stories of writers & artists

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INTRODUCTION: Henry James’ Portrait of the Artist \THE MADONNA OF THE FUuTUuRE (1873) ‘THE AUTHOR OF BELTRAFFIO (1884) \ ‘THE Lesson OF THE MASTER (1888) GREVILLE FANE (1593) THE REAL THING (7893) J Tue Mippie Years (7893) V ‘THE DEATH OF THE LION (7894) THE Next TIME (73895) THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET (7896) BROKEN WINGS (7900)

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INTRODUCTION aes 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.

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 life.”

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 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

HENRY JAMES’ PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST iba 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 in tensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in m own kind of expression of that.”” No passage in his prefaces had run 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.

III

Three other stories, written at widely spaced intervals, may be added to the group with which we started to give us James’ answer most compactly. The Madonna of the Future (1873) can tell us why he saw so much value in art. The Real Thing (1893) is his most intimate fable of what that value consists in. The Story in It (1903) can demonstrate that art “makes life” only to the degree that it rises from, and, in turn, serves to heighten felt experience.

The Madonna of the Future is one of James’ earliest real accomplishments, though it may seem still very “literary,” with the detail of its unachieved canvas taken over from Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, and the speech of a Florentine painter quoted from Musset. But it puts very affectingly many of the problems of the beginning artist, and it vibrates with James’ peculiarly high spiritual notes. It sprang from his own first immersion in Italian art, which had been followed by a reluctant return home. In part, therefore, the story dramatizes the special case of the American, as James had begun to feel the burden of it. The old Yankee painter, who has lived out his life in Florence, confesses sadly, and James’ own anxiety is in his voice: ‘We're the disinherited of Art! We're condemned to be superficial! We're excluded from the magic circle! The soil of American perception is a poor little barren artificial deposit! Yes, we're wedded to imperfection! An American, to excel, has just ten times as much to learn as a European! We lack the deeper sense! We have neither tact nor force! How should we have them? Our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present . . . We poor aspirants must live in perpetual exile.” To which the young narrator rejoins, speaking for James’ hopes: “Nothing is so idle as to talk about our want of a nursing air, of a kindly soil, of opportunity, of the things that help. The only thing that helps is to do something fine. There’s no law in our glorious Constitution against that. Invent, create, achieve.”

The intensity with which Americans like James and Poe and Eliot have cared about art has been almost a compulsive reaction against its neglect in their surroundings. It is significant, as Harry Levin has said, that whereas Balzac’s story emphasizes the essential vitality of life upon which art must be based, Hawthorne’s The Artist of the Beautiful is concerned with the spiritual ideals which sustain the artist, and James insists that such ideals may themselves be a delusion and that the only health for the artist is in the constant practice of his craft. For James, at the outset of his career, there was an even deeper dread than that voiced by the old painter. He had seen in his father’s generation, which was Emerson’s generation, so many artists whose master canvases remained blanks, so many transcendental geniuses without the concentration of talent. His own father was a haunting case, possessing an amazing flair for style in individual sentences but absolutely no organizing form, without which his books remained unreadable. There was a further personal pressure behind this story: here was James himself, already at the verge of thirty, and with hardly a start in fiction. Was he to be yet another of Emerson’s promising young men, afraid to take the plunge? Still, as he contemplated the old painter’s fatal mistake in so idealizing art that he never brought it to earth, James could envisage an even worse fate in the opposite extreme, that of cynical talent without an ideal. His particular American heritage spoke through him as he created the Italian contriver of obscene animal figurines. To this heritage James was to owe his deepest tones, the blackest threads in his design, the rare ability to suggest the horror of spiritual death. Such horror comes out in this early story with the intensity of the narrator’s revulsion from this sculptor’s declaration: “Cats and monkeys—monkeys and cats—all human life is there!”

The rival claims of the real and the ideal in art, and the dread that he might never find his own way of reconciling talent and genius, had long since been resolved by James when an anecdote dropped by his friend Du Maurier stimulated him to one of the lightest and yet most searching affirmations of his aesthetic theory. He produced exactly what he hoped for in his note-book recording that The Real Thing ‘should be a little gem of bright quick vivid form.” The fable here is so resiliently designed and brings out his ideas about art through so many deft symbols that nothing short of the whole can properly convey its effect. But James’ main convictions may be suggested by recalling the situation. Major Monarch and his wife, the real social thing, are desperately out of funds and want to sit for illustrations for a modern society novel. The painter-narrator is touched by their plight and reluctantly takes them on, but is immediately faced with a whole series of problems. He has a detestation of the amateur in art, and an awareness of the stultification involved in type-casting—indeed, he is very like James in his deep-rooted desire for character instead of types. Moreover, he confesses to an innate preference for appearance over reality, for “the represented subject over the real one.”

Does this mean that his art is an escape, a hollow evasion of experience as Wells found James? The answer involves James’ wholehearted repudiation of realism as mere literal reporting. The painter’s regular model, Miss Churm, is anything but the real thing. She is a freckled cockney, but a clever actress and so a constantly shifting challenge to fresh embodiment; whereas the Major’s wife, a lady certainly, ‘is always the same lady” and soon comes to look “singularly like a bad illustration.” The show-down occurs when a little Italian model turns up with the confident belief that he can pose for an English gentleman far better than the massive Major. He soon proves that he is as good as Miss Churm, “who could look, when requested, like an Italian.” His brilliant mimetic gift illustrates the necessary doctrine of imitation for any branch of art. It tells the painter again what he already knew, that action must be heightened by stylization,

f art is to convey the essence and not the accidents of life. And so e is forced to turn away the Monarchs, with James’ experienced and now thoroughly anti-transcendental “lesson”: ‘that in the deceptive atmosphere of art even the highest respectability may fail of being plastic.”

A kind of grace note to this discussion, concentrating directly on the art of fiction, is sounded by The Story in It. One of the shortest of James’ compositions, it amounts to another condensed parable of his material and method. Maud Blessingbourne’s fondness for French novels and D’Annunzio is in contrast with the simple absorption in life of her hostess, Mrs. Dyott. An afternoon visit is paid by Colonel Voyt, who,—though this has not been told to Maud,—is Mrs. Dyott’s lover. ‘The conversation centers on Maud’s reading, on the contrast between Anglo-Saxon fiction and the French. The Colonel holds that

“they do what they feel, and they feel more things than we.” Granting the superior continental maturity, Maud holds that their fiction still lacks variety, that their lovers are all the same, that, for instance, they never portray “a decent woman.” The Colonel contends that you must choose, since “the subject the novelist treats is the rise, the formation, the development, the climax and for the most part the decline of a relation ... If a relation stops, where’s the story? If it doesn’t stop, where’s the innocence?” If you don’t choose, you’re back in the floundering evasions of the English novel.

Maud doesn’t argue, but she is not convinced. After the Colonel has left, she indicates why she feels so sure of her grounds. She herself is absorbed in the kind of inner drama which French fiction neglects. She is in love, but she will not say with whom; the man does not even suspect it, and she is determined, for unspoken reasons, that he should not. Mrs. Dyott tacitly guesses the truth, that Maud is in love with the Colonel, and when she next sees him, tells him so. He is astonished, but has then to grant that Maud’s “consciousness, if they let it alone—as they of course after this mercifully must— was, in the last analysis, a kind of shy romance. Not a romance like // their own, a thing to make the fortune of any author up to the mark —one who should have the invention or who could have the courage; but a small scared starved subjective satisfaction that would do her no harm and nobody else any good. Who but a duffer—he stuck to his contention—would see the shadow of a ‘story’ in it?”

Wells and his million followers would agree with the Colonel. I have deliberately ended James’ plea on one of his special cases of scruples and renunciation, for such cases are recurrent threads in his carpet. The question, however, remains whether they are too special to make a living figure. Nothing could have shocked James worse than Wells’ notion that the patiently projected essence of his stories amounted to nothing more than “a bit of string.” For James, unlike the aesthetes of the nineties, always insisted on the supreme importance of subject, yet insisted also that what was important could not be legislated arbitrarily but must be determined by the artist’s own seasoned vision of experience, and that substance could be produced only through form.

The split between James and Wells, between the inner and the outer world, between analytic subtlety and surface reporting, is a sign of one of the great cultural maladjustments of our age. Both James and Wells were damaged by it. The absence of critical appreciation forced James to his own extremes, to such overly ingenious effects as that in The Figure in the Carpet itself, where the breathless pursuit of Hugh Vereker’ s “meaning” ends as the kind of arid curiosity against which Wells protested. The failure of James’ contemporaries to respond to Flaubert’s challenge for composition compelled James to insist upon it to such lengths that he finally objected to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as “fluid _puddings” because of their “defiance of economy and architecture.” Though Wells did not have that tragic blindness, his increasing indifference to any art is equally unbalanced. His novels have profited less and less by any of James’ advice, and in his carelessly thrown together Autobiography he dismissed them altogether as of no lasting worth.

The consequences of this split between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” have been especially virulent in America, fed, on the one part, by the divorce between our educated minds and experience which Santayana named the genteel tradition; and, on the other, by the enormous premiums paid to any sensationalism. Despite the fact that he was himself the extreme case of a writer glutted by slabs of raw experience which he could not assimilate, Thomas Wolfe discerned one phase of our dilemma. At one extreme are “the laboring, farming sort of people’ from which Wolfe came, who think of the writer as some one romantic and remote from their own lives. At the other extreme are “the university-going kind of people, and these people also become fascinated with the glamor and difficulty of writing, but in a different way. They get more involved or fancy than the most involved and fancy European people of this sort. They become more ‘Flauberty’ than Flaubert. They establish little magazines that not only split a hair with the best of them, but they split , more hairs than Europeans think of splitting. The Europeans say: ‘Oh God, where did these people, these aesthetic Americans, ever come from?’ . . . I think all of us who have tried to write in this country may have fallen in between these two groups of well meaning and misguided people, and if we become writers finally, it is in spite of each of them.”

Whitman escaped from one group, and James anticipated the other. It has been the fashion of recent criticism to dramatize the irreconcilable cleavage between the “lowbrows” and the ‘“highbrows” in our literature as stemming symbolically from these two writers. But it is forgotten that James himself bridged the gap. At twentytwo, as the smartest of destructive young reviewers for the newlylaunched Nation, he wrote his notorious apostrophe ‘‘from the intelligence to the bard” of Drum Taps. But in later years, as Edith Wharton has told us, he delighted in reciting Whitman’s lines, “in a mood of subdued ecstasy”; and he took satisfaction too in what he called the “flat, familiar, affectionate, illiterate colloquy” of the letters to Pete Doyle. Such ripened appreciation does not in itself accomplish a reconciliation; but as Santayana observed, James in his own work overcame the genteel tradition “in the classic way, by understanding it.”

The value of James’ figure may be judged, as he insisted, only if it is sought out through his work as a whole. Only thus may be decided whether his scruples and renunciations are a sterile emptiness, or the guides to a peculiarly poignant suffering and inner triumph. One augury for life rather than death in his work has shone through his whole relationship with Wells. As he said, in his final letter in that interchange, it was when another “personal and intellectual history” had been determined “in the way most different” from his own that he most wanted to get at it—“‘precisely for the extension of life.” It was the same with his relationship with his brother William, who from the time of The Europeans to The Golden Bowl was writing well-intentioned worried letters of uncomprehending counsel, only to have Henry reply at the end that he would “sooner descend to a dishonoured grave” than to have written such “things of the current age” as he had heard William express admiration for. “Yet,” he added, “I can read you with rapture.” We appear to have the case then that the seemingly special novelist is more outgoing in his interests than either the great journalist or the lively philosopher. Attention, perception, sympathy, are all on his side. His portrait of the artist would seem to challenge comparable qualities of our own.