The Common Pursuit (33 page)

I will only comment, without wishing to question the justice of this conclusion, that Dr Wellek seems to me to assume too easily that the poet's essential 'belief is what can be most readily extracted as such from his works by a philosopher.

HENRY JAMES AND THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM

TO form a just idea of Mr Quentin Anderson's contribution to the understanding of Henry James one needs to have read his essay in The Kenyan Review for Autumn, 1946. He had room there to develop his case at length, and the interested reader of the briefer presentment that, at the Editors' invitation, he wrote for Scrutiny (September and December, 1947) ought to know that the fuller treatment exists and may, by those who have no access to it, be taken as, in an important respect, finally convincing.

Mr Anderson has established, I think, a very interesting fact. Not only are there decided manifestations in James's work of a strong and sympathic interest on his part in his father's system; in certain of bis books, generally considered as constituting his 'major phase', the system is present to such effect that, unadverted and unuiformed, the reader is without the key to the essential intention—the intention that makes the given book what it is and explains what James saw it as being. The fact, then, has its bearings for criticism.

The statement of these is not a simple matter. Moreover, Mr Anderson seems to me to have started with radical misconceptions as to what they could be. But I should like at the outset to make quite plain my sense of the positive value of his work. His argument regards mainly the late novels and stories. These, of course, are very highly rated by the fashionable admirers of James, who, indeed, assumed them to be the supreme expression of his genius, but seem quite incapable of suggesting either any intelligible grounds for the assumption or any clear idea of the kind of thing we are supposed to be admiring. Novels are novels; James's distinction, we gather, is that he handles with great refinement the relations between 'civilized' individuals—representative members of a Victorian or Edwardian house-party: these late books (that appears to be the assumption) are especially alembicated specimens

of the same variety of'the novel'. Well, Mr Anderson shows that The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl are, in intention, allegories about Man, and by both intention and method much more closely related to Everyman than to 'the novel of manners'. If this fact can be brought to general notice its disconcerting effect may be salutary. It may even induce some receptivity in respect of the truth diat even in his earlier work James is not a mere novelist of manners; so that ultimately it will become impossible for critics to tell us, as Mr David Garnett does, that James's characters are 'ordinary people' . . . 'just as much alive as the people we meet in hotels or at the houses of our friends, but no more'.

But to return to my disagreements with Mr Anderson: he doesn't, I've suggested, deal satisfactorily with the critical bearings of the fact he establishes. The fact itself, I think, is less clear-cut and measurable than he supposes. 'The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl were planned as a single poem embracing the history of mankind. They represent three stages in the experience of the race which are paralleled by three stages in the moral career of an individual'. And Mr Anderson, in his essay in The Kenyon Review, gives a detailed account of the three works as allegorizing faithfully and comprehensively the blend of Swedenborg and Fourier (for that's what it is, though Mr Anderson himself doesn't put it that way) elaboratedjjDy Henry James senior. I am not convinced that the younger James even in intention identified himself as completely with his father's system as that—I can't believe it, if only because the system, taken as a whole, seems to me prettty meaningless, except as satisfying the particular emotional and moral needs of the leisure-class American idealist who elaborated it.

But what I have to insist on is that intention in the important sense can only be determined by the tests applied in literary criticism. The analysis and judgment of works of literary art belong to the literary critic, who is one in so far as he observes a disciplined relevance in response, comment and determination of significance. He is concerned with the work in front of him as something that should contain within itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise. The more experience—experience of life and literature together—he brings to bear on it the better, of

course; and it is true that extraneous information may make him more percipient. But the business of critical intelligence will remain what it was: to ensure relevance of response and to determine what is actually there in the work of art. The critic will be especially wary how he uses extraneous knowledge about the writer's intentions. Intentions are nothing in art except as realized, and the tests of realization will remain what they were. They are applied in the operation of the critic's sensibility; they are a matter of his sense, derived from his literary experience, of what the living thing feels like—of die difference between that which has been willed and put there, or represents no profound integration, and that which grows from a deep centre of life. These tests may very well reveal that the deep animating intention (if that is the right word) is something very different from the intention the author would declare.

My main criticism of Mr Anderson is that he is not, in his interpretation of James, actively enough a literary critic: his use of his key seems to be something apart from has critical sensibility. Doesn't he assume his value-judgments, and rest inertly on the conventional consensus that rates the late novels so high ? I may be wrong in this general suggestion, but I am sure that his commentary on The Ambassadors implies an indefensible valuation. Why should he assume that the reader tends, almost irresistibly (though mistakenly) to identify himself with Strether ? I can only comment that I haven't been in the least tempted so to identify myself, or to spend any moral or intellectual energy determining the worth or significance of Strether's resolution to *have got nothing for himself. For all the light Mr Anderson throws on possible intentions, The Ambassadors still seems to me so feeble a piece of word-spinning that I should have been inclined to dismiss it as merely senile if James hadn't himself provided an explanation in telling us that it had been conceived as a short story. What Mr Anderson points to is a set of preoccupations that helps us to understand how James should have been so mistakenly led into fluffing out the story to the bulk and pretensions of a major work.

I suspect that The Ambassadors, which to me remains wholly boring, doesn't belong so essentially with the other late 'great' novels as Mr Anderson thinks—and as, perhaps, James himself in

elaborating it, intended. But before I leave Strether I have a comment to make on the kind of significance Mr Anderson attributes to him. Strether represents, we are told, self-righteousness. What Mr Anderson's argument, so far as I understand it, seems to compel one to point out is that self-righteousness and moral neutrality are not exhaustive alternatives. We can resolve to eschew self-righteousness, and yet, without inconsistency, believe we have a duty of moral discrimination. It is true that our judgments ought to come from an impersonal centre in us, and that we shouldn't have been able to make them but for a truth the statement of which would be a generalized form of Mr Anderson's proposition: * If James had not felt in himself the very impulses which he saw crystallized in American manners he would not have understood American manners'. This possibility of impersonality and this measure of'community of consciousness' are implied in the existence of art.

Difficult as they are for discussion and definition, these truths are profoundly familiar. It is only here and there, in the individual focus, that consciousness exists, and yet, as the experience of great literature brings home to us very forcibly, and the more forcibly the more we ponder it, that is not the last word: the individual focus of consciousness is not an insulated unit, whose relation with others are merely external and susceptible of statement in Benthamite terms.

It is difficult to see what more can be conveyed by the phrase in which Mr Anderson summarizes the elder James, 'We all share the same consciousness', than a reminder of these familiar truths. Clearly, it can't be literally true: when the lorry breaks your leg you feel the pain and I don't. And what the special Jamesian intention may be is not given definition and cogency by any success of concrete presentment in the younger James's art.

But at this point there is a discrimination to be made: both The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl seem to me much more interesting than The Ambassadors, and interesting in the general way suggested by Mr Anderson. They are no more specimens of 'the novel' than Everyman is a specimen of naturalistic drama. Thanks to the light brought by Mr Anderson we can see, for instance, in the peculiar impressiveness of Mrs Lowder of The Wings of the Dove, 'Britannia of the Market-Place', a triumph of

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 227

morality art. Yet that light makes no essential difference to my own final judgments about the book, which remains, as preponderantly as before, fussily vague and intolerably sentimental. Milly Theale, for all the elaboration of indirectnesses with which James sets about generating her, remains an empty excuse for unctuous sentimentality. Kate Croy continues to engage more of our sympathy than suits the author's purpose.

The Golden Bowl had always seemed the most interesting of the late novels. Helped by Mr Anderson, we can give a better account of its relative strength—though not, I think, a less disabling account of its total unsatisfactoriness. Adverted of the morality intention, we can refrain from dismissing Adam Verver tout court as the American millionaire denatured and sentimentalized. Adam, we can see, stands for America in certain of its aspects—on the one hand (going with the loosening of tradition) a characteristic innocence combined with generous goodwill, and, on the other, the supremacy of wealth that makes possible the purchase of what America hasn't been able to produce, represented by Prince Amerigo and the fabulous collection of objets d'art that is to be housed in American City. What precisely the allegorical intention amounts to in full it is difficult to determine—to say which is to make a radical criticism. Certainly it doesn't merely amount to the elder James's system. For not only is American City a penal Botany Bay for Charlotte x ; about the withdrawal there of the Ververs there is an unmistakable pathos.

1 Mr Anderson's account of American City is different:

She is led off in a silken halter to become the cicerone of the temple of the divine-natural humanity. Appearance, the sum of all the objects of art which represent the divinity, is to be housed in America, the spiritual realm.

But how does he explain James's presenting Madame Merle's banishment in this unambiguous light (the quotation comes from the late revised version— and in any case Mr Anderson contends that James based his work from the outset on an acceptance of his father's apocalyptic philosophy) 2—

'It's my husband who doesn't get on with me', said Isabel.

'I could have told him he wouldn't. I don't call that crowing over you ,

Mrs Touchett added. 'Do you still like Serena Merle ?' she went on.

'Not as I once did. But it doesn't matter, for she's going to America'.

'To America ? She must have done something very bad'.

'Yes—very bad'.

What we are not reconciled to by any awareness of intentions is the outraging of our moral sense by the handling of the adultery theme—the triangle, or rather quadrilateral, of personal relations. We remain convinced that when an author, whatever symbolism he intends, presents a drama of men and women, he is committed to dealing in terms of men and women, and mustn't ask us to acquiesce in valuations that contradict our profoundest ethical sensibility. If, of course, he can work a revolutionary change in that sensibility, well and good, but who will contend that James's art in those late novels has that power ? In The Golden Bowl we continue to find our moral sense outraged.

Actually we can see that James doesn't realize what violent accommodations he is demanding of us, for his own sense of life is in abeyance. This, in spite of all our attempts to say what can be said in favour of The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, is the judgment we rest at. And what, in fact, Mr Anderson has done is to further the diagnosis of James's late phase. It had already been plain that the hypertrophy of technique, the overdoing, was correlated with a malnutrition. James paid the penalty of living too much as novelist, and not richly enough as a man. He paid the price, too, of his upbringing—of never having been allowed to take root in any community, so that for all his intense critical interest in civilization, he never developed any sense of society as a system of functions and responsibilities. And he spent his life, when not at house-parties of a merely social kind (he was unaware, it would seem, of the Victorian country-house at its functional best), dining out and writing. The deep consciousness that he had no public and no hope of real critical attention would confirm the dispositions tending to life-impoverishment in his art. It is in this late period that the inherited symbolism assumes control, and we can see why this should be so: it moves into the place once occupied in force by the system of interests belonging to the novelist as novelist—the system of interests derived from his most vital experience. We can see too that in coming so to power it both increases, and disguises from James, the separation of his art from life.

The system of symbolism, in short, doesn't represent the structure of interests behind his operative sensibility; it dosen't belong with his creativeness. It is from the beginning, in fact,

THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 229

associated with an odd weakness, which, we can now see, it helps to explain—for, as Mr Anderson enables us to perceive, an intention to be identified with it asserts itself as an intrusive presence even in James's early phase. A representative instance may be seen in The American, with its symbolically named hero, Christopher Newman, who, starting from nothing, has rapidly made his pile in the West, and yet is offered to us as embodying a guileless integrity that places him at a disadvantage in dealing with a corrupt and self-seeking aristocratic Europe. If we ask how James can have been guilty of so preposterous an unreality, the answer lies in the paternal spell. The system of die elder James had at its centre, as its living principle, an optimistic and idealistic Americanism. The relation to reality of the satisfaction it gave him is suggested by a passage quoted by Mr Matthiessen in The James Family (p. 286):