United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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of it seem equally significant to him. His work is accordingly the quintessence of real¬ ism.” James’s conscious purpose in writing has been “the achievement of a more and more intimate and exquisite correspondence with life in his art.” His realism does not perhaps leave a very vivid impression of reality. We are not for the most part familiar with the society which he paints. The people we know lead lives more emotional and less divested of social and professional limitations. As Beach observes, “The people we know do not so con¬ sistently as the characters of James make a conscious art of life. They apply art to this or that detail or relation; but they cannot, or they will not take the trouble to make their whole life a work of considered beauty. The people of James are mostly rich or in some way raised above the necessity of earning their bread. Their relationships are greatly simplified to make them still more free. They are often free from the ordinary scruples of the man in the street, free from the New England conscience in its cruder aspects. Being very clever, they are free from the intellectual limitations under which plain people labor. They are preter- naturally free, living in a moral vacuum, as it were. Moreover, the elements of fife are sim¬ plified to an extreme degree, everything in any way irrelevant being shut out from all con¬ sideration. Under this head come social and religious movements and struggles. It is per¬ haps just the irrelevant matters—as they would be for James—that create more than anything else in the ordinary novel the illusion of every¬ day life. So that it seems a rarefied and trans¬ cendental atmosphere into which James lifts us, an atmosphere in which there is nothing to impede the free action of spirits.” It must be understood that Paris does not provide a background for James’s characters. They are Paris—with the exception, of course, of Waymarsh and Sarah Pocock, who remain relentlessly American and “joyless.” In the very first chapter we learn that Strether is aware of how little Waymarsh will fit in with the European atmosphere. And as I have said, the story of “The Ambassadors” is the process of the acclimatization of Lambert Strether. But to get back to James’s realism; whether or not he creates in us the impression of reality, his attitude is uncompromisingly realistic. He carries Arnold’s theory of “disinterested curi¬ osity” to th e farthest possible degree. He is interested only in plain, unvarnished facts, and he refuses (as he says himself) to apply even “a single coat of rose-color.” Writing of Daudet, James says: “It is the real—the trans¬ muted real—that he gives us best; the fruit of a process that adds to observations what a kiss adds to a greeting. The joy, the excitement of recognition, are keen, even when the object recognized is dismal.” Does James succeed in rousing this joy of recognition in his readers? Some people find that he does; and their pleasure in his character¬ ization is much greater than that experienced by readers who have never met characters such as Strether or Maria Gastrey, or who at least have never noticed them. Wholly imag¬ inative characters often seem to us much more real than James’s careful, painstaking repro¬ ductions of reality. We would know Becky Sharp if we met her again, while we might meet Maria Gastrey a dozen times and see her only as one of a crowd. James does no high-lighting. So anxious is he to preserve his attitude of disinterested curiosity as the only properly artistic attitude that at times it is forced upon our notice as much as an aggressive and in¬ trusive personal element could be. “In James’s later work,” says Brownell, “what we get, what we see, what impresses us, is not the point of view, it is his own disinterested curiosity. It counts as part, as a main part, of the spectacle he provides for us. We see him busily getting out of the way, visibly withdrawing behind the screen of his story, illustrating his theory by palpably withholding from us the expected, the needful, exposition and explanation, making of his work, in fine, a kind of elaborate and com¬ plicated factification between us and his per¬ sonality.” What James dreads most of all, he says himself, is“the terrible fluidity of self¬ revelation.” So, although Beach is tempted to identify Strether with James himself, on ac¬ count of “his maturity and independence, his sympathetic and discriminating quality of mind, his patience and the unfailing satisfaction he takes in the interpretation of his subject,” the complicated structural difficulties James has taken such pleasure in putting before us leave us uncertain as to whether or not Lambert 27

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LEWIS AND JAMES A Critical Survey of ‘The Ambassadors’ and ‘Babbitt’ KAY ROWLETTE HHHE GERM of James’s idea in writing “The Ambassadors” is to be found in chapter xi of this book. Strether acknowledges to “Little Bilham” that he has made the mistake of not living, and advises his young friend to “live all he can”: “Don’t forget that you’re young— blessedly young; be glad of it, on the contrary, and live up to it. Live all you can, it’s a mis¬ take not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had? This place and these impressions—mild as you may find them to wind a man up so, all my impressions of Chad and of people I’ve seen at his place,—well, have had their abundant message for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh, I do see, at least; and more than you’d believe or I can express. It’s too late. And it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my hav¬ ing had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint, receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.” It is the life of the intelligence that Strether here has in mind. As the critic Beach points out, “He has done the best he could for himself in Woollett. He has attached himself to the woman of highest intelligence and most im¬ posing character in the place. He has published a magazine with a green cover. But he has not enjoyed there the intellectual amenities for which he has himself such an unusual aptitude. He has never found intelligence tempered with imagination, intelligence made sociable.” The process of the story is one of vision rather than action. It is a process of enlighten¬ ment. What we are really occupied with is the discovery of Paris, or, more strictly speaking, the relation Strether bears to that order of civilization. The subject proper is the matter of free intellectual exploration in general, of the open mind in contrast to the mind closed and swaddled in prejudice and narrow views. We have the contrast of two civilizations—the Puritanic and the hedonistic, the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the American and the Euro¬ pean. “Strether’s discovery of the open mind is his discovery of Europe.” All this contrast has to be discovered through Strether himself; and he perceives it by means of three sets of characters revolving about him. Madame de Vionnet represents the pure European strain; Chad and Maria Gastrey the transformed American type, and Waymarsh and Sarah Pocock, not to mention the invisible but omni¬ present Mrs. Newsome, the unchangeable, im¬ movable American species. “The Ambassadors” attains unity and sim¬ plicity by focusing on “the intellectual adven¬ ture of one man in the exploration of one sim¬ ple human situation.” This method, however, confines James strictly to Lambert Strether; he forfeits the valuable privilege of exploring the mental processes of other characters. They reveal themselves to us only as they reveal themselves to Strether. We are not even al- lowd to concentrate for a moment on the love affair between Chad Newsome and Madame de Vionnet, which James makes merely incidental to the emancipation of Strether from the limit¬ ing prejudices of Woollett. Appreciative readers of Henry James are rather scarce. The common protest made against him is that he is so vague, so rambling, so complicated, that we get lost trying to fol¬ low him, and even if we do push on intrepidly to the end we find that there really is no de¬ finite conclusion. To many, James’s work is nothing but a heaping up of trivialities. Yet, to quote Brownell, “life, considered as artistic material, is to James himself so serious and so significant that nothing it contains seems trivial to him. ... If he eschews the foreign, he revels in the pertinent. As an artist he has a pro¬ found respect for his material, and all details 26

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Strether is a projection of the personality of Henry James. Furthermore, James does not make the people of whom he writes his own by present¬ ing them and coloring them from his particular point of view. They may exist in life, but they do not fire the imagination as does a Becky Sharp or a Tess Durbeyfield. There is not enough of their creator in them to constitute them a particular society. Brownell claims that James’s characters, taken together, form the least successful ele¬ ment of his fiction. This is partly because the author himself seems less interested in their personalities than in the situation in which he places them. They are not very vividly char¬ acterized, and are not completely presented as human beings. In fact, James gives a wide berth to “the province of the heart” and con¬ fines himself to a purely intellectual interest in his characters. And “a picture of human life without reference to the passions . . . cannot but be limited and defective.” Our acquaint¬ ance with his characters is of necessity partial and superficial. Some readers will share James’s delight in watching a purely intel¬ lectual process, but the majority are more read¬ ily interested through their sympathies. It is long before we learn definitely that Chad and Madame de Vi onnet are really in love; the phrase “a virtuous attachment” may mean any¬ thing or nothing. Jeanne de Vionnet is mar- mied in most summary fashion to a man of whom we have never even heard. Little Bil- ham promises to try to care for Mamie Pocock because Strether wishes it, and, in his own words, he “would do anything in the world for Strether.” At the end we are left uncertain as to whether or not Strether is in love with Maria Gastrey or she with him. All these things are merely incidental to the unfolding of the theme James wishes to convey. The personal struggle which supplies the dramatic element takes place too exclusively within the mind of Strether, so the inherent drama largely fails to get itself realized. The story, or rather the development of the theme, moves very slowly indeed. It is a pro¬ cess of slow enlightenment. James will never give us any more information than he feels we can quite digest at one time, and so he keeps our curiosity continually aroused. Long pas¬ sages of dialogue must be waded through for a kernel of new knowledge, which often is not conveyed in words at all, but in a gesture or the abrupt breaking off of a sentence. In “The Art of Fiction,” James says, “It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way.” Consequently there is much in James’ dialogue that escapes us, and we are left with the im¬ pression that it is colorless and featureless. Certainly he takes no pains to make his char¬ acters witty or spectacular. “When they play their trump card,” says Beach, “it is not with a great smack down upon the table. They drop it rather out of their voluminous coat-sleeves and slip it on the green baize with discreet and apologetic gesture.” In the first place, James shows very little difference between his characters with regard to language and manner of speech. They all seem to be of approximately the same culture and intelligence. This makes it difficult to fol¬ low the process of thought through his dia¬ logues, which are typically very slow, with occasional bursts of rapid fire in the exchange of views. Between antagonists the dialogue unfolds like a game of chess in which each move must be studied with the most intense concentration. Between confederates the pro¬ cess is like the putting together of a picture- puzzle, each assisting the other by well-chosen words, gestures, inflections. James is fond of sprinkling his dialogue with expressions such as: “She wondered, seemed a little to doubt.” “She took it in then.” “She hesitated afresh, but she brought it out.” “She saw what he meant.” “He had sufficiently understood.” “They fronted each other, across the table, as if things unuttered were in the air.” Our knowledge of Chad, Madame de Vion¬ net, and even Maria Gastrey never goes very deep. Chad is measured only in terms of his improvement over the Chad of Woollett days. His manners are excellent—that is really all we see. Madame de Vionnet we accept as a woman with some peculiar individual charm which cannot be described to us save by the word “wonderful,” a word very much over¬ worked in the opinion of some readers, but it is strange what an impression James has been able to build up by its constant use. However, all the other characters are subordinate to (Continued on page 38) 28