HENRY JAMES, JR.
by William Dean Howells
The events of Mr. James's life--as we agree to understand
events--may be told in a very few words. His race is Irish on
his father's side and Scotch on his mother's, to which mingled
strains the generalizer may attribute, if he likes, that union of
vivid expression and dispassionate analysis which has
characterized his work from the first. There are none of those
early struggles with poverty, which render the lives of so many
distinguished Americans monotonous reading, to record in his
case: the cabin hearth-fire did not light him to the youthful
pursuit of literature; he had from the start all those advantages
which, when they go too far, become limitations.
He was born in New York city in the year 1843, and his first
lessons in life and letters were the best which the
metropolis--so small in the perspective diminishing to that
date--could afford. In his twelfth year his family went abroad,
and after some stay in England made a long sojourn in France and
Switzerland. They returned to America in 1860, placing
themselves at Newport, and for a year or two Mr. James was at the
Harvard Law School, where, perhaps, he did not study a great deal
of law. His father removed from Newport to Cambridge in 1866,
and there Mr. James remained till he went abroad, three years
later, for the residence in England and Italy which, with
infrequent visits home, has continued ever since.
It was during these three years of his Cambridge life that I
became acquainted with his work. He had already printed a
tale--"The Story of a Year"--in the "Atlantic Monthly," when I
was asked to be Mr. Fields's assistant in the management, and it
was my fortune to read Mr. James's second contribution in
manuscript. "Would you take it?" asked my chief. "Yes, and all
the stories you can get from the writer." One is much securer of
judgment at twenty-nine than, say, at forty-five; but if
this was a mistake of mine I am not yet old enough to regret it.
The story was called "Poor Richard," and it dealt with the
conscience of a man very much in love with a woman who loved his
rival. He told this rival a lie, which sent him away to his
death on the field,--in that day nearly every fictitious
personage had something to do with the war,--but Poor Richard's
lie did not win him his love. It still seems to me that the
situation was strongly and finely felt. One's pity went, as it
should, with the liar; but the whole story had a pathos which
lingers in my mind equally with a sense of the new literary
qualities which gave me such delight in it. I admired, as we
must in all that Mr. James has written, the finished workmanship
in which there is no loss of vigor; the luminous and uncommon use
of words, the originality of phrase, the whole clear and
beautiful style, which I confess I weakly liked the better for
the occasional gallicisms remaining from an inveterate habit of
French. Those who know the writings of Mr. Henry James will
recognize the inherited felicity of diction which is so striking
in the writings of Mr. Henry James, Jr. The son's diction is not
so racy as the father's; it lacks its daring, but it is as
fortunate and graphic; and I cannot give it greater praise than
this, though it has, when he will, a splendor and state which is
wholly its own.
Mr. James is now so universally recognized that I shall seem to
be making an unwarrantable claim when I express my belief that
the popularity of his stories was once largely confined to Mr.
Field's assistant. They had characteristics which forbade any
editor to refuse them; and there are no anecdotes of
thrice-rejected manuscripts finally printed to tell of him; his
work was at once successful with all the magazines. But with the
readers of "The Atlantic," of "Harper's," of "Lippincott's," of
"The Galaxy," of "The Century," it was another affair. The
flavor was so strange, that, with rare exceptions, they had to
"learn to like" it. Probably few writers have in the same degree
compelled the liking of their readers. He was reluctantly
accepted, partly through a mistake as to his attitude--through
the confusion of his point of view with his private opinion--in
the reader's mind. This confusion caused the tears of rage which
bedewed our continent in behalf of the "average American girl"
supposed to be satirized in Daisy Miller, and prevented the
perception of the fact that, so far as the average American girl
was studied at all in Daisy Miller, her indestructible innocence,
her invulnerable new-worldliness, had never been so delicately
appreciated. It was so plain that Mr. James disliked her vulgar
conditions, that the very people to whom he revealed her
essential sweetness and light were furious that he should have
seemed not to see what existed through him. In other words, they
would have liked him better if he had been a worse artist--if he
had been a little more confidential.
But that artistic impartiality which puzzled so many in the
treatment of Daisy Miller is one of the qualities most valuable
in the eyes of those who care how things are done, and I am not
sure that it is not Mr. James's most characteristic quality. As
"frost performs the effect of fire," this impartiality comes at
last to the same result as sympathy. We may be quite sure that
Mr. James does not like the peculiar phase of our civilization
typified in Henrietta Stackpole; but he treats her with such
exquisite justice that he lets US like her. It is an extreme
case, but I confidently allege it in proof.
His impartiality is part of the reserve with which he works in
most respects, and which at first glance makes us say that he is
wanting in humor. But I feel pretty certain that Mr. James has
not been able to disinherit himself to this degree. We Americans
are terribly in earnest about making ourselves, individually and
collectively; but I fancy that our prevailing mood in the face of
all problems is that of an abiding faith which can afford to be
funny. He has himself indicated that we have, as a nation, as a
people, our joke, and every one of us is in the joke more or
less. We may, some of us, dislike it extremely, disapprove it
wholly, and even abhor it, but we are in the joke all the same,
and no one of us is safe from becoming the great American
humorist at any given moment. The danger is not apparent in Mr.
James's case, and I confess that I read him with a relief in the
comparative immunity that he affords from the national
facetiousness. Many of his people are humorously imagined, or
rather humorously SEEN, like Daisy Miller's mother, but these do
not give a dominant color; the business in hand is commonly
serious, and the droll people are subordinated. They abound,
nevertheless, and many of them are perfectly new finds, like Mr.
Tristram in "The American," the bill-paying father in the
"Pension Beaurepas," the anxiously Europeanizing mother in the
same story, the amusing little Madame de Belgarde, Henrietta
Stackpole, and even Newman himself. But though Mr. James
portrays the humorous in character, he is decidedly not on
humorous terms with his reader; he ignores rather than recognizes
the fact that they are both in the joke.
If we take him at all we must take him on his own ground, for
clearly he will not come to ours. We must make concessions to
him, not in this respect only, but in several others, chief among
which is the motive for reading fiction. By example, at least,
he teaches that it is the pursuit and not the end which should
give us pleasure; for he often prefers to leave us to our own
conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he has
interested us. There is no question, of course, but he could
tell the story of Isabel in "The Portrait of a Lady" to the end,
yet he does not tell it. We must agree, then, to take what seems
a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name
for this new kind in fiction. Evidently it is the character, not
the fate, of his people which occupies him; when he has fully
developed their character he leaves them to what destiny the
reader pleases.
The analytic tendency seems to have increased with him as his
work has gone on. Some of the earlier tales were very dramatic:
"A Passionate Pilgrim," which I should rank above all his other
short stories, and for ...
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