Instigations Part 24

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 s.h.i.+ning 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 acc.u.mulation 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 ma.n.u.script. 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 a.n.a.lyzed, 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 d.a.m.n'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 bra.s.s 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 Pa.s.sages 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 a.n.a.lysis of something detestable; of something which one wants to eliminate. Poetry is the a.s.sertion of a positive, _i.e._, of desire, and endures for a longer period. Poetic satire is only an a.s.sertion 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 a.s.serts something to be worth while, or d.a.m.ns a contrary; at any rate a.s.serts emotional values. The best prose is, has been a presentation (complicated and elaborate as you like) of circ.u.mstances, of conditions, for the most part abominable, or at the mildest, amendable. This a.s.sertion 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) a.n.a.lysis.

Neither prose nor drama can attain poetic intensity save by construction, almost by scenario; by so arranging the circ.u.mstance 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 _Nichee 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 _murs contemporaines_ was so circ.u.mstantial, 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 supposit.i.tious 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 gla.s.s paperweights.

He was a great man of letters, a great artist in portrayal; he was concerned with mental temperatures, circ.u.mvolvulous 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 a.s.surance 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 "aesthetic" 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.

II.

In contradiction to, in wholly antipodal distinction from, Henry James, de Gourmont was an artist of the nude. He was an intelligence almost more than an artist; when he portrays, he is concerned with hardly more than the permanent human elements. His people are only by accident of any particular era. He is poet, more by possessing a certain quality of mind than by virtue of having written fine poems; you could scarcely contend that he was a novelist.

He was intensely aware of the differences of emotional timbre; and as a man's message is precisely his _facon de voir_, his modality of apperception, this particular awareness was his "message."

Where James is concerned with the social tone of his subjects, with their entourage, with their _superstes_ of dogmatized "form," ethic, etc., de Gourmont is concerned with their modality and resonance in emotion.

Mauve, Fanette, Neobelle, La Vierge aux Platres, are all studies in different _permanent_ kinds of people; they are not the results of environments or of "social causes," their circ.u.mstance is an accident and is on the whole scarcely alluded to. Gourmont differentiates his characters by the modes of their sensibility, not by sub-degrees of their state of civilization.

He recognizes the right of individuals to _feel_ differently. Confucian, Epicurean, a considerer and entertainer of ideas, this complicated sensuous wisdom is almost the one ubiquitous element, the "self" which keeps his superficially heterogeneous work vaguely "unified."

The study of emotion does not follow a set chronological arc; it extends from the "Physique de l'Amour" to "Le Latin Mystique"; from the condensation of Fabre's knowledge of insects to

"Amas ut facias pulchram"

in the Sequaire of G.o.ddeschalk

(in "Le Latin Mystique").