III
TRANSITION
WASHINGTON SQUARE (1881), Mr James' first important work that does not deal with the international situation, is a work of great genius. Into the small mould of the story of how a plain and stupid girl was jilted by a fortune-hunter when he discovered that she would be disinherited by her contemptuous father on her marriage, Mr James concentrated all the sense which he had absorbed throughout his childhood of the simple, provincial life which went on behind the brown stone of old New York. It has in it a wealth of feeling that does not seem to have originated with Mr James, just as an old wives' tale told over and over again by the fireside becomes charged with a synthetic emotion derived from the comments and expressions of innumerable auditors; and one may surmise that Catherine's tragedy was first presented to him as an item of local gossip, sympathetically discussed by his charming New York cousins and friends. Certainly the tale of this dull girl, who was "twenty years old before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe," and progressed by such clumsinesses through a career of which the only remarkable facts were that "Morris Townsend had trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring," is consecrated by an element of pity which was afterwards signally to disappear from Mr James' work.
The book so beautifully expresses the woe of all those people to whom nothing ever happens, who are aware of the gay challenge of life but are prevented by something leaden in their substance from responding, that one is not surprised to find that like most good stories about inarticulate people—like Une Vie and Un Cœur Simple—it is written with the most deliberate cunning. The story is evoked according to Turgeniev's method of calling his novels out of the inchoate real world; and what that is had better, since Mr James had been using it with increasing power since Roderick Hudson, be stated in his own words.
"I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgeniev in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles, 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. I seem to myself to have as much as I need—to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them placed, I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them—of which I dare say, alas, que cela manque souvent d'architecture....'"
And as regards the statement in prose of the conception thus formed it is plain that, although Mr James had formed his irrational dislike of Flaubert many years before, it was that great master who had taught him his art of rubbing down the too brilliant phrase to tone with the quiet harmony of the whole, of obliterating the exotic effect that would compromise the lorn simplicity of the subject. This masterly use of technical resource to unfold an idea whose beauty would to a lesser artist have seemed hopelessly sheathed in obscurity, makes Washington Square the perfect termination to Mr James' first period of genius.
It was unfortunately quite definitely a termination; for until ten years had passed Mr James was doomed to produce no work which was not to have the solidity of its characters and the beauty of its prose rendered slightly ridiculous by its lack of purpose and unity. In those days, when the international theme was slipping from Mr James' grasp and he was looking round for another, one could no more expect him to produce work completely and serenely formed by the imagination than one could ask an author to continue his industry on a journey from Paris to Madrid, with the jolting of the train destroying his physical calm and the new land crying for his attention at the carriage window. For Mr James was literally travelling all through the eighties; he was touring either the countries of Europe with his body or the art of Europe with his mind. It was his intention to find that intellectual basis without which, his blood and upbringing assured him, he would be unable to use his genius with noble or permanent results.
How difficult this search was to be, and yet how ultimately fruitful, can be judged from A Little Tour in France (1884). That is one of the happiest and sunniest travel books in all literature. Cœlum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt; but Mr James did, and it is as pleasant to see his intelligence sunning itself on the hot Latin soil, fresh and cool as though he had not years of the creative struggle behind him and years more to come, as it is to see a lizard crawl from the crevice of a Provençal rock and play among the tufts of rosemary. Yet whenever Mr James has to note some detail in his description of French towns which refers to the life which has formed them, the reader's fury mounts. It is horrible that his references to the Franco-Prussian War should be faintly jocular, and one burns with shame for them until one comes to an amazing sentence about the French Revolution, in which it is plainly implied that the rightness and necessity of that declaration of the principle of freedom are still debatable questions. One perceives with relief that he said these things because, as one guessed in The Passionate Pilgrim, his strong sight of the thing that is was accompanied by blindness to the thing that has been. He did not know whether the Franco-Prussian War was horrible or not, because he had been out of Europe when it raged; and because he had not been born at the time he could no more speak well of the French Revolution than he could propose for his club a person whom he had never met. And for the same reason he failed to envisage the Roman Empire save as a source of agreeable ruins which, since he did not understand the spirit that built them, he imagined might have been made still more agreeable. Their vastness did not impress him as the merging-point of the geological record and history, but stirred in him that benevolence which is often aroused by clumsy largeness. He patted the Roman Theatre at Arles as though it were Jumbo at the Zoo, and remarked, quite in the manner of Horace Walpole, that the pavement of coloured marble "gives an idea of the elegance of the interior"; but the arena at Nîmes and that vast, high, yellow aqueduct, whose three tiers appal the valley of the Gardon, were too much for him, and he pronounced them "not at all exquisite." The man who could write those phrases was incapable of forming a philosophy, for no man can fully understand his kind unless he have a revelation of old Rome and perceive in its works a record of the pride men felt in serviceable labour for the State. And yet what, in this particular case, did all that matter? What need was there for Mr James to know anything but that ink makes black, expressive marks on paper, when he could tell so exquisitely how the Château de Chenonceaux sends out its white galleries across the clear water of the Cher, how the crenellated ramparts of the Château d'Amboise look down over hanging gardens to the far-shining Loire, and with what peculiar wonder Carcassonne, Aigues-Mortes and all the other towns with lovely names, glow in the clear bright light of France? It was enough that there was no beauty on earth that could daunt his power of description.
The record of his mental wanderings is not quite so happy. Mr James has an immense prestige as critic, but a certain sentence that occurred more than once in his obituary notices made it doubtful whether this does not merely mean that people have run their eyes over the titles of Mr James' essays and have accepted the fact that he dealt with authors rarely read by the British as a guarantee of their rareness of merit. That it should be reverently remarked on that most solemn occasion that Flaubert was Mr James' adored master, when he had written more than one exquisitely feline essay to delicately convey what a fluke it was that this fellow who panted under his phrase like a bricklayer under his hod should have produced Madame Bovary, is just such an ironic happening as he would have liked to be introduced into one of his humorous studies of the literary life. Such intimations make one guess that the homage which England loves to pay to the unread is responsible for half Mr James' reputation as a critic; and probably he owed the other half to the gratitude of his readers for a pleasure which is undoubtedly given by his critical writings, but which nevertheless does not prove them great criticism. It is true that French Poets and Novelists are the best reviews ever written, and that it is good to listen to the old author gossiping in Notes on Novelists (1914) about the authors he had known long ago and to watch him tracing, with all his supreme genius for detecting personality, the imprint of dead masters on the fading surface of old work. But he is always entirely lacking in that necessary element of great criticism, the capacity for universal reference. The eye that judges a work of art should have surveyed the whole human field, so that it can tell from what clay this precious thing was made, in what craftsman's cot that trick of fashioning was learned, what natural beauty suggested to the creative impulse this appropriate form, what human institution helped or hindered its making. Of that general culture Mr James was so deficient that he was capable of inserting in quite an intelligent essay on Théophile Gautier this amazing sentence: "Even his æsthetic principles are held with a good-humoured laxity that allows him, for instance, to say in a hundred places the most delightfully sympathetic and pictorial things about the romantic or Shakespearean drama, and yet to describe a pedantically classical revival of the Antigone at Münich with the most ungrudging relish." And while this ignorance was perpetually blinding him to the purpose of many fair artistic structures his literary power was perpetually betraying him into the graceful and forceful publication of his blindness. Long after one has forgotten all the deliverances of critics with greater wisdom but less craft of phrase, one remembers his extraordinary opinion that Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine, that book which will appeal in every generation to those who have been visited by the angel of speculative thought, which is not only itself a beautiful growth but has borne beautiful fruit in Thaïs, is merely "strange" and has no more reference to life than the gimcrack Eastern Pavilion at an Exposition. And he lacked, moreover, that necessary attribute of the good critic, the power to bid bad authors to go to the devil. There are certain Victorian works of art which, however much esteemed by the many, are no more matter for criticism than a pair of elastic-sided boots; yet there is a paper in Essays in London (1893) in which Mr James talks of "the numbers of sorts of distinction, the educated insight, the comprehensive ardour of Mrs Humphry Ward...." It recalls that the art which he privately cultivated was courtesy, but it suggests that his criticism was bound to consist for the most part of just such pleasant footnotes to the obvious as Partial Portraits (1888) which, with the exception of some interesting personal recollections of Turgeniev, tell us nothing more startling than that de Maupassant wrote a hard prose and that Daudet was a Provençal.
How greatly he needed the intellectual basis which he found in none of these researches becomes increasingly plain in each novel that he published during this period. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is given a superficial unity by the beauty of its heroine; on the first reading one cannot take one's eyes off the clear gaze that Isabel Archer levels at life. As she moves forward to meet the world, holding her fortune in hand without avarice yet very carefully, lest she should buy anything gross with it, one thinks that there never was a heroine who deserved better of life. "She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, and bravery, and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action; she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong." One is glad to see that the girl has the most wonderful friend, a woman who is at once the most flexible femme du monde and the freshest and most candid soul; and among the kindnesses this friend does her is her introduction to a certain Tuscan villa that looks down on the valley of the Arno, where on a mossy stone bench tangled with wild roses there sits Gilbert Osmond, a gentleman of great dignity who has been too fine to partake in the common struggle and so lives in honest poverty, with his daughter Pansy, a little girl from whose character conventual training has removed every attribute save whiteness and sweetness, so that she lies under life like a fine cloth on a sunny bleaching-green. Here, of all places in the world, she is least likely to meet the jealousy and falseness and cruelty which were the only things she feared, and so she marries Osmond in the happy faith that henceforth nothing will be admitted to her life save nobility. But all her marriage brings the girl is evidence of increasing painfulness that her friend is a squalid adventuress who has preserved her appearance of freshness as carefully as a strolling musician his fiddle, in order that she might charm such honest fools as Isabel; that Osmond has withdrawn from the world, not because he is too fine for it, but because he is a hating creature, and hates the world as he now hates his wife; that Pansy is the illegitimate child of these two, and her need of a dowry the chief reason why Osmond has married Isabel. It is a tale which would draw tears from a reviewer, and yet the conduct invented for Isabel is so inconsistent and so suggestive of the nincompoop, and so clearly proceeding from a brain whose ethical world was but a chaos, that it is a mistake to subject the book to the white light of a second reading. When we are told that Isabel married Osmond because "there had been nothing very delicate in inheriting seventy thousand pounds, and she hoped he might use her fortune in a way that might make her think better of it and would rub off a certain grossness attaching to the good luck of an unexpected inheritance," we feel that this is mere simpering; for there could be nothing less delicate than to marry a person for any reason but the consciousness of passion. And the grand climax of her conduct, her return to Osmond after the full revelation of his guilt has come to augment her anguish at his unkindness, proves her not the very paragon of ladies but merely very ladylike. If their marriage was to be a reality it was to be a degradation of the will whose integrity the whole book is an invitation to admire; if it was to be a sham it was still a larger concession to society than should have been made by an honest woman. Yet for all the poor quality of the motives which furnish Isabel's moral stuffing, The Portrait of a Lady is entirely n successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.