The Critical Voice of Henry James Stephen Gurney

More documents

Recommendations

Info

either a lurid and irresponsible distraction from the serious business of living or an esoteric escape from an impoverished existence. For James the serious business of living is the novelist’s central concern. The para- phernalia of craft, despite its indispensable importance, is only of service when it is subordinate to an overwhelming concern with the moral complexity of the human condition. Thus James in “The Future of the Novel” prophetically warns that the future of fiction is intimately bound up with the future of society that produces and con- sumes it . . . [and] a community addicted to reflection and fond of ideas will try experi- ments with the story that will be left untried in a community mainly devoted to traveling and shooting, to pushing trade and playing foot- ball.’ James observes that the proliferation of mass or pulp fiction at the turn of the cen- tury was a disturbing sign of the times. Catering, in terms of intelligence and moral perception, to the lowest common denominator in society signalled “the demoralization, the vulgarization of litera- ture in general” (I, p. 103). A refining of the reader’s critical sense thus became for James the indispensable correlative of the artist’s task. His theoretical discussions of criticism constantly and courageously defend the role of the critic as a necessary helpmate to the artist. James’s compact essay on the “Science of Criticism” defines the critic as a kind of voice in the wilderness, creating the appropriate intellectual conditions and moral sensitivity required of the reading public if the revelation that the artist is best able to bestow is to flourish and bear fruit. “In this light,” writes James, “the critic is the real helper of the artist, a torch-bearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother” (I, p. 98). Such an office requires a self-effacing humility from a critic-a simultaneous devotedness to the exploration of human nature and a concomitant perception of the artist’s fidelity to that exploration as he renders his image of human life. Hence, “criticism is the critic, just as art is the artist” (I, p. 98). The serv- iceableness of a critic’s pronouncements is not merely dependent upon the exercise of a special hyper-aesthetic faculty, but rather on the critic’s overall development and breadth of sympathetic vision: “[llt certainly represents the Knight,” writes James, “who has knelt through his long vigil and has the piety of his office” (1, p. 98). The piety of the critic’s office is nowhere more evident than in James’s own axio- matic discussion of his craft in “The Art of Fiction.99 Here James emphatically argues that the value of a piece of fiction is direct- ly traceable to the artist’s faithfulness to and understanding of life: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life” (I, p. 46). The novel as a hermetically sealed system of interlocking forms, the novel as a self- reflexive mirror blind to outward reality, the novel as a verbal construct insulated from existence by the formal convention of its own boundaries simply does not exist for James. Such esoteric concepts --those, in short, which prevail at the present-would signal for James the death warrant of fiction as a viable vehicle for the representation of life or a suitable object for a mature reader’s consideration. But what does the word ‘‘life’’ embody for James? It is not merely the mechanical attraction of the sexes (which “has no more dignity,” according to James, “. . . than the boots and shoes that we see, in the corridors of promiscuous hotels, standing, often in double pairs, at the doors of rooms” [II, p. 942]), or the passive abandonment to sensation, or even the shifting panorama of social conventions. Though these are part and parcel of the novelist’s materials, there is an added element without which his work fails as a history of human relations. That element derives from his “power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implica- tion of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern” (I, p. 53). An indifference to these intangible and yet decisive vibra- tions of human consciousness, that unseen dimension which determines our alliance 352 Fall 1989
with virtue or vice, kindness or selfishness, forbearance or egotism, is the larger pattern to which our individual acts bear witness and judgment. Contrary to Flaubert and the fictional progeny he fostered, James avers that art is infinitely more than the sum of its structural parts or the arrangement of lights and shades on a blank canvas. Though the most assiduous craftsmanship is required of all aspirants to the realm of fiction, the “subject matter” is of equal, perhaps even preponderant, importance. While acknowledging their technical innovations, James clearly dissociates himself from Flaubert, de Maupassant, or Zola when he argues that the subject of a novel “matters, to my sense, in the highest degree, and if I might put up a prayer it would be that artists should select none but the richest” (I, p. 57)-by which he makes it known that not Nana, nor Sentimental Education, nor BelleAmi figure as the wisest, nor even in a strictly fictional sense, the most propitious of subjects. The most propitious for James is precisely that which, as he stipulates in his discussion of Anthony Trollope, enables “the heart of man to know itself‘’ (1, p. 1,353). But what of James’s practical or applied as opposed to his theoretical criticism? How do these maxims translate into an evaluation of contemporaries? Even readers who find James’s pronouncements an occasion for critical misgiving will be compelled to admit that when he castigates those writers whose reputations seem to us assured, he never fails at the least to irritate us into a fresh evaluation of a familiar or accepted master. At times, of course-as in his inability to recognize Dickens’s achievement in Our Mutual Friend-he was dead wrong. But this is an egregious exception and stems, in part, from James’s own failure to explore the Dickensian landscape of London in The Princess Casamassima (a rare instance of sour grapes in a critic otherwise most trustworthy). On the whole, James is an admirable guide to the novelists of his period; and his judgments, predicated as ModernAge they are on the critical assumptions we have formerly noted, invariably lead us to the heart of a writer’s excellences or defi- ciencies. The constant critical touchstone that informs James’s estimations of his contemporaries is, again, the degree of their fidelity to the surface and depth of life. “The novel is history” (I, p. 46) he throws down like a gauntlet, thus placing himself in opposition to his French col- leagues who either regarded fiction as a piquant gallery of graphic pictures steri- lized of all moral considerations or a slice of life in which the predominant sense seems to be that of smell. But James also distances himself from those novelists in England and America who equally falsi- fied life by virtue of their skittishness in dealing with the less savory aspects of human relations or by subscribing to an arbitrary moral censor, which can equally obscure a knowledge of the human heart. Here James’s critical position, adjudicat- ing between the Anglo-Saxon writer whose subservience to social convention limits his exploration of human motives and the French writer who frequently dis- misses all moral considerations as mere conventions conditioned by an arbitrary social code, parallels and complements the international or cross-cultural subject matter of James’s own novels and pro- vides a bridge, as it were, between James’s Anglo-Saxon affiliations (in terms of a Hawthorne or a George Eliot with their allegorical emphasis and adherence to strict moral standards) and his French or Continental affiliations (in terms of a Flaubert or a de Maupassant, with their self-effacing responsiveness to the some- times seamy actualities of human existence). This comprehensiveness, this abil- ity to straddle and give due weight to com- peting aesthetic claims, endows James’s critical observations with unprecedented elasticity and suppleness. James thus maintains an unremitting dialectical interplay between the two sides of his own critical consciousness. His larg- est praise is reserved for writers, like Turgenev, who endeavored to harmonize their susceptibility to the gritty textures of 353
Page 1: The Critical Voice of Henry James E
Page 5 and 6: expression of a total view of the w
Page 7 and 8: friendship with and appreciation of
Page 9: and consciousness, life and art, pe

The Critical Voice of Henry James Stephen Gurney

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?