Contemporary American Literature / Bibliographies and Study Outlines

by John Matthews Manly; Edith Rickert

2. One of the important Prefaces on James’s theory of the novel and his method of work is that to the Portrait of a Lady, from which the extract below is taken. In speaking of Turgenev’s attitude toward his characters, James says:

He saw them, in that fashion, as disponible, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel.

“To arrive at these things is to arrive at my ‘story,’ he said, “and that’s the way I look for it. The result is that I’m often accused of not having ‘story’ enough....”

So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew from his reference to the intensity of suggestion that may reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image en disponible. It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just that blest habit of one’s own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived or encountered individual, some brace or group of individuals, with the germinal property and authority. I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting—a too preliminary, a preferential interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse. I might envy, though I couldn’t emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make out his agents afterwards: I could think so little of any situation that didn’t depend for its interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it....

The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to “grow” with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality. That element is but another name for the more or less close connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere experience.

On one thing I was determined; that, though I should clearly have to pile brick upon brick for the creation of an interest, I would leave no pretext for saying that anything is out of line, scale or perspective. I would build large—in fine embossed vaults and painted arches, as who should say, and yet never let it appear that the chequered pavement, the ground under the reader’s feet, fails to stretch at every point to the base of the walls....

The bricks, for the whole counting-over—putting for bricks little touches and inventions and enhancements by the way—affect me in truth as well-nigh innumerable and as ever so scrupulously fitted together and packed-in. It is an effect of detail, of the minutest; though, if one were in this connexion to say all, one would express the hope that the general, the ampler part of the modest monument still survives....

So early was to begin my tendency to overtreat, rather than undertreat (when there was choice or danger) my subject. (Many members of my craft, I gather, are far from agreeing with me, but I have always held overtreating the minor disservice.) ... There was the danger of the noted “thinness”—which was to be averted, tooth and nail, by cultivation of the lively.... And then there was another matter. I had, within the few preceding years, come to live in London, and the “international” light lay, in those days, to my sense, thick and rich upon the scene. It was the light in which so much of the picture hung. But that is another matter. There is really too much to say.

3. Remember the following clues in reading James’s, work: “His one preoccupation was the criticism, for his own purpose, of the art of life.” The emphasis is on the word art. His purpose is suggested by his own claim to have “that tender appreciation of actuality which makes even the application of a single coat of rose-color seem an act of violence.”

4. There is suggestion of Mr. James’s limitations in the facts that he was tone deaf and so could not appreciate music, and that he is said not to have written a line of verse, and also in the fact that although his method of presentation in the novels is dramatic throughout and he strongly desired to write plays, the eight plays that he wrote (three of which were presented) were failures.