Henry James’s Obscurity

Henry James’s last work was his essay on Rupert Brooke, written as an introduction to Letters from America. Mr. James’s essay is a personal appreciation, and not in any way a biographical memoir. Such a memoir, by another hand, will follow. Mr. James left unfinished two novels, and a third volume of the series begun with A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother.

Presumably the public (which might well make a start with the short stories of which Mr. Secker has already published eight half-crown volumes, very pleasant to the eye) will at last begin to buy James’s novels. They have certainly not bought them in the past. He was, in critical circles, almost universally recognized as one of the three or four greatest of English writers living a week ago. But some of his books had not even gone into a second edition. He was intermittently talked about in the Press. Fifteen years or so ago he had a boom of the sort; then there was a period of comparative newspaper obscurity; in the last three or four years he suddenly and silently, like a star appearing from behind a cloud, took his unchallenged place in the firmament as one of the established great. But he was not widely read. Daisy Miller, ever so many years ago, had a fairly general success; The Golden Bowl, also, I should think, sold well. But many people who paid lip homage to him were very unfamiliar with his work.

In no case would a man with his interests, his approach, his subtlety and avoidance of the grosser excitements, his restraint and delicacy, have sold by the hundred thousand. But his appeal was still further limited by the legend of his style. I remember reading an old novel written in the days when Robert Browning was an Incomprehensible studied by a Cult. The heroine of it gave herself away rather by remarking, “Oh, Mr. Browning! I’ve never been able to understand a single thing that he has written. That is why I have never tried.” One feels that there were persons who were in the same position as towards Henry James. They had heard that he was a hard nut to crack; they had seen perhaps—it was always a great temptation to a reviewer to extract—specimens of his more elaborate discursions, complicated arabesques of sentences, parenthesis after parenthesis wandering from comma to comma like barbed wire tangled around its supports. And they thought therefore that he was an obscure eclectic as difficult as Jacob Behmen or Swedenborg and lacking their excuse of religious inspiration. Certainly he was sometimes difficult. But it was a unique kind of obscurity. There is an obscurity produced when a man, eagerly tumbling along an argument, writes down only a sort of fitful shorthand, a language which leaves things out and which resembles the stray pieces of disconnected paper in gutter or hedge which merely indicate the course that the runner has taken. There is another and commoner kind of obscurity of speech which derives from mistiness of mind; for a man cannot write clearly down what he does not clearly think. And there is a kind of obscurity which is produced by mere inaptitude for writing: the awkwardness of the cow handling a rifle. James’s obscurity was the direct product of his passion for clarity. He detested the slipshod sentence which, compact as it may look as a piece of grammar, is a mere pot-shot as a piece of representation. He wanted to make no statement which did not embody precisely what he wanted to say; what, that is to say, he saw as Truth. He would have taken, for example, that last sentence of mine and, endeavouring to give it a more exact shape, have made of it something like the following:

“He wanted, when, that is, he experienced anything so definite or, shall we put it, so positively energetic, as a want, to make no statement, none at any rate which might be taken by even the least perceptive of his hearers as a delivered, and, as it were, final testimony of his reaction to things as he saw them, which did not precisely embody what he wanted (when, once more, he coherently desired anything, as we have it, ‘higher’ than the elementary physical) to say; what, that is to say, he saw, at the moment of speech, be it understood, for the eye of the watcher changes, as what, in the absence of a happier name, it has pleased us to ennoble with the majestic name of Truth.”

I don’t suggest that I myself have added anything to my own sentence by this addition of the pomp and circumstance of parenthesis and circumlocution. I have merely turned a short platitude into a long one. But it may serve to show the method by which Henry James arrived at his more tortuous pages. The method has its disadvantages. The man who employs it is sometimes like a man working with a pickaxe in a cave. The more he digs away the larger the unattacked expanse which invites his strength; or, as one might say, the bigger the hole he is in. But when this method is employed by a man with the analytical powers, the sensitiveness to fine shades, material and spiritual, of Henry James, the result is a “product” (the kind of word that James would always have put in actual or implied inverted commas) which never stales and from which one gets more and more enjoyment each time one reads. In the last resort novels live by the richness of their detail; and James’s detail is exquisite and inexhaustible.

Few modern writers have exercised so strong an influence over those who have surrendered themselves to him. He is, I should say, more infectious than any writer since (what a strange collocation!) Lord Macaulay. A man with a formed style can usually read and enjoy Carlyle, Jeremy Taylor, de Quincey, or George Meredith without showing the least tendency (unless deliberate) to imitate them. But when one has (I don’t speak only for myself) been reading James one finds for a time that one is tempted to write even one’s private letters in a style which shows plainly that one has set him as a seal upon one’s arm. Even now, when I am merely thinking about him, I feel the pressure of that stern artistic conscience, and can only with an effort resist the demand that I should guard myself here, qualify myself here, and elucidate myself there. He was irresistible, like one of those stammerers or persons with other attractive or unattractive vocal idiosyncrasies whom one cannot help imitating when one is with them. A person of any force gets through this and the permanent effect of a subjugation to James was always good. A too marked echo of him would be painful: but his example was salutary. It may be possible to grumble with him for this and that. He did write mainly about persons with incomes (though these also are God’s creatures); he did occasionally behave (as Mr. Wells very wittily put it) like a hippopotamus picking up a pea; and he did annoy some enthusiasts by refusing to place his pen habitually at the service of the Great Forces of Our Time and other things whose capital importance is of custom indicated by capital letters. But in an age of sloppy writing he stood for accuracy of craftsmanship; and even men whose subjects are Invisible Exports of the Parthenogenesis of Plants might learn from him how to use to more advantage their intellects and their pens.