Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes

by Henry James

I am writing a treatise when I meant only to give a glance; and it may be asked if the best thing I find in Mr. Gissing is after all then but an opportunity to denounce. The answer to that is that I find two other things—or should find them rather had I not deprived myself as usual of proper space. One of these is the pretext for speaking, by absolute rebound, as it were, and in the interest of vivid contrast, of Pierre Loti; the other is a better occasion still, an occasion for the liveliest sympathy. It is impossible not to be affected by the frankness and straightness of Mr. Gissing’s feeling for his subject, a subject almost always distinctly remunerative to the ironic and even to the dramatic mind. He has the strongest deepest sense of common humanity, of the general struggle and the general grey grim comedy. He loves the real, he renders it, and though he has a tendency to drift too much with his tide, he gives us, in the great welter of the savourless, an individual manly strain. If he only had distinction he would make the suburbs “hum.” I don’t mean of course by his circulation there—the effect Ibsen is supposed to have on them; I mean objectively and as a rounded whole, as a great theme treated.

I am ashamed of having postponed “Ramuntcho,” for “Ramuntcho” is a direct recall of the beauty of “Pêcheur d’Islande” and “Mon Frère Yves”—in other words a literary impression of the most exquisite order. Perhaps indeed it is as well that a critic should postpone—and quite indefinitely—an author as to whom he is ready to confess that his critical instinct is quite suspended. Oh the blessing of a book, the luxury of a talent, that one is only anxious not to reason about, only anxious to turn over in the mind and to taste! It is a poor business perhaps, but I have nothing more responsible to say of Loti than that I adore him. I love him when he is bad—and heaven knows he has occasionally been so—more than I love other writers when they are good. If therefore he is on the whole quite at his best in “Ramuntcho” I fear my appreciation is an undertaking too merely active for indirect expression. I can give it no more coherent form than to say that he makes the act of partaking one of the joys that, as things mainly go, a reader must be pretty well provided to be able not to jump at. And yet there are readers, apparently, who are so provided. There are readers who don’t jump and are cocksure they can do without it. My sense of the situation is that they are wrong—that with famine stalking so abroad literally no one can. I defy it not to tell somewhere—become a gap one can immediately “spot.”

It is well to content one’s self, at all events, with affection; so stiff a job, in such a case, is understanding or, still more, explanation. There is a kind of finality in Loti’s simplicity—if it even be simplicity. He performs in an air in which, on the part of the spectator, analysis withers and only submission lives. Has it anything to do with literature? Has it anything to do with nature? It must be, we should suppose, the last refinement either of one or of the other. Is it all emotion, is it all calculation, is it all truth, is it all humbug? All we can say as readers is that it is for ourselves all experience, and of the most personal intensity. The great question is whether it be emotion “neat” or emotion rendered and reduced. If it be resolved into art why hasn’t it more of the chill? If it be sensibility pure why isn’t it cruder and clumsier? What is exquisite is the contact of sensibility made somehow so convenient—with only the beauty preserved. It is not too much to say of Loti that his sensibility begins where that of most of those who use the article ends. If moreover in effect he represents the triumph of instinct, when was instinct ever so sustained and so unerring? It keeps him unfailingly, in the matter of “dialogue,” out of the overflow and the waste. It is a joy to see how his looseness is pervaded after all by proportion.

LONDON NOTES
August 1897

I shrink at this day from any air of relapsing into reference to those Victorian saturnalia of which the force may now be taken as pretty well spent; and if I remount the stream for an instant it is but with the innocent intention of plucking the one little flower of literature that, while the current roared, happened—so far at least as I could observe—to sprout by the bank. If it was sole of its kind moreover it was, I hasten to add, a mere accident of the Jubilee and as little a prominent as a preconcerted feature. What it comes to therefore is that if I gathered at the supreme moment a literary impression, the literary impression had yet nothing to do with the affair; nothing, that is, beyond the casual connection given by a somewhat acrid aftertaste, the vision of the London of the morrow as I met this experience in a woeful squeeze through town the day after the fair. It was the singular fate of M. Paul Bourget, invited to lecture at Oxford under university patronage and with Gustave Flaubert for his subject, to have found his appearance arranged for June 23. I express this untowardness but feebly, I know, for those at a distance from the edge of the whirlpool, the vast concentric eddies that sucked down all other life.

I found, on the morrow in question—the great day had been the 22nd—the main suggestion of a journey from the south of England up to Waterloo and across from Waterloo to Paddington to be that of one of those deep gasps or wild staggers, losses of wind and of balance, that follow some tremendous effort or some violent concussion. The weather was splendid and torrid and London a huge dusty cabless confusion of timber already tottering, of decorations already stale, of badauds already bored. The banquet-hall was by no means deserted, but it was choked with mere echoes and candle-ends; one had heard often enough of a “great national awakening,” and this was the greatest it would have been possible to imagine. Millions of eyes, opening to dust and glare from the scenery of dreams, seemed slowly to stare and to try to recollect. Certainly at that distance the omens were poor for such concentration as a French critic might have been moved to count upon, and even on reaching Oxford I was met by the sense that the spirit of that seat of learning, though accustomed to intellectual strain, had before the afternoon but little of a margin for pulling itself together. Let me say at once that it made the most of the scant interval and that when five o’clock came the bare scholastic room at the Taylorian offered M. Bourget’s reputation and topic, in the hot dead Oxford air, an attention as deep and as many-headed as the combination could ever have hoped to command.

For one auditor of whom I can speak, at all events, the occasion had an intensity of interest transcending even that of Flaubert’s strange personal story—which was part of M. Bourget’s theme—and of the new and deep meanings that the lecturer read into it. Just the fact of the occasion itself struck me as having well-nigh most to say, and at any rate fed most the all but bottomless sense that constitutes to-day my chief receptacle of impressions; a sense which at the same time I fear I cannot better describe than as that of the way we are markedly going. No undue eagerness to determine whether this be well or ill attaches to the particular consciousness I speak of, and I can only give it frankly for what, on the whole, it most, for beguilement, for amusement, for the sweet thrill of perception, represents and achieves—the quickened notation of our “modernity.” I feel that I can pay this last-named lively influence no greater tribute than by candidly accepting as an aid to expression its convenient name. To do that doubtless is to accept with the name a host of other things. From the moment, at any rate, the quickening I speak of sets in it is wonderful how many of these other things play, by every circumstance, into the picture.

That the day should have come for M. Bourget to lecture at Oxford, and should have come by the same stroke for Gustave Flaubert to be lectured about, filled the mind to a degree, and left it in an agitation of violence, which almost excluded the question of what in especial one of these spirits was to give and the other to gain. It was enough of an emotion, for the occasion, to live in the circumstance that the author of “Madame Bovary” could receive in England a public baptism of such peculiar solemnity. With the vision of that, one could bring in all the light and colour of all the rest of the picture and absolutely see, for the instant, something momentous in the very act of happening, something certainly that might easily become momentous with a little interpretation. Such are the happy chances of the critical spirit, always yearning to interpret, but not always in presence of the right mystery.

There was a degree of poetic justice, or at least of poetic generosity, in the introduction of Flaubert to a scene, to conditions of credit and honour, so little to have been by himself ever apprehended or estimated: it was impossible not to feel that no setting or stage for the crowning of his bust could less have appeared familiar to him, and that he wouldn’t have failed to wonder into what strangely alien air his glory had strayed. So it is that, as I say, the whole affair was a little miracle of our breathless pace, and no corner from which another member of the craft could watch it was so quiet as to attenuate the small magnificence of the hour. No novelist, in a word, worth his salt could fail of a consciousness, under the impression, of his becoming rather more of a novelist than before. Was it not, on the whole, just the essence of the matter that had for the moment there its official recognition? were not the blest mystery and art ushered forward in a more expectant and consecrating hush than had ever yet been known to wait upon them?