A. Fervent Disciple
The Pilgrimage of Henry James.- -By V.an Wyck -Brooks.
(Cape. 7s. 6d.) , • . • . • Ma.,Beoencs has attempted, with much subtlety and ingenuity, to shew us, as by some penetrating X-ray, the mind and methods of. that most distinguished artist and most lovable personage, Henry James ; but though he has . brought to his task keenness and perception,. it must be confessed that his ray does not penetrate, but only by its illumination shows the insuperable. difficulty of doing so. His book, in fact, which constantl' stimulates though it. Often provokes the reader, must be -classed with those that offer us solutions to the piystery of Edwin Drood. We find ourselves folio:iv-ring the arguments with interest, but reveiting from the conclusions
.to which they lead. •
, It is impossible, •ferinstance; to :agree with his pronounce- ment that, after long sojourn in England, Henry James, taking stock of his experiences, decided that he was " utterly lonely"- in this " clumsy, materialized, brutalize& snobbish IbitiSh' World," where 'vulgarity reigned supreme, --nr that, with the exception of Robert Louis Stevenson, no one under- stood or cared to underling hil'art."' It is true that the seles of his books in England were small, and that iii certain passages in his letterS he ,comMenta bitterly on this, but he alio knew from experience that there were many people of line taste in Engrain(' who regarded him as a master of fiction; and that he had about him a very large circle of devoted friends. Nor Could a man who really felt himself a stranger here have possibly floviri so clear a 'signal of Iris sympathies as to be naturalized as an Englishman. The Outbreak of the War (combined with the long-continued neutrality of America) showed to Henry James himself, if not to Mr. BroOki, hOw intensely English he was Almoli immediately he gave up living at his beloved Rye because he could not hear not to be beating in the very Prilse of-London. That heliad moments of disillusionment is beyond question-, but England remained him till the 'end the country ie'Which the magic of the past most Iliagered;lind hi which he felt himself:moat athoine. Ile may not have achieved that " saturation " in English con- sciousness at ;which he had aimed, but -to represent hini as "standing hi tears anlidthe abeekhrs " is Ifsetious distertion of MS case. We cannot brit notice' a similar distortion when Brookl quotes from Roderick Hudson a remark about the "virtual quarrel " of Americans 'with their -country, as representing-Henry James's 'view at the time he wrote the book, for this surely is an 'interpolation made Whin he revised it many years later. • it is a -slip also to represent him playing bridge at a date when bridge had not come to England, and us being welcomed back' to Rye by Ellen Terry's -waving to hiin from her garden above the old AciWer, for she 'lived-in Winchelsea.
Far the most interesting period in Henry James's literary 'career is his sortie "Into 'the dramatic -field, and his swift retreat into- the. bristling fortress, so to speak, of his later fiction. It is clear, as Mr. Brooks points out, that -he had long hankered after the theatre, but it is equally • clear, ..ons.the same evidence of his correspondence, though ...Mr. Brooks rejects that part of it, that the desire to make money .was the determining influence in.that disastrous excursion. Henry James- himself says, "My books don't sell, and it looks as if my plays might. Therefore.l am going with a brazen front to write half a dozen " : and again, afterwards, "- it ..was wholly for money-I adventured." In the face of such explicit statements we cannot doubt his determining motive, . and his failure was the chief. cause .of-his abandoning his _attempt. He believed himself capable .of success, and he refers at the time, with a curious apostasyyto the " pale little art of fic- tion" as a restricted- substitute 4or his real gift. But with the collapse- of Guy Doraville this -latter conviction vanished for. ever, and. we shall be right in taking it as a hope rather than a faith, which is made of sterner stuff. The real import- .a.oce of his theatrical venture is .that it drove him. back. to fiction with a sense of escape. from- the horror of the stage : fiction• became. to him, as he, bolted and barred the doors of his -fortress, a • more adorable . mistress than ever... He repudiated the direct blatant appeal of drama, in which there is no place for exquisite analysis of motive and .fine dissection, and in violent reaction he flung himself finally into thepractice of an art of which thetechnique was precisely the opposite to that of the stage, and which, to a,large.extent, was his own-invention. Like Browning, it was the processes of -thought, not the resultant action,- that fascinated him : he was like one.who takes far more interest-in the works. of a watch, its cogs and springs and adjustments, than in the fact that the dial of it shows the time. His interest in drama, indeed, ceased just where the interest of the playgoer begins. The playgoer wants to see things happen : Henry James, in his late fiction,- was solely concerned with the infinite dissection of the motives and attitudes of the persons among whom a situation develops. The involved interplay of minds is his preoccupation, and he records it in that intricate allusive style in which also we recognize his reaction from dramatic speech. Here again we cannot agree with Mr. Brooks, who -tells us that in style he now eschewed " the thin,.the sharp, the ,meagre,'.' - if by these epithets is _designated the lucid and limpid manner of his earlier novels. The new style was an instrument of the new. technique, and .many of: his most devoted admirers cannot but regret the abandonment of the old. Yet, though copiously disagreeing- with many of Mr. Brooks's conclusions, we - recognize his " saturation" in his subject, which so infects him that often whole pages might have been written by Henry James himself. His enthusiasm, his subtlety, his perception, make his book valuable and welcome.
E. F. BuissON,.
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