Collected Essays (5 page)

But no one can long fail to discover how superficial is the purely aesthetic appeal of Catholicism; it is more accidental than the closeness of turf. The pageantry may be well done and excite the cultured visitor or it may be ill done and repel him. The Catholic Church has never hesitated to indulge in the lowest forms of popular ‘art’; it has never used beauty for the sake of beauty. Any little junk shop of statues and holy pictures beside a cathedral is an example of what I mean. ‘The Catholic Church, as churches go today,’ James wrote in
A Little Tour in France
, ‘is certainly the most spectacular; but it must feel that it has a great fund of impressiveness to draw upon when it opens such sordid little shops of sanctity as this.’ If it had been true that Henry James had no religious sense and that Catholicism spoke only to his aesthetic sense, Catholicism and Henry James at this point would finally have parted company; or if his religious sense had been sufficiently vague and ‘numinous’, he would then surely have approached the Anglican Church to discover whether he could find there satisfaction for the sense of awe and reverence, whether he could build within it his system of ‘make-believe’. If the Anglican Church did not offer to his love of age so unbroken a tradition, it offered to an Englishman or an American a purer literary appeal. Crashaw’s style, if it occasionally has the beauty of those ‘marble plains’, is more often the poetical equivalent of the shop for holy statues; it has neither the purity nor the emotional integrity of Herbert’s and Vaughan’s; nor as literature can the Douai Bible be compared with the Authorized Version. And yet the Anglican Church never gained the least hold on James’s interest, while the Catholic Church seems to have retained its appeal to the end. He never even felt the possibility of choice; it was membership of the Catholic Church or nothing. Rowland Mallet wondered ‘whether it be that one tacitly concedes to the Roman Church the monopoly of a guarantee of immortality, so that if one is indisposed to bargain with her for the precious gift one must do without it altogether’.

In James’s first novel,
Roderick Hudson
, published in 1875, six years after his first sight of the high tribune and the tortured neophytes, the hero ‘pushed into St Peter’s, in whose vast clear element the hardest particle of thought ever infallibly entered into solution. From a heartache to a Roman rain there were few contrarieties the great church did not help him to forget.’ The same emotion was later expressed in novel after novel. In times of mental weariness, at moments of crisis, his characters inevitably find their way into some dim nave, to some lit altar; Merton Densher, haunted by his own treachery, enters the Brompton Oratory, ‘on the edge of a splendid service – the flocking crowd told of it – which glittered and resounded, from distant depths, in the blaze of altar lights and the swell of organ and choir. It didn’t match his own day, but it was much less of a discord than some other things actual and possible.’

It is a rather lukewarm tribute to a religious system, but Strether in
The Ambassadors
, published in 1903, enters Notre-Dame for a more significant purpose.

He was aware of having no errand in such a place but the desire not to be, for the hour, in certain other places; a sense of safety, of simplification, which each time he yielded to it he amused himself by thinking of as a private concession to cowardice. The great church had no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul; but it was none the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what he couldn’t elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday he had earned. He was tired, but he wasn’t plain – that was the pity and the trouble of it; he was able, however, to drop his problem at the door very much as if it had been the copper piece that he deposited, on the threshold, in the receptacle of the inveterate blind beggar. He trod the long dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the clustered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid upon him its spell. . . . This form of sacrifice did at any rate for the occasion as well as another; it made him quite sufficiently understand how, within the precinct, for the real refugee, the things of the world could fall into abeyance. That was the cowardice, probably – to dodge them, to beg the question, not to deal with it in the hard outer light; but his own oblivions were too brief, too vain, to hurt anyone but himself, and he had a vague and fanciful kindness of certain persons whom he met, figures of mystery and anxiety, and whom, with observation for his pastime, he ranked with those who were fleeing from justice. Justice was outside, in the hard light, and injustice too; but one was as absent as the other from the air of the long aisles and the brightness of the many altars.

It is worth noting, in connexion with Mr MacCarthy’s criticism, that this was not Strether’s first visit to Notre-Dame:

he had lately made the pilgrimage more than once by himself – had quite stolen off, taking an unnoticed chance and making no point of speaking of the adventure when restored to his friends.

In 1875, Rowland Mallet found in St Peter’s relief for most contrarieties ‘from a heartache to a Roman rain’; in 1903 Strether found in Notre-Dame ‘a sense of safety, of simplification’; the difference is remarkably small, and almost equally small the difference between Strether’s feelings and those of the ‘real refugee’, whom he watches ‘from a respectable distance, remarking some note of behaviour, of penitence, of prostration, of the absolved, relieved state’. Strether wondered whether the attitude of a woman who sat without prayer ‘were some congruous fruit of absolution, of ‘indulgence’. He knew but dimly what indulgence, in such a place, might mean; yet he had, as with a soft sweep, a vision of how it might indeed add to the zest of active rights.’ It would have been a more astonishing avowal if Strether’s knowledge had been less dim, and it must be admitted that the vagueness of James’s knowledge, which led him sometimes ludicrously astray, may have contributed to the emotional appeal.

But it would be unfair to attribute this constant intrusion of the Catholic Church merely to the unreasoning emotions. There were dogmas in Catholic teaching, avoided by the Anglican Church, which attracted James, and one of these dealt with prayers for the dead.

Mr MacCarthy mentions James’s horror of ‘the brutality and rushing confusion of the world, where the dead are forgotten’, and James himself, trying to trace the genesis of that beautiful and ridiculous story
The Altar of the Dead
, came to the conclusion that the idea embodied in it ‘had always, or from ever so far back, been there’. This is not to say that he was conscious of how fully Catholic teaching might have satisfied his desire not merely to commemorate but to share life with the dead. Commemoration – there is as much acreage of marble monuments in the London churches as any man can need; James wanted something more living, something symbolized in his mind, in the story to which I refer, by candles on an altar. It was not exactly prayer, but how close it was to prayer, how near James was to believing that the dead have need of prayer, may be seen in the case of George Stransom.

He had not had more losses than most men, but he had counted his losses more; he hadn’t seen death more closely, but had in a manner felt it more deeply. He had formed little by little the habit of numbering his Dead: it had come to him early in life that there was something one had to do for them. They were there in their simplified intensified essence, their conscious absence and expressive patience, as personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb. When all sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if their purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so little that they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of the hard usage of life. They had no organized service, no reserved place, no honour, no shelter, no safety.

The Altar of the Dead
I have called ridiculous as well as beautiful, and it is ridiculous because James never understood that his desire to help the dead was not a personal passion, that it did not require secret subjective rites. Haunted by this idea of the neglected dead, ‘the general black truth that London was a terrible place to die in’, by the phrase of his foreign friend, as they watched a funeral train ‘bound merrily by’ on its way to Kensal Green, ‘
Mourir à Londres, c’est être bien mort
’, James was literally driven into a church. Stransom leaves the grey foggy afternoon for ‘a temple of the old persuasion, and there had evidently been a function – perhaps a service for the dead; the high altar was still a blaze of candles. This was an exhibition he always liked, and he dropped into a seat with relief. More than it had ever yet come home to him it struck him as good there should be churches.’ This one might expect to be the end of Stransom’s search. He had only to kneel, to pray, to remember. But again the subjective beauty of the story is caricatured by the objective action. Stransom buys an altar for one of the chapels: ‘the altar and the sacred shell that half encircled it, consecrated to an ostensible and customary worship, were to be splendidly maintained; all that Stransom reserved to himself was the number of his lights, and the free enjoyment of his intentions’. Surely no one so near in spirit, at any rate in thin one particular, to the Catholic Church was ever so ignorant of its rules. How was it that a writer as careful as James to secure the fullest authenticity for his subjects could mar in this way one of his most important stories? It cannot be said that he had not the time to study Catholicism: there was no limit to the time which James would devote to anything remotely connected with his art. Was it perhaps that the son of the old Swedenborgian was afraid of capture? A friend of James once spoke to him of a lady who had been converted to Catholicism. James was silent for a long while; then he remarked that he envied her.

The second point which may have attracted James to the Church was its treatment of supernatural evil. The Anglican Church had almost relinquished Hell. It smoked and burned on Sundays only in obscure provincial pulpits, but no day passed in a Catholic Church without prayers for deliverance from evil spirits ‘wandering through the world for the ruin of souls’. This savage elementary belief found an echo in James’s sophisticated mind, to which the evil of the world was very present. He faced it in his work with a religious intensity. The man was sensitive, a lover of privacy, but it is absurd for Mr MacCarthy to picture the writer ‘flying with frightened eyes and stopped ears from that City of Destruction till the terrified bang of his sanctuary door leaves him palpitating but safe’.

If he fled from London to Rye, it was the better to turn at bay. This imaginary world, which according to Mr MacCarthy he created, peopled with ‘beings who had leisure and the finest faculties for comprehending and appreciating each other, where the reward of goodness was the recognition of its beauty’, comes not from James’s imagination but from Mr MacCarthy’s; the world of Henry James’s novels is a world of treachery and deceit, a realist’s world in which Osmond is victorious, Isabel Archer defeated, Densher gains his end and Milly Theale dies disillusioned. The novels are only saved from the deepest cynicism by the religious sense; the struggle between the beautiful and the treacherous is lent, as in Hardy’s novels, the importance of the supernatural, human nature is not despicable in Osmond or Densher, for they are both capable of damnation. ‘It is true to say’, Mr Eliot has written in an essay on Baudelaire, ‘that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned.’ This worst cannot be said of James’s characters: both Densher and the Prince have on their faces the flush of the flames.

One remembers in this context the poor damned ghost of Brydon’s other self, Brydon, the American expatriate and cultured failure, who returns after many years and in his New York house becomes aware of another presence, the self he might have been, unhappy and ravaged with a million a year and ruined sight and crippled hand. Through the great house he hunts the ghost, until it turns at bay under the fanlight in the entrance hall.

Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay. This only could it be – this only till he recognized, with his advance, that what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it and in which, so far from being offered in defiance, it was buried as for dark deprecation. So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher light, hard and acute – his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening dress, of dangling double eyeglass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watchguard and polished shoe. . . . He could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape as a proof that
he
, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn’t be faced in his triumph. Wasn’t the proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and completely spread’? – so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these hands had lost two fingers which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved.

When the hands drop they disclose a face of horror, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, and as the ghost advances, Brydon falls back ‘as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed’.

The story has been quoted by an American critic as an example of the fascination and repulsion James felt for his country. The idea that he should have stayed and faced his native scene never left him; he never ceased to wonder whether he had not cut himself off from the source of deepest inspiration. This the story reveals on one level of consciousness; on a deeper level it is not too fanciful to see in it an expression of faith in man’s ability to damn himself. A rage of personality – it is a quality of the religious sense, a spiritual quality which the materialist writer can never convey, not even Dickens, by the most adept use of exaggeration.