Stories of writers and artists

Front matter

coLL. U. M.

ART IN FICTION

Henry James

Contents

InTROpDucTION: Henry James’ Portrait of the Artist THE MADONNA OF Tue EUTUBiAeZ2) THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO (1884) THE LEssON OF THE MASTER (7888) GREVILLE FANE (2893)

THE Mipp_e YEArRs (1893)

THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET (1896) BROKEN WINGS (1900)

Introduction

AMES’ prefaces have established themselves exactly as he envisaged them to Howells, as “a sort of comprehensive manual or vademecum for aspirants in our arduous profession.” No other writer of fiction has bequeathed a comparable body of discourse for the understanding of his art. Two of his novels, Roderick Hudson and The Tragic Muse, have for their respective heroes a sculptor and a painter. But another grouping of James’ work, to which far less consideration has been paid, presents even more intimately, if in the guise of fable, his portrait of the writer. He himself called attention to his stories dealing with the life of art by composing one of the volumes of his collected edition from them: The Lesson of the Master, The Death of the Lion, The Next Time, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Coxon Fund. But a single volume would not hold them all, and they ran part way through the next: The Author of Beltraffio, and four shorter pieces, The Middle Years, Greville Fane, Broken Wings, and The Tree of Knowledge. The last of these shades off into the treatment characteristic of many other James stories: it is not primarily about the nature of art or of the artist; it uses the situation of a sculptor, whose family are in loyal conspiracy to hide from him his utter lack of talent, for the kind of psychological concealments and revelation so dear to James. The Coxon Fund, again, explicitly sets out to present the type of peculiarly helpless artistic temperament represented by Coleridge. But the center of reference in the others is to problems which James knew from the inside and whose urgency was ever with him, problems of the writer and his audience, of the lack of intelligent appreciation and of the demands of his craft. They also dramatize the issue which is still our issue, the relation of the artist to society.

The title stories of the two volumes, The Lesson of the Master (1888) and The Author of Beltraffio (1884), deal, in different ways, with the split between life and art. The one “lesson” which Henry St. George drills into young Paul Overt is not to be like him. The Master has reaped all the material rewards of a successful writer, but he has ceased to write important books and has come to look like “a lucky stockbroker.” The choice that he insists upon between the world and the supremely exacting mistress of art may sound curiously dated to a generation whose most effective symbol of the artist has been a figure like Malraux, gathering the knowledge for his writing as he served in the air force for Loyalist Spain. But the half century since Henry St. George has known far more stream-lined ways of selling out than that smooth English gentleman ever dreamed of, and the choice still remains, even if not cast in James’ monastic terms.

Equally dated is “the gospel of art” enunciated by Mark Ambient in the pages of his masterpiece Beltraffio. The donnée here, as James indicated in a still unpublished note-book, came to him from an anecdote he had heard about John Addington Symonds (not about Stevenson, as has long been the gossip). A situation was suggested by the reported cleavage between Symonds and his wife, who, in no sort of sympathy with his books, disapproved of their tone as “immoral, pagan, hyperaesthetic.” The story which James invented to dramatize such a situation concentrated on the battle between Mark Ambient and his conventionally Christian wife over the control of their child, and reached its lurid climax in her deliberately letting the boy die from an attack of diphtheria rather than expose him to what she conceived to be the corruption of his pagan father.

James worked under two handicaps here. He made Mark Ambient so completely the correct English gentleman that he hardly succeeds in persuading us that he had really imagined him as a pagan sensualist. And increasing this unreality is the fact that he set himself to dramatize the aesthetic gospel of the eighties without quite indicating, perhaps without being quite sure at this stage of his development, exactly how much of it he accepted for himself. He was later to portray in The Tragic Muse (1890) the brilliant futility of the aesthete in the eerie figure of Gabriel Nash. In The Author of Beltraffio he made some fine humorous thrusts at the excesses of the movement. Nature faithfully copies art in Ambient’s surroundings; even the creepers on the brown old walls appeared to have been borrowed from a pre-Raphaelite masterpiece. And as though a revenge for his aestheticism, Ambient’s sister, who, in her faded velvet

A A EP robe, seemed to have the notion that “she made up very well as a Rossetti,” was a weirdly affected imitation of everything that in Ambient was original.

Ambient’s own intense devotion to “every manifestation of human energy” is close to Pater’s. And although James was to speak, a decade after this story, of Pater’s having had “a phosphorescence, not a flame,” there seems an inescapable kinship between Pater’s aspiration to be the hard gem-like flame and Strether’s famous exhortation to live, in The Ambassadors. Moreover, when Strether tries to convey the multiple-imaged fascination of Madame de Vionnet in likening her to a Renaissance medallion, “to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud,” “to a sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge,” to Cleopatra herself in her variety, we are not far from the elaborate spell of Pater’s Mona Lisa. A further comparison would have to reckon with the fact that James’ recurrent use of the word “morality’ has a residue, quite foreign to Pater, of the values of James’ transcendentalist father. For Pater, despite his debt to Arnold, would hardly have been able to rise to James’ classic formulation, in the preface to The Portrait of A Lady, that there is “no more nutritive or suggestive truth . . . than that of the perfect dependence of the ‘moral’ sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it.” Yet Pater and James would be in accord with Mark Ambient’s “passion for form,” and likewise with his conviction that the artist must not falsify or smooth away details, but “must give the impression of life itself.”

The stories where James is writing from the heart of his own aesthetic convictions are the rest of the group, most of which belong to the years 1893-6. These were crucial years for James. He had felt that with The Tragic Muse he had reached a dead-end with the long novel, and had turned to his anxious experiment with the stage. The failure of Guy Domville, early in 1895, marked the end of that chapter, and only a couple of weeks later he was writing to Howells: “I have felt, for a long time past, that I have fallen upon evil days—every sign or symbol of one’s being in the least wanted, anywhere or by any one having so utterly failed. A new generation, that I know not, and mainly prize not, has taken universal possession.” One great change from the old days was that James had now found that the magazines would hardly accept him any more, a serious matter for an artist now past fifty. He had only one answer: “Produce again—produce; produce better than ever, and all will yet be well.” And even before the end of his letter to Howells he had rallied to the point of taking delight in the fact that he was “bursting with ideas and subjects.”

He had already reached a partial resolution of his dilemma by dramatizing the problems over which he had been brooding, even though he could find for some of the resulting stories no more likely channel of publication than The Yellow Book. The Death of the Lion was printed by Harland with éclat as the leading item in his first issue (1894), though James was increasingly to feel the incongruity of having appeared among the newer aesthetes, the descendants of Pater; and was to take characteristic solace that his ““comparatively so incurious text” had at least not provoked Beardsley into a perverse illustration.

How little characteristic it was of him to view his problems grimly is borne out by the tone of this story, where the situation is the reverse of James’ own, that of the sudden fame of a heretofore unsuccessful writer. The whole is shot through with Flaubert’s refrain about “the hatred of literature,” as the admiring young critic who tells the story reflects that now Neil Paraday’s rare talent is “to be squeezed into his horrible age.” But though the “lion” is soon exhausted and thus killed by the violence with which he is taken up by Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, the handling of the theme is on a comic plane. No one at the country house where they are so ardently discussing his new book, while he lies sick upstairs, may have read beyond its twentieth page, and his hostess may end by losing his last manuscript, but still he has had the unique privilege of being brought into the sphere of his popular contemporaries, Guy Walsingham, the lady-author of Obsessions, and Dora Forbes, of The Other Way Round, who turns out to be a man with a big red moustache.

How clearly James observed the rdle played by the best-selling author of his day, and how little he envied it, may be read in the winning portrait he gives of Greville Fane, another lady whose pen dipped into gold. The reason why the critic—the most frequent narrator for these stories—liked her so much is that she rested him so from literature. He marvelled at her continued success, since her books were in no relation.to life, until he reflected that “It’s only real success that wanes, it’s only solid things that melt.” What endeared her to him, as she traced the loves of the duchesses beside the widowed cribs of her children, was her blind devotion to them alone. The plot of the story turns around the contrast between her and her

ELI: eT RE gs i a NE EE I = FINE SR RO Irie SO son, who grows up to pretend to be a novelist, a fake disciple of form, and, while waiting for “inspiration,” sponges on her generosity. James’ tender handling of her character did not prevent him from commenting on the vulgarization of taste accomplished by a lady who could contribute volumes “to the diversion of her contemporaries,” but who “couldn’t write a page of English.” He had similar authors in mind when, in The American Scene, he trained his eye upon “the little tales, mostly by ladies, and about and for children romping through the ruins of the Language, in the monthly magazines.”

In The Next Time his approach to his own situation is no longer so oblique, though the tone is still that of high comedy. Here Mrs. Highmore, “‘one of the most voluminous writers” of the age, yearns to be like her brother-in-law Ralph Limbert, “but of course only once, an exquisite failure.”” He, on the other hand, had worn out his energies in the effort to sell. After The Major Key never even got the publisher’s money back, he tried for every popular device, but the worst he could do couldn’t escape from being ‘“‘a shameless, merciless masterpiece” which only the critics read. It was the same to the end of his short career. Even The Hidden Heart, planned as an adventure story, turned out to be “but another female child.’ There was to be no next time for him any more than for Mrs. Highmore. As his critic friend, whose love was “the love that killed” with a popular audience, was to sum it up: “You can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.”

The same phrase was turned by James about himself, immediately after the disastrous opening night of Guy Domuille, in a letter to his brother William. But though he recounted the brutal shock of having been hissed and booed by the gallery after responding to the cry of “Author! Author!” he added: “Don’t worry about me; I’m a Rock.” Yet the problem of an audience was to bother him to the end. As he wrote in his note-book, The Next Time was suggested to him “really by all the little backward memories of one’s own frustrated ambition;” and he recalled particularly how, in his early years, he had contracted to write some Paris letters for The New York Tribune, and how, despite every effort, he hadn’t been able to make them bad enough to satisfy Whitelaw Reid. Broken Wings, written half a dozen years after the rest of the group, projected the situation of two writers, a man and a woman, who each had enjoyed a following in society, only to have it fall away, and to come to the realization that nothing was to be gained by an author in the country-house world, a world which simply took all one’s cleverness and had no imagination to give. James said in his preface that he failed “to disinter again the buried germ” of this story, but went on to ask, “When had I been, as a fellow scribbler, closed to the general admonition of such adventures?” And thinking perhaps also of his own moment of popularity after Daisy Miller, he declared that “to dissimulate the grim realities of shrunken ‘custom,’ the felt chill of a lower professional temperature—any old note-book would show that laid away as a tragic ‘value.’ ”

Where James draws most deeply on his own accumulated thoughts for these stories is in The Middle Years, in which the author-narrator is of the novelist’s own age. Dencombe had been very sick, and picking up, in his convalescence, his book of the year before, he has a fresh impression of his own work. Like James he is “a passionate corrector” of his text, and thinking how much of his life it had taken to produce so little art, what he longs for most is “Ah for another go, ah for a better chance!” It is not necessary to force a too close parallel with James’ life, since his own health, very precarious earlier, had developed by middle age considerable powers of endurance. Yet his sister’s death in England in 1892, the year before this story, had heightened his feeling of isolation; and it is out of isolation that Dencombe cries: “I’ve outlived, I’ve lost by the way.” Dencombe comes through to a renewed faith in creative possibilities, to the reassurance that there never is exhaustion in the abundance of material, but only “in the miserable artist.” But he is not to have another chance. He recognizes that he is dying, and says with the eloquence of James’ own urgency: “We work in the dark— we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

The very conception of The Figure in the Carpet (1896) sprang from such passion. ‘This was the story which James himself called “a significant fable”; and he said that what had stimulated him to write it was his acute impression of the Anglo-American’s “so marked collective mistrust of anything like close or analytic appreciation.” This story was designed as a plea for such mature criticism, as ‘the prefaces were to be another. In it the ideal readers are those for whom “literature was a game of skill,” since “skill meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life.”

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In the view of the novelist Hugh Vereker life could be conveyed only indirectly, symbolically; his particular sense of it ran through all his books as their “exquisite scheme,” “like a complex figure in a Persian carpet.” James’ title has given a phrase to the close textual criticism which he helped to inaugurate. Gide used it in his journal (1927) and Eliot, in introducing Wilson Knight's interpretation of Shakespeare’s imaginative patterns (1930) held it up as the critic's goal. The impulse behind the phrase has quickened our awareness that the task of the critic today, after a century of historical accretion, is to see an artist’s work not piece-meal but in its significant entirety, to find his compelling portrait in his works.

II

But the question that James’ contemporaries might well ask was where he found, round about him at that hour, any models on which he could plead verisimilitude for his supersubtle Neil Faradays and Ralph Limberts and Hugh Verekers. He could simply answer that they had been “fathered but on his own intimate experience,” that they had been “drawn preponderantly from the depths of the designer’s own mind.” But such an origin, he insisted, did not permit their being dismissed as unreal, since he had deliberately projected their situations as a form of what he called “operative irony,” as a means of asserting that “if the life about us for the last thirty years refuses warrant for these examples, then so much the worse for that ies

If pressed further, he could have specified, as he did in his letters, how barren he found the sensibility of his milieu, in contrast with the analytic alertness of the French or of Turgenieff. There was no novelist in England with whom he could share his aims. He saw quite through the pointless elaborations of his somewhat older contemporary Meredith. On finishing Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894) he was moved to declare to Gosse that he doubted “if any equal quantity of extravagant verbiage, or airs and graces, of phrases and attitudes, of obscurities and alembications, ever started less their subject . . .” He granted that he might be overstating the case, but he could not escape the conviction that many of Meredith’s “profundities and tortuosities prove when threshed out to be only pretentious statements of the very simplest propositions.” On the other hand, James was temperamentally at the opposite pole from Hardy, and never got closer to him than granting that Tess “is chock-full of faults and falsity, and yet has a singular beauty.”

He continued to appreciate Howells and was in intermittent correspondence with him; but the one English practitioner of his craft with whom he felt a kinship was Stevenson, whom, unfortunately, he had come to know only a year before Stevenson left for the South Seas. But James’ letters show the pitch of his admiration, which probably seems excessive to most readers now. What drew James to him was their common devotion to style. He also felt that he had at last found a reader who could understand what “an abject density and puerility” the current standards of criticism had fallen to. He was not blind to Stevenson’s limitations, to his frequent mere “cleverness,” to his “awfully jolly” side, but with Stevenson’s departure he stated that he had “literally no one” left to share with, that he was “more and more shut up to the solitude inevitably the portion, in these islands, of him who would really try, even in so small a way as mine, to do it.” Then, during the rehearsals of Guy Domville, came the news of Stevenson’s death.

James was never to lose his avid curiosity in any potential incarnations of the artist, and, as late as 1914, in his essay on The New Novel, he was welcoming the promise of D. H. Lawrence, and, too generously, that of Hugh Walpole and Compton Mackenzie. Almost a quarter of a century before, he had been writing Stevenson that “the only news in literature” was “the infant monster of a Kipling.” As though by the law of opposites James had been fascinated by the virility of his first stories, and thought that perhaps he contained “the seeds of an English Balzac.” But as the years went on and James applied the demands of mature criticism, he wrote an incisive thumbnail critique to Grace Norton: “‘My view of his prose future | has much shrunken in the light of one’s increasingly observing how | little of life he can make use of . . . He has come steadily from the | less simple in subject to the more simple—from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the ‘Tommies, from the Tommies | to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and the screws . . .” And the trouble with his handling of “steam and patriotism” was that it was so “mixed up with God.”

Just at this time, near the close of the century, James’ attention was attracted to a talent that he was to watch with interest for the eter hain rest of his life. No two writers could be farther apart in their aims than James and Wells, the apostle of craftsmanship and the greatest journalist of the great age of journalism. Their interchange deserves, therefore, more prominence than it has yet received as a symbolic landmark in modern critical debate. It constitutes also a kind of parable of the problems of the artist to put beside James’ fictional creations and thus to add some further strokes to his self-portrait.

James’ first letter is in appreciation of Wells’ critical interest in The Turn of the Screw, and James’ own statement that this story “is essentially a pot-boiler and jeu d’esprit” might serve as a check to our recent over-interpretation of it. What drew James to Wells was a more abundant energy than Kipling’s, an ability to convey visible and audible life that he had so utterly missed in Meredith. After reading Kipps he declared: “You are, for me, more than ever, the most interesting ‘literary man’ of your generation—in fact, the only interesting one.” He pronounced him in Tono Bungay to be “a very swagger performer” whose “vividness and colour” would have been the envy of Dickens. To be sure, James had to protest again and again, as of The New Machiavelli, against “that accurst autobiographic form which puts.a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and easy.” He had known long since that their worlds were other, but, under the spell of Wells’ force, he said: “I always read you ... as I read no one else, with a complete abdication of all _. . ‘principles of criticism,’ canons of form, preconceptions of felicity, references to the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition.” Of course, James could not do any such thing for long, and he had to comment to Mrs. Ward on the strange co-existence in Wells “of so much talent with so little art, so much life with (so to speak) so little living.” This was always a basic criterion for James. But though he finally had to tell Wells that he found his persistent neglect of method to have become inexcusably “unconscious,” he was still forced to add that there was no one else “who makes the whole apple-cart so run away that I don’t care if I don’t upset it and only want to stand out of its path and see it go.”

But a jarring climax to their relation came in the year before James’ death, when he was seventy-two and Wells forty-nine. Wells issued a facile catch-all volume, the alleged literary remains of George Boon, The Mind of the Race. This included an amateurish parody of James and some very heavy-handed discussion of him. Boon asserts that “James has never discovered that a novel isn’t a picture . . . that life isn’t a studio.” He goes on to take exception to James’ insistence upon composition and comes to the conclusion that his people are all “eviscerated,” that his books are of an “elaborate, copious emptiness.” “The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity and an entirely superficial curiosity . . . His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his novel is about is always there. It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.”

James wrote at once, in profound bewilderment since, having enjoyed Wells so “enormously from far back,” he had grown into “the habit of taking some common meeting-ground . . . for granted, and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a bridge which made communication possible.” “But,” he went on, “I am by nature more in dread of any fool’s paradise, or at least of any bad misguidedness, than in love with the idea of a security proved, and the fact that a mind as brilliant as yours can resolve me into such an unmitigated mistake, can’t enjoy me in anything like the degree in which I like to think I may be enjoyed, makes me greatly want to fix myself, for as long as my nerves will stand it, with such a pair of eyes.” The defense that rose from such scrutiny rested its case squarely on “my measure of fullness—fullness of life and of the projection of it, which seems to you such an emptiness of both.” Every sentence of this defense should be read in its slow dignified context, but since the issues were sharpened by Wells’ reply, we had better turn to it.

He pointed up their fundamental divergence in attitude by saying, “To you literature like painting is an end, to me literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. Your view was, I felt, altogether too prominent in the world of criticism and I assailed it in lines of harsh antagonism. And writing that stuff about you was the first escape I had from the obsession of this war. Boon is just a waste-paper basket . . . I had rather be called a journalist than an artist, that is the essence of it, and there was no other antagonist possible than yourself. But since it was printed I have regretted a hundred times that I did not express our profound and incurable contrast with a better grace.”

James’ answer was immediate and forthright, not at all in the manner with which Boon had charged him, the painful manner of

I GD EL TIE AACE LIS. E ELL EEA ELE ONT CL LL ELIE AON LLIN IA ILNF A a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea. “I am bound to tell you that I don’t think your letter makes out any sort of case for the bad manners of Boon, as far as your indulgence in them at the expense of your poor old H.J. is concerned—I say ‘your’ simply because he has been yours, in the most liberal, continual, sacrificial, the most admiring and abounding critical way, ever since he began to know your writings: as to which you have had copious testimony.” He took up Wells’ case point by point. The comparison of a book to a wastebasket struck him “as the reverse of felicitous, for what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what one doesn't commit to publicity and make the affirmation of one’s estimate of one’s contemporaries by.” He didn’t have to elaborate his often expressed belief concerning the age’s primary root of corruption: as he had remarked to Howells some years before, “The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the general anglo-saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant Bayadére of Journalism.” Nor did he see it anywhere evident that “my view of ‘life and literature, —or what you impute to me as such, is carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace—so unaware do I seem, on the contrary, that my products constitute an example in any measurable degree followed.” The crux of the matter, however, was that he had no view of life and literature “other than that our form of the latter . . . is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shining experience of the individual practitioner . . . Of course for myself I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that.” No passage in his prefaces had rung more eloquently of his aims.

He was not in the least taken in by Wells’ specious contrast between architecture and painting. His intimate knowledge of all the plastic arts told him that “there is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically ‘for use’ that doesn’t leave any other art whatever exactly asmuchso.. . It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I wouldn’t be Boon for the world, and am only, yours faithfully, Henry James.”

To that Wells could only reply: “I don’t clearly understand your concluding phrases—which shews no doubt how completely they define our difference. When you say ‘it is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance,’ I can only read sense into it by assuming that you are using ‘art’ for every conscious human activity. I use the word for a research and attainment that is technical and special.” That draws the central issue between them as sharply as possible, since the emptiness or living intricacy of the figure in James’ carpet depends on whether he was using “art” as a mystical abracadabra or with verifiable comprehension of the enormous value he imputes to it.