Aspects of the novel
So enormous is the sacrifice that many readers cannot get interested in
James, although they can follow what he says (his difficulty has been
much exaggerated), and can appreciate his effects. They cannot grant his
premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can
do us a novel.
He has, in the first place, a very short list of characters. I have
already mentioned two--the observer who tries to influence the action,
and the second-rate outsider (to whom, for example, all the brilliant
opening of _What Maisie Knew_ is entrusted). Then there is the
sympathetic foil--very lively and frequently female--in _The
Ambassadors_. Maria Gostrey plays this part; there is the wonderful rare
heroine, whom Mme. de Vionnet approached and who is consummated by Milly
in _The Wings of the Dove_; there is sometimes a villain, sometimes a
young artist with generous impulses; and that is about all. For so fine
a novelist it is a poor show.
In the second place, the characters, beside being few in number, are
constructed on very stingy lines. They are incapable of fun, of rapid
motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will
not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the
sources of their income, their servants are noiseless or resemble
themselves, no social explanation of the world we know is possible for
them, for there are no stupid people in their world, no barriers of
language, and no poor. Even their sensations are limited. They can land
in Europe and look at works of art and at each other, but that is all.
Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James's pages--maimed yet
specialized. They remind one of the exquisite deformities who haunted
Egyptian art in the reign of Akhenaton--huge heads and tiny legs, but
nevertheless charming. In the following reign they disappear.
Now this drastic curtailment, both of the numbers of human beings and of
their attributes, is in the interests of the pattern. The longer James
worked, the more convinced he grew that a novel should be a whole--not
necessarily geometric like _The Ambassadors_, but it should accrete
round a single topic, situation, gesture, which should occupy the
characters and provide a plot, and should also fasten up the novel on
the outside--catch its scattered statements in a net, make them cohere
like a planet, and swing through the skies of memory. A pattern must
emerge, and anything that emerged from the pattern must be pruned off as
wanton distraction. Who so wanton as human beings? Put Tom Jones or Emma
or even Mr. Casaubon into a Henry James book, and the book will burn to
ashes, whereas we could put them into one another's books and only cause
local inflammation. Only a Henry James character will suit, and though
they are not dead--certain selected recesses of experience he explores
very well--they are gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in
other books, and ourselves. And this castrating is not in the interests
of the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no philosophy in the novels, no
religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no
benefit for the superhuman at all. It is for the sake of a particular
æsthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price.
H. G. Wells has been amusing on this point, and perhaps profound. In
_Boon_--one of his liveliest works--he had Henry James much upon his
mind, and wrote a superb parody of him.
James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of art that
must be judged by its oneness. Some one gave him that idea in the
beginning of things and he has never found it out. He doesn't find
things out. He doesn't even seem to want to find things out. He accepts
very readily and then--elaborates.... The only living human motives left
in his novels are a certain avidity and an entirely superficial
curiosity.... His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by
link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his
novel is _about_ is always there. It is like a church lit but with no
congregation to distract you, with every light and line focussed on the
high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there,
is a dead kitten, an egg shell, a piece of string.... Like his _Altar of
the Dead_ with nothing to the dead at all.... For if there was, they
couldn't all be candles, and the effect would vanish.
Wells sent _Boon_ as a present to James, apparently thinking the master
would be as much pleased by such heartiness and honesty as was he
himself. The master was far from pleased, and a most interesting
correspondence ensued.[10] Each of the eminent men becomes more and more
himself as it proceeds. James is polite, reminiscent, bewildered, and
exceedingly formidable: he admits that the parody has not "filled him
with a fond elation," and regrets in conclusion that he can sign himself
"only yours faithfully, Henry James." Wells is bewildered too, but in a
different way; he cannot understand why the man should be upset. And,
beyond the personal comedy, there is the great literary importance of
the issue. It is this question of the rigid pattern: hour-glass or grand
chain or converging lines of the cathedral or diverging lines of the
Catherine wheel, or bed of Procrustes--whatever image you like as long
as it implies unity. Can it be combined with the immense richness of
material which life provides? Wells and James would agree it cannot,
Wells would go on to say that life should be given the preference, and
must not be whittled or distended for a pattern's sake. My own
prejudices are with Wells. The James novels are a unique possession and
the reader who cannot accept his premises misses some valuable and
exquisite sensations. But I do not want more of his novels, especially
when they are written by some one else, just as I do not want the art of
Akhenaton to extend into the reign of Tutankhamen.
That then is the disadvantage of a rigid pattern. It may externalize the
atmosphere, spring naturally from the plot, but it shuts the doors on
life and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the
drawing-room. Beauty has arrived, but in too tyrannous a guise. In
plays--the plays of Racine, for instance--she may be justified because
beauty can be a great empress on the stage, and reconcile us to the loss
of the men we knew. But in the novel, her tyranny as it grows powerful
grows petty, and generates regrets which sometimes take the form of
books like _Boon_. To put it in other words, the novel is not capable of
as much artistic development as the drama: its humanity or the grossness
of its material hinder it (use whichever phrase you like). To most
readers of fiction the sensation from a pattern is not intense enough to
justify the sacrifices that made it, and their verdict is "Beautifully
done, but not worth doing."
Still this is not the end of our quest. We will not give up the hope of
beauty yet. Cannot it be introduced into fiction by some other method
than the pattern? Let us edge rather nervously towards the idea of
"rhythm."
Rhythm is sometimes quite easy. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, for
instance, starts with the rhythm "diddidy dum," which we can all hear
and tap to. But the symphony as a whole has also a rhythm--due mainly to
the relation between its movements--which some people can hear but no
one can tap to. This second sort of rhythm is difficult, and whether it
is substantially the same as the first sort only a musician could tell
us. What a literary man wants to say though is that the first kind of
rhythm, the diddidy dum, can be found in certain novels and may give
them beauty. And the other rhythm, the difficult one--the rhythm of the
Fifth Symphony as a whole--I cannot quote you any parallels for that in
fiction, yet it may be present.
Rhythm in the easy sense, is illustrated by the work of Marcel
Proust.[11]
Proust's conclusion has not been published yet, and his admirers say
that when it comes everything will fall into its place, times past will
be recaptured and fixed, we shall have a perfect whole. I do not believe
this. The work seems to me a progressive rather than an æsthetic
confession, and with the elaboration of Albertine the author was getting
tired. Bits of news may await us, but it will be surprising if we have
to revise our opinion of the whole book. The book is chaotic, ill
constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs
together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.
There are several examples (the photographing of the grandmother is one
of them) but the most important from the binding point of view is his
use of the "little phrase" in the music of Vinteuil. It does more than
anything else--more even than the jealousy which successively destroys
Swann, the hero, and Charlus--to make us feel that we are in a
homogeneous world. We first hear Vinteuil's name in hideous
circumstances. The musician is dead--an obscure little country organist,
unknown to fame--and his daughter is defiling his memory. The horrible
scene is to radiate in several directions, but it passes, we forget
about it.
Then we are at a Paris salon. A violin sonata is performed and a little
phrase from its andante catches the ear of Swann and steals into his
life. It is always a living being, but takes various forms. For a time
it attends his love for Odette. The love affair goes wrong, the phrase
is forgotten, we forget it. Then it breaks out again when he is ravaged
by jealousy, and now it attends his misery and past happiness at once,
without losing its own divine character. Who wrote the sonata? On
hearing it is by Vinteuil, Swann says, "I once knew a wretched little
organist of that name--it couldn't be by him." But it is, and Vinteuil's
daughter and her friend transcribed and published it.
That seems all. The little phrase crosses the book again and again, but
as an echo, a memory; we like to encounter it, but it has no binding
power. Then, hundreds and hundreds of pages on, when Vinteuil has become
a national possession, and there is talk of raising a statue to him in
the town where he has been so wretched and so obscure, another work of
his is performed--a posthumous sextet. The hero listens--he is in an
unknown rather terrible universe while a sinister dawn reddens the sea.
Suddenly for him and for the reader too, the little phrase of the sonata
recurs--half heard, changed, but giving complete orientation, so that he
is back in the country of his childhood with the knowledge that it
belongs to the unknown.
We are not obliged to agree with Proust's actual musical descriptions
(they are too pictorial for my own taste): but what we must admire is
his use of rhythm in literature, and his use of something which is akin
by nature to the effect it has to produce--namely a musical phrase.
Heard by various people--first by Swann, then by the hero--the phrase of
Vinteuil is not tethered; it is not a banner such as we find George
Meredith using--a double-blossomed cherry tree to accompany Clara
Middleton, a yacht in smooth waters for Cecilia Halkett. A banner can
only reappear, rhythm can develop, and the little phrase has a life of
its own, unconnected with the lives of its auditors, as with the life of
the man who composed it. It is almost an actor, but not quite, and that
"not quite" means that its power has gone towards stitching Proust's
book together from the inside, and towards the establishment of beauty
and the ravishing of the reader's memory. There are times when the
little phrase--from its gloomy inception, through the sonata into the
sextet--means everything to the reader. There are times when it means
nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in