BOO R S.
MR. HENRY JAMES'S TALES.*
'Time tales will increase, rather than diminish, Mr. Henry James's reputation as a student of human nature, though they are all short, and all, after his usual habit, sketchy. They are all studies, taken from the point ea view of what may be called a refined neutrality, of the unsatisfactory aspects of human destiny. What interests Mr. Henry James is,—we think we may say exclusively,—any absolute misunderstanding and misfit between character and. circumstalie0. He delights in aualysing the seeming perversities of th e human lot,—the critical failures of the higher genius,—the miserliness of fortune just when even the most sparing gift would be enough to secure a great wealth of happiness,—the mysterious recoils of feeling which cause so many cups of joy to be dashed voluntarily from the very lips,—the tyranniesof the east over the present. Mr. Henry James's subjects veil' often remind us of Mr. 'dough's Amours de Voyage, though that exquisite literary gem is a poem, and Mr. James's tales are all, in form at least, prose. Mr. ()lough was the first to introduce the practice of making the insufficiency of emotion for its own purposes a separate subject of critical study, and to accompany his picture by indications of all that wealthof inherited culture and delicate criticism which are needful to Make you understand how the springs of the emotions had been weakened by the ratified intel- lectual atmosphere in which they grew. In Amours de Voyage you see perfectly mirrored the great dote of influences—critical, poetic, artistic, ethical, historieal—which make up the culture of our age, and the effect which these have on a mind of high calibre in implanting a deep distruet of its own feelings, and a tendency to acquiesce in every check which they receive from for- tune. Mr. Henry James is always taking up the same theme, and indeed very often he takes it up es the same outward world,—the world of Italian art and English culture. In the first of these
geniva of an American artist tales, he shows us how the just great enough to enable him to execute something great where the pressure of 0, momentary emergency was
at hand to help him, yet failea adequate stimulus for the creative life, and left a wreck and a failure, where nature had given every element of success except self-confidence, and that initiative which self-canfidenee ensures. In the second—the weakest tale in these volumes, and the weakest we have seen from Mr. Henry James's pen—he paints a perverse caprice of nature's, in making the wounded pride caused by a beautiful woman's rejection of the hero, effect a cure in an apparently dying man, and then causing the woman to pine away and die for the want of the love. which she had rejected and could not recover. This is much the feeblest and least natural of the tales, and seems to be rather a tour-de-for i ee n presenting the pessimist view of 'human destiny, than a serious composition. In the third tale, we have a very subtle study of the contrast between a pure American girl's idealistic view of the old French noblesse, and her actual expelience of a selfish and worthless French husband of long 'descent, whom she has married out of the depths of her girlish enthusiasm,—the contrast being pointed, of course, * The Madonna of flis Fature, and Other Tato. By Henry Jame, Jun. 2 vole, efaemulan. by the appearance of the right man on the scene when it is too late to have any effect on the development of the story, except by eliciting a deeper shade of depravity in the husband, and a finer shade of moral idealism in the wife. In the fourth tale, Mr. Henry James studies the passion of an in- genuous, utterly Inexperienced, American youth for a clever Prussian adventuress, whose only interest in him is her percep- tion that he keeps back something from her which stimulates her sense of intellectual curiosity, and induces her to lead. him on with a false hope till she has solved her problem. In the fifth tale, he describes to us how a man of fifty finds out that he had been wrong in distrusting the woman he had loved thirty years before,—a fact which he discovers as a consequence of warning a young friend against the daughter of this woman, BO finding that his warnings are needless, and the young man's confidence better founded than his own former diffidence. And. in the last tale, Mr. Henry James gives us a study of a poet who loves two women at the same time, one in one mood, and. one in another, and discover§ that to marry, or be perfectly de- voted to, either, Is to lose the spring of his imaginative passion, by losing the contrast which is needful to its highest fire.
In all these stories there is the same bent for discovering and. analysing, not the harmonies, but the discords, of the world. Mr. Henry James loves torsos. His favourite theme is not what used to be called poetic justice, but rather the poetic injustice of life. A woman who deserves to be most happy and is unhappy, on account chiefly of the purity of her own girlish enthusiasm,—an artist who has had everything given him but the initiative and audacity needful to succeed,—a faithful lover, who has ruined his highest hopes by a mistake of judgment,—or to go back to former tales of his, a girl too frank for the conven- tional modesty, and too modest for the reputation she unfortu- nately gains by her singular frankness,—a simple American, who falls in love with the mellow beauty of the older world, and who finds the prejudices and traditions of that older world all combining to rob him of the prize he has half-won, —such are the themes in which Mr. Henry James chiefly delights, and in the perverse turns of which he finds his keenest intellectual stimulua.
And Yet you can hardly say that Mr. James is a pessimist, though there is pessimism in all his plots. He does not so much seem to indict the scheme of Providence,—to reproach the destinies with wilfully punishing the noble-minded, and wrecking the high aims of genius,—as to note these short- comings with a refined kind of neutrality, even intimating that these appareet blots in life are, after all, very endurable, and due, perhaps not unftequently, to some deep reserve or self-restraining strain of temperament in man, that may, after all, be better than happiness; itself. Thus his last tale in the firstvolume of this book ends with the death of Madame de Mauves' bad hus- band; whereupon the young Am crime, who had felt that she was his highest ideal of womanhood, h eaxs of this, but does not return to Europe. He was at first strongly moved to do so, " but several years have passed, and he still lingers at home. The truth is, that in the midst of all the ardent tenderness of his memory of Madame de Mauves, he has become conscious of a singular feel-
which awe would hardly be too strong a ing,—a feeling for term." But evidently
Mr. Henry James is not here quite sin- cote with us. There is no excuse for awe at all. Madame de Mauves had behaved just as any woman of true purity of mind and. heart would have behaved, and not otherwise. What was restraining the young man was not awe of Madame de Mauves, but a secret doubt whether his own feeling for her was adequate to her ideal of what this kind of devotion ought to be, and. a secret distrust of the depth and intensity of his own feeling. Indeed, though Mr. Henry James's heroes are gener- ally, on the whole, good, he very often almost apologises for their goodness, or at least admits that he can find no better explanation and justification of it, than a lingering asceticism, inherited from the old Puritans, which had survived the moral logic of its origin. His tastes are much finer than his principles—so far, of course, as he developes them dramatically in these stories —ever appear to be. The self-abnegation, of which his favourite characters arc generally capable, is due more to a fastidious taste, than to a deep conviction of right and wrong. And as their moral taste is more fastidious than their principles, so their love is apt to be more refined than earnest. They often find it fade away when it comes to the final test. In the last tale, the poet cannot bring himself to sacrifice his imaginative life to his affection for either of the young ladies between whom his heart is divided, just as, in "Madame de Mauves," Longmore finds himself disposed to linger in the United States after every obstacle to his avowal of love for the lady appears to have been removed. The moral background of Mr. Henry James's novels is a refined criticism of the emotions, which results in a con- viction that they will not bear very much strain upon them, and which tends, of course, to produce the result which it thus autieipates. He sometimes describes even the higher morality as due to nothing better than a half-intelligible " asceticism " of feeling ; and certainly, if men are like the creatures of Mr. Henry James's fables, so it must often be, for this asceti- cism of feeling, Or at least that reluctance to act upon the promptings of feeling which he attributes to this "asceticism," continues after the moral restraints which made such" asceticism" coincident with virtue are withdrawn. On the whole, Mr. Henry James's world is very like the world depicted in Mr. Clough's fine poem, a world in which all the principles and all the affections are BO much diluted with a fine speculative doubt, that neither are the principles strong enough to rule the character, except when they survive in the form of fastidiousfta,stes, nor are the affections strong enough to win their own happiness, unless,— which rarely happens,—the hand of destiny pulls along with the too faint promptings of the heart.
Previous page
