A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

V

James has dealt almost wholly with exceptions and unusual cases. His "Bostonians" are not typical Bostonians at all—it is not too strong to declare that they are abnormalities; his "Europeans" are almost as bad; his characters studied along the grand tour are rare exceptions if we compare them with the great average American type. Of strong, elemental men and women, the personalities shown by novelists like Fielding and Tolstoy and Hardy and Mark Twain, he knows nothing. He is feminine rather than masculine; he is exquisite rather than strong. In his essay on Turgenieff he records that the great Russian was never one of his admirers. "I do not think my stories struck him as quite meat for men."

There is a lack, too, of seriousness: the novels really accomplish nothing. "The manner," according to Turgenieff's opinion, "is more apparent than the matter." Style is preferred to message. There is no humor, no stirring of emotions, nothing pitched above the key of perfect refinement—the reader does not feel and therefore does not care. It is a mere intellectual exercise, a problem in psychology.

That James himself was aware of this weakness we learn from his essay on Daudet. Of Sidonie Chebe he writes, "She is not felt," and again, "His weakness has been want of acquaintance with his subject. He has not felt what he has observed." It is a judgment that sweeps over the whole fiction of Henry James. He has never been possessed by his subject or by his characters, he has never been seized and hurried along by his stories, he has never told them because they had to be told, he has never written a single sentence with held breath and beating heart, and as a result his work can never find for long an audience save the select few; an audience indeed that at length must become as restricted as that which now reads the exquisite creations of the elder James, his father.

There is another element that must be weighed before we can understand fully the work of this writer, an element that is distinctly classical. The basis underlying all of this mass of analysis is self-consciousness. Never was author more subjective and more enamoured of his own psychological processes than Henry James. Never does he lose sight of himself. These characters of his are all of them Henry James. They slip out of their costumes at slightest provocation to talk with his tones, to voice his philosophy, to follow his mental processes. In externals they are true to model though not always deeply; the hands are the hands of Christopher Newman, but the voice is the voice of Henry James.

The tendency to self-consciousness has colored everything. Even his criticism has had its personal basis. It has consisted of studies in expatriation: the life of Story, that prototype of James; the life of Hawthorne, that exposition of the rawness of America and the unfitness of the new land for the residence of men of culture; The American Scene—that mental analysis tracing every shade of emotion as he revisits what has become to him a foreign land. His literary essays cover largely the experiences of his apprenticeship. They trace the path of his own growth in art. They are strings of brilliants, flashing, often incomparable, but they are not criticism in the highest sense of the word criticism. Few men have said such brilliant things about Balzac, Maupassant, Daudet, Stevenson as James, yet for all that a critic in the wider sense of the term really he is not. He lacks perspective, philosophy, system. He makes epigrams and pithy remarks. The ability to project himself into the standpoint of another, to view with sympathy of comprehension, he did not have. Within his limited range he could measure and the rules of art he could apply with brilliancy, but he could not feel.

Self-study, the pursuit of every fleeting impression, became in the author at last a veritable obsession. In his later books like Notes of a Son and Brother, for instance, and The American Scene, his finger is constantly upon his own pulse. He seeks the source of his every fleeting emotion. He does not tell us why he did not want to enter Harvard; he tries rather to trace the subtle thread of causation that could have led him not to want to want to go. When A Small Boy and Others appeared the world cried out, "Is it possible that at last Henry James has revealed himself?" whereas the truth was that few men ever have revealed themselves more. All this endless dissection and analysis and scrutiny of the inner workings is in reality an analysis of Henry James himself. Objective he could not be. He could only stand in his solitude and interpret his own introspections.

And his solitude it has been and his self-contemplation that have evolved his later manner. A consciously wrought-out style like Pater's or Maupassant's comes always as a result of solitude, of self-conscious concentration, of classicism. Eternal contemplation of manner can result only in mannerism more and more, until mannerism becomes the ruling characteristic. Classicism perishes at last of its own refinement.