The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel 9781472554291, 9781472508393

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS C H A P T E R Four originally appeared i n Essays in Criticism, and I am grateful to the editors for permitting me to reprint it here. M y debts to other critics, colleagues, students, and friends are many and various but I should like to express particular gratitude to the people who have read and criticized parts o f the book in manuscript: to m y husband, to Jerome Beaty, to Graham Handley, W . J. Harvey, and Reginald Levy. I am grateful too to the adviser o f the Athlone Press from whose comments I have profited. M y special thanks are due to M a r t i n D o d s w o r t h who undertook to look up certain details in the Russian text o f Anna Karenina, and whose researches so strengthened and extended m y own analysis that they are printed as an appendix to Chapter V I I . B.H.

Introduction M Y subject is the variety o f narrative form, illustrated by a sample o f a few novels and novelists sufficiently repre­ sentative and distinctive. Before enlarging on individuality and difference, i t seems useful to begin w i t h some brief and obvious remarks about the basic kinds o f organization i n fiction. T h e novelist, whoever he is and whenever he is w r i t i n g , is giving form to a story, giving form to his moral and metaphysical views, and g i v i n g form to his particular experience o f sensations, people, places, and society. H e tells a story. Even i n the recent French anti-novel, this entails clarity, continuity, and a rising curve o f expecta­ tion. T h e action o f the story may be minimal, as it is i n The Square, by Marguerite Duras, or dislocated, as i t is i n A l a i n Robbe-Grillet, or muted and attenuated, as i t is i n Virginia W o o l f . I t may be violent and exciting, as i t is in Dickens and Graham Greene, or depend less on external adventure than on the troubled consciousness and feelings, as i t does i n D . H . Lawrence's Women in Love. I t may be the chief principle o f organization, as i t is i n Wuthering Heights or "Jane Eyre, where the actual physical events provide the primary means o f delineating character and change, or i t may provide a fitfully recurring tension as it does i n Dickens, 1

I should draw attention, perhaps unnecessarily, to the limits of m y selected novels and novelists. I have said nothing about the symbolic novels of such writers as K a f k a or C a m u s , where m y criterion of truthfulness seems to apply only in a v e r y special sense, since in these novels the immediacy and individual identity is frankly subdued to the structure o f fable, and realistic surface is abrogated. S y m b o l i c fable can reveal h u m a n truths with a special intensity and power, but m y concern has been with fiction attempting, at least in part, some degree of psychological realism. D . H . Lawrence's Women in Lime might be regarded as a symbolic fable but appears to me to be a mixed form, possessing the realism of psychological detail and individual identity. 1

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where the story line does not always coincide w i t h moral criticism or social satire. I t may be placed i n the context o f long spaces o f routine or randomly flowing experience, as i t is i n Anna Karenina. I t may be very simple, as i n Jane Austen, or h i g h l y complicated, as i n George E l i o t . But i f the novel does not possess the form o f the story then it is not a novel. Even defiant story-tellers like Sterne or Joyce or RobbeGrillet have either had to retain its rudimentary features or have had to exploit the very form they were flouting. Tristram Shandy tantalizes conventional narrative expecta­ tions but only succeeds i n its teasing satire by keeping w i t h i n the limits o f fiction and occasionally satisfying our need to know what happened next. W e may often be told what happened before instead o f what happened afterwards, we may never know what happened i n the end, but the whole ingenious structure is committed to the form of expectation and curiosity. I n telling his story, or i n between telling his story, the novelist is also organizing his criticism o f life. H e may be fitting the complexity and contradictoriness o f life into a predetermined dogmatic pattern, like Defoe and Charlotte Bronte' or H a r d y . H e may be using dogmatic patterns i n order to test and reject them, like George Eliot and Tolstoy and Lawrence. H e may be less interested in showing ideals and models than i n rejecting them, but, like the story, the moral view is always present i n some form or another even in crude stereotyped novels. Its form is the form of moral categories, w h i c h the novel shares w i t h the psychologist's case-book or w i t h almost anyone's gossip, but although the u n i t y o f moral category is a very important aspect of the form o f a novel, it is not the aspect which defines its peculiar qualities as a novel. I n order to be a novel, and not an abstract analysis, it must give substance to individuality as well as to categories. T h e novel holds us by its story and informs us by its

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moral argument, but i t moves us by its individual presences and moments, by what Lawrence calls 'the l i v i n g m o m e n t ' and 'the v i v i d relation . . . at that quick moment o f t i m e ' and by what James calls 'the love of each seized identity.' T h i s k i n d o f separation o f morality and truthful realization is arbitrary, since the novelist's evaluation of life is w o r k e d out i n particular, not i n general, terms. A moral scheme can be made to seem workable, a metaphysical argument plaus­ ible, by an art w h i c h leaves out the individual stubbornness o f facts and feelings. For this reason I have avoided the w o r d 'realism' and fallen back on 'truthfulness'. As Robert Louis Stevenson said o f ' t r u t h ' , this is a term ' o f debatable propriety' but useful since i t is suggestive both o f a satis­ factory translation o f experience into art and o f an honest and sensitive recognition o f facts and feelings often evaded and avoided in life, not merely i n art. I f the concept of form is to be used faithfully and usefully i t must be enlarged to include the individual life w h i c h is the breath o f fiction and o f a real response to fiction. A n d this real response is m u c h more than a recognition o f our familiar experience, must often involve that new recognition w h i c h , as Lawrence knew, was frequently painful. T e l l i n g the t r u t h i n fiction is not invariably different from telling the t r u t h i n life, though our response to a novel involves both the comparison w i t h the w o r l d we k n o w and the new apprehension o f the w o r l d we do not know. 1

I t may be objected at this point that I am emptying all meaning from the term ' f o r m ' . I hope that the detailed argument i n the body o f the book w i l l succeed i n demon­ strating that we can enlarge the scope of the term w i t h o u t such a loss. T h e truthful detail may look irrelevant i f we see form i n a merely skeletal way, as the form of the story or the form of moral categories. I f we look also for the form o f particularity I t h i n k we can do justice to the difficulty and power o f the novelist's art and stay honestly close to the 1

See p. 32.

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reader's response. I f we admire the narrative curve o f tension we may place Trollope higher than Tolstoy. I f we admire the thematic organization we may place James Gould Cozzens higher than Lawrence. I f we admire the form o f t r u t h , we can do neither. These three aspects of the art o f fiction may be all strongly present, as they are i n Great Expectations and Middlemarch, two novels remarkable for their harmonious combination o f the good story, the working-out o f a moral problem, and the lively representation o f reality. N o t all critics and novelists w o u l d admit these novels as ideal forms. I w o u l d myself argue that the form of represented t r u t h i n Middlemarch is not perfect, and that this has often been ignored, or ack­ nowledged but not expressed as formal criticism, because critics have been more interested i n the novel's narrative and moral organization than i n the completeness and consistency o f its imitation o f life. T h i s is using formal analysis and formal criteria i n a very wide sense, one very unlike the analysis and criteria o f our first great critic o f fiction, H e n r y James. James also denied formal harmony to such great Victorians as Dickens and George Eliot, but granted their life while he denied their art. H e w o u l d certainly not have admitted m y suggested three purposes o f fiction, since they include no mention o f form for its own sake. James d i d more than anyone to define the aesthetic status o f fiction, and it seems apparent from his various discussions o f narrative form, that he became more interested i n g i v i n g the novel a strong and conspicuous aesthetic interest than i n telling a good story, or w o r k i n g out a moral argument, or m a k i n g a representation of life as i t feels when we live i t . H e d i d all these things, usually d i d them sup­ remely well, and was by no means unaware of their existence and importance, as is vividly apparent i n his tribute to Balzac's 'insistent particulars' and 'love o f each seized i d e n t i t y ' ( ' T h e Lesson o f Balzac', 77?!? House of Fiction, ed. L e o n Edel). But he was chiefly concerned w i t h

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praising and publicizing a conspicuously aesthetic and intensely concentrated form. Both in his novels and i n his rejection of the large loose baggy monsters o f the m i d nineteenth century we find the aesthetic principle which is left out i n my division o f narrative form into the story, the argument, and the imitation of life. James could not deny that those novelists he attacked gave form to a story or to a criticism o f life or to psychological experience, but what he could and d i d find lacking was his own k i n d of narrative form. T h i s is the form o f a highly concentrated unity, the result o f the r i g i d economy w h i c h is essential i n drama and possible, though rare, i n fiction. L o o k e d at another way, i t is an assertive display o f form which is common i n music and the plastic arts, and rare i n fiction. James saw himself as refining and toughening the forms o f fiction, and not merely i n a way appropriate for himself, a choice from many possible experiments i n the m e d i u m . H e saw this as the best way. N o r indeed d i d he see his experiment as intrinsically fraught w i t h dangers and limitations, and this is not really surprising. H i s remarkable achievement is the creation o f a narrowly limited and even gratuitously stringent form, which only rarely distorts his human materials. T h e last t h i n g I want to do is to applaud the expansive realism o f George Eliot and Tolstoy by presenting James as the model of aesthetic form and a typically damaging instance o f its falsity. W e can, I suggest, recognize both his t r i u m p h and the t r i u m p h o f George E l i o t and Tolstoy i f we admit that there are intrinsic difficulties and dangers in the aesthetic assertion and con­ centration. T o take note of the failures in James is to equip ourselves for recognizing his successes. H e himself accused George Eliot not only o f 'redundancy' but also of sacri­ ficing 'the irresponsible plastic way' to her intellectual system ( ' T h e L i f e o f George E l i o t ' , Partial Portraits). H i s aesthetic ideal also took its toll. I f we recognize, for instance, that the concluding rejection of M a r i a Gostrey

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at the end o f The Ambassadors makes an affirmation w h i c h is thematically and aesthetically satisfactory but humanly rather unsupported, we can better appreciate the reasons w h y the end o f The Wings of the Hove is both formally essential and very m o v i n g . Once we appreciate the diffi­ culties involved i n the Jamesian dramatic economy we come to see his reasons for flouting the author's voice as used by George E l i o t . George Eliot's commentary has form and function, but when James keeps rigidly w i t h i n the con­ sciousness o f Strether he is surely achieving something impossible w i t h i n the looser form o f the conventional Victorian novel. W e should add that George E l i o t achieves effects w h i c h James does not, but what is important is the individual achievement, not the competition between narra­ tive forms. James's formal stringency is not the only source o f assertive order and selected pattern. T h e dogmatist has his sche­ matism too, and i n some o f the novels o f Defoe and Charlotte Bronte and H a r d y we find another k i n d o f concentrated form, much less aesthetically conspicuous than anything i n James but also very different from the expansive qualifica­ tions o f George E l i o t and Tolstoy. I f James is on occasion guilty o f sacrificing human plausibility to economy and symmetry, Defoe and H a r d y are more frequently guilty o f sacrificing the exception or the qualification which w o u l d blur what seems to them to be the typical pattern i n life. H e r e o f course we are on notably different ground, since the ideological simplification or distortion is not just a literary imitation, to be judged as realistic or unrealistic. I t is an error or a partiality or a blindness or a fantasy which may be transferred from life to art. Both aesthetic selection and dogmatic selection have their dangers and limitations, but both can yield vitality enough to make a novel which is more than either a pleasing form or a plain fable, and w h i c h has the colour o f life. I have tried to show the limitations o f form in novels

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which generally contrive to overcome them i n an imagina­ tive apprehension o f t r u t h . James achieved vitality under hard conditions, just as George E l i o t achieved u n i t y while exploring the widest variations and complexities. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina probably comes nearest to a form w h i c h preserves unity and meaningful contrast while keeping close to the apparently formless flow o f experience. A l l three, in very different ways, make their individual forms out o f what James call the 'awful mixture o f things'. I m i g h t have enlarged m y account o f this formal variety by g i v i n g other examples o f restriction. T h e novels o f Virginia W o o l f would provide simpler and cruder examples o f the aesthetic novel than anything James ever wrote, while the simple early Victorian Christian novels o f Elizabeth Sewell or Charlotte Yonge, often directly designed as instruments o f religious education, w o u l d be stark instances o f the distor­ tions o f dogmatic form. But I have not wanted to attempt a large classification, but merely to show the variety o f com­ binations i n novelists for w h o m I have strong sympathy and admiration. I w o u l d not want to disguise m y belief that the expansive novel has its special advantages. T h e Tolstoyan form has a richness and freedom and immediacy peculiar to itself, and this is not always sufficiently recognized even by critics who are fervent i n their rejection o f James's partiality. W e have by now accepted the deficiencies o f James as a judge o f other novelists, but what seems to have happened is that we still use the Jamesian formal standards w i t h little qualifica­ tion i n our own analysis. W e insist that the large loose baggy monster has unity, has symbolic concentration, has patterns of imagery and a thematic construction o f character, and in the result the baggy monster is processed by our N e w Criticism into something strikingly like the original Jame­ sian streamlined beast. I n attacking James for passing an act of uniformity against the novelists we seem to be in danger o f still pressing his standards o f uniformity, not

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claiming that Tolstoy and James are achieving different kinds o f imaginative form, but at least appearing to claim that the novels James rejected were other versions o f his o w n achievement. T h i s is, I believe, to belittle and blur the individual power o f James and Tolstoy and George E l i o t . I have tried to show that there is after all some sense i n calling novels like Middlemarch and Anna Karenina large and loose, but that this largeness and looseness has a special advantage, allowing the novelist to report truthfully and fully the quality o f the individual moment, the loose end, the doubt and contradiction and mutability. James was w r o n g to call such novels ' f l u i d puddings' but we m i g h t do worse than keep his adjective while rejecting his noun. W e can only bracket George E l i o t and Tolstoy for tem­ porary convenience o f contrast. I f George E l i o t makes H a r d y and James at times appear thinly schematic, so i n t u r n does Tolstoy make George E l i o t at times appear overoptimistic and final i n her moral analysis, and restricted i n her report o f life. Middlemarch is very like Anna Karenina i n its ability to create and break categories, and i n its t r u t h to the complexity and shifts o f human emotion, but i t has a pattern o f moral development and conclusiveness w h i c h Tolstoy blurs i n truthful doubt. I t has too a conventional exclusion o f sex which is very visible i f we put i t beside Anna Karenina or Lady Chatterleys Lover, t w o novels w h i c h I want to bracket only temporarily i n contrast w i t h Middlemarch, since sexual realism is by no means the same t h i n g i n Tolstoy and Lawrence. B u t i f we are considering the truthfulness o f the large expansive novel we should bear i n m i n d that social convention imposed a restriction on George Eliot just as surely as self-imposed artistic discipline imposed restrictions on James. T h e limitation o f E . M . Forster's disarmingly argued suggestion that we can look at novelists as i f they were w o r k i n g together i n a circular room is that i t ignores those historical conditions w h i c h determine form as well as theme. George Eliot and Lawrence are plainly not

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w o r k i n g i n the same room, and although they are both remarkably honest novelists, the limitations o f Forster's metaphor are clearly apparent i f we put Middlemarch beside Lady Chatterlef s Lover. Lawrence throws into sharp relief not only those evasions and omissions which we take for granted i n the Victorian novel, but is, like Tolstoy, a good example o f the novelist whose form is closely conditioned by the conscious relation o f his art to his life. Lawrence is the most complete antithesis to James, for he rejects external formal principles, demands the right to make the novel reflect the illogicality, absurdity, and intransigence o f life, eschews finality, and usually defies the diagrammatic forms o f fable. B u t we can only use critical comparison i f we, like the truthful novelist, give u p the neatness o f categories when they cease to correspond to the richness o f our material. I n some ways Lawrence resembles James: his symbolic unity, his psychic converse between characters, and his frequently concentrated point o f view, all force the critic to modify the antithesis. M o r e ­ over, i f we compare Lawrence w i t h George E l i o t and Tolstoy, he shows occasional lapses into that very schematism he attacks most fiercely in theory. I f Lady Chatterlefs Lover is more complete i n its sexual frankness than Middlemarch, it has the disadvantage o f a serious lapse into schematic fable which makes Sir Clifford Chatterley an implausible construct compared w i t h the lovingly rendered Casaubon. I t w i l l not do to suggest that Lawrence is free to tell the whole t r u t h because he is unaesthetic compared w i t h James, undogmatic compared w i t h H a r d y , and socially uninhibited compared w i t h George E l i o t . Some o f the factors which determine form can be isolated, but not all, and i f Lawrence has the explicable advantages o f his chosen form he also shows less explicable failures and inconsistencies. One o f m y chief interests i n this comparison o f novels and novelists is the relation between generalization and particular liveliness, and, as I have just suggested, the critic must keep

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an eye on his categories, useful though they are u p to a point. U p to a point i t is possible to define some o f the variations o f narrative form by erecting a scaffolding of categories. W e can suggest that some novels are externally and internally more restricted than others, some expressing a fixed opinion i n a fixed pattern, some coming to value means as m u c h as ends, some deferring pragmatically to the con­ fusion and relativity o f judgement and solution. Such a scaffolding is only useful i f i t is admittedly impermanent, and i t is no use t h r o w i n g i n such an admission at the beginning and end o f discussion. I have tried to modify m y classification wherever i t seem to be becoming misleading, and this may at times have resulted i n a tiresome process of shifting contrast and comparison. T h e novel shows us the artist and moralist who is prepared to disprove, not only to prove, his hypotheses, t h o u g h at times i t is hard to say whether he is open-eyed or unaware when he blurs con­ clusion or goes against the grain o f his own beliefs. I f we are to attempt any celebration and analysis o f the most various and least aesthetic moral art—the art of fiction—we must use our categories as probes rather than proofs. I f the differences I describe i n m y chosen novelists t u r n out to be less impressive than the common features, i t w o u l d be unreasonable o f me to object.

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Total Relevance: Henry James is almost always telling a single story, while Dickens and George E l i o t and Tolstoy are telling several. T h i s simple difference o f scope and quantity determines many differences o f form, and should not be neglected, though i t is by no means the most interesting difference between James's concentrated narrative and the expansive novels o f the great Victorians. W h a t distinguishes the Jamesian novel from its large loose baggy contemporaries is the special relation of its parts to the whole. I t would take too m u c h space to examine fully all the characteristics o f the Jamesian economy, and m y purpose here is to choose some o f those features which have not already been exhaustively discussed in order to b r i n g out some o f the merits and defects w h i c h make h i m significantly different from most other novelists. A full account w o u l d have to include dis­ cussion o f his symbolism, his dramatic prefiguration, his allusiveness, and his irony. I have left out some o f these subjects entirely, and only briefly touched on others. For similar reasons, I have not treated his novels chronologically, though I am aware that his formal concentration varies and develops. N o r have I treated the novels very evenly. After a lengthy discussion o f some o f the formal problems o f the late novels, I have thrown out some barely substantiated remarks on similar problems elsewhere. I f this makes some of m y judgements appear flimsy, I can only plead that I wanted to keep James in his place i n this book, as an illus­ tration in danger o f swallowing m y thesis, but I hope not actually doing so. H E N R Y JAMES

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George E l i o t expressed the hope that every detail i n Middlemarch had its place in the total design. Middlemarch is indeed a novel w i t h no irrelevant digressions, no disturb­ i n g loose ends, no padding either o f h u m o u r or circum­ stantial description or local colour. I t is not, however, a novel where every episode, every description, every psycho­ logical observation, and every metaphor, is o f equal i m ­ portance. Its total design is that of an intricately graduated order. Some details are more important than others, some of its most v i v i d and memorable moments lie apart from the main action and the main moral argument. T h e y may well command a powerful assent of feeling or thought, they often suggest the pressure and possibility of actions and choices not taken up w i t h i n the novel, and in these and other ways they have their part to play in building up the substantial appearance o f t r u t h . Some o f the details could be dropped without much loss to the main figure i n the carpet. T h e development of Dorothea's story, i n all its moral and psycho­ logical implication, could not do without W i l l Ladislaw's relationship w i t h Rosamond Vincy, which precipitates a crisis, change, and conclusion. B u t i t could do without the striking moment when Ladislaw sees, as a distinct possi­ bility, that he may be undesiringly led into adultery w i t h Rosamond. T h i s single realistic flash o f vision—hardly ever mentioned by George Eliot's critics—is a local t r u t h , not an essential detail i n the argument. T h e fact that we are never told w h y the railwayman in Anna Karenina was killed—he may have been d r u n k or too muffled against the cold to hear the t r a i n — i n no way affects the action or the major ironies and symbols, but its local effect o f casualness and ignorance has its part to play in the complete truthfulness o f the novel. W e should accept Bartle Massey's crusty bachelor dislike of women i n Adam Bede without the hints about his past history, but the glimpse, incomplete and brief and u n ­ sentimental, gives us that sense of characters acting from a complete existence which is so characteristic of George

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Eliot. There is a powerful image used i n Chapter xv o f Middlemarch to express Lydgate's ability to see beyond his passion for Laure while i n its grips: 'while we rave on the heights, [we] behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us'. I t has no place i n the image-patterns of the novel and does not even express one o f the dominant themes, but its local reminder o f Lydgate's double v i s i o n — extended and brought home i n the generalization—is deeply moving. There are many such details i n the expansive novel which play a small but cumulatively important part i n building up a truthful impression o f human complexity. T h i s sounds vague, and I t h i n k necessarily so. I t is hard to see how the critic can demonstrate the cumulative effect o f particular details and moments w h i c h cannot be reduced to a poetic or thematic pattern. W h a t is possible is some account o f moments o f feeling or sensation which are s t r i k i n g even though formally isolated. H o w often, i n our criticism o f novels, do we pick out such m o v i n g details w h i c h may testify to a sensitive i f unmethodical response? I do not suggest that criticism should revert to this k i n d of impres­ sionism, but merely that there is perhaps something w r o n g w i t h a critical account o f a novel w h i c h mentions only those details and images w h i c h fit into a symbolic series or a codifiable moral argument. I f we apply the Jamesian standards o f cross-reference and total relevance then we may move too far away from the actual experience o f responding to fiction. I f our test is strictly thematic or poetic, then we may judge such details as irrelevant or, in James's word, 'arbitrary'. W h a t we often do in practice is to exaggerate the symbolic relevance. W"e describe those moths w h i c h flap round when Karenin discusses his divorce w i t h the lawyer as symbols o f Anna's situation, point out that the story o f Rumpelstiltskin told by M a r y Garth at the Vincys' party is significantly placed i n a novel about work, bargains, marriage, and nemesis. W h a t we do equally often is just to

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forget about such details. T h e investigation o f the wide significance o f small points has become standardized. I t is a teachable method, and can be applied by almost anyone capable o f reading, w r i t i n g , and counting. But how often do we publish our negative evidence—the images which do not belong to the pattern, the detail which is simply a detail, like Lovers' Vows in Mansfield Park, which so many o f us have read eagerly and found to our disappointment to have no symbolic resonance ? T h e novel is usually concerned w i t h g i v i n g a substantial picture o f human relationships, and i f this fails no amount o f serious purpose or poetic unity can make it a good novel. But the unpopularity o f character-analysis i n Shakespearean criticism may have made its contribution to our exaggerated emphasis on theme and symbolism. I f we content ourselves w i t h doing only what D . H . Lawrence called 'reducing the novel to its didactic capacity' or w i t h regarding the novel as a poem—which it is not—we lose the necessary respect for the insistent local appearances o f t r u t h . T h e novels of Dickens and George E l i o t may be dis­ torted by such analysis, but the novels of H e n r y James w i l l suffer much less. For the unusual feature o f the Jamesian novel—particularly the three late novels—is that it makes i t almost impossible for us to maintain such a distinction between local effect and central relevance. T h e local v i v i d ­ ness o f person or scene or object is nearly always a symbolic contribution to the main action and argument. T h e loose detail is seldom found in the clear definition and compressed observation of a Jamesian novel. W h e n James withholds information—as he does o f course on several celebrated occasions—his silence is portentous and conspicuous, and echoes throughout the novel. Compare his evasion about M i l l y ' s illness or the nature o f the small object manufac­ tured by Chad's ancestors w i t h Tolstoy's tiny, quiet, barely noticeable refusal to give a full report on the reasons for the railwayman's death i n Anna Karenina. T h e gratuitous

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detail, or the assertive silence, which need not be the result of careless or imperfect organization, contributes to the lifelike impression o f a w o r l d w h i c h has blurred and i m ­ perfectly k n o w n details, rough edges, loose ends, and unacted possibilities. T h i s is not the k i n d o f w o r l d created by James. T h e details which m i g h t be gratuitous i n another novel, such as the idle flow o f talk at a dinner-party or the fur­ niture i n a room, or gestures or colours, sooner or later impress us (sooner rather than later) as having a density o f reference, a large irony, a symbolic weight, when they make their cunning appearances, i n The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove. There is no free observation i n the concentrated Jamesian novel. T h e observer himself is never free to be a mere recorder, but is always using the external appearances i n order to pick up cues and clues. James gives us a dramatically enclosed and self-contained w o r l d where everything has relevance to the main argument, where appearances, gestures, objects, images, conversation, all shoot out like sure arrows to the heart o f the matter. H i s pattern is insistently centripetal, his relevance is total. A n d its definition is simpler and clearer and has a more i m m e d i ­ ate aesthetic assertiveness, like the form o f a song or a pot, than that o f the novel whose intricate structure keeps greater faith w i t h the complexities, uncertainties, and changes o f its raw life materials. O n the face o f it, the novel dealing w i t h the single action has plenty o f chance to be leisurely and wayward, while the three-volume novel has special needs for economy. Dickens and George E l i o t have to make many transitions i n action, persons, time, place, and atmosphere. T h e y usually have to make a serial construction memorable, coherent, and unified. I am referring here not to serial publication, for this o f course applies to James too, but to the serial structure o f a multiple novel when read straight off, w i t h the regular interruptions not of time but o f its rotating stories. T h e

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dense symbolic scenes o f Tolstoy and George E l i o t show the characteristic economy o f the large loose form. There is the first scene i n the railway-station i n Anna Karenina. I t is an intricate meeting-place and a beginning, a knot o f symbolism and irony i n w h i c h past, present, and future and three sets o f destiny are bound together. There is the scene o f Featherstone's funeral i n Middlemarch where Dorothea looks down reluctantly from the window, and refuses, like her author, to echo M r s Cadwallader's views on the gro­ tesque humanity seen below. T h i s scene, too, is a strongly symbolic and ironical condensation o f time and action and persons. A n o t h e r source o f unity is found i n the b i n d i n g power o f recurrent imagery and symbols, especially func­ tional i n George Eliot and Dickens. T h e special need for u n i t y i n the large novel is met i n various ways, and even i n lesser masters o f the form, like Trollope or even H a r r i e t Beecher Stowe, the need to cover large tracts o f time and place and to handle a variety o f people and events makes some modes o f economy and tightness essential. T h e large novel w h i c h is also rambling and discrete is by any stan­ dards a loose monstrosity, but i t is very different from the novels o f Dickens, George Eliot, and Tolstoy. I t w o u l d be an exaggeration to suggest that this k i n d o f condensation is sustained throughout the great Victorian l o n g novel. For one pregnant scene o f the k i n d I have mentioned, there are many w h i c h have slighter general reference, like some o f the domestic scenes i n Middlemarch or the comic scenes i n Dickens, where i t would be hard to argue the pressure o f total relevance. There are many scenes in the expansive novel which have the uncommitted air of life's normal flow, standing outside crisis and symbolic vividness, sketching in social manners and connections and familiarizing rather than developing character, and provid­ ing the necessary illusion o f a slow movement o f time and a natural unfolding o f character and action. There is a special k i n d o f leisureliness associated w i t h Middlemarch and Anna

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17

Karenina, though they are not chronicle novels like David Copperfield or The Mill on the Floss or War and Peace, but have a much briefer time-span. T h i s leisureliness is one of the results o f the novelist's ability to suggest the ordinary life between crises. Tolstoy, in particular, has a remarkable capacity for filling the novel w i t h scenes which lie right out­ side the tensions o f plot, corresponding most closely w i t h the normal pace o f life, not shaped by the climactic curves leading to crises and conclusions. I n the late novels o f James, and indeed i n most o f his early w o r k too, each scene vibrates w i t h the expectancy leading to the crisis, and a remarkable number of scenes are actual scenes o f crisis, either o f consciousness or event. Each scene has the resonance and totally committed relevance o f the railway-station scene i n Anna Karenina or the funeral scene i n Middlemarch. James's interest in the theatre, his own experiments i n drama, and his insistent use o f dramatic analogy i n his remarks on the novel, serve as reminders that this k i n d of condensation o f scene and symbol is something we find more often in the drama than i n fiction. Character­ istic o f drama too, and another source o f condensation i n James, is the absence o f the narrator, except i n a very muted form. Every detail has to tell i n the dramatic medium, and James uses details as H u m p t y - D u m p t y uses words, m a k i n g them w o r k overtime. For the novel does not demand this k i n d o f insistent condensation. I t is not restricted i n time, like a play. A l l its parts are accessible: we can always t u r n back its pages. James's extra demands may have been necessary to h i m , but they are not the necessary responses to the exigencies o f his medium. Since I am claiming total relevance for James I cannot provide effective illustration, and m y claim w i l l be meaningless unless every reader checks for himself throughout the course o f the novel. But in an attempt to illustrate I shall look at some scenes from The Wings of the Dove, not scenes of crisis in the ordinary sense of the word, but typical examples of James's insistent

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central relevance. I n the dialogue and i n the visual partic­ ulars there is a depth of irony w h i c h does not blur or dis­ tance the actual scene, but w h i c h takes us beyond that scene. T h e phenomenal w o r l d never shines innocently i n its own r i g h t i n James, but it is not reduced or schematized out o f existence. One o f the most interesting qualities of his insistent condensation is his ability to give the symbol w i t h ­ out losing vital particularity. I n Chapter v i i o f The Wings of the Dove L o r d M a r k and M i l l y Theale are sitting next to each other at dinner, and James gives us a conversation w i t h the appropriate surface o f w i t , flattery, and exaggeration. Such remarks as ' Y o u ' r e the best t h i n g n o w ' and ' y o u shall see everything' have perfect propriety and verisimilitude for the people and the social occasion. But James also ensures that the superficial appearance o f small-talk shall vibrate portentously, shall strike us as small-talk w i t h a difference. H e manages this i n several ways. First, by a favourite device of his which he uses i n several novels, and w h i c h is to be found i n a much cruder form i n Daniel Deronda, at the first meeting of Grandcourt and Gwendolen. T h i s is the device o f unspoken dialogue. After L o r d M a r k tells M i l l y that she 'shall see everything' the dialogue is suspended while we move into M i l l y ' s unspoken reflections. H e r s is a consciousness both febrile and acute, marked by feelings of isolation, unreality, and by an obsession w h i c h makes her most plausibly read this stranger's polite remarks as double-entendres. L o r d M a r k ' s actual words are sufficiently pointed to encourage her iron­ ical interpretations, since he is endowed w i t h Jamesian extra-sensory perception, but they are not so pointed that we cannot take them at their face-value. But what he says in the imaginary continuation o f their dialogue w i t h i n M i l l y ' s m i n d cannot be taken at face-value alone. T h e gap between his smail-talk and her larger obsessed interpretation is bridged by what she imagines. T h i s is M i l l y reading between his lines:

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Inexpressive, but intensely significant, he met as no one else could have done the very question she had suddenly put to M r s . Stringham on the Briinig. Should she have i t , whatever she did have, that ques­ tion had been, for long? ' A h , so possibly n o t ' , her neighbour appeared to reply; 'therefore, don't you see? I'm the way.' I t was vivid that he might be, i n spite o f his absence o f flourish; the way being doubtless just i n that absence, (ch. vii)

There is no longer the nice balance between a plausible social dialogue and an ironical cue for the k n o w i n g reader. M i l l y ' s interpretation and extension o f L o r d M a r k ' s words does not belong to the context o f normal social exchange. T h e literal application o f ' y o u shall see everything' is j u s t not present i n 'I'm the w a y ' . L o r d M a r k could not k n o w that she is i l l , could not understand her unspoken question even i f he heard i t , could not yet be offering himself as 'the w a y ' . T h e scene establishes M i l l y ' s sick susceptibilities but i t does more than this. I t also looks ahead, prefiguring L o r d M a r k ' s later understanding and proposals, though i n ­ completely. Such concentration has a further convenience, for i t establishes that genuine and characteristic rapport so rapidly experienced by many Jamesian characters. These characters do not need to go through a lengthy process o f getting acquainted. T h e i r endowment o f sensibility and intelligence is exploited by James to b r i n g about this k i n d o f subterranean, almost telepathic contact. T h e nearest t h i n g to this i n the novel is Lawrence's psycho-physical affinities, different i n many ways but having some o f the same consequences. James does not use this rapport i n sexual relations alone. Indeed, i t is usually more marked i n asexual relations, though the contact between L o r d M a r k and M i l l y is an interesting borderline case. W h e r e other novelists may use the fact or the convention of love at first sight James exploits the intelligence and sensibility o f his people and creates the convention of speedy rapport, which enables h i m to leave out many steps and explanations which slow up

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and—from a Jamesian point o f view—'waste' time i n Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. Both George E l i o t and Tolstoy use the sudden rapport o f sexual tension i n the first encounters o f Stephen and M a g g i e , Vronsky and Anna, but only in these fairly restricted amorous situations. T h e speed w i t h which characters come to understand each other i n a Jamesian novel is one o f the features o f his concentration. I n this example there is both a subjective rendering of events and words and the sense of the ordinary social occasion, though i f we follow the movement o f the scene i t can be seen to move away from the sense o f things as they are outside the distorting imagination and stay w i t h i n M i l l y ' s m i n d . But James does not need the dramatically decorous excuse o f sick distortion to achieve this effect. Later in the novel, for instance, he brings about foreshorten­ i n g and moving brevity by the use o f Susan Shepherd Stringham's intuitive knowledge o f L o r d M a r k ' s interview w i t h M i l l y . I n t u i t i o n is exaggerated into telepathic com­ munication between all kinds o f people and i n all kinds o f circumstance, and any account o f James's experiments in point o f view needs to emphasize this remarkable short­ cut. I am here concerned w i t h the concentration o f which the intuitional convention is only one aspect. T h e casual con­ versation—or what w o u l d be casual conversation i n most other novels—is compressed and speeded up, but so too is the presentation o f the visible presences o f people and objects. Earlier i n this same chapter we are made aware o f the room and people not as solid real appearances but as the notation o f M i l l y ' s consciousness: T h e smallest things, the faces, the hands, the jewels o f the women, the sound o f words, especially o f names, across the table, the shape o f the forks, the arrangement o f the flowers, the attitude o f the servants, the walls o f the room, were all touches i n a picture and denotements in a play; and they marked for her, moreover, her alertness o f vision.

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M i l l y ' s sharpened and uncomfortable consciousness is the point o f view, and the w o r l d which she observes is not only coloured by her sensibility and predicament but self­ consciously and intelligently interpreted by her. She sees her own unnaturally sharpened vision. T h e dramatic cor­ relative is to be found in many forms i n many novels but never quite like this. George Eliot observes the deadened appearances o f objects to the disenchanted eye, but it is she who observes the distortion, and M a g g i e or Dorothea res­ pond without recording any awareness of their acts o f dis­ tortion. Defoe marks the terrified flight o f M o l l Flanders after she has been tempted to k i l l a child by giving a long list o f street-names, but this is the author's interpolation, conveying the emotion w i t h o u t comment by a symbol standing between the character and the reader. RobbeGrillet enumerates the appearances o f many things in Jealousy to convey the meticulous and obsessed searching o f the jealous eye, but this too is an objective correlative. James makes the characters self-consciously formulate the symbolic and personal distortion and this has the special dramatic effect o f m a k i n g the visible world especially rele­ vant while indicating its actual undifferentiated status. M i l l y moves and observes in a w o r l d o f solid objects but for her they are transparent, revealing always her plight, her passion for life and her awareness o f death. She is made fully aware o f her obsessed act o f selection. T h e author is able to stand aside, letting the character 'dramatize', never having to m u r m u r 'poor child, it was not like this at a l l ' in the way George Eliot murmurs her compassionate and ironical wisdom while Caterina wanders through the bright morning, or H e t t y Sorrel through the harvest-fields, while M a g g i e pushes back her hair and eagerly reads on i n Thomas a Kempis. T h e awareness of the characters in James extends beyond an interpretation of the world to a critical awareness of the act of interpretation, and this is again a mode of condensation. A n d the self-consciousness o f this

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k i n d o f interpretation does not reduce the vitality o f the solid w o r l d but indeed allows for its existence. T h e phenom­ enal w o r l d is being interpreted and stands alive outside the self-conscious act. I n Chapter x i i i o f The Wings of the Dove there is con­ densation t h r o u g h character which is a clearer instance o f the combination o f symbol and substance. M i l l y is wander­ ing through the L o n d o n streets. She has been instructed 'to live' by Sir L u k e , whose blend o f familiar medical evasiveness and Jamesian cryptic knowingness is brilliantly brought off. Streets, scenes, and people are described in some detail. T h e objects carry the force o f personal relevance as they are interpreted by M i l l y . E v e r y t h i n g i n the scene, down to the bench she sits on, is transmitted to us as she sees i t and as she sees herself seeing i t : She had come out, as she presently saw, at the Regent's Park, round w h i c h , on t w o or three occasions w i t h Kate Croy, her public chariot had solemnly rolled. B u t she went into i t further n o w ; this was the real thing; the real thing was to be quite away from the pompous roads, well w i t h i n the centre and on the stretches o f shabby grass. Here were benches and smutty sheep; here were idle lads at games o f ball, w i t h their cries mild i n the thick air; here were wanderers, anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless were hundreds o f others just i n the same box. T h e i r box, their great common anxiety, what was i t , i n this g r i m breathing-space, but the practical question o f life? T h e y could live i f they would; that is, like herself, they had been told so; she saw them all about her, on seats, digesting the information, feeling it altered, assimilated, recognising i t again as something, i n a slightly different shape, familiar enough, the blessed old t r u t h that they would live i f they could. A l l she thus shared w i t h them made her wish to sit i n their company; which she so far did that she looked for a bench that was empty, eschewing a still emptier chair that she saw hard by and for which she would have paid, w i t h superiority, a fee.

T h e pathos and hard t r u t h o f this moment belong to a convention older than the novel. T h i s is M i l l y accepting the classlessness o f death. James gives to the irony his own special twist f o r what is real death f o r M i l l y is equated w i t h

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the poverty o f ordinary life around her. T h e equation is established by a mode of concentrated reference rather like the loaded dialogue o f the dinner-party. H e r e the simple cliche" and dead metaphor is given revived precise reference: 'she went into i t further n o w ' , 'the same b o x ' , 'the question of life' and 'breathing-space' point both to M i l l y and the life around her, and the duplicity o f these puns enables her to express, even to w o r k out, her pity for the others and her pity for herself. T h e scene is full o f M i l l y ' s sick obsession, but i t is also full o f meticulous reasoning. T h e obsession, like Lear's, embraces the general plight, involving an act o f compassionate generalization and an insight w h i c h is not merely inturned. H e r reflections on the significance o f the doctor's res­ ponse r u n throughout the Regent's Park scene. H e r compassion for the people around is related to his com­ passion for her: He dressed out for her the compassion he so signally permitted h i m ­ self to waste; but its operation for herself was as directly divesting, denuding, exposing. I t reduced her to her ultimate state, which was that o f a poor g i r l — w i t h her rent to pay for example—staring before her i n a great city. M i l l y had her rent to pay, her rent for her future; everything else but how to meet it fell away from her i n pieces, i n tatters. T h i s was the sensation the great man had doubtless not pur­ posed. W e l l , she must go home, like the poor girl, and see. T h e r e might after all be ways; the poor girl too would be thinking. I t came back for that matter perhaps to views already presented. She looked about her again, on her feet, at her scattered, melancholy comrades— some o f them so melancholy as to be down on their stomachs i n the grass, turned away, ignoring, burrowing; she saw once more, w i t h them, those two faces o f the question between which there was so little to choose for inspiration. I t was perhaps superficially more striking that one could live i f one would; but it was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible, in short, that one would live i f one could.

M i l l y converts the w o r l d o f the park, like the scene at the dinner-party, into a subjective and transparent w o r l d of

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appropriate appearances, metaphors for her predicament which are not mere rhetorical identifications, conceited and convenient, but the literal identifications o f genuine sym­ pathy. H e r poor neighbours supply the r i g h t term only by being seen and felt for what they are. O u r impression o f her sympathy co-exists w i t h the impression o f her reduction to poverty and anxiety and isolation, and, finally, w i t h the impression o f the courage w h i c h makes her stand up instead o f b u r r o w i n g and t u r n i n g away. T h i s courage is both a quality to be asserted and a quality to be broken. She is later most literally to become the poor g i r l because o f her poverty and because o f her riches. She too is eventually to t u r n away and burrow like her scattered melancholy comrades. H e r e the condensation o f scene and sensation answers exactly to James's d i c t u m i n The Art of Fiction: ' W h a t is character but the determination o f incident? W h a t is i n ­ cident but the illustration o f character?' I t is largely achieved by conscious symbolic interpretation on the part o f the character. H a r d y selects the rich and barren land for Tess but it is M i l l y whose pity and self-pity is made to select the park as her image. W e are given not only the external image, filled w i t h irony, but the implications o f the despair and love and courage w i t h w h i c h she courts anony­ m i t y , recognizes anxiety, and defines the question o f l i v i n g and d y i n g . T h e very explicit act o f selection allows full and concrete status to the environment and its people—these are real people and a real g r i m breathing-space. W e dis­ criminate between her self-involvement and the pressure o f the real hard w o r l d outside because there is no distortion and no sentimentality. T h e very flaunting o f the act of interpretation admits, w i t h i n the novel, that there is a gap between the w o r l d outside and the use she makes o f it in formulating her plight. T h e result of this extremely sophis­ ticated use o f pathetic fallacy and imagery is to admit the fallacy and the residual facts beyond it, in a way w h i c h

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the conventional uses o f symbolic environment seldom achieve. I have dwelt on this k i n d o f condensation because I t h i n k it helps to explain w h y James can manage his insistent centripetal motion w i t h o u t losing the solid w o r l d . I t m i g h t be tempting, i n theoretical abstraction from the actual novels, to suggest that Tolstoy's moths i n the lawyer's room in Anna Karenina have a solidity w h i c h James's insistently symbolic objects lack. James manages, in fact, to combine the significance objects hold for the character w i t h the sense o f their objective significance. I t is rather like the way we make personal symbols i n real life, t a k i n g the weather or the object or the happy and unhappy coincidence i n a way w h i c h confesses the arbitrariness o f our act o f fanciful interpreta­ tion. ' T h i s is what i t seems to i m p l y ' we say, w i t h o u t t a k i n g the symbolic reading too seriously. I do not suggest that James always makes his symbolic references i n this way, and indeed his use o f the Dove and the Golden Bowl is a very different and more conventionally 'conceited' mode o f generalization w h i c h totally absorbs the object i n the symbol. But the b u l k o f James's generalization is done i n this way, by scenes rather than metaphors, or by scenes w h i c h provide a literal source for metaphor at the same time as preserving their immediacy and particularity. T h i s is not a novel where the central obsession gives us a claustrophobic w o r l d w i t h i n the m i n d . Anyone who knows Robbe-Grillet w i l l see the difference. M i l l y ' s consciousness is o f course not always central, not always the narrative register. There is another s t r i k i n g use of appropriate environment much later in the novel, when in Chapter xxx it is M e r t o n Densher who is tormented by solitude and uncertainty. H e is turned away for the first time from the Palazzo Leporelli, and while Eugenio ex­ plains that the ladies are 'a " l e e t l e " fatigued', it is, charac­ teristically, what is not said as well as what is said w h i c h has a sinister quality:

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T h e y stood for a long minute facing each other over all they didn't say. . . . I t was a Venice all o f evil that had broken out for them alike, so that they were together i n their anxiety, i f they really could have met on i t ; a Venice o f cold, lashing rain from a l o w black sky, o f wicked wind raging through narrow passes, o f general arrest and interruption, w i t h the people engaged i n all the water-life huddled, stranded and wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridges. A n d , a page later: Here, i n the high arcade, half Venice was crowded close, while, on the M o l o , at the limit o f the expanse, the old columns o f St. M a r k and of the L i o n were like the lintels o f a door wide open to the storm. I t was odd for h i m , as he moved, that it should have made such a differ­ ence—if the difference wasn't only that the palace had for the first time failed o f a welcome. There was more, but it came from that; that gave the harsh note and broke the spell. T h e wet and the cold were now to reckon w i t h , and it was precisely, to Densher, as i f he had seen the obliteration, at a stroke, o f the margin o f a faith in which they were all living. T h e margin had been his name for it—for the thing that, though it had held out, could bear no shock. T h e shock, i n some form, had come, and he wondered about it while, threading his way among loungers as vague as himself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly on the rubbish i n shops. T h e r e were stretches o f the gallery paved w i t h squares o f red marble, greasy now w i t h the salt spray; and the whole place, i n its huge elegance, the grace o f its conception and the beauty of its detail, was more than ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room o f Europe, profaned and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. He brushed shoulders w i t h brown men whose hats askew, and the loose sleeves o f whose pendent jackets, made them resemble melancholy maskers. T h i s description of Venice smudged by rain, its inhabi­ tants at a loss, is, like the scene in Regent's Park, carefully placed between two climaxes. Before it comes the denial at the Palazzo, and after it the glimpse of L o r d M a r k . T h e denial makes Densher k n o w that something has happened, seeing L o r d M a r k tells h i m what has happened: ' T h e weather had changed, the rain was ugly, the w i n d wicked,

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the sea impossible, because o f L o r d M a r k . I t was because o f h i m , a fortiori that the palace was closed.' H e does not learn the details o f L o r d M a r k ' s disclosures u n t i l he is told by Susan Shepherd Stringham who knows by intuition, but he knows enough. T h e wandering i n the rain, w i t h ' the broken charm o f the w o r l d a b o u t . . . broken into smaller pieces' continues d u r i n g the three days between seeing L o r d M a r k and being visited by M r s Stringham. W h e n she turns up she too is viewed as part o f the appropriate appearance o f things, for ' I t appeared a part o f her weight that she was i n a wet waterproof. . . and that her face, under her veil, richly rosy w i t h the d r i v i n g w i n d , was—and the veil too—as splashed as i f the rain were her tears.' T h i s is one o f the most elaborate pieces o f symbolic description i n the novel, w i t h a mobile, cinematic use o f sympathetic weather and vague anonymous passers-by. Both feeling and technique m i g h t belong to a film by A n t o n i o n i . Once more the external w o r l d mirrors the sen­ sations o f the character, once more a shock w i t h i n is shown in terms of a violent change without, once more the slow and gradual groping o f inner reflection is worked out and defined by the aid o f significant appearances. For the reader there is the shock o f the change i n Venice. T h e breaking o f the charm is as violent as the deliberate change o f M i l l y ' s surroundings from the rich protective w o r l d o f drawingroom and chariot to the shabby exposure o f the park. Once more i t is the character who makes the interpretation. James puts the symbolic values in his own words rather more than he does i n the earlier episode but I have quoted enough to show that the burden o f the interpretation is Densher's. Once more the scene and the sensations are intimately fused, and in the fusion the symbolic transference does not obliter­ ate the solid presences o f the streets and weather and people. Densher is given the right place, the right neighbours, and the right conditions for formulating his shock and fear. H e is also given something precise to do and somewhere precise

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to do i t , so that his claustrophobic obsession, r e m i n d i n g us o f M i l l y ' s , has a local habitation. There is, finally, an excellent example of the two-faced Jamesian dialogue which is plausible on the surface but bristling w i t h hidden meanings, i n the recognition scene between Densher and M r s Stringham. W e first see M r s Stringham's waterproof and her wet face, and at the end o f their long dialogue, where tension is largely the product of what is read between the lines, there is a good small example o f James's ability to make a symbol without loss o f definiteness. Someone once said i n a discussion o f symbolic inter­ pretation that we had got to the point where a character could not t u r n on the l i g h t without something being made o f it, and at the end o f Chapter xxxi, Densher asks i f lights shall be l i t : Dusk was now deeper, and after he had once more taken counsel o f the dreariness without he turned to his companion. 'Shall we have lights—a lamp or the candles?' ' N o t for me.' 'Nothing?' ' N o t for me.'

A n y comment on the delicacy o f this seems clumsy. I w i l l only say that i f the Venetian scenes seem over-elaborate or in any way melodramatic, the weight o f this brief passage is the product o f great restraint. I t is done by sheer infectious tension, by the unspoken words, by the context o f the reve­ lation, and the sense o f shame and irrevocability. B y now a mere detail like the 'the dreariness w i t h o u t ' and the repe­ tition o f ' N o t for m e ' tips us over from a mere sense o f time and place and atmosphere, from an impression o f a protec­ tive dimness for which Densher feels grateful, to the recognition o f a larger darkness. I t is a recognition which does not signal furtively to the reader behind the backs o f the characters, but which is their recognition too. ' T r y to be one o f the people on w h o m nothing is lost', is James's advice to the novice i n The Art of Fiction and his

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w o r l d o f intense and total relevance is the i m p r i n t o f charac­ ters on w h o m nothing is lost. I n this way he achieves the concentration o f appearances and larger meanings, the con­ centration o f narration and action w i t h i n character, a n d — something I have not mentioned but which is familiar to every reader o f James—the concentration o f past and future i n the present tense. T h e sensibility o f the characteristic Jamesian centre o f consciousness is not merely a power o f moral insight. T h e moral vision o f decency is often very slowly and painfully purchased, as i n the case o f Densher, and is made dependent on something like the sensibility o f the critic. There are few symbolic objects or scenes or persons in James which are not fairly explicitly interpreted by the characters themselves.

CHAPTER I I

The Matter and the Treatment: Henry James is life and life', James says i n his Preface to The Tragic Muse, ' and as waste is only life sacrificed and thereby prevented from " c o u n t i n g " I delight i n a deep-breathing economy and an organic form.' James is supporting form as the appropriate means to the end o f representing life, but when we come to look closely at both theory and practice this relationship o f means and end turns out to be neither easy nor coherent. Perhaps we should look first at his romantic terminology. ' O r g a n i c f o r m ' is a term w h i c h has outlived its usefulness, at least i f i t is used without qualifi­ cation and copious tests. There is a character i n M a l c o l m Bradbury's Eating People is Wrong, who disconcerts his Professor by asking i n a seminar, ' W h a t is organic f o r m ? ' and who goes on to argue, awkwardly and soundly, that i f we cut off an arm, the man may live, but i f we cut off his head, he w i l l die. I t is usually difficult to distinguish head from arm i n James. H i s ' organic forms' lack the graduation of the natural organism for he is, as I have already suggested, luxuriating i n difficulties which arise necessarily i n the drama but which are a more gratuitous discipline i n the novel. T h e k i n d o f characteristic condensation I have been discussing is by no means essential to narrative, and most novelists have managed w i t h a looser structure, dividing the modes and the effects i n a way foreign to James. T h e play has to economize on time and effects, and cannot use its author's voice directly. T h e closest analogy to James's art 'THERE

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comes from the cinema, and not the theatre, though in both film and theatre the visual medium has to be at once intensely realistic and symbolic. James is also much more aware of creating a beautiful form than most novelists have been, and here again the analogy which is most useful comes from the unliterary arts, from painting or sculpture or music, where the delights are more sensuously immediate than in most novels, and where the formal appearances are not merely received as means to the end o f expression but are apprehended as pleasureable. T h e balance-loving, antithetical nature of man finds more satisfaction in a novel by James than in one by Dickens or George Eliot, where the form is less visible and more func­ tionally subordinate. Even where James is talking o f the effects o f a strict compression and unity he is very much concerned w i t h the aesthetic delight which the pattern may produce as pattern and not as means. H e says, at the end o f the Preface to The Tragic Muse, that though the novel d i d not entirely fulfil his intentions, since N i c k D o r m e r ' insisted i n the event on looking as simple and flat as some mere brass check or engraved number', i t succeeds i n its 'preserved and achieved unity . . . o f t o n e ' : T h a t preserved and achieved unity and quality o f tone, a value i n itself, which I referred to at the beginning o f these remarks. W h a t I mean by this is that the interest created, and the expression o f that interest, are things kept, as to kind, genuine and true to themselves. T h e appeal, the fidelity to the prime motive, is, w i t h no little art, strained clear (even as silver is polished) in a degree answering—at least by intention—to the air o f beauty. [The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur, p. 97)

T h e question of the beauty of narrative form is not one I wish to discuss here, but we must bear i n m i n d , when praising and blaming James, that his ideas o f formal econ­ omy are based on an unusually aesthetic and dramatic inten­ tion. I t w o u l d surely be a besotted Jamesian who always insisted that this k i n d o f economy had no disadvantages, and

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James himself admitted that i n particular instances there was a sacrifice o f life to his requirements o f form. I t w o u l d be a besotted Jamesian who attempted to explain the passion for economy solely i n terms o f the dramatic and aesthetic purposes, who saw i n every case o f concentration the appropriate moral i m p r i n t we can find i n the passages I have quoted from The Wings of the Dove. T h i s passion may sometimes strike us as a spinsterly dislike o f loose ends, especially when we see i t , outside the accomplished novel, in the preliminaries o f the notebooks. W h e n we compare James's analysis o f his art and materials w i t h the less literary despairs o f Tolstoy and D . H . Lawrence, his formal obses­ sion seems appropriate to a writer l i v i n g so entirely i n and for his art. L i k e his predilection for the renounced relation­ ship, i t may arouse some suspicion. Before m o v i n g on to the discussion o f his failures—many o f them self-acknowledged—I should like to look at one o f the most powerful defences o f formal economy. I t betrays perhaps some unconscious suggestion o f the limitations o f this h i g h l y disciplined art. T h e defence is supplied by another novelist, a friend and contemporary o f James w o r k ­ i n g i n very different areas o f human experience but w o r k i n g to the same rigorous standards o f form and style: M r . James utters his mind w i t h a becoming fervour on the sanctity of t r u t h to the novelist; on a more careful examination t r u t h w i l l seem a word o f debatable propriety, not only for the labours o f the novelist, but for those o f the historian. N o art—to use the daring phrase o f M r . James—can successfully 'compete w i t h l i f e ' ; and the art that does so is condemned to perish montibus aviis. Life goes before us, infinite i n complications; attended by the most various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the mind—the seat of w o n ­ der, to the touch—so thrillingly delicate, and to the belly—so imper­ ious when starved. I t combines and employs i n its manifestation the method and the material, not o f one art only, but o f all the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling w i t h a few of life's majestic chords; painting is but a shadow o f its gorgeous pageantry o f light and colour; literature

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does but drily indicate that wealth o f incident, or moral obligation, o f virtue, vice, action, rapture, and agony, w i t h which i t teems... . W h a t , then, is the object, what the method, o f an art, and what the source o f its power? T h e whole secret is that no art does 'compete w i t h life'. Man's one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion o f reality. T h e arts, like arithmetic and geometry, t u r n away their eyes from the gross, coloured, and mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a certain figmentary abstraction. Geometry w i l l tell us o f a circle, a thing never found i n nature; asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it lays its hand upon its m o u t h . . . . For the welter o f impressions, all forcible but discrete, which life presents, it substitutes a certain artificial series o f impressions, all indeed most feebly represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent o f the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes i n music or like the graduated tints i n a good picture. For all its chapters, from all its pages, from all its sen­ tences, the well-written novel echoes and re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to this must every incident and character contribute; the style must be pitched i n unison w i t h this; and i f there is anywhere a word that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and ( I had almost said) fuller without it. Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a w o r k o f art, i n comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate. 1

T h i s is Robert L o u i s Stevenson's Humble Remonstrance, w h i c h was published i n Longman's Magazine i n December 1884, i n reply to James's essay The Art of Fiction w h i c h had appeared there i n September o f the same year. James had been attacking W a l t e r Besant's exaggerated claims for the artistry o f fiction, and had pleaded for the importance o f the novelist's sense o f reality and 'solidity of specification'. ' T h e only classification o f the novel that I can understand', he said, 'is into that which has life and that which has it n o t ' , and a little later we find h i m insisting that 'catching the strange irregular r h y t h m o f life . . . is the attempt whose 1

R e p r i n t e d i n Henry 'James and Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Janet A d a m S m i t h ,

pp. 89-92.

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strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet.' T h i s essay, perhaps the most theoretical discussion of his art, must be read together w i t h his Prefaces, written more than twenty years later. I n the Preface to The Tragic Muse, we find h i m a d m i t t i n g that The Newcomes and Les Trois Mousquetaires and Peace and War [_sic] have ' l i f e ' and adding the stern question, ' b u t what do such large loose baggy monsters, w i t h their queer elements o f the accidental and the arbitrary, artistic­ ally mean}' Life is no longer enough. James's 'strange irregular r h y t h m o f life' is not really inconsistent w i t h Stevenson's rejection of the abrupt and the illogical, though his choice o f phrase may have played its part i n provoking Stevenson's clearer defence o f their common pursuit. Stevenson's eloquent plea for concentration and total rele­ vance defines the limitations o f ' l i f e ' and i f Prose Fiction had a M u s e these are the accents i n which she w o u l d speak to James and Turgenev and Stevenson himself. T h e y are, however, not her only accents, and i n order to recognize her catholicity we should put beside them not merely the prac­ tice of the large loose Victorians and the Russians but the spirited defence of t r u t h and rejection o f artistry made by D . H . Lawrence. A s we shall see, it is Lawrence who passionately advocated a m e d i u m which should express just that illogicality and abruptness and monstrosity which Stevenson accepted i n life but excluded from literature. T h e novelist who tries to give us the green or the iron circle is indeed sacrificing the clear assertion o f circularity, but the novelist who concentrates on a single feature makes sacrifices too. I t is obvious from James's Prefaces that he was certainly not unaware of the many special dangers and difficulties o f his search for economy. I n his essay on The Art of Fiction he insists that form and content are inseparable, though i n a context where he is attacking the notion that there is 'a part of the novel which is the story and part of it which for mystical reasons is not.' But when he is discussing

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the characters o f his novels he finds it possible to make another distinction, and indeed resents the blindness o f those naive critics who do not see i t : I t is a familiar t r u t h to the novelist, at the strenuous hour, that, as certain elements i n any w o r k are o f the essence, so others are only o f the form; that as this or that character, this or that disposition o f the material, belongs to the subject directly, so to speak, so this or that other belongs to it but indirectly—belongs intimately to the treatment. T h i s is a t r u t h , however, o f which he rarely gets the benefit—since i t could be assured to h i m , really, but by criticism based upon perception, criticism which is too little o f this world. (The Art of the Novel, PP- 5 3 - 4 )

A n d he goes on to discuss the 'superabundance' o f Henrietta Stackpole, in The Portrait of a Lady. I n the Pre­ faces he is plainly aware of the difficulties involved i n placing a character i n the right formal position and preserving the necessary life. T h e failure o f M a r y Garland, i n Roderick Hudson, he describes as a sacrifice of life to f o r m : T h e difficulty had been from the first that I required my anti­ thesis to Christina L i g h t , one o f the main terms o f the subject. One is ridden by the law that antitheses, to be efficient, shall be both direct and complete. Directness seemed to fail unless M a r y should be, so to speak ' p l a i n ' , Christina being essentially so 'coloured'; and complete­ ness seemed to fail unless she too should have her potency. {The Art of the Novel,

p. 18)

W e m i g h t perhaps question James's formulation o f this ' l a w ' that antitheses should be direct and complete. George E l i o t and Tolstoy and D . H . Lawrence all confront his challenge w i t h character-antithesis which make the categor­ ies clear while allowing for qualifications and incompleteness. But while this sense of ' l a w ' is characteristic, so also is his test o f life. H e suggests that M a r y ' s failure, which is the product o f a complete antithesis, is a grave one, since we are just not convinced that M a r y would be capable o f casting such a spell on Roderick at a time when he is also under the

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spell o f his sense o f artistic power and opportunity, 'at a moment o f the liveliest other preoccupation'. ' T h e damage to verisimilitude', says James, 'is deep.' H e felt that he had failed again i n handling the antithesis o f place i n the same novel, and finds i n his treatment o f N o r t h a m p t o n , Mass. another unfortunately unbalanced weak term. There are many examples o f the same stringent test o f life, and o f the same acknowledgement o f the dangers of his own peculiar formalism in his criticism o f The American. H e tells us that he was 'so possessed' o f his germinal idea o f Newman's betrayal that he 'attached too scant an importance to its fashion o f coming about' and admits that the portrait o f M a d a m e de Cintre and many individual scenes, show a cursoriness or an implausibility which wreck the novel. Once more his distinction between form and essence is crucial, and he sees his hero as the predetermined ' l i g h t e d figure' surrounded by a lamentable obscurity. T h i s distinction between characters belonging to the essence and characters belonging to the form is not neces­ sarily one peculiar to all novels or even to all forms o f con­ centrated narrative. W e do not find it often i n H a r d y , w i t h the possible exception o f his rustic choruses, who m i g h t usefully be contrasted w i t h George Eliot's and who are both essentially and formally functional. I t m i g h t perhaps help us to describe some o f the features o f the novels o f Defoe and Charlotte Bronte and E . M . Forster, all very different artists w o r k i n g i n a very restricted form. I n Defoe's novels we usually see one essential and v i v i d character i n a w o r l d of functional shadows, and we m i g h t complain that Jane Eyre is ' o f the essence' and Rochester, at least i n his moral conversion, too crudely ' o f the f o r m ' . T h e distinction, however, is one which I t h i n k breaks down i n the face o f the novels of George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy, where there is an initial or fundamental imaginative refusal to dis­ criminate between characters who are major and those who are minor terms. T h e multiple action gives lavish oppor-

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tunity to develop an essential character i n one story and use h i m as a functional character i n another, and the very appearance o f Lydgate or Oblonsky as minor terms i n the story o f Dorothea or A n n a gives a special and truthful irony to the shifting pattern. T h i s is to express the difference between M a r y Garland and Lydgate or Oblonsky i n mech­ anical and quantitative terms, and though we may observe that the multiple plot lends itself to an economical double use o f characters, so that they may be central and functional, major and minor, this is clearly not the whole story. I t seems more appropriate to speak o f an undivided imaginative sense o f character r u n n i n g through the whole hierarchy o f the pattern, rather than o f the opportunities of the multiple action. There are indeed minor characters who have no central position, no story of their own, but who are still so brilliantly and warmly particularized that there seems to be no distinction between form and essence. There are characters who have an important part to play as agents or messengers, plot-characters like Bartle Massey i n Adam Bede or Klesmer i n Daniel Deronda, who strike us as being created out o f the same loving identification as main charac­ ters such as A d a m and Gwendolen. There are characters described by James as fools, 'fools who minister, at a par­ ticular crisis, to the intensity o f the free spirit engaged w i t h t h e m ' . W h e n M r s Poyser ministers to Dinah's intensities, or Oblonsky to Karenin's, the minor characters not only appear as intense and alive, but actually function i n this k i n d of contrast by virtue of their own experience and their capacity for response and feeling. W h e n James is discussing the character of M a r i a Gostrey, in The Ambassadors, to w h o m I shall return later, he speaks of the need to dissimulate bare function, to disguise the character belonging to the form and not to the essence. I t does not seem appropriate to say that George Eliot and Tolstoy are simply very successful i n this k i n d of dissimulation. Shakespeare's functional characters like M e r c u t i o and

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Enobarbus seem to be cases o f dazzling disguise, but when we look at both their personality and their dramatic role Shakespeare appears to be performing an act o f strict sub­ ordination, so that the vividness o f the minor figure is there to animate the function. Neither character is shown at length in independent action: even the treacherous flight and death o f Enobarbus is made w i t h complete reference to Antony's central position and problem. W h e r e James suc­ ceeds w i t h his functional characters i t is as the dramatist succeeds, w i t h an appearance o f v i v i d life but no suggestion o f action outside the frame o f the concentrated form. J i m Pocock is an excellent lively parody o f Strether, presenting a vulgar knowingness about the advantages of Paris w h i c h throws both the narrowness of W o o l l e t t and the finer moral discriminations of Strether into h i g h relief. H e exists only w i t h i n this function. T h e Assinghams i n The Golden Bowl provide a varied chorus, fully delineated w i t h i n the limits of the function, reacting w i t h insight and blindness, possessiveness and responsibility, acting as agents, commentators, and prophets. There is absolutely nothing i n their characters or relationship or social position which conveys any sense o f larger existence. T h e i r ' p o v e r t y ' , their detachment, and their childlessness are never described except as equipment for their function. A character like Catherine A r r o w p o i n t in Daniel Deronda, or Varenka i n Anna Karenina, fulfils a function o f antithesis, plain to the reader and indeed explicitly noted by the 'major terms', Gwendolen and K i t t y . But each is as substantial and sympathetic as the major characters, not just because they have many facets and v i v i d personalities, but also because they are shown w i t h great economy, and the novelist has clearly little scope for showing them changing and developing on anything like the scale on which the major characters change and develop. But when Catherine is seen w i t h Klesmer, the relationship asserts itself as m o v i n g and convincing in its own right, not as a mere mirror for the problems of the heroine. W h e n

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Varenka makes friends w i t h K i t t y , or is shown in her own abortive love-affair, the response w h i c h is brought about i n the reader is a sympathy w i t h the individual case. T o des­ cribe Catherine A r r o w p o i n t or Varenka, or even M r s Poyser or M r Brooke, entirely i n terms o f their contribution to plot and moral argument is to leave out a great deal o f what they say and do, and to leave out also the impression o f a world composed of individual lives, not o f manipulated agents. Henrietta Stackpole and M i s s Barrace have their loves and their careers, but these are treated very thinly and comically, belonging to a different mode from the medium o f love w h i c h creates Isabel and Strether. T h e y are also treated very sketchily, and tend to be invisible when not actually on the stage, whereas one o f the details w h i c h testifies to the individual status o f Catherine A r r o w p o i n t , for instance, is the resonance w h i c h a mere mention o f her name can b r i n g . W e know, i n spite of brief treatment, that Catherine and Klesmer are going on w i t h their satisfying and stable life, and there are v i v i d reminders of its continued existence. James at times even gives us the impression o f cursory motivation, so that M i s s Barrace's relationship w i t h Waymarsh is nothing but a parody o f Strether's w i t h M a r i a Gostrey. H i s minor characters do not have a full weight o f substantial life behind them and i f this is economy and Varenka is 'waste', we should remember that economy can be mean and waste generous. I had better add that I agree w i t h James and many other critics that George E l i o t is certainly capable o f failure. W h e n she creates an inani­ mate character it is usually not because she has failed w i t h a minor term but w i t h a major term, and this too has its own significance. One of James's doubtful minor terms is M a r i a Gostrey, and in the Preface to The Ambassadors he has several illuminating comments on her function and treatment: 1

T h e fact t h a t some o f these f u n c t i o n a l characters h a d p r o t o t y p e s i n life is i n t e r ­ esting b u t i r r e l e v a n t . 1

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She is the reader's friend . . . in consequence o f dispositions that make h i m so eminently require one; and she acts i n that capacity, and really i n that capacity alone, w i t h exemplary devotion, from beginning to end o f the book. She is an enrolled, a direct, aid to lucidity; she is, in fine, to tear off her mask, the most unmitigated and abandoned o f ficelles. H a l f the dramatist's art, as we well know—since i f we don't it's not the fault o f the proofs that lie scattered about us—is i n the use officelles; by which I mean i n a deep dissimulation o f his dependence on them. (The Art of the Novel, p. 322) H e goes on, a little later, to say something about this dissimulation, and refers us to the last scene o f the novel: H o w and where and w h y to make Miss Gostrey's false connexion carry itself, under a due high polish, as a real one. Nowhere is i t more o f an artful expedient for mere consistency o f form, to mention a case, than i n the last 'scene' o f the book, where its function is to give or to add nothing whatever, but only to express as vividly as possible certain things quite other than itself and that are o f the already fixed and appointed measure. Since, however, art is all expression, and is thereby vividness, one was to find the door open to any amount o f delightful dissimulation. . . . T o project imaginatively, for m y hero, a relation that has nothing to do w i t h the matter (the matter o f m y sub­ ject) but has everything to do w i t h the manner (the manner o f m y presentation o f the same) and yet to treat i t , at close quarters and for fully economic expression's possible sake,,as i f it were important and essential—to do that sort o f thing and yet muddle nothing may easily become, as one goes, a signally attaching proposition (op. cit. p.324) A l t h o u g h James is fully aware that a functional character may be given inadequate life, and although he is fully aware that a functional character may engage too m u c h o f our interest (he thinks this happens i n the case o f H e n r i e t t a Stackpole) he does not, as far as I know, consider the possi­ b i l i t y that a functional character may be given too m u c h life, may step w i t h impropriety outside the function, may be too heavily disguised. T h i s problem may be implied i n the 'yet muddle n o t h i n g ' o f the paragraph I have j u s t quoted, but certainly James does not give an instance of this k i n d o f muddle.

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A t the end o f The Ambassadors James exploits his own marvellous devices of telepathic communication and the circumlocutory hint, to make M a r i a Gostrey propose to Strether and, w i t h a little less evasion, to make Strether say no: He had sufficiently understood. 'So good as this place at this moment ? So good as what you make o f everything you touch ?' H e took a minute to say, for, really and truly, what stood about h i m there in her offer—which was as the offer o f exquisite service, o f lightened care, for the rest o f his days—might well have tempted. I t built h i m softly round, it roofed h i m warmly over, i t rested, all so firm, on selection. A n d what ruled selection was beauty and knowledge. I t was awkward, i t was almost stupid, not to seem to prize such things; yet, none the less, so far as they made his opportunity they made i t only for a moment. She would moreover understand—she always under­ stood. T h a t indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on. 'There's nothing, you know, I wouldn't do for you.' ' O h yes—I know.' 'There's nothing,' she repeated, ' i n all the world.' ' I know. I know. But all the same I must go.' He had got it at last. ' T o be right.' ' T o be right?' She had echoed i t i n vague deprecation, but he felt i t already clear for her. ' T h a t , you see, is my only logic. N o t , out o f the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.' She thought. ' But w i t h your wonderful impressions you'll have got a great deal.' ' A great deal'—he agreed. ' B u t nothing like you. It's you who would make me w r o n g ! ' Honest and fine, she couldn't greatly pretend she didn't see i t . Still, she could pretend just a little. ' B u t w h y should you be so dreadfully right?' ' T h a t ' s the way t h a t — i f I must go—you yourself would be the first to want me. A n d I can't do anything else.' So then she had to take i t , though still w i t h her defeated protest. ' I t isn't so much your being " r i g h t " — i t ' s your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so.'

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' O h but you're just as bad yourself. Y o u can't resist me when I point that out.' She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. ' I can't indeed resist you.' ' T h e n there we are!' said Strether.

T h i s scene o f renunciation has more than the single function indicated by James. A s well as dissimulating the functional thinness o f M a r i a Gostrey i t gives the last con­ sistent t u r n o f the screw i n its demonstration o f Strether's disinterestedness. H e has learnt first the limitations o f W o o l l e t t and then the limitations of the aesthetic sense o f Paris. H e has revised both his first prejudices about the effects o f Europe on Chad, and then his hasty romantic view o f Chad's superior refinements. H a v i n g cast off two illusions he is left to make the renunciation of any personal advantage—except the advantage o f knowledge—which the affair has brought to h i m . B u t this last renunciation is made to appear strongly active, unlike his earlier reactions w h i c h have followed inevitably and more passively on seeing the facts. I t is as i f James were making the moral collocation he had earlier made i n The Portrait of a Lady, where Isabel makes a similar advance i n moral perception and ends w i t h the last fine development showing itself i n a painful openeyed disregard o f self. There is at least one vital difference between Isabel and Strether: she is involved i n action i n a way w h i c h he is not. H e has his ambassadorial function, but i n spite o f the advice he gives to L i t t l e Bilham, and eventually to Chad, he has not been intimately involved in the relations he has observed and come to understand and appraise. T h e final renunciation has something gratuitous about i t : having learnt that there is coarseness in W o o l l e t t and betrayal i n Paris, he cannot himself learn to accept the future M a r i a proffers. James says i n the Preface that this last scene gives and adds nothing, that the relation projected here has nothing to do w i t h the matter and everything w i t h the manner. T h i s is a somewhat confusing gloss. T h e

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'relation' implies a possible course o f action, a practical choice, of the k i n d Strether has not had before. T h i s may be to discriminate crudely between k n o w i n g and doing, i n a way foreign to James, but even i f we withdraw this dis­ crimination, and rephrase the difference, there still seems to be some difficulty i n accepting the possibilities o f marriage for Strether, the observer who receives his education too late, and his admirable confidante. There is certainly moral consistency here. Strether is enacting the k i n d of disinterested­ ness w h i c h endorses his moral vision. H e originally sees Chad as acting in the very way he himself failed to act as a young man, and his admiration and vicarious approval are loudly voiced i n the famous scene where he advises L i t t l e Bilham to live. B u t by the time his education has been completed we have come to see the crudity o f this advice. Chad's betrayal of Madame de Vionnet, w h i c h Strether knows is all but an accomplished fact, and his new-found vocation i n advertising, have made it clear that Chad is not the k i n d o f man who fairly represents a possible past m i g h t have-been for Strether. I t is not just a question o f James's failure in dissimu­ lating M a r i a Gostrey's functional identity—that merely brings out the ' m u d d l e ' more clearly. Strether's education is, I suggest, made implausible in the interests of consistency and completeness, and verisimilitude has been sacrificed to the r u l i n g idea. T h e conclusion, down to the last detail, is a symmetrical and final statement w h i c h takes us back to the beginning o f the novel, but it is, unlike the end of The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, more sym­ metrical than likely. W h e n have we been able to t h i n k of this k i n d o f future for Strether ? W h a t view o f his relation w i t h M a r i a has presented itself which makes us able to see this last beautiful denial as a real renunciation at all ? James apparently considered the end successful, and i f he had met the suggestion that it creates more difficulties than it smoothes away, he would presumably have accounted for

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the muddle by referring to Maria's disguise. But there is, I suggest, another reason, harking back to what I have been saying about the critical skills o f his main characters. I f i t is M i l l y who most successfully interprets the symbolism which defines her, so i t is Strether who—less successfully— interprets the moral structure o f this book. I f the novel had ended before the last scene, the critic m i g h t well have commented that this k i n d o f middle-aged Bildungsroman movingly and appropriately uses the point o f view o f a disengaged spectator, whose sensibility rather than his actions convinces the reader that there is a k i n d o f decency w h i c h Chad lacks and a k i n d o f refinement w h i c h M r s Newsome lacks. T h i s last scene makes Strether put this perception into so many words, and the words are given the occasion o f action. T h i s falsification o f action seems to me to impose an unnecessary strain on a great novel. A similar unsuccessful gloss on the novel's implications is made at the end o f The Golden Bowl. I n this novel Char­ lotte is the only character who is excluded from revealing her centre o f consciousness, and for that there may be certain internal reasons. Amerigo's intelligence and his moral superi­ ority to Charlotte qualify h i m for playing his initial part as a sensitive though inadequate register o f action. H i s narra­ tive function reveals his goodwill, his innocence, his subtlety, and his capacity for a certain degree of insight. A d a m Verver's much briefer appearance as narrative register is also both appropriate and necessary. W i t h o u t his solitary vision we should see very m u c h less clearly his need for Charlotte, his protective love for M a g g i e and, eventually, the ironical probability that while M a g g i e deceives and pro­ tects h i m he is doing the same for her. M a g g i e qualifies for the role of narrator at precisely that moment when she begins to see that something is happening, and her gradual dis­ covery and decisions to remain silent and to lie take us along the characteristic track o f doubt, glimmerings, and insight. Perhaps James does not use Charlotte because she would

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either tell us too much and rush us rapidly past the fine discriminations between her deceit and Amerigo's blunderings, or, later, w o u l d tell us too little, since she is excluded from knowledge. She is, as A m e r i g o says, in one of those correlations o f intelligence and moral integrity which may well make us feel uneasy, too stupid to record the subtlety o f this moral action. T h e form o f the novel is most sensitively adapted to the relationships and developments o f the characters, and Char­ lotte's exclusion, though it perhaps brings her a sympathy which blurs the final effect, is at least understandable. B u t the sympathy which so many readers have felt for Charlotte has, I think, more to do w i t h the way James delegates his authorial summary to M a g g i e . W h e n I spoke o f the charac­ ter acting as critic, I m i g h t equally well have spoken o f the character acting as author. I n the case of M i l l y Theale, the dramatic appropriateness o f her critical insight seems per­ fect. I n the case of M a g g i e something happens w h i c h is less successful. James does not choose to speak in his own voice, not at least when it comes to m a k i n g explicit moral judge­ ments, though he does not choose to leave these judgements to the reader. A n d it is M a g g i e who is given words which express Charlotte's function i n the novel: 'She has been necessary to b u i l d us u p ' , which is a remark which either author or critic m i g h t have made w i t h better, taste. O n the lips o f the woman who is defending her unsuccessful rival to the husband she has just won it seems a staggeringly selfish and complacent comment. I do not suggest that this one single comment strains the book: I t h i n k it is indeed a consistent and conveniently blatant example of the whole conception of M a g g i e . T h e conception seems to be flawed by James's refusal to let her be either simply biassed and jealous, as Jane Austen allows Fanny to be, in Mansfield 1

F o r an account o f these d i s c r i m i n a t i o n s , see ' T h e G i v e n A p p e a r a n c e o f C h a r l o t t e V e r v e r ' , b y E l i z a b e t h O w e n , Essays in Criticism, V o l . x i n , N o . 4 , O c t o b e r 1963. 1

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T R E A T M E N T :

Park, after she has t r i u m p h e d i n not wholly dissimilar circumstances, or less intelligently articulate. N o woman i n Maggie's position w o u l d be i n a state to make this k i n d o f godlike comment w i t h godlike disinterestedness. T h e ten­ derness and passion o f the last triumphant embrace com­ pletes the pattern only at the expense o f that sympathy w h i c h should allow us to rejoice at the Prince's words, ' I see only y o u ' . These are not the only places where James's character­ istic concentration and economy is dearly purchased, but they are important and conveniently similar examples. L e t me now add briefly, i n tentative suggestions rather than full discussion, that other examples o f implausibility are to be found i n James's earlier dramatic novels like The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, and The Awkward Age, all novels owing much to his experiments i n drama, and all deliberate exercises in a restricted point of view and dialogue. I n each case there is not merely strict economy but perfect and conspicuous symmetry: The Awkward Age was planned as a number of illuminating mirrors placed evenly round their centre, What Maisie Knew has the formality of a quad­ rille, i n balance and in permutation, and The Spoils of Poynton has the basic irony of the fatal Spoils, worked out i n an equipoise of irony and cross-purposes. Each novel pur­ chases form at the expense of humanity: The Awkward Age, a novel first conceived as a short story and developing theme at top-heavy length, has the most embarrassing solution propounded i n fiction. Its heroine is the sacrifice to E n g l i s h compromise, and her awkwardness such an impediment i n love that she eventually turns to M r L o n g d o n for protection. Neither Van's sense of her awkwardness nor our response to the solution is more than cursorily handled. What Maisie Knew reduces appropriate feeling for the likely results o f marital disaster to a brilliant exercise i n plotting. T h e response o f the child is exploited rather than properly delineated and the agility of form is achieved at the expense

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of feeling. The Spoils of Poynton is one o f those stories where the original ' g e r m ' was tiny in relation to the final product, and i n the Preface we can trace James's slow development o f the fitting human action, first h i t t i n g on Fleda's conscious­ ness, then on her relations w i t h Owen. T h e original b r i g h t idea was the irony o f the all-powerful Spoils, their value, their theft, and their badly timed return, and the human action is developed as manner rather than matter, to use James's distinction. N o t all the characters are sufficiently subdued to the ironical fatality o f the Spoils, and Fleda's renunciation of Owen, her change o f m i n d , and his capi­ tulation (off stage) to the terrible M o n a Brigstock have a thinness o f motivation, explicable possibly by their sub­ ordinated mechanical position. T h e important t h i n g — to judge from the reports o f James's planning and from the results—is not the human action but the planned and external destiny. T h e over-valued Spoils and M r s Gereth's clever but 'not intelligent' bargaining w i t h them have sub­ stance and conviction, and the relationships o f Fleda, Owen, and M o n a are not exactly implausible—the renunciations, changes, and capitulation are all possible events—but are cursorily worked out in the particular terms o f the novel, appearing too conveniently present as occasions for the main irony rather than convincing i n their own right. M r s Gereth has to believe strongly enough i n the possibilities o f Owen's love for Fleda i n order to send the Spoils back to Poynton. T h e final outcome is predetermined by the original idea, and must be one o f ironical loss. Fleda's first renun­ ciation, her change o f m i n d , and Mona's victory, are as subordinated to the planned plot as Jude's death is sub­ ordinated to the ideological pattern. I n The Spoils of Poynton there is a cursoriness of motivation which makes the relation of end and means starkly apparent. W e may want to say the same about the suicide and the murders o f Father T i m e , but it would be difficult to say that the details o f Jude's susceptibilities and Sue's frigidity are as flimsily specified.

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A t his best, i n The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove, James achieves his elegance and economy, as H a r d y usually achieves his dogmatic illustration, without the loss of plausibility and particularity. James's aesthetic obsession often betrays itself—and l i f e — i n his conclusions, where the expense o f t r u t h shows itself i n the final symmetry or completion. B u t i f the man­ nered aesthetic conclusions of The Spoils of Poynton and The Ambassadors are clear instances of aesthetic betrayal, ex­ cluding the illogical and the untidy at some cost, some of his novels are remarkable just for their triumphantly open and 'incomplete' endings, w h i c h at least appear to accom­ modate the abrupt and the unfinished r h y t h m o f actual existence. James says himself, 'really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle w i t h i n w h i c h they shall happily appear to do so' (The Art of the Novel). T h e metaphor o f the geometrician and his circle, w h i c h was used by Stevenson, has different i m ­ plications i n different novels. James's narrative form is not conspicuous for its closure. James seldom completes the circle by death or marriage, and those novels where these conventional endings appear have an air of finality of their own. This is true of Roderick Hudson (though Christina L i g h t continued to solicit her author, w i t h some success, for a future i n another novel), in Daisy Miller, The Princess Casamassima and The Bostonians. I n many of the other novels the conclusion is less that of a climax in action, like a death or a marriage, than a dis­ solution o f local tension. T h i s is usually both a moral solution and the end to a certain set of social relations. T h e charmed circle is broken in The Awkward Age, and although Nanda's future is uncertain we know what it w i l l not be like. T h e same t h i n g applies to the last three novels, where a partic­ ular set of relationships, which have constituted the action and the structure, come to an end. T h e intricate dance is

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over, and the survivors left, either i n isolation, as in The Wings of the Dove, or i n a very different relation, as in The Golden Bowl. M o s t commonly, we have the isolated i n d i ­ vidual, who has learnt a lesson which involves a clean break. T h e ' open' endings o f The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove leave us in some uncertainty. W e do not know what w i l l happen to Isabel Archer, merely that she w i l l return to her husband, having been exposed to the fullest temptation o f passionate love. W e do not know what w i l l happen to Kate and M e r t o n Densher, merely that their relationship has been made impossible by the one event they longed for and worked for. But all that we do not know is the detail of the future, and i n Isabel's case we have some g r i m suggestions remaining from the action that has been set before us. T h e important t h i n g is not left doubtful—the moral issue is absolutely clear. Strether can have nothing for himself, having seen the cruel consequences of selfishness. Kate and Densher can never again be as they were. Isabel sees a straight path. James not only shows this but makes it morally explicit. T h e line he draws at the end of these novels is not at all like the line cut by the frame of an impressionist painting, suggesting the arbitrary limits of the impression. N o r is it like the head emerging from the rough unworked block, i m p l y i n g the struggle w i t h the raw material. N o r again is it like the line drawn at the end o f Anna Karenina or Women in Love or Lady Chatterley's Lover which draws our attention to inconclusiveness and the onward flow. T h i s appearance of an invitation to speculate further has its own completeness: i f we make the attempt we are brought up against the lack of cues and against the moral finality. James does not give us the detailed guarantee for the future which we find at the end of Hard Times—one of Dickens's best endings—or at the end of Middlemarch. Such guarantees rest on the convention that everything of moral importance has happened to these people. They may go on having 1

1

T h i s is h o w I read Isabel's last e n c o u n t e r w i t h Caspar G o o d w o o d .

5 9 3 - + . 5 > Bronte, E m i l y , 1, r 8 ; 8 o

I 0

1 8

5

Camus, Albert, 1 Carlyle, Thomas, 11 o Cary, Joyce, 1 7 8 - 9 Chambers, Jessie, 1 4 0 - 1 , 144 Chase, Richard, 70, 7 5 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 76 Christian, R. F., 175 Cozzens, James G o u l d , 4 Crews, Frederick, 75, 7 7 - 8 1 Daiches, D a v i d , 120 Defoe, Daniel, 6, 2 1 , 36, 5 1 , 5 3 - 6 5 , 69, 7 1 - 3 , 80, 135, 185 Dickens, Charles, I , 4, 1 1 , 1 4 - 1 7 , 3 1 , 36, 49, 52, 5;, 6 1 , 88, 1 0 9 110, 126, 1 3 6 - 8 , 185, 1 9 2 - 3 , 195, 198-200 Donne, John, 104 Dostoievsky, Fedor, 181 Dumas, Alexandre, 34

Duras, Marguerite, 1 Eliot, George, 2, 4 - 1 0 , 1 1 - 1 8 , 2 0 - 1 , 3 . 3 5-9. 5 > 6 1 , 6 7 - 9 , 7 1 , 106-31, 1 3 5 - 7 , 1 4 6 - 8 , 1 6 8 169, 170, 172, 1 7 4 - 6 , 182, 185, 187-9;, 9 9 > ° > °7> 209210 1

2

T

8 _

2

2

2

Faulkner, W i l l i a m , 198 Forster, E . M . , 8, 9, 36, 5 1 , 53, 73-82,121—3, 1 3 0 , 1 3 6 , 1 8 0 , 207 Freud, Sigmund, 140, 142, 145 Galsworthy, John, 132 Gissing, George, 1 2 1 , 126-7 G o l d i n g , W i l l i a m , 81 Greene, G r a h a m , 1, 81 Gudzii, N . K . , 213-16 Hagan, John, 109 H a r d y , Thomas, 6 - 9 , 24, 36, 4 7 48, 5 1 , 53,7°-5> - > 9 > 3 > 135, i 8 r 8 l

2

i o

r

2

James, H e n r y , 3, 4 - 9 , I I - 5 0 , 5 1 , 53. 57. 7+, 76, 8 3 - 5 , 1 0 1 , 1 0 5 - 6 , 116, 1 2 1 , 127, 132, 1 4 6 - 8 , 173, 1 8 3 - 5 , 1 8 7 - 8 , 192, 193, 199, 201, 206-7 James, W i l l i a m , 129 Johnson, Samuel, 172 Joyce, James, 2, 7 5 - 6 , 132-5, 185, 198

218

I N D E X

Kafka, Franz, i K n i g h t , G . W i l s o n , 163 Kotzebue, A . F . F . v o n , 14 Lawrence, D . H . , 1-4, 8 - 9 , 19, 32, 34, 35, 4 9 , 8 1 - 2 , 106, 109, n o ­ i l 1, 1 2 2 - 4 , l 3 - 7 3 . i 7 4 - 8 i » 209, 211 Leavis, F . R., 132, 1 4 9 - 5 0 , 156 L i n a t i , Carlo, 133, 173 Lukacs, G e o r g , 81 2

Schorer, M a r k , 1 3 8 - 4 6 Sewell, Elizabeth, 7, 64 Shakespeare, W i l l i a m , 23, 3 7 - 8 , 85, 90, 164, 165, 166, 180 Smollett, Tobias, 61 Sparrow, John, 163 Stendhal, 105 Sterne, Laurence, 2 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 3, 3 2 - 3 , 34. 4 8 . 173. ' 3 8

Thackeray, W i l l i a m Makepeace, M a u d e , Louise and A y l m e r , 175 M e r e d i t h , George, 6 1 , 7 1 , 8 3 - 1 0 4 , 105, 1 2 2 - 3 , 135, 146, 172, 207

147. 193. 195 T i l l o t s o n , Kathleen, 63, 68 Tolstoy, Leo, 2, 4 - 1 7 , 20, 25, 32, 35. 3 ~9> 4 9 . 7 i - 2 . 106, 147, 174-216 Trollope, Anthony, 4 Turgenev, Ivan S., 181 6

O r w e l l , George, 53, 172 O w e n , Elizabeth, 45 Proust, M a r c e l , 83 Richardson, D o r o t h y , 133 Richardson, Samuel, 81 Robbe-Grillet, A l a i n , 1, 2, 2 1 , 25 Robson, W . W . , 147

no,

W a t t , Ian, 54-5 W o o l f , V i r g i n i a , 1, 7, 7 6 - 7 , 207 Yonge, Charlotte M a r y , 7, 64