Henry James: (1843-1916)

I

To suggest what is felt by those who never had the honor of so much as a glimpse of Henry James the man, it is necessary only to say that Henry James the craftsman has become, by the sharp physical finality of death, at last wholly and securely ours. A living author is the more or less prized property of his age, to be cuffed or caressed, or both, as the caprice of the age wills: a dead author is the undisputed possession of the many or few who duly love him. The genius of Henry James, which has for twenty years past expressed itself both as a ripened historical influence and as a series of vivid and commanding appeals to the renewed contemporary appreciation, has attained its rounded completion, not by any possibility to be added to; and this very lamentable fact of the last page blackened over, the last word dictated, has the effect of making over his genius to us bodily as a sum-total, the most lavish gift surely of our time, if one except that of Meredith. We find our title to his gift confirmed in the obituary columns of all manner of dailies and weeklies and their several ‘supplements’ — columns that have seemed to slam a door on our treasure-room of the past and, with a parting twist of the rusted key, crunchingly to lock it; which sovereign gesture of dismissal we need only interpret as a surrender of the key to whatever fortunate comer knows how to turn it, in order to get at the full volume of our inheritance. Such at least will be the attitude of those for whom a new and complete Henry James begins just where the frayed and fragmentary subject of journalism has lately ended; those who feel his death as a summons to the calm privilege of considering his worth and of trying to measure the full extent of what he has come to mean to them.

How much there has been to interfere with the serenity and solid comfort of our possession of him, those can appreciate whose helpless solicitude has followed him, on his more or less annual ‘appearances,’ through the rough gauntlet of criticisms, reviews, notices, parodies — the tumult of jeers mostly echoed and therefore meaningless, meaningless and therefore unanswerable except by his answer of silence. We have not had, happily for ourselves, the distress of seeing him mind what the heedless said of him: he bore everything as though it had not existed, and to the practical purpose of convincing us eventually that for him it really did not exist. In that he was like a slender and shrinking youth of incredible unsophistication, caught in some bar-room medley of lewd songs meant to confuse him, and obscene jokes at his expense, not only not knowing in his innocence what it could all possibly mean, but, wondrously and beautifully, quite making out through his amazement that they did n’t know either, those others of the song and the jest, his irresponsible tormentors, who would neither like him nor let him alone, who would do neither more nor less than senselessly bawl at him.

Only we, the shamed, outraged bystanders, could not feel our neighbors’ discourtesy the less because he, our lovable stripling, appeared not to feel it at all; the very perfection of his poise being in fact, to our tortured helplessness, the last ‘ turn of the screw.’ If he had given the least sign of needing us, for defense, for intervention, for anything that could have set us between him and the rabble! But one could hardly remonstrate without seeming to inform him that one thought of him as being affronted. And if he actually did not know, if it had not ever occurred to him that he could be exposed to affront, why then, heaven prosper his innocence! could we set ourselves so near the rabble as to squabble with them over how they ought to treat him? To squabble over the terms of Henry James’s reception was, we felt, the great unworthiness, second only to the ignorant derision. It was our affair just to deserve him by prizing what he prized, ignoring what he ignored, and meeting him at his own level, in the Great Good Place his kindly solicitude had made for us. If it was not in his vocabulary to say anything to the criticism of derision, we did best not to have anything to say to it. Only we could not quite ignore what he ignored, being of coarser clay; we could not help suffering for him, even if he obviously did not know how to suffer for himself.

And then, the shame we felt for our coevals, the vague sense of responsibility for the profane laughter that we could not explicitly disclaim, since we could not seem to be aware of it — these too were insurgent instincts, not too easily put down. But now all that is done with, at least nearly enough so that the quiet voice, the accent of appreciation and of faith, need not be a shriek to get itself pitched above the babbling ribaldry. This is the atonement we draw out of our very loss: that, because the resistance is so suddenly withdrawn, appreciation can operate more naturally, with less self-consciousness, than ever before. This is the auspicious time for it to set in earnest about its task of rescue and extrication, grateful that it can begin to disentangle from the old confusion those matters which it feels to be of the first importance.

II

To come at once to the most minutely specific matter of all is to begin where discussion has too often unfortunately ended. We mean, of course, the matter of Henry James’s personal style, in the narrower sense of verbal and phrasal quality, the contour and color of sentences. That style is the most intense vibration, certainly, of the personal note, the last inch of the development of expression toward the individual. In its task of fitting Henry James and what he had to say, it dropped more and more into certain persistent mannerisms; so that it is no matter for surprise if the larger significance of his manner seemed to have got lost among them.

The manner of Henry James, as distinguished from any and all mannerisms, is essentially the Henry James sentence. If his phrase-vocabulary is sometimes so unidiomatic that it is French, and sometimes so idiomatic that it is a species of refined slang of polite society, it must not be overlooked that his characteristic sentence is so beautifully cadenced that it is English of the purest. The rhythm and fluid beauty of prose were obvious and necessary tenets of his artistic faith. The Henry James sentence is a way of modifying everything and of obeying the stern injunction, never elsewhere more than half obeyed, to put modifiers with what they modify. The result is like a tree that has put forth, on one side and the other, so thick a succession of twigs and offshoots, and so luxuriantly covered their irregularities with massed foliage, that the main trunk is quite obscured. Or it is as though the author had set down his thought, embroidered it in every conceivable way, and then erased all but the embroidery. The meaning seems rather sketched than written; sketched with the finest pencil, in all desirable sharpness, but without hardness, of line.

That soft accuracy of touch appears at its best wherever a situation makes the liveliest appeal to the author’s kindly eager solicitude for his characters. For example, Herbert Dodd, a forlorn clerk whom life has ‘scraped bare,’ as he sat on his seaward-facing ‘ bench of desolation,’ ‘might in these sessions, with his eyes on the gray-green sea, have been counting again and still recounting the beads, almost worn smooth, of his rosary of pain — which had for the fingers of memory and the recurrences of wonder the same felt break of the smaller ones by the larger that would have aided a pious mumble in some dusky altar-chapel.’ It is in such contexts, where the question is of insight or sympathy, that Henry James is most himself, his touch unique and unapproachable.

In dealing with physical objects and the externals of personality, he often reminds one of the later and less periodic manner of Pater — as, for example, in rendering this interior of a French dining-room: ‘The little waxed salle-àmanger was sallow and sociable; François, dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a brother; the high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held, muchrubbed hands, seemed always assenting exuberantly to something unsaid; the Paris evening, in short, was, for Strether, in the very taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was innocently pleased to think it, of the wine, in the pleasant coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the thick-crusted bread.’

In all such passages — and our offered pair strictly and fairly represent the later and latest manner, the very upshot of the long adventure of Henry James’s style — there is the nicest possible care for the music of prose, the chime of sounds in combination, the word fitly spoken that is like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver.’

So far we take no explicit account of Henry James’s extraordinary felicity of phrase, a point in which he strikes one as nothing short of Meredithian. The impact of his wit is the more forcible because one has it to reckon with almost from the beginning, — indeed, from before the beginning, in the works of his little-known, little-read father,— whereas so many of his later characteristics grew upon him by slow accretions, from imperceptible beginnings. Nothing in his later work could be better than the description of Mr. Tristram in The American (1877) as ’large, smooth, and pink, with the air of a successfully potted plant.’ This is of the same substance as his description of Jim Pocock in The Ambassadors (1903) as ‘small and fat and constantly facetious, straw-colored and destitute of marks’; he ‘would have been practically indistinguishable had not his constant preference for light gray clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories done what it could for his identity.’ This is the swift summarizing touch often applied to individuals whose reality far exceeds their importance to the story. Another instance of the same felicity, the socially indispensable Miss Banker, in The Two Faces, was ‘stout red rich mature universal — a massive much-fingered volume, alphabetical wonderful indexed, that opened of itself at the right place.’ Later, bristling with new items of gossip, she has ‘ filled in gaps and become, as it were, revised and enlarged.’ Mrs. Assingham, ‘the most luminous of wives,’ dazes her somewhat lumpish husband with the dexterity of her analysis of a situation: ‘Whereupon, breaking short off, to ascend to her room, she presented her highly decorated back — in which, in odd places, controlling the complications of its aspect, the ruby or the garnet, the turquoise and the topaz, gleamed like faint symbols of the wit that pinned together the satin patches of her argument’ — and, one is constrained to add, like faint symbols of the wit that describes her, the Henry James wit that pins together the variously textured patches of his prose style, from Roderick Hudson to the last critiques and prefaces.

III

To the reader who finds in all this only bafflement, one must admit that the process of Henry James does largely consist in amassing subtleties. He flutes overtones instead of sounding the fundamental; and if the whole suggestive series of harmonics turns out not to suffice, as it confessedly does turn out for those who like the full organ of style and its emotional blare of brass, why then nothing is proved except that some persons like the more raucous instrumentation. If this final and nondebatable preference exists on adequate trial, one must make a virtue of accepting it as the non disputandum of æsthetics. But practically everything else in Henry James, the whole array of artistic devices and expedients, will be found enormously to count for simplification of the novel and of its machinery.

The principle of his basic simplicity is of course to be sought in his one inclusive interest, which has never for an instant shifted: his interest in the two interdependent fruits of civilization, of breeding, of the human horticulture at its most exquisite. The first of those fruits is perfection of environment, of scene — the spirit or ‘genius’ of place, if place be considered as the embodiment of man’s aspirations, loyalties, traditions, of his illustrious successes and his tragic failures. The second is perfection of the individual soul. All the best work of Henry James is reducible by analysis to a case of saturation with these two human idealities. He is the historian of man’s objects of art, his buildings, streets, cities, the outer shell and the inner decorations of his culture; and he is ‘the historian of fine consciences.’

If we state the two together, it is because of their interpenetration and essential oneness. It is in fact in Henry James’s treatment of backgrounds that one begins to detect the infusion of his social sense. Not only does he catch the exact shade or tonal nuance of his scene, his Rome, London, Paris, or New York: he unravels its cluster of inwrought relations and connections with society, he makes it ramify spatially in every direction and temporally into the known past or the implied future. Geographically, the Paris of The Ambassadors is France crystallized, an affirmation of scores of towns and countrysides. Still more, it is a marginal commentary on England across the Channel, a critical analysis of America across the Atlantic — always with accentuated reference to Woollett, Massachusetts. The metropolis is presented, through Strether’s observing and contrasting mind, in terms of everything that it is not. And temporally one feels Paris as the child of Empire, the grandchild of Revolution. By innuendo, the yesterday is shown as penumbrally lurking behind and round the to-day. In the salon of Madame de Vionnet ‘ the ghost of the Empire walked.’ And — ‘The light in her beautiful, formal room was dim . . . there was a pair of clusters of candles that glimmered over the chimney-piece. . . . He heard . . . from the empty court, the small plash of the fountain. From beyond this, and as from a great distance . . . came, as if excited and exciting, the vague voice of Paris. . . . Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded dates, the days and nights of revolution, the sounds had come in, the omens, the beginnings broken out. They were the smell of revolution, the smell of the public temper — or perhaps simply the smell of blood.’ This is the process of saturation, the saturation of the subject with all manner of discovered contacts and values. Its effect is indescribably to thicken and augment the social significance of places and of things, which, at their best and under such auspices, amount in themselves to criticism of life.

The second and far more important kind of saturation is that of personality, of the fine individual conscience. In more and more fully achieving it, Henry James arrived, by the middle of his career as a novelist, at the practice of tincturing the material of each story as vividly as possible with the finest consciousness present in it. He views the action of the given story, not as the omniscient reporter whose only limitation is that of plausibility, and who can observe actions in different spots simultaneously, nor yet as the narrator who hands over his material to a first-person-singular, a convenient eye-witness or participant delegated to talk the story for him, but in a somewhat different, a very special and characteristic way. He creates for the subject, and puts into it as observer and actor, the one personality or point of view in and through which the operation of the subject becomes most significant and most rewarding: then he studies the action from that point of view supplemented by his own. By this we mean that his chosen observer views the action objectively, while the author views the observer objectively. The story that he tells is not of the facts only: it is, especially and primarily, of some one’s enlightened perception of the facts. Thus our realization of the facts is suffused with the sense of another’s realization of them; we know the facts through seeing what shape and color they assume for a consciousness felt by us as vividly present throughout, and known to us as that of the invisible author can never be. The task becomes then to behold the subject through the mind in which it can take on the finest shapes and shades, the rarest values. On these terms every one of Henry James’s best pieces tends to become a story about a story, a recital of some one’s perception of events, that perception being sifted and weighed and in general selectively reëedited by the author as he passes it on to us.

In certain important ways too devious for our time and space, this trick of method determines and explains the incomparably finished technique of Henry James, every one of whose artistic manipulations exists solely for service of the will to know, to understand, to unriddle the central mystery of character. It is this incessant and indomitable will to know that leads him to his studies of the finest, rarest, most specialized of human relationships: that of the painter to his still unpainted ‘Madonna of the Future’; that of the ‘Passionate Pilgrim’ to his ancestral home; that of poor little Maisie to her scandalously divorced and squabbling parents; that most frequent relation of the lover who renounces his hopes because only so can his conscience define itself in action; that of the artist’s wife who has an unquenchable distaste for her husband’s work — these and a host of ot hers still more complex or richly ramifying, all of them proposed first, and presently brought to dramatic focus, as struggles of the individual soul rendered transparent to the reader.

IV

If we turn back a moment to qualify this insistence on the rewarding richness of the minds through which Henry James did his reproducing, it is only for defiance of an exaggerated public impression that most of his protagonists are formidably intellectual persons. He docs of course exert some of his best gifts in the portrayal of intellectual types; and it is true that he has never found his interest to shift its centre of gravity very far toward the street, the shop, or the factory. But to let the mind course at random over the list of his most arresting and communicative personœ is to experience a difficulty in recalling a great number who are intellectuals primarily, whereas the others, those who think with their nerves, positively throng. The values that recur and persist are passion and quickness of intuition, rather than profundity of thought. Even when the case proposed is that of the artist incarnate, we see him primarily outside the studio, in trouble, in love, in some light romantic escapade, or perhaps in debt; and our awareness of the creative talent in him is only our tribute to the general adequacy of Henry James’s characters — their adequacy, that is, for plausibly living up to any high requirement he makes of them. The task is to invent for each case as it comes up the one personality in presence of which it yields the most of its distilled essence, not by any means always the greatest personage. ‘A subject residing in somebody’s excited and concentrated feeling about something—both the something and the somebody being of course as important as possible — has more beauty to give out than under any other style of pressure.’ 1 That is one declaration of moment. But it needs this supplement: ‘The thing is to lodge somewhere at the heart of one’s complexity an irrepressible appreciation; but where a light lamp will carry all the flame I incline to look askance at a heavy.’ ¹

If there is any one type of appreciation in the analysis of which this author definitely excels himself, it is that of the very young girl in a difficult social situation, carrying it through with ‘acuteness and intensity, reflexion and passion,’ ‘a high lucidity,’ taking above all ‘a contributive and participant view of her situation.’ Of the less known of this type there are Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, Nanda Brookfield in The Awkward Age, Rose Tramore in The Chaperon, Laura Wing in A London Life — to all of whom the best-known Daisy Miller becomes, through her one last half-delirious flash of insight, the worthy elder cousin. Their altogether charming and lovable junior is of course little Maisie in What Maisie Knew — a mere wisp of childhood, bundled back and forth between parents divorced after an unsavory scandal, flung about as though she were a recurring taunt in some spiteful and monotonous argument, yet sweetly saved from the unlovely total of what she ‘ knew ’ by just her appreciation, her adjustment to the homely oddness of her standing — the answer of the responsible child in her to the irresponsible child in each of her parents and their various connections.

Of the others, the variegated types that make up the world of Henry James’s characters, there is no room to speak in detail. They are the select motley of all Cosmopolis. Let us content ourselves for the moment with noting that the best of the men, men such as Christopher Newman and Strether and Nick Dormer and Prince Amerigo, shine in the panoply of such virtues as we see in the best of the women: intuition, a grave and kindly solicitude, impressibility, readiness for the giveand-take of friendly intercourse — and in addition something which Europe mainly teaches them, a finished gentility, gentleness refined upon by breeding, the ideal consummation of chivalry. All of Henry James’s best — and his aristocracy is genuinely of bestness — are agents of the same social law, in the light of which his less than best are judged: the law of understanding of one’s fellows and of perfect charity for them — ‘never rashly to forget and never consciously to wound.’

This formula, the formula of Henry James’s large general definition of breeding, is the most important element in his work on the non-technical side. To see life steadily and see it whole has denoted in his practice the attempt to see it through the greatest faculty or motive applicable to it— the insatiable will to know, to understand. That will, a necessity to him and to his most representative men and women, rules and includes every lesser motive. It is simply the generalized version of his prized qualities of passion, intuition, reflexion, intensity — the ‘contributive and participant view ’ of life. He finds no need to write grim tragedies, which at their artistic best are the product of crucial misunderstandings, because he is always writing about the thing that makes the crucial misunderstanding impossible — the faculty of sympathetic insight working among difficulties, picking its way through them, achieving in the end, if it be worthy, the contact of understanding spirit with spirit understood. He confronts his personœ at the outset with a social situation that is like a very complicated lock, to which there is, there must be, they feel, somewhere a key. It is possible to break the lock; and oftentimes there is plenty of good sound raw common sense to be alleged for that course, on the usual blundering human theory that life is too short for anything but bold and violent action, the swiftest means of ‘getting there.’ But that is not the philosophy of our personœ in the given impasse: their one highest duty is to find the key. That it happens to be also their one highest privilege is the reason why their striving is seen as going on before us in the flush and glow of a warm human appeal. If they were seeking their ideal, a beautiful rightness of conduct, in the cold white light of some bloodless and sterile theory of obligation, the whole affair would strike us as intellectualized, flat, arid, and unrewarding. But all their waiting and wondering and subtle devising is in behalf of something they profoundly want, something profoundly worth wanting. By exhibiting the patience of self-knowledge, of slow self-mastery, they bring the issue out of their conflicts without the stress of a fiery or tragic dénouement. Their escape from that danger is the success of their understanding. The reasoned conduct that provides the way of escape is an expression of the social conscience, the inveterate human instinct of solidarity — Henry James’s greatest thing in the world.

V

As we pass on to the description of Henry James’s ‘art,’ using that sometimes despised and rejected word in its broad structural sense, we shall find a unique distinction in his procedure with a subject from the point of his first contact with its primary ‘germ.’ The accepted procedure of the realist is of course the collecting, note-taking, ‘documenting,’ or at any rate some form of the additive, whereby the germ is induced to multiply itself to the desired size. Henry James’s first thought, on the other hand, was to secrete his first tiny ‘wind-blown particle’ of suggestion, to shield it from the touch of any actuality outside his own imagination. We know the realist who conceives a story in his ow n mind and relies on life for the rest. Henry James, by his own repeated account, drew his initial conceptions from life and relied on his own mind for the rest. It is clear, again by his own account, that he distrusted life as an artistic selective principle, considered it in fact an artistic bungler and wastrel. Its way was to furnish the nucleus of a story, and then wantonly to wreck the story. By this it is not meant that he parted company with life or shirked important truths, but that he was far too interested in the law of life to dally among accidents or to prize odds and ends of reality just because they existed. A comment of his own illumines this point: —

‘ . . . The very source of interest for the artist . . . resides in the strong consciousness of his seeing all for himself. He has to borrow his motive, which is certainly half the battle; and this motive is his ground, his site and his foundation. But after that he only lends and gives, only builds and piles high, lays together the blocks quarried in the deeps of his imagination and on his personal premises. He thus remains all the while in intimate commerce with his motive, and can say to himself — what really more than anything else inflames and sustains him — that he alone has the secret of the particular case, he alone can measure the truth of the direction to be taken by his developed data. There can be for him, evidently, only one logic for these things; there can be for him only one truth and one direction — the quarter in which his subject most completely expresses itself. The careful ascertainment of how it shall do so, and the art of finding it with consequent authority — since this sense of “authority” is for the masterbuilder the treasure of treasures, or at least the joy of joys — renews in the modern alchemist something like the old dream of the secret of life.’ ²

This dream and this secret are the explanation of Henry James’s unvarying scorn for ‘the story that can be told’ and of his life-long endeavor to tell ‘the story that cannot be told.’

Henry James found his interest at the central truth of things, and let who would be interested in the surface facts.

Of the swarming consequences of this interest as his art worked them out in one case after another, space permits the naming of only the most significant. It explains, first, the progressive simplification of his art through the forty years and more of his productivity. He withdraws from himself every factitious external aid, leaves himself more and more with a free hand. Austerely alone with his theme, taking it on its own terms, making the most of its peculiar intensity, he finds actually a notation for cadences of the unheard melody, ‘the story that cannot be told.’ A second momentous result is the breaking-down of the canonical distinctions between novel and short story — this latter, with its specialized and arbitrary ‘technique,’ a greatly overrated form at best. Obviously a theme developed on the conditions just described admits of no academical control from without; and it is consequently impossible to locate the point where the ‘anecdotic’ short story becomes the ‘developmental,’ or where the ‘developmental’ short story becomes the novel-according-to-Henry-James.

Again and, in the present connection, finally, this same austere use of the imagination accounts for the sense we all have of the profound originality of Henry James. Realism on the lower plane never gives us that sense: its whole force is of the opposite appeal, that to memory or recognition leaping out to embrace undoubted actuality. No critic has ever questioned Henry James’s possession of the more fundamental and creative originality; but, most oddly from the present point of view, he has been praised above all for the novelty of his plots, which, as we have seen, are the one element of his art which he derived straight from brute material or factual reality, and which therefore can hardly justify our sense of his being so overwhelmingly individual. His true originality is first and always that of treatment. It is the outcome of his living at the centre of his subject. His process, like that of Meredith’s Comedy, ‘rejects all accessories.’ The realist lives, of course, all round the circumference of his subject and clutters his scene with accessories, and he is lucky if, in the end, he has made us aware that the subject has any centre at all. In reading Henry James we are aware of hardly anything else; everything in him has the magic of supreme relevance. His best performances have the self-evident and self-sufficient beauty of a solitary cloud hung in a still sky, or, in his better phrase, ‘ the hard beauty of the diamond.’ It is that splendid isolation and separate completeness of his themes, rather than their novelty as ideas, that surrounds us as we read with an eerie sensation never yet evoked by the novel which is a mere tranche de vie: the conviction that here is something that was never in the world before, something that is indestructibly and perfectly itself.

VI

The body of Henry James’s work is, then, its studied formal exquisiteness. But it has a soul as well as a body; and its soul is a faith, a philosophy of the social conscience. Stated in one word that has all the air of being as old as Latin, that philosophy is Renunciation; but in a very special sense, quite remote from that of Christian dogma and on a different moral foundation. The Christian consciousness of guilt is replaced by the consciousness of worth; the soul renounces, not that it may be tempered and sensitized in suffering, but simply that it may live up to itself. It suffers, not blindly, but with eyes open and intent, after all the questions have been asked and suffering has been proved the one thinkable answer. Renunciation in this view is obedience to an inner law of necessity, the immediate exercise of a highest privilege.

The social sense of this view becomes intelligible if we remember that the highest privilege in the world of Henry James’s characters is expressible only in terms of their relations to their fellows. There is nothing in their world except attitudes; a personality is the sum of its relations. One is happy just in proportion to the gift for surrounding one’s self with intimate and flawless relationships; one must learn to think out of one’s own point of view, think the thoughts of others, and in so doing partly cease to think of one’s self. A social situation is a network of gossamer threads floating invisible, binding life to life in bonds fragile and perfect. A blunderer may tear all those threads from their contacts and leave half a dozen lives detached, shorn of half their meaning. The indispensable social grace is, then, to walk softly enough to feel the faintest brush of those intangible relations and to retreat, if need be, in time. The retreat is one’s personal loss. But one must have seen far enough into the situation to apprehend the still greater loss of having one’s way at the expense of muddling situations and spoiling lives and generally proving one’s self an impenetrable brute. Self-esteem of this sort is practically a synonym for consideration of others.

If we have understood that renunciation of something immensely valuable for the sake of something quite without price is the crux of Henry James’s greatest stories and his all-inclusive test of character, we see in the same glimpse why his most fruitful theme is international in scope. As the spokesman (and he is almost never the satirist) of the American abroad, he has an opportunity to present in a large way the contact of international ideals, influences, civilizations — the contrasted values of different traditions of breeding, each with merits, splendors even, that only the touch of the other can fully reveal. And through that juxtaposition of excellences the individual may find himself in a tragic dilemma, involving, by whatever way he escapes, the loss of important things relinquished. The measure of his worth is simply what he chooses to spare and what to cling to. The Wings of the Dove shows him, for example, choosing to renounce a living love for a memory that exerts a peculiar claim. The problem of the international novel as Henry James practiced it was to bring out of a concrete social contingency so many conflicting ideals, all in their several ways desirable, that the individual soul must prove its fineness through choice and consequent sacrifice. The philosophy that comes out of this favorite theme is all in Strether’s words as he effaces himself from the tangled situation of The Ambassadors: ‘That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.’ Materially, he has got nothing; spiritually, he has lost much but gained more.

That renunciation of this order is anything but the casual affair of one story or one period, we may prove by the case of The American, a story of twenty-five years earlier. The ‘American’ is Christopher Newman, a youngish retired business man taking his first long Continental holiday. He becomes engaged to Madame de Cintré, the widowed daughter of an ancient and distinguished house; but his fiancée’s mother, a personage of sinister and, as it proves, lethal potentialities, cruelly contrives the breaking-off of the engagement. Then Newman finds his revenge prepared and waiting in the shape of a grim secret out of the past, involving unbearable disgrace for the family that has but just disgraced him. He has only to open his lips to destroy them. But somehow the fancied taste of revenge stales in his mouth — perhaps because he has savored it too long. He stands before the house of the Carmelites where Madame de Cintré has walled herself away from the world, and realizes how dead and meaningless is the whole story, how ‘the days and years of the future would pile themselves above her like the huge immovable slab of a tomb.’ Then he wanders into Notre Dame and sits down absently in the ‘splendid dimness.’

‘ The most unpleasant thing that had ever happened to him had reached its formal conclusion; he had learnt his lesson —not indeed that he the least understood it — and could put away the book. He leaned his head for a long time on the chair in front of him; when he took it up he felt he was himself again. Somewhere in his soul a tight constriction had loosened. He thought of the Bellegardes; he had almost forgotten them. He remembered them as people he had meant to do something to. He gave a groan as he remembered what he had meant to do; he was annoyed, and yet partly incredulous, at his having meant to do it: the bottom suddenly had fallen out of his revenge. Whether it was Christian charity or mere human weakness of will — what it was, in the background of his spirit — I don’t pretend to say; but Newman’s last thought was that of course he would let the Bellegardes go. If he had spoken it aloud he would have said he did n’t want to hurt them. He quite failed, of a sudden, to recognize the fact of his having cultivated any such link with them. It was a link for themselves perhaps, their having so hurt him; but that side of it was now not his affair. At last he got up and came out of the darkening church; not with the elastic step of a man who has won a victory or taken a resolve — rather to the quiet measure of a discreet escape, of a retreat with appearances preserved.’

Thus one of the earliest, assuredly one of the finest, versions of the reiterated lesson, the lesson of the sensitive conscience expressing itself in social terms. It is the moral foundation of every piece of ideally right conduct in the thirty volumes of Henry James. It is the sense too of the one grand public gesture of Henry James’s life, his thrilling personal renunciation. We are glad, those of us who think we humbly understand him, that in the second summer of the war he saw the way to bring himself so immeasurably nearer to us. We knew he would do it; how, being himself, could he not do it? And when he stepped from under our flag — our poor dimmed blurred stars he must have thought them — he stepped straight into our hearts. We are not told that his thought was to reprove us. At least we know that, if it were, he had earned the right by first immensely loving us; and should we not be able to bear ‘ the gentle reproof of exquisite solicitude,’ as Professor Wendell has called it? But the emphasis was not on that, on the reproof or the loss: with Henry James it never was on either. Still less could it have been on himself. He was committing himself, we know well, to something vaster even than England, vaster than empires and the Empire, and more enduring than they — the future of human solidarity in the world. He was living a chapter, the last for him, of the story that cannot be told.