BOOKS
James's Little Tarts
Y TONY 'FANNER HERE is the second batch* of James's 'little tarts,' as he chose to call his short stories, as opposed to the 'beef and potatoes' of his full- length novels. We may agree that James's novels are meaty, but it would be a great mistake to dis- miss his shorter works as so much jam—they are fibrous with meaning and, to pursue a metaphor Which James brought on himself, they provide a meal in, themselves. The publication of these nineteen short stories (which James wrote be, tween 1873 and 1882) so soon after Leon Edel's account of James's 'Conquest of London' is in- deed felicitous, since his biography gives us the varied occasions of their composition. The famous 'Madonna of the Future' was written While James was fingering his European 'wound' in the vacant New England air. The narrator— and James perfects the use of the urbane specu- lative narrator in these stories—meets an Ameri can artist in Florence who announces with great Vehemence: 'We are the disinherited of Art!
We lack the deeper sense. . . . We poor aspirants must' live in perpetual exile.' This artist dreams of painting a Madonna of transcen- dental perfection—containing and improving the work of all the ages. Substitute novel for painting and You have James's own lauietly cherished dream. Yet he can see the dangers. This artist has in fact produced-nothing—except some early Work of charm and spontaneity. He finds he has wasted my life in preparation.' Between pas- sionate response to Europe and exalted artistic aspirations, actual creation has got left behind. Jaynes is warning himself. The note of personal address is also clear in a deft little allegory Called 'Benvolio.' James wrote this while work- ing as a journalist in New York. The young hero-writer has two lovers. The Countess: 'You represent the world and everything that the World can give. . . . You are a divine embodi- Ment of all the amenities, the refinements, the Fomplexities of life. You are the flower of ur- anity, of culture, of tradition !'—and Scholas- tea, a pale thin girl who reads transcendentalist philosophy in a closet. The Countess charms Benvolio with her rich concrete life: but he !nrns _
to Seholastica when the world seems
en.ideo us or worthless and she provides him with ,tev,ating abstractions. After much - inconstancy and oscillation he abandons the Countess and ,,,,ar,rles Scholastics. Thus James makes sport `-'- nis flirtations with Europe and his attach- liri_ent to New England. But Benvolio's work ,Ilecornes very dull when he settles for Scholas- .",ea James preferred to continue flirting with• the Countess. initiated N'Yhen James watched the excavations in Italy l orc., by the Risorgimento he found it very 3 *,,7113111: COMM LIE TALES OF HENRY JAMES: VOLS. s.1 `to see the past, the ancient world, as one cacti) 4• Edited by Leon Edel. (Hart-Davis, 35s. stands there, bodily turned up with the spade,' and out of that odd feeling he made two deeply suggestive stories. In 'The Last of the Valerii' we see a young rich American girl marrying an Italian Count and taking control of his Villa. She orders excavations, and a magnificent Juno is disinterred. But the statue brings out all the latent paganism in the Count: 'the unholy passions of his forefathers stirred blindly in his untaught nature and clamoured dumbly for an issue.' He abandons his wife and worships the old goddess. Finally the American girl takes it upon herself to bury the statue—to control and obliterate the old gods, the old passions, with her own hand. Already we find an American heiress having to cope with an ancient unexpected dark- ness; already the shape of The Golden Bowl is dimly announcing itself to James's imagination. In 'Adina' a man virtually robs a peasant of an old topaz which turns out to have been the badge of the Emperor Tiberius. He tries to make his fiancee wear it: she, an innocent American girl, refuses because of its dark past. 'Wasn't he one of the bad Emperors—one of the worst? It is almost a pollution to have a thing that he had looked at and touched coming to one in such direct descent.' She finally runs away with the peasant and the collector hurls the topaz-into the Tiber. The past has poisoned his life.
Other important Jamesian themes are broached in these volumes. 'Madame de Mauves' is an innocent idealistic rich American girl who marries an amoral French aristocrat. While he sows endless oats, she sits very still, nourishing her sense, of injured innocence and developing her conscience at the expense of all joy in life.
"have nothing on earth but a conscience— nothing but a dogged, clinging, inexpugnable conscience.' The narrator's and our own sym- pathies are with her. Yet there is a dramatic re- versal. Her husband repents, falls in love with her, goes on his knees to her, but—'She was stone, she was ice, she was outraged virtue.' He commits suicide. Here James has shown not only victimised purity—but also something of the cruelties of conscience, something of the ice in innocence. The international theme deepens. More rather chilling women appear in 'Craw- ford's Consistency' and 'Longstaff's Marriage'— a beautiful insensitive puppet, a masterful bully, a sexless Diana who dies of love she offered too late. And of course there is also 'Daisy M iller*--- a story with a contained freshness, an ironic brio, a sensitive elan which never fades and which testifies to something -perfectly done, a note perfectly hit, a balance perfectly held.
Following the success of this story James rushed
out a series of stories on the international theme - -`The Pension Beaurepas,"An International Episode,' `A Bundle of Letters,' The Point of View.' These are not stories so much as vehicles for his own mixed, attitudes towards Europe and America. The fermenting ambivalence of his opinions produces page after page of sparkling spirited comments, as comic as mor- dant, with some of the best laughs aimed at himself. He will give us a Frenchman com- plaining of the 'colossal, mediocrity' and 'skin- deep civilisation' of America only to follow him with a young American castigating the 'false politeness and real rapacity' of European types, pointing out that 'an aristocracy is bad manners organised' and then going on confidently to assert: 'We shall have all the Titians by and by, and we shall move over a few cathedrals.' Some of James's sociological comments are as shrewd as they arc witty ('Longfellow wrote a charming little poem, called "The Children's Hour," but he ought to have called it "The Children's Century—) and there is a wonderfully engaging zest in the endless discussion which he had made his own-- the dialogue of worlds old and new.
More sombre and personal is 'The Diary of a Man of Fifty'-----a diary which tells how an age- ing bachelor returns to Florence where he had once loved a woman but left her because he thought she was immoral. He meets a young man who is in love with that very woman's daughter. He tries to persuade him to do as he once did and abandon the woman. But the young man follows his instincts, risks the woman's character, and is very happy. The old man sud- denly wonders about the girl's mother: 'I had a complete theory about her'—but what if the theory had falsely robbed him of a life of human happiness? 'That's a charming discovery for a man of my age.' This was written at a time when James was wondering whether 'it was better to cultivate an art than to cultivate a passion.' The dangers of theoretic speculation, the cost of art in terms of life—James is looking deep into him- self. There are other stories, some minor, none utterly trivial. An English MP, a contemporary of James's, wrote about the writer in his reminiscences, and what he said of James's con-• versation we may say of his writings: 'There is only, so far as I know, one thing which Henry James could never do in any conversation—he never could be commonplace.'
Previous page
