CHAPTER XCVIII

THE CULTURED-CLASS HISTORIAN

We are getting down to modern times, and have come to the first great artist of whom I can say that with my own eyes I saw him. Shortly before the war, coming out of the dining-room of the New Reform Club in London, my host, H. G. Wells, stopped me and whispered: “There sits the Great Cham.” He may have said “Great Buddha” or “Great Jupiter”; anyhow, I looked, and seated at a table in solitary state was a large elderly gentleman, with large bald head shining whitely, and jaws moving meditatively. I knew him from his pictures; and besides, there was at that time only one Great Cham, or Great Buddha, or Great Jupiter of international letters.

I did not ask to meet him, because, having read him, I understood the aesthetic proprieties, and did not wish to surprise a Great Master with his mouth full of lunch. Also, the days of my discipleship had long since passed, and I was not sure if I would be able to think of just the proper delicate subtlety with which to convey my attitude to one whom I had once revered, and now regarded with affection because of reverence remembered. That sentence is a little longer and more subtle than I usually write--such being the effect upon one’s style of merely thinking about Henry James.

In my youth I wanted to know the great world, and who could tell me with such compelling authority? I read everything he had written up to that time--no small task, some forty volumes, many of them fat. I stuck to it day and night for a couple of months, and then wrote an essay, “The Leisure-Class Historian,” which, alas, no editor could be found to publish, and which was consumed, with all the rest of my belongings except one night-shirt, in the Helicon Hall fire.

Coming back to the task at this interval, I realize that I gave Henry James too broad a title; he is “the cultured-class historian.” He knows of the existence of the uncultivated mob of idle rich, the “high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, orchid-arranging,” as he describes them; but his theme is that small section of the rich who possess aesthetic sensibilities, and withdraw in haughty aloofness from high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, and orchid-arranging, and live fastidious lives devoted to the cultivation of beauty. The word “beauty” Henry James understands in the broadest sense; it covers not merely the things you look at, but the things you do and the things you think. You recognize it by its being elegant, dignified and restrained.

To an outsider it might appear cold, but the Master admits you to the inside, and you discover that it is passionate, quivering with feeling. But it sternly checks its impulses, and seldom permits itself to do anything except to think about the problems confronting it, to analyze these problems in minute detail, to pile up subtlety and complication concerning them--literally whole mountains of complication; or perhaps (since, when you are reading or writing or discussing Henry James, you anticipate many variations of metaphor, and endless subtle shadings of metaphor, and parenthetical disquisitions interpreting and qualifying, and still further, as it were, intensifying metaphor--each separate complication, you will note, set apart from other complications by a comma) it would convey a more accurate impression of the authentic Jamesian manner, if I were to say that he builds towering structures of subtle sophistication, which structures you, with joy and excitement of the mind, see rising, unexpectedly splendid, before you, revealing new possibilities of penetration into the refinements of sensibility, as well as new possibilities of sentence structure, which convey, by infinite variation of shadings, a sense, or, as it were, almost a sensation, of the actuality of exceptional mental experience.

Such are the great rambling sentences, through which you stagger and gasp your way. You keep on, because you find that the old boy is really saying something. He is not delighting in intricacy and smartness for their own sake, as you so often feel to your annoyance with Meredith; he is not deliberately confusing you with useless obscure detail like Browning; he is really making a heroic effort to convey some complicated intricacy in the mental processes of people who not merely think, but who think about thinking, and think about thinking about thinking.

Henry James was born in New York in 1843, his father being a theological writer. His elder brother, William, became a popular professor of psychology at Harvard, thus giving rise to the jest that “William is a psychologist who writes like a novelist, and Henry is a novelist who writes like a psychologist.” Henry was taken abroad and educated in England, France and Switzerland, which had the effect of cutting his roots from under him. At the age of twenty-six he moved permanently to England, and from that time made his home there, with occasional trips to the Continent.

He was a sensitive youth, quiet and shy; he suffered from spinal trouble, and liked to sit quietly in drawing-rooms and listen to other people talk. Then he would go apart for long periods, and reflect upon what he had heard, and weave it into stories. He was grateful to his friends if they would tell him their troubles, because that provided him with copy; but he never told anyone his own troubles, and his friends lost sight of the possibility that anything might ever have happened to him personally. Edmund Gosse, who became his intimate, tells how in his old age James, walking up and down in a garden one evening, was suddenly moved to open his heart. Looking up at a light in the house, he was reminded of a scene long, long ago, when he had stood in a street one rainy night, looking up thus to a lighted window, expecting to see a face, but the face had not come. That was all of the story; but Mr. Gosse was thrilled, even appalled. Actually, once upon a time, something had happened to the Master!

It would perhaps not be indelicate of us to feel warranted in assuming that this something had to do with the relation of the sexes. We note that this relation is, like everything else in the Henry James world, fastidious, reserved, and governed by the aesthetic sensibilities. These people do not love, they talk about loving; and as years pass, and the later manner grows, their talk comes more and more to deal with the condition of having been loved.

In “Daisy Miller,” an early story which made the young author famous, we see an innocent American girl in Rome, who to her horror receives an improper advance from a young Italian. In “Madame de Mauves” we see an American lady, unhappily married to a Frenchman in Paris, tempted by passion for a true young American. But when we come to the great long novels with the great long sentences of the “third manner,” we find ourselves dealing with the fact that once upon a time, long, long ago, a man and a woman committed an impropriety, and now somebody else is slowly finding out about it, to the general horror and dismay. Thus “The Golden Bowl,” seven hundred and eighty-nine closely printed pages, dealing with the mental and emotional reactions of a woman who has an intimate woman friend, and discovers that her husband has at some past period been the lover of this friend. Or “What Maisie Knew,” in which we discover an ancient intrigue through the eyes of the little daughter of the intriguing woman. Perhaps you think you know what obscenity is, but you get a new revelation of its possibilities when you proceed through the mind of a child to pick up hints and allusions of the elders, and piece them into a pattern of fornication.

Henry James, the son of an American theological writer, acquired, like Hawthorne, an inside knowledge of Puritanism, and in his early novels he took the New England point of view toward intrigues and improprieties. Thus Daisy Miller is innocent and free, and the dark, wicked Italian misunderstands her freedom, and thinks she is what a girl with such manners would be in Europe. Madame de Mauves, a loyal wife, is married to a Frenchman of no morals, and when she loves a true and good American, she scorns to sin, for the reason that she would be imitating the Frenchman, she would be doing what the Frenchman expects her to do. “The American” is a novel about a “man from home,” who has made money, and seeks a cultured wife among the French nobility, and gradually finds that he is in a nest of murders. All regulation hundred percent patriotic stuff!

But Europe grew upon Henry James, and America faded, and the aesthetic sensibilities became less Puritanical and more cosmopolitan. So we have “The Ambassadors,” the world’s great international novel. Something over twenty years ago I went with a friend on a canoeing trip in the far Northern wilds, and for six weeks we saw only one white man, the keeper of a Hudson Bay trading post. Baggage had to be limited on such a trip, and I took only one book. Evening after evening I would read it, a few pages at a time, lying in a tent by candle light. So I had plenty of time to note every subtlety, and before I got through I was talking Henry James in my sleep. Now the twenty years are as a day, and the characters and their story are as vivid as ever in my mind.

A young New Englander, son of a wealthy family, has come to Paris and settled there, refusing to go home. His family send an elderly friend as ambassador to bring back the prodigal. This ambassador, whose name is Strether, discovers that a crude young barbarian has been changed by his Parisian life into a cultured and self-possessed man of the world. Strether is duly impressed by the change, and attributes it to the influence of a middle-aged French lady, who has been the young man’s good angel.

He writes about the situation, but the family is not satisfied, and another ambassador comes, this time the young man’s elder sister, the incarnation of the acidulous propriety of New England. This sister is not in the least impressed by the French lady, but on the contrary suspects the very worst between the lady and her brother. Strether is shocked by her crude ideas; but then comes the climax of the drama--a scene wherein it is accidentally revealed to Strether that the acidulous sister is right; a part of the process whereby the charming French lady has civilized the young barbarian has been to take him as her lover. So two civilizations meet, and in the clash between them we see the hearts of both revealed.

You note that in all these stories we are dealing with well-to-do people. No other kind of people exist in the world of Henry James. Such highly complicated and subtle aesthetic sensibilities are only possible in connection with large sums of money, freely furnished to the characters without effort on their part. It is impossible to imagine any person in the “third manner” being so vulgar as to make, or even to take money. What they do is to spend money elegantly, and when they meet persons who spend it inelegantly, they turn away in dignified disdain. There are only a few passages in which the novelist condescends to be aware of the existence of the lower orders, who by their toil produce the wealth which makes the aesthetic sensibilities possible. We get one such glimpse in “The Princess Casamassima”; the hero glances at the women and girls of the working classes, and then:

“What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?” he asked himself as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball of consuming fire.

This cultured-class hero fails to ask himself what would happen to his cultured self if the working-class vermin were to be wiped out. Manifestly, these vermin have to be allowed to go on working, in order that elegant illuminati from America and England and Italy and France may gather in the great capitals to listen to beautiful music and attend the newest art exhibitions and discuss the newest books. It is necessary that hundreds of millions of peasants should drudge on the rack-rented soil of Europe, it is necessary that mill slaves in New England and sweat-shop slaves in New York and mine slaves in Pennsylvania should wear out their bodies, in order that culture ambassadors may acquire old world subtlety and understanding; may watch the “European scene” and, by reporting it for us, enable us, at least in imagination, to escape the crudity and provinciality of our home lives.

Henry James wrote a biography of Hawthorne, who as a fellow sufferer under Puritanism he greatly admired; and in the course of that biography he drew a picture of the “American scene,” which enables us to understand why a cultured-class novelist fled from it at the age of twenty-six, and came back for only one visit in a long lifetime. Read the list of our deficiencies--and do not read it hurriedly, but stop and, as Henry James would say, “savour” each phrase, realizing the mass of content it has to the aesthetically sensitive mind:

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, no abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot!

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