Critical Essays on Henry James by Peter Rawlings

Author:Peter Rawlings [Rawlings, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138611504
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

The letters of Henry James. Selects and editor by Percy Lubbock. Two volumes. Charles Scribuers’s Sons.

James Gibbons Huneker, The Lesson of the Master’, Bookman (New York), 51 (1920), pp. 364–368.

A Shake Down

I have forgotten the moment of lunar imbecility in which I conceived the idea of a “Henry James” number.* The pile of typescript on my floor can but annoyingly and too palpably testify that the madness has raged for some weeks.

Henry James was aware of the spherical form of the planet, and susceptible to a given situation, and to the tone and tonality of persons as perhaps no other author in all literature. The victim and the votary of the “scene,” he had no very great narrative sense, or at the least, he attained the narrative faculty but per aspera, through very great striving.

It is impossible to speak accurately of “his style,” for he passed through several styles which differ greatly one from another; but in his last, his most complicated and elaborate, he is capable of great concision; and if, in it, the single sentence is apt to turn and perform evolutions for almost pages at a time, he nevertheless manages to say on one page more than many a more “direct” author would convey only in the course of a chapter.

His plots and incidents are often but adumbrations or symbols of the quality of his “people,” illustrations invented, contrived, often factitiously and almost transparently, to show what acts, what situations, what contingencies would befit or display certain characters. We are hardly asked to accept them as happening.

He did not begin his career with any theory of art for art’s sake, and a lack of this theory may have damaged his earlier work.

If we take “French Poels and Novelists” as indication of his then (1878) opinions, and novels of the nineties showing a later bias, we might contend that our subject began his career with a desire to square all things to the ethical standards of a Salem mid-week Unitarian prayer meeting, and that to almost the end of his course he greatly desired to fit the world into the social exigencies of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s characters.

Out of the unfortunate cobwebs he emerged into his greatness, I think, by two causes: first by reason of his hatred of personal intimate tyrannies working at close range; and secondly, in later life, because the actual mechanism of his scriptorial processes became so bulky, became so huge a contrivance for record and depiction, that the old man simply couldn’t remember or keep his mind on or animadvert on anything but the authenticity of his impression.

* Little Review, Aug., 1918.

I take it as the supreme reward for an artist; the supreme return that his artistic conscience can make him after years spent in its service, that the momentum of his art, the sheer bulk of his processes, the (si licet) size of his fly-wheel, should heave him out of himself, out of his personal limitations, out of the tangles of heredity and of environment, out of the bias of early training, of early predilections, whether of Florence, A.

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