Partial Portraits

THE dearth of criticism at the present time might seem to indicate a decline of interest in literature on the intellectual side. The critical movement which began with the expansion of English thought in this century has lost its force, and is now apparently subordinated to the later historical spirit. Were it not for the somewhat weary contest of the rival schools of the novelists, and for the opportunity which the career of the new fiction in France and Russia affords, the field of criticism would appear exhausted. Arnold stands entirely by himself as the pure critic, interested in the spirit of literature rather than in its biographical side or its relations to the common movement of society. The group of pleasant and elegant essayists who are the successors of men of larger calibre, if not of finer perceptions, content themselves with very modest aims, and they do not hit above the mark. Mr. James is one of these, and his new volume is a good example to show to what extent reviewing on a small scale and what one may call the professional spirit have occupied the ground of one of the great departments of letters. When new books appear, something must needs be said of them ; when new names rise into a sudden popularity, and much more when the acknowledged heads of literature die and are buried and have their lives written, an attempt must be made to define their qualities and take their measure; and always, it would seem, a novelist has something to tell the world of his art, and must, after the fashion of Goethe, free his bosom of that dangerous stuff, his opinion. Mr. James writes on these occasions and from these motives. Emerson, George Eliot, and Turgenief receive judgment from his pen, in the hall of the dead ; Daudet and Guy de Maupassant are noticed, as the modern phrase is ; and throughout all the essays there are confidences and particular criticisms which come from the professional sanctum of the author. The collection thus is made up of occasional pieces, adapted to the ephemeral life of magazines rather than to the requirements of substantial literature. It puts forth no claim to the highest critical value, but is no more than a bundle of papers full of excellent talk about books and their makers, and deriving their interest from the quick and nimble intellectual spirits of their author.

They are most agreeable to read, and especially in those cases in which the author is still alive is there no offense in them. The treatment of Daudet is to be described only as caressing. The language is worried for its finest phrases and softest epithets to express the delight of the critic in Daudet’s personal charm, literary style, and finished stories, and the work when done is a marvel of deftness; sincerity and compliment are seldom so happily married. Toward Guy de Maupassant Mr. James’s temper is different. It cannot be said that he patronizes him, but he pets him, and reminds one of nothing so much as a fatherly friend saying a good word for a particularly naughty boy. In dealing with these two, the critic is in his element. In his former volume of essays, which is certainly the more substantial of the two, he had the advantage of treating oidy French subjects; for a critic is apt to write best of what he most appreciates, and it is the Gallic literary spirit which most attracts Mr. James. His critical work upon French literature, as a whole, is the best accessible to the English reader ; and in the additions which he makes now by his papers upon Daudet and Maupassant he does not fall behind his earlier, and perhaps more laborious, essays upon the French poets and novelists, either in penetration, frankness, or breadth of treatment. There is, however, no change in one respect. He does not give the reader immediate and full grasp of the subject, but leaves one at the end somewhat in doubt what to think. He is in a sense inconclusive, and has given the impression that be means to be. His mind is inductive, and he prefers to gather together an array of facts about the temperament and art of whomever he is discussing and adds a number of remarks of his own, often acute and always felicitous ; but just as one is expecting to find this material binding itself together into a coherent and orderly judgment, he is left to draw his own conclusions. Mr. James remarks somewhere in these essays upon the fact that French writers deal largely with surfaces, and he goes on to justify them by saying that life itself is very largely a thing of surfaces. We do not quote the statement to agree with it, but to say that it applies very well to his own criticism. It is almost entirely concerned with surfaces. It lacks anatomy ; and it is in the anatomy of the body that its unity is to be sought. Mr. James gives many aspects, reflections at all angles from all lights, innumerable details, of his perceptions ; but his examination stops with the surface. The difficulty is further increased by his practice of taking up one novel after another seriatim, often of one character after another, until the reader, even if familiar with the world of Trollope for instance, becomes confused and perplexed. This is professional criticism, technical to an annoying degree. The genius of an author is not most simply set forth by a catalogue of his creations; but this is Mr. James’s confirmed method. The vigor, the pleasant wit, and the constant alertness of mind which characterize these critiques in petto keep the interest alive ; but it follows of necessity that one receives a blurred impression. Great detail and frequent change in the point of view are so much characteristics of Mr. James’s method that they cannot go unmentioned. He evidently puts value upon them, but to us it seems undeniable that they are largely responsible for the disappointment which is sometimes complained of by those who read to find plain and substantial judgments.

If we allow Mr. James the benefit of a rule which he quotes from Guy de Maupassant to the effect that a literary work is to be judged subject to its author’s intentions in writing it, the case is made somewhat easier. He does not favor, apparently, what is known as final criticism ; rather, if he conveys an impression, which he acknowledges to be individual and possibly transitory, made upon him by the artistic work of another, he considers his duty done. To fall in with this amounts to accepting his essays in the main as an expression of the personal preferences of his own temperament, which may or may not be valid in the case of others; and when read with this understanding all annoyance disappears, for Mr. James as a talker about books is one of the most excellent of literary companions. His knowledge is of the fullest, his resources of allusion and comparison are endless, his demarkation of different schools of literature is exact; an unfailing ease of expression and command of an admirably free conversational style add to his powers of entertainment; and he has the one talent of good intellectual fellowship, which is, not to take things too seriously.

A better example of his tact in criticism cannot be taken than the opening essay of this volume, the paper upon Emerson. His personal attitude toward the wise moralist of Concord is one that he himself thoroughly understands ; he is familiar with his subject and entirely at ease in its presence, and the result is a cheerful and appreciative, but by no means idolatrous essay. He cannot resist the temptation to play a little, in his accustomed manner, with the society about Emerson. He feels an itching in his satirical fingers to “ represent life ” as it was in the transcendental community, with its clerical antecedents, its meagreness of amusement, its lyceum, its aberrations, its paucity and foibles and eccentricity ; and he makes bold to regret that Emerson’s biographer did not relieve the pale figure of the philosopher upon this background of poor human nature in ordinary mortals. It has always seemed to us a singular felicity of Mr. Cabot’s biography that it so successfully avoided the details of the time and such personality the absence of which Mr. James regrets ; it is better and more fitting that the character of Emerson should stand out single and solitary, as he essentially was in his life, instead of being confused with those about him and to a certain extent parodied by them. Their memory is a very mortal one, and we do not in this instance feel the force of Mr, James’s contention that a man of genius must be known by the society he kept; indeed, Emerson cannot be said to have had fellowship with any unless it were with such shadowy figures as Plotinus and the other ghosts of the intellect whose walking places he discovered. In this one respect, at least, the solitariness of his genius, he stands, as Arnold asserted, with Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and the rest of the hermit names of literature. The humorous element the presence of which Mr. James misses is one to which he is very keenly sensitive, and he finds it in Emerson himself, though he hardly does more than betray his perception of it. Here was a critical test of what we have called his tact, and he bears it like pure gold. The reality and sincerity of his appreciation of Emerson is, under the circumstances, the most surprising thing in the essay, and vouches for the extraordinary openness and adaptibility of his mind ; for Mr. James, with many intellectual temptations to a more narrow admiration, has very unusual catholicity of taste. Less cannot be said for an appreciation that ranges from Stevenson to Trollope, and from George Eliot to the merry tales of Maupassant.

He keeps his best word for France. That country is intellectually his native heath. He is quite sensible of his different blood; he acknowledges that Daudet sometimes, in his confidences to his readers, writes in a way that he would not emulate if he could; but for all that it is the French who must stir his curiosity and appeal to the hospitality of his mind. The remarkably powerful reminiscences of Turgenief, which are the gem of the volume, gain much by being set in a French ground, whose characteristics harmonize with Mr. James’s tastes and are a kind of home for them. It is, however, the twin essays upon Daudet and Maupassant, to which reference has already been made, that reveal the infatuation, if one may use so strong a word, of the author. He makes these essays, and particularly the last, an occasion not only for unwearied compliment, which the literary gifts of the two French story-tellers excuse if they do not entirely justify, but also for a skillful defense of the modern spirit in French fiction. He acknowledges plainly certain traits of Guy de Maupassant which need not be more directly alluded to, but he afterwards diminishes their disagreeableness to the Anglo-Saxon almost, if not quite, to the vanishing point; and one who does not lose his own powers of perception and decision in the maze of the sentences cannot but admire the literary finesse by which the art of Maupassant is substituted for his substance, as if there were no more morals in Paris than in Arcady or Patagonia. But this is the only essay in which the critic appears to have a case to defend ; in the others he does lose the character of the observer, however friendly he may show himself and anxious to please and be pleased. In the justification of Maupassant, on the contrary, he may fairly be held to have exceeded the critic’s charter and trespassed on the demesne of the partisan. It is more agreeable to turn back to the charming pages on Daudet, to see Mr. James in his best mood and spirit, using his powers of delicate perception most keenly and pleasurably, and praising without any afterthought or forethought that in which he finds an immediate and great delight. There is here, too, the double sense of mind and of culture in the writer, and a certain humaneness without any touch of satire, which gives charm to the style. Work of this sort is rare, and it is to be specially welcomed for its intellectual spirit, to the absence of which in our current criticism we have alluded. This same spirit pervades the volume, and together with it one finds a copiousness, an art, and an amiability which would of themselves distinguish the book and commend it, as few works of criticism ever commend themselves, to authors and readers alike.