Critical Essays on Henry James

Peter Rawlings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138611443
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429873126
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1993. Including essays by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and H.G. Wells, this is an anthology of critical thought about Henry James, designed to give scholars and students of James' work access to material that they would otherwise have difficulty finding.

Recent Literature.

IF novelists and poets are not the best critics of their art, they are often the most suggestive commentators upon it; and when they have the skill to formulate and weave together their opinions they give us something rather better than mere criticism. Readers of Mr. Henry James, Jr., were for some time, and a few of them may still be, in doubt whether he is more a novelist than critic; but we think his recent volume of essays¹ may go a good way towards fixing the opinion that his peculiar attractiveness in this line of writing is due in great measure to the fact that he is himself a creative artist. His reviews of other writers are not precisely criticism, but they possess a pleasant flavor of criticism, agreeably diffused through a mass of sympathetic and often keenly analytical impressions. It is saying a great deal when we admit that he reminds us more of Sainte-Beuve than any other English writer; but he is more a causeur than the author of the famous Causeries, and less a critic in the systematic sense. We hardly know how we can fully illustrate our meaning except by more references and quotations than it is convenient to make here. But let the reader turn to the splendid chapter on Balzac, who has never before received so abundant and interesting a showing, within similar compass, as at Mr. James’s hands. In this there are to be found most of the interesting facts of Balzac’s life grouped with good judgment, a sketchy view of the character of his works, and a great many vivid statements of the impressions produced by them. But we can imagine that to a person who had read nothing of Balzac the article would have an exasperating inconclusiveness. It is a mixture of the frankest admiration and (to use Mr. James’s own word) of brutal snubbing, which continues to the very last page. The one unqualified statement — and that, by the way, is a real gain to one’s stock of well-defined perceptions—is that Balzac’s great characteristic was his “sense of this present terrestrial life, which has never been surpassed, and in which his genius overshadowed everything else.” For the rest, we are given to understand that his greatest merits were his greatest faults; that his novels are ponderous and shapeless, yet have more composition and more grasp on the reader’s attention than any others, etc. “He believed that he was about as creative as the Deity, and that if mankind and human history were swept away the Comćdio Humaine would be a perfectly adequato substitute for them,” is the writer’s witty statement of the degree of his conceit; and he quotes Taine, approvingly, as saying that after Shakespeare Balzac is our great magazine of documents on human nature; yet this he partially retracts, again, by saying that when Shakespeare is suggested we feel rather Balzac’s differences from him. The French novelist’s atmosphere, we are told, is musty, limited, artificial. In the next sentence, however, Mr. James assures us that, notwithstanding this “artificial” atmosphere, Balzac is to be taken, like Shakespeare, as a final authority on human nature. Then again he lowers him a peg by saying that he lacked “that slight but needful thing,—charm.” “But our last word about aim is that he had incomparable power.” The writer himself seems to feel, in this closing sentence, that he has given a somewhat too paradoxical summary. The same difficulty could be raised with all the other essays in this collection, excepting the one on Tourguèneff, which comes near being a masterpiece of criticism, and perhaps ought to be decidedly rated as such. In general, there is a want of some positive or negative result clearly enunciated; and the presence of such results is what, to our mind, distinguishes the systematic critic like Sainte-Beuve or Matthew Arnold from the highly suggestive, charming talker like Mr. James.

If we are speaking of criticism, the question is whether we are to approach as nearly as possible to an equation of conflicting views, or whether we are to work out a problem to some conclusion on one side or the other. As a matter of definition we are inclined to say that pure criticism has for its aim the latter task. In the case of Balzac, for example, there is a wonderful stimulus and surprise in the obvious inadequacy and disrelish with which Sainte-Beuve treats him. The very narrowness of hit judgment has a value. Mr. James may say that he does not write either for readers who simply want information about French authors, or for those who prefer opinions that cat only one way; and that he cultivates breadth, of set purpose. It is not necessary, however, to be narrow in taking a side: there are critics who show the finest comprehension of all the aspects of a genius, yet on the whole advocate a certain view with satisfactory unity and consecutiveness. We find fault with Mr. James’s attitude, judged as a critic, because it implies a certain nervousness that if he curtails his contradictory impressions he may not appear liberal enough. With less extreme expression and more art, liberality need not fear to be overlooked. Λ fault connected with this is the tone of patronage which the writer is led to take towards the larger minds among those which he discusses; and possibly attributable to the same source is a not altogether pleasant jocularity in the treatment of those dubious relations between men and women which the themes selected naturally involve.

William Dean Howells, ‘Recent literature’, a Review of French Poets and Novelists, Atlantic Monthly, 42 (1878), pp. 118–119.

But we have said that a creative artist discoursing on the works of other creators can be more entertaining than the mere critic; and Mr. James is irresistible in the ease and brilliancy of his style, and the felicity with which he calls our attention to the qualities most to be admired in his subjects and traces some of the reasons why they are admirable. Next to the Tourguéneff we like best the paper on De Musset, which differs from all the others in having to some extent the tone of advocacy, and pushing its view of the poet with a thoroughly enjoyable ardor. That on Merimé’s Letters is almost too slight to keep company with the rest, and we do not know how to excuse, in the essay on the Theatre Français, the haste with which Mile. Sarah Bernhard is passed by. Even with the style, too, one is occasionally dissatisfied, owing to some obscurity which seems to be due to a disinclination to correct. It is regrettable that we have not space to pay the homage of quotation to several of the searching, the humorous, the sympathetic things which Mr. James scatters copiously over his pages; and we cannot deny ourselves, in closing, the privilege of reproducing here, if only in tribute to our own appreciativcuess, these fragments from the shrewd and trenchant essay on Baudelaire. “A good way to embrace Baudelaire at a glance is to say that he was in his treatment of evil exactly what Hawthorne was not, — Hawthorne, who felt the thing at its source, deep in the human consciousness. Baudelaire’s infinitely slighter genius apart, he was a sort of Hawthorne reversed.” “The crudity of sentiment of the advocates of ‘art for art’ is often a striking example of the fact that a great deal of what is called culture may fail to dissipate a well-seated provincialism of spirit. They talk of morality as Miss Edgeworth’s infantine heroes and heroines talk of ‘physic’. . . It is in reality simply a part of the essential richness of inspiration, — it has nothing to do with the artistic process, and it has everything to do with the artistic effect.” That is almost the best thing in this superior book. The point has hardly been put with so much grasp and cleverness before.

¹ Fnntk Poets and Novelist. By HENRY JAMES, Ja. London · Macmillan & Go. 1878.

— Mr. Henry James’s last volume, French Poets and Novelists, is the most perversely uncertain book of criticism I have ever read. No sooner have you pinned your faith upon some excellent sentences, breathing admiration for one of the French geniuses he discusses, than upon turning the leaf you discover another set of paragraphs concerning the same person, equally excellent, but bristling with censure. He never says one single admiring word without coming back, sooner or later, to take the life out of it with a thrust as keen as it is skillful. He is so anxiously impartial that, from beginning to end, we are never sure where he stands himself; like the countryman, who, upon hearing of a certain great fortune, fixed his eyes upon a fence and remarked thoughtfully, “Well, if I had that amount of money, I wouldn’t live here. No, by George! — nor anywhere else!” so in this volume Mr. James certainly is n’t here; no, nor anywhere else! In spite of his delightful style, therefore, I felt after reading these pages of his as if I would like to have a partisan admirer of each one of those French geniuses enter, take a chair, and talk to me for at least an hour, just to restore my balance.

Emerson defines a partisan as a narrow man who, because he does not see many things, sees some one intensely and becomes inspired by it. Now Mr. James sees so many things, sees so widely, that he loses, I think, the entirety, the plain effect of the whole. And, if we are not careful, he is such a wizard with his words that he will make us lose it too. He will describe to you so accurately and beautifully the ten thousand nerves and muscles, their hues and purposes, that you will forget that your interest should be in the whole, not parts, and that the most perfect colored map known of the nerves and muscles is not, after all, the man. His book therefore, as a whole, is unsatisfactory. Every one can see how slight, insufficient, and hurried are some of these papers; like the one on Merimée. And as for the one on the Théâtre Français, — what shall we say of a man who, after proposing to bring before us, one by one, the principal members of that perfect company, rings down the curtain and goes home without calling forward the one who to ninety-nine out of a hundred of us is by far the most interesting, namely, Sara Bernhardt? Then he gives us ever so many charming microscopic pages about a departed French lady of whom we have never heard, and only a patched-up account of George Sand! And so on. Finally, he really uses that reporter’s word “enjoyable.” I am so pleased by this last that I voluntarily acknowledge the delightfulness of such phrases as “her serene volubility,” “the earth-scented facts of life,” “tragically uncomfortable,” and others like them, with which the pages are gemmed; his style certainly is delicious. Only, one resents even deliciousness when it is continually presented at the point of the bayonet.

The paper on Tourguéneff is a strong contribution, alas! to the “Tourguéneff literature” of to-day. In it he says, alas!” Nothing in my opinion cultivates the taste more [alas!] than to read him.” (The sighs are mine.) Mr. James has let himself out a breadth here. Whether he balances it with something terrible on the next page, as usual, I do not remember; but I will balance it with something which I consider terrible (although I presume he does not) from his own essay. It was so dreadful that I wrote it down. “He [Tourguéneff] is a storyteller who has taken notes. If we are not mistaken, he writes down an idiosyncrasy of character, a fragment of talk, an attitude, a feature [yes, especially noses], a gesture, and keeps it if need be for twenty years, till just the moment for using it comes, just the spot for placing it.” Precisely. That is the way it reads, — a patchwork of facts, attitudes, and features. But where is the beauty? Where is the interest? Where is the passion? Where the continuity? And more than all, where is the happiness? French Poets and Novelists. By Henry James. (London : Macmillan & Co., 1878.)

[Unsigned], A Review of French Poets and Novelists, Atlantic Monthly, 42 (1878), pp. 508–509.

SOME people, we believe, are of opinion that there is too much criticism nowadays. It is hardly to be expected., however, that critics themselves should be thus minded; and for our own part we are very glad to welcome plenty more of it. It is extremely unlikely that any man of competent culture and intelligence can set himself seriously to work to tell us how the productions of other men affect him without teaching us something the learning of which is both interesting in itself and useful as a help to the study of his subjects. In great part of the book before us, moreover, Mr. James speaks with the authority of actual experience. He has himself applied his notions of what a novel should be to the task of actual novel-production, and that not without’ considerable success. The fact does not, perhaps, add to the authority of his criticism, but it certainly adds to its interest. The contents of the book are sufficiently miscellaneous. There are three essays on French poets, De Musset, Gautier, and Baudelaire; four on French novelists, George Sand, Balzac, De Bernard, and Flaubert; and some others on subjects which, though not exactly answering to the title, are not very far removed from it, such as the Russian novelist Turgénieff, Merimée’s Lettree à une Inconnue, and so forth, besides a paper, the most interesting of all, to our thinking, on Mr. James’s own impressions of French actors.

We may say at once, and frankly, that Mr, James does not take high rank as a poetical critic. There is indeed one remark of his, which, unless we mistake him, settles his claims in this direction. He speaks of Poe’s “very valueless verses.” Now we are of course well enough aware’ of the incomprehensible fancy of American critics for depreciating Poe, and we are also well aware that all critics are entitled to differ as to his comparative merits according as they take for their criterion his best, average, or worst work. Perhaps Mr. James only means that some of the verses are very valueless. But if he means to apply that epithet to “Annabel Lee “and” The Haunted Palace,” to mention no others, we must regretfully inform him that he is out of court. He thus confesses himself to possess no ear, and, without an ear, poetical criticism is impossible. It so happens, however, that no one of the three poets treated by Mr. James is a poet pure and simple, and hence there is still much that is interesting in his essays. That on Gautier abounds with ingenious epigram, and will be found very amusing reading. Mr. James’s admiration for Alfred de Musset is satisfactory, after the rather hard measure which both in England and France has been of late years dealt to that poet, and the critic’s appreciation of things dramatic makes his verdict a valuable one. As to Baudelaire Mr, James will hardly expect us to agree with him. His remarks are, however, decidedly interesting as presenting very well the merely common-sense view of the matter—a view which is indeed generally that which Mr. James prefers. The fault is that the writer has not taken in anything like the whole of his subject. Somebody has very happily observed that the decriers of Voltaire speak of him “as if he had never done anything but write the Pucelle and make jokes on Habakkuk.” Mr. James and his like write of Baudelaire as if he had never dono anything but write La Charoync and talk about baby’s brain a. It is rather amusing to find that Mr. James makes absolutely no mention of the Petits Poâmes en Prose. “Les Bienfaits de la Lime” and “La Belle Doro-theo” would have squared but awkwardly with his theory of Baudelaire’s ex elusive devotion to “the nasty.”

Very different is Mr. James’s handling of the novelists. His essays on Sand and Balzac aro really admirable. One feels not only that he is thoroughly acquainted with the whole range of subject in each case, but that his matter-of-fact, external way of looking at it has its advantage. As an instance of this we may mention that while his admiration for Balzac is unstinted—indeed those who know Mr. James’s own novels can best judge of this—he fully admits the “lack of charm” which is the great fault of the Comedie Humaine, and which most of its admirers deny so lustily. Again, after speaking with the utmost relish of Ceorge Sand, he confesses that ho cannot read her books twice, a difficulty we fancy more often felt than admitted. If we had to find fault with this part of the book we should say that the life and personality of the writers seems to possess a rather disproportionate interest for Mr. James, but tin’s is natural enough in one who is evidently a student of life and character rather than of books. On the other hand it would be difficult to find a better piece of mere book criticism —putting the opinions expressed aside— than the notice of Madame Bovary, not an easy book to criticise cither. It is curious to contrast with this Mr. James’s summary depreciation of the masterly Tentation de Saint Antoine. In dealing with Charles do Bernard the criticism is again one of the man almost as much as of his work, and a capital piece of criticism it is of its kind. The miscellaneous essays at the end of the book will not be of least interest to the reader. The first is on Turgénieff. We are not told whether Mr. James derives his knowledge of the Russian novelist from the originals or from translations, but whichever of the two be his source of information, ho has evidently studied his subject very carefully. The paper might, perhaps, be better entitled “The Characteristics of a Novelist, as oxhibitod in Ivan Turgénieff,” and it contains some interesting hints as to Mr. James’s views of his own function. We are very glad to sec that ho fully recognises the necessity of basing novel-writing on the study of character. The two next papers aro on the letters of the Ampèrcs and of Madame de Sabran, and they are capital examples of the sort of narrativo exposition which Sainte-Beuve put in vogue. In treating of Merimée Mr. James is, perhaps, again a little inadequate, because the man in Merimée is distinctly inferior to the litterateur. But the dramatic criticism which closes the volume is very pleasant and full of life. Mr. James is one of those good Americans who have gone to Paris before they die, and his enjoyment of the fine things Paris has to offer is quite exhilarating. Altogether the book is one to be recommonded, though we should like exactly to reverse the order of its component parts, because, as it is, Mr. James has not put his best foot foremost. As a critic of pure literature he is somewhat defective: but as a critic of life as represented in literature he takes very high rank indeed, and gives promise of much success in his other and more peculiar vocation of novelist.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

George Saintsbury, A Review of French Poets and Novelists, Academy, 13 (20 April 1878), pp. 337–338.

James’s Hawthorne.¹

MR. JAMES’S book on Hawthorne, in Morley’s English Men of Letters series, merits far closer examination and care-fuller notice than we can give it here, alike for the interest of its subject, the peculiarity of its point of view, and the charm and distinction of its literature. An American author writing of an American author for an English public incurs risks with his fellow-countrymen which Mr. James must have faced, and is much more likely to possess the foreigner whom he addresses with a clear idea of our conditions than to please the civilization whose portrait is taken. Forty-six, fifty, sixty-four, are not dates so remote, nor are Salem and Concord societies so extinct, that the people of those periods and places can be safely described as provincial, not once, but a dozen times; and we foresee, without any very powerful prophetic lens, that Mr. James will be in some quarters promptly attainted of high treason. For ourselves, we will be content with saying that the provinciality strikes us as somewhat over-insisted upon, and that, speaking from the point of not being at all provincial ourselves, we think the epithet is sometimes mistaken. If it is not provincial for an Englishman to be English, or a Frenchman French, then it is not so for an American to be American; and if Hawthorne was “exquisitely provincial,” one had better take one’s chance of universality with him than with almost any Londoner or Parisian of his time. Provinciality, we understand it, is a thing of the mind or the soul; but if it is a thing of the experiences, then that is another matter, and there is no quarrel. Hawthorne undoubtedly saw less of the world in New England than one sees in Europe, but he was no cockney, as Europeans are apt to be.

At the same time we must not be thought to deny the value and delight-fulness of those chapters on Salem and Brook Farm and Concord. They are not very close in description, and the places seem deliciously divined rather than s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General Editor’ Preface
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. William Dean Howells, ‘Recent Literature’, A Review of French Poets and Novelists, Atlantic Monthly, 42 (1878), pp. 118–119.
• 2. [Unsigned], A Review of French Poets and Novelists, Atlantic Monthly, 42 (1878), pp. 508–509.
• 3. George Saintsbury, A Review of French Poets and Novelists, Academy, 13 (20 April 1878), pp. 337–338.
• 4. William Dean Howells, ‘James’s Hawthorne’, Atlantic Monthly, 45 (1880), pp. 282–285.
• 5. [Unsigned], ‘James’s Hawthorne’, Nation, 30 (1880), pp. 80–81.
• 6. William Dean Howells, ‘Henry James, Jr.’, Century Magazine, 25, n.s. 3 (1882), pp. 28–29.
• 7. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, Longman’s Magazine, 5 (1884), pp. 139–147.
• 8. [Unsigned], A Review of French Poets and Novelists, Dial, 5 (1884), p. 16.
• 9. James Ashcroft Noble, A Review of Partial Portraits, Academy, No. 841, 16 June 1888, pp. 406–407.
• 10. [Unsigned, Woodberry], A Review of Partial Portraits, Atlantic Monthly, 62 (1888), pp. 564–568.
• 11. [Unsigned], ‘James’s “Partial Portraits’”, Nation, 47 (1888), pp. 75–76.46
• 12. Robert Buchanan, ‘The Modern Young Man as Critic’, Universal Review, 3 (1889), pp. 353–372.
• 13. [Unsigned], ‘Henry James’, A Review of Essays in London and Elsewhere, Nation, 57 (1893), pp. 416–417.
• 14. [Unsigned], ‘Contemporary Essays’, A Review of Essays in London and Elsewhere, Atlantic Monthly, 73 (1894), pp. 267–268.
• 15. [Unsigned], ‘Mr. Henry James as an Essayist’, A Review of Essays in London and Elsewhere, Dial, 16 (1894), p. 25.
• 16. Annie Macdonnell, ‘Henry James’, Bookman (New York), 4 (1896), pp. 20–22.
• 17. [Unsigned], ‘Critic and Author’, Living Age, 236 (3 January 1903), pp. 61–63.
• 18. Elizabeth Luther Cary, The Novels of Henry James: A Study (New York and London, 1905), pp. 34–38, 169–188.
• 19. [Unsigned], ‘Brilliant Essays by Mr. James’, A Review of The Question of our Speech and The Lesson of Balzac, Dial (1905), p. 311.
• 20. Edward E. Hale, ‘The Rejuvenation of Henry James’, Dial, 44 (1908), pp. 174–176.
• 21. Montgomery Schuyler, ‘Henry James Done Over’, New York Times, 13 (11 January 1908), pp. 13–15.
• 22. Edward Clark Marsh, ‘Henry James: Auto-Critic’, Bookman (New York), 30 (1909), pp. 138–143.
• 23. W.C. Brownell, American Prose Masters (New York, 1909), pp. 238242, 260–263.
• 24. M. Sturge Gretton, ‘Mr. Henry James and his Prefaces’, Contemporary Review, 150 (1912), pp. 69–78.
• 25. Ford Madox Hueffer, Henry James: A Critical Study (London, 1913), pp. 135–140.
• 26. Louis I. Bredvold, ‘Essays on the Novel’, A Review of Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes, Dial (1914), pp. 332–333.
• 27. Philip Littell, ‘Henry James as Critic’, A Review of Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes, New Republic, 21 November 1914, pp. 26–28.
• 28. Henry Sydnor Harrison, A Review of Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes, Yale Review (1914), pp. 608–611.
• 29. Brander Matthews, ‘Henry James’s “Notes on Novelists’”, Bookman (New York), 40 (1914), pp. 460–462.
• 30. Rebecca West, ‘Reading Henry James in War Time’, New Republic, 27 February 1915, pp. 98–100.
• 31. T.S. Eliot, ‘In Memory of Henry James’, Egoist, 5, No. 1 (January 1918), pp. 1–2.
• 32. John Rodker, ‘The Notes on Novelists’, Little Review, 5 (August 1918), pp. 53–56.
• 33. James Gibbons Huneker, ‘The Lesson of the Master’, Bookman (New York), 51 (1920), pp. 364–368.
• 34. Ezra Pound, Instigations (New York, 1920), pp. 111–113, 122–128.
• 35. John G. Palache, ‘The Critical Faculty of Henry James’, University of California Chronicle, 26 (1924), pp. 399–410.
• 36. A.B. Walkley, ‘Henry James and His Letters’, Fortnightly Review, n.s. 107 (1928), pp. 864–873.
• 37. Morris Roberts, Henry James’s Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), pp. 4–9, 57–79.
• 38. George E. DeMille, Literary Criticism in America: A Preliminary Survey (New York, 1931), pp. 158–181.
• 39. Van Wyck Brooks, ‘Henry James as a Reviewer’, in Sketches in Criticism (New York, 1932), pp. 190–196.
• 40. H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866), 2 vols. (London, 1934), II, pp. 487–494.
• 41. Conrad Aiken, A Review of The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, edited by Richard P. Blackmur, Criterion, 14 (1935), pp. 667–669.
• 42. Allan Wade, ‘Introduction’ to The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, by Henry James, edited by Allan Wade (London, 1949), pp. xii–xxv.
• 43. R.P. Blackmur, ‘Introduction’, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James (London and New York, 1947), pp. vii–xxxix.
• 44. René Wellek, ‘Henry James’s Literary Theory and Criticism’, American Literature, 30 (1958), pp. 293–321.
• 45. Mark Spilka, ‘Henry James and Walter Besant: “The Art of Fiction” Controversy’, in Towards a Poetics of Fiction, edited by Mark Spilka (Bloomington and London, 1977), pp. 190–208.
• 46. Matthew Little, ‘Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction”: Word, Self, Experience’, Philological Quarterly, 64 (1985), pp. 225–238.
• 47. Philip Home, A Review of Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, a bibliography, by Fred Kaplan, The Guardian, 15 December 1992.