United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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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

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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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The Techique of Robert Frost and T. S. Elio t IRENE HODGSON HPHE present generation of poets has been very concerned with the problem of cap¬ turing in their poetry the spirit of their own times and of finding a form and idiom suited to the expression of that spirit. It is this problem that F. R. Leavis had in mind when he wrote in “Modern Bearings”: “Poetry matters be¬ cause of the mind of poet who is more alive than other people, more alive in his own age.” It is this attitude which has produced a reaction against the Victorians and the traditional Georgians because of their withdrawal from contemporary issues and their conventionality of form and subject matter. T. S. Eliot, as a poet and a critic, has been a leading figure in this revolt. He has been in¬ tensely aware of the problems of his genera¬ tion ... of what appears to him the decadence, the chaos and the futility of modern life. Out of his mental struggle has come a new type of poetry, startlingly original in technique, about which has evolved a storm of controversy. Robert Frost has said of this technique: “I like to read Eliot because it is fun seeing the way he does things; but I am always glad it is his way and not mine.” The two poets have little in common. Frost seems scarcely aware of the problems, of life and of poetic expres¬ sion, with which Eliot grapples. The contrast between the two poets brings to mind Thomas Hardy’s well-known little poem, ‘In Time of “the Breaking of Nations.” ’ In relative terms, Eliot is concerned with ‘war’s annals’ and the ‘passing of Dynasties,’ while Frost writes of the simple and enduring things, ‘a man har¬ rowing clods,’ ‘thin smoke without flame from the heaps of couch-grass’ and ‘a maid and her wight.’ Frost has treated these themes with¬ out any ostentatious effort to be ‘modern,’ yet, in his own way, he is as modern as Eliot. He is in agreement with the modern tend¬ ency to accept any subject, form or diction as capable of poetic treatment. However, he has not carried this practice to an extreme. In fact much of his poetry, especially his earlier work, is extremely conventional. “Rose Pogonias,” a poem in his first volume, is a good example of this aspect of Frost’s style. The first stanza will suffice: A saturated meadow, Sun-shaped and jewel-small, A circle scarcely wider Than the trees around were tall; Where winds were quite excluded, Aid the air was stifling sweet With the breath of many flowers— A temple of the heat. Most of his best work, however, is in easy blank verse. He has said that there are two rival factors in a poem—the inflexion demanded by the verse pattern and that demanded by the sense and that neither should be completely subjected to the other. In other words, the rhythm should follow a pattern but there is no need to condone variations. There is noth¬ ing very radical about this theory. Poets have always made use of it, although seldom allow¬ ing themselves the freedom which Frost does. His diction in his dialogues is that of the New Englanders whom he describes. Dialect is not used and yet the flavour of the speech is there—the impression of dialect is conveyed. Frost has succeeded in doing what Words¬ worth aimed at—using the speech of the com¬ mon people as a medium of poetic expression. His words are fresh, vivid, precise, carefully chosen. His own definition of poetry—“words that have become deeds”—reflects his attempt to find words that are active. He sought what he called “unmade words,” and tried to give them beauty and poetic significance. To make his meaning clearer, he has said of the word ‘alien,’ that since Keats wrote: “She stood in tears amid the alien corn,” no poet has a right to use that word except in connection with Ellis Island. 26