Collected Essays Page 4

  In James’s first novel, Roderick Hudson, published in 1875, six years after his first sight of the high tribune and the tortured neophytes, the hero ‘pushed into St Peter’s, in whose vast clear element the hardest particle of thought ever infallibly entered into solution. From a heartache to a Roman rain there were few contrarieties the great church did not help him to forget.’ The same emotion was later expressed in novel after novel. In times of mental weariness, at moments of crisis, his characters inevitably find their way into some dim nave, to some lit altar; Merton Densher, haunted by his own treachery, enters the Brompton Oratory, ‘on the edge of a splendid service – the flocking crowd told of it – which glittered and resounded, from distant depths, in the blaze of altar lights and the swell of organ and choir. It didn’t match his own day, but it was much less of a discord than some other things actual and possible.’

  It is a rather lukewarm tribute to a religious system, but Strether in The Ambassadors, published in 1903, enters Notre-Dame for a more significant purpose.

  He was aware of having no errand in such a place but the desire not to be, for the hour, in certain other places; a sense of safety, of simplification, which each time he yielded to it he amused himself by thinking of as a private concession to cowardice. The great church had no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what he couldn’t elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday he had earned. He was tired, but he wasn’t plain – that was the pity and the trouble of it; he was able, however, to drop his problem at the door very much as if it had been the copper piece that he deposited, on the threshold, in the receptacle of the inveterate blind beggar. He trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the clustered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid upon him its spell. . . . This form of sacrifice did at any rate for the occasion as well as another; it made him quite sufficiently understand how, within the precinct, for the real refugee, the things of the world could fall into abeyance. That was the cowardice, probably – to dodge them, to beg the question, not to deal with it in the hard outer light; but his own oblivions were too brief, too vain, to hurt anyone but himself, and he had a vague and fanciful kindness of certain persons whom he met, figures of mystery and anxiety, and whom, with observation for his pastime, he ranked with those who were fleeing from justice. Justice was outside, in the hard light, and injustice too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of the long aisles and the brightness of the many altars.

  It is worth noting, in connexion with Mr MacCarthy’s criticism, that this was not Strether’s first visit to Notre-Dame:

  he had lately made the pilgrimage more than once by himself – had quite stolen off, taking an unnoticed chance and making no point of speaking of the adventure when restored to his friends.

  In 1875, Rowland Mallet found in St Peter’s relief for most contrarieties ‘from a heartache to a Roman rain’; in 1903 Strether found in Notre-Dame ‘a sense of safety, of simplification’; the difference is remarkably small, and almost equally small the difference between Strether’s feelings and those of the ‘real refugee’, whom he watches ‘from a respectable distance, remarking some note of behaviour, of penitence, of prostration, of the absolved, relieved state’. Strether wondered whether the attitude of a woman who sat without prayer ‘were some congruous fruit of absolution, of ‘indulgence’. He knew but dimly what indulgence, in such a place, might mean; yet he had, as with a soft sweep, a vision of how it might indeed add to the zest of active rights.’ It would have been a more astonishing avowal if Strether’s knowledge had been less dim, and it must be admitted that the vagueness of James’s knowledge, which led him sometimes ludicrously astray, may have contributed to the emotional appeal.

  But it would be unfair to attribute this constant intrusion of the Catholic Church merely to the unreasoning emotions. There were dogmas in Catholic teaching, avoided by the Anglican Church, which attracted James, and one of these dealt with prayers for the dead.

  Mr MacCarthy mentions James’s horror of ‘the brutality and rushing confusion of the world, where the dead are forgotten’, and James himself, trying to trace the genesis of that beautiful and ridiculous story The Altar of the Dead, came to the conclusion that the idea embodied in it ‘had always, or from ever so far back, been there’. This is not to say that he was conscious of how fully Catholic teaching might have satisfied his desire not merely to commemorate but to share life with the dead. Commemoration – there is as much acreage of marble monuments in the London churches as any man can need; James wanted something more living, something symbolized in his mind, in the story to which I refer, by candles on an altar. It was not exactly prayer, but how close it was to prayer, how near James was to believing that the dead have need of prayer, may be seen in the case of George Stransom.

  He had not had more losses than most men, but he had counted his losses more; he hadn’t seen death more closely, but had in a manner felt it more deeply. He had formed little by little the habit of numbering his Dead: it had come to him early in life that there was something one had to do for them. They were there in their simplified intensified essence, their conscious absence and expressive patience, as personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb. When all sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if their purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so little that they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of the hard usage of life. They had no organized service, no reserved place, no honour, no shelter, no safety.

  The Altar of the Dead I have called ridiculous as well as beautiful, and it is ridiculous because James never understood that his desire to help the dead was not a personal passion, that it did not require secret subjective rites. Haunted by this idea of the neglected dead, ‘the general black truth that London was a terrible place to die in’, by the phrase of his foreign friend, as they watched a funeral train ‘bound merrily by’ on its way to Kensal Green, ‘Mourir à Londres, c’est être bien mort’, James was literally driven into a church. Stransom leaves the grey foggy afternoon for ‘a temple of the old persuasion, and there had evidently been a function – perhaps a service for the dead; the high altar was still a blaze of candles. This was an exhibition he always liked, and he dropped into a seat with relief. More than it had ever yet come home to him it struck him as good there should be churches.’ This one might expect to be the end of Stransom’s search. He had only to kneel, to pray, to remember. But again the subjective beauty of the story is caricatured by the objective action. Stransom buys an altar for one of the chapels: ‘the altar and the sacred shell that half encircled it, consecrated to an ostensible and customary worship, were to be splendidly maintained; all that Stransom reserved to himself was the number of his lights, and the free enjoyment of his intentions’. Surely no one so near in spirit, at any rate in thin one particular, to the Catholic Church was ever so ignorant of its rules. How was it that a writer as careful as James to secure the fullest authenticity for his subjects could mar in this way one of his most important stories? It cannot be said that he had not the time to study Catholicism: there was no limit to the time which James would devote to anything remotely connected with his art. Was it perhaps that the son of the old Swedenborgian was afraid of capture? A friend of James once spoke to him of a lady who had been converted to Catholicism. James was silent for a long while; then he remarked that he envied her.

  The second point which may have attracted James to the Church was its treatment of supernatural evil. The Anglican Church had almost relinquished Hell. It smoked and burned on Sundays only in obscure provincial pulpits, but no day passed in a Catholic Church without prayers for deliverance from evil spirits ‘wandering through the world for the ruin of souls’. This savage elementary belief found an echo in James’s sophisticated mind, to which the evil of the world was very present. He faced it in his work with a religious inten
sity. The man was sensitive, a lover of privacy, but it is absurd for Mr MacCarthy to picture the writer ‘flying with frightened eyes and stopped ears from that City of Destruction till the terrified bang of his sanctuary door leaves him palpitating but safe’.

  If he fled from London to Rye, it was the better to turn at bay. This imaginary world, which according to Mr MacCarthy he created, peopled with ‘beings who had leisure and the finest faculties for comprehending and appreciating each other, where the reward of goodness was the recognition of its beauty’, comes not from James’s imagination but from Mr MacCarthy’s; the world of Henry James’s novels is a world of treachery and deceit, a realist’s world in which Osmond is victorious, Isabel Archer defeated, Densher gains his end and Milly Theale dies disillusioned. The novels are only saved from the deepest cynicism by the religious sense; the struggle between the beautiful and the treacherous is lent, as in Hardy’s novels, the importance of the supernatural, human nature is not despicable in Osmond or Densher, for they are both capable of damnation. ‘It is true to say’, Mr Eliot has written in an essay on Baudelaire, ‘that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned.’ This worst cannot be said of James’s characters: both Densher and the Prince have on their faces the flush of the flames.

  One remembers in this context the poor damned ghost of Brydon’s other self, Brydon, the American expatriate and cultured failure, who returns after many years and in his New York house becomes aware of another presence, the self he might have been, unhappy and ravaged with a million a year and ruined sight and crippled hand. Through the great house he hunts the ghost, until it turns at bay under the fanlight in the entrance hall.

  Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay. This only could it be – this only till he recognized, with his advance, that what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it and in which, so far from being offered in defiance, it was buried as for dark deprecation. So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher light, hard and acute – his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening dress, of dangling double eyeglass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watchguard and polished shoe. . . . He could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape as a proof that he, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn’t be faced in his triumph. Wasn’t the proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and completely spread’? – so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these hands had lost two fingers which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved.

  When the hands drop they disclose a face of horror, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, and as the ghost advances, Brydon falls back ‘as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed’.

  The story has been quoted by an American critic as an example of the fascination and repulsion James felt for his country. The idea that he should have stayed and faced his native scene never left him; he never ceased to wonder whether he had not cut himself off from the source of deepest inspiration. This the story reveals on one level of consciousness; on a deeper level it is not too fanciful to see in it an expression of faith in man’s ability to damn himself. A rage of personality – it is a quality of the religious sense, a spiritual quality which the materialist writer can never convey, not even Dickens, by the most adept use of exaggeration.

  It is tempting to reinforce this point – James’s belief in super-natural evil – with The Turn of the Screw. Here in the two evil spirits – Peter Quint, the dead valet, with his ginger hair and his little whiskers and his air of an actor and ‘his white face of damnation’, and Miss Jessel ‘dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty, and her unutterable woe’ – is the explicit breath of Hell. They declare themselves in every attitude and glance, with everything but voice, to be suffering the torments of the damned, the torments which they intend the two children to share. It is tempting to point to the scene of Miles’s confession, which frees him from the possession of Peter Quint. But James himself has uttered too clear a warning. The story is, in his own words, ‘a fairy-tale pure and simple’, something seasonable for Christmas, ‘a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught . . . the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious’. So a valuable ally must be relinquished, not without a mental reservation that no one by mere calculation could have made the situation so ‘reek with the air of Evil’ and amazement that such a story should have been thought seasonable for Christmas.

  Hell and Purgatory. James came very close to a direct statement of his belief in both of these. What personal experience of treachery and death stood between the author of Washington Square and The Bostonians and the author of The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl is not known. The younger author might have developed into the gentle urbane social critic of Mr MacCarthy’s imagination, the latter writer is only just prevented from being as explicitly religious as Dostoevsky by the fact that neither a philosophy nor a creed ever emerged from his religious sense. His religion was always a mirror of his experience. Experience taught him to believe in supernatural evil, but not in supernatural good. Milly Theale is all human; her courage has not the supernatural support which holds Kate Croy and Charlotte Stant in a strong coil. The rage of personality is all the devil’s. The good and the beautiful meet betrayal with patience and forgiveness, but without sublimity, and their death is at best a guarantee of no more pain. Ralph Touchett dying at Gardencourt only offers himself the consolation that pain is passing. ‘I don’t know why we should suffer so much. Perhaps I shall find out.’

  It would be wrong to leave the impression that James’s religious sense ever brought him nearer than hailing distance to an organized system, even to a system organized by himself. The organizing ability exhausted itself in his father and elder brother. James never tried to state a philosophy and this reluctance to trespass outside his art may have led Mr MacCarthy astray. But no one, with the example of Hardy before them, can deny that James was right. The novelist depends preponderantly on his personal experience, the philosopher on correlating the experience of others, and the novelist’s philosophy will always be a little lop-sided. There is much in common between the pessimism of Hardy and of James; both had a stronger belief in supernatural evil than in supernatural good, and if James had, like Hardy, tried to systematize his ideas, his novels too would have lurched with the same one-sided gait. They retain their beautiful symmetry at a price, the price which Turgenev paid and Dostoevsky refused to pay, the price of refraining from adding to the novelist’s distinction that of a philosopher or a religious teacher of the second rank.

  1933

  THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

  ‘THE conception of a certain young lady affronting her destiny’ – that is how Henry James described the subject of this book, for which he felt, next to The Ambassadors, the greatest personal tenderness. In his wonderful preface (for no other book in the collected edition of his works did he write a preface so rich in revelations and memories) he compares The Portrait of a Lady several times to a building, and it is as a great, leisurely built cathedral that one thinks of it, with immense smooth pillars, side-chapels and aisles, and a dark crypt where Ralph Touchett lies in marble like a crusader with his feet crossed to show that he has seen the Holy Land; sometimes, indeed, it may seem to us too ample a shrine for one portrait until we remember that this master-craftsman always has his reasons: those huge pillars are required to bear the weight of Time (that dark ba
ckward and abysm that is the novelist’s abiding problem): the succession of side-chapels are all designed to cast their particular light upon the high altar: no vista is without its ambiguous purpose. The whole building, indeed, is a triumph of architectural planning: the prentice hand which had already produced some works – Roderick Hudson and The American – impressive if clumsy, and others – The Europeans and Washington Square – graceful if slight, had at last learnt the whole secret of planning for permanence. And the subject? ‘A certain young woman affronting her destiny.’ Does it perhaps still, at first thought, seem a little inadequate?

  The answer, of course, is that it all depends on the destiny, and about the destiny Henry James has in his preface nothing to tell us. He is always something of a conjurer in these prefaces; he seems ready to disclose everything – the source of his story: the technique of its writing: even the room in which he settles down to work and the noises of the street outside. Sometimes he blinds the reader with a bold sleight of hand, calling, for example, The Turn of the Screw ‘a fairy-tale pure and simple’. We must always remain on our guard while reading these prefaces, for at a certain level no writer has really disclosed less.