Henry James

by Rebecca West

This last conception of Europe is the subject of Roderick Hudson (1875). Roderick Hudson is not a good book. It throws a light upon the lack of attention given at that period to the art of writing that within a few years of each other two men of great genius—Thomas Hardy and Henry James—wrote in their thirties first novels spoilt by technical blemishes of a sort that the most giftless modern miss with a subscription to Mudie's would never commit in her first literary experiment. Roderick Hudson is wooden, it is crammed with local colour like a schoolmistress's bedroom full of photographs of Rome, it has a plain boiled suet heroine called Mary. But its idea is magnificent. An American of fortune takes Hudson, who has already shown talent as a sculptor, from his stool in a lawyer's office in Northampton, Massachusetts, and sets him up in a studio in Rome. It is the fear of old Mrs Hudson and of Mary, his fiancée, that European life will be too soft for him. But the very opposite occurs; it is he who is too soft for European life. The business of art means not only lounging under the pines of the Villa Ludovisi and chiselling the noble substance of Carrara marble; it means also the painful toil of creation, which demands from the artist an austerer renunciation of every grossness than was ever expected of any law-abiding citizen of Northampton, which sends a man naked and alone to awful moments which, if he be strong, give him spiritual strength, but if he be weak heap on him the black weakness of neurasthenia. And when that has turned him into a raw, hurt, raging creature he is further snared by the loveliness of Christina Light, who is characteristically European in that her circumstances have not the same clear beauty as her face. She is being hawked over the Continent to find a rich husband by her mother and a Cavaliere who is really her father, and this ugly girlhood has so corrupted her vigorous spirit that the young American's courtship provokes from her nothing but eccentric favours or perverse insults. After the collapse of his art and his love Roderick falls over a precipice in a too minutely described Switzerland, hurled by a dénouement which has inspired Mr James to one of his broadest jokes. In the first edition Roderick, on hearing that, while he has been vexing his benefactor with his moods, that gentleman has been manfully repressing a passion for Mary, exclaims, "It's like something in a novel!" which Mr James in the definitive edition has altered to, "It's like something in a bad novel!"

This conception of Europe as a complex organism which would have no use, or only a cruel use, for those bred by the simple organism of America, animates Four Meetings (1877), that exquisite short story which came first of all of the many masterpieces that Mr James was to produce. It is the tale of a little schoolmistress who, having long nourished a passion for Europe upon such slender intimations as photographs of the Castle of Chillon, at last collects a sum for the trip, is met at Havre by a cousin, one of those Americans on whom Continental life has acted as a solvent of all decent moral tissues, and is tricked out of her money by his story of a runaway marriage with a Countess; returns to New England hoping to "see something of this dear old Europe yet," and has that hope ironically fulfilled by the descent upon her for life of the said Countess, who is so distinctly "something of this dear old Europe" that the very sight of her transports the travelled recounter of the story to "some dusky landing before a shabby Parisian quatrième—to an open door revealing a greasy ante-chamber, and to Madame, leaning over the banisters, while she holds a faded dressing-gown together and bawls down to the portress to bring up her coffee." It is one of the saddest stories in the world, and one of the cleverest. There is not one of its simple phrases but has its beautiful bearing on the subject, and in the treatment of emotional values one sees that the essays on French Poets and Novelists (1878), which for some years he had been sending to America with the excited air of a missionary, were the notes of an attentive pupil. "Detachment" was the lesson that that period preached in its reaction against the George Sand method, whereby the author rolled through his pages locked in an embrace with his subject. We have forgotten its real significance, so frequently has it been used as an excuse for the treatment of emotional situations with encyclopædic detail of circumstance and not a grain of emotional realisation, but here we can recover it. The author's pity for the schoolmistress is never allowed to make his Countess sinister instead of gross, and his sense of the comic in the Countess is never allowed to make the schoolmistress's woe more dreary; the situation stands as solid and has as many aspects as it would have in life.

The American (1877) still holds this view of Europe. Its theme, to quote Mr James in the preface of the definitive edition, is "the situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged compatriot; the point being in especial that he should suffer at the hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible civilisation and to be of an order far superior to his own." Christopher Newman, the robust compatriot, is such a large, simple, lovable person that the rest of the story leads one to suspect that one may say of Mr James, as he said of Balzac, that "his figures, as a general thing, are better than the use he makes of them." He walks through Europe examining its culture with such an effect on the natives as an amiable buffalo traversing the Galerie d'Apollon might produce upon the copyists of the Louvre, and finally presents himself at the house where he is least welcome in the world, the home of the de Bellegardes, a proud and ancient Royalist family. Thereafter, the novel is an exposition of the way things do not happen. Claire de Cintré, the widowed daughter whom Newman desires to marry, is represented as having above all things beauty of character; but when her family snatches her from him in a frenzy of pride she allows herself to be bundled into a convent with a weakness that would convict of imbecility any woman of twenty-eight. And since her mother and brother had murdered her father by refusing him medicine at a physical crisis, and sustained themselves in the act by the reflection that after all they were only keeping up the good old family tone, one wonders where she got this beauty of character. The child of this damned house might have flamed with a strange fire, but she could not have diffused a rectory lamp-light. But the series of inconsistencies of which this is only one leads, like a jolting motor-bus that puts one down at Hampton Court, to an exquisite situation. Newman discovers the secret of the Marquis' murder and intends to publish it as a punishment for the cruel wrong the de Bellegardes have done him, but sacrifices this satisfaction simply because there can be no link—not even the link of revenge—between such as they and such as he. In all literature there is no passage so full of the very passion of moral exaltation as the description of how Newman stands before the Carmelite house in the Rue d'Enfer and looks up at the blank, discoloured wall, behind which his lost lady is immured, then walks back to Notre Dame and there, "the far-away bells chiming off into space, at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word," decides that such things as revenge "were really not his game." So it is with Mr James to the end. The foreground is as often as not red with the blood of slaughtered probabilities; a gentleman at a dinner-party tells the lady on his left (a perfect stranger who never appears again in the story) that some years ago he proposed to the lady in white sitting opposite to them; a curio dealer calls on a lady in Portland Place just to wind up the plot. But the great glow at the back, the emotional conflagration, is always right.

The Europeans (1878) marks the first time when Mr James took the international situation as a joke, and he could joke very happily in those days when his sentence was a straight young thing that could run where it liked, instead of a delicate creature swathed in relative clauses as an invalid in shawls. There is no other book by Mr James which has quite the clear, sunlit charm of this description of the visit of Eugenia, the morganatically married Baroness, and her brother Felix, the Bohemian painter, to their cousins' New England farm. There is nothing at all to their discredit in the past of these two graceful young people, but they resemble Harlequin and Columbine in the instability of their existence and the sharp line they draw between their privacy and their publicity. It appears to them natural that the private life should be spent largely in wondering how the last public appearance went off and planning effects for the next, a point of view which arouses the worst suspicions in their cousins, who are accustomed to live as though the sky were indeed a broad open eye. So Felix has the greatest difficulty in persuading his uncle, who takes thirty-two bites to a moral decision, just as Mr Gladstone took thirty-two bites to a mouthful, that he is a suitable husband for his cousin Gertrude; and poor Eugenia fails altogether in an environment where a lie from her lips is not treated as un petit péché d'une petite femme, but remains simply a lie. The frame of mind this state of affairs produces in the poor lady is exquisitely described in a passage which shows her going wistfully through the house of the man who did not propose to her because he detected her lie, after a visit to his dying mother.

"Mrs Acton had told Eugenia that her waiting-woman would be in the hall to show her downstairs; but the large landing outside her door was empty, and Eugenia stood there looking about.... She passed slowly downstairs, still looking about. The broad staircase made a great bend, and in the angle was a high window, looking westward, with a deep bench, covered with a row of flowering plants in curious old pots of blue China-ware. The yellow afternoon light came in through the flowers and flickered a little on the white wainscots. Eugenia paused a moment; the house was perfectly still, save for the ticking, somewhere, of a great clock. The lower hall stretched away at the foot of the stairs, half covered over with a large Oriental rug. Eugenia lingered a little, noticing a great many things. 'Comme c'est bien!' she said to herself; such a large, solid, irreproachable basis of existence the place seemed to her to indicate. And then she reflected that Mrs Acton was soon to withdraw from it. The reflection accompanied her the rest of the way downstairs, where she paused again, making more observations. The hall was extremely broad, and on either side of the front door was a wide, deeply-set window, which threw the shadows of everything back into the house. There were high-backed chairs along the wall and big Eastern vases upon tables, and, on either side, a large cabinet with a glass front and little curiosities within, dimly gleaming. The doors were open—into the darkened parlour, the library, the dining-room. All these rooms seemed empty. Eugenia passed along and stopped a moment on the threshold of each. 'Comme c'est bien!' she murmured again; she had thought of just such a house as this when she decided to come to America. She opened the front door for herself—her light tread had summoned none of the servants—and on the threshold she gave a last look...."

That is the pure note of the early James, like a pipe played carefully by a boy. It sounds as beautifully in Daisy Miller, that short novel which, though it deals with conditions peculiar to a small section of continental life forty years ago, will strike each new generation afresh as sad and lovely. Daisy, who is like one of those girls who smile upon us from the covers of American magazines, glaringly beautiful and healthy but without the "tone" given by diligent study of the grace of conduct, comes to Europe and plays in its sunshine like a happy child. She wants to go to the Castle of Chillon, so she accepts the escort for the afternoon of a young American who is staying at the same hotel; she likes to walk in the Pincian, so she takes a stroll there one afternoon with a certain liquid-eyed Roman. The woman who does a thing for the sake of the thing in itself is always suspected by society, and the American colony, which professes the mellow conventions of Europe with all its own national crudity, accuses her of vulgarity and even lightness. They talk so bitterly that when the young American, who is half in love with Daisy, finds her viewing the Colosseum by moonlight with the Roman, he leaps to the conclusion that she is a disreputable woman. Why he does so is not quite clear, since surely it is the essential thing about a disreputable woman that her evenings are not free for visits to the Colosseum. Poor Daisy takes in part of his meaning and, saying in a little strange voice, "I don't care whether I get Roman fever or not!" goes back to her hotel and dies of malaria. And the young American, "staring at the raw protuberance among the April daisies" in the Protestant cemetery, learns from the Roman's lips that Daisy was "most innocent."

It is a lyric whose beauty may be measured by the attention which, in spite of its tragedy, it everywhere provoked. It was interesting to note how often in the obituary notices of Mr James it was said that he had never attained popularity, for it shows how soon London forgets its gifts of fame. From 1875 to 1885 (to put it roughly) all England and America were as captivated by the clear beauty of Mr James' work as in the nineties they were hypnotised by the bright-coloured beauty of Mr Kipling's art. On London staircases everyone turned to look at the American with the long, silky, black beard which, I am told by one who met him then, gave him the appearance of "an Elizabethan sea captain." But for all the exquisiteness of Daisy Miller there were discernible in it certain black lines which, like the dark veining in a crocus that foretells its decay, showed that this was a loveliness which was in the very act of passing. The young American might have been so worked upon by his friends that he could readily believe his Daisy a light woman, but he need not have manifested his acceptance of this belief by being grossly rude to her and by reflecting that if "after Daisy's return there had been an exchange of jokes between the porter and the cab-driver ... it had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him that the little American flirt should be 'talked about' by low-minded menials." When one remembers the grave courtesy with which Christopher Newman treated Mlle Noémie Nioche, the little French drab who called herself un esprit libre, it is plain that we are no longer dealing with the same Mr James. The Mr James we are to deal with henceforth had ceased to be an American and had lost his native reactions to emotional stimuli. He was becoming a European and for several years to come was to spend his time slowly mastering its conventions; which means that he was learning a new emotional language.

The first works he produced when he was at once a finished writer and only the cocoon of a European, present the paradoxical appearance of being perfect in phrase and incredibly naive in their estimates of persons and situations. The Pension Beaurepas (1879), that melancholy tale of the ailing old American whose wife and daughter have dragged him off on an expensive trip to Europe, while ruin falls on his untended business in New York, has its tone of pathos spoiled by extraordinarily cold-blooded and, to women of to-day, extremely unsavoury discussions of how a girl ought to behave if she wants to be married. The Siege of London (1883), which is the story of a Texan adventuress of many divorces who marries into an English county family, fails to produce the designed effect of outrage, because the adventuress is the only person who shows any signs of human worth, and the life which she is supposed to have violated by her marriage is suggested simply by statements that the people concerned had titles and lived in large houses. In Pandora (1884), which describes a German diplomat's amazement that an unmarried girl can be a social success in America, we feel as bored as we would if we were forced to listen to the exclamations of a dog-fancier on finding that a Pekingese with regular features had got a prize at a dog show. In Lady Barbarina (1884), which tells how a peer's daughter who marries an American millionaire refuses to live in America, the American picture is painted with the flatness of a flagging interest, and we suspect Mr James of taking English architecture as an index of English character; he had still to grasp the paradox that the people who live in the solidities of Grosvenor Square are the best colonising and seafaring stock in the world. In The Reverberator (1888), wherein an American girl guilelessly prattles to a newspaper correspondent about the affairs of her French fiancé's family and is cast out by them when he publishes her prattlings in the States, we seem to see the international situation slowly fading from Mr James' immediate consciousness. In turning over its pages we see the author sitting down before a pile of white paper and finely inscribing it with memories of past contacts with Americans; we do not see him entering his study with traces still on his lips of a smile provoked in the street outside by the loveliness and innocent barbarism of his compatriots. In those days he had lost America and had not yet found Europe, but he was to find it very soon. In A London Life (1889), the tale of an innocent American girl who comes over to live with her sister and her aristocratic English husband, and stands appalled at their debts, their debaucheries, their infidelities, he has rendered beautifully the feeling caused by ill lives when led in old homes of elmy parks and honourable histories. It is a sense of disgust such as comes to the early-rising guest who goes into a drawing-room in the morning and finds last night's coffee-cups and decanters and cigarette ends looking dreadful in the sunlight. The house is being badly managed; it will go to rack and ruin. That is an aspect of England; but the American onlooker is just a clean-minded little thing that might have bloomed anywhere, and all references to her Americanness are dragged in with an effort. It is plain that he had lost all his love for the international situation.

That Mr James continued to write about Americans in Europe long after their common motive and their individual adventures had ceased to excite his wonder or his sympathy, was the manifestation of a certain delusion about his art which was ultimately to do him a mischief. He believed that if one knew a subject one could write about it; and since there was no aspect of the international situation with which he was not familiar, he could not see why the description of these aspects should not easily make art. The profound truth that an artist should feel passion for his subject was naturally distasteful to one who wanted to live wholly without violence even of the emotions; a preference for passionless detachment was at that date the mode in French literature, which was the only literature that he studied with any attention. The de Goncourts, Zola, and even de Maupassant thought that an artist ought to be able to lift any subject into art by his treatment, just as an advertising agent ought to be able to "float" any article into popularity by his posters. But human experience, which includes a realisation of the deadness of most of the de Goncourts' and Zola's productions, proves the contrary. Unless a subject is congenial to the character of the artist the subconscious self will not wake up and reward the busy conscious mind by distributions of its hoarded riches in the form of the right word, the magic phrase, the clarifying incident. Why are books about ideas so commonly bad, since the genius of M. Anatole France and Mr Wells have proved that they need not be so, if it be not that the majority of people reserve passion for their personal relationships and therefore never "feel" an idea with the sensitive finger-tips of affection?

The absence of this necessary attitude to his subject explains in part the tenuity of Mr James' later novels on the international situation; but there is also another element that irritates present-day readers and makes the texture of the life represented seem poor. That element, which is not peculiar to Mr James, but is a part of the social atmosphere of his time, is the persistent presentation of woman not as a human, but as a sexual being. One can learn nothing of the heroine's beliefs and character for the hullabaloo that has been set up because she has come in too late or gone out too early or omitted to provide herself with that figure of questionable use—for the dove-like manners of the young men forbid the thought that she was there to protect the girl from assault, and the mild tongues of the young ladies make it unlikely that the duel of the sexes was then so bitter that they required an umpire—the chaperon. It appears that the young woman of that period could get through the world only by perpetually jumping through hoops held up to her by society, a method of progression which was more suited to circus girls than to persons of dignity, and which sometimes caused nasty falls. There is nothing more humiliating to women in all fiction than the end of A London Life, where the heroine, appalled at having been left in an opera box alone with a young man, turns to him and begs him, although she knows well that he does not love her, to marry her and save her good name. Purity and innocence are excellent things, but a world in which they have to be guarded by such cramping contrivances of conduct is as ridiculous as a heaven where the saints all go about with their haloes protected by mackintosh covers.