Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought

A Study in the Relationship between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James

Richard A. Hocks

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807878767, 9780807812259
• eBook ISBN: 9781469640242
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This brilliant new study is the first comprehensive and penetrating exploration of the complex and important aesthetic and intellectual relationship between the Jameses. Hocks relates organically what William thought to how Henry thought, and his convincing argument becomes a profound examination of Henry's mind and the way in which his work dramatized a particular philosophical attitude through its unique and felicitous style.

Originally published in 1974.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Part One

William and Henry James: The Nature of the Relationship

I. Perspective, Method, and Aesthetic Assumptions

There may be times when what is most needed is, not so much a new discovery or a new idea as a different “slant”; I mean a comparatively slight readjustment in our way of looking at the things and ideas on which attention is already fixed.

OWEN BARFIELD, Saving the Appearances

In the final volume, recently published, of what is now the definitive biography of Henry James, Professor Leon Edel quotes from a hitherto unpublished letter by William James in which the philosopher declines membership in the Academy of Arts and Letters, because, in part, “my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy.”¹ Edel maintains that such an “irrational” gesture by William James constitutes the surfacing of a “hidden animus” for Henry James that was lifelong and indeed became most fully expressed in the philosopher’s antagonism toward his brother’s late style.

Almost immediately Edel was challenged by Jacques Barzun, who, as current president of the Academy, has access to the letter in question. Barzun contends that Edel has distorted the tone of William James’s remarks, totally overlooked his comic irony, and needlessly de-emphasized the various other reasons given explicitly in the letter for not joining the organization.² It is the sort of debate which gives little promise of being resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. Edel is Henry James’s definitive biographer, and his case has the authority of a Life which has taken five volumes and twenty-one years to write, and which in turn culminates his lifelong study of Henry James. On the other hand, no student of either of the famous brothers has ever previously failed to be impressed by the warm relations that seemed, at least, to exist between them, however different the directions of their respective intellectual lives or their distinctive temperaments. The portrait drawn of their relationship in Gay Wilson Allen’s William James (1967) is as close and fundamentally affectionate, as lacking in psychic hostility and “rivalry,” as it had been earlier in Ralph Barton Perry’s monumental Thought and Character of William James (1935), where the discussion was of course more on the side of intellectual rather than personal biography.³

In the pages that follow I shall be presenting a case the implications of which can be shown, I believe, to be ultimately compatible with both positions; a case, that is, which may be said to clarify them both by suggesting the actual relationship between them. More immediately and directly, however, my allegiances belong with and my argument derives from the older position, although I am not at all embarking here on a biographical study. This book, then, attempts to present the only case left, the only one which has not as yet received its extensive treatment, although it has certainly been many times suggested and talked about. William James’s growing impatience with Henry’s work of the “major phase” has long been known, and it has now been given a prominent psychological foundation in the Edel biography. But the obverse view—namely, Henry James’s growing affirmation of and identity with William’s philosophical thought during the same period of time—has been correspondingly ignored or else (as in Perry’s work) fully cited and promptly dismissed. Leon Edel, for one, does not quote Henry’s extensive claims of apposition with William’s “later thought”; neither does Gay Wilson Allen, however, even though his view of the personal relationship might perhaps have prompted it. Only Ralph Barton Perry and F. O. Matthiessen have to my knowledge cited the full range of Henry’s remarks and then chosen to discard them—Perry unhesitatingly, Matthiessen more thoughtfully.⁴

I am proposing essentially that William James’s pragmatistic thought is literally actualized as the literary art and idiom of his brother Henry James, especially so in the later work. I would suggest that, whereas William is the pragmatist, Henry is, so to speak, the pragmatism; that is, he possesses the very mode of thinking that William characteristically expounds. To embody so fully William’s thought, I would further contend, is to be “Jamesian” in just those ways that have long been the subject of literary criticism. In other words I do not propose a radically new and different interpretation as such of Henry James, either of his themes or of his distinctive method: he has probably received, all in all, about the best critical exegesis of any American writer. At the same time I would argue that his later work, at least, can be literally and positively reinterpreted by way of this perspective: the difference between a reinterpretation and a new one is that expressed in the epigraph to this chapter. Nevertheless, my aim remains primarily that of demonstrating the remarkable congruity between William’s philosophical thought and the Jamesian idiom much perceived by the literary criticism. It is a relationship something like that between “vitamin C” and the orange.

For this reason the reader should not anticipate an argument from “influence” which, even if there were some evidence for it, does not truly clarify the nature of the relationship between their respective work. Nor should he expect an argument in any way analogous to Quentin Anderson’s thesis, that James’s three late novels—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl—form a unified allegory of his father’s Swedenborgian religious thought.⁵ A Henry James who embodies William’s pragmatistic thought is certainly no allegorist, but a psychological realist who possesses as well a prevailing measure or characteristic tendency toward ethical idealism.⁶ The Henry James of this study can be shown, above all, to have “unconsciously pragmatised,” which is what the novelist himself unquestionably believed and which he never conceived to have extended to his father’s thought. That there is an overtone, an idealistic resonance, from Henry Senior present in both William’s and Henry’s work is a more reasonable and persuasive hypothesis; and it is one which was given its hearing ten years before Quentin Anderson by F. O. Matthiessen in The James Family.⁷

I have said that the relationship that obtains between William and Henry James might perhaps be imaged as that between “vitamin C” and the orange. The demands of demonstrating such a conjunction are often different from those of presenting conventional “influence”; they are even different—not entirely, but at certain key points—from presenting an extended series of internal parallels. The reader should keep in mind that Henry James does not merely express William’s views or “doctrine” in his work, but that William in his thought effectively “names” or “tells” what Henry characteristically portrays or dramatizes. William’s famous subtitle for Pragmatism—A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking—is therefore the appropriate key signature for the kind of relationship to be found in this study. It is also the relationship perceived by Henry himself, particularly in his reference to “M. Jourdain.”⁸ It is perhaps worth recalling in this general context the remarks made by one of James’s better critics, Dorothea Krook, at the conclusion of her study of his later work—The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James. “There remains,” she writes, “the question of the sources of James’s view of reality and its essential logic as these have been outlined here. It will be evident that it has affinities with the so-called idealist philosophies of the nineteenth century; and it is even possible that James was aware of the connexion.” Krook then continues:

I have thought it safer, however, to proceed on the hypothesis that he did not take it from anywhere, or anybody, in particular: neither from Hegel, nor F. H. Bradley, nor from his brother William’s Pragmatism, nor (least of all) from his father’s Swedenborgian system. I have supposed he took it from the ambient air of nineteenth-century speculation, whose main current was the preoccupation with the phenomenon of self-consciousness. To this air he had been exposed from his earliest years; and the animating intellectual atmosphere of his remarkable home, created by his father and the circle of gifted friends and relations commemorated in the pages of Notes of a Son and Brother, made perhaps the heaviest contribution to Henry James’s philosophical development.⁹

Krook does acknowledge in a footnote the fact of Henry’s claims of identity with “William’s Pragmatism.” Her general conclusion, however, as it is here expressed, is both representative and significant. It is representative in its wish to avoid tying James down to anyone’s philosophical “system”; it is significant because Krook’s view of James is a good deal more explicitly philosophical in its implications than that of the overwhelming majority of Jacobite critics, for whom James is preeminently an artist and not a philosopher.

My own view is perhaps more “cordial”—to use one of William’s favorite pragmatistic terms—to Krook’s remarks than may at first appear. Indeed I hope my view can be shown to be equally “cordial” to any number of critics for whom Krook’s own approach makes James too much of a “thinker.”¹⁰ The key to the whole issue, really, is the precise quality of that “ambient air of nineteenth-century speculation . . . the preoccupation with the phenomenon of self-consciousness”; that is to say, how, first, to identify the main currents of that “ambient air”; and how, second, to put ourselves back—if indeed it is possible to do so—into something like an internal or “existential” relationship with it. The answer to the first problem involves us with William James, both because he articulated the “new” psychology in his famous “stream of consciousness” argument and because his pragmatism, itself an organic development from his psychology, was, as he said, “A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.” The answer to the second question is more difficult, obviously, and involves in the most fundamental way our views of what constitutes proper “historiography.” The relationship here proposed between William and Henry James is one which merits, at least in part, the sort of approach to the materials of the past outlined by Owen Barfield in his book Speaker’s Meaning, or found in the following passage from Saving the Appearances, where he concludes his chapter on “The Texture of Medieval Thought”:

It will be well to point out here that, if I have concentrated on one particular medieval philosopher [Thomas Aquinas], rather than attempted a conspectus of the whole field of medieval philosophy or theories of knowledge, it is because that is the method which a history of consciousness, as distinct from a history of ideas, must adopt. It must attempt to penetrate into the very texture and activity of thought, rather than to collate conclusions. It is concerned, semantically, with the way in which words are used rather than with the product of discourse. Expressed in terms of logic, its business is more with the proposition than with the syllogism and more with the term than with the proposition. Therefore it must particularize. It must choose some one, or at best a few points, for its penetration.¹¹

The method here called for by Barfield is one that Henry James throughout his career naturally adopted, his “sense of the past,” although James characteristically limited its scope to his own “cultivated consciousness,” as in the late autobiographical volumes, or to the more immediate past of his central fictional characters, as in Lambert Strether’s memories of Woollett and of Mrs. Newsome in The Ambassadors. It assumes increasing importance, moreover, in his very late “ghostly” tales, such as “The Jolly Corner” or the unfinished Sense of the Past, where it only begins to approach a conscious theory or Weltanschauung proper, having earlier and throughout most of his career been a matter of subordinating all historical and ideological “background” materials to the dramatic presentation of character and individual consciousness. It is not so important, however, that we subscribe to the notion that James’s methodology anticipated the viability of a history of consciousness, as distinct from a history of ideas. In his case we happen to be confronted with the appropriate sensibility, much as we speak of those writers, James included, who “anticipated” Freud. What is important is the pertinence of such a methodology and the assumptions on which it is based to our ever “penetrating” that “ambient air” referred to by Dorothea Krook. The William-Henry relationship simply forces us to attempt such an exploration, because it is the most appropriate way to test the proposition—Henry James’s proposition—that “all [his] life” he had “unconsciously pragmatised.” Although the issue is not one of influence, it is one of a “family consciousness”; beyond that, however, it is a situation which extends to and bespeaks the brothers’ fundamental and similar participation in the inner working of the later nineteenth century.

The adoption of such a method as the one just outlined is not, however, so pervasive in this study as to present any real difficulties in comprehension or clarification. It is more in the way of a guiding presupposition and only surfaces as an obvious “strategy” in Part 2, the rather unusual “explication” there given a well-known letter by James to Henry Adams. This segment rather unabashedly utilizes the letter to Adams as a convenient “locus” for an extended foray into the Jamesian mind or—more properly—mode of thinking. The letter is, really, an “excuse,” a point of departure, a way to move into and eventually to come out of the Jamesian mind. It provides purely artificial boundaries for my examination, but that examination has—as will quickly become apparent—a far more ambitious subject and scope. It examines the main lines of Henry James’s later fiction and criticism and its counterpart in the philosophical thought of his brother. This use of a “moment” or “locus” in the Adams letter simply means that I have taken seriously Kant’s famous adage that “concepts without percepts are blind,” and extended it to the William Jamesian position that experience is always conjunctive and continuous, and that within its ongoing circular movement ideas have their role to play: they are “transitional,” i.e., generated by an experience in order to terminate back in the experience. The letter may thus be thought of as a “chosen” experience; whereas my discussion, via it, of James’s writings and of William’s thought, together with my ranging over the mid and late nineteenth century—these may be conceived of as a series of “transitional” ideas, both generated by the “moment” (the letter) and then terminated in it again and again. Let me add that since this is a study of the Jameses and not a lyric poem I have taken pains to remember, especially in this same section, the rest of Kant’s adage: “percepts without concepts are dumb.” For most readers the main value of Part 2 will lie in the demonstration of the surprisingly total identity of William’s thought with Henry’s idiom; at the same time the continual occasion for it, the continued and persistent presence of the letter, may appear puzzling—as though the weight of importance has been reversed and matters big and broad are needlessly made as if to “depend” on the less significant letter. Of course the argument does not, obviously, depend on the letter to Adams. My making it appear to do so merely simulates—and at a distance—the distinctively Jamesian mode of thinking I am at the same time writing about. The philosophical name for this procedure, in any case, is William’s doctrine of “ambulation,” the subject of the last chapter of Part 1. A more familiar term from Henry James for the very same process is that of a “germ”—I have used the letter to Adams as a germ.

It is my hope nevertheless that the section just spoken of may serve to reinforce the general proposal that the William-Henry relationship is one that yields additional understanding from the sort of penetration that occurs at the level of history of consciousness rather than that of the history of ideas. As we have seen Barfield point out, the former approach “must particularize . . . mu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One. William and Henry James: The Nature of the Relationship
• Part Two. The Brothers “Confluent,” “Conjoined,” “Concatenated”: A Letter to Henry Adams
• Part Three. Pragmatistic Thought and the Art of Fiction: Ambulation into Polarity
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index