Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 870
I think that in two quotations from one of our author’s prefaces I can give you the whole of this one side of his figure. This is Mr. James writing in the summer of 1873, the story called Madame de Mauves: —
I recall the tolerably wide court of an old inn at Bad-Homburg in the Taunus Hills — a dejected and forlorn little place (its seconde jeunesse not yet in sight) during the years immediately following the Franco-Prussian war, which had overturned, with that of Baden Baden, its altar, the well-appointed worship of the great goddess Chance — a homely enclosure on the ground level of which I occupied a dampish, dusky, unsunned room, cool, however, to the relief of the fevered Muse, during some very hot weather. The place was so dark that I could see my way to and from my inkstand, I remember, but by keeping the door to the court open — thanks to which also the Muse, witness of many mild domestic incidents, was distracted and beguiled. In this retreat I was visited by the gentle Euphemia; I sat in crepuscular comfort pouring forth again, and no doubt artfully editing, the confidences with which she honoured me.
And isn’t it just precisely after such a visit of his lady that Mr. James may have got up and strolled amidst the shaded paths around the pump-room — the paths across which nowadays the golf balls fly? And, strolling decorously, must he not have met another decorous stroller, he listening with his sweet, sad, enigmatic smile to the confidences of Princess P — who would be upon his right arm, and at the same time to those of landed-proprietor W — ff who would be grumbling into his left ear? Can’t we imagine, in fact, that, strolling at such a pace, in much such a season, in that sort of place and frame of mind, in the contemplative and respectable seventies, our author first met the beautiful genius? Let me once more hasten to say that this is only an imaginary picture of what might have happened, Turgenieff having been much at Nauheim, Homburg and similar places of sad or agreeable loungings. It would not be even necessary to postulate that our author ever met the Russian writer; Turgenieff was in those days so much in the air, and the air then was so exactly suited to his frame of mind and so ready for his pervasion, that no actual meeting would have been in the least necessary. Mr. James would have had “to go about with” the beautiful genius, if not in his actual company, in Paris, in Florence, on the Taunus Hills or in the haunts of ancient peace — he would have had to have Turgenieff with him, if not at his side, then, in his head, in his heart, in his pockets, in his portmanteau.
That then was the early James, in his chastened, rarefied, not yet quite European habit. Let us take a picture of him in his more luxuriant robustness, in his full strength, as nearly pagan as it was possible for one to be who was born under the shadow of Brook Farm or of Concord in its entirety. Mr. James is speaking here of how he got hold of the “subject” of The Reverberator that was published in 1888.
“It was in a grand old city of the south of Europe (though neither in Rome nor yet in Florence) long years ago, and during a winter spent there in the seeing of many people on the pleasantest terms in the world, as they now seem to me to have been, as well as in the hearing of infinite talk — talk, mainly, inexhaustibly about persons and the personal equation and the personal mystery. This somehow had to be in an odd easy, friendly, a miscellaneous, many coloured little metropolis, where the casual exotic society was a thing of heterogeneous vivid patches, but with a fine old native basis....”
Between, however, the chastened, comparatively reticent days and this luxuriance of phrase and of gossip as well — between these two phases there went a whole mint of developments. This we might well call the frame of mind of A Little Tour in France: this developed later into the frame of mind of The American Scene which again and later still was to become the mystifications and bewilderments of The Prefaces, those wild debauches.
But, in between the circumstances of Madame de Mauves of 1873, and the writing of The Little Tour, we have to place — as it helps us to place our subject — the collected papers of the volume called French Poets and Novelists. The volume was published in England in 1884, but the papers, as far as their writing was concerned, had been scattered through several previous years. In this volume our author desperately belauds Balzac, places Turgenieff at the top of the tree, damns Flaubert — whom he always disliked — poor dear old Flaubert! — by bracketing him in the same paper with Charles de Bernard, an, even then, forgotten scribbler who hopelessly imitated but in some respects improved upon Balzac. He writes about Musset with great justice and very little sympathy; about ce pauvre Théo with a great deal of sympathy and not much critical justice; about George Sand with relish as a wicked old woman, and about Mérimée with pity for his physical ills and with not much feeling for his clear, hard diction.
French Poets and Novelists is, in fact, much more — however skilfully Mr. James sought to veil the fact — an expression of likes and dislikes than a display of criticism, criticism dealing with things by a certain standard and leaving liking to take care of itself. That does not make the volume any less valuable as an index to our present study — the development of Mr. James’ temperament. As such it is just simply of the highest order.
To write of L’Education Sentimentale — that illuminating work of which someone has said that even to begin to understand it you must read it fourteen times — and I, I who speak to you, have done that and affirm the truth of the other writer’s statement — to write of this book thus: —
“... To read it is, to the finer sense, like masticating ashes and sawdust. L’Education Sentimentale is elaborately and massively dreary. That a novel should have a certain charm seems to us the most rudimentary of principles, and there is no more charm in this laborious monument to a treacherous ideal than there is interest in a heap of gravel” — such writing is the merest petulance, the merest vexation. The vexation was not without cause — for L’Education Sentimentale is, in its own self, that real Comédie Humaine that Balzac professed to have written; and it is vexing to find that a real person has come along to do what one’s pet charlatan has only professed to perform.
Or again, such an obiter dictum as this, introduced into an article upon Charles Baudelaire whom our author much disliked:” Baudelaire was a poet, and for a poet to be a realist is nonsense” — to read such a sentence! — makes one despair of human nature. But the fact is that our master was at that date a revolutionist of letters who, coming from New England in search of the Finer Sense and the Finer Reticence of Europe, much disliked what he found. Mr. James was in the same boat as Flaubert and Baudelaire, but his dislike for their figures in its expression was unbounded. Flaubert looked at life with all its dirt, its treacheries, its accepted ideas and, by rendering them to the life, might well have driven them out of existence. Mr. James also has looked at life with its treacheries, its banalities, its shirkings and its charlatanries, all of them founded on the essential dirtiness of human nature, — qui vous donne une fière idée de l’homme! Like Flaubert, he has rendered these tendencies of his fellows, but with a more delicate irony; and, if the world read him to any great extent, the world might well be a pleasanter place.
Yes, Mr. James was in the same boat with Flaubert, with Zola, with Turgenieff, with Maupassant, even with Baudelaire. But, since he had come to Europe to find respectability, he tried desperately to ally himself with the comparatively established Balzac, Sand, Charles de Bernard. One expects him almost, in these manifestoes, to enthrone Dumas Père, and all his contemporaries — the aristocratic Turgenieff alone excepted (though even the beautiful genius whom he sets on a level with George Eliot! was to be reproached, according to our author, with “delighting in sadness”). All his other contemporaries of any significance our author shrinks from. If it would be too much to say that this suggests to us the figure of Satan rebuking sin, at the very least it must suggest the elegantly habited form of a Robespierre animadverting on the dress, habits and aspirations of Danton, St. Just, Maillard and Couthon.
The real fact is this: The volume called French Poets and Novelists is, before anything, the first expression of a gigantic disappointment — the first formal confession of all the young James’ illusions perdus. It is impossible to imagine that Mr. James was ever even relatively naïf; yet, at the cost of scrupulously investigating, we find the impossible imagination become the indubitable fact. There is a passage in A Passionate Pilgrim that puts the matter exactly enough — and all the more exactly because our subject, in his later revision, has very efficiently — and with a mature and bitter irony, crossed the “t’s” and dotted every “i.” For, if this is what the fictitious Passionate Pilgrim came to find in Europe, isn’t it what Mr. James, a pilgrim just as passionate and by now much more hopeless, so vainly sought?
It was my thought that I believed in pleasure here below; I believe in it still, but as I believe in the immortality of the soul. The soul is immortal certainly — if you’ve got one; but most people haven’t. Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure right through; but it never is. My taste was to be the best in the world: well, perhaps it was.... I think I should have been all right in a world arranged on different lines. Before heaven, sir — whoever you are — I’m in practice so absurdly tender-hearted that I can afford to say it: I entered upon life a perfect gentleman. I had the love of old forms and pleasant rites, and I found them nowhere — found a world all hard lines and harsh lights, without lines, without composition, as they say of pictures, without the lovely mystery of colour.... Sitting here in this old park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the misty verge of what might have been! I should have been born here, not there; here my makeshift distinctions would have found things they’d have been true of... This is a world I could have got on with beautifully.
Thus the Passionate Pilgrim, sitting in no place further to seek than Hampton Court — this poor American, with all his naivete still virgin, voices what is the final, sad message of Henry James to humanity. Or perhaps the last words of The Madonna of the Future may enshrine the final message: “I seemed to catch the other... echo: ‘Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats — all human life is there.’” But that is perhaps too much of an echo of the Beautiful Genius to be true James! No, I prefer “The soul is immortal certainly — if you’ve got one; but most people haven’t! Pleasure would be right if it were pleasure right through; but it never is” And this, you will observe, is the gentleman who reproached Turgenieff with delighting in sadness, Flaubert with cynicism, and Baudelaire with loving dirt!
But that was in the early eighties when some of our subject’s illusions still remained.
I have said that the conscious or unconscious mission of Mr. James was to civilise his people — whom he always loved. To put it more exactly, now that we have a little developed our theme, we should say that our author’s mission in coming to the Old World was to find a milieu, an atmosphere, upon which America might safely model hers — an atmosphere in which wise and sympathetic duchesses and countesses said always the right thing, observed the “old forms and pleasant rites,” an atmosphere half that of Florence, half of Hampton Court with a flavour of Versailles. From Italy, France and England the dayspring was to have come; but half a century of pilgrimages have left him with no further message than that — that the soul’s immortal, but that most people have not got souls — are in the end just the stuff with which to fill graveyards; that cela vous donne une fière idée de l’homme; homo homini lupus, or any other old message of all the old messages of this old and wise world. Bric-a-brac, pallazzi, châteaux, haunts of ancient peace — these the pilgrim found in matchless abundance, in scores, in hundreds. Poynton, Matcham, Lackley, Hampton....” The gondola stopped; the old palace was there. How charming! it’s grey and pink... From the first visit to Madonnas of the Louvre, in The American, to the last days of the eponymous vessel of The Golden Bowl, there is no end to the articles de vertu.... But as for the duchesses with souls — well, most duchesses haven’t got them!
Italy gives you as her final figure the Prince of the last novel — a person not much different from any American; England gives you, as the coping-stones of its haunts of humanity, Beale Farrange, the child bandied from pillar to post; the Gereths, mother and son — brigand or imbecile; and the Brigstocks. And France — well, as France would — France first knocked the stuffing out of our poor master’s Utopia.... For, from New England the young James had looked upon Europe as a place where Balzac and George Eliot were worshipped in an atmosphere of old forms and pleasant rites. And in France he found Revolution — an atrocious figure of a sort of berserker in a dressing-gown who was banging down all the pillars of all the old academies and roaring out “À bas — !” well, down with accepted ideas!
It was not, in fact, rest, amenities, serenities — other than in title — standards, rites, or anything settled, that Mr. James was to find in Europe.... It was rather the shaking off of academicisms; he left far more respectability behind him, in New England. And the final knock came from an Empire of which New England might well never have heard — New England which cherished its reasoned optimism; its belief in a Destiny that gives a chastenedly good time to the sober, the industrious, the continent — to those, in fact, that bridle, self-consciously, their passions....
That virus we may see already working in so early a book as The Portrait of a Lady. There, the self-conscious, self-bridling New England heroine ensues a lifetime of yearning misery at the hands of a possibly exaggerated, but still quite possible, pair of selfish scoundrels, so that Providence fails of its mission.... No, the writer who, acting by the standards of New England, in 1884, reproves the Russian author for delighting in sadness, could very soon give Turgenieff several points and a good beating. For the Russian could never have written The Turn of the Screw; and, if he could have given us Daisy Miller, he certainly could not have written: “Cats and monkeys, monkeys and cats — all human life is there....” At the end of one of the Russian’s books a character is left, sitting gazing enigmatically into space and wondering if Russia will ever produce a Man. But what Mr. James wants is a civilisation — and just because the American’s aspirations are boundless by comparison, so his final note is despair. Turgenieff’s is only an enigmatic sadness....
That is the nett result. As to the stages of despair I have not the space — I have not indeed the inclination — to pursue them very minutely.... We have the decidedly continental Mr. James who continued until the early eighties, ending perhaps with A Little Tour in France, in which perhaps he was taking a farewell conscious or unconscious of Latin ideas. We have the international frame of mind, as our author calls it — a phase which produced The Four Meetings, An International Episode, The Pension Beaurepas, The Siege of London, Lady Barharina — a phase which lasted, let us say, for four or five years with occasional revivals. We have what Mr. James calls the “Kensington days” which produced the wonderful studies of English authors and artists with their infinitely saddest of all lives led by mortal man. Those days of contact with the wonderful Yellow Book group gave us that wonderful series of stories — The Death of the Lion, The Lesson of the Master, The Next Time, The Real Thing, The Coxon Fund, Greville Fane — and just as the wonderful periodical was the only place in which these stories could have appeared, so our wonderful master was the only man who could have given us those nouvelles. I harp so upon the word wonderful because I find literally nothing to say about these things — I have just wonder, and that is all that there is to it....
And then, in what it is convenient to label the Rye days, our master gave us firstly the final masterpiece — I don’t mean the last, but the most consummate — in The Spoils of Poynton. It was as if, with the failure and passing of The Yellow Book and of the Yellow group; with the extinction of the last attempt at an establishment of a literary and artistic life in England — with the passing of the glorious early nineties, Mr. James gave up the attempt to make an artistic milieu interesting to the inhabitants of this island. The first and only attempt! There is no doubt that it was another disillusionment....
Our subject had tried to find in London, in English society, a region, or at least a corner, in which the only really productive class (of all the classes and all the masses) might be, if not honoured, then at least allowed some social value, even if it were the barest of social existences. But, with The Death of the Lion he had seen to the bottom of that possibility. A master, as he seems to tell us, might have a chance of an invitation to an ‘‘English country house,” but only on condition that he was a Lion. And then he would have to compete with Guy Walsingham, the lady novelist with a male pseudonym, and with a moustached wonder writing under a lady’s name; and he would, the master, be allowed no fire in his bedroom and would die of pneumonia in such a way as to get the hostess great credit in the Press for having afforded the master a room in which to die....
So that, giving up this attempt to paint a life which is no life — (since in England the author, as such, ranks beneath the governess and the vicar and just above the servants, has no canons, no costume, no habits as a class and no rank in the State, and it is impossible to make “atmospheric” studies of a life where there are no habits, no costumes, no manners, no canons, no standard, no solidarity, no aims, and no rank in the State!) — giving up this impossible attempt Mr. James devoted himself to the task of portraying the lives of English people who were just people — good people, comfortably off, as a rule. He had tried to find his Great Good Place — his earthly Utopia — in Italy, in France, in English literary life. He had failed.
He found English people who were just people singularly nasty. For he gave us The Spoils of Poynton, a romance of English grab; What Maisie Knew, a romance of the English habit of trying to shift responsibility; The Turn of the Screw, a romance of the English habit of leaving young children to the care of improper maids and salacious ostlers; and so on, right up to The Golden Bowl and The Bench of Desolation, neither of which could be called exactly “pretty” stories, though the latter is cheerful by comparison and in a desolating way.
