MR. HENRY JAMES'S NEW NOVEL.*
IT cannot be said of any one of Mr. James's stories, "This is his best," or, "This is his worst ; " because no one of them is all one thing; like human beings, they are partly good, and partly not so good; they have their phases of exceeding strength and veracity, and also phases which are neither strong nor veracious. It does not concern us to give an explanation of this fact; it is to be found, of course, in the character or literary -views of the writer himself; but we may observe that it seems to indicate either an actual lack of experience in certain directions, or else a constitutional reserve which prevents Mr. James from writing up to the experience he has. The experience we refer to is not of the ways of the world, with which Mr. James has every sign of being politely familiar ; nor of men and women in their every-day aspect; still less of literary ways and means, of which he may be pronounced, in his own line, almost a master. The experience we mean is experience of passion. If Mr. James be not incapable of describing passion, at all events he has still to show that he is capable of it. During the last fifteen years, more or less, he has been writing stories of remarkable subtlety, charm, and literary finish ; he has introduced us to many characters who seemed to have in them capacities for the higl.est passion,—as witness Christina Light, in the novel called Roderick Hudson; and yet he has never allowed them to bring those capacities to the proof. He uniformly evades the situation ; but the evasion is managed with so much ingenuity and plausibility, that although we may be disappointed, or even irritated, we are deprived of the right of giving those emotions satisfactory expression. We feel, more or less vaguely, that we have been unfairly dealt with, but we are unable to show exactly how the unfairness comes about.
This defect in Mr. James's novels would be less noticeable, were they in all other respects less excellent. As it is, they may be compared to a beautiful face, full of culture and good- breeding, but wanting that fire in the eye and fashion of the lip that shows a passionate human soul. Thus the beauty and other good attributes, which would have given the passion its fullest effect, are rendered by its absence akin to deformities. They have no business to be there, because their unsupported
* Confidence. By Henry James, Junior. 2 vols. London Chatto and Windus.
presence makes them seem incongruous, and therefore untrue.. Beyond this complaint—which, to be sure, goes rather deep— we have little to say of Mr. James's novels that is not com- plimentary. He does not much trouble himself to contrive- intricate plots, or to imagine strange situations; but he cuts at slice out of life almost at haphazard, and then goes about to reveal and analyse its constituent parts. This method, when well applied, is very telling, though open to some obvious dis- advantages. For, while the human element in fiction has ever the stronger interest, few human lives are so completely rounded as to give opportunity for an artistic cUnouement- The story ends, but it leaves the reader still with something to wish for. Something in the way of incident and circumstance- is useful to fill up the gap. However, Mr. James is never dull.; his power of felicitous statement, taken by itself, would ensure him against that; and his occasional wit, his frequent touches of arch irony, and his unfailing thoughtfulness and purity of diction, are all so much to the good. He always puts his reader in a good humour, and makes him feel as if he were moving in the most cultivated society. The interest of his stories lies, as we have said, in the characters; we are introduced to them, and we generally see them distinctly enough, but we do not know them till later on, if at all; and we can never be sure wha1. they will do next. This is what happens in real life ; it is piquant and stimulating, and if it be not the very best plan to work upon in fiction (as to which point we are not at present prepared to give an opinion), it has, at all events, the author- isation of so eminent a master as Tourgugneff. What is more to the purpose, it evidently snits Mr. James, whose creed, so far- m it may be guessed from his writings, seems to be a refined and elevated sort of materialism, insomuch that he objects to, believe in anything that he has not objectively seen or known ; and although endowed with a strength of superficial imagination which has seldom been surpassed, he shrinks from setting down in black and white anything for which his imagination is his only warrant. This is a most commendable principle, though there are doubtless limits to the extent to which it should be fol- lowed; Shakespeare, for example, could hardly have written some scenes of Lear from his actual knowledge; but, grasping as he did the very core of human nature, he was able to con- struct thence any conceivable human situation. We do not want Mr. James to write another Lear, but we do wish, in reference to his present book, that he had been pleased, in the denouement, to trust a little more to what imagination would say might have happened, and a little less to what his personal experience of life had to propound on the matter. In Confidence,. as in nearly all of Mr. James's novels, there is a point at which the reader could lay down the book and say, "This is one of the finest stories ever written." But the reader goes on, and he is disappointed. All the elements of a masterly conclusion are here, but the opportunity is not taken advantage of. The heroine, Angela Vivian, is one of Mr. James's best and large feminine conceptions, which is saying a great deal, for kin women are always better than his men, and his men are far above the ordinary fiction-level. Angela's character is steadily and luminously developed, without one false note or insufficient phrase, up to the 197th page of the second volume. Thenceforward she, and all the rest of the dramatis peroonce with her, become—to our comprehension, at least—incompre- hensible. Gordon Wright, the last person in the world to do such a thing, abruptly puts on the mask of a scoundrel and a- " cad." Bernard Longueville, the accomplished and clever man of the world, assumes the guise of a poltroon and an ass. And Angela, the noble, proud, and tender woman, whose mixture of simple honesty and inscrutable reserve has rendered her thus far a heroine for every reader to fall in love with,—Angelai lapses into a theatric tone and attitude, and for the sake of creating a dramatic surprise utters and proposes absurdities- which Blanche herself might have shrunk from. The effect,. altogether, is as if the whole party, after having led a logical and respectable existence in a reasonable world, had suddenly grouped themselves before the footlights of some obscure, pro- vincial stage, and begun to enact a piece of melodramatic claptrap. What could Mr. James have been thinking of P
The only suggestion we can make in answer to this question is, that he desired to avoid the true artistic conclusion de- manded by his premises ; and the reason of this desire was a reluctance to undertake the description of a passionate situa- tion. It was a situation the right treatment of which would have raised Mr. James's reputation as a novelist to a place
among the highest. Bernard Longueville was not the man tamely to submit to a gross insult levelled at the woman to whom he was betrothed, nor was Angela the woman either to Fe so insulted, or, in the very heat of the moment, composedly to execute a knowing little manceuvre of insight, and, at the same time, to devise a far-fetched and improbable scheme of recon- ciliation. She would have set the wrong right, no doubt, as a heroine should ; but it would have been by some grand dilation of the spirit, overawing and paralysing the baser soul. As for Bernard, unless we are greatly mistaken, he would have beckoned Gordon out of the room, and would then have promptly and relentlessly kicked him downstairs. Men who are in love and engaged to be married have a strong sense of possession, which will make a champion of the veriest craven, upon occasion given. The result of Mr. James's reticence—to call it by no severer name—is this : that he loses all belief in his own characters, and that they consequently lose their lifelikeness ; that the remaining situations are tamely described through the medium of Angela's letters, and that the novel ends prematurely and stagnantly. Upon the whole, it strikes us that the author may have altered the design which he had sketched out for him- self at the beginning of the story. Granting that Gordon might have married Blanche, there is no reason shown why the union should have turned out a more harmonious one than it was made superficially to appear. In the presentation of Gordon's character, furthermore, no indication is given of any element which would lead him deliberately to abandon his wife to a lover, in order to obtain grounds for a divorce from her. But no author of Mr. James's abilities has a right to violate the modesty of nature, merely to save himself the trouble of being arduously observant of it. At his worst, however, he provokes a great deal of reviewing.
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