MR. JAMES TURNS THE SCREW.
Mr. Henry James is perhaps the one anomaly of American art. True, we have Howells at his heels, some people may say at his head, but Howells is by no means an inexplicable product, and he is as far from being like James as James is far from being the counterpart of Turgeneff, the master inspiration of them both. One may not like Mr. James—and there are many who will simply not face his difficulties—but one must concede that he is literature. He is indeed so emphatically literature that he is not always life as well. It is not a little to say of an author on the shady side of his prime that he still reserves for his public the quality of continual surprise. Long ere this, one is minded to assert, judging on general principles, Mr. James must have declared his reach. Such utterances are, however, always contradicted by his latest book. And his latest books, especially in the last few years, have been a succession of surprises—shocks would be a better word, it may be—that uproot presumptions. “What Maizie Knew,” for example, was a glance of Mr. James’ brilliancy from quite a new angle. It was such an extraordinary ray of his art that it has not yet ceased to leave a green spot of bewilderment on the vision of the critic. With the cry caused by “In a Cage” still in the air, comes his very newest volume, “The Two Magics” (New York: The Macmillan Co.,) as unprecedented a composition as any of his repertory. To say that “The Turn of the Screw” dashes one with amazement is not to be in the least hyperbolic. It does amaze—it simply takes one’s breath and keeps it until one has finished the tale. One is amazed at the art, one is amazed at the substance—and one is amazed at Mr. James himself, and that, perhaps, most of all. It is an incredible production for a Bostonian, no matter though he be long acclimated to foreign heaths as in the instances of the author. We know of no other case where Bostonian blood has failed so signally to tell.
One is saved from the supreme shock, however, by one thing—the matter of Maizie. Maizie in “What Maizie knew” was at least an intimation of the terrible facts of Miles and Flora. These angelic visions of eight and ten are a twin-birth of horror before which the hideous perspicacity of Maizie pales to insignificance. They are veritable limbs of Satan not in any human forgivable sense, but astounding monsters of precocious sinfulness that give one a positive chill to consider as within the bounds of possibility. Their portrayal is a slaughter of the innocents equal to that of Herod. One arraigns Mr. James’ inhumanity in thus stooping to cast so cruel a stain on the character of childhood. Maizie was surely enough—much more than enough.
Can the treatment of such abomination be within the pales of art? One is obliged to admit that it can be, because Mr. James has demonstrated it—demonstrated it as we hope it will not be demonstrated often. It has, however, required all the resources of his skill. The marvel is that he never even falters—makes one false stroke with his brush. As it stands, “The Turn of the Screw” is a masterpiece; one fails to see how it could be improved. Its art gives the envelopment to the subject that saves it superbly. It is the kind of envelopment one finds in the portraits of Whistler, for instance, and that is perfect.
Far from blurting out the business he may have in hand, Mr. James can scarcely be said, at least in these latter days of his art, to tell it at all. Most readers of “What Maizie Knew” must have been struck in the perusal with the fact that never once did the story for all its plotless volume state in cold type what the child really did know. And yet that Maizie knew what she shouldn’t have known was as obvious as though she had drawn naughty pictures on her slate. The reader knew what Maizie knew by a more subtle means of intelligence—by a kind of telepathic communication. The book was a supreme piece of insinuation. Perfectly proper, indeed, as far as the print was concerned, but what scandal between the lines! One finds oneself subject to this same sort of telepathic play in “The Turn of the Screw.” It is all secretive enough—superficially. The nightmare of children’s little obsessed souls is not dragged into the light of day, but the horror is there, nevertheless, patent to the eye and palpable to the touch. Mr. James turns the screw, indeed! To set down the details of the story would be to mar its subtle relation of style and substance. It is for the reader to take or to leave, as he finds it in Mr. James’ volume.
“Covering End,” the other tale, included under the title of “The Two Magics,” is quite in Mr. James’ usual manner. The “magic” of this charming comedy is a very white magic, being no more than the brisk spell exerted by the heroine—a Daisy Miller of later growth—upon the hero, the owner of an old English “show” country house. “It was magnificent and shabby, and the eyes of the dozen dark old portraits seemed, in their eternal attention, to count the cracks in the pavement, the rents in the seats of the chairs and the missing tones in the Flemish tapestry.” We have again all the sentiment of “old things” as found in “The Spoils of Poynton.” The story is the kind of comedy that would “scream” in the hands of ordinary art. Mr. James’ material is, however, never so ill-bred. Mrs. Gracedew, widow, “from Missouri Top,” bursts upon all this faded splendor and question of mortgages with a perfect whirl of Americanism. Her conversation is a kind of metal skirt-dancing—a perpetual flash of pink fleshings. She is everywhere in the house at the same time—“an apparition, a presence requiring announcement and explanation,” indeed. She covets the house, she covets “the good and faithful servant”—poor Chivers, whom she calls “Rembrant van Rhyn, with three stars”; she covets the mortgaged owner, Clement Yule. They are all “types.” Even Cora Prodmore is a type—“the ‘awfully nice girl’ of all the English novels, the ‘simple maiden in her flower’ of—who is it?—your great poet.” It is Daisy Miller with additional assurance of widowhood. She “grabs” the whole situation with all the prompt enterprise of Missouri Top. “I’m here,” she announces to “the lawful heir,” “for an act of salvation—I’m here to avert a sacrifice!” That she will avert it the reader never questions. It is all delightfully spirited and worthy of Mr. James. It is quite as much a masterpiece of subtlety and finished style as “The Turn of the Screw,” if not so new a note in conception. After the horror of this latter tale it is more than a matter of refreshment—it has the virtue of salvation.
A GERMAN MASTERPIECE.
The interest of the Anglo-Saxon public in German fiction has always been languid compared with the avidity with which it devours the works, good, bad and indifferent, of French authors. Mrs. Wister, Clara Bell, and a few other translators, suffice to supply the English-speaking market with all it demands in literature from the land of Goethe and Schiller, while, on the other hand, hundreds can scarcely fill the publishers’ orders for translations from the French. It may be that German novels are too limited in their appeal—too intrinsically German and hearth-centered—too largely lacking in that modern “finish” for which English authors so frantically strive and French authors so frequently attain; too deficient in what we are pleased to regard as the saving sense of “smartness.” German novels as a rule have more soul than smartness, and that is almost unforgivable in an age when genius like the reformed pirate is expected to do fancy work.
It is perhaps because of this characteristic “high seriousness,” to use a favorite phrase of Matthew Arnold’s, of Hermann Sudermann’s pen that he has remained so little known to us in spite of his rare force. He belongs to the brainy band of modern novelists which can almost be told off on the fingers; of which in England Geo. Meredith is the lone Pompey’s Pillar; Balzac, in France, the pyramid; and in Russia Turgeneff, the sardonic sphinx. Sudermannn first reached our transatlantic consciousness through the success of Duse’s portrayal of Magda in “Home”, a tragedy full of fierce psychic value and human pathos.