HENRY JAMES

An Appreciation

1905

The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of
Mr. Henry James's work. His books stand on my shelves in a
place whose accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent
communion. But not all his books. There is no collected
edition to date, such as some of "our masters" have been
provided with; no neat rows of volumes in buckram or half
calf, putting forth a hasty claim to completeness, and con-
veying to my mind a hint of finality, of a surrender to fate
of that field in which all those victories have been won.
Nothing of the sort has been done for Mr. Henry James's
victories in England.

In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of
wonders, one would not exhaust oneself in barren marvelling
over mere bindings, had not the fact, or rather the absence
of the material fact, prominent in the case of other men
whose writing counts (for good or evil) - had it not been,
I say, expressive of a direct truth spiritual and intellec-
tual; an accident of - I suppose - the publishing business
acquiring a symbolic meaning from its negative nature. Be-
cause, emphatically, in the body of Mr. Henry James's work
there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of sur-
render, or even of probability of surrender, to his own
victorious achievement in that field where he is a master.

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Happily, he will never be able to claim completeness; and,
were he to confess to it in a moment of self-ignorance, he
would not be believed by the very minds for whom such a
confession naturally would be meant. It is impossible to
think of Mr. Henry James becoming "complete" otherwise than
by the brutality of our common fate whose finality is mean-
ingless - in the sense of its logic being of a material
order, the logic of a falling stone.

I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James
dips his pen; indeed, I heard that of late he had been dic-
tating; but I know that his mind is steeped in the waters
flowing from the fountain of intellectual youth. The thing -
a privilege - a miracle - what you will - is not quite hidden
from the meanest of us who run as we read. To those who have
the grace to stay their feet it is manifest. After some twenty
years of attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's work,
it grows into absolute conviction which, all personal feeling
apart, brings a sense of happiness into one's artistic exis-
tence. If gratitude, as someone defined it, is a lively sense
of favours to come, it becomes very easy to be grateful to the
author of "The Ambassadors" - to name the latest of his works.
The favours are sure to come; the spring of that benevolence
will never run dry. The stream of inspiration flows brimful
in a predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods of
drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms of the
land of letters, without languor or violence in its force,
never running back upon itself, opening new visions at every

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turn of its course through that richly inhabited country
its fertility has created for our delectation, for our
judgment, for our exploring. It is, in fact, a magic
spring.

With this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring,
of the inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as applied
to Mr. Henry James's inspiration, may be dropped. In its
volume and force the body of his work may be compared rather
to a majestic river. All creative art is magic, is evocation
of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and
surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by
the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration
of the most insignificant tides of reality.

Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of
fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in dark-
ness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a
great multitude. It is rescue work, this snatching of
vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words,
out of the native obscurity into a light where the strugg-
ling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only
possible form of permanence in this world of relative values -
the permanence of memory. And the multitude feels it obscure-
ly too; since the demand of the individual to the artist is,
in effect, the cry "Take me out of myself!" meaning really,
out of my perishable activity into the light of imperishable
consciousness. But everything is relative, and the light of
consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of
the things of this earth, imperishable only as against the

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with my kind, I am inclined to think that the last utterance
will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to
us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is delightful in its
pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will
sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner
of an army having won a barren victory. It will not know
when it is beaten. And perhaps it is right in that quality.
The victories are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear
from a purely strategical, utilitarian point of view. Mr.
Henry James seems to hold that belief. Nobody has rendered
better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how
to drape the robe of spiritual honour about the drooping
form of a victor in a barren strife. And the honour is
always well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry James chron-
icles with such subtle and direct insight are, though only
personal contests, desperate in their silence, none the
less heroic (in the modern sense) for the absence of shout-
ed watchwords, clash of arms and sound of trumpets. Those
are adventures in which only choice souls are ever involved.
And Mr. Henry James records them with a fearless and insis-
tent fidelity to the péripéties of the contest, and the feel-
ing of the combatants.

The fiercest excitements of a romance "de cape et d'espée,"
the romance of yard-arm and boarding pike so dear to youth,
whose knowledge of action (as of other things) is imperfect
and limited, are matched, for the quickening of our maturer
years, by the tasks set, by the difficulties presented, to
the sense of truth, of necessity - before all, of conduct -

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of Mr. Henry James's men and women. His mankind is delight-
ful. It is delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own
itself beaten; it will sleep on the battlefield. These
warlike images come by themselves under the pen; since from
the duality of man's nature and the competition of individuals,
the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a
history of a really very relentless warfare. Neither his
fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man
alone. In virtue of these allies and enemies, he holds his
precarious dominion, he possesses his fleeting significance;
and it is this relation in all its manifestations, great and
little, superficial or profound, and this relation alone,
that is commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the
art of the novelist in the only possible way in which the
task can be performed: by the independent creation of cir-
cumstance and character, achieved against all the diffi-
culties of expression, in an imaginative effort finding
its inspiration from the reality of forms and sensations.
That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be
given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses
of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters
of fiction. There is no other secret behind the curtain.
All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the su-
preme energy of an act of renunciation. It is the uttermost
limit of our power; it is the most potent and effective force
at our disposal on which rest the labours of a solitary man
in his study, the rock on which have been built commonwealths
whose might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans.

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Like a natural force which is obscured as much as illuminated by the multiplicity of phenomena, the power of renunciation is obscured by the mass of weaknesses, vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and compromises which make up the sum of our activity. But no man or woman worthy of the name can pretend to anything more, to anything greater. And Mr. Henry James's men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits his art, so clear, so sure of itself, has drawn round their activities. He would be the last to claim for them Titanic proportions. The earth itself has grown smaller in the course of ages. But in every sphere of human perplexities and emotions, there are more greatnesses than one - not counting here the greatness of the artist himself. Whenever he stands, at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions or his passions to his gods. That is the problem, great enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and knowledge.

In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr. Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. I think that the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable. Fiction is history, human history; or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting - on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian

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may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the
preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
As is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr.
Henry James is the historian of fine consciences.

Of course, this is a general statement; but I don't
think its truth will be, or can be questioned. Its fault
is that it leaves so much out; and, besides, Mr. Henry
James is much too considerable to be put into the nutshell
of a phrase. The fact remains that he has made his choice,
and that his choice is justified up to the hilt by the
success of his art. He has taken for himself the greater
part. The range of a fine conscience covers more good and
evil than the range of conscience which may be called,
roughly, not fine; a conscience, less troubled by the
nice discrimination of shades of conduct. A fine conscience
is more concerned with essentials; its triumphs are more
perfect, if less profitable, in a worldly sense. There is,
in short, more truth in its working for a historian to
detect and to show. It is a thing of infinite complication
and suggestion. None of these escapes the art of Mr. Henry
James. He has mastered the country, his domain, not wild
indeed, but full of romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and
sunny places. There are no secrets left within his range.
He has disclosed them as they should be disclosed - that is,
beautifully. And, indeed, ugliness has but little place in
this world of his creation. Yet it is always felt in the
truthfulness of his art; it is there, it surrounds the scene,
it presses close upon it. It is made visible, tangible, in

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the struggles, in the contacts of the fine consciences, in
their perplexities, in the sophism of their mistakes. For
a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one. What is
natural about it is just its fineness, and abiding sense
of the intangible, ever-present, right. It is most visible
in their ultimate triumph, in their emergence from miracle,
through an energetic act of renunciation. Energetic, not
violent; the distinction is wide, enormous, like that be-
tween substance and shadow.

Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold of
the substance, of what is worth having, of what is worth
holding. The contrary opinion has been, if not absolutely
affirmed, then at least implied, with some frequency. To
most of us, living willingly in a sort of intellectual
moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of truth, the
shadows so firmly renounced by Mr. Henry James's men and
women, stand out endowed with extraordinary value, with a
value so extraordinary that their rejection offends, by
its un-called for scrupulousness, those business-like in-
stincts which a careful Providence has implanted in our
breasts. And, apart from that just cause of discontent,
it is obvious that a solution by rejection must always
present a certain lack of finality, especially startling
when contrasted with the usual methods of solution by re-
wards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a
broken leg or a sudden death. Why the reading public which,
as a body, has never laid upon a story-teller the command
to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of Divine