Views and Reviews Part 1

Views and Reviews.

by Henry James.

INTRODUCTION

_Those whose palates are accustomed to the subtle flavours of the wines of the Rhine and Moselle can smack their lips and name the vintage at the first taste. Likewise any one fairly familiar with the work of Mr.

James during his forty years of literary activity can, after the reading of a single page taken at random, judge with a remarkable accuracy the date of its composition. Yet the transition has not been abrupt and the styles of writing which the author has adopted, early, middle and late, have blended in such a way that he has been bringing many of his earlier readers, though some have fallen by the wayside, along with him to a genuine appreciation of his present work._

_It is not unnatural but disappointing that those of the present generation who chance to meet Mr. James in one of the later novels are not as likely to seek a second volume as those who read_ Daisy Miller _some thirty years ago when that study first appeared, so fresh in its note of charm and pathos, in the now almost unfindable brown wrappers of Harper's Half Hour Series, for they may forever miss a rare enjoyment._

_In the critical papers which make up the contents of this book, the characteristics of the author's later style are wholly absent. Without the date of the original appearance of these essays in periodical form being indicated, the chronological setting of this work is apparent. No sentences with marvelously intricate complications of construction and with expressions involved are in the author's method at this time, while for clearness and charm these views and reviews are admirable specimens, showing qualities which brought Mr. James his early readers and first made his name an essential feature of the announcements of publishers of the more discriminating periodicals forty years ago._

_The earliest authenticated magazine article by Mr. James--printed when he was twenty-one--is a critical notice of Na.s.sau W. Senior's_ Essays on Fiction _in_ The North American Review _for October, 1864. From this time until the appearance of his first volume_--A Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim and Other Tales, _Boston: 1875--as many as one hundred and twenty-five serious literary notices contributed to periodicals can be traced to him_.

_During this period it must also be remembered that Mr. James was equally employed in writing short stories, art criticism and notes of travel, both at home and abroad, and that these were also distinctive features of the widely scattered journals in which they appeared._

_In_ The North American Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Galaxy, Lippincott's Magazine, The New York Tribune, The Independent _and some other periodicals, the authors.h.i.+p of such work was attributed to Mr.

James on the publication of the articles or in regularly issued indexes._

_The articles in_ The Nation _are seldom signed, and there is no published index showing the contributors to its files. In preparing a recent[*] Bibliography of the writings of Henry James I had access to a record which the late Wendell Phillips Garrison, who was Mr. G.o.dkin's a.s.sociate from the founding of the paper and after 1881 editor in charge until June 28, 1906, had carefully kept of every author's work which his paper had published since its first issue. The amount of matter which Mr. James had provided, and the variety of interests concerning which he wrote, made an amazing array of notes. It is from the early issues of_ The Nation _that much of the contents of this volume is reprinted. Of Mr. James's contributions to periodicals those to this paper were perhaps the most notable as well as the most frequent. He was represented in its first number--July 6, 1865--by some critical notes on Henry W. Kingsley's novel_, "The Hillyars and the Bartons: A Story of Two Families," _under the t.i.tle_, "The n.o.ble School of Fiction," _and the name "Henry James" appears in the publisher's announced list of contributors to the early volumes. Many of these papers which first appeared in_ The Nation _have been reprinted, but few readers at this distance can realize how much the esteem in which that journal was immediately held under the editorial supervision of Mr. G.o.dkin was due to perhaps its youngest regular contributor._

[*] _A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906_.

_Volumes of the collected critical papers have already appeared_,--French Poets and Novelists, London: _1878, and_ Partial Portraits, _London: 1888, are the more notable,--but by far the greater part of these contemporary Essays on the literature of the late sixties and the seventies are now almost lost in the files of old or extinct periodicals._

_We are accustomed these later years to think of Mr. James as novelist rather than literary essayist and he has been cited by a recent writer as an author of fiction who becomes a critic on occasion and, he also adds, that his a.n.a.lytical system of novel writing excellently fits him for the office of critic; but, on the contrary, the papers in this volume seem to show that his early self-training as a critic has been the preparation for the creation of his characters in fiction._

_The true lover of Mr. James's work feels the same delightful sense of intimate discovery in touching these early papers that an artist does in finding a portfolio of early sketches by a beloved master whose developed power and strength is known to him. There is the recognition of the characteristic touch even here--the insight, the thought within a thought, (more lately the despair of privileged psychologic athletes), the mystery of seeing--not what is apparent to the outward eye but what we fancied we concealed successfully within our inmost selves. There is the extraordinary sense of his having put on paper what we really thought--what we now think--that gives us more faith than ever in our artist who is expression for us who feel, but who are yet dumb._

_LE ROY PHILLIPS._

_Boston, April 10, 1908._

VIEWS AND REVIEWS

THE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT

The critic's first duty in the presence of an author's collective works is to seek out some key to his method, some utterance of his literary convictions, some indication of his ruling theory.

The amount of labour involved in an inquiry of this kind will depend very much upon the author.

In some cases the critic will find express declarations; in other cases he will have to content himself with conscientious inductions. In a writer so fond of digressions as George Eliot, he has reason to expect that broad evidences of artistic faith will not be wanting. He finds in _Adam Bede_ the following pa.s.sage:--

"Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward, and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art those old women sc.r.a.ping carrots with their work-worn hands,--those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house,--those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world,--those homes with their tin cans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their cl.u.s.ters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common, coa.r.s.e people, who have no picturesque, sentimental wretchedness. It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes....

"There are few prophets in the world,--few sublimely beautiful women,--few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities; I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellowmen, especially for the few in the foreground of the great mult.i.tude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy....

"I herewith discharge my conscience," our author continues, "and declare that I have had quite enthusiastic movements of admiration toward old gentlemen who spoke the worst English, who were occasionally fretful in their temper, and who had never moved in a higher sphere of influence than that of parish overseer; and that the way in which I have come to the conclusion that human nature is loveable--the way I have learnt something of its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries--has been by living a great deal among people more or less commonplace and vulgar, of whom you would perhaps hear nothing very surprising if you were to inquire about them in the neighbourhoods where they dwelt."

But even in the absence of any such avowed predilections as these, a brief glance over the princ.i.p.al figures of her different works would a.s.sure us that our author's sympathies are with common people. Silas Marner is a linen-weaver, Adam Bede is a carpenter, Maggie Tulliver is a miller's daughter, Felix Holt is a watchmaker, Dinah Morris works in a factory, and Hetty Sorrel is a dairy-maid.

Esther Lyon, indeed, is a daily governess; but t.i.to Melema alone is a scholar. In the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, the author is constantly slipping down from the clergymen, her heroes, to the most ignorant and obscure of their paris.h.i.+oners. Even in _Romola_ she consecrates page after page to the conversation of the Florentine populace. She is as unmistakably a painter of _bourgeois_ life as Thackeray was a painter of the life of drawing-rooms.

Her opportunities for the study of the manners of the solid lower cla.s.ses have evidently been very great. We have her word for it that she has lived much among the farmers, mechanics, and small traders of that central region of England which she has made known to us under the name of Loams.h.i.+re.

The conditions of the popular life in this district in that already distant period to which she refers the action of most of her stories--the end of the last century and the beginning of the present--were so different from any that have been seen in America, that an American, in treating of her books, must be satisfied not to touch upon the question of their accuracy and fidelity as pictures of manners and customs. He can only say that they bear strong internal evidence of truthfulness.

If he is a great admirer of George Eliot, he will indeed be tempted to affirm that they must be true. They offer a completeness, a rich density of detail, which could be the fruit only of a long term of conscious contact,--such as would make it much more difficult for the author to fall into the perversion and suppression of facts, than to set them down literally. It is very probable that her colours are a little too bright, and her shadows of too mild a gray, that the sky of her landscapes is too sunny, and their atmosphere too redolent of peace and abundance. Local affection may be accountable for half of this excess of brilliancy; the author's native optimism is accountable for the other half.

I do not remember, in all her novels, an instance of gross misery of any kind not directly caused by the folly of the sufferer. There are no pictures of vice or poverty or squalor. There are no rags, no gin, no brutal pa.s.sions. That average humanity which she favours is very _borne_ in intellect, but very genial in heart, as a glance at its representatives in her pages will convince us.

In _Adam Bede_, there is Mr. Irwine, the vicar, with avowedly no qualification for his profession, placidly playing chess with his mother, stroking his dogs, and dipping into Greek tragedies; there is the excellent Martin Poyser at the Farm, good-natured and rubicund; there is his wife, somewhat too sharply voluble, but only in behalf of cleanliness and honesty and order; there is Captain Donnithorne at the Hall, who does a poor girl a mortal wrong, but who is, after all, such a nice, good-looking fellow; there are Adam and Seth Bede, the carpenter's sons, the strongest, purest, most discreet of young rustics. The same broad felicity prevails in _The Mill on the Floss_. Mr. Tulliver, indeed, fails in business; but his failure only serves as an offset to the general integrity and prosperity.

His son is obstinate and wilful; but it is all on the side of virtue. His daughter is somewhat sentimental and erratic; but she is more conscientious yet.

Conscience, in the cla.s.ses from which George Eliot recruits her figures, is a universal gift. Decency and plenty and good-humour follow contentedly in its train. The word which sums up the common traits of our author's various groups is the word _respectable_. Adam Bede is pre-eminently a respectable young man; so is Arthur Donnithorne; so, although he will persist in going without a cravat, is Felix Holt. So, with perhaps the exception of Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest, is every important character to be found in our author's writings. They all share this fundamental trait,--that in each of them pa.s.sion proves itself feebler than conscience.

The first work which made the name of George Eliot generally known, contains, to my perception, only a small number of the germs of her future power. From the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ to _Adam Bede_ she made not so much a step as a leap. Of the three tales contained in the former work, I think the first is much the best. It is short, broadly descriptive, humourous, and exceedingly pathetic. "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" are fortunes which clever story-tellers with a turn for pathos, from Oliver Goldsmith downward, have found of very good account,--the fortunes of a hapless clergyman of the Church of England in daily contention with the problem how upon eighty pounds a year to support a wife and six children in all due ecclesiastical gentility.

"Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," the second of the tales in question, I cannot hesitate to p.r.o.nounce a failure. George Eliot's pictures of drawing-room life are only interesting when they are linked or related to scenes in the tavern parlour, the dairy, and the cottage. Mr. Gilfil's love-story is enacted entirely in the drawing-room, and in consequence it is singularly deficient in force and reality. Not that it is vulgar,--for our author's good taste never forsakes her,--but it is thin, flat, and trivial. But for a certain family likeness in the use of language and the rhythm of the style, it would be hard to believe that these pages are by the same hand as _Silas Marner_.

In "Janet's Repentance," the last and longest of the three clerical stories, we return to middle life,--the life represented by the Dodsons in _The Mill on the Floss_. The subject of this tale might almost be qualified by the French epithet _scabreux_.

It would be difficult for what is called _realism_ to go further than in the adoption of a heroine stained with the vice of intemperance. The theme is unpleasant; the author chose it at her peril. It must be added, however, that Janet Dempster has many provocations. Married to a brutal drunkard, she takes refuge in drink against his ill-usage; and the story deals less with her lapse into disgrace than with her redemption, through the kind offices of the Reverend Edgar Tryan,--by virtue of which, indeed, it takes its place in the clerical series. I cannot help thinking that the stern and tragical character of the subject has been enfeebled by the over-diffuseness of the narrative and the excess of local touches. The abundance of the author's recollections and observations of village life clogs the dramatic movement, over which she has as yet a comparatively slight control. In her subsequent works the stouter fabric of the story is better able to support this heavy drapery of humour and digression.

To a certain extent, I think _Silas Marner_ holds a higher place than any of the author's works.

It is more nearly a masterpiece; it has more of that simple, rounded, consummate aspect, that absence of loose ends and gaping issues, which marks a cla.s.sical work. What was attempted in it, indeed, was within more immediate reach than the heart-trials of Adam Bede and Maggie Tulliver.

A poor, dull-witted, disappointed Methodist cloth-weaver; a little golden-haired foundling child; a well-meaning, irresolute country squire, and his patient, childless wife;--these, with a chorus of simple, beer-loving villagers, make up the _dramatis personae_. More than any of its brother-works, _Silas Marner_, I think, leaves upon the mind a deep impression of the grossly material life of agricultural England in the last days of the old _regime_,--the days of full-orbed Toryism, of Trafalgar and of Waterloo, when the invasive spirit of French domination threw England back upon a sense of her own insular solidity, and made her for the time doubly, brutally, morbidly English.

Perhaps the best pages in the work are the first thirty, telling the story of poor Marner's disappointments in friends.h.i.+p and in love, his unmerited disgrace, and his long, lonely twilight-life at Raveloe, with the sole companions.h.i.+p of his loom, in which his muscles moved "with such even repet.i.tion, that their pause seemed almost as much a constraint as the holding of his breath."

Here, as in all George Eliot's books, there is a middle life and a low life; and here, as usual, I prefer the low life. In _Silas Marner_, in my opinion, she has come nearest the mildly rich tints of brown and gray, the mellow lights and the undreadful corner-shadows of the Dutch masters whom she emulates. One of the chapters contains a scene in a pot-house, which frequent reference has made famous. Never was a group of honest, garrulous village simpletons more kindly and humanely handled. After a long and somewhat chilling silence, amid the pipes and beer, the landlord opens the conversation "by saying in a doubtful tone to his cousin the butcher:--

"'Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you druv in yesterday, Bob?'

"The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man, was not disposed to answer rashly. He gave a few puffs before he spat, and replied, 'And they wouldn't be fur wrong, John.'

"After this feeble, delusive thaw, silence set in as severely as before.

"'Was it a red Durham?' said the farrier, taking up the thread of discourse after the lapse of a few minutes.

"The farrier looked at the landlord, and the landlord looked at the butcher, as the person who must take the responsibility of answering.

"'Red it was,' said the butcher, in his good-humoured husky treble,--'and a Durham it was.'

"'Then you needn't tell me who you bought it of,' said the farrier, looking round with some triumph; 'I know who it is has got the red Durhams o' this country-side. And she'd a white star on her brow, I'll bet a penny?'