaze. His eyebrows were thick and his nostrils wide, and when he was uncovered, in the saloon, it was visible that his grizzled hair was dense and perpendicular. He might have looked rather grim and truculent hadn't it been for the mild familiar accommodating gaze with which his large light-colored pupils--the leisurely eyes of a silent man--appeared to consider surrounding objects. He was evidently more friendly than fierce, but he was more diffident than friendly. He liked to have you in sight, but wouldn't have pretended to understand you much or to classify you, and would have been sorry it should put you under an obligation. He and his wife spoke sometimes, but seldom talked, and there was something vague and patient about them as if they had become victims of a wrought spell. The spell, however, was of no sinister cast; it was the fascination of prosperity, the confidence of security, which sometimes makes people arrogant, but which had had such a different effect on this simple satisfied pair, in whom further development of every kind appeared to have been happily arrested."
Pandora's approach to her parents:
"These little offices were usually performed deftly, rapidly, with the minimum of words, and when their daughter drew near them, Mr. and Mrs. Day closed their eyes after the fashion of a pair of household dogs who expect to be scratched."
The tale is another synthesis of some of the million reasons why Germany will never conquer the world, why the Hun is impossible, why "boche" is merely "bursch." The imbecility of a certain Wellsian journalist in treating this gem is again proof that it is written for the relatively-developed American, not for the island écaillère. If Henry James, as Ford Madox Hueffer says, set out to civilize the United States, it is at least an easier job than raising British Suburbia to a bearable level. From that milieu at least we have nothing of value to learn; we shall not take our tonality from that _niveau._
In describing "Pandora's" success as "purely personal," Henry James has hit on the secret of the Quattrocento. 1450 to 1550, the vital part of the Renaissance. Aristocracy decays when it ceases to be selective, when the basis of selection is not personal. It is a critical acuteness, not a snobbism, which last is selection on some other principle than that of a personal quality. It is servility to rule-of-thumb criteria, and a dullness of perception, a timidity in acceptance. The whole force of the Renaissance was in the personality of its selection.
There is no faking the amount of perceptive energy concentrated in Henry James's vignettes in such phrases as that on the parents like domestic dogs waiting to be scratched, or in the ten thousand phrases of this sort which abound in his writings. If we were back in the time of Bruyère, we could easily make a whole book of "Characters" from Henry James's vignettes.[9] The vein holds from beginning to end of his work; from this writing of the eighties to "The Ivory Tower." As for example, Gussie Braddon:
"Rosanna waited facing her, noting her extraordinary perfection of neatness, of elegance, of arrangement, of which it couldn't be said whether they most handed over to you, as on some polished salver, the clear truth of her essential commonness or transposed it into an element that could please, that could even fascinate, as a supreme attestation of care. 'Take her as an advertisement of all the latest knowledges of how to "treat" every inch of the human surface and where to "get" every scrap of the personal envelope, so far as she _is_ enveloped, and she does achieve an effect sublime in itself and thereby absolute in a wavering world.'"
We note no inconsiderable progress in the actual writing, in _mîstria_, when we reach the ultimate volumes.
1886. "Bostonians." Other stories in this collection mostly rejected from collected edition.
"Princess Casamassima" inferior continuation of "Roderick Hudson." His original subject matter is beginning to go thin.
1888. "The Reverberator," process of fantasia beginning.
Fantasia of Americans vs. the "old aristocracy," "The American" with the sexes reversed. Possibly the theme shows as well in "Les Transatlantiques," the two methods, give one at least a certain pleasure of contrast.
1888. "Aspern Papers," inferior. "Louisa Pallant," a study in the maternal or abysmal relation, good James. "Modern Warning," rejected from collected edition.
1889. "A London Life." "The Patagonia."
"The Patagonia," not a masterpiece. Slow in opening, excellent in parts, but the sense of the finale intrudes all along. It seems true but there is no alternative ending. One doubts whether a story is really constructed with any mastery when the end, for the purpose of making it a story, is so unescapable. The effect of reality is produced, of course, by the reality of the people in the opening scene; there is no doubt about that part being "to the life."
"The Liar" is superb in its way, perhaps the best of the allegories, of the plots invented purely to be an exposition of impression. It is magnificent in its presentation of the people, both the old man and the Liar, who is masterly.
"Mrs. Temperly" is another such excellent delineation and shows James as an excellent hater, but G.S. Street expresses a concentration of annoyance with a greater polish and suavity in method; and neither explains, theorizes, nor comments.
James never has De Maupassant's reality. His (H.J.'s) people almost always convince, i.e., we believe implicitly that they exist. We also think that Henry James has made up some sort of story as an excuse for writing his impression of the people.
One sees the slight vacancy of the stories of this period, the short clear sentence, the dallying with _jeu d'esprit_, with epigram no better than, though not inferior to, the run of epigram in the nineties. It all explains James's need of opacity, his reaching out for a chiaroscuro to distinguish himself from his contemporaries and in which he could put the whole of his much more complex apperception.
Then comes, roughly, the period of cobwebs and of excessive cobwebs and of furniture, finally justified in "The Finer Grain," a book of tales with no mis-fire, and the style so vindicated in the triumphs of the various books of Memoirs and "The American Scene."
Fantasias: "Dominic Ferrand," "Nona Vincent" (tales obviously aimed at the "Yellow Book," but seem to have missed it, a detour in James's career). All artists who discover anything make such detours and must, in the course of things (as in the cobwebs), push certain experiments beyond the right curve of their art. This is not so much the doom as the function of all "revolutionary" or experimental art, and I think masterwork is usually the result of the return from such excess. One does not know, simply does not know, the true curve until one has pushed one's method beyond it. Until then it is merely a frontier, not a chosen route. It is an open question, and there is no dogmatic answer, whether an artist should write and rewrite the same story (à la Flaubert) or whether he should take a new canvas.
"The Papers," a fantasia, diverting; "The Birthplace," fairy-godmother element mentioned above, excellent. "Edmund Orme," inferior; "Yellow Book" tale, not accepted by that periodical.
1889-1893. Period of this entoilment in the "Yellow Book," short sentences, the epigrammatic. He reacts from this into the allegorical. In general the work of this period is not up to the mark. "The Chaperon," "The Real Thing," fantasias of "wit." By fantasias I mean sketches in which the people are "real" or convince one of their verity, but where the story is utterly unconvincing, is not intended to convince, is merely a sort of exaggeration of the fitting situation or the situation which ought to result in order to display some type at its apogee. "The Real Thing" rather better than other stories in this volume.
Thus the lady and gentleman model in "The Real Thing." London society is finely ladled in "The Chaperon," which is almost as a story, romanticism.
"Greville Fane" is a scandalous photograph from the life about which the great blagueur scandalously lies in his preface (collected edition). I have been too diverted comparing it with _an_ original to give a sane view of its art.
1890. "The Tragic Muse," uneven, full of good things but showing Henry James in the didactic role a little too openly. He preaches, he also displays fine perception of the parochialism of the British political career. It is a readable novel with tracts interpolated. (Excellent and commendable tracts arguing certainly for the right thing, enjoyable, etc.) Excellent text-book for young men with ambitions, etc.
1892. "Lesson of the Master" (cobweb). "The Pupil," a masterpiece, one of his best and keenest studies. "Brooksmith" of the best.
1893. "The Private Life." Title story, waste verbiage at the start, ridiculous to put all this camouflage over something au fond merely an idea. Not life, not people, allegory, dated to "Yellow Book" era. Won't hold against "Candide." H.J.'s tilting against the vacuity of the public figure is, naturally, pleasing, i.e., it is pleasing that he should tilt, but the amusement partakes of the nature of seeing cocoanuts hurled at an aunt sally.
There are other stories, good enough to be carried by H.J.'s best work, not detrimental, but not enough to have "made him": "Europe" (Hawthorny), "Paste," "The Middle Years," "Broken Wings," etc. Part of the great man's work can perhaps only be criticized as "etc."
1895. "Terminations, Coxon Fund," perhaps best of this lot, a disquisition, but entertaining, perhaps the germ of Galsworthy to be found in it (to no glory of either author) as perhaps a residuum of Dickens in Maisie's Mrs. Wix. Verbalism, but delightful verbalism in Coxon affair, sic:
"Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular,"
or
"a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproachable and insufferable person"
or (for the whole type)
"put such ignorance into her cleverness?"
Miss Anvoy's echo concerning "a crystal" is excellently introduced, but is possibly in the nature of a sleight of hand trick (contemporary with "Lady Windemere's Fan"). Does H.J.'s "politics" remind one of Dizzy's scribbling, just a little?" Confidence, under the new Ministry, was understood to be reviving," etc.
Perhaps one covers the ground by saying that the James of this period is "light literature," entertaining if one have nothing better to do. Neither "Terminations" nor (1896) "Embarrassments" would have founded a reputation.
1896-97. Improvement through "Other House" and "Spoils of Poynton." I leave the appreciation of these, to me, detestable works to Mr. Hueffer. They seem to me full of a good deal of needless fuss, though I do not mean to deny any art that may be in them.
1897. The emergence in "What Maisie Knew." Problem of the adolescent female. Carried on in:
1899. "The Awkward Age," fairy godmother and spotless lamb and all the rest of it. Only real thing the impression of people, not observation or real knowledge. Action only to give reader the tone, symbolizing the tone of the people. Opening _tour de force_, a study in punks, a cheese _soufflé_ of the leprous crust of society done to a turn and a niceness save where he puts on the _dulcissimo, vox humana_, stop. James was the dispassionate observer. He started with the moral obsession; before he had worked clear of it he was entoiled in the obsession of social tone. He has pages of clear depiction, even of satire, but the sentimentalist is always lurking just round the corner. This softens his edges. He has not the clear hardness, the cold satiric justness that G.S. Street has displayed in treating situations, certain struggles between certain idiocies and certain vulgarities. This book is a spécialité of local interest. It is an étude in ephemera. If it contained any revelation in 1899, it no longer contains it. His characters are reduced to the status of _voyeurs_, elaborate analysis of the much too special cases, a bundle of swine and asses who cannot mind their own business, who do not know enough to mind their own business. James's lamentable lack of the classics is perhaps responsible for his absorption in bagatelles.... He has no real series of backgrounds of _mœurs du passé_, only the "sweet dim faded lavender" tune and in opposition to modernity, plush nickel-plated, to the disparagement, naturally, of the latter.
Kipling's "Bigod, now-I-know-all-about-this manner," is an annoyance, but one wonders if parts of Kipling by the sheer force of content, of tale to tell, will not outlast most of James's cobwebs. There is no substitute for narrative-sense, however many different and entrancing charms may be spread before us.
"The Awkward Age" might have been done, from one point of view, as satire, in one-fourth the space. On the other hand, James does give us the subtly graded atmospheres of his different houses most excellently. And indeed, this may be regarded as _his_ subject.
If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, impressions of personal tone and quality _are his subject;_ that in these he gets certain things that almost no one else had done before him. These timbres and tonalities are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc., but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc., etc., life would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it.[10]
The main feeling in "The Awkward Age" is satiric. The dashes of sentiment do not help the work as literature. The acute observer is often referred to:
Page 131. "The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have detected...."
Page 133. "And it might have been apparent still to our sharp spectator...."
Page 310. "But the acute observer we are constantly taking for granted would perhaps have detected...."
Page 323. "A supposititious spectator would certainly have imagined...." (This also occurs in "Ivory Tower." Page 196.)
This scrutinous person wastes a great deal of time in pretending to conceal his contempt for Mrs. Brook, Vanderbank, the other punks, and lays it on so _thick_ when presenting his old sentimentalist Longdon, who at the one critical moment behaves _with a stupidity,_ with a lack of delicacy, since we are dealing with these refinements. Of course neither this stupidity of his action nor the tone of the other characters has anything to do with the question of _mæstria_, if they _were_ dispassionately or impartially rendered. The book is weak because all through it James is so manifestly carrying on a long _tenzone_ so fiercely and loudly, a long argument _for_ the old lavender. There is also the constant implication that Vanderbank ought to want Nanda, though why the devil he should be supposed to be even mildly under this obligation, is not made clear. A basis in the classics, castor oil, even Stevenson's "Virginibus Puerisque" might have helped matters. One's complaint is not that people of this sort don't exist, that they aren't like everything else a subject for literature, but that James doesn't anywhere in the book get down to bed-rock. It is too much as if he were depicting stage scenery not _as_ stage scenery, but as nature.
All this critique is very possibly an exaggeration. Take it at half its strength; I do not intend to defend it.
Epigrammatic manner in opening, compare Kipling; compare De Maupassant, superb ideas, verity, fantasia, fantasia group, reality, charming stories, poppycock. "Yellow Book" touches in "The Real Thing," general statements about their souls, near to bad writing, perfectly lucid.
"Nona Vincent," he writes like an adolescent, might be a person of eighteen doing first story.
Page 201. "Public interest in spiritual life of the army." ("The Real Thing.")
Page 201. German Invasion.
Loathsome prigs, stiff conventions, editor of cheap magazines ladled in Sir Wots-his-name.
1893. In the interim he had brought out "In the Cage," excellent opening sentence, matter too much talked around and around, and "The Two Magics." This last a Freudian affair which seems to me to have attracted undue interest, i.e., interest out of proportion to the importance as literature and _as part of_ Henry James's own work, because of this subject matter. The obscenity of "The Turn of the Screw" has given it undue prominence. People now "drawn" to obscene as were people of Milton's period by an equally disgusting bigotry; one unconscious on author's part; the other, a surgical treatment of a disease. Thus much for progress on part of authors if public has not progressed. The point of my remarks is that an extraneous criterion comes in. One must keep to the question of literature, not of irrelevancies. Galdos' "Lo Prohibido" does Freud long before the sex crank got to it. Kipling really does the psychic, ghosts, etc., to say nothing of his having the "sense of story."
1900. "The Soft Side," collection containing: "The Abasement of the Northmores," good; again the motif of the vacuity of the public man, the "figure"; he has tried it again in "The Private Life," which, however, falls into the allegorical. A rotten fall it is too, and Henry James at his worst in it, i.e., the allegorical. "Fordham's Castle" appears in the collected edition only--it may belong to this period but is probably earlier, comedietta, excellently, perhaps flawlessly done. Here, as so often, the circumstances are mostly a description of the character of the personal tone of the "sitters"; for his people are so much more, or so much more often, "sitters" than actors. Protagonists it may be. When they act, they are apt to stage-act, which reduces their action again to being a mere attempt at description. ("The Liar," for example.) Compare Maupassant's "Toine" for treatment of case similar to "Fordham Castle."
1902-05. "The Sacred Fount," "Wings of a Dove," "Golden Bowl" period.
"Dove" and "Bowl" certainly not models for other writers, a caviare not part of the canon (metaphors be hanged for the moment).
Henry James is certainly not a model for narrative novelists, for young writers of fiction; perhaps not even a subject of study till they have attained some sublimity of the critical sense or are at least ready to be constantly alert, constantly on guard.
I cannot see that he will harm a critic or a describer of places, a recorder of impressions, whether they be people, places, music.
1903. "Better Sort," mildish.
1903. "The Ambassadors," rather clearer than the other work. Etude of Paris vs. Woollett. Exhortation to the idle, well-to-do, to leave home.
1907. "The American Scene," triumph of the author's long practice. A creation of America. A book no "serious American" will neglect. How many Americans make any attempt toward a realization of that country is of course beyond our power to compute. The desire to see the national face in a mirror may be in itself an exotic. I know of no such grave record, of no such attempt at faithful portrayal, as "The American Scene." Thus America is to the careful observer; this volume and the American scenes in the fiction and memoirs, in "The Europeans," "The Patagonia," "Washington Square," etc., bulk large in the very small amount of writing which can be counted as history of _mœurs contemporaines,_ of national habit of our time and of the two or three generations preceding us. Newport, the standardized face, the Capitol, Independence Hall, the absence of penetralia, innocence, essential vagueness, etc., language "only definable as not in _intention_ Yiddish," the tabernacle of Grant's ashes, the public collapse of the individual, the St. Gaudens statue. There is nothing to be gained by making excerpts; the volume is large, but one should in time drift through it. I mean any American with pretenses to an intellectual life should drift through it. It is not enough to have perused "The Constitution" and to have "heerd tell" of the national founders.
1910. "The Finer Grain," collection of short stories without a slip. "The Velvet Glove," "Mona Montravers," "A Round of Visits" (the old New York versus the new), "Crapey Cornelia," "The Bench of Desolation."
It is by beginning on this collection, or perhaps taking it after such stories as "The Pupil" and "Brooksmith," that the general literate reader will best come to James, must in brief be convinced of him and can tell whether or not the "marginal" James is for him. Whether or no the involutions of the "Golden Bowl" will titillate his arcane sensibilities. If the reader does not "get" "The Finer Grain" there is no sense in his trying the more elaborate "Wings of a Dove," "Sacred Fount," "Golden Bowl." If, on the contrary, he does feel the peculiar, unclassic attraction of the author he may or may not enjoy the uncanonical books.
1911. "The Outcry," a relapse. Connoisseurship fad again, inferior work.
1913. "A Small Boy and Others," the beginning of the memoirs. Beginning of this volume disgusting. First three pages enough to put one off Henry James once and for all, damn badly written, atrocious vocabulary. Page 33, a few lines of good writing. Reader might start about here, any reader, that is, to whom New York of that period is of interest. New York of the fifties is significant, in so far as it is typical of what a hundred smaller American cities have been since. The tone of the work shows in excerpts:
"The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not conscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or was conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having borne to their surrounding medium--the fact that their unconsciousnes could be so preserved...."
Or later, when dealing with a pre-Y.-M.-C.-A. America.
"Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman, all but closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I anticipated his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent that I thought _he_ must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectly afterwards the impression I so made on her--in which the general proposition that the gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on occasion be best described by the term I had used, sought to destroy the particular presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary measure, show himself for one of these. He didn't to all appearance, for I was afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that memory remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at my having leaped to so baseless a view...."
"The grim little generalization remained, none the less, and I may speak of it--since I speak of everything--as still standing: the striking evidence that scarce aught but disaster _could_, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed. Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort was to _be_ exposed--in the absence, I mean, of some fairly abnormal predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure, sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready, even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried on disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were 'sympathetic,' though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to recognize or to find possible any practical application of moneyed, that is, of transmitted ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly to the bad with it--which meant even then going as often as possible to Paris...."
"The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster...."
"It has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw the 'natural' so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, or comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this was because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so little there to threaten it...."
On page 72 he quotes his father on "flagrant morality." In Chapter X we have a remarkable portrayal of a character by almost nothing save vacuums, "timorous philistine in a world of dangers." Our author notes the "finer civility" but does not see that it is a thing of no period. It is the property of a few individuals, personally transmitted. Henry James had a mania for setting these things in an era or a "faubourg," despite the continued testimony that the worst manners have constantly impinged upon the most brilliant societies; that decent detail of conduct is a personal talent.
The production of "Il Corteggiano" proves perhaps nothing more than the degree in which Castiglione's contemporaries "needed to be told." On page 236 ("Small Boy and Others") the phrase "presence without type." On page 286, the people "who cultivated for years the highest instructional, social and moral possibilities of Geneva." Page 283, "discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those days on that issue of the producible _name_." Page 304, "For even in those days some Americans were rich and several sophisticated." Page 313, The real give away of W.J. Page 341, Scarification of Ste-Beuve. Page 179, Crystal Palace. Page 214, Social relativity.
One is impatient for Henry James to do people.
A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE. The disadvantage of giving impressions of real instead of imaginary places is that they conflict with other people's impressions. I do not see Angoulême via Balzac, nor do I feel Henry James's contacts with the places where our tracks have crossed very remarkable. I dare say it is a good enough guide for people more meagrely furnished with associations or perceptions. Allow me my _piéton's_ shrug for the man who has gone only by train.
Henry James is not very deep in ancient associations. The American's enjoyment of England in "The Passionate Pilgrim" is more searching than anything continental. Windy generality in "Tour in France," and perhaps indication of how little Henry James's tentacles penetrated into any era before 1600, or perhaps before 1780.
Vignette bottom of page 337-8 ("Passionate Pilgrim") "full of glimpses and responses, of deserts and desolations." "His perceptions would be fine and his opinions pathetic." Commiseration of Searle vs. detachment, in "Four Meetings."
Of the posthumous work, "The Middle Years" is perhaps the most charming. "The Ivory Tower," full of accumulated perceptions, swift illuminating phrases, perhaps part of a masterpiece. "The Sense of the Past," less important. I leave my comment of "The Middle Years" as I wrote it, but have recast the analysis of notes to "The Ivory Tower."
Flaubert is in six volumes, four or five of which every literate man must at one time or another assault. James is strewn over about forty--part of which must go into desuetude, have perhaps done so already.
I have not in these notes attempted the Paterine art of appreciation, e.g., as in taking the perhaps sole readable paragraph of Pico Mirandola and writing an empurpled descant.
The problem--discussion of which is about as "artistic" as a street map--is: can we conceive a five or six volume edition of James so selected as to hold its own internationally? My contention is for this possibility.
My notes are no more than a tentative suggestion, to wit: that some such compact edition might be, to advantage, tried on the less patient public. I have been, alas, no more fortunate than our subject in keeping out irrelevant, non-esthetic, non-literary, non-technical vistas and strictures.
"THE MIDDLE YEARS"
The Middle Years is a tale of the great adventure; for, putting aside a few simple adventures, sentimental, phallic, Nimrodic, the remaining great adventure is precisely the approach to the Metropolis; for the provincial of our race the specific approach to London, and no subject surely could more heighten the pitch of writing than that the treated approach should be that of the greatest writer of our time and own
## particular language. We may, I think, set aside Thomas Hardy as of an
age not our own; of perhaps Walter Scott's or of L'Abbé Prévost's, but remote from us and things familiarly under our hand; and we skip over the next few crops of writers as lacking in any comparative interest, interest in a writer being primarily in his degree of sensitization; and on this count we may throw out the whole Wells-Bennett period, for what interest can we take in instruments which must of nature miss two-thirds of the vibrations in any conceivable situation? In James the maximum sensibility compatible with efficient writing was present. Indeed, in reading these pages one can but despair over the inadequacy of one's own literary sensitization, one's so utterly inferior state of awareness; even allowing for what the author himself allows: his not really, perhaps, having felt at twenty-six, all that at seventy he more or less read into the memory of his feeling. The point is that with the exception of exceptional moments in Hueffer, we find no trace of such degree of awareness in the next lot of writers, or until the first novels of Lewis and Joyce, whose awareness is, without saying, of a nature greatly different in kind.
It is not the book for any reader to tackle who has not read a good deal of James, or who has not, in default of that reading, been endowed with a natural Jamesian sensibility (a case almost negligible by any likelihood); neither is it a book of memoirs, I mean one does not turn to it seeking information about Victorian worthies; any more than one did, when the old man himself was talking, want to be told anything; there are encyclopedias in sufficiency, and statistics, and human mines of information, boring sufficiency; one asked and isks only that the slow voice should continue--evaluating, or perhaps only tying up the strands of a sentence: "And how my old friend.... _Howells_...." etc.
The effects of H.J.'s first breakfasts in Liverpool, invited upstairs at Half Moon Street, are of infinitely more value than any anecdotes of the Laureate (even though H.J.'s inability not to see all through the Laureate is compensated by a quip melting one's personal objection to anything Tennyson touched, by making him merely an old gentleman whatsoever with a gleam of fun in his make-up).
All comers to the contrary, and the proportionate sale of his works, and statistics whatsoever to the contrary, only an American who has come abroad will ever draw _all_ the succulence from Henry James's writings; the denizen of Manchester or Wellington may know what it feels like to reach London, the Londoner born will not be able quite to reconstruct even this part of the book; and if for intimacy H.J. might have stayed at the same hotel on the same day as one's grandfather; and if the same American names had part in one's own inceptions in London, one's own so wholly different and less padded inceptions; one has perhaps a purely personal, selfish, unliterary sense of intimacy: with, in my own case, the vast unbridgeable difference of settling-in and escape.
The essence of James is that he is always "settling-in," it is the ground-tone of his genius.
Apart from the state of James's sensibility on arrival nothing else matters, the "mildness of the critical air," the fatuity of George Eliot's husband, the illustrational and accomplished lady, even the faculty for a portrait in a paragraph, not to be matched by contemporary effects in half-metric, are indeed all subordinate to one's curiosity as to what Henry James knew, and what he did not know on landing. The portrait of the author on the cover showing him bearded, and looking rather like a cross between a bishop and a Cape Cod longshoreman, is an incident gratuitous, interesting, but in no way connected with the young man of the text.
The England of a still rather whiskered age, never looking inward, in short, the Victorian, is exquisitely embalmed, and "mounted," as is, I think, the term for microscopy. The book is just the right length as a volume, but one mourns there not being twenty more, for here is the unfinished work ... not in "The Sense of the Past," for there the pen was weary, as it had been in "The Outcry," and the talent that was never most worth its own while when gone off on connoisseurship, was, conceivably, finished; but here in his depiction of his earlier self the verve returned in full vigor.
THE NOTES TO "THE IVORY TOWER"[11]
The great artists among men of letters have occasionally and by tradition burst into an _Ars Poetica_ or an _Arte nuevo de hacer Comedias_, and it should come as no surprise that Henry James has left us some sort of treatise on novel-writing--no surprise, that is, to the discriminating reader who is _not_, for the most part, a writer of English novels. Various reviewers have hinted obscurely that some such treatise is either adumbrated or concealed in the Notes for "The Ivory Tower" and for "The Sense of the Past"; they have said, indeed, that novelists will "profit greatly," etc., but no one has set forth the gist or the generalities which are to be found in these notes.
Divested of its fine verbiage, of its clichés, of its provincialisms of American phrase, and of the special details relating to the particular
## book in his mind, the formula for building a novel (any novel, not
merely any "psychological" novel); the things to have clearly in mind before starting to write it are enumerated in "The Ivory Tower" notes somewhat as follows:--
1. Choice of names for characters; names that will "fit" their owners, and that will not "joggle" or be cacophonie when in juxtaposition on the page.
2. Exposition of one group of characters and of the "situation." (In "The Ivory Tower" this was to be done in three subdivisions. "Book I" was to give the "Immediate Facts.")
3. One character at least is hitched to his "characteristic." We are to have one character's impression on another.
4. (Book III.) Various reactions and interactions of characters.
5. The character, i.e., the main character, is "faced with the situation."
6. For "The Ivory Tower" and probably for any novel, there is now need to show clearly and definitely the "antecedents," i.e., anything that had happened before the story started. And we find Henry James making up his mind which characters have interacted before this story opens, and which things are to be due to fresh impacts of one character on another.
7. Particular consideration of the special case in hand. The working-free from incongruities inherent in the first vague preconceptions of the plot. Thus:
(a) The hinge of the thing is not to be the effect of A. on B. or of B. on A.; nor of A. on C. or of C. on B.; but is to be due to an effect all round, of A. and B. and C. working on each other.
(b) James's care not to repeat figures from earlier novels. Not a categoric prohibition, but a caution not to sail too near the wind in this matter.
(c) A care not to get too many "personally remarkable" people, and not enough stupid ones into the story.
(d) Care for the relative "weight" as well as the varied "tone" of the characters.
(We observe, in all this, the peculiarly American passion for "art"; for having a system in things, _cf._ Whistler.)
(e) Consideration how far one character "faces" the problem of another character's "character."
(This and section "d" continue the preoccupation with "moral values" shown in James's early criticism in "French Poets and Novelists.")
8. Definite "_joints_"; or relations of one character to another finally fitted and settled.
This brings us again to point 5. The character, i.e., the main character definitely "faced" with the situation.
9. The consequences.
10. (a) Further consideration of the state of character C. before contact with B., etc.
(b) The effect of further characters on the mind, and thence on the
## action of A.
(c) Considerations of the effect of a fourth main character; of introducing a subsidiary character, and its effect, i.e., that of having an extra character for a particular function.
11. The great "_coup_" foreshadowed.
(In this case the mild Othello, more and more drifting consciously into the grip of the mild Iago--I use the terms "Othello" and "Iago" merely to avoid, if not "hero," at least "villain"; the sensitive temperament allowing the rapacious temperament to become effective.)
(a) The main character in perplexity as to how far he shall combat the drift of things.
(b) The opposed character's perception of this.
(These sub-sections are, of course, sub-sections for a psychological novel; one would have different but equivalent "joints" in a novel of
## action.)
(c) Effect of all this on third character. (In this case female, attracted to "man-of-action" quality).
(d) A.'s general perception of these things and his weighing of values, a phase solely for the psychological novel.
(e) Weighing of how much A.'s perception of the relations between B. and C. is to be dénouement, and how much, more or less, known.
12. Main character's "solution" or vision of what course he will take.
13. The fourth character's "break into" things, or into a perception of things,
(a) Actions of an auxiliary character, of what would have been low life in old Spanish or Elizabethan drama. This character affects the main
## action (as sometimes a "_gracioso_" [servant, buffoon, Sancho Panza]
affects the main action in a play, for example, of Lope de Vega's).
(b) Caution not to let author's interest in fascinating auxiliary character run away with his whole plan and design.
(This kind of restraint is precisely what leaves a reader "wanting more"; which gives a novel the "feel" of being full of life; convinces the reader of an abundant energy, an abundant sense of life in an author.)
14. Effects of course of the action on fourth main character and on the others. The scale being kept by the relation here not being between main character and _one_ antagonist, but with a group of three people, relations "different" though their "point" is the same; _cf._ a main character vs. a Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, or "attendant lords." James always has half an eye on play construction; the scene.
(a) The second auxiliary character brought out more definitely. (This is accidental. It might happen at any suitable point in a story wherever needed.)
(b) Act of this auxiliary person reaches through to main action.
15. We see the author determining just how bad a case he is going to make his villain.
(a) Further determination of his hero. (In this case an absolute non-producer, non-accumulator.)
(b) Care not to get an unmixed "bad" in his "villain," but to keep a right balance, a dependency, in this case, on the main character's weakness or easiness.
(c) Decision how the main "coup" or transfer shall slide through.
16. Effect upon C. Effect upon main characters' relations to D., E. and F.
At this point, in the consideration of eight of the ten "books" of his novel, we see the author most intent on his composition or architecture, most anxious to get all the sections fitted in with the greatest economy, a sort of crux of his excitement and anxiety, a fullness of his perception that the thing must be so tightly packed that no sentence can afford to be out of place.
17. Climax. The _Deus_ or, in this case, _Dea, ex machina_. Devices for prolonging climax. The fourth main character having been, as it were, held back for a sort of weight or balance here, and as a "resolution" of the tangles.
Finis.
18. Author's final considerations of time scheme, i.e., fitting the
## action into time not too great for unity, and great enough to allow for
needed complexity. Slighter consideration of place scheme; where final scenes shall be laid, etc.
Here in a few paragraphs are the bare bones of the plan described in eighty of Henry James's pages. The detailed thoroughness of this plan, the complicated consciousness displayed in it, gives us the measure of this author's superiority, as conscious artist, over the "normal" British novelist, i.e., over the sort of person who tells you that when he did his first book he "just sat down and wrote the first paragraph," and then found he "couldn't stop." This he tells you in a manner clearly implying that, from that humble beginning to the shining hour of the present, he has given the matter no further thought, and that his succeeding works were all knocked off with equal simplicity.
I give this outline with such fullness because it is a landmark in the history of the novel, as written in English. It is inconceivable that Fielding or Richardson should have left, or that Thomas Hardy should leave, such testimony to a comprehension of the novel as a "form." The Notes are, on the other hand, quite distinct from the voluminous, prefaces which so many French poets write before they have done anything else. James, we note, wrote no prefaces until there were twenty-four volumes of his novels and stories waiting to be collected and republished. The Notes are simply the accumulation of his craftsman's knowledge, they are, in all their length, the summary of the things he would have, as a matter of habit, in his mind before embarking on composition.
I take it rather as a sign of editorial woodenheadedness that these Notes are printed at the _end_ of "The Ivory Tower"; if one have sense enough to suspect that the typical mentality of the elderly heavy reviewer has been shown, one will for oneself reverse the order; read the notes with interest and turn to the text already with the excitement of the sport or with the zest to see if, with this chance of creating the masterpiece so outlined, the distinguished author is going to make good. If on the other hand one reads the unfinished text, there is no escaping the boredom of re-reading in skeleton, with tentative and confusing names, the bare statement of what has been, in the text, more fully set before us.
The text is attestation of the rich, banked-up perception of the author. I dare say the snap and rattle of the fun, or much of it, will be only half perceptible to those who do not know both banks of the Atlantic; but enough remains to show the author at his best; despite the fact that occasionally he puts in the mouths of his characters sentences or phrases that no one but he himself could have used. I cannot attribute this to the unfinished state of the manuscript. These oversights are few, but they are the kind of slip which occurs in his earlier work. We note also that his novel is a descriptive novel, not a novel that simply depicts people speaking and moving. There is a constant dissertation going on, and in it is our major enjoyment. The Notes to "The Sense of the Past" are not so fine a specimen of method, as they are the plan not of a whole book, but only of the latter section. The editor is quite right to print them at the end of the volume.
Of the actual writing in the three posthumous books, far the most charming is to be found in "The Middle Years." Here again one is not much concerned with Mr. James's mildly ironic reminiscences of Tennyson and the Victorians, but rather with James's own temperament, and with his recording of inn-rooms, breakfasts, butlers, etc., very much as he had done in his fiction. There is no need for its being "memoirs" at all; call the protagonist Mr. Ponsonby or Mr. Hampton, obliterate the known names of celebrities and half celebrities, and the whole thing becomes a James novel, and, so far as it goes, a mate to the best of them.
Retaining the name of the author, any faithful reader of James, or at any rate the attentive student, finds a good deal of amusement in deciphering the young James, his temperament as mellowed by recollection and here recorded forty years later, and then in contrasting it with the young James as revealed or even "betrayed" in his own early criticisms, "French Poets and Novelists," a much cruder and more savagely puritanical and plainly New England product with, however, certain permanent traits of his character already in evidence, and with a critical faculty keen enough to hit on certain weaknesses in the authors analyzed, often with profundity, and with often a "rightness" in his mistakes. I mean that apparent errors are at times only an excess of zeal and overshooting of his mark, which was to make for an improvement, by him, of certain defects.
[1] This holds, despite anything that may be said of his fuss about social order, social tone. I naturally do not drag in political connotations, from which H.J. was, we believe, wholly exempt. What he fights is "influence", the impinging of family pressure, the impinging of one personality on another; all of them in highest degree damn'd, loathsome and detestable. Respect for the peripheries of the individual may be, however, a discovery of our generation; I doubt it, but it seems to have been at low ebb in some districts (not rural) for some time.
[2] _Little Review_, Aug., 1918.
[3] I differ, beyond that point, with our author. I enjoy ascent as much as I loathe descent in an elevator. I do not mind the click of brass doors. I had indeed for, my earliest toy, if I was not brought up in it, the rather slow and well-behaved elevator in a quiet and quietly bright huge sanatorium. The height of high buildings, the chasms of New York are delectable; but this is beside the point; one is not asked to share the views and tastes of a writer.
[4] "For a poet to be realist is of course nonsense", and, as Hueffer says, such a sentence from such a source is enough to make one despair of human nature.
[5] Ford Madox Hueffer's volume on Henry James.
[6] It is my personal feeling at the moment that _La Fille Elisa_ is worth so much more than all Balzac that the things are as out of scale as a sapphire and a plum pudding, and that _Elisa,_ despite the dull section, is worth most of James's writing. This is, however, aside from the question we are discussing.
[7] T.S. Eliot.
[8] Page numbers in Collected Edition.
[9] Since writing the above I find that some such compilation has been attempted; had indeed been planned by the anthologist, and, in plan, approved by H.J.: "Pictures and Passages from Henry James" selected by Ruth Head (Chatto and Windus, 1916), if not exactly the book to convince the rising generation of H.J.'s powers of survival, is at any rate a most charming tribute to our subject from one who had begun to read him in "the eighties".
[10] Most good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of negation; is the detailed, convincing analysis of something detestable; of something which one wants to eliminate. Poetry is the assertion of a positive, _i.e._, of desire, and endures for a longer period. Poetic satire is only an assertion of this positive, inversely, _i.e._, as of an opposite hatred.
This is a highly untechnical, unimpressionist, in fact almost theological manner of statement; but is perhaps the root difference between the two arts of literature.
Most good poetry asserts something to be worth while, or damns a contrary; at any rate asserts emotional values. The best prose is, has been a presentation (complicated and elaborate as you like) of circumstances, of conditions, for the most part abominable, or at the mildest, amendable. This assertion of the more or less objectionable only becomes doctrinaire and rotten art when the narrator mis-states from dogmatic bias, and when he suggests some quack remedy (prohibition, Christianity, social theory of one sort or another), the only cure being that humanity should display more intelligence and good-will than humanity is capable of displaying.
Poetry = Emotional synthesis, quite as real, quite as realist as any prose (or intellectual) analysis.
Neither prose nor drama can attain poetic intensity save by construction, almost by scenario; by so arranging the circumstance that some perfectly simple speech, perception, dogmatic statement appears in abnormal vigor. Thus when Frederic in _L'Education_ observes Mme. Arnoux's shoe-laces as she is descending the stair; or in Turgenev the statement, quotation of a Russian proverb about the "heart of another", or "Nothing but death is irrevocable" toward the end of _Nichée de Gentils-hommes._
[11] Recast from an article in _The Future._
III
REMY DE GOURMONT
A DISTINCTION
_followed by notes_
The mind of Remy de Gourmont was less like the mind of Henry James than any contemporary mind I can think of. James' drawing of _mœurs contemporaines_ was so circumstantial, so concerned with the setting, with detail, nuance, social aroma, that his transcripts were "out of date" almost before his books had gone into a second edition; out of date that is, in the sense that his interpretations of society could never serve as a guide to such supposititious utilitarian members of the next generation as might so desire to use them.
He has left his scene and his characters, unalterable as the little paper flowers permanently visible inside the lumpy glass paperweights. He was a great man of letters, a great artist in portrayal; he was concerned with mental temperatures, circumvolvulous social pressures, the clash of contending conventions, as Hogarth with the cut of contemporary coats.
On no occasion would any man of my generation have broached an intimate idea to H.J., or to Thomas Hardy, O.M., or, years since, to Swinburne, or even to Mr. Yeats with any feeling that the said idea was likely to be received, grasped, comprehended. However much one may have admired Yeats' poetry; however much one may have been admonished by Henry James' prose works, one has never thought of agreeing with either.
You could, on the other hand, have said to De Gourmont anything that came into your head; you could have sent him anything you had written with a reasonable assurance that he would have known what you were driving at. If this distinction is purely my own, and subjective, and even if it be wholly untrue, one will be very hard pressed to find any other man born in the "fifties" of whom it is even suggestible.
De Gourmont prepared our era; behind him there stretches a limitless darkness; there _was_ the counter-reformation, still extant in the English printer; there _was_ the restoration of the Inquisition by the Catholic Roman Church, holy and apostolic, in the year of grace 1824; there was the Mephistopheles period, morals of the opera left over from the Spanish XVIIth century plays of "capa y espada"; Don Juan for subject matter, etc.; there was the period of English Christian bigotry, Saml. Smiles, exhibition of '51 ("Centennial of '76"), machine-made building "ornament," etc., enduring in the people who did not read Saml. Butler; there was the Emerson-Tennysonian plus optimism period; there was the "æsthetic" era during which people "wrought" as the impeccable Beerbohm has noted; there was the period of funny symboliste trappings, "sin," satanism, rosy cross, heavy lilies, Jersey Lilies, etc.,
"Ch'hanno perduto il ben del intelletto"
all these periods had mislaid the light of the XVIIIth century; though in the symbolistes Gourmont had his beginning.