Henry James

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Title:     Henry James
Author: John Cowper Powys [More Titles by Powys]

The greatness of a writer can be estimated by the gap which would yawn in our interpretation of life if we conceived for a moment the expurgation of his whole body of work from our minds.

And what a hole there would be, what a jagged, bleeding, horrible hole, if the books of Henry James--and it is a continuous satisfaction to a lover of literature to think how many of them there are--were flung upon oblivion.

How often as the days of our life drift by, growing constantly more crowded and difficult, do we find ourselves exclaiming, "Only Henry James could describe this! What a situation for Henry James!"

The man has come to get himself associated more--oh, far more --than any other writer of our day, with the actual stir and pressure of environment in which we habitually move. I say "we." By this I mean the great mass of educated people in Europe, England and America. Of the "Masses," as they are called; of the persons by whose labours our middle-class and upper-class life, with its comparative leisure and comfort, is made possible, Henry James has little to say.

He never or very rarely deals, as Balzac and de Maupassant and Hardy do, with the farmers and farm labourers on the land. He never or very rarely deals with the slums of our great cities, as did Dickens and Victor Hugo. He confines himself more rigorously than any other novelist of equal power to the ways and manners and entanglements of people who are "in society," or who could be in society if they wanted to, or are on the verge and edge of society.

When the "lower classes"--I use the convenient term; doubtless in the eyes of celestial hierarchies the situation is reversed--enter at all into the circle of Mr. James' consciousness, they enter, either as interesting anarchists, like young Hyacinth, or as servants. Servants--especially butlers and valets--play a considerable part, and so do poor relations and impecunious dependents. For these latter of both sexes the great urbane author has a peculiar and tender consideration. It is not in the least that he is snobbish. Of that personal uneasiness in the presence of worldly greatness so unpleasantly prominent in Thackeray there is absolutely nothing. It is only that, conscientious artist as he is, he is unwilling to risk any sort of aesthetic "faux pas" by adventuring outside his natural sphere, the sphere to which he was born. Of gentlefolk who are poor and of artists and writers who are poor there are innumerable types strewn throughout his works.

It were quite unfair to say that he only writes of the idle rich. What he actually does is--as I have said--to write of our upper middle class life, with its aristocrats at the top and its luckless governesses and tutors and journalists at the bottom; as we, who are in it, know it and feel it and suffer from it, every day of our existence.

And, curiously enough, this is a very rare achievement. Of course there is a horde of second-rate writers, cheap hucksters of glittering sentimental wares for the half-educated, who write voluminously of the life of which I am speaking. There are others, more cultivated but endowed with less vivacity, who crowd their pages with grave personages from what are called "liberal professions." But the more imaginative writers of our day are not to be looked for in the drawing-rooms of their wives and daughters.

Mr. Hardy confines himself to the meadows of Blackmoor and the highways and hedges of Dorset Uplands. Mr. Conrad sails down tropical rivers and among the islands of Southern seas. The American Mr. Dreiser ploughs his earth-upheaving path through the workshops of Chicago and the warehouses of Manhattan.

It is Henry James and Henry James alone, who unravels for us the tangled skein of our actual normal-abnormal life, as the destinies twist and knot it in the civilised chambers of our natural sojourning.

The curious thing is that even among our younger and most modern writers, no one, except John Galsworthy, really deals with the sort of life that I have in mind when I speak of the European "upper classes"; and one knows how Mr. Galsworthy's noble and chivalrous interest in social questions militates against the intellectual detachment of his curiosity.

The cleverer authors among our younger school almost invariably restrict their scope to what one feels are autobiographical histories of their own wanderings through the pseudo-Latin quarters of London and Paris. They flood their pages with struggling artists, emancipated seamstresses, demi-mondaine actresses, social reformers, and all the rag-tag and bob-tail of suburban semi-culture; whereas in some mysterious way--probably by reason of their not possessing imaginations strong enough to sweep them out of the circle of their own experiences--the more normal tide of ordinary "upper-class" civilisation passes them untouched.

It is imagination which is lacking, imagination which, as in the case of Balzac and Dostoievsky, can carry a writer beyond the sphere of his own personal adventures, into the great tides and currents of the human comedy, and into the larger air of the permanent life-forces. It is the universal element which one misses in these clever and interesting books, that universal element which in the work of Henry James is never absent, however slight and frivolous his immediate subject or however commonplace and conventional his characters.

Is it, after all, not they,--these younger philosophical realists--but he, the great urbane humanist, who restricts his scope, narrowing it down to oft-repeated types and familiar scenes, which, as the world swings forward, seem to present themselves over and over again as an integral and classic embodiment of the permanent forces of life? It might seem so sometimes; especially when one considers how little new or startling "action" there is in Henry James, how few romantic or outstanding figures there are to arrest us with the shock of sensational surprise. Or is it, when we get to the bottom of the difference--this difference which separates Henry James from the bulk of our younger novelists--not a matter of subject at all, but purely a matter of method and mental atmosphere?

May it not, perhaps, turn out that all those younger men are preoccupied with some purely personal philosophy of life, some definite scheme of things--like the pattern idea in "Human Bondage"--to which they are anxious to sacrifice their experiences and subordinate their imaginations? Are they not all, as a matter of fact, interested more deeply in hitting home some original philosophical nail, than in letting the vast human tragedy strike them out of a clear sky? But it matters little which way it is. The fact that concerns us now is to note that Henry James has still no rival, nor anything approaching a rival, in his universal treatment of European Society. None, even among our most cynical and disillusioned younger writers, are able to get as completely rid as he of any "a priori" system or able to envisage, as he did, in passionate colourless curiosity, the panorama of human characters drawn out along the common road of ordinary civilised life.

Putting Flaubert aside, Henry James is the only one of the great modern novelists to be absolutely free from any philosophical system. Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Balzac, Hardy, de Maupassant, D'Annunzio--they all have their metaphysical or anti-metaphysical bias, their gesture of faith or denial.

Even Flaubert himself makes a kind of philosophic attitude out of his loathing for the common-place. Henry James alone confronts the universe with only one passion, with only one purpose, with only one obsession--the passion and the purpose of satisfying his insatiable curiosity upon the procession of human motives and the stream of human psychological reactions, which pass him by in their eternal flux.

This cold, calm, detached intellectual curiosity, free from any moral alloy, renders him an extraordinary and unique figure; a figure that would be almost inhuman, if it were not that the fury of his research is softened and mitigated by a deep and tender pity for every sort and condition of frail human creature subjected to his unwearied scrutiny.

This is one of the basic contradictions of Mr. James' fascinating personality, that he is able to retain the clear and Olympian detachment of his purely aesthetic curiosity and yet to betray a tenderness--why should one not say, in the best meaning of that excellent word, a goodness of heart?--in his relations with his characters, and with us, his unknown readers, who so easily might be his characters.

It is one of the profoundest secrets of art itself, this contradiction, and it reveals the fact that however carefully a great spirit may divest itself of philosophy and system there is a residuum of personal character left behind--of personal predilection and taste--which all the artistic objectivity in the world cannot overcome.

I am myself inclined to think that it is this very tenderness and friendliness in Henry James, this natural amiability of disposition which all his detachment and curiosity cannot kill, that makes him so much more attractive a figure than the sombre Flaubert whose passion for literary objectivism is touched by no such charm.

It is a matter of great interest to watch the little tricks and devices of a genius of this kind preparing the ground, as one might put it, for the peculiar harvest of impressions.

What Henry James aims at is a clear field for the psychological emotions of people who have, so to speak, time and leisure to indulge themselves in all the secondary reactions and subtle ramifications of their peculiar feelings.

The crude and intrusive details of any business or profession, the energy-absorbing toil of manual or otherwise exhausting labour, prevent, quite naturally, any constant preoccupation with one's emotional experiences. A Maxim Gorky or a Thomas Hardy will turn the technical labours of his emotionally-stricken people into tragic accomplices of the human drama, making field or factory, as it may happen, dumb but significant participators in the fatal issue. But in their case, and in the case of so many other powerful modern writers, the emotions required are simple and direct, such as harmonise well with the work of men's hands and the old eternal struggle with the elements.

It may be said, and with a great deal of plausibility, that this natural and simple toil adds a dignity and a grandeur to human emotions which must necessarily vanish with the vanishing of its heavy burdens. It may be said that the mere existence of an upper class more or less liberated from such labours and permitted the leisure to make so much of its passing sensations, is itself a grievous indictment of our present system. This also is a contention full of convincing force.

Oscar Wilde himself--the most sophisticated of hedonists--declares in his "Soul of Man" that the inequality of the present system, when one considers aesthetic values alone, is as injurious to the rich as it is pernicious to the poor. Almost every one of the great modern writers, not excluding even the courtly Turgenief, utters bitter and eloquent protests against the injustice of this difference.

Nietzsche alone maintains the necessity of a slave caste in order that the masters of civilisation may live largely, freely, nobly, as did the ancient aristocracies of the classic ages, without contact with the burden and tediousness of labour. And in this--in his habitual and arbitrary neglect of the toiling masses--Henry James is more in harmony with the Nietzschean doctrine than any other great novelist of our age. He is indeed, the only one--except perhaps Paul Bourget, and Bourget cannot in any sense be regarded as his intellectual equal--who relentlessly and unscrupulously rules out of his work every aspect of "the spirit of the revolution."

There is something almost terrifying and inhuman about this imperturbable stolidity of indifference to the sufferings and aspirations of the many too many. One could imagine any intellectual proletarian rising up from his perusal of these voluminous books with a howl of indignation against their urbane and incorrigible author.

I do not blush to confess that I have myself sometimes shared this righteous astonishment. Is it possible that the aloofness of this tenderhearted man from the burden of his age, is due to his American antecedents?

Rich people in America are far less responsible in their attitude towards the working classes, and far less troubled by pricks of conscience than in older countries, where some remote traces of the feudal system still do something towards bridging the gulf between class and class.

One must remember too that, after all, Henry James is a great deracine, a passionate pilgrim from the new world making amorous advances toward the old. It is always difficult, in a country which is not one's own, to feel the sting of conscience with regard to social injustices as sharply as one feels it at home. Travelling in Egypt or Morocco, one seems to take it carelessly for granted that there should be scenes of miserable poverty sprinkled around the picturesque objects of our aesthetic tour.

Well! England and France and Italy are to Henry James like Egypt and Morocco; and as long as he finds us picturesquely and charmingly ourselves; set that is, in our proper setting, and with the picturesque background of local colour behind us--he naturally does not feel it incumbent upon him to worry himself very greatly over our social inequalities.

But there is probably more in it than that. These things--the presence or the absence of the revolutionary conscience--are matters, when one gets to the bottom of it, of individual temperament, and James, the kindest and most charitable of men in his personal life, was simply untouched by that particular spark of "saeva indignatio."

It was not out of stupidity or any lack of sensitiveness that he let it alone. Perhaps--who can tell?--he, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, overcame "the temptation of pity," and deliberately turned aside from the "ugliest man's" cries.

One feels in one's more ardent moments, when the wish to smite this accursed economic system some shattering blow becomes red-hot, a little chilled, it must be confessed, when one recalls that immense brow, heavy with brooding intellect, and those dreamy, full-orbed Shakespearian eyes. Was the man, one is tempted to wonder then, too great, too lonely, too wise, to believe in any beautiful desperate change in the tragic "pathos of distance" between man and man? Was indeed the whole mortal business of human life a sort of grand tour of "Egypt and Morocco" to him; a mere long-drawn-out search after aesthetic sensations and a patient satisfying of Olympian curiosity?

No novelist that has ever lived "shows his hand" so little, in the sense of coming before the foot-lights and making gestures to the crowd; but in a deeper implication, none shows it more constantly.

To have a style so marked and sealed, so stamped and dyed for one's own in the integral way James has it, a style so personal and unique that its peculiar flavour rises from every single sentence on the page, is indeed, in a deep sense, to betray one's hidden soul to the world.

This, at any rate, is the only kind of betrayal that we--the general public--are permitted to surprise him in; unless one counts as a personal revelation the grave portentous solemnity of his technical prefaces. Like that amiable girl in Wilhelm Meister who, when asked whether she had ever loved, replied "Never--or always!" Henry James may be said to have never "coined his soul" or always to have coined it.

This style of his--so dyed and ingrained with personality--becomes in his later books, a stumbling-block to many readers; to the readers who want their "story" and have no wish to be teased and distracted "en route." Certainly his style thickens and gathers in fuller intensity as well as diffuses itself in wider atmospheric attenuation as his later manner grows upon him. The thing becomes at once richer and more evasive. But this implies no violent or sudden change, such as might excite suspicion of any arbitrary "tour-de-force." The characteristic elements are there from the beginning. They are only emphasized and drawn out to their logical issues by the process of his development.

From the very start he possesses a style which has its own flavour. It is only that the perfume of it diffuses itself more insidiously, in proportion as its petals, so to speak, warmed by the sun of maturer experience and subtler imagination, open to the air.

The result of this natural and organic development is precisely what one would have anticipated. Lovers of simple story-telling prefer the earlier work with its Daisy Miller, Roderick Hudson, and The Portrait of a Lady.

Virtuosos of rare psychological achievements and of strange aesthetic experiments prefer his very latest writings, including such a difficult and complicated book as "The Golden Bowl" or the short stories in "The Finer Grain."

On the other hand, those among us who are concerned with sheer beauty of form apart both from exciting subjects and psychological curiosities, hold by the intermediate period--the period extending, let us say, from the beginning of the last five years of the Nineteenth to the end of the first five years of the Twentieth century.

As a matter of fact, "The Golden Bowl," one of his most elaborate and exhaustive masterpieces, was published in November, 1904; and "The Sacred Fount," perhaps the most difficult as it is certainly one of the most characteristic of all his stories, appeared very much earlier. But taking his works as a whole, that epoch--from 1895 to 1905--may be regarded as his apogee, as his "Great Noon."

"The Awkward Age," for instance, the book of all others for which initiated admirers have an insistent devotion, appeared in 1899, while the collection of stories entitled "The Better Sort," which includes that masterpiece of tenderhearted malice "The Beldonald Holbein," came out in 1903.

As I have hinted, the whole question of selecting the period of a great artist's manner which contains his most significant work is largely a matter of taste; and the thing--as we have seen--is complicated by all sorts of overlappings, reversions, anticipations; but if I were myself pressed to suggest a brief list of books, which might be found to contain the quintessential qualities both of Henry James' attitude and his method, I should certainly include "The Tragic Muse," "The Spoils of Poynton," "What Maisie Knew," "The Ambassadors," "The Private Life" and "The Soft Side," whatever else it were difficult to omit.

Putting everything he wrote together, and letting these many-coloured opals and amethysts of intellectual imagination slide through our passionate fingers, I would perhaps select "The Great Good Place" as the best of all his short stories, and "The Tragic Muse" as the best of all his longer ones.

One sometimes, at unfortunately rare intervals, comes across a person who has really "collected" Henry James from the very beginning. Such persons are greatly to be envied. I think perhaps, they are the only bibliophiles for whom I have a tenderness; for they prove themselves so much more than bibliophiles; they prove themselves wise and prudent anticipators of the verdict of posterity.

It is impossible to enjoy the reprinted editions, in their tiresome monotony of luxurious bindings, as delicately as one enjoyed these first flowers of the author's genius, dewy with his authentic blessing. I am myself proud to recall the fact that, before the nineteenth century closed, I had secured a whole shelf of these sibylline volumes; buying most of them--I can recall the occasion--in one huge derelict pile from a certain friendly book-shop in Brighton; and leaving the precious parcel, promise of more than royal delights, in some little waiting-room on the sun-bathed Georgian front, while I walked the beach like a Grand Vizier who has received a present from the Sultan.

The only people who are to be more envied than those who have collected Henry James from the beginning--and these alas! are most of them grey-headed now--are the people who, possessed of the true interior unction, have by some accident of obstructing circumstance been debarred from this voluptuous pleasure until late in their experience. What ecstasies such persons have in store for them, what "linked sweetness long-drawn out" of sybaritish enjoyment!

But I was speaking of those secret and interesting preparations that every great artist makes before he gets to work; those clearings of his selected field of operations from the alien and irrelevant growths.

What Henry James requires before he can set his psychological machinery in motion is uninterrupted leisure for the persons of his emotional dramas. Leisure first, and after leisure a certain pleasant congruity of background.

Henry James is indeed the author "par excellence" of a leisured upper class who have time to think and feel, and to dwell at large upon their thoughts and feelings, undisturbed by the spade, the plough, the sword, the counter, the wheels of factories or the roar of traffic. It is amusing to watch the thousand and one devices by which he disentangles his people from the intrusive irrelevancy of work. They are either rich themselves--and it cannot be concealed that money, though not over-emphasised, is never quite eliminated from the field of action--or they are dependent upon rich relatives and friends.

It is for this reason perhaps that there are so few professional people in his books. The absence of lawyers is quite striking; so is the absence of doctors,--though a charming example of the latter profession does certainly appear in "The Wings of a Dove" as the medical attendant upon the dying girl in Venice. I cannot at this moment recall a single clergyman or priest. Is this because these spiritual guides of our race are too poor or too over-worked to serve his purpose, or do we perhaps,--in this regrettable "lacuna"--stumble upon one of the little smiling prejudices of our great conformist? He must have met some black coats, we are compelled to suppose, in the drawing-rooms of his country houses. Did he perhaps, like so many of his discreet and cautious young men, "conform" without "committing himself," in these high places?

If I were asked what types of character--among men I mean--emerge as most characteristic of his interest and as best lending themselves to his method, I should put my finger upon those pathetic middle-aged persons, like Mr. Verver in "The Golden Bowl," or Mr. Longdon in "The Awkward Age," who, full of riches and sad experience, have retired completely from active life, only to exercise from the depths of their sumptuous houses and secluded gardens, a sort of fairy influence upon the fortunes of their younger friends.

In the second place, I would indicate, as characteristic of this author, those wealthy and amiable young men who, as a general rule from America, but sometimes from the country-houses of England, wander at large and with genial "artistic" sympathies through the picturesque cities of Europe, carrying their susceptible hearts and sound moral principles into "pension" and "studio" where they are permitted to encounter those other favourite "subjects" of this cosmopolitan author, the wandering poverty-stricken gentlewoman with her engaging daughters, or the ambiguous adventuress with her shadowy past. The only persons who seem allowed to work at their trade in Henry James, are the writers and artists. These labour continually and with most interesting results. Indeed no great novelist, not even Balzac himself, has written so well about authors and painters. Paul Bourget attempts it, but there is a certain pedantic air of a craftsman writing about craftsmen, a connoisseur writing about connoisseurs, in his treatment of such things, which detracts from the human interest. Paul Bourget lacks, too, that fine malice, that sly arch humour, which saves Henry James from ever making his artists "professional" or his writers prolix.

But if he describes fellow-labourers thus sympathetically, it must not be forgotten that by far the most fascinating "artistic" person in all his books, is that astonishing Gabriel Nash in "The Tragic Muse." And the role of Gabriel Nash is to do nothing at all. To do nothing; but to be perpetually and insidiously enticing others, out of the sphere of all practical duties, responsibilities and undertakings, to renounce everything for art. Anything more charming or characteristic than Gabriel Nash's final departure from the scene, it would be impossible to find. He does not depart. He "goes up"--and "out." He melts into thin air. He dissolves like an iridescent vapour. He is--and then again, he is not.

I sometimes seem to see the portentous Henry James himself, with his soft plump hands, heavy forehead and drooping-lidded eyes, flitting to and fro through the drawing-rooms of our fantastic civilisation, like some huge feathery-winged moth-owl, murmuring, just as Gabriel Nash used to do, wistful and whimsical protests against all this tiresome "business of life" which distracts people from psychology and beauty and amiable conversation!

Alas! he too has now "passed away"; vanishing as lightly and swiftly as this other, leaving behind him as the one drastic and spectacular action in a life of pure aesthetic creation, his definite renunciation of the world of his engendering and his formal reception into the more leisured atmosphere of the traditions of his adoption.

That he--of all men the most peaceful--should have taken such a step in the mid-torrent of the war, is a clinching proof of the value which he placed upon the sacred shrines of his passionate pilgrimage.

When we come to take up the actual threads of his peculiar style, and to examine them one by one, we cannot fail to note certain marked characteristics, which separate him entirely from other writers of our age.

One of the most interesting of these is his way of handling those innumerable colloquialisms and light "short-cuts" of speech, which--especially in their use by super-refined people--have a grace and charm quite their own. The literary value of the colloquialisms of upper-class people has never, except here and there in the plays of Oscar Wilde, been exploited as delightfully and effectively as in Henry James.

Just as Charles Lamb will make use of Milton or Sir Thomas Browne or the "Anatomy of Melancholy"; and endow his thefts with an originality all his own, making them seem different in the transposition, and in some mysterious way richer, so Henry James will take the airy levities of his aristocratic youths and the little provocative ejaculations of his well-bred maidens, and out of these weave a filmy, evasive, delicate essence, light as a gossamer-seed and bitter as coloquintida, which, mingled with his own graver and mellower tones, becomes an absolutely new medium in the history of human style.

The interesting thing to observe about all this is that the argot that he makes use of is not the slang of his own America, far less is it the more fantastic colloquialism of the English Public Schools. It is really a sort of sublimated and apotheosized "argot," an "argot" of a kind of platonic archetypal drawing-room; such a drawing-room as has never existed perhaps, but to which all drawing-rooms or salons, if you will, of elegant conversation, perpetually approximate. It is indeed the light and airy speech, eminently natural and spontaneous, but at the same time profoundly sophisticated, of a sort of Utopian aristocracy, that will, in some such delicious hesitations, innuendoes and stammerings, express their "superficiality out of profundity," in the gay, subtle, epicurean days which are to come.

It is only offensive to tiresome realistic people, void of humour as they are void of imagination, this sweet psychological persiflage. To such persons it may even seem a little ridiculous that everybody --from retired American Millionaires down to the quaintest of Hertfordshire old maids--should utter their sentiments in this same manner. But such objectors are too pig-headed and stupid to understand the rudimentary conventions of art, or those felicitous "illusions," which, as Charles Lamb reminds us in speaking of some sophisticated old English actors, are a kind of pleasant challenge from the intelligent comedian to his intelligent audience.

One very delicate and dainty device of Henry James is his trick of placing "inverted commas" round even the most harmless of colloquialisms. This has a curiously distinguished and refined effect. It seems constantly to say to his readers.--"one knows very well, we know very well, how ridiculous and vulgar all this is; but there are certain things that cannot be otherwise expressed!" It creates a sort of scholarly "rapport"--this use of commas--between the gentility of the author and the assumed gentility of the reader, taking the latter into a kind of amiable partnership in ironic superiority.

I say "gentility"--but that is not exactly the word; for there is not the remotest trace of snobbishness in Henry James. It is rather that he indicates to a small inner circle of intellectually detached persons, his recognition of their fastidiousness and their prejudices, and his sly humorous consciousness of the gulf between their classical mode of speech and the casual lapses of ordinary human conversation.

In spite of all his detachment no novelist diffuses his personal temperament so completely through his work as Henry James does. In this sense--in the sense of temperamental style--he is far more personal than Balzac and incomparably more so than Turgenief.

One does not, in reading these great authors, savour the actual style on every page, in every sentence. We have large blank spaces, so to speak, of straightforward colourless narrative. But there are no "blank spaces" in Henry James. Every sentence is penetrated and heavy with the fragrance of his peculiar grace. One might almost say--so strong is this subjective element in the great objective aesthete--that James writes novels like an essayist, like some epicurean Walter Pater, suddenly grown interested in common humanity, and finding in the psychology of ordinary people a provocation and a stimulus as insidious and suggestive as in the lines and colours of mediaeval art. This essayist attitude accounts largely for those superior "inverted commas" which throw such a clear space of ironic detachment round his characters and his scenes.

On the other hand, what a man he is for concealing his opinions! Who can lay his finger on a single formal announcement of moral or philosophical partizanship in Henry James? Who can catch him for a moment declaring himself a conservative, a liberal, a Christian, a pagan, a pantheist, a pluralist, a socialist, a reactionary, a single taxer, a realist, a symbolist, an empiricist, a believer in ideals, a materialist, an advocate of New Thought, an esoteric Buddhist, an Hegelian, a Pragmatist, a Free Lover?

It would be possible to go over this formidable list of angles of human vision, and find evidence somewhere in his books sufficient to make him out an adherent of every one of them. Consider his use of the supernatural for instance. Hardly any modern writer makes so constant, so artistic a use of the machinery of the invisible world; and yet who would have the temerity to say that Henry James believed even so much as in ghosts?

I know nothing of Mr. James' formal religious views, or to what pious communion, if any, that brooding forehead and disillusioned eyes were wont to drift on days of devotion. But I cannot resist a secret fancy that it was to some old-fashioned and not too ritualistic Anglican church that he sometimes may have been met proceeding, in silk hat and well-polished shoes, at the close of a long Autumn afternoon, across the fallen leaves of Hyde Park!

There is an unction, a dreamy thrill about some of those descriptions of town and country churches in conventional England which would suggest that he had no secularistic aversion to these modest usages. Perhaps, like Charles Darwin, he would have answered impertinent questions about his faith by pointing to just such patient unexcluding shrines of drowsy controversy-hating piety.

I cannot see him listening to modernistic rhetoric. I cannot see him prostrated before ritualistic revivals. But I can see him sitting placid and still, like a great well-groomed visitor in "Egypt and Morocco," listening pensively to some old-fashioned clergyman, whose goodness of heart redeems the innocence of his brain; while the mellow sunshine falls through the high windows upon the fair hair of Nanda or Aggie, or Mamie or Nina or Maud, thinking quiet thoughts in front of him.

It is strange how difficult it is to forget the personal appearance of this great man when one reads his works. What a head he had; what weight of massive brooding bulk! When one thinks of the head of Henry James and the head of Oscar Wilde--both of them with something that suggests the classical ages in their flesh-heavy contours--one is inclined to agree with Shakespeare's Caesar in his suspicion of "lean men."

Think of the harassed and rat-like physiognomy of nearly all the younger writers of our day! Do their countenances suggest, as these of James and Wilde, that their pens will "drop fatness"? Can one not discern the envious eye, the serpent's tongue, the scowl of the aggressive dissenter, the leer of the street urchin?

How excellent it is, in this modern world, to come upon the "equinimitas" of the great ages! After all, in the confused noises of our human arena, it is something to encounter an author who preserves restraint and dignity and urbanity. It is something more to encounter one who has, in the very depths of his soul, the ancient virtue of magnanimity.

This American visitor to Europe brings back to us those "good manners of the soul" which we were in danger of forgetting; and the more we read the writings of Henry James, the more fully we become aware that there is only one origin of this spiritual charm, this aristocratic grace; and that is a sensitive and noble heart.

The movement of literature at the present time is all towards action and adventure. This is right and proper in its place, and a good antidote to the tedious moralising of the past generation.

The influence of Nietzsche upon the spiritual plane, and that of the war upon the emotional plane, have thrown us violently out of the sphere of aesthetic receptivity into the sphere of heroic and laconic wrestling.

Short stories, short poems, short speeches, short questions, short answers, short pity and short shrift, are the order of the day. Far and far have we been tossed from the dreamy purlieus of his "great good place," with its long sunny hours under misty trees, and its interminable conversations upon smooth-cut lawns! The sweet psychology of terrace-walks is scattered, and the noise of the chariots and the horsemen breaks the magical stillness where lovers philosophised and philosophers loved.

But let none of the strenuous gentlemen, whose abrupt ways seem encouraged by this earthquake, congratulate themselves that refinement and beauty and distinction and toleration have left the world forever, for them to "bustle in." It is not for long. The sun does not stop shining or the dew cease falling or the fountains of rain dry up because of the cruelty of men. It is not for long. The "humanism" of Henry James, with its "still small voice," is bound to return. The stars in their courses fight for it. It is the pleasure of the consciousness of life itself; of the life that, whether with Washington Square, or Kensington Park, or the rosy campaniles of the Giudecca, or the minarets of Sacre-Coeur, or the roofs of Montmartre, or the herbaceous borders and shadowy terraces of English gardens, as its background, must flow and flow and flow, with its tender equivocations and its suppliance of wistful mystery, as long as men and women have any leisure to love or any intelligence to analyse their love!

He is an aristocrat, and he writes--better than any--of the aristocracy; and yet, in the long result, is it of his well-bred levities and of his pleasantly-housed, lightly-living people, that one comes to think? Is it not rather of those tragic and faded figures, figures of sensitive men and sensitive women for whom the world has no place, and of whom few--even among artists--speak or care to speak, with sympathy and understanding?

He has, just here, and in his own way, something of that sheer human pity for desolate and derelict spirits which breaks forth so savagely sometimes, and with so unexpected a passion, from amid the brutalities and sensualities of Guy de Maupassant.

No one who has ever lived has written more tenderly or beautifully of what Charles Lamb would call "superannuated people." Old bachelors, living in a sort of romantic exile, among mementoes of a remote past; old maids, living in an attenuated dream of "what might have been," and playing heart-breaking tricks with their forlorn fancies; no one has dealt more generously, more imaginatively with such as these. He is a little cruel to them sometimes, but with a fine caressing cruelty which is a far greater tribute than indifference; and is there not, after all, a certain element of cruelty in every species of tender love?

Though more than any one capable of discerning rare and complicated issues, where to the vulgar mind all would seem grey and dull and profitless, Henry James has, and it is absurd not to admit it, a "penchant" for the abnormal and the bizarre. This element appears more often in the short stories than the longer ones, but it is never very far away.

I sometimes think that many of the gentle and pure-souled people who read this amiable writer go on their way through his pages without discerning this quiver, this ripple, this vibration, of "miching mallecho." On softly-stepping feline feet, the great sleek panther of psychological curiosity glides into very perverse, very dubious paths. The exquisite tenuity and flexibility of his style, light as the flutter of a feather through the air, enable him to wander freely and at large where almost every other writer would trip and stumble in the mud. It is one of the most interesting phenomena in literature, this sly, quiet, half ironic dalliance with equivocal matters.

Henry James can say things that no one else could say, and approach subjects that no one else could approach, simply by reason of the grave whimsical playfulness of his manner and the extraordinary malleableness of his evasive style. It is because his style can be as simple and clear as sunlight, and yet as airy and impalpable as the invisible wind, that he manages to achieve these results. He uses little words, little harmless innocent words, but by the connotation he gives them, and the way in which he softly flings them out, one by one, like dandelion seeds upon swiftly-sliding water, one is being continually startled into sharp arrested attention, as if--in the silence that follows their utterance--somebody, as the phrase goes, "stepped over one's grave."

How dearly one grows to love all his dainty tricks of speech! That constant repetition of the word "wonderful"--of the word "beautiful"--how beautifully and wonderfully he works it up into a sort of tender chorus of little caressing cries over the astounding tapestry woven by the invisible fates! The charming way his people "drop" their little equivocal innocent-wicked retorts; "drop" them and "fling them out," and "sweetly hazard" them and "wonderfully wail" them, produces the same effect of balanced expectancy and suspended judgment that one derives from those ambiguous "so it might seems" of the wavering Platonic Dialogue.

The final impression left upon the mind after one closes one of these fascinating volumes is, it must be confessed, a little sad. So much ambiguity in human life--so much unnecessary suffering--so many mad, blind, wilful misunderstandings! A little sad--and yet, on the other hand, we remain fortified and sustained with a certain interior detachment.

After all, it is soon over--the whole motley farce--and, while it lasts, nothing in it matters so very greatly, or at any rate matters enough to disturb our amusement, our good-temper, our toleration. Nothing matters so very greatly. And yet everything--each of us, as we try to make our difficult meanings clear, the meanings of our hidden souls, and each of these meanings themselves as we stammer them forth to one another--matters so "wonderfully," so "beautifully"!

The tangled thread of our days may be knotted and twisted; but, after all, if we have the magnanimity to let off lightly those "who trespass against us" we have not learnt our aesthetic lesson of regarding the whole business of life as a complicated Henry James story, altogether in vain.

We have come to regard the world as a more or less amusing Spectacle, without forgetting to be decently considerate of the other shadows in the gilt-framed mirror!

Perhaps, in our final estimate of him, what emerges most definitely as Henry James' doctrine is the height and depth and breadth of the gulf which separates those who have taste and sensitiveness from those who have none. That is the "motif" of the "Spoils of Poynton," and I do not know any one of all his books more instinct with his peculiar spiritual essence.

Below every other controversy and struggle in the world is the controversy between those who possess this secret of "The Finer Grain" and those who have it not. There can be no reconciliation, no truce, no "rapport" between these. At best there can be only mitigated hostility on the one side, and ironical submission on the other. The world is made after this fashion and after no other, and the best policy is to follow our great artists and turn the contrast between the two into a cause of aesthetic entertainment.

Duality rules the universe. If it were not for the fools there would be no wisdom. If it were not for those who could never understand him, there could be no Henry James.

One comes at any rate to see, from the exquisite success upon us of this author's method, how futile it is, in this world whereof the beginning and the end are dreams, to bind an artist down to tedious and photographic reality.

People do not and perhaps never will--even in archetypal Platonic drawing-rooms--converse with one another quite so goldenly; or tell the amber-coloured beads of their secret psychology with quite so felicitous an unction. What matter? It is the prerogative of fine and great art to create, by its shaping and formative imagination, new and impossible worlds for our enjoyment.

And the world created by Henry James is like some classic Arcadia of psychological beauty--some universal Garden of Versailles unprofaned by the noises of the crowd--where among the terraces and fountains delicate Watteau-like figures move and whisper and make love in a soft artificial fairy moonlight dimmed and tinted with the shadows of passions and misty with the rain of tender regrets; human figures without name or place. For who remembers the names of these sweet phantoms or the titles of their "great good places" in this hospitable fairy-land of the harassed sensitive ones of the earth; where courtesy is the only law of existence and good taste the only moral code?

[The end]
John Cowper Powys's essay: Henry James

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