James's Fools
The Comic Sense of Henry James. By Richard Poirer. (Chatto and Windus, 30s.) RICHARD. POIRER quotes, in his first chapter, a passage from James's Preface to The Spoils of Poynton: Thus we get perhaps a vivid enough little example, in the ccincrete, of the general truth, for the spectator of life, that the fixed con- stituents of any reproducible action are the fools who minister, at the particular crisis, to the intensity of the free spirit engaged with them. The fools are interesting by contrast, by the salience they acquire, and by a hundred other of their advantages; and the free spirit, always tormented, and by no means triumphant, is heroic, ironic, pathetic or whatever, and, as exemplified in the record of Fleda Vetch, for instance, 'successful,' only through • having re- mained free.
Taking this as a cue, Mr. Poirer analyses the function of James's 'fools,' in whom the Jamesian comedy is largely invested, in the early novels up to The Portrait of a Lady. There has always been a general recognition of how funny James can be. The best chapter of Constance Rourke's American Humour, published as long Ago as 1931, wfis devoted to James. Nevertheless. the subject has been touched on very lightly by most critics, if at all. The assumption seems to have been that the comic element in the novels is superficial, something that might, perhaps, be skimmed off the top, leaving the critic to deal with a profounder pattern of significance than anything indicated by James's humour. Mr. Poirer wishes to show the function played by the comic clement in defining that free play of will and aspiration which characterises James's more favoured heroines and heroes. From such a view the comic element is seen as essential and central.
Mr. Poirer quotes George Eliot's statement that the subject of Midd!march had to do with a 'certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity.' This is a condition of being in which the Jamesian protagonist typically finds himself. James creates his comic characters at times almost as if they were Jonsonian humours to define the stock attitudes of conventional society against which the pro- tagonist is in reaction. These stock figures are 'fixed,' always predictable, and never susceptible to the processes of Jamesian 'life.' They exist to deny or limit that freedom of aspiration that de- fines Roderick Hudson, Gertrude Wentworth, Isabel Archer, or (in a novel which Mr. Poirer doesn't treat) Lambert Strether. The nature of Strether's final 'triumph' of consciousness really only becomes clear in his final defence of Mme de Vionnet when she is attacked by the 'comic' Sarah Pocock. After all, it is Sarah who has judged correctly what the 'facts' of Chad's and Mme de Vionnet's friendship arc. The 'facts' aren't revealed to Strether until later; yet in the
'fixed' attitude of outrage that Sarah Pocock exhibits on this occasion, we see how irrelevant for any true understanding the 'facts' really are. It is, in such scenes, the comic element in James's presentation of the Pococks that helps us towards an insight into the ultimate quality of Strether's restored and vivified consciousness.
Freedom of the kind James wishes to give his characters (particularly in the case of Isabel Archer) is not attainable, and scarcely con- ceivable, in conventional society unless that society is fictionally somehow 'placed' or 'fixed.' Jane Austen's heroines work out their lives within the context of a society that is positively accepted: that is imagined as encompassing any possible ambition or ideal the heroine may possess. But it is against society that the aspiring idealism of Isabel or Roderick or Strether is pitted. This, Mr. Poirer argues, calls for a highly strategic presentation of society in James's fiction which will give us the illusion of realism but which will at the same time allow for a re- ordering of values and hierarchies permitting the freedom and aspirations of the central characters, which are not comprehended within the social frame, to find expression. James does this in many of his novels by reducing society to 'comic fixity,' to a set of frozen attitudes in contrast with which the aspiring freedom of the prota- gonist can be more surely realised and defined.
The 'fixed' characters are not, of course, all comic. Gilbert Osmund is the most 'fixed' of them all--the embodiment of that death-in-life which total commitment to social convention entails. The ending of The Portrait is James's comment on the impossibility of achieving the kind of freedom Isabel desired. Her progress is from the circle of benignly 'fixed' characters such as Henrietta, Mrs. Touchett, even (on the non- comic level) Lord Warburton and Casper Good- wood, who represent system and the nob-imagina- tive world of convention and tradition, to the diabolic fixity of Osmund's house—`the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation.' The hub around which The Portrait revolves is Ralph Touchett, who alone has an adequate understanding both of the 'fixity' of society and of Isabel's desire for freedom. In a novel where there is such a polarity of fixity and freedom as The Portrait represents, a detached and comprehensive intelligence having an under- standing of both terms, as Ralph does, is in- dispensable to keep the frozen world of conven- tion and the free soul in focused and intelligible relationship. In the end it is perhaps only in the consciousness of Ralph that we find freedom realised in The Portrait.
Unlike most American critics, Mr. Poirer dis- likes the generalising statement so much that he increases difficulties by shying away from a forthright or dogmatic description of his argu- ment, which we arrive at obliquely through successive analyses of the early novels. Like James with Isabel, he seems intent on endowing his argument with as much freedom and as little fixity as possible. There are obvious critical virtues in this, but it also entails an air of tenuity and elusiveness. The great value of the book lies in the detailed treatment of the in- dividual novels; and in at least two cases, The Europeans and Washington Square, the readings seem to me final and definitive. I know of no other treatment of Dr. Sloper's relation with his daughter Catherine that is at all adequate.
This study of James is filled with valuable,in- sights, and is obviously the product of a fine critical intelligence. It would have been a still better book had it been a shorter one, but such objections are marginal. During the past eight
or ten years as many books on James have issued from the American university presses. Among them, I believe this is the only one that hasmad a detailed scrutiny, almost page by page. 01 James's techniques as an artist, rather thala giving us new interpretations of his 'thought' James's 'thought' is certainly not irrelevant. but it is good to be brought back to James specificallY as an artist, and it is especially gratifying that Mr. Poirer should reassert this emphasis ir, th field of the early novels, which are still under estimated at the expense of 'the major phase.
LEY
MARIUS RE •1-:
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