Collected Essays (7 page)

This then is the destiny that not only the young women affront – you must betray or, more fortunately perhaps, you must be betrayed. A few – James himself, Ralph Touchett in this novel, Mrs Assingham in
The Golden Bowl
– will simply sadly watch. We shall never know what it was at the very start of life that so deeply impressed on the young James’s mind this sense of treachery; but when we remember how patiently and faithfully throughout his life he drew the portrait of one young woman who died, one wonders whether it was just simply a death that opened his eyes to the inherent disappointment of existence, the betrayal of hope. The eyes once open, the material need never fail him. He could sit there, an ageing honoured man in Lamb House, Rye, and hear the footsteps of the traitors and their victims going endlessly by on the pavement. It is of James himself that we think when we read in
The Portrait of a Lady
of Ralph Touchett’s melancholy vigil in the big house in Winchester Square:

The square was still, the house was still, when he raised one of the windows of the dining-room to let in the air he heard the slow creak of the boots of a lone constable. His own step, in the empty place, seemed loud and sonorous; some of the carpets had been raised, and whenever he moved he roused a melancholy echo. He sat down in one of the armchairs; the big dark dining table twinkled here and there in the small candle-light; the pictures on the wall, all of them very brown, looked vague and incoherent There was a ghostly presence as of dinners long since digested, of table-talk that had lost its actuality. This hint of the supernatural perhaps had something to do with the fact that his imagination took a flight and that he remained in his chair a long time beyond the hour at which he should have been in bed; doing nothing, not even reading the evening paper. I say he did nothing, and I maintain the phrase in the face of the fact that he thought at these moments of Isabel.

1947

THE PLAYS OF HENRY JAMES

T
HERE
had always been – let us face it – a suspicion of vulgarity about the Old Master. Just as the tiny colloquialism was sometimes hidden unnoticeably away in the intricate convolutions of his sentences, so one was sometimes fleetingly aware of small clouds – difficult to detach in the bland wide sunlit air of his later world – of something closely akin to the vulgar. Was it sometimes his aesthetic approach to the human problem, his use of the word ‘beautiful’ in connexion with an emotional situation? Was it sometimes a touch of aesthetic exclusiveness as in the reference to Poynton and its treasures, ‘there were places much grander and richer, bus no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those really informed’? Was it sometimes a hidden craving for the mere treasures themselves, for the cash value? We must do James justice. He would not have altered a sentence of a novel or a story for the sake of popularity or monetary reward, but the craving was there, disguised by references to financial problems that did not really exist – his private income was adequate, even comfortable. But if only, it surely occurred to him, there were some literary Tom Tiddler’s ground he could enter as a stranger, where he would not be compromised if observed in the act of stooping to pick up the gold and silver; in that case he was ready for a while to put integrity in the drawer and turn the key. Fate was kind to him: other artists have had the same intention and have been caught by success. James found neither cash nor credit on the stage and returned enriched by his failure.

Of course it would be wrong to suggest that the appeal of the theatre to James was purely commercial. He was challenged, as any artist, by a new method of expression; the pride and interest in attempting the difficult and the new possessed him. He wrote to his brother:

I feel at last as if I had found my real form, which I am capable of carrying far, and for which the pale little art of fiction, as I have practised it, has been, for me, but a limited and restricted substitute. The strange thing is that I always, universally, knew
this
was my more characteristic form – but was kept away from it by a half-modest, half-exaggerated sense of the difficulty (that is, I mean the practical odiousness) of the conditions. But now that I have accepted them and met them, I see that one isn’t at all, needfully, their victim, but is, from the moment one is anything, one’s self, worth speaking of, their
master
: and may use them, command them, squeeze them, lift them up and better them. As for the form
itself
, its honour and inspiration are (
à défaut d’autres
) in its difficulty. If it were easy to write a good play I couldn’t and wouldn’t think of it; but it is in fact damnably hard (to this truth the paucity of the article – in the English-speaking world – testifies), and that constitutes a solid respectability – guarantees one’s
intellectual
self-respect.

But even in this mood is not the self-respect a little too underlined, the protest purposely loud to drown another note, which was to be repeated again and again? ‘I am very impatient to get to work writing for the stage – a project I have long had. I am . . . certain I should succeed and it would be an open gate to money making,’ and later he turned with some ignobility on Wilde, when
The Importance of Being Earnest
had followed his own catastrophic failure
Guy Domville
at the St James’s Theatre: ‘There is nothing fortunately so dead as a dead play – unless it be sometimes a living one. Oscar Wilde’s farce . . . is, I believe, a great success – and with his two roaring successes running now at once he must be raking in the profits.’ The ring of the counter is in the phrase.

Until Mr Edel published this huge volume
*1
(over 800 pages, the greater part in double column) we had no idea how completely James had failed. The two volumes of
Theatricals
published in his lifetime were slight affairs. The theatre of his time was so bad, we had wondered whether it was not possible that his contemporaries had simply failed to recognize his genius as a playwright. We knew the sad story of the production of
Guy Domville
, the successful first act, the laughter in the second, the storm of catcalls at the close; we had heard how the critics had defended it, how the prose was praised by the young Bernard Shaw, and yet there existed, so far as one could discover, only a typewritten copy in the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Yes, one had expectations and excitement. Now the picture has been filled in, and reading the deplorable results of ‘the theatrical years’ we need to bear always in mind James’s recovery. This is unmistakably trash, but it is not the end of a great writer: out of the experience and failure with another technique came the three great novels
The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl.
He was never so much of a dramatist as when he had ceased to have theatrical ambitions.

Mr Edel has done a magnificent editorial work. Why should the word ‘painstaking’ carry implications of dullness? Here every pain has been taken and every pain has had its reward. Each play has a separate factual preface of extreme readability; particularly fascinating is the long preface to
Guy Domville
which traces the disastrous first night almost hour by hour: the early afternoon when two unknown ladies sent a telegram from Sloane Street Post Office to George Alexander, ‘With hearty wishes for a complete failure’; James sitting in the Haymarket listening to Wilde’s epigrams and unaware of the applause at his own first curtain; the disastrous laughable hat in the second act; the first mutter from the gallery in the third, when Alexander began to deliver the speech, ‘I am the last, my lord of the Domvilles,’ to be answered, ‘It’s a bloody good thing y’are’; the pandemonium at the close when this too sensitive author, who had anticipated failure but not this savage public execration, was flung helplessly into the turmoil from the peace of the night in St James’s Square and fled into the wings, his face ‘green with dismay’; the grim first night supper party which took place ‘as arranged’.

It is easier now to understand the public than the critics who were perhaps influenced by horror of the Roman holiday. H. G. Wells found the play ‘finely conceived and beautifully written’: Shaw wrote, ‘Line after line comes with such a delicate turn and fall that I unhesitatingly challenge any of our popular dramatists to write a scene in verse with half the beauty of Mr James’s prose. . . .
Guy Domville
is a story and not a mere situation hung out on a gallows of plot. And it is a story of fine sentiment and delicate manners, with an entirely worthy and touching ending.’ To us today the story of
Guy Domville
seems singularly unconvincing, one more example of the not always fortunate fascination exercised on James by the Christian faith and by Catholicism in particular. It stands beside
The Altar of the Dead
and
The Great Good Place
as an example of how completely James could miss the point. Mr Edel writes truly of James’s interest in Catholicism being mainly an interest in a refuge and a retreat; when James wrote in that mood from the outside he conveyed a genuine and moving sense of nostalgia. But in
Guy Domville
he was rashly attempting to convey the sense of Catholicism from within: his characters are Catholics, his hero a young man brought up to become a priest. Domville is on the eve of leaving England to enter a seminary when he becomes heir to a fortune and estate (money again!) and is tempted temporarily by a mistaken sense of duty to his family to re-enter the world. The story is set in the eighteenth century, and the period falls like a dead hand over the prose. Unlike the hero of
The Sense of the Past
we never really go back. Can we believe in a young man who speaks of a girl as ‘attached to our Holy Church’? There is really more truth to the religious life in the novels of Mrs Humphrey Ward. Here for example is
Guy Domville’s
first reply to temptation:

Break with all the past, and break with it this minute? – turn back from the threshold, take my hand from the plough? – the hour is too troubled, your news too strange, your summons too sudden!

Strangely enough the failure of
Guy Domville
was not the end. Now that he had given up any hopes of stage success, perhaps he felt a certain freedom in his relations with that ‘insufferable little art’. The love affair was at an end and he need no longer try to please. ‘The hard meagreness inherent in the theatrical form’ could be ignored. One critic had observed of his early plays, ‘We wish very much that Mr James would write some farces to please himself, and not to please the stage’, and right at the close with
The Outcry
– a thin amusing story of how a picture was saved for the nation against the will of the owner, an individualistic peer who wanted to sell it for sheer cussedness to an American dealer – he very nearly succeeded in producing an actable comedy. A comedy, for the author of
The Turn of the Screw
and
The Wings of the Dove
strangely failed when he tried on the stage to express the horrors or tragedies of the human situation. ‘You don’t know – but we’re abysses,’ one of the characters cried in his creaking melodrama,
The Other House
, but it was just the sense of the abyss that he failed on those flat boards ever to convey. Turn to his ghost story of
Owen Wingrave
, the story of a young man who refused to continue the military tradition of his family and died bravely facing the supernatural in his own home (‘Owen Wingrave, dressed as he had last seen him, lay dead on the spot on which his ancestor had been found. He was all the young soldier on the gained field’) and compare the dignity of this story, which does indeed convey a sense of the abyss, with the complicated and unspeakable prattle of the stage adaptation.

That proud old Sir Philip, and that wonderful Miss Wingrave, Deputy Governor, herself, of the Family Fortress – that they with their immense Military Tradition, and with their particular responsibility to his gallant Father, the Soldier Son, the Soldier Brother sacrificed on an Egyptian battlefield, and whose example – as that of his dead Mother’s, of so warlike a race too – it had been their religion to keep before him; that
they
should take sudden startling action hard is a fact I indeed understand and appreciate. But – I maintain it to you – I should deny my own intelligence if I didn’t find our young man, at our crisis, and certainly at
his
, more interesting, perhaps than ever!

Unwillingly we have to condemn the Master for a fault we had previously never suspected the possibility of his possessing – incompetence.

1950

THE DARK BACKWARD: A FOOTNOTE

‘T
HIS
eternal time-question is . . . for the novelist always there and always formidable; always insisting on the
effect
of the great lapse and passage, of the “dark backward and abysm”. by the terms of truth, and on the effect of compression, of composition and form, by the terms of literary arrangement. It is really a business to terrify all but stout hearts. . . .’ So Henry James in the preface to his first novel, written at the end of his career when he could see all the difficulties.

The moment comes to every writer worth consideration when he faces for the first time something which he
knows
he cannot do. It is the moment by which he will be judged, the moment when his individual technique will be evolved. For technique is more than anything else a means of evading the personally impossible, of disguising a deficiency. The whole magnificent achievement of James’s prefaces is from this point of view like a confession of failure. He is telling how he hid the traces of the botched line.

The consciousness of what he cannot do – and it is sometimes something so apparently simple that a more popular writer never gives it a thought – is a mark of the good novelist. The second rate novelists never know: nothing is beyond their sublimely foolish confidence as they turn out their great epics of European turmoil or industrial unrest, their family sagas. The Lake novelists, the Severn novelists, the Yorkshire novelists, the Jewish novelists, they stream by, like recruits in the first month of a war, with a
folie de grandeur
on their march to oblivion. Not for them the plan of campaign, the recognition of impenetrable enemy lines which cannot be taken by direct assault, which must be turned or for which new instruments of war must be invented. And they have their uses as cannon fodder. They are the lives lost in proving the ineffectiveness of the frontal assault. (There is irony, of course, in the fact that the technique an original writer used to cover his personal difficulties will later be taken over by other writers who may not share his difficulties and who believe that his value has lain in his method.)