Page images
PDF
EPUB

HENRY JAMES

(1843-)

ENRY JAMES has added much to American literature in a form of fiction in which he was to some extent an innovator. Still more important is his influence on younger men, through the success with which he carried out his method. The novel of delicate observation, of social details, free form, strong emphasis, depending for its charm on subtlety of suggestion, is largely his creation. This we may see by reading the novels written before his time. We shall then realize better how new a note his was; and then in the works of men ten or fifteen years younger we can see clearly how much there is in their manner directly suggested by him.

When he began, as a very young man, his first work clearly showed his bent. His boyhood had been a preparation for detachment and expression, but it had only emphasized tendencies existing in him from the first. He was born in 1843, in New York city. Even in his earliest years he showed an extraordinary love for refinement and intellectual delicacy. He tells us himself that he used to sit on the hearth-rug and study Punch, when the other boys were playing their games. He wanted to know intimately the life which the pictures of John Leech and the other illustrators suggested to him. They interested him because it was with character they dealt, and because their characteristics were intimacy, light irony, and fineness of detail. When he was only eleven he was able to carry out his hope; and he spent the next six years-among the most impressionable of a boy's life in Italy and England, making still stronger his taste for culture, for art, for charming tradition of every kind, social and artistic. For six years more his home was in Newport, and in his own family he heard always brilliant conversation. His father, Henry James, was an impassioned and eloquent writer on ethics and religion. William James, the psychologist, was a brother; and the rest of the family were all original and expressive talkers. During these years Henry used often to lock himself in his room all day, taking his meals there and refusing to be disturbed. At the end of several days he would show the family a story,- a very bad one at first. When he was about twenty they began to understand that he had talent. His unremitting work was giving him the power of expressing more

adequately the things he saw. In 1862 he entered the Harvard Law School, but studied little law, going instead to listen to lectures of James Russell Lowell and devoting himself to the study of books. His first successes in the magazines decided him to trust to literature as a career. In 1869 he went abroad again, and since then has lived there practically all the time, with Paris at first and then London as his home, and Italy as his chief visiting-place. There is little to tell of his life. It is a quiet study of people in society, of books, of art and places; and the most important results of it are given in an account of his work. His first novel showed only promise, not very much skill. This was 'Watch and Ward,' published in 1871. But after some shorter studies he produced in 1875 'Roderick Hudson,' a novel hardly inferior to his best later work. It combines forcible character study with more sentiment than he ever allows himself in his later books, and with the delicate play of intellectual acuteness which we associate above all else with Mr. James's work. This book made prominent at once the two motives which have been dominant ever since. The first is the contrast between Americans and Europeans. The second is the contrast between the artistic nature on the one hand, and on the other the absolutely prosaic, inartistic, merely human type of man. The earlier novels have more simplicity, more rapid movement, more fun than the later ones. Another point of Mr. James's art comes out clearly in this first long novel; namely, the principle that the story should stop with abruptness and incompleteness, like the tale of any man's life broken off without warning on a certain day. Perhaps the fact that Mr. James has carried on the story of the heroine of this novel in another,― the only instance of that practice in his works,—shows an exceptional interest in her; and he has certainly left no other creation so poetic as Christina Light.

After several more short stories, 'The American' appeared in 1877. Besides retaining much of his early charm, this story gives us the most careful picture of a genuine American which Mr. James has drawn. Most of his books have Americans in them; but they are Americans floating in European circles, who have become denationalized, or else the crude class set in contrast against the background of foreign culture. Christopher Newman, however, is a man through and through, with the native qualities in their most typical form. Another American character, not less famous, Daisy Miller, is the heroine of the story of the same name which appeared two years later. The burlesque element is more marked there. The emphasis is laid on crudities which are noticeable mainly because they are different from certain things in Europe. Still there is in the story also something of the same depth of understanding that appears in the analysis of Christopher Newman; and there is in the character of the

It

heroine a power of pathos which Mr. James has not often shown. is clearly the most popular of his shorter stories. It was dramatized four years later, but without success. In the mean time, in 1881, appeared 'Washington Square,' a gentle and pleasing study, the scene of which is laid in New York's old aristocratic neighborhood; and 'The Portrait of a Lady,' one of the most popular of the longer novels, and containing some of the author's best drawn characters.

Until 1886 less important works appeared; and then came two long novels, the much discussed 'Bostonians' and the less read but more liked 'Princess Casamassima.' 'The Bostonians' was simple in construction, with little plot, giving simply a long, careful picture of three American types. It shows no liking for any one of the characters depicted, but extreme subtlety, and probably as much accuracy as could be obtained without sympathy. The 'Princess Casamassima' is one of the great triumphs of Mr. James's art; and taken with 'Roderick Hudson,' to which it is a sort of sequel, it probably gives a more adequate idea of his art than any other work. In the earlier story of Christina Light the artistic element and charm are at the highest; in the later one, the grayer atmosphere is charged with a power of substantial analysis and construction that he has never surpassed. It was in a review of this novel that Mr. Howells first uttered his earnest appreciation of Mr. James's greatness, his originality, and his influence on younger writers. The Tragic Muse,' which was published in 1890, is the most complicated of his stories, the most difficult in structure, and in spite of its great length it is successful to the end. One of his friends said on reading it, "I will say it is your best novel if you promise never to do it again;" meaning that one step further in the direction of elaboration would be fatal. The characters in this story are English, and Mr. James makes them with hardly an exception more charming than he does his Americans. The warning of his friend has been justified by Mr. James's own books in the last half-dozen years. His strength has been given mainly to an attempt to become more dramatic. Several short comedies were written and not acted. The American' was presented without success; and other unsuccessful efforts in connection with the stage were made, which showed Mr. James's perception of the fact that the drama must be quicker, more striking, than his natural method. Toward that end he is working constantly. His novel 'The Other House,' published in 1896, is so condensed in treatment as well as dramatic in plot that it might be put upon the stage with little change. Few of his admirers ever expected to see a murder in one of Mr. James's books; and yet this last novel, with a plot that might well be called sensational, is one of his most finished pieces of art.

To one who believes that the group of long novels is the best work that Mr. James has done, several reasons present themselves. He writes a great deal, and many of his themes in the shorter stories are simply episodes. The ideas over which he has thought longest, which are large and deeply understood, are in the main saved for the sustained novels. These seldom indulge in the episode: their march is continuous, their effect cumulative. Every page is an integral part of the whole. Of the stories, many of which have simple picturesque motives, this is less true. Their workmanship is less severe. Another reason for the superiority of the great romances is that Mr. James's method of accumulation-of fine distinctions, delicate shades, and few sharp strokes-is in itself less appropriate to the short story.

Although it is in fiction that he is mainly known, as the subtlest of American novelists, and the inventor to a large extent of the present artistic society novel, yet he is also one of our first essayists. Early in his literary career he published Transatlantic Sketches'; and since then have appeared 'Portraits of Places,' 'French Poets and Novelists,' the 'Biography of Hawthorne,' 'Partial Portraits,' 'A Little Tour in France,' and other volumes of essays. There are few more stimulating guides to thought, few more sincere and just appreciations, than can be found among his essays; for Mr. James is a man whose education in life has come largely through books. He is especially happy in his descriptions of the French masters who have influenced him,-Turgénieff, Mérimée, De Maupassant, and others, as well as some Englishmen with whom he is in sympathy, notably Du Maurier. A very subtle artist writing about the work of other artists, he has made such interesting essays that some careful readers put him even higher as a critic than as a novelist. In both kinds of work he has taught the same lesson,—the love of the artistic, perfect finish, which has been carried by him at least as far as by any other American prose writer.

[ocr errors]

The volume called from one of its components 'A Passionate Pilgrim,' published in 1875, contains six of Mr. James's earlier sketches. Among these, 'The Madonna of the Future,' perhaps better than any other, illustrates at once his artistic delicacy of touch, his sympathetic insight into character, and lastly the powerful impression made upon his imagination by the art treasures of Italy. This masterpiece in miniature it is happily possible to present here entire.

« PreviousContinue »