HENRY JAMES

By FRANK SW1NNERTON

HENRY JAMES was born on April 15th, 1843; and his work is probably now less read and less appreciated than it was se any time between 1875, when Roderick Hudson was published, end the hour of his death in 1916. The neglect is a misfortune be the craft of novel-writing, to which he devoted continuous attention. It is a misfortune because, although at the heart of James's work there was fatal poverty, so that most of his greatlyelaborated characters, when stripped, are seen to be—unknown to James—common cheats, liars, adulterers and simpletons without grandeur, his taste, dramatic skill and technical brilliance were so

o straordinary that no writer of tales can afford to ignore their samnaple.

He was born in Albany, New York. His grandfather, an Irishman, bad enjoyed great commercial success in Albany ; and his father, a mystical philosopher whose idolisation of Swedenborg was such that he never travelled without a complete set of the master's works, was able to indulge unlimited leisure by taking his sons—especially Henry—upon all sorts of impulsive journeys, some of them as far

n a Europe. These journeys quite confirmed Henry James's temperament; for, by means of what he afterwards called "pedestrian wing," he learned from them almost everything he knew. He had practically no formal education. He drew the most enchanting sensual experience from wandering and wondering contact with the sights of old towns and cities, and tasted "all the fun . . . of the queer so-called inward sort" of the life which he hoped eventually Se lead. As soon as he could do so he left the United States and settled in Europe, making his home in England and at last becoming—it was a deliberate gesture of loyalty in the last war—a

n aturalised Englishman.

The factual bases of our much-relished civilisation were not avail able to the gaper ; but he saw and dreamed, aesthetically, dramatically, confident in "the positive saving virtue of vagueness," and with no sense whatever, now or hereafter, of the material. The material, the literal, were anathema to hini, as they had been Io his father. "My most general notion was the very ecstasy of understanding; . . . wherever I looked, and still more wherever I pressed, I sank in and in up to my nose."

Such was the cultivation of aniartises temperament. Its active use was likewise early developed. In boyhood, when Henry, with his brother William, first turned to literature, circumstance decided that the paper which both used should consist of sheets of four pages, the first three of them, ruled, being used for dramatic composition, while the fourth, a blank, positively encouraged the sister art of drawing. Thus was the Jacobean technique formed. His novels were fundamentally dramatic, and he saw them always,

from a proper distance, the connoisseur's distance, in scenes and in pictures. They were novels of the easel. He even went so far as to link the two arts, using in relation to the novel the terms-foreground, middle distance, composition, tone, values and so on— of painting. "There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and no beautiful, report of things on the novelist's, the painter's, part unless a particular detachment has operated."

The detachment was again a temperamental trait. He decided in youth that "one way of taking life was to "go in for everything and every one, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the other way was to be occupied, quite as occupied, just with the sense and image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion." In consequence, he was always apart from life, apart from his aesthetic production, remotely a spectator of pictorial drama. At first, in Roderick Hudson, he used a colourless participant observer to draw every necessary inference. When he tired of that method, and, sitting as it were behind closed blinds, consummately pictured scenes more bizarre and more literary, he developed his extraordinary second stage in technique. Employing some abnormally sensitive person, a postmistress in In the Cage, a child in What Maisie Knew, a "little flurried bundle of petticoats" in the brilliant Spoils of Poynton, he elucidated the conflicts of small groups, through his sensitives—adding clue to clue for the reader's enthralment, eliminating all that d,id not heighten the drama. And in the last phase, when he dictated the immensely long novels of his later years, walkbig about the room and searching elaborately and copiously for the exact word, he used the subtle, exclamatory comments of a band of onlookers, as in The Golden Bowl, to show how really remarkable was something whiCh—when one penetrated the secret—proved to be not so very remarkable after all. 1 ' In all three stages the artist's attitude was the same: he was to be separate from his picture, as the painter is separate ; the drama was to be seen within an imposed form which caught the actors in the crucial stages of a complex situation ; there were to be as few facts as possible (because "everything should represent something more -than what immediately and all too blankly met the eye "); and the story, for he loved a story, must be communicated with the greatest imaginable indinctness. "My identity for myself was all in my sensibility to their (i.e., his characters') exhibition, with not a scrap left over for a personal show."

There was little enough personal show in the great autobiographical volumes, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother and the fragment The Middle Years. They are possibly the most elaborate, as they are sertainly the finest, of all his works ; and they surpass his novels in virtue of the fact that, for the first time, he was imagining men of stature. The method might be the same—that of the detached spectatOr—but love warmed and, spiced and made profound the delineation of character. Love may also

have spoiled the detachment ; but it gives these books astonishing value as evocations of the past, and the portrait of Henry James, senior, is a masterpiece. Moreover, James's inexhaustible penetration of his own motives makes easy for others an appreciation of his temperament, his real subtlety, his aesthetic aims, and the limitations imposed upon his creative work by his preference for the speculative over the actual.

Apart from these autobiographies, Henry James is to be read at his unique decorative best in the two comedies, The Spoils of

Poynton and The Ambassadors. These represent the author's

nearest approach to his ideal of detached technical perfection. The ideal was pursued for nearly fifty years. It was once cruelly likened to the performance of a hippopotamus picking up a pea-; but it was better than that. He reached in The Spoils of Poynton and The Ambassadors a most beautiful technique, which aroused admiration

in connoisseurs and stirred the more sensitive among them, if they

were of the craft, to robuster but still emulative effort. What he discussed in these and more ambitious books was often far from reality, the serious echo and analysis 'of assemblies of ghosts ; but it c must boldly be said, a hundred years after James's birth.; and—one h sometimes feels—centuries after the supersession of art m the novel, that the performance was superb, and that noi to iecognise its exquisiteness is in betray invincible philistinism.