MR. HENRY JAMES'S "PARTIAL PORTRAITS."* MR. HENRY JAMES'S volume of
partial portraits is full of clever writing and pleasantly suggestive criticism on books and men of letters. In it he shows an excellent faculty for getting at the heart of books and exhibiting them to us in their true lights. Indeed, we cannot help feeling as we read that Mr. James is often more successful as an essayist than as a novelist. The very faults which are so conspicuous in his work as a narrator become positive virtues in his literary dis- quisition, and the circular manner—the habit of running round instead of straight—which is so tiresome when we want to get on with a story, is pleasant enough, if our only desire is to be allured into hearing yet another interpretation of some well- known author's spirit. Then, too, in a work like the present, Mr. James's exquisite felicity of word and phrase stands him in good stead, for neatness and delicacy of touch are the very life-blood of the form of letters which he is practising here.
Mr. James would have made his volume more of a book, and less of a fortuitous collection of miscellaneous essays, if he had put his disquisition on "The Art of Fiction" first in
• Partial Portraits. By Henry James. London Macmillan and Co. 1888. order, instead of last, and placed the essays on Emerson and George Du Maurier apart and at the end, as mere acci- dental additions to the volume. Nine out of the eleven essays deal with criticisms of novelists, French and English, and to appreciate these writings properly, Mr. James's theory of the novel, contained in "The Art of Fiction," ought first to be read. To have had that paper by way of introduction would have helped the reader to carry away with him a sense of unity which is missing now. The paper in question, we may begin by saying, is an extremely interesting one, notwith- standing that the greater part of it seems to us entirely mis- taken. Mr. James's view of the art of fiction is vitiated by a central fallacy, the fallacy that realism—the photographic representation of life and of the world—is more than a mere method, more than a particular form of workmanship. He goes wrong in attempting to describe it as an essential condition of the novelist's art, instead of what it rightly is, an accessory. In truth, realism is not more an essential in the novel than it is in painting or sculpture. The story which is not realistic is no more bad art than are the landscapes of Turner upon which no eye ever rested except in his canvasses. How this confusion impregnates and destroys the greater part of Mr. James's criticism on this subject, may be gathered best from his state- ment that "the only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life," and from his subsequent declaration that "the only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary is that it be interesting." Here, then, roughly —for in the essays these statements are shaded off in IL hundred ways—is Mr. James's view of the novel. To us, as we have said before, it appears completely and entirely inadequate. Mr. James is further terribly alarmed lest any one should venture to think that a novel ought to have a moral purpose, and grows almost breathless in his insistence that no such limitation is to be placed upon the novelist's art. Well, we are willing to grant him that. There is, perhaps, no reason why a novel should have a definite moral purpose any more than a railway time-table, though, by making the admission, we no doubt place novels below the greatest works of literature, such as the tragedies of the Greeks, where a conscious moral import is always present, and where it was always intended to produce a moral effect through the "pity and terror "to be awakened in the minds of those who witnessed them. If, however, the novel need not have a moral effect, it must in its ideal conception be much more than merely interesting. It can never be con- tent to evoke curiosity merely. The ideal novel must, in the highest meaning of the word, please,—that is, it must appeal to the sense which, for want of a more general term, we must call the sense of beauty. Just as the only absolute obliga- tion of a picture or a statue is to be beautiful in the highest, widest sense, so we may say that the only absolute obliga- tion of the novel is to satisfy the sense, not now of figurative beauty, but of beauty—fitness, proportion, and perfection—as we recognise it in conduct, in character, and in the thousand incorporeal manifestations of life. The reason for the existence of the novel is the attempt to satisfy this sense sometimes by one set of instruments, sometimes by another, sometimes by tragic, sometimes by comic means, now by the hard, clear instrumentality of realism, again by methods as shadowy and as indistinctly marked as those of the realist are pronounced. In fact, then, the true obligation of the novel is the obligation which it shares with every possible form of art, the obligation of appealing to the sense of essential beauty, —using the word in its widest, most comprehensive meaning, and with the variations suitable to the nature of the particular art. If, however, we cannot agree with Mr. James's main assumption that the novelist has only to flash his camera at life promiscuously, and give us the results without stopping to inquire whether those results will shock, disgust, or please us, there are other things which he says by the way, well worth hearing. For instance, what could be better than the passage in which he criticises the notion that a novelist must write from experience P- " It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience ; to our supposititious aspirant such a declaration might savour of mockery. What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end ? Experience is never limited, and it is never complete ; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind ; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it con- verts the very pulses of the air into revelations. The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen. I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Pro- testant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her pecu- liar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture ; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was ex- perience. She had got her direct personal impression, and she turned out her type. She knew what youth was, and what Pro- testantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French, so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which, when you give it an inch, takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education."
Mr. James might have added to his example of the novelist who drew French Protestants without experience, the curious circumstance mentioned by Anthony Trollope in his autobio- graphy. Though Mr. Trollope's readers found in his books such an intimate knowledge of the lives of Bishops, Deans, and Church dignitaries of every sort as to make it almost impossible to believe that he had not at some time or other lived in a Cathedral Close, the novelist, as a matter of fact, had never seen the society he described so accurately, except in his mind's eye.
Interesting as is the essay on "The Art of Fiction," it can- not, however, compare for a moment with the really wonderful study entitled "Robert Louis Stevenson." Here we have Mr. James at his best. He is not trying to make a paradoxical philosophy of art ; he is not engaged in showing his readers how stupid and how bourgeois are their ordinary moral likes and dislikes ; but in thorough sympathy with his subject, he triumphantly achieves what he sets out to accomplish,—the production of a piece of pure literary portraiture. On the style of the author of Treasure Island, Mr. James is pecu- liarly happy. He catches, it seems to us, exactly the right feeling when he speaks of it as he does in the following passage :— " Mr. Stevenson delights in a style, and his own has nothing accidental or diffident; it is eminently conscious of its responsi- bilities, and meets them with a kind of gallantry—as if language were a pretty woman, and a person who proposes to handle it had of necessity to be something of a Don Juan. This bravery of gesture is a noticeable part of his nature, and it is rather odd that at the same time a striking feature of that nature should be an absence of care for things feminine. His books are for the most part books without women, and it is not women who fall most in love with them. But Mr. Stevenson does not need, as we may say, a petticoat to inflame him : a happy collocation of words will serve the purpose, or a singular image, or the bright eye of a passing conceit, and he will carry off a pretty paradox without so much as a scuffle. The tone of letters is in him—the tone of letters as distinct from that of philosophy, or of those industries whose uses are supposed to be immediate. Many readers, no doubt, consider that he carries it too far ; they manifest an impatience for some glimpse of his moral message. They may be heard to ask what it is ho proposes to demonstrate, with such a variety of paces and grazes."
Hardly less happy is the delicate perception with which Mr. James has perceived that "the direct expression of the love of youth is the beginning and the end of his [Mr. Stevenson's] message." But though we delight in Mr. Stevenson's style, though we admit the charm which he evokes by his love of and sympathy with youth, and though we acknowledge the extraordinary vitality found everywhere in his work, we cannot help thinking that there are very fatal wants and weaknesses in the writings of the author of Kidnapped,— faults, indeed, which quite prevent him taking rank with the greatest of romantic writers. That heroic tone, that chivalry of sentiment, that nobility of literary carriage, which is so delightful in Scott—if Mr. James will not think the com- parison derogatory to his hero—is not to be found in Mr. Stevenson's books. Compare for a moment Kidnapped with Redgauntlet,—the books have many points in common, and suggest the comparison themselves. In the one, we find occasional bad workmanship, and indistinct, slovenly narration. The other is polished till the friction of reading is done away with altogether. Yet in Kidnapped the moral pace is, as it were, always very pedestrian; while in Redgawntlet we feel every now and again—as in the scene at the end between General Campbell and the Pretender—a breath of the purer, nobler air of life, which it is so difficult for the novelist to give us, but which, when we find it, is so delightful, so price- less a boon. Splendid as is Mr. Stevenson's power of in- teresting and exciting, readable as his books are in an astonishing degree, there is a lack of this nobler tone of life about them which leaves a want for ever unsatisfied as we read.
With so much of criticism, we must leave Mr. James's charming volume without stopping to say even a word as to his penetrating paper on Emerson, or as to the delightful pot- pourri gathered from Punch which he has called by the name of our greatest living comic designer, George Du Manlier. No reader who is fond of letters, and takes up Mr. James's book, will, we are sure, put it aside till he has read it through ; and no such reader, having read, will fail to rise interested and amused by the quick and pregnant criticisms upon books and the arts of literature which its pages contain in such opulent abundance.
Previous page
