Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 872
“I went to fetch water from the spring:
I found that a convolvulus had twined its tendrils round the well-rope.
I went and borrowed water from my neighbour....”
A Russian peasant would take two days in telling that story, giving you the genealogy and the history of the province, the fact that it was necessary to bribe the Governor with rouble notes hidden in bread-offerings, and hour-long dissertations on the goodness of God and the nature of the feelings that it is probable a clinging tendril might have. And this is not merely a matter of selection. It is the self-protective spirit of the race which does not and cannot feel itself safe unless every loophole for objection is closed up. It needs documented reality and documented reality and again documented reality.
In that way you have such writers as the late Count Tolstoy and the late Fyodor Dostoieffsky, story-tellers of the most intense literal realism, with an unrivalled gift for rendering the scenes that they choose for rendering. They choose those scenes, however, without much consideration of whether they have any effect in carrying the story forward, or are of any other use than that of expressing passionate convictions of the author. Between the French schools and the Russian there stands the figure of Turgenieff who had instinctively a great deal of the Frenchman’s art — his very first short story is as finished in form as the most perfect of Maupassant’s contes — and who had a self-effacement unknown otherwise amongst the Russians who are mostly pedagogues. And the most valuable of all the innumerable matters in Mr. James’ Prefaces concerns itself with the beautiful genius as a builder up of stories (Collected Edition. Preface, Vol. III.): —
I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel.
“To arrive at these things is to arrive at my ‘story,’” he said, “and that’s the way I look for it. The result is that I’m often accused of not having ‘story’ enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I need — to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them placed, I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them — of which I dare say, alas, que cela manque souvent d,’ architecture. But I would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too much — when there’s danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The French of course like more of it than I give — having by their own genius such a hand for it; and indeed one must give all one can. As for the origin of one’s wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where they come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn’t it all we can say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are there at almost any turn of the road? They accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them. They are the breath of life — by which I mean that life, in its own way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a manner prescribed and imposed — floated into our minds by the current of life. That reduces to imbecility the vain critic’s quarrel, so often, with one’s subject, when he hasn’t the wit to accept it. Will he point out then which other it should properly have been? — his office being, essentially, to point out. Il en serait bien embarrassé. Ah, when he points out what I’ve done or failed to do with it, that’s another matter: there he’s on his ground. I give him up my ‘architecture,’” my distinguished friend concluded, “as much as he will.”
Mr. James, if he professes himself infinitely grateful to Turgenieff for the service of these hints, nevertheless inclines actually rather to the French method of building up a subject. In a note upon Daisy Miller, his earliest “story,” he characteristically justifies his proceedings which characterise his later years even more than his former (Collected Edition. Vol. XVIII, Preface.): —
It was in Italy again — in Venice and in the prized society of an interesting friend, now dead, with whom I happened to wait, on the Grand Canal, at the animated water-steps of one of the hotels. The considerable little terrace there was so disposed as to make a salient stage for certain demonstrations on the part of two young girls, children they, if ever, of Nature and of freedom, whose use of those resources, in the general public eye, and under our own as we sat in the gondola, drew from the lips of a second companion, sociably afloat with us, the remark that there before us, with no sign absent, were a couple of attesting Daisy Millers. Then it was that, in my charming hostess’s prompt protest, the whirligig, as I have called it, at once betrayed itself. “How can you liken those creatures to a figure of which the only fault is touchingly to have transmuted so sorry a type and to have, by a poetic artifice, not only led our judgment of it astray, but made any judgment quite impossible?” With which this gentle lady and admirable critic turned on the author himself. “You know you quite falsified, by the turn you gave it, the thing you had begun with having in mind, the thing you had had, to satiety, the chance of ‘observing’: your pretty perversion of it, or your unprincipled mystification of our sense of it, does it really too much honour — in spite of which, none the less, as anything charming or touching always to that extent justifies itself, we after a fashion forgive and understand you. But why waste your romance? There are cases, too many, in which you’ve done it again; in which, provoked by a spirit of observation at first no doubt sufficiently sincere, and with the measured and felt truth fairly twitching your sleeve, you have yielded to your incurable prejudice in favour of grace — to whatever it is in you that makes so inordinately for form and prettiness and pathos; not to say sometimes for misplaced drolling. Is it that you’ve after all too much imagination? Those awful young women capering at the hotel door, they are the real little Daisy Millers that were; whereas yours in the tale is such a one, more’s the pity, as — for pitch of the ingenuous, for quality of the artless — couldn’t possibly have been at all.” My answer to all which bristled of course with more professions than I can or need report here; the chief of them inevitably to the effect that my supposedly typical little figure was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else; since this is what helpful imagination, in however slight a dose, ever directly makes for.
Thus according to our subject’s conscious canons an author is justified in sacrificing, if not the inherent probabilities of his “affair,” then at least the photographic realities, to his sense of beauty. Beauty he elsewhere defines as the fun, the interest, the amusingness, the awakening qualities of a story....
Action, that is to say, in the sense of anybody’s doing anything, is singularly rare in any of Mr. James’ nouvelles; but what the French call progression d’effet is never absent from the almost apparently negligible of them.
The aspect of the” affair” in hand will change incredibly whilst the characters do no more than sit in arm-chairs or open bookcases. In that sense “nouvelles” by this author, however much they may resemble “studies,” are never anything of the sort. The treatment of mental progressions is so rare in Anglo-Saxon — and for the matter of that in Latin — fiction that the unsuspecting reader might well mistake the mood of The Lesson of the Master for the mood of Bielshin Prairie, which is a true sketch. Mr. James, however, has never, as far as I can recall, given us a real sketch, any more than Daisy Miller, which he labels “a study” is a real study. The Point of View might pass for one of these, but as a matter of fact it is a true short story, the account of conflicting irresolutions ending in a determination. To a school of readers whose chief pabula are spotless detectives conflicting with besmirched criminals, traffickers in white slaves with unspotted victims, or idle rich with spotless poor and the black generally with the white; whose “action” is limited to the deciphering of cryptograms, the unveiling of adventuresses, the dismantling of the stage with revolver shots and so on — to the readers of such enlivening fictions the actions and progressions of our author — those conflicts of irresolution with irresolution whose only pistol shot is the arriving at a determination — may well bear the aspects of studies in metaphysics. But, actually upon its larger scale and with its reversing of the order of the incidents, every short story of Mr. James’ is a true short story — as dependent for surprise upon its last word as is La Parure. If you will take The Turn of the Screw, with its apparent digressions, its speculations, its turns and its twists, you will see that the real interest centres round the proposition: Is the narrator right or wrong in thinking that if the little boy can only disburden himself of a full confession he will be saved for ever from the evil ascendancy of Peter Quint. And this hangs in the balance until the very last sentence settles it:
“We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.”
Maupassant would have told the story in ten pages, Mr. James taking one hundred and fifty. But, though the French genius would have removed from it the aspect of being a nouvelle, he could have made it no more of a conte, except for the shortness. Mr. James’ sense of form is, in fact, so nice as to be unrivalled; his sense of his subject is nearly as fierce as Flaubert’s; his digressions are no more digressions; his disquisitions no more disquisitions. If he seldom goes so far as to give us a final sentence like: “Personne ne croyait que l’Abbé s’était donné la mort he does it — as if to show us that he can — superbly in the sentence I have just quoted. Generally it strikes him as a device too barbaric and one to be shrunk from.
Mr. James, in fact, shrinks from most definite things. Heaven knows there is no reason why he should not shrink from them just as his and our nations — just as all Anglo-Saxondom shrinks from the definite statement. His glass — the poor dear English language and the poor dear Puritan temperament — isn’t very big, but it is capable of infinite arabesques. The Latin and the Papist spirit isn’t in the least afraid of definition or of coarseness if the defining of a situation calls for coarseness, cynicism or brutality. “Tu es Petrus, et super...”we are accustomed to say, taking the words on their face value.... But the American and the Englishman, the essential Protestants, shrink from a direct proposition whether it be made by Our Lord or by any other person. And, if they shrink from the hearing of a direct proposition, refining and refining away the incidence, until it appears no more than allegory in the end, still more will they shrink from putting a direct statement into direct words. As I have pointed out elsewhere, when a French peasant sees a suspicious character upon the road, he says: “C’est qu’que maoufatan”—”It’s some evildoer,” the English farm labourer would say: “I guess he’s up to no good.” And, just as the Anglo-Saxon shrinks from a direct statement of fact — insisting that it shall be said to him instead of “The majority of the House of Commons closured the Budget through” —
“Le Roy remercy ses bons sujets et ainsi le veult,” which is a silly sort of lie — or just as he prefers the allegorical statement: “We handed him a lemon and he quit,” to a harsh account of business proceedings, so invariably, wishing all statements made to him — if they are to carry conviction — to be wrapped up in allegory, he is the best Anglo-Saxon who most wraps up his statements.
Mr. James expresses matchlessly his race and its religion. These call for delicate and sympathetic deeds and gentle surmises rather than for clear actions and definite beliefs. So Mr. James first refines all action out of his work — alLnon-psychological action — and, little by little, sets himself to express himself purely in allegory.
What he has got from abroad is the technique of Form, and in that he has reunited the stream of Anglo-Saxon imagination with the broad stream of international culture. He has in short written, in English, books that are worthy to be read by readers of the great Continental writers. As far as his phraseology goes (and le style c’est l’homme) he has expressed his race. And for a man to have attained to international rank with phrases intimately national, is the supreme achievement of writers — a glory that is reserved only for the Dantes, the Goethes and the Shakespeares, who none the less remain supremely national.
I am not saying that the tendency to write allegorically may not be carried too far. To say that “X had not succeeded in planting in his temperate garden a specimen of the rank exotic each of whose leaves is a rustling cheque,” may have its disadvantages as well as its advantages considered as a way of expressing the fact that X wrote books that did not pay. It is not at any rate journalese, that flail of the Anglo-Saxon race, that infinite corrupter of the Anglo-Saxon mind, that destined and ultimate cause of the downfall of Anglo-Saxon empires, since the race that cannot either in allegories or in direct speech think clearly is doomed to fall before nations who can; and Japan is ever on the threshold with the tendrils twining round its well-ropes....
But the question of the taste for allegorical modes of expression is after all only a question of taste. Personally I should say that Mr. James’ style strikes me as almost unapproachable up to the day when he concluded The Spoils of Poynton; it is lucid, picturesque and as forcible as it can be, considering that he writes in English. With What Maisie Knew it begins to become, as we should say in talking of pheasants, a little “high.” And so it goes on until, with the Prefaces and with A Small Boy, it just simply soars. There is not any other word for it....
But that is only a question again of taste, and it is very possible that generations trained in the appreciation of this author will find vapid what to me seems clear, and that such a sentence as — the succession of fifty thousand sentences such as: “There at any rate — for the story, that is, for the pearl of my idea — I had to take, in the name of the particular instance, no less deep and straight a dive into the deep sea of a certain general truth than I had taken in quest of Flickerbridge.”
It obviously means something — they all obviously mean something, the five hundred. thousand sentences of the Prefaces, of A Small Boy, of The American Scene. If you will read them aloud you will find them reasonably clear. For the latest James — the James of the latest stage is simply colloquial. Nothing more and nothing less. It is a matter of inflexions of the voice much more than of commas or even of italics. And I have found repeatedly that when I read a passage aloud, whether from the Prefaces or The Golden Bowl, it became, to myself at least, infinitely clear, though no less infinitely embroidered and decorative.
Whether that implies that, in his latest phase, Mr. James has been riding his Muse and his Method to death, or whether it means that he is sapiently aiming a shaft at oblivion, I am scarcely concerned to say. It has at any rate been anticipated that all the novels of the indefinitely distant future shall be read out from gramophones to public assemblies. In that Utopia A Small Boy would be limpid.
But of this I am certain: Looking upon the immense range of the books written by this author, upon the immensity of the scrupulous labours, upon the fineness of the mind, the nobility of the character, the highness of the hope, the greatness of the quest, the felicity of the genius and the truth that is at once beauty and more than beauty — of this I am certain, that such immortality as mankind has to bestow (most of them haven’t any souls!) whether of the talking hooter, or of the silent pages, will rest upon the author of Daisy Miller. It will rest also with the author of The Golden Bowl.
V. APPENDIX
The following comparisons of passages from the earlier editions of Mr. James’, with the same passages revised and amplified for the Definitive Edition, published by Messrs. Macmillan, may be of interest to the reader.
Daisy Miller (Edition: Macmillan, 1883).
“Oh, blazes; it’s har-r-d!” he exclaimed, pronouncing the adjective in a peculiar manner.
Winterbourne had immediately perceived that he might have the honour of claiming him as a fellow-countryman. “Take care you don’t hurt your teeth,” he said, paternally.
“I haven’t got any teeth to hurt. They have all come out. I have only got seven teeth. My mother counted them last night, and one came out right afterwards. She said she’d slap me if any more came out. I can’t help it. It’s this old Europe. It’s the climate that makes them come out. In America they didn’t come out. It’s these hotels.”
Winterbourne was much amused. “If you eat three lumps of sugar your mother will certainly slap you,” he said.
“She’s got to give me some candy, then,” rejoined his young interlocutor. “I can’t get any candy here — any American candy. American candy’s the best candy.”
“And are American little boys the best little boys?” asked Winterbourne.
“I don’t know. I’m an American boy,” said the child.
“I see you are one of the best!” laughed Winterbourne.
“Are you an American man?” pursued this vivacious infant. And then, on Winterbourne’s affirmative reply, “American men are the best,” he declared.
His companion thanked him for the compliment; and the child, who had now got astride of his alpenstock, stood looking about him, while he attacked a second lump of sugar. Winterbourne wondered if he himself had been like this in his infancy, for he had been brought to Europe at about this age.
