A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

The earlier group of stories center about a comparatively few types. First, there are the young men of the Roland Mallet, Ralph Touchett order, "highly civilized young Americans," he calls them in Confidence, "born to an easy fortune and a tranquil destiny"; "men who conceive of life as a fine art." His novels are full of them, creatures of whim who know nothing of the bitterness of struggle, who drift from capital to capital of Europe mindful only of their own comfort, highly sensitive organisms withal, subject to evanescent emotions which they analyze with minuteness, and brilliant at every point when their intellectual powers are called into play. They talk in witty flashes for hours on end and deliver finished lectures at the call of an epigram. They cannot talk without philosophizing or hear a maiden laugh without analysis. They are brilliant all the time. The conversation of Gilbert Osmond and Mrs. Merle fills Isabel with amazement: "They talked extremely well; it struck her almost as a dramatic entertainment, rehearsed in advance." Page after page they talk in a staccato, breathless profusion of wit, epigram, repartee, verbal jewels worthy of Alexander Pope flying at every opening of the lips—is even French culture as brilliant as this? Mr. Brand in The Europeans listening to the Baroness Münster, bursts out rapturously at last, "Now I suppose that is what is called conversation, real conversation. It is quite the style we have heard about—the style of Madame de Staël, of Madame Récamier."

Within this narrow circle of Europe-visiting, highly civilized, occupationless men and women, James is at his best. Had he not been reared by Henry James, Senior? Had he not lived his whole life in the charmed circle of the highly civilized? But once outside of this small area he ceases to be convincing. Of the great mass of the American people he knows but little. He has seen them only at a distance.

As some rich woman, on a winter's morn,
Eyes through her silken curtains the poor drudge
Who with numb, blacken'd fingers makes her fire ...
And wonders how she lives, and what the thoughts
Of that poor drudge may be,

so of James when he attempts to portray the great mass of his countrymen. One needs to examine only the case of Christopher Newman in The American. Given a man who left home at eight years of age to work in the mills, who at length manufactures wash tubs, then leather, and at last by sheer Yankee impudence and energy makes himself a millionaire at forty. Thrust this man suddenly into the circles of French nobility, place him in the presence of the Countess de Belgrade and ask yourself if he will talk like this:

She is a woman of conventions and proprieties; her world is the world of things immutably decreed. But how she is at home in it, and what a paradise she finds it. She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden; and when she sees "This is genteel," or "This is improper," written on a mile-stone she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose.

This is not Christopher Newman; this is no American self-made man talking; it is Henry James himself. Did he realize his mistake when his art was more mature and his judgment more ripe? Collate the changes which he made thirty years later for the final edition of The American. Newman is asked, for instance, if he is visiting Europe for the first time. According to the earlier version he replies, "Very much so"; according to the latest version, "Quite immensely the first." Is more proof needed? All his average Americans—Daisy Miller, Henrietta Stackpole, Casper Goodwood, and the others, fall short in the same way. Objectively they are true to life. As a painter of external portraits, as a depicter of tricks of personality, of manners, of all that makes up a perfect external likeness, James is surpassed not even by Howells; but he fails to reach the springs of life. Howells's Silas Lapham is a living personality; James's Christopher Newman is a lay figure in Yankee costume. For James knows Americans chiefly as he has studied them in pensions and hotels along the grand tour. He has not been introduced to them, he has simply watched them—their uneasiness in their new element, their attempts at adjustment, their odd little mistakes; he hears them talk at the tables around him—their ejaculations, their wonder, their enthusiasm, and he jots it all down. He has no sympathy, he has no feeling, he has no object, save the scientific desire to record phenomena.

This material he weaves into novels—stories, but not stories told with narrative intent, not stories for entertainment or wonder or sensation. The story is a clinic, a dissection, a psychological seminar. What Maisie Knew is an addition to the literature of child study. It is as if he had set himself to observe case after case for his brother, William James, to use as materials for psychological generalizations and a final treatise. The data are often inaccurate because of the observer's personal equation; it does not always conform with the results of our own observing—we wonder, for instance, if he is as far afield in his pictures of the European aristocracy as in those of his average Americans—yet the process is always the same.

Rapidity of movement is foreign to his method; he is not concerned with movement. On the portrait of one lady he will expend two hundred thousand words. Basil in The Bostonians passes the evening with his Cousin Olive: the call occupies nine chapters; Verena Tarrant calls on Miss Chancellor: it is two chapters before either of them moves or speaks. It transports us back into the eighteenth century to the nine-volume novel. At every step analysis, searchings for the springs of thought and act—philosophizing. Lord Warburton stands before Miss Archer to propose marriage, but before we hear his voice we must analyze minutely his sensations and hers. Her first feeling was alarm. "This alarm was composed of several elements, not all of which were disagreeable; she had spent several days in analyzing them," etc. A review of this analysis fills a page. Then we study the psychology of the lover. First, he wonders why he is about to propose: "He calculated that he had spent about twenty-six hours in her company. He had summed up all this—the perversity of the impulse, the—" etc., etc. A proposal each step and speech of which is followed by a careful clinic to determine the resultant emotion, and a rigid analysis of all the elements that combined to produce that particular shade of emotion and no other, can hardly satisfy the demands of the average modern reader of fiction. It is the province of the novel to produce with verisimilitude an area of human life and to make the reader for a swift period at home in that area; it is not the record of a scientific investigation.

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."