AN APPRECIATION--1905
The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry James's
work. His books stand on my shelves in a place whose accessibility
proclaims the habit of frequent communion. But not all his books. There
is no collected edition to date, such as some of "our masters" have been
provided with; no neat rows of volumes in buckram or half calf, putting
forth a hasty claim to completeness, and conveying to my mind a hint of
finality, of a surrender to fate of that field in which all these
victories have been won. Nothing of the sort has been done for Mr. Henry
James's victories in England.
In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one would
not exhaust oneself in barren marvelling over mere bindings, had not the
fact, or rather the absence of the material fact, prominent in the case
of other men whose writing counts, (for good or evil)--had it not been, I
say, expressive of a direct truth spiritual and intellectual; an accident
of--I suppose--the publishing business acquiring a symbolic meaning from
its negative nature. Because, emphatically, in the body of Mr. Henry
James's work there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of
surrender, or even of probability of surrender, to his own victorious
achievement in that field where he is a master. Happily, he will never
be able to claim completeness; and, were he to confess to it in a moment
of self-ignorance, he would not be believed by the very minds for whom
such a confession naturally would be meant. It is impossible to think of
Mr. Henry James becoming "complete" otherwise than by the brutality of
our common fate whose finality is meaningless--in the sense of its logic
being of a material order, the logic of a falling stone.
I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen;
indeed, I heard that of late he had been dictating; but I know that his
mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of intellectual
youth. The thing--a privilege--a miracle--what you will--is not quite
hidden from the meanest of us who run as we read. To those who have the
grace to stay their feet it is manifest. After some twenty years of
attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's work, it grows into
absolute conviction which, all personal feeling apart, brings a sense of
happiness into one's artistic existence. If gratitude, as someone
defined it, is a lively sense of favours to come, it becomes very easy to
be grateful to the author of The Ambassadors--to name the latest of his
works. The favours are sure to come; the spring of that benevolence will
never run dry. The stream of inspiration flows brimful in a
predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods of drought, untroubled
in its clearness by the storms of the land of letters, without languor or
violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening new
visions at every turn of its course through that richly inhabited country
its fertility has created for our delectation, for our judgment, for our
exploring. It is, in fact, a magic spring.
With this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the
inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as applied to Mr. Henry
James's inspiration, may be dropped. In its volume and force the body of
his work may be compared rather to a majestic river. All creative art is
magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening,
familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by
the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most
insignificant tides of reality.
Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be
compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of
wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this
snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out
of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be
seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in
this world of relative values--the permanence of memory. And the
multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of the individual to
the artist is, in effect, the cry, "Take me out of myself!" meaning
really, out of my perishable activity into the light of imperishable
consciousness. But everything is relative, and the light of
consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the things of
this earth, imperishable only as against the short-lived work of our
industrious hands.
When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship
fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying
earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain,
shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of
the sun. The artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain,
may find its voice in some individual of that last group, gifted with a
power of expression and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate
experience of mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art. I do
not mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments of
humanity by an ingenious tale. It would be too much to expect--from
humanity. I doubt the heroism of the hearers. As to the heroism of the
artist, no doubt is necessary. There would be on his part no heroism.
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates (the clearest form of
demonstration) because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him,
silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group
alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a
black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the
earth. It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative
man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without
to-morrow--whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic
comment, who can guess?
For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am
inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it
may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is
delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It
will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an
army having won a barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten.
And perhaps it is right in that quality. The victories are not, perhaps,
so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point
of view. Mr. Henry James seems to hold that belief. Nobody has rendered
better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how to drape the robe
of spiritual honour about the drooping form of a victor in a barren
strife. And the honour is always well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry
James chronicles with such subtle and direct insight are, though only
personal contests, desperate in their silence, none the less heroic (in
the modern sense) for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of arms
and sound of trumpets. Those are adventures in which only choice souls
are ever involved. And Mr. Henry James records them with a fearless and
insistent fidelity to the _peripeties_ of the contest, and the feelings
of the combatants.
The fiercest excitements of a romance _de cape et d'epee_, the romance of
yard-arm and boarding pike so dear to youth, whose knowledge of action
(as of other things) is imperfect and limited, are matched, for the
quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by the difficulties
presented, to the sense of truth, of necessity--before all, of conduct--of
Mr. Henry James's men and women. His mankind is delightful. It is
delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own itself beaten; it will
sleep on the battlefield. These warlike images come by themselves under
the pen; since from the duality of man's nature and the competition of
individuals, the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a
history of a really very relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor
his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone. In virtue of these
allies and enemies, he holds his precarious dominion, he possesses his
fleeting significance; and it is this relation in all its manifestations,
great and little, superficial or profound, and this relation alone, that
is commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist
in the only possible way in which the task can be performed: by the
independent creation of circumstance and character, achieved against all
the difficulties of expression, in an imaginative effort finding its
inspiration from the reality of forms and sensations. That a sacrifice
must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in
the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by
the masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind the curtain. All
adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an
act of renunciation. It is the uttermost limit of our power; it is the
most potent and effective force at our disposal on which rest the labours
of a solitary man in his study, the rock on which have been built
commonwealths whose might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans. Like
a natural force which is obscured as much as illuminated by the
multiplicity of phenomena, the power of renunciation is obscured by the
mass of weaknesses, vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and
compromises which make up the sum of our activity. But no man or woman
worthy of the name can pretend to anything more, to anything greater. And
Mr. Henry James's men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits
his art, so clear, so sure of itself, has drawn round their activities.
He would be the last to claim for them Titanic proportions. The earth
itself has grown smaller in the course of ages. But in every sphere of
human perplexities and emotions, there are more greatnesses than one--not
counting here the greatness of the artist himself. Wherever he stands,
at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to
his passions, or his passions to his gods. That is the problem, great
enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and
knowledge.
In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr.
Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the
only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. I think that
the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable.
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more
than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of
forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based
on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting--on second-hand
impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A
historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the
preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. As is meet
for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian
of fine consciences.
Of course, this is a general statement; but I don't think its truth will
be, or can be questioned. Its fault is that it leaves so much out; and,
besides, Mr. Henry James is much too considerable to be put into the
nutshell of a phrase. The fact remains that he has made his choice, and
that his choice is justified up to the hilt by the success of his art. He
has taken for himself the greater part. The range of a fine conscience
covers more good and evil than the range of conscience which may be
called, roughly, not fine; a conscience, less troubled by the nice
discrimination of shades of conduct. A fine conscience is more concerned
with essentials; its triumphs are more perfect, if less profitable, in a
worldly sense. There is, in short, more truth in its working for a
historian to detect and to show. It is a thing of infinite complication
and suggestion. None of these escapes the art of Mr. Henry James. He
has mastered the country, his domain, not wild indeed, but full of
romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and sunny places. There are no
secrets left within his range. He has disclosed them as they should be
disclosed--that is, beautifully. And, indeed, ugliness has but little
place in this world of his creation. Yet, it is always felt in the
truthfulness of his art; it is there, it surrounds the scene, it presses
close upon it. It is made visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the
contacts of the fine consciences, in their perplexities, in the sophism
of their mistakes. For a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one.
What is natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the
intangible, ever-present, right. It is most visible in their ultimate
triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of
renunciation. Energetic, not violent: the distinction is wide, enormous,
like that between substance and shadow.
Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold of the substance, of
what is worth having, of what is worth holding. The contrary opinion has
been, if not absolutely affirmed, then at least implied, with some
frequency. To most of us, living willingly in a sort of intellectual
moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of truth, the shadows so firmly
renounced by Mr. Henry James's men and women, stand out endowed with
extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary that their rejection
offends, by its uncalled-for scrupulousness, those business-like
instincts which a careful Providence has implanted in our breasts. And,
apart from that just cause of discontent, it is obvious that a solution
by rejection must always present a certain lack of finality, especially
startling when contrasted with the usual methods of solution by rewards
and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden
death. Why the reading public which, as a body, has never laid upon a
story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this
sham of Divine Omnipotence, is utterly incomprehensible. But so it is;
and these solutions are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire
for finality, for which our hearts yearn with a longing greater than the
longing for the loaves and fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true
desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be
set at rest. One is never set at rest by Mr. Henry James's novels. His
books end as an episode in life ends. You remain with the sense of the
life still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is felt in
that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word has
been read. It is eminently satisfying, but it is not final. Mr. Henry
James, great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the
impossible.