Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes

by Henry James

LONDON NOTES
January 1897

I am afraid the interest of the world of native letters is not at this moment so great as to make us despise mere translation as an aid to curiosity. There is indeed no reason why we should forbear to say in advance what we are certain, every time, to say after (after the heat has cooled I mean:) namely, that nothing is easier to concede than that Ibsen—contentious name!—would be much less remarked if he were one of a dozen. It is impossible, in London at least, to shut one’s eyes to the fact that if to so many ingenious minds he is a kind of pictorial monster, a grotesque on the sign of a side-show, this is at least partly because his form has a monstrous rarity. It is one of the odd things of our actual esthetics that the more theatres multiply the less any one reads a play—the less any one cares, in a word, for the text of the adventure. That no one ever does read a play has long been a commonplace of the wisdom of booksellers. Ibsen, however, is a text, and Ibsen is read, and Ibsen contradicts the custom and confounds the prejudice; with the effect thereby, in an odd way, of being doubly an exotic. His violent substance imposes, as it were, his insidious form; it is not (as would have seemed more likely) the form that imposes the substance. Mr. William Archer has just published his version of “John Gabriel Borkman,” of which, moreover, French and German versions reach us at the same moment. There are therefore all the elements of a fresh breeze in the wind—one has already a sense as of a cracking of whips and a girding of loins. You may by this time be terribly tired of it all in America; but, as I mentioned a fortnight ago, we have had very recent evidence that languor here, in this connection, is by no means as yet the dominant note. It is not the dispute itself, however, that most interests me: let me pay it, for what it has been and what it still may be, the mere superficial tribute of saying that it constitutes one of the very few cases of contagious discussion of a matter not political, a question not of mere practice, of which I remember to have felt, in a heavy air, the engaging titillation. In London generally, I think, the wandering breath of criticism is the stray guest at the big party—the shy young man whom nobody knows. In this remarkable instance the shy young man has ventured to pause and hover, has lighted on a topic, introduced himself and, after a gasp of consternation in the company, seen a little circle gather round him. I can only speak as one of the little circle, testifying to my individual glee.

The author who at the age of seventy, a provincial of provincials, turns out “John Gabriel” is frankly for me so much one of the peculiar pleasures of the day, one of the current strong sensations, that, erect as he seems still to stand, I deplore his extreme maturity and, thinking of what shall happen, look round in vain for any other possible source of the same kind of emotion. For Ibsen strikes me as an extraordinary curiosity, and every time he sounds his note the miracle to my perception is renewed. I call it a miracle because it is a result of so dry a view of life, so indifferent a vision of the comedy of things. His idea of the thing represented is never the comic idea, though this is evidently what it often only can be for many of his English readers and spectators. Comedy moreover is a product mainly of observation, and I scarcely know what to say of his figures except that they haven’t the signs. The answer to that is doubtless partly that they haven’t the English, but have the Norwegian. In such a case one of the Norwegian must be in truth this very lack of signs.

They have no tone but their moral tone. They are highly animated abstractions, with the extraordinary, the brilliant property of becoming when represented at once more abstract and more living. If the spirit is a lamp within us, glowing through what the world and the flesh make of us as through a ground-glass shade, then such pictures as Little Eyolf and John Gabriel are each a chassez-croisez of lamps burning, as in tasteless parlours, with the flame practically exposed. There are no shades in the house, or the Norwegian ground-glass is singularly clear. There is a positive odour of spiritual paraffin. The author nevertheless arrives at the dramatist’s great goal—he arrives for all his meagreness at intensity. The meagreness, which is after all but an unconscious, an admirable economy, never interferes with that: it plays straight into the hands of his rare mastery of form. The contrast between this form—so difficult to have reached, so “evolved,” so civilised—and the bareness and bleakness of his little northern democracy is the source of half the hard frugal charm that he puts forth. In the cold fixed light of it the notes we speak of as deficiencies take a sharp value in the picture. There is no small-talk, there are scarcely any manners. On the other hand there is so little vulgarity that this of itself has almost the effect of a deeper, a more lonely provincialism. The background at any rate is the sunset over the ice. Well in the very front of the scene lunges with extraordinary length of arm the Ego against the Ego, and rocks in a rigour of passion the soul against the soul—a spectacle, a movement, as definite as the relief of silhouettes in black paper or of a train of Eskimo dogs on the snow. Down from that desolation the sturdy old symbolist comes this time with a supreme example of his method. It is a high wonder and pleasure to welcome such splendid fruit from sap that might by now have shown something of the chill of age. Never has he juggled more gallantly with difficulty and danger than in this really prodigious “John Gabriel,” in which a great span of tragedy is taken between three or four persons—a trio of the grim and grizzled—in the two or three hours of a winter’s evening; in which the whole thing throbs with an actability that fairly shakes us as we read; and in which, as the very flower of his artistic triumph, he has given us for the most beautiful and touching of his heroines a sad old maid of sixty. Such “parts,” even from the vulgarest point of view, are Borkman and Ella Rentheim.

LONDON NOTES
June 1897

I am afraid there are at this moment only two notes for a communication from London to strike. One is that of the plunge into the deep and turbid waters of the Jubilee; the other is that of the inevitable retreat from them—the backward scramble up the bank and scurry over its crest and out of sight. London is in a sorry state; nevertheless I judge that the number of persons about to arrive undaunted will not fall substantially short of the number of horror-stricken fugitives. Not to depart is practically to arrive; for there is little difference in the two kinds of violence, the shock you await or the shock that awaits you. Let me hasten, however, to declare that—to speak for the present only of the former of these—the prospect is full of suggestion, the affair promises a rare sort of interest. It began a fortnight since to be clear—and the certitude grows each day—that we are to be treated to a revelation really precious, the domestic or familiar vision, as it were, the back-stairs or underside view, of a situation that will rank as celebrated. Balzac’s image of l’envers de l’histoire contemporaine is in fact already under our nose, already offered us in a big bouncing unmistakable case. We brush with an irreverent hand the back of the tapestry—we crawl on unabashed knees under the tent of the circus. The commemoration of the completed sixtieth year of her Majesty’s reign will figure to the end of time in the roll of English wonders and can scarcely fail to hold its own as an occasion unparalleled. And yet we touch it as we come and go—we feel it mainly as a great incommodity. It has already so intimate, so ugly, so measurable a side that these impressions begin to fall into their place with a kind of representative force, to figure as a symbol of the general truth that the principal pomps and circumstances of the historic page have had their most intense existence as material and social arrangements, disagreeable or amusing accidents, affecting the few momentary mortals at that time in the neighbourhood. The gross defacement of London, the uproarious traffic in seats, the miles of unsightly scaffolding between the West End and the City, the screaming advertisements, the sordid struggle, the individual questions—“Haven’t we been cheated by the plausible wretch?” or “How the devil shall we get to our seats after paying such a lot, hey?”—these things are actually the historic page. If we are writing that page every hour let us at any rate commend ourselves for having begun betimes, even though this early diligence be attended with extraordinary effects. The great day was a week ago still a month off, but what we even then had full in view, was, for the coming stretch of time, a London reduced to such disfigurement as might much better seem to consort with some great national penance or mourning. The show, when the show comes off, is to last but a couple of hours; and nothing so odd surely ever occurred in such a connection as so huge a disproportion between the discipline and the joy. If this be honour, the simple may well say, give us, merciful powers, the rigour of indifference! From Hyde Park Corner to the heart of the City and over the water to the solid south the long line of thoroughfares is masked by a forest of timber and smothered in swaggering posters and catchpenny bids, with all of which and with the vociferous air that enfolds them we are to spend these next weeks in such comfort as we may. The splendour will have of course to be great to wash down the vulgarity—and infinitely dazzling no doubt it will be; yet even if it falls short I shall still feel that, let the quantity of shock, as I have ventured to call it, be what it must, it will on the whole be exceeded by what I have ventured to call the quantity of suggestion. This, to be frank, has even now rolled up at such a rate that to deal with it I should scarce know where to take it first. Let me not therefore pretend to deal, but only glance and pass.

The foremost, the immense impression is of course the constant, the permanent, the ever-supreme—the impression of that greatest glory of our race, its passionate feeling for trade. I doubt if the commercial instinct be not, as London now feels it throb and glow, quite as striking as any conceivable projection of it that even our American pressure of the pump might, at the highest, produce. That is the real tent of the circus—that is the real back of the tapestry. There have long, I know, been persons ready to prove by book that the explanation of the “historical event” has always been somebody’s desire to make money; never, at all events, from the near view, will that explanation have covered so much of the ground. No result of the fact that the Queen has reigned sixty years—no sort of sentimental or other association with it—begins to have the air of coming home to the London conscience like this happy consequence of the chance in it to sell something dear. As yet that chance is the one sound that fills the air, and will probably be the only note audibly struck till the plaudits of the day itself begin to substitute, none too soon, a more mellifluous one. When the people are all at the windows and in the trees and on the water-spouts, house-tops, scaffolds and other ledges and coigns of vantage set as traps for them by the motive power, then doubtless there will be another aspect to reckon with—then we shall see, of the grand occasion, nothing but what is decently and presentably historic. All I mean is that, pending the apotheosis, London has found in this particular chapter of the career of its aged sovereign only an enormous selfish advertisement. It came to me the other day in a quoted epigram that the advertisement shows as far off as across the Channel and all the way to Paris, where one of the reflections it has suggested—as it must inevitably suggest many—appears to be that, in contrast, when, a year ago, the Russian sovereigns were about to arrive no good Parisian thought for a moment of anything but how he could most work for the adornment of his town. I dare say that in fact from a good Parisian or two a window or a tree was to be hired; but the echo is at least interesting as an echo, not less than as a reminder of how we still wait here for the outbreak of the kind of enthusiasm that shall take the decorative form. The graceful tip of its nose has, it must be admitted, yet to show. But there are other sides still, and one of them immense—the light we may take as flooding, I mean, the whole question of the solidity of the throne. It is impossible to live long in England without feeling that the monarchy is—below-ground, so to speak, in particular—a rock; but it was reserved for these days to accentuate the immobility of even that portion of the rock which protrudes above the surface. It is being tested in a manner by fire, and it resists with a vitality nothing short of prophetic. The commercial instinct, as I say, perches upon it with a security and a success that banish a rival from the field. It is the biggest of all draws for the biggest of all circuses; it will bring more money to more doors than anything that can be imagined in its place. It will march through the ages unshaken. The coronation of a new sovereign is an event, at the worst, well within the compass of the mind, and what will that bring with it so much as a fresh lively market and miles of new posters and new carpentry? Then, who knows?—coronations will, for a stretch and a change perhaps, be more frequent than anniversaries; and the bargains struck over the last will, again at the worst, carry an hilarious country well on to the next. Has not the monarchy moreover—besides thus periodically making trade roar—the lively merit, for such an observer as I fancy considering these things, of helping more than anything else the answers to the questions into which our actual curiosity most overflows; the question for instance of whether in the case before us the triumph of vulgarity be not precisely the flushed but muscular triumph of the inevitable? If vulgarity thrones now on the house-tops, “blown” and red in the face, is it not because it has been pushed aloft by deep forces and is really after all itself the show? The picturesque at any rate has to meet the conditions. We miss, we regret the old “style” of history; but the style would, I think, be there if we let it: the age has a manner of its own that disconcerts, that swamps it. The age is the loudest thing of all. What has altered is simply the conditions. Poor history has to meet them, these conditions; she must accommodate herself. She must accept vulgarity or perish. Some day doubtless she will perish, but for a little while longer she remembers and struggles. She becomes indeed, as we look up Piccadilly in the light of this image, perhaps rather more dramatic than ever—at any rate more pathetic, more noble in her choked humiliation. Then even as we pity her we try perhaps to bring her round, to make her understand a little better. We try to explain that if we are dreadful to deal with it is only, really, a good deal because we so detestably grow and grow. There is so horribly much of us—that’s where our style breaks down. Small crowds and paltry bargains didn’t matter, and a little vulgarity—just a very little—could in other times manage to pass. Our shame, alas, is our quantity.

I have no sooner, none the less, qualified it so ungraciously than I ask myself what after all we should do without it. If we have opened the floodgates we have at least opened them wide, and it is our very quantity that perhaps in the last resort will save us. It cuts both ways, as the phrase is—it covers all the ground; it helps the escape as well as produces the assault. If retreat for instance at the present juncture is, as I began by hinting, urgently imposed, it is thanks to our having so much of everything that we find a bridge for our feet. We hope to get off in time, but meanwhile even on the spot there are blessed alternatives and reliefs. I have been trying a number very hard, but I have expatiated so on the complaint that I have left little room for the remedy. London reminds one of nothing so often as of the help she gives one to forget her. One of the forms actually taken by this happy habit is the ingenious little exhibition, at the Grafton Galleries, of so-called Dramatic and Musical Art. The name is rather a grand one and the show has many gaps; but it profits, as such places in London so often profit, by the law that makes you mostly care less what you get into than what you get out of. With its Hogarths and Zoffanys—none too many, I admit—its other last-century portraits and relics, its numerous ghosts of Garrick, its old play-bills and prints, its echoes of dead plaudits and its very thin attendance, it happens to be for the moment a quiet bower in the bear-garden. It is a “scratch” company, but only—and I can scarce say why—in the portion in which the portraits of the day prevail is the impression vulgar. Even there indeed this suspicion receives a grand lift from Mr. Whistler’s exquisite image of Henry Irving as the Philip of Tennyson’s “Queen Mary.” To pause before such a work is in fact to be held to the spot by just the highest operation of the charm one has sought there—the charm of a certain degree of melancholy meditation. Meditation indeed forgets Garrick and Hogarth and all the handsome heads of the Kembles in wonder reintensified at the attitude of a stupid generation toward an art and a taste so rare. Wonder is perhaps after all not the word to use, for how should a stupid generation, liking so much that it does like and with a faculty trained to coarser motions, recognise in Mr. Whistler’s work one of the finest of all distillations of the artistic intelligence? To turn from his picture to the rest of the show—which, of course, I admit, is not a collection of masterpieces—is to drop from the world of distinction, of perception, of beauty and mystery and perpetuity, into—well, a very ordinary place. And yet the effect of Whistler at his best is exactly to give to the place he hangs in—or perhaps I should say to the person he hangs for—something of the sense, of the illusion, of a great museum. He isolates himself in a manner all his own; his presence is in itself a sort of implication of a choice corner. Have we in this a faint foresight of the eventual turn of the wheel—of one of the nooks of honour, those innermost rooms of great collections, in which our posterity shall find him? Look at him at any rate on any occasion, but above all at his best, only long enough, and hallucination sets in. We are in the presence of one of the prizes marked with two stars in the guidebook; the polished floor is beneath us and the rococo roof above; the great names are ranged about, and the eye is aware of the near window, in its deep recess, that overhangs old gardens or a celebrated square.