Henry James' Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition

10.1057/9780230106864 - Henry James' Narrative Technique, Kristin Boudreau Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect...

Author: Kristin Boudreau

59 downloads 1311 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

10.1057/9780230106864 - Henry James' Narrative Technique, Kristin Boudreau

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Henry James’ Narrative Technique



This page intentionally left blank

C o nsc io usness, Percep t i on , a n d C o gn it i o n

Kristin Boudreau



Henry James’ Narrative Technique

HENRY JAMES’ NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

Copyright © Kristin Boudreau, 2010.

Cover photograph of Henry James near Rye, Sussex. Courtesy of the Leon Edel Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library Ink drawing by Max Beerbohm of Henry James on the witness stand. Courtesy of the Henry James Collection (#6251-K). Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Albert and Shirley Small Collections Library, University of Virginia Library. Reproduction of John Singer Sargent’s Sortie de l’église, Campo San Canciano, Venice (c. 1882). Courtesy of Marie and Hugh Halff First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-10262-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boudreau, Kristin, 1965– Henry James’ narrative technique: consciousness, perception, and cognition/Kristin Boudreau. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-230-10262-0 (alk. paper) 1. James, Henry, 1843–1916—Technique. 2. Narration (Rhetoric)—History—20th century. 3. Narration (Rhetoric)— History—19th century. 4. Consciousness in literature. 5. Fiction—Technique. I. Title. PS2127.T4B68 2010 813’.4—dc22 2009040628 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company First edition: May 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.

For Grace,


who makes the heart too big for the body.





List of Figures

ix

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Thinking of Philosophy

1

1

Experiences of Culture, History, and Politics in The Bostonians

2 Hyacinth Robinson’s Demoralization 3 4

31 63

But Half the Matter: Picturing Thought and Feeling in The Wings of the Dove

103

Passionate Pilgrimages: James’ Travel in Italy and the United States

139

Notes

181

Bibliography

193

Index

199



Contents




0.1

2.1

“A Nightmare, Mr. Henry James Subpoenaed as Psychological Expert in a Cause Célebrè.” Caricature by Max Beerbohm John Singer Sargent, Sortie de l’église, Campo San Canciano, Venice (c. 1882)


25 96


L i st of Figu res




Henry James’ Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition situates Henry James’ famous narrative technique within an emerging modernist tradition with roots in philosophical debates between rationalism and empiricism. The book takes as its point of departure T. S. Eliot’s famous (and famously misunderstood) claim that James “had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” Although most critics responding to Eliot’s description have misunderstood it to mean that thought itself could not survive in such a rarefied mind as James’, Eliot meant his remark as high praise, and we can begin to understand his words only when we consider them within a philosophical tradition that distinguished “ideas” from “thought and feeling.” Eliot had this tradition in mind when he dismissed ideas in favor of superior cognitive activities like thought and feeling—activities that he saw exhibited in James’ writings far more consistently than in the works of his contemporaries. James was “the most intelligent man of his generation,” Eliot maintained. This book takes seriously Eliot’s distinction between thought and ideas and the philosophical tradition that provided these categories and informed his thinking. The tradition that shaped Eliot’s literary criticism also influenced Henry James’ depictions of consciousness, which sit at the center of his narrative technique. Although James did not read systematically in philosophy, he was familiar with many of the philosophical debates of his day because his brother William and his father, Henry, took part in them and shared their work with the younger Henry James. To examine some of the philosophical debates that the novelist encountered—in particular, the dispute between his father and Ralph Waldo Emerson and then a generation later his brother William’s differences with rationalist philosophy—is to conclude that James would have shared Eliot’s suspicion of ideas, whose definition for nineteenth-century philosophers was very close to today’s definition of “ideology.” James would have recalled his father’s maddening dispute with Emerson over the value of empirical and a priori knowledge (Emerson valued the former, James the latter) and would have been



Preface and Acknowledgments

P re fac e a n d Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

reminded of it in his brother’s philosophy, which shared Emerson’s esteem for randomly acquired empirical details or what William James called “the passing pulses of our life.” The debate between ideas and thought is played out in both the plots and the narrative form of James’ writings. This book explores James’ narrative investigations into these various modes of cognition, with the aim of showing that his temperamental preference for thought and feeling rather than ideas had consequences for the kind of narratives he wrote. Narrative possibility is most challenged by thought, feeling, and other forms of cognition that (unlike ideas) don’t lend themselves to simple pronouncements. James’ famous technique of moving between various centers of consciousness is most fruitful when those consciousnesses are open to a wide range of stimuli; the narrow-minded consciousness does not invite the same kind of narrative experimentation. Like many projects that consider and explain James’ narrative technique, this book consists of close readings of several of his long and short fictional works. My particular approach is to situate these readings within a larger discussion of the philosophical traditions informing James’ narrative innovations, a context that gives rise to a compelling story of the novelist’s own deep reflections on the ways we apprehend reality. My approach combines biography, literary criticism, and cultural history to account for James’ development as a thinker and a writer. I have tried to write a story about James in his cultural moment that will appeal to philosophers and nonphilosophers alike. Without knowing it until recently, I have been brooding on this book for many years. I trace its inspiration to an episode from my distant graduate school days that might have remained an embarrassment and nothing more but for that remarkable process of ripening and unfolding that Emerson describes in his “Natural History of the Intellect.” Like many critics before me, I had blundered into characterizing Eliot’s description of James as an “insult”; unlike these earlier critics, I was then in the company of one of the most careful readers of his own generation, James Longenbach. Jim corrected me, assuring me that Eliot had written his remark in admiration. Mortification and the press of other projects kept me from thinking too much about what it might mean to believe that ideas really could “violate” a mind, but in later years, reading and rereading James and Emerson with my students, I returned many times to Eliot’s comment, seeing more in James’ narratives as I read them in the light of Eliot’s distinction between ideas and their superior cognitive modes.



xii

xiii

So my first debt of gratitude is to Jim, whose example of attentive and generous reading has served me well as I have returned to James again and again. Having provided the inspiration for this book, of course, he should be held blameless for its faults. Anybody who has held an administrative position knows the value of support staff to attend to details and help a scholar create and defend small fortresses of time. This book would never have been written without the loyal and generous support of Melanie Childers, Mary Helen Menken, Patty Bradberry, Bennie McKinley, and Deana Howard of the University of Georgia English Department; its birth pangs would have been much more acute if not for the warm welcome and gracious efforts of Margaret Brodmerkle, Mary Cotnoir, and Karen Hassett of the Department of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In addition to these kind and loyal souls, I have been fortunate to work with outstanding librarians and technical support staff. Virginia Feher and her colleagues at the University of Georgia Interlibrary Loan Department have been invaluable resources, embracing all my assignments with alacrity. At Worcester Polytechnic Institute, I’ve found Ellen Lincourt and David Botelho to be enthusiastic partners in my quests to find and reproduce images. Gregory Houston, Richard Virr, and Ann Marie Holland at McGill University’s Rare Books and Special Collections located and reproduced the image of Henry James and his bicycle that appears on the cover here. I am grateful to the McGill University Library for permission to reproduce that photograph, which comes from the Leon Edel Collection in the McGill University Library’s Special Collections. I never knew exactly which librarian at the University of Virginia’s Special Collections library helped me to locate and reproduce Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Henry James, but I thank the staff for their work and gratefully acknowledge the Clifton Waller Barrett Library at the University of Virginia for permission to reproduce the image. I’m grateful to Lisa Reitzes, formerly of Trinity University, and Tracy Baker-White, formerly of the San Antonio Museum of Art, for making it possible for me to view and view again (almost memorizing the details of) John Singer Sargent’s splendid painting, Sortie de l’église, Campo San Canciano, Venice, which I first encountered in 1996 at an exhibit of American impressionism at the San Antonio Museum of Art. For permission to reproduce that image, and for their generosity in sharing it with the world first in the spectacular SAMA space and then subsequently at larger museums as part of a traveling Sargent exhibit, I thank Marie and Hugh Halff. I am grateful for two grants that supported more sustained reading in philosophy and to the people who made these experiences so



P r e f a c e a n d A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s


rich. As my Department Head at the University of Georgia, Nelson Hilton supported my application to these two programs and shared my enthusiasm when I received them, and I thank him for his encouragement. A Study in a Second Discipline Grant from the University of Georgia enabled me to spend a year immersed in philosophy courses. In that year I was treated to rigorous and exciting classes taught by Beth Preston, Elizabeth Brient, and Richard Winfield at the University of Georgia; I was also able to do my own desultory reading and reflecting on the philosophical traditions that informed James’ writings. A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities offered me the rare privilege of studying later that year with the philosopher Russell Goodman at the University of New Mexico; he and my fellow students in the seminar “Reading Emerson’s Essays” provided a thrilling intellectual pause in my ordinary work as a college teacher. That episode has enriched my teaching and has remained with me as the high-water mark of my academic life. More specifically, it gave me the opportunity to discover a different Emerson than I had previously known: a philosopher who valued “intellect receptive,” a cognitive disposition he described as a “pious reception.” This was the Emerson who so thoroughly influenced Henry James, and my sense of James has developed with my growing admiration for Emerson. Henry James’ Narrative Technique would have been a very different (and inferior) book if not for the influence of my fellow Emersonians, in particular Russell Goodman, Tom Meyer, Todd Richardson, Bonnie Carr, Elizabeth Addison, John Holzwarth, Tom Alexander, Felicia Kruse, and Kelly Jolley. I have had the great good fortune to teach some splendid students over the years, particularly at the University of Georgia. Conversations and classes with Leslie Petty, Leslie McAbee, Jessica Holden, Jennifer Eimers, Rosemary Luttrell, Mollie Barnes, Steph Hyre, and Amber Shaw have enriched my thinking about James, Emerson, and narrative. At Georgia as well I relied on four particular friends and colleagues— Doug Anderson, Hubert McAlexander, Adam Parkes, and Susan Rosenbaum—to challenge and inspire me. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Doug, who has always been for me an ideal reader, colleague, and friend and who lately has compounded my debt with his example as the Perfect Department Head. He has given me much over the years, most recently the impression that he wouldn’t rather be reading in solitude than dealing with my various annoyances. I’ve never believed his act but have been touched by the effort he puts into it. Linda Simon’s attentive reading and generous advice helped me pull this project together in its final stages, and my editors at Palgrave



xiv

xv

Macmillan, Brigitte Shull and Lee Norton, have patiently and expertly shepherded it through to press. An appealingly interdisciplinary audience at Worcester Polytechnic Institute sat through a portion of my final chapter here and gave me welcome advice and attention; I am grateful to these new colleagues for their (unexpected) interest in Henry James and his late prose style. And while I do not impose Henry James on them, my family have always been my greatest champions, and I thank them—my father, Gordon; my husband, Kes; my siblings Vin, Toinette, Joe, Pascale, Maura, Pete, Suzy, John, Gordy, Lou, and Margaret—for their constant solidarity through the years. Finally, this book is for my daughter Grace, who knows (and teaches me daily) the superiority of possibilities over finished facts.







4

Thi nking of Philosophy

R

eaders of Henry and William James have often observed that while Henry wrote novels like a psychologist, William wrote psychology like a novelist.1 Numerous critics have studied the influence of William’s professional disciplines, psychology and philosophy, on the fictional writings of his brother Henry.2 While I am following these critics in attending to Henry James’ broad concern with depicting consciousness, I am focusing more narrowly on his specific but no less persistent concern with the distinction between thought and ideas. T. S. Eliot famously described Henry James as a man with “a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,” and while this description is occasionally quoted, it has never been adequately explained, let alone tested. None of the scholars who takes up the topic of James’ indebtedness to philosophy and psychology has had much to say about Eliot’s observation or about his distinction between thought and idea, although it was an important (if unexpressed) concern for Henry James as well as for this most discerning critic. Most critics who respond to Eliot’s comment, in fact, have typically misunderstood it as an insult. But the statement was high if eccentric praise from Eliot, whose graduate work was in philosophy and whose distinction between “ideas” and “thought” requires careful attention to elucidate properly. Here is Eliot’s comment in context: James’ critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it . . . . In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the



I ntroduction

2

H e n r y J a m e s ’ N a r r at i v e T e c h n i q u e

For Eliot, the practice of “thinking with our feelings” was altogether too rare; the “parasite idea” was too often allowed to corrupt or occlude “sensation and thought.” What did Eliot mean by this distinction between thought and ideas, and would it be wrongheaded to turn to philosophy to discover the clue not only to Eliot’s criticism but also to James’ depictions of consciousness? Henry James, unlike T. S. Eliot, never studied philosophy, although he was an avid and eclectic reader who enthusiastically read most of his brother William’s writings. He never studied the tradition of “ideas” in Western philosophy—a tradition that begins with Plato’s forms and assumes a number of very different incarnations, as diverse as the thing that evolves from “impressions” in empiricist thought3 and the substance of all matter in Hegel’s system of world history.4 We do know, however, that some of this tradition made its way into his consciousness, not only as an adult when he was reading his brother’s published works on philosophy and psychology, but still earlier when he was a young man growing up in Cambridge and hearing the debates about idealism that transpired in that intellectual community. Henry James’ brother William came to hate the idealism that both boys learned at their father’s knee. For William James, writing later in Pragmatism, abstract ideas were scarcely distinguishable from ideology, the use of an abstract principle that tends to override all contradictory empirical evidence. William derided such abstractions—what he called “rationalism”—in his groundbreaking philosophical study. Rationalism, he claimed, “lose[s] contact with the concrete parts of life” (13), forcing all experience into a single model of truth. To be sure, the philosopher recognized the allure of this model. Writing in A Pluralistic Universe, he observed that philosophers “have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle [of experience]; and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat, they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure” (45). In contrast, the “pluralistic empiricism” that James preferred, he admitted, “offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid,



political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. . . . Mr. Chesterton’s brain swarms with ideas; I see no evidence that it thinks. James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation. (The Little Review 1918)

3

muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility” (45). But, James insisted, not only does the rationalist’s model of the world falsely depict our muddled world, it also discourages us human subjects from drawing on the full resources of our perceptions to experience that world. In her recent discussion of James’ hostility to rationalism, Linda Simon paints a vivid picture of the attractions this muddled world held for James and his reasons for preferring his “sorry” alternative of empiricism to the “orderly” scheme advanced by rationalists. If rationalism proposes an “intellectually neat” form of reality, that is because it omits many of the messy but real details of experience that interfere with its neatness. As Simon argues, “James believed that systems, paradigms, and intellectualized orderliness—whether from philosophy, science, or religion—preclude our apprehending reality” (“Bewitched” 41). The model is false, but its gravest danger is the threat it poses to our perceptions: ideas and systems “threatened to obscure awareness, forcing people to believe they knew what they saw or felt before an experience had even taken place” (43). James objected so vehemently to systems because he valued perception (including what Eliot identified as thought and feeling) above any idea that might seek to generalize or tidy up these elements of experience. As Simon observes, these perceptual and emotional elements, resisting an orderly design, delightfully and at times maddeningly complex, inviting observation, analysis, and enjoyment, constituted a promise of pleasure predicated on the unexpected. This promise was menaced by rationalist schemes and ideas, which offered a priori explanations of the world. “A world without the possibility of the new,” Simon writes, “a world that is consistent and predictable: such a world would be nothing less than catastrophic. For James, novelty is implicit in a ‘cosmological theory of promise,’ a theory that posits an unstable, inconstant universe containing not merely the tangible, but the miraculous and astonishing” (39). William James, we can see, held ideas (or what he also called “concepts”) in contempt even as he understood their nearly irresistible appeal. If his novelist-brother never so explicitly proclaimed hostility to ideas, we can see why T. S. Eliot saw in Henry James’ writings an opposition to ideas that might have rivaled William’s more direct attacks. Henry’s preferred medium was the novel, a form that invited explorations into individual subjective states. If his fictions stopped short of seeking the answers to the riddles of existence that motivated his brother’s philosophy and psychology, still the forms of fiction invite a minute attentiveness that can be found as well in



Introduction


William’s chosen disciplines. Linda Simon describes here William’s esteem for empiricism in terms that might just as easily be applied to Henry’s theory of fiction: “James’ rejection of scientific and philosophical systems was motivated, in part, by his desire to account for the importance of the complexity of feelings, perceptions, and states of being that comprised the protean self. One path to self-knowledge, he believed, involved close attention to one’s responses to the intricacy and contingency of experiences. ‘The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience,’ he wrote” (43–44). What was Henry James’ epistemology? If, as Eliot contends, the novelist shared his brother’s resistance to ideology—and if, as I am contending, he also understood the attraction to ideological thought—it will be helpful to consider the intellectual climate of Cambridge that gave rise to his own responses to ideas, his sense of the relative superiority of thought and feeling to ideas, though tempered, as always, by his sense that ideas could be impossibly seductive. His experiments in fiction, I will be arguing, dramatize the ebb and flow of these two powerful poles of epistemology, as the mind alternates between the grasp of an idea and the condition of abandonment to other moods, other sources of meaning, that we can best identify as anti-ideological. These two alternating positions were a topic of much discussion in the novelist’s adulthood, particularly among his brother’s friends at Harvard. These intellectuals were deeply influenced by the work of the empiricists, particularly David Hume, whose empiricism, though James thought it overly hardheaded and materialistic, nevertheless correctly identified the problem of dogmatism that had plagued Western philosophy.5 “The rationalist finally,” James noted in his lectures on Pragmatism, “will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion” (Pragmatism 10). Elsewhere he defined “the dogmatic ideal” as “the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy” (Pluralistic Universe 100–101). While William James, as we have seen, railed against rationalist thought in Pragmatism (where he called rationalism a “serpent,” 13), his friend Charles Sanders Peirce had identified the problem of dogmatic thought as early as 1877 in “The Fixation of Belief,” an essay he published in Popular Science Monthly. There he demonstrated that dogmatism was a problem plaguing ordinary people as well as philosophers. Peirce distinguished between the scientific method, which relies on the “laws of perception,” and three dogmatic alternatives. The “method of tenacity,” motivated by a “vague dread of doubt,”



4

5

prompts people to “cling spasmodically to the views they already take” rather than submit those views to new and perhaps challenging facts, thereby fixing beliefs in individuals. The “method of authority” fixes belief within an entire community by regulating opinions with force, thereby making “intellectual slaves” of individuals. The “a priori method” generates not only obedience but even the “impulse to believe,” and though it leaves the believer “outwardly quite free to choose” what to believe, it nudges him toward particular beliefs by means of “accidental causes” rather than facts. All three of these forms of belief are versions of what we might call ideology, as distinct from an inductive method that refrains from judging in favor of a less conclusive, more empirical mode of confronting the world—what T. S. Eliot referred to as “thought” and “feeling,” Peirce attributed to the “laws of perception,” and William James fondly and playfully described as “the immediately given world of sense and all its squalid particulars” (Pluralistic Universe 93). Their colleague John Dewey, too, distinguished between what I have been calling “ideology”—he called it a “system” or “authority”6—and a mode of thinking that he identified with democracy or open-mindedness. The “democratic faith,” he maintained, could be stated in the formal terms of a philosophic position. So stated, democracy is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness. Every other form of moral and social faith rests upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control; to some “authority” alleged to exist outside the processes of experience. Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained. . . . (“Creative Democracy” 229)

The point here is not that these philosophers all shared the same philosophy: although they have all been identified with Pragmatism, they in fact disagreed about what that meant. Rather, I mean to argue that they shared a deep suspicion of a priori thought and philosophical systems that did not grant the greatest possible authority to what the novelist Henry James would later call “experience liberated.”7 For Dewey, Peirce, and William James, immediate experience, insofar as it could be freed from prejudice, must be the beginning of any true belief, rather than being subordinated to some preconceived idea about the world (alternately called “rationalist” or “dogmatic”) that would distort or suppress experience. As James insisted, “the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied



Introduction


by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of conception . . . not suggested originally by the parts” (Pluralistic Universe 8). It is no accident that Dewey identified Ralph Waldo Emerson with the philosophical position of open-mindedness—he called Emerson the “philosopher of democracy”—because Emerson often found himself defending the empirical method against his friend Henry James, Sr.’s, more dogmatic idealism. Emerson was dismissive of intellectual systems—at his most mild he “confess[ed] to a little distrust of that completeness of system which metaphysicians are apt to affect,”8 though he tended to use more vehement expressions of this distrust. He was much more tolerant of methods, which specified a procedure but did not impose a comprehensive body of doctrines or overdetermine an outcome. Emerson believed that nature has a method, not often discerned by humans,9 and that humans were patterned after nature: “Each mind,” he wrote in “Intellect,” “has its own method.”10 Temperamentally, Emerson was drawn toward an empirical outlook on the world that must have irritated the elder James, who exercised a much different philosophical attitude. As we will see in a brief exploration of the vexed friendship between Emerson and James, the hostility between ideas and thought, rationalism and empiricism, or dogmatism and open-mindedness, was not something that T. S. Eliot invented or even that William James’ generation of philosophers introduced. The novelist first encountered the competition between these two philosophical outlooks in his childhood, and if we want to recover traces of the controversy from the New England of Henry James’ youth, we can do no better than examine the different intellectual dispositions of his father, the famously ideological Swedenborgian, and his father’s sometime friend and antagonist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although I want to resist the temptation of identifying either man with any one consistent position, it is roughly accurate to say that James, Sr., was the more unfailingly dogmatic in his beliefs while Emerson was more inclined to let his experiences determine his beliefs. Though both men were idealists of a sort, they were idealists of very different sorts, and we can speculate that their differences provided the young Henry James with much food for later thought. Andrew Taylor calls attention to the “small but significant detail” of Isabel Archer’s reading matter in an early chapter of Portrait of a Lady, when Lydia Touchett discovers her young niece in the Archer family house in Albany. Isabel is reading a history of German philosophy, which, Taylor notes, recalls the tension between James,



6

7

Sr., and Emerson. While Emerson was deeply and favorably influenced by Kant—as distilled for American readers by the Unitarian minister Frederic Henry Hedge—the senior James reacted with hostility to the idea that, as Hedge put it, “the world without depends on the nature of our intuitions” rather than the other way around. Taylor notes that James’ “1863 volume Substance and Shadow contains an attack on Kant’s ideas, suggesting that the German thinker had erroneously . . . plac[ed] man at the centre of the philosophical universe” (Taylor 127). We shall see how central this difference was to the tension between Emerson, who counted self-reliance among the most important virtues, and his friend James, who believed that society could do no better than redeem the wicked individual by purging him of his very selfhood. As many critics have observed, Isabel’s immature ideas resemble Emerson’s, but we should also bear in mind that her young unstructured life, her grandmother’s Albany house, and her extended family of cousins evoke the novelist’s own youth. James’ choice to place this book of German philosophy in her hands—a book, Taylor reminds us, that “contains ideas which James Senior would consider to be pernicious” (128)—suggests that even as James was venturing on his first fictional masterpiece, his mind was turned toward the intellectual debates of his earlier years.

Emerson, James, Sr., and European Philosophy Although Emerson mentioned Kant approvingly on occasion—most notably in “The Transcendentalist” (1842) and Essays: First Series (1841)—it is doubtful that either he or James ever read Kant directly. If Kant was a polarizing figure for James and Emerson, then, we might expect even more dramatic differences over the philosophers that both men did read directly, though it should come as no surprise that these differences, like others, coalesced around the importance of the individual. The German idealist G. W. F. Hegel was one such figure whose powerful presence in American intellectual circles drew the attention of both James and Emerson. Hegelianism reigned supreme among particular groups of American philosophers centered in St. Louis and Cincinnati from the 1850s until nearly the end of the century, and both Emerson and James, Sr., were auxiliary members of the St. Louis Hegelians11—though, as we shall see, that fact may mean less than it seems. Emerson did not discover the German idealist until late in life, but the American’s writings, early and late, reflect a belief in some



Introduction


large, unifying spirit—what he alternately called “Oversoul,” “Spirit,” “Unity,” and “Soul”—that roughly resembles Hegel’s notion of an overriding “World Spirit.” Hegel’s “Spirit” is the “complete antithesis” of “matter” (Introduction to the Philosophy of History 20), just as Emerson opposed “Soul” to “Nature” (Nature 8). “The Over-Soul” is Emerson’s tribute to “that Unity, . . . within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other” (385–86). In Emerson’s early writings we can find a hint that he would later have an uneasy relationship with Hegel’s works in spite of these common threads. Whereas Emerson claimed in Nature that the person who “thinks most” of that “ineffable essence which we call Spirit” “will say least” about it (Essays and Lectures [hereafter EL] 40), Hegel had thought much but also said much about Spirit, having worked out a system that designated “World Spirit” as the origin and substance of all human history.12 Emerson might also have been expected to resist the place that Hegel assigns to the individual in his system of world history, where all human activity—though it may satisfy individual actors—is finally only the means World Spirit uses to bring about its own ends, often through the unconscious participation of those human actors. Hegel’s vantage point reduces the individual subject to one of many, a mere speck in an “imponderable mass of wills, interests, and activities” that constitute “the tools and means of World Spirit for achieving its goal.”13 If Emerson never contested Hegel’s view of the individual, it may be because he never encountered it; we will see sufficient resistance in his response to Swedenborg. When he did finally turn to Hegel, Emerson found the philosopher intriguing but difficult. After visiting St. Louis in 1867 to address the St. Louis Hegelians, he subscribed to the newly established Journal of Speculative Philosophy, which was largely devoted to the writings and interpretations of Hegel and other German idealists. He clearly recognized the value of Hegel’s system, even if he didn’t understand it. “I mean that you shall make me acquainted with the true value & performance of Hegel,” he wrote to its editor, William Torrey Harris. Emerson was not confident that he would understand Hegel, but he was hopeful: “I shall read & wait.” There is no evidence that Emerson ever undertook the work that would convince a trained philosopher that he understood the difficult Hegelian system. In spite of a resolution to read this journal “much in the next month” (March 3, 1870), Emerson never moved very far beyond his initial assessment of the German philosopher: “When I fish in Hegel, I cannot get a bite; in addition the labor is so hard in reading him, that I get a headache” (Snider 329–30).



8

9

While Emerson worked hard to understand Hegel and may not have been temperamentally disposed toward such a systematic philosopher, his friend Henry James dismissed the German’s writings much more quickly and preferred to find his idealism in the works of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Both Emerson and James, in fact, found the writings of Swedenborg to be a much more accessible philosophy, one that resembled Hegelian idealism in ways that mattered to these literary men of Cambridge and Concord, without the complications of Hegel’s system. While Emerson never gave up the hope that he would one day understand the great German, James contended that Hegel’s writing was too obscure to be worth his time. “[R]emember,” he advised his readers, “. . . that it is characteristic of the highest truth to be accessible to common minds, and inaccessible only to ambitious ones. Tried by this test, the difference between the two writers [Swedenborg and Hegel] is incomparably in favor of Swedenborg” (Secret 5). James, moreover, considered idealism to be “the secret blight of philosophy ever since men began to speculate,” and he contended that Swedenborg “correct[ed] . . . this pernicious idealistic bent of the mind” (Secret 8). But Swedenborg was more thoroughly an idealist than James recognized.14 Like Plato, he considered that the spiritual world was more real than the material world. Emerson paid tribute to this Platonic strain in Swedenborg, noting that the Swedish mystic, “who appeared to his contemporaries a visionary, and elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real life of any man then in the world” (“Swedenborg” 664).15 Emerson even attributed Swedenborg’s mystic vision to “that property which Plato denoted as Reminiscence” (662). Because Swedenborg, like Emerson, saw necessary connections between material and spiritual being, his idealism perhaps resembled Hegel’s more than it did Plato’s. Swedenborg shared Hegel’s belief that all material existence emanates from an Idea or Spirit that constitutes the substance of the world—though for Hegel this Spirit was immanent in the visible world, whereas Swedenborg claimed that it was transcendent. Whether we choose to call Swedenborg an idealist or, like Emerson, settle on the looser term of “mystic,” what most concerns me here is the very different ways that Emerson and James became absorbed with his works. Their interest is about all that Emerson and James had in common where Swedenborg was concerned, and their extreme differences over Swedenborg’s import and value suggest significant differences in the two men’s philosophies and temperaments. How is it that these two close friends, living within sixteen miles of one another and traveling in the same intellectual and social circles, came to such



Introduction


different conclusions about one of their favorite thinkers? Or more helpfully stated, how could these two men, with such idiosyncratic views of the topic that most interested them—the role of the individual in the world—have turned to the same writer for inspiration? It seems strange that they would both be drawn to Swedenborg, since Emerson insisted that “every heart vibrates to [the] iron string” of self-trust,16 while James concluded that self was the “curse of mankind,” which could only be redeemed when the individual acknowledged “the sheer and abject phenomenality of selfhood” and renounced his debilitating solitude.17 Andrew Taylor notes that “vastation,” the turning point in James’ progress toward a twiceborn existence, begins in isolation and moves toward the creation of “a divinely ordered social utopia” (122). If James believed that “the social condition peculiar to man . . . makes his highest life to depend upon his relations to his fellows,”18 Emerson never quite abandoned his suspicion that “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members” (“Self-Reliance” 261). This difference in philosophy apparently affected their relationship with one another; as Taylor explains, James, Sr., “felt that Emerson’s privileging of refreshed individual perception as the means by which spiritual recovery might be achieved was a far too isolating and subjective process” (85). It is likely that this difference affected their readings in philosophy as well, as we shall see. The question of how James and Emerson differed over Swedenborg is important because the topic of the individual was also deeply interesting to the young Henry James, arguably the most important literary descendent of James and Emerson. I want to consider the ways that Emerson and the elder James influenced the thought of James’ son, and particularly the novelist’s abiding concern for the individual who finds herself making choices and finding meaning not in solitude but in a world of other people whose own sources of meaning can be attractive and overpowering. James’ characters face a world that may be understood in a variety of ways, and when they are tempted by the attractive shortcut of an ideological reading of the world, it is possible to see the shadow of Emerson’s difference with James, Sr., lurking just beneath the surface of James’ fiction. Before turning to the novelist’s lifelong literary responses to ideology, I want first to consider the fact that Emerson recognized, and worried about, Swedenborg’s ideology, while the elder James did not, and that perhaps James worried less about ideology because he was less concerned than Emerson about the integrity of the individual and the sovereignty of his unmediated experiences and perceptions.



10

11

It may seem that I am conflating “idea” with “ideology” here, but Eliot’s clear use of the word “idea” as an epithet, as well as William James’ more elaborate complaint, suggests the near inseparability of the two concepts. James begins one of his lectures on Pragmatism with a glance at rationalistic thought, which resembles ideology in its resistance to different ideas: “What hardens the heart of every one I approach with the view of truth sketched out in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion of the Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound.” James lists a number of “great single-word answers to the world’s riddle,” including “the Idea” (Pragmatism 109). Although “the Idea” (with its capital I) most likely refers to “World Spirit,” the doctrine at the center of Hegel’s philosophical system, it might also be understood more generically (as Eliot used it) to represent any abstract and eternal principle at the heart of rationalist thought. For James as, we can assume, for Eliot, any overriding “idea”—whether it be an immanent Geist, like Hegel’s “World Spirit,” or a transcendent Spirit like Swedenborg’s—subordinates all other experience to it in much the same way that ideology does, “corrupt[ing],” as Eliot charged, more immediate feelings and thoughts. William James laments that most philosophers failed to see the true value of ideas—what he here calls “concepts”—as helpful ways of organizing perceptions. “Use concepts when they help,” he advises, “and drop them when they hinder understanding; and take reality bodily and integrally up into philosophy in exactly the perceptual shape in which it comes” (Some Problems of Philosophy 95). Ideas or “conceptual systems,” he maintains, “are secondary and on the whole imperfect and ministerial forms of being” (109). James has much to say about rationalism in Pragmatism, where rationalist thought as he describes it resembles both ideology and idealism, or the notion that ideas or mental entities are more real than physical entities. And while it is difficult to interpret the following account, the novelist notes in his autobiography that his family was often amused by his father’s ideas. “The happiest household pleasantry invested our legend of our mother’s fond habit of address, ‘Your father’s ideas, you know—!’ which was always the signal for our embracing her with the last responsive finality (and, for the full pleasure of it, in his presence).”19 James’ failure to note the content of his father’s ideas, and the playful context in which he recalls his mother’s “fond” words and “free jokes” at her husband’s expense, suggest that what was amusing to the young novelist (and his mother) was not so much the particular ideas as the regular habit



Introduction


of the James patriarch to formulate and promulgate his ideas. The father’s enthusiasm for ideas sets him apart, as we will see, from his Concord neighbor Emerson. While the elder James had little patience for either Kant or Hegel, he considered himself a great admirer of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose insistence that the spiritual and material worlds were linked would later influence German romanticism and idealism. But the Swedenborgian who had introduced James to the works of his favorite thinker contended that James understood so little of Swedenborg that he had misread his opposition to the philosopher as agreement. “Your theory has been suggested by his collision with your mind;” J. J. Garth Wilkinson wrote to his friend; “he has struck you hard; and in the tenderness and generosity of your constitution, you have accepted his heavy blow as polite intercourse; and founded, on your own side, not his, a friendship with his works, instead of recognizing his opposition as the main fact between you” (Perry 26–27).20 Further confirmation that James did not think as a philosopher can be found in C. S. Peirce’s review of James’ book, The Secret of Swedenborg. “That [James’] doctrines are incapable of being established by reasoning is, in fact, plainly stated by him more than once,” Peirce wrote. “This being so, why call them philosophy? The ‘sanction of the heart’ he rightly says is their only voucher.”21 What follows is not an explication of Swedenborg, but rather an account of how James and Emerson read and understood this philosopher—or failed to read him, in some cases, and misread him, if you will. Although some philosophers may disagree, there is much to be made of misreadings, as Harold Bloom has persuasively shown. I am less interested in explaining Swedenborg, or in showing that Emerson and James understood him accurately or inaccurately, than in getting at how “Swedenborg,” as they understood the concept, functioned within their larger philosophies.22 My hope is that in examining their differences over Swedenborg specifically and idealism more generally, I can highlight a fact about these two influential American writers that does not emerge when we simply say that they were friends who shared the intellectual society of nineteenth-century New England and who shared, as well, an abiding respect for Swedenborg. Indeed, their responses to Swedenborg could not have been more different. The starkest way to put it is that James’ reading of Swedenborg was deeply ideological, while Emerson’s was—well, Emersonian: whimsical, irreverent, and anti-ideological. Of course both James and Emerson admired Emanuel Swedenborg. Emerson included a chapter on the mystic in his 1845 lecture series,



12

13

Representative Men, which he published in 1850. He refers frequently to Swedenborg in his essays, beginning with Nature in 1836 and keeping it up through the late essay, “Inspiration,” published in 1875, where he writes that “Swedenborg’s genius was the perception of the doctrine that The Lord flows into the spirits of angels and men” (277).23 James, likewise, devoted much of his life to promoting Swedenborgian thought. In addition to naming one of his sons after the British Swedenborgian J. J. Garth Wilkinson, James accepted Wilkinson’s challenge to assume as his “sacred calling” the vocation of explicating Swedenborg’s thoughts in print (letter cited in Habegger 236). James’ 1869 book, The Secret of Swedenborg: Being an Elucidation of His Doctrine of the Divine Natural Humanity, is only one of the lengthier projects in this lifetime undertaking. But to say that both men admired the Swedish mystic tells only part of the story.

James’ Swedenborg If Emerson, as I have noted, was suspicious of systems, the same cannot be said of Henry James, Sr. Indeed, James devotes the 243 pages of The Secret of Swedenborg to explaining and illuminating Swedenborg’s complicated system of creation and redemption. Briefly put, the system begins with the process of creation wherein human beings are given life in their own form, a form that is essentially alienated from the creator: “The creature, in order to be created, in order truly to be, must exist or go forth from the creator; and he can thus exist or go forth only in his own form, of course” (Secret 15). The creature thus has his own subjective life distinct from the creator’s, a life that is both “strictly subordinate” and also necessarily “antagonistic” to his creator (30), in fact “the exact logical opposite of God” (46). Creation, then, requires antagonism, taking the form of the creature’s sense of independence from his creator and from all other forces. James and Swedenborg both deplore this apparent independence (which James elsewhere calls “selfishness”), even though it is a necessary part of the process of Divine Revelation. As James explains, “unless his nature undergo some modification at the creative hands, by lending itself to his subsequent spiritual redemption,” the human being or “creature of an infinite power is shut up to an eternal subjective antagonism with his creator” (47). The second stage of Swedenborg’s system is the process of individual redemption, the “modification at the creative hands” that enables an “ascending” movement “by which the creature . . . becomes conscious of himself as separated from his



Introduction


creative source, and instinctively reacts against the fact, or seeks to reunite himself with God” (90). Finally, the redemption of the individual takes place within a larger framework of societal redemption, in which the same selfish interests that inflict the individual are purged from the social body, enabling the entire race to rejoin the creator: No one is so dull as not to be able to recognize, either through himself or others, that a certain purifying process is going on in all history, public and private, whereby both the race and the individual are being gradually disciplined out of selfish into associated ends, and out of ignorant into enlightened methods, of action. Progress, whether public or private, seems to take place in an invariably negative way, that is, it always exacts a preliminary experience and acknowledgment of evil and error. Our vices and follies, collective and personal, have wrought us infinitely more advantage than our virtue and knowledge have ever achieved. (81)

In James’ account of Swedenborg’s system, human selfishness is the source of all wickedness, selflessness the source of all goodness, and human history moves toward redemption, the final stage of creation, resulting in a brotherhood or ideal society in which every person relinquishes selfhood and willingly obeys the laws of society. James’ enthusiasm for Swedenborg’s system depends not only on his tolerance for complicated systems but also on his endorsement of the premise that self-reliance is a phantom, a “childish illusion on the creature’s part, due to his native ignorance and imbecility in spiritual things; the real truth of the case being all the while, that when he feels himself to be most absolute and independent, he is then precisely the most abject puppet or dependent creature of the creative wisdom” (50). In this belief, we can be sure, he distinguished himself radically from his friend Emerson, who may have acknowledged that spontaneous actions and oblique glances were often superior to deliberate acts, which could be “vitiated as much by too violent direction given by our will, as by too great negligence” (“Intellect” 419 in EL), but never went so far as to claim that all human thought is mere delusion. Emerson’s middle way granted much of the power of human creativity to divine intervention, but he could not have agreed with James that the human and divine were locked into an antagonistic contest. How could such a belief yield advice like this from Emerson: “[N]ow you must labor with your brains, and now you must forbear your activity, and see what the great Soul showeth” (420)? James, however, contended that “the creature, by virtue of his native arrogance and stupidity in divine things, inflates himself to absolute dimensions” (50).



14

15

Only the complete loss of this individuality or “native arrogance,” James insisted, could bring about redemption. At no point in The Secret of Swedenborg does James take issue with Swedenborg’s claims. Toward the end of the book, in fact, he alludes to his own spiritual crisis and the “exquisite peace” that he found when he discovered Swedenborg’s doctrine (170). The story of James’ “vastation” or spiritual crisis and his subsequent discovery of Swedenborg is well known.24 Throughout The Secret of Swedenborg, the author presents himself as a partisan for Swedenborg and his system, announcing at one point, “I attempt no apology, accordingly, for Swedenborg’s doctrine on this subject [the abject nothingness of creation], but applaud it with all my heart” (48). And while James at one point reminds readers that “Swedenborg was all simply a seer, and in no sense a dogmatist or ‘thinker’” (39–40), on another occasion he gestures with approval at Swedenborg’s “dogmatic pretensions” (11). Coming from a different author, the phrase “dogmatic pretensions” might be read pejoratively, but as we might guess from James’ approval of the stark terms of this book, he seldom objected to a dogmatic view or presentation if he agreed with its conclusion. C. S. Peirce, whose own views on dogmatism we have already seen in his 1877 essay, “The Fixation of Belief,” may well have been prompted to write that essay after reviewing The Secret of Swedenborg in 1869. In this book, James’ authorial voice behaves according to Peirce’s description of one of the dogmatic methods, the “method of authority,” which attempts to regulate opinions by force. James writes, for instance, that his readers “need not expect, as I have already said, to find [Swedenborg] justifying himself in a strictly ratiocinative way, or as men deal with what they feel to be matter of opinion merely, but affirmatively rather, or as they deal with what they feel to be matter of precise knowledge” (90). Not only does James point to and tolerate Swedenborg’s apparent dogmatism, but he affirms it in his own dogmatic way. In Peirce’s 1869 review of James’ book, the younger philosopher complains about James’ dogmatic method and his refusal to justify Swedenborg’s claims. As Peirce writes, This is not the language of a philosopher. . . . What men treat by mere affirmation are matters which they do not believe will be questioned, together with such as they conceive cannot be questioned. But what is in the mind of a writer who talks of justifying himself affirmatively? His affirmative justification can amount to nothing but energetic assertion, or energetic denunciation of others. Hence we cannot be surprised at meeting frequently in Mr. James’ writings such phrases as,



Introduction

H e n r y J a m e s ’ N a r r at i v e T e c h n i q u e “incorrigible fool,” “abject blunder,” “transparent quibble,” “silly,” “impossible for human fatuity ever to go a step farther,” “these disputatious gentlemen,” “not honest,” “utter unscrupulous abandonment of himself to,” “flat-footed and flat-headed,” “willful and wicked antediluvian,”—epithets harmless enough, but not wisely applied to thoughts and men that are great historical factors. (465)

Had T. S. Eliot read The Secret of Swedenborg, he might have agreed with William James’ assessment of his father’s intellectual work: that it constituted not thought so much as ideas, and even those ideas were tedious. As William wrote in his introduction to The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, “with all the richness of style, the ideas are singularly unvaried and few. Probably few authors have so devoted their entire lives to the monotonous elaboration of one single bundle of truths” (9).

Emerson’s Swedenborg Emerson’s indifference to systems is evident in his many accounts of Swedenborg, which give little insight into the elaborate process we have just considered. Instead, Emerson mainly prized the mystic’s metaphorical mind: “Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages,” Emerson wrote, “stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought” (“The Poet” EL 464). Emerson appreciated Swedenborg’s theory of correspondence, which drew an invisible line connecting the material facts available to the senses (what Emerson often designated as “nature”) with the “spiritual facts” that could not be seen by human eyes but could be deduced, as he wrote in Nature, by means of the “natural facts” that symbolized them (20). Every “sensuous fact” had its corresponding truth or “manifold meaning” in the spiritual world (“The Poet” 447); the man of genius could decipher the earth’s elaborate sign-system or “hieroglyphic” (“Country Life,” Natural History of the Intellect in Complete Works of RWE, Centenary Edition 12:165). Readers of Emerson are familiar with the homage that Emerson routinely paid in his essays to Swedenborg, who had first articulated this theory of Correspondence, first put it “into a detached and scientific statement,” as Emerson writes (EL 674). As Emerson draws near the close of “The American Scholar,” he introduces Swedenborg to his audience as a “man of genius . . . whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated” (69). Having exhorted the graduates in his audience to consider how the intellect learns to “animate the last fibre of . . . nature, by insight” (55), Emerson points to Swedenborg as the man who



16

17

first charted this path for the scholar, the man who “saw and showed the connection between nature and the affections of the soul” (69), demonstrating the affinity between material forms and spiritual truths. There is no need to dwell on the deep affinity that Emerson found in Swedenborg’s theory of correspondence, because Emerson never wavered from his belief that Swedenborg was right about the necessary connection between the natural and spiritual worlds, and he never stopped paying tribute to Swedenborg for articulating this connection in theoretical form. What may need elaboration is Emerson’s growing distance from the rest of what we call “Swedenborg”: the personality of this famous mystic as found in his writings and—perhaps the cause of that personality, perhaps its result—the way that Swedenborg imposed his theory on the world of appearances, rather than allowing himself to be enchanted and intrigued by such appearances in order to learn new spiritual laws. By 1845, when Emerson delivered his Representative Men series, he devoted one lecture to “Swedenborg, or, the Mystic.” Once again, Emerson offers his readers much of the same tone of admiration and even occasional reverence for Swedenborg that we have seen in his earlier treatments: leading us into the world of morals, he writes that Swedenborg introduced us into “a region of grandeur which reduces all material magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch that has reason the doors of the universe” (661–62). Emerson plainly approves of Swedenborg for ushering even the wretch into this spiritual world; his words here echo his own nearly mystic account of transcendent thought in “The Divinity School Address,” where the receptive mind turns from nature’s luxurious display to a higher world, as “the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe” (75). But an unmistakable new note of criticism for the mystic creeps into Emerson’s laudatory words. We might be tempted to see this criticism merely as Emerson’s effort to avoid appearing as a slavish imitator. As early as “The Divinity School Address” he had cautioned against turning admiration into imitation, and his example tellingly mentions Swedenborg, as if intellectual proximity to this particular great man made Emerson especially nervous: “Once leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge, as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s, and you get wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts” (88). In his late essay “Greatness,” Emerson reminded his readers of what he had often said before: the scholar must have the “courage” to “criticize Kant and Swedenborg” (CW 311). But there was more to Emerson’s critique of Swedenborg than his general aversion to imitation: Emerson believed that Swedenborg’s



Introduction


system was too systematic, that Swedenborg had “moulded the religious doctrines into some neat and plausible system,” as he would later complain in “Immortality” (CW 329). Any such system, Emerson knew, was nearly incapable of offering the possibility of surprise or chance. For Emerson as for the younger Henry James, surprise was one of the compensations for human ignorance, bewilderment a tonic alternative to complacency or what Emerson calls an “impudent knowingness” (“Experience” EL, 475). As Cavell provocatively suggests, Emerson may have suspected that “experience . . . might be limited in advance by the conceptual limitations you impose upon it” (“Thinking of Emerson” 12). What Cavell calls “true thinking,” on the other hand, may be “thinking as receiving or letting be of something, as opposed to the positing or putting together of something” (15). This form of thinking cannot transpire unless one temporarily puts aside one’s system or ideology, which Emerson’s Swedenborg seems to have been incapable of doing. While Emerson admired emblematic or figurative thought, especially when it articulated the invisible threads linking the material and spiritual worlds, Swedenborg’s figurative thought was too predictable and constricting: “All his types mean the same few things. All his figures speak one speech” (682). The problem is not simply that Swedenborg is no poet and therefore cannot give the things of the material world “a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object” (“The Poet” EL, 456). The trouble for Emerson is that Swedenborg has overloaded his writings, his view of the universe, with his own abstract idea and in the process has lost sight of what the universe (or words themselves, in their less conventional and more surprising uses) might say to him. Not only the poet but “every intellectual man quickly learns,” Emerson explains in “The Poet,” that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. (459)

Swedenborg’s idea, Emerson suggests, has short-circuited the universal currents that flow through individual human beings as they



18

19

flow through inanimate objects. Rather than speaking in thunder, Swedenborg speaks in abstract ideas, or what we might here call ideology. While those ideas were, as we have seen, profoundly interesting to Emerson, the essayist plainly laments Swedenborg’s tone of deadness, even world-weariness, as he utters his grand ideas. The implacable presence of ideology raises a second, related problem for Emerson, who believed that Swedenborg’s words failed to animate the mute material world and were themselves inanimate. For Emerson, Swedenborg’s works were devoid of human emotion, and lacking emotion they lacked life. “[H]is books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in these gardens of the dead” (688). The cadences as well as the sentiments of these lines should remind us of Emerson’s similar complaint in his “Divinity School Address,” where he recalls the sermon of a man whose words gave no hint of a living person: A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it . . . Not one fact in all his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. (EL 84–85)

Here as in his account of Swedenborg, Emerson lists the things he misses in the language of these abstract, doctrinal men: the particular details that attest to lived experience. If the highest thoughts are universal, still the instruments on which they play are the particularities of the natural world, the “fact[s]” of human “experience.” Emerson knows, of course, that the preacher, like Swedenborg, has indeed lived a life; he knows this because he knows that his own life contains particular episodes that give pain and pleasure, and he assumes that human experience must take a similar form in other human beings. “This man had ploughed,” Emerson muses, “and planted, and talked, and bought, and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all” (85). Like Swedenborg’s writings, the preacher’s sermon is a garden “of the dead.” Unlike the words of Montaigne—which, Emerson claims, “would bleed” if they were cut (EL 700)—Swedenborg’s words are bloodless.



Introduction


If Emerson is sad for Swedenborg and the preacher, he is also sad for their audiences, who will find it hard to persuade themselves to attend to these words. Considering Emerson’s exhortation in “The American Scholar” about creative reading, it is not surprising that Swedenborg’s systematic thought should have troubled Emerson, because Swedenborg’s system left no possibility for original thought or inspiration on the part of his reader. As “gardens of the dead,” Swedenborg’s works will never invite a reader to experience them as what Emerson described in that early address as “quick thought” rather than “dead fact.” The written work of true genius “now endures, . . . now flies, . . . now inspires” (EL 56). Having nearly vowed to “go to church no more” (84) after hearing the inanimate preacher, Emerson now worries that Swedenborg “will not be read longer” (688). Emerson’s dismay at the lack of vitality in Swedenborg’s hands is an important symptom of what he considered a larger problem in this Great Man’s thought. Swedenborg represented for Emerson a dangerous kind of idealism that swallowed the individual subject in its influence. While Swedenborg’s books resemble all books of genius in their dangerous tendency to inspire idolatry—“True in transition, they become false if fixed” (682)—Emerson had a more specific objection to the mystic’s philosophy: “Swedenborg’s system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no individual in it” (682). In distinguishing between the “dynamic” force of Swedenborg’s system, powerful enough to act on other minds, and the vitality or life that it lacks, Emerson implies that Swedenborg’s system is mechanical but perhaps not natural. It can force others into compliance but it cannot “generate life,” not even perhaps the impression of Swedenborg’s own life. Like the “merely spectral” preacher, Swedenborg himself—once a living, thinking man—is absent from his writings. So, too, is the individual in a larger sense. Swedenborg’s universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order, and with unbroken unity, but cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is none. There is an immense chain of intermediation, extending from centre to extremes, which bereaves every agency of all freedom and character. The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought comes into each mind by influence from a society of spirits that surround it, and into these form a higher society, and so on. (682)

The picture Emerson paints of Swedenborg’s system is stunning and impressive but lifeless; though Swedenborg may have derived



20

21

his idea from Descartes, his human minds are far more passive than the Cartesian mind, whose thoughts of an infinitely perfect being emanate from ideas that the perfect being has implanted. Descartes’s mind was active, seeking to find the origin of its own ideas. Emerson’s inquisitive mind is likewise active, asking “What am I? and What is? . . . with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched” (Nature, EL 75). Even when Emerson shares Swedenborg’s suspicion that the universe is only the sum of our ideas, he does so with a distinct human touch—either of exuberance, as in Nature, or of the enervated despair of “Experience.” When Emerson complains that there is no “individual” in Swedenborg’s prose, he is missing the changing moods by which we know we are in the presence of the human. For Emerson, Swedenborg’s writings suffer from a sad, even an uncanny uniformity. Swedenborg may have believed that the “mind of the magnetizer” was the mind of God, but it is clear in Emerson’s account that the mind is in fact Swedenborg’s. When calling attention to these limitations in Swedenborg’s thought, Emerson often turned to the personality of the man as it shuffled through the pages of his texts. Anticipating William James, Emerson was convinced that Swedenborg was a sick soul. As early as his 1845 lecture on the mystic, Emerson speculated that “[p]ossibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted faculties” (EL 681). We might pause a moment and wonder what kind of introversion could seem dangerous or unhealthy to Emerson, who frequently counsels introspection, self-trust, and solitude, and for whom the ideal theory constituted a “noble doubt” (EL 32, emphasis mine). Was it that Swedenborg could have benefited from Emerson’s insistence that “[a]ction is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential” (“American Scholar” EL, 60)? Was Emerson perhaps thinking of Swedenborg when he wrote these lines? In any case, Swedenborg represented a kind of moral disease to Emerson, who was saddened by the “air of infinite grief, and the sound of wailing, all over and through [Swedenborg’s] lurid universe” (681). For Emerson, whose varying moods, as Cavell has demonstrated, offer a key to his thought,25 Swedenborg’s writings are all the product of a single mood, a mood of gloomy dread: The sad muse loves night and death, and the pit. His Inferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the same relation to the generosities and joys of truth, of which human souls have already made us cognisant, as a man’s bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid pictures, to the phenomenon of dreaming, which



Introduction

22


How tragic for Emerson—for whom “a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments” (EL 43)—that Swedenborg’s dreams are all the nightmares of a dyspeptic soul. Emerson was famously ambivalent about the topic of evil: was “evil,” as he once maintained, “merely privative” (EL 77), “the only sin . . . limitation” (EL 406)? Or did the answer to this question depend on one’s perspective, as he seems to suggest in “Experience,” where he observes that “[s]in seen from the thought, is a diminution or less: seen from the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad” (EL 489)? Andrew Taylor locates the source—in James, Sr.,—of the oft-repeated claim that Emerson had no awareness of evil. Taylor argues that James’ misreading can be traced to “the fact that [he] failed to recognize (or chose to dismiss) the essentially dualistic nature of Emerson’s philosophy; namely that Emerson was able to survey life from an absolute as well as from a relative viewpoint, always privileging the former in the sense that the relative, the human, could be subsumed in an all-encompassing absoluteness. Thus evil could be contained by a greater goodness” (96). If the truth, as Taylor suggests, is that Emerson acknowledged the existence of evil but understood human experience as a combination of good and evil (97), it is also true that he chose not to dwell on the moral problems caused by sin. Believing that “[n]o man can afford to waste his moments in compunctions” (EL 685), he regarded an attenuated conscience as a sign of a diseased mind: “Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man” (EL 305). Above all, Emerson considered that Swedenborg had such a mind. “To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived,” Emerson grieved, “that Swedenborg admitted no conversion for evil spirits!” (685). It is impossible to explain with any conviction why Emerson’s friend Henry James, Sr., took such a different view of Swedenborg, apart from wondering whether James’ son William wasn’t right in contending that temperament determines one’s philosophical outlook.26 Taylor notes the “strong disparities of sensibility” between these two men (98), disparities that not only explain why sin and redemption were at the heart of James’ philosophy and almost absent



nightly turns many an honest gentleman, benevolent, but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a dog about the outer yards and kennels of creation. When he mounts into the heaven, I do not hear its language. A man should not tell me that he has walked among the angels; his proof is, that his eloquence makes him one. (“Swedenborg” EL, 687)

Introduction

23

from Emerson’s, but also account for Emerson’s resistance to James’ many overtures of intimacy.27

We pause here to consider the legacy of ideas and idealism that these two men left for the novelist Henry James. The elder James was completely untroubled by the picture that Swedenborg painted of the individual’s role in the world: for James, the less autonomy individuals had in the moral realm, the better. Nor was he troubled that Swedenborg was haunted by what Emerson called “devils” (685); James shared Swedenborg’s belief in devils and the palpable presence of evil in the world. For James, these things were related: he believed that “the curse of mankind, that which keeps our manhood so little and so depraved, is its sense of selfhood, and the absurd abominable opinionativeness it engenders.”28 As Habegger notes, James tended to utter his objection to egotism in a “loudly defiant” way (348), as in his 1855 book, The Nature of Evil, which defined evil unequivocally as “The sentiment of independent selfhood: the conviction of being the source of one’s own good and evil: such is the sole ground of every evil known to the spiritual universe” (143). Whereas Emerson, as we have seen, regarded the consciousness of evil as a symptom of diseased introspection and regretted its dominance in Swedenborg’s works, James considered that “the main philosophic obligation we owe to Swedenborg lies in his clearly identifying the evil principle in existence with selfhood” (Society 68–69). It should be clear here that James was not merely being provocative in his theological vocabulary, but genuinely regarded selfhood as the original sin of humankind, a sin that could only be redeemed through the individual’s absorption into the State.29 It would be too easy to say that the younger Henry James would become an Emersonian thinker, though he surely admired those Emersonian virtues of surprise, bewilderment, and spontaneity, and his novels contain a protest against the kind of ideological thinking that we find in the works of his father. Emerson’s critique of dogged willfulness might have struck a chord with the younger James: “Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream” (“Spiritual Laws” EL, 313). Though the sentiment here—that individual will is less potent than it would like to think—would have provoked enthusiastic agreement from the elder James, the element of surprise



The Younger Henry James


in Emerson’s prose style affirms his arguments, whereas James, Sr.’s resolutely argumentative voice would seem to belie the dismissive things he says about the individual will. As Peirce notes in his review of The Secret of Swedenborg, James, Sr.’s dogmatic prose style (and, we might add, his temperament) leaves no room for serendipitous discoveries. The younger James surely shared his brother’s esteem for “the genuineness of each particular moment in which we feel the squeeze of this world’s life” (Some Problems 110). If William called the empiricist’s belief in the genuineness of these moments an “Eden from which rationalists seek in vain to expel us” (ibid.), for his novelist-brother the case was not so simple. Henry James’ fictions, that is, confront his readers with the problem of how to decipher the world—often a morass of competing ethical claims—without embracing dogmatism in the hope of a plain answer. A cartoon by Max Beerbohm highlights the moral and cognitive uneasiness introduced by Jamesian skepticism even as it throws into relief this distinction between dogmatism, motivated by a “vague dread of doubt,” as Peirce observed, and a more skeptical empiricism. The cartoon also illustrates where we might expect to find Henry James in the dispute between philosophical approaches (see Figure 0.1). The scene is a courtroom, Henry James has been summoned to the witness stand as a psychological expert, and the cross-examining lawyer has lost all patience with the witness. “Come, sir,” he explodes, “I ask you a plain question and I expect a plain answer!”30 The joke, of course, has to do with James’ bewilderingly obscure prose style: nothing this novelist says or writes can possibly be “plain.” But we might also consider the scenario as a comment on James’ epistemological style: while the lawyer craves moral clarity and aims to put his case in the clearest and least ambiguous manner, a thinker like James is always apt to frustrate this aim, being—if we recall William James’ description of the empiricist—“more sceptical and open to discussion” (Pragmatism 10). A brief survey of James’ fiction indicates his obvious interest in these two competing modes of thought. Isabel Archer’s friend Henrietta Stackpole harbors “clear-cut views on most subjects; her cherished desire had long been to come to Europe and write a series of letters to the Interviewer from the radical point of view—an enterprise the less difficult as she knew perfectly in advance what her opinions would be and to how many objections most European institutions lay open.”31 Isabel shares something of Henrietta’s confidence in her own ideas, having a “fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness” (68). Isabel is a strange combination



24

25

Figure 0.1 “A Nightmare, Mr. Henry James Subpoenaed as Psychological Expert in a Cause Célebrè.” Caricature by Max Beerbohm. Courtesy of the Henry James Collection (#6251-K0), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Albert and Shirley Small Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.

of moral rigidness and flexibility, and while her dogmatic qualities set her up for tragedy in the years ahead, her flexibility protects her from the kind of criticism that James’ brother William leveled against unadulterated rationalists. James’ narrator darkly hints at these two outcomes in an early chapter: Altogether, with her meagre knowledge, her inflated ideals, her confidence at once innocent and dogmatic, her temper at once exacting and indulgent, her mixture of curiosity and fastidiousness, of vivacity and indifference, her desire to look very well and to be if possible even better, her determination to see, to try, to know, her combination of the delicate, desultory, flame-like spirit and the eager and personal creature of conditions: she would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended to awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant. (69)

James’ characters do not often fit easily into his brother William’s categories of rationalist (dogmatist) and empiricist (skeptic), which is to say that even the finest minds of his invention are at times violated, to borrow Eliot’s phrase, by ideas and ideology, and likewise that even his most ideological minds are capable of authentic thought and feeling when they attend to the elements of genuine perception.



Introduction


Indeed, some of James’ most poignant stories involve the dogmatist who glimpses, belatedly, another version of truth and begins to understand the (now irreversible) consequences of his or her dogmatism. The governess who narrates The Turn of the Screw (1898) is quick to conclude that a former servant is a “horror” (189),32 that a punished child is “only too fine and fair for the little horrid unclean school-world” that has expelled him (182), that a man looking into a window is searching for a child to corrupt (168); and finally, that the small children in her charge are complicit in an unspeakably horrid commerce between two wicked adults. Possessed of a “portentous clearness” (194), she takes even silences and failed appearances as proofs of the conclusions she has already drawn, and she triumphs rather than mourns at what she regards as evidence because it “justifie[s]” her outraged certainties (278). Late in the account of her efforts to uncover the scandal and purify her charges, however, the governess is struck by the one doubt that intrudes upon her usual certitude: “I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?” (307). Although she is “paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the question,” it seems that the consequences of this possibility are too much for her to contemplate: rather than abandon her certainties and assume a more skeptical stance, the governess banishes all doubts. “[D]etermined to have all [her] proof” (309), she lunges at her young pupil, smothering him in order to defend him against the wickedness she already knows to possess him, and discovering that her confidence has cost the boy his life. One final example should suffice to document James’ interest in this tension between ideas and thought or feeling. Although the drama of “The Beast in the Jungle” begins with a feeling—a “sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible” (71)—it gradually turns into a fixed idea, an “obsession,” as John Marcher himself designates his presentiment of singularity (74).33 The origin of Marcher’s idea is more authentic than a mere opinion based on doctrines or principles; it follows David Hume’s explanation of the origin of ideas, which, he claimed, begin in impressions or sensations, which then give rise to fainter copies or memories of past impressions. These fainter copies are ideas, and to establish the reality of any idea, it must be traced to its impression. Any idea without an originary impression is merely an empty word or concept.34 John Marcher’s fixed idea at least begins authentically as



26

27

a feeling, the “deepest thing within [him]” (71). But eventually—by the time readers meet him, on the occasion of his reunion with May Bartram—this impression has hardened into an obsession, and the idea has corrupted his feelings, perceptions and relationships. His relationship to most people is characterized by contempt, since his sense of the rare fate reserved for him alone throws all other human beings into the light of the common. Because they regard ordinary life as meaningful, these people can only be stupid, and Marcher silently scoffs at “the stupid world” (82) for not recognizing the real interior life hidden under his painted features. Meanwhile, he thinks he has found an exceptional companion in May Bartram, the woman who knows his secret and whose life is as full as his own in waiting for Marcher to meet his fate. And yet, while May shares Marcher’s obsession, she also has another life that exceeds it and that would be plain to anyone whose senses are not clouded, as Marcher’s are, by his own idea. Because Marcher has no interest in anything beyond his fate, he forces May into “a false account of herself”: There was but one account of her that would have been true all the while and that she could give straight to nobody, least of all to John Marcher. Her whole attitude was a virtual statement, but the perception of that only seemed called to take its place for him as one of the many things necessarily crowded out of his consciousness. (82–83)

May is in love with John Marcher, and if her “whole attitude” of love speaks the words that she cannot, they are lost on Marcher, for whom this perception—among “many [other] things”—is “crowded out of his consciousness” by the idea that overwhelms everything else. If the “perception” of May’s feelings can find no room in Marcher’s consciousness—if indeed May sickens and dies without his seeing that she has offered him her love—Marcher frees himself from the tyranny of his idea just long enough to recognize what he has missed. He senses that he has missed out on what Eliot called “sensation and thought”; after May’s death he searches his memory in order to “win back by an effort of thought the lost stuff of consciousness” (117). But he is still motivated by his idea: thinking that what he has failed to notice is the event that corresponds to his idea, he searches his past for proof that his idea was not false. His first real perception comes by chance when he sees a stranger at the cemetery whose “ravage[d] . . . features” indicate a passion like nothing Marcher has ever felt. The man’s face makes an impression, “a perception so sharp that nothing else in the picture comparatively lived” (123).



Introduction


The perception is followed quickly by a thought, “the awful thought” that May “was what he had missed” (125). Marcher’s perception is authentic because it arises independently of his idea, though of course it is also deeply entangled with it: his perception, finally, that what he has lost has been the greatest casualty of his parasite idea. The “taste of life” comes to Marcher finally as he sees his idea as Eliot saw it, a corrupting force that is (in Emerson’s words) “dynamic” but not “vital.” But the taste is “belated and bitter” (126). The philosopher Stanley Cavell has done more than perhaps any other critic to teach us that the category “philosophy” can include writers who were not trained philosophers and who never built philosophical systems akin to those of Kant and Hume. Although Cavell may not have convinced all philosophers that his cherished writers, Emerson and Thoreau, deserve to rank alongside Kant and Hume in the pantheon of philosophers, he has been persuasive in his insistence that these writers should be taken seriously as intellectuals who understood the large philosophical problems that have engaged canonical philosophers—and whose own responses to these problems were every bit as intellectually rigorous. More recently, Martha Nussbaum has followed Cavell’s example, going much further to demonstrate not only that literature may be philosophy’s equal but also that it might at times surpass the schematic arguments and examples of traditional philosophy: [T]here may be some views of the world and how one should live in it—views, especially, that emphasize the world’s surprising variety, its complexity and mysteriousness, its flawed and imperfect beauty—that cannot be fully and adequately stated in the language of conventional philosophical prose, a style remarkably flat and lacking in wonder—but only in a language and in forms themselves more complex, more allusive, more attentive to particulars. Not perhaps, either, in the expositional structure conventional to philosophy, which sets out to establish something and then does so, without surprise, without incident—but only in a form that itself implies that life contains significant surprises . . . (3)

Nussbaum’s argument about prose style goes to the heart of what I have been arguing here about dogmatism, on the one hand, and a more open-minded empiricism on the other. James, Sr.’s flat and confident prose style neatly captures the certainty of his argument and the closed nature of Swedenborg’s system as he understands it. But as Nussbaum suggests, even an empiricist like William James might be confined by a prose style that seems to belie the claims he makes about the importance of skepticism—particularly about one’s



28

29

own strongest beliefs—and about the value of particularity.35 I think it is no accident that T. S. Eliot, who understood and valued both philosophy and literature, would have turned to the novelist Henry James as a model of superior intelligence, for it is in James’ fiction that we find a style responsive to the twin insights that, on the one hand, willful and systematic attempts to understand the universe don’t necessarily lead to happy outcomes, and on the other, that their attraction is at times impossible to resist. Nussbaum’s remarks about the centrality of surprise to human existence reminds us, too, that “The Beast in the Jungle” hinges on a very Emersonian insight into the way that chance perceptions can break through unperceiving dogmatic thought. Emerson might almost be describing John Marcher when he writes in “Intellect” (1841) that In the most worn, pedantic, introverted self-tormenter’s life, the greatest part is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until he can take himself up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity and wilfulness [sic] have not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree. (EL 418).

John Marcher, of course, thinks that his fate is incalculable, unforeseen, and unimaginable not because he understands that such is the nature of all human experience, but because he sees himself as a rarity, an exception to the mundane human lot. And yet he spends the greater part of his own life and May Bartram’s doggedly trying to foresee what fate has in store for him. What he misses is the ordinary but still exceptional experience of life itself, and he misses it precisely because of his efforts to see the thing he cannot see. He is “worn” and “pedantic” indeed in his confidence that ordinary existence is not worth his attention, and it is this very dogmatism that enables him to disregard and undervalue the everyday moments in his own life until they are past recovering. It is “an accident, superficially slight,” a “thing of the merest chance” (122) that enables Marcher to perceive for the first time what has eluded him in his more deliberate meditations on his life, and in making the discovery he learns what Emerson describes in “Intellect”: “Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you” (418). Nussbaum notes that although the “view of life expressed” by ancient playwrights and poets often seemed to ancient philosophers



Introduction


“subversive of morality narrowly construed” because these literary accounts dealt “with the passionate love of particulars, with grief, pain, and bewilderment,” these very features constituted ancient literature’s “most essential ethical functions” in the minds of their creators (22). Morality “narrowly construed” is, for Nussbaum, the stuff of abstract philosophical treatises, whose examples are so general as to be inadequately complex, and whose morality relies on an “antecedently built system of rules” (37). As readers of Henry James’ fiction already know—and as Nussbaum has demonstrated—his narratives do not present us with easily disentangled moral dilemmas. James’ fiction, early and late, considers the complicated place of the individual in a social world that often seems as coldly intricate or as ruthlessly indifferent as his father’s or Swedenborg’s world order, but without their clear-cut paths to deliverance. James sometimes brings his characters to muse on the question of evil—as when Isabel Osmond wonders whether Madame Merle, the architect of her sorrows, is an evil woman, or when Kate Croy invites us to regard her actions as beyond good and evil. Even with his most destructive and malevolent characters, the novelist defies his readers to pass categorical moral judgments. Instead, they—as well as James’ readers—must find a way out of their ideological impasses in order to feel and discern the truth of what James calls their “exposed and entangled state.”36 The following pages will explore the sometimes-bewildered movement, in James’ fiction, between ideology and authentic thoughts and feelings about the “exposed and entangled state” of human existence.



30

4

Exper i ences of Cultu re, H istory, and Poli tics in T H E B O S T O N I A N S

A

s one of Henry James’ most political works, the 1886 novel The Bostonians affords us an opportunity to explore the spectrum of political experience in James’ writings, from its most ideological to its most impressionistic. The story brings together a former Confederate soldier, a Boston blue blood whose brothers have died fighting for the Union army, feminist reformers, pseudoscientists, bourgeois people of leisure seeking novel experiences, and newspaper reporters hoping to chronicle and benefit from the abrupt social changes taking place at the convergence of these various interest groups. If The Bostonians does not present a single, discernible position on the women’s movement, on conservative politics, or on political organizations in general, it does demonstrate that the artist need not treat politics ideologically. When Eliot mentioned the “political . . . idea” as one of the products of the typical English novelist, he was suggesting not that superior writers avoid politics altogether, but that they approach the political as an experience of “living beings” rather than inert “ideas.” Another way to describe this distinction might be to consider it as a contrast between the personal and the impersonal: the idea, showing no signs of life, has no bearing upon personal experience. Readers of James’ novel have long puzzled over the author’s sympathies: does he want readers to feel contempt for the women’s movement? For the disinherited, conservative Southerner who rages against the “encroachments of modern democracy” (199)? For those reformers who secretly long for the days before abolition, when their own lives felt richer? For the bourgeoisie who affiliate themselves



Chapter 1


with fashionable political movements in order to solidify their class identity? For journalists, whose professional success depends on the sensationalization of political speech? As I have argued elsewhere, the composition history of James’ novel may be important in locating and explaining his narrative loyalties: because the novel was first published serially, James was able to read the early reviews before he finished writing, and when those reviews expressed outrage over his satiric treatment of feminist reformers, he softened his depictions in the later chapters.1 The result is a narrative voice that sometimes turns penitently against its earlier judgments. Miss Birdseye, the suffragist represented in an early chapter as a “confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow-creatures, if possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements” (55), assumes a more heroic presence in her final days, as she rests in a quiet fishing village awaiting her death. Even Basil Ransom comes at last to have a genial regard for this enemy of his conservative values; she strikes him “as the incarnation of well-earned rest, of patient, submissive superannuation. At the end of her long day’s work she might have been placed there to enjoy this dim prevision of the peaceful river, the gleaming shores, of the paradise her unselfish life had certainly qualified her to enter, and which, apparently, would so soon be opened to her” (352). But the explanation that James was accommodating his critics only partly accounts for the differences between these two passages and other distinctions in the novel that we shall consider. James was not so much improving the characters he depicted as altering his narrative disposition toward them. Miss Birdseye’s values do not, after all, change in the course of the novel, and neither does her behavior. Her dying words concern the “progress” she has been able to “measure” from her old age and the “justice” to women that has eluded her, but that, as she impersonally and placidly assures her friends, will come to them if they continue to work patiently (387–88). Miss Birdseye remains throughout the novel a character defined by her embrace of reform movements, a figure whose ideas and passions alike take political matters as their content, and whose human relations are formed in the context of her radical political affiliations. If the character at the center of these passages is the same, the differences in the perspectives can be understood in light of Eliot’s distinction between ideas, on the one hand, and thought and feeling



32

33

on the other: in the earlier passage, Miss Birdseye is described as a character whose political ideas prevent her from learning anything about her fellow creatures. In the second passage, the antifeminist Basil Ransom breaks through his own ideological judgment of the women’s movement and sees the dying woman not as a caricature of reformers but as a woman whose long work—irrespective of what he thinks about that work and its purposes—has earned his respect and tenderness. Political ideas, Eliot contended, enable those who hold them and who see the world through their interposing medium to evade “sensation and thought.” If Miss Birdseye’s “humanitary zeal” is an ideological position that prevents her from knowing her fellow creatures, James’ novel invites us to ask whether all politics is necessarily ideological? Is a thoughtful or sensational politics possible? And what is the full range of possible political experiences? At one end of the epistemological spectrum is a mode of thought and discourse that clearly conforms to what Eliot denounced as “the political idea,” and when we attempt to locate James’ preferences we should be careful to distinguish between the content and the form of these politics. The form of the political idea, like the form of all ideas, is solid and hermetically sealed, like the classically designed “marble temple shining on a hill” that William James used as his image for rationalist philosophy.2 Ideas, unlike thoughts, do not change when they come into contact with other influences, but merely stand coldly aloof, like the “classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present,” in William James’ words. This is what James meant by the “simple, clean, and noble” outlines of abstract thought (14), and we see some of the most damning illustrations of this kind of thought among the radicals who dominate the early pages of Henry James’ novel. It is easy to recognize the shortcomings of an impersonal, abstract politics when we note that “political ideas” are distasteful to a range of characters and for reasons that have nothing to do with their content. The narrator seems to offer invidious hints about Mrs. Farrinder, the “copious, handsome woman” whose “terrible regularity of feature” suggests intellectual regularity as well, for “she seemed to face you with a question of which the answer was preordained” (58). If the narrator feels the least bit uneasy about the uniformity of a massproduced culture, that uneasiness extends to Mrs. Farrinder, about whom “there was a lithographic smoothness . . . , and a mixture of the American matron and the public character. There was something public in her eye, which was large, cold, and quiet; it had acquired



E x p e r i e n c e s o f C u lt u r e , H i s t o r y, a n d P o l i t i c s


a sort of exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lecture-desk, over a sea of heads, while its distinguished owner was eulogized by a leading citizen” (58). The conservative Basil Ransom makes a quick discovery about her when he intuits “that he should not in the least discover Mrs. Farrinder’s real opinion, and her dissimulation added to his impression that she was a woman with a policy. It was none of his business whether in her heart she thought Verena a parrot or a genius; it was perceptible to him that she saw she would be effective, would help the cause” (88). The radical Olive later has occasion to say something very similar: “Mrs. Farrinder . . . brought a great intellect to the matter; but she was not personal enough—she was too abstract” (106). Abstract politics take their most debased form in the way that Verena and her parents officially regard her gift for public speaking. All of them insist that Verena’s gift is not personal, not a quality that can be identified with the woman herself. While they can’t quite account for it, they all allow Verena’s claim that “It isn’t me” (79). As the crowd responds appreciatively to Verena’s speech, her father looked around at the company with all his teeth, and said that these flattering allusions were not so embarrassing as they might otherwise be, inasmuch as any success that he and his daughter might have had was so thoroughly impersonal: he insisted on that word. They had just heard her say, “It is not me, mother,” and he and Mrs. Tarrant and the girl herself were all equally aware it was not she. It was some power outside—it seemed to flow through her; he couldn’t pretend to say why his daughter should be called, more than any one else. (79–80)

Olive, like her author, is irritated by these claims to impersonality and the implicit argument that an abstract, impersonal politics is superior to a concrete and human one. She utters a “low, impatient sigh” when someone describes Verena’s talent as an external substance that “seems to pass into her” (78). After listening to much palaver about the impersonal nature of Verena’s speech, Olive asks that the lecture begin. “A voice, a human voice, is what we want” (81), she urges. And at the end of the lecture she is deeply moved. Though the narrator describes the effect of the lecture as a “universal contagion” (88), Olive is affected in a profoundly idiosyncratic way: she turns to Basil “an extraordinary face, a face he scarcely understood or even recognized. It was portentously grave, the eyes were enlarged, [and] there was a red spot in each of the cheeks” (89–90). When she thinks about Verena’s value to the women’s movement, she is thinking of a personal quality, the younger woman’s “pure voice” (115).



34

35

Eliot claimed that “the most intelligent man of his generation” (46) was untouched by ideas, and in these scenes we can see the low esteem in which James held such things. But it would be an overstatement to say that James regarded ideas exactly as Eliot did. The novelist recognized the typological tradition—extending backward to his native country’s colonial origins—of seeing the world according to preexisting (usually Biblical) patterns. Typological thought helped to explain and organize an otherwise unintelligible world to Puritan colonists, though, as Mitchell Breitwieser explains, it also did violence to “those aspects of represented experience that do not confirm it” (24).3 James seems to have understood the impulse as a means of enlarging personal feelings with a larger historical narrative even as he recognized its destructive effects. Olive Chancellor, the descendent of American Puritans, turns to typological thought both to help express the nobleness of her dying friend’s long life and to understand Miss Birdseye’s work in the context of a larger tradition. Miss Birdseye “had always had for Olive a kind of aroma of martyrdom, and her battered, unremunerated, unpensioned old age brought angry tears, springing from depths of outraged theory, into Miss Chancellor’s eyes” (189). It doesn’t matter that Miss Birdseye, in speaking of her long life and her many political accomplishments, offers the deathbed comment, “It has been a lovely time” (387), as if her life consisted of dances rather than temperance lectures to hostile Irish audiences, month-long passages in Georgia prisons, or the care of pestilential children (189). For Olive, the “frumpy little missionary was the last link in a tradition, and . . . when she could be called away the heroic age of New England life—the age of plain living and high thinking, of pure ideals and earnest effort, of moral passion and noble experiment—would effectually be closed” (189). James subtly points to the distortion in Olive’s typological depiction of her dying friend, but he treats the effects of her “outraged theory” with more tenderness than satire, as if aware of the very human impulses behind this particular distortion. If typological vision can be, as Thomas Loebel notes, a “heavyhanded discourse” (69), if it fails to illuminate all of experience, the pitfalls of such a discourse were familiar to James, who encountered a similar warning in the “Conclusion” to Walter Pater’s famous work, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. The book had been published in 1873, and as Jonathan Freedman notes, James had read it carefully in 1873 or 1874, mentioning it explicitly in a travel essay of 1874 and echoing it profoundly in Roderick Hudson, published in 1875.4 Pater does not specifically refer to typological thought, but





his warning against philosophical systems—what I have been calling, following the philosophical tradition of rationalism, “ideas”—would certainly include typology as well as other forms of ideological thinking. Pater acknowledges the potential value of “ideas” while also warning against their power to coerce experience into particular channels and thereby to neglect the remainder that does not flow easily along such channels. “Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism,” Pater writes, “may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.” However, “The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience . . . has no real claim upon us” (189). James, to be sure, didn’t need Pater’s warning to become suspicious of ideological thought; as we have already seen, he developed a healthy skepticism about ideas as a young man, simply by comparing his father’s dogmatic philosophy to the more experiential, impressionistic, and receptive philosophy practiced by his family’s friend Emerson. But Pater’s explicit warning helps us to see James’ preference for thought and feeling over ideas as part of a larger aesthetic tradition that was emerging as he began to mature as a writer of fiction.5 When Pater urges his readers to think of “success” as nothing more or less than the “ecstasy” enjoyed by those who are able to experience fully the limited number of pulses allotted to a single human life (189), he is urging them to elevate experience—the “tone,” the “mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement,” the impressions available to “constant and eager observation” (188)—above belief, prejudice, theory, or any other system that might damage this impulse toward observation and enjoyment. The Bostonians highlights the coercive effect of ideology on enjoyment, most notably in the way that the morally and politically sensitive Olive Chancellor condemns herself to experiences—primarily personal encounters and modes of transit—that are aesthetically repellant to her. Though “wandering about Boston at night” is “a kind of exposure she greatly disliked,” though she “loathe[s]” the streetcar, she generally submits to this public conveyance for ideological reasons: “devotedly nurs[ing] . . . a theory which bade her put off invidious differences and mingle in the common life,” she forces herself to confront the same conditions that are necessary for the working women who figure so centrally in her system of social reform. “Boston was full of poor girls who had to walk about at night and to squeeze into horse-cars in which every sense was displeased; and why should she hold herself superior to these? Olive Chancellor regulated her conduct on lofty principles” (52). The implied author has



36

37

nothing to say about the content of these democratic impulses: if they are genuine passions in Pater’s terminology—thoughts or feelings in Eliot’s—then they contribute to what Pater called “a quickened sense of life” (Renaissance 190). Olive, however, is too dogmatically moral to stop and heed Pater’s warning: “Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness” (190). Olive’s democratic principle is in fact the opposite of a passion, and as an idea rather than a feeling, it commits her to the very opposite of enjoyment. Finding herself in the bare and vulgar space of her friend Miss Birdseye’s boardinghouse, lighted by a “hot glare of gas, which made it look white and featureless,” Olive must hide her aesthetic discomfort because her democratic principles forbid her to utter an aesthetic preference for any one place over another, especially when the featureless space is inhabited by a political reformer. But indeed Olive “mortally disliked it, and . . . in a career in which she was constantly exposing herself to offence and laceration, her most poignant suffering came from the injury of her taste. She had tried to kill that nerve, to persuade herself that taste was only frivolity in the disguise of knowledge; but her susceptibility was constantly blooming afresh and making her wonder whether an absence of nice arrangements were a necessary part of the enthusiasm of humanity” (57). It might be possible to read this passage as satire directed against Olive’s insufficiently democratic principles; if, after all, she can hardly tolerate the barren interior of a shabby boardinghouse, how can we trust her political theories, and mustn’t her commitment to full equality really be untrustworthy?6 But if we read Olive’s aesthetic sensibilities as among her most spontaneous impulses, impulses she cannot govern even though they conflict painfully with her political principles, we will see these sensibilities as the quality that redeems Olive and tempers her lapses into political impersonality. I will have more to say about Olive’s impersonality in the context of her experience of history and of politics, but for now I want to focus on how it affects her experience of culture.

Cultural Thoughts and Ideas To highlight Olive’s ideological, unspontaneous contact with the world around her, it will be useful to turn briefly to the very different experience of her friend Verena, whose encounters with the larger world are remarkably free of the ideological. The contrast is most telling in the radically different ways that these characters interact with the urban spaces of Boston and New York. The city, of course, offers the person





of sensibility a vast array of experiences. As a space where people of different classes, races, and types mingle often indiscriminately, the city is configured, at least in its most public places, as a democratic space, and it therefore offers a certain kind of political experience. Filled with museums, parks, and buildings, it is also a cultural space, to be experienced with a historical or aesthetic eye. Charles Baudelaire famously identified the city as the site of aesthetic experience when he located his “Painter of Modern Life” in the streets of Paris. James’ dramatization of the ideological constraints that Olive, the “ticklish spinster” (54), sets upon her experiences of the urban scene appears in greater relief when we contrast to them the much freer encounters of Verena. One might argue, of course, that Verena’s experiences are childish and that as a historically and culturally naïve figure, she does not represent James’ ideal epistemological center. But, as Baudelaire famously noted, the child is most free from the kind of ideological constraints that undermine Olive’s unmediated sensibilities: “Let us go back, if we can, by a retrospective effort of the imagination, towards our most youthful, our earliest, impressions . . . The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour.”7 Olive seems to think of Verena in this light, as a person who was constructed for pleasure, “made to enjoy” (289). Noting Verena’s difference from herself, Olive seems to think that her own inability to enjoy the world, based largely on her commitment to social reform, is “much more natural and perhaps higher” than a childlike disposition for pleasure. If Verena resents the value judgment, she cannot refute Olive’s characterization “as she looked out the window of the carriage at the bright, amusing city, where the elements seemed so numerous, the animation so immense, the shops so brilliant, the women so strikingly dressed, and knew that these things quickened her curiosity, all her pulses” (289). James, like Baudelaire, identifies Verena’s sense of spontaneous enjoyment and curiosity with her youth and inexperience. “[Y]oung enough to enjoy any journey in a horse-car,” the narrator explains, Verena “was ever-curious about the world” (98). As she spends more time with her more politically earnest friend Olive, Verena’s spontaneous and unmediated experiences of the world become both rarer and more precious as they undergo pressure from Olive’s political ideology. When their political work takes them to New York in an effort to spread their message to a wider audience, Verena’s pleasure in the new experiences of this larger city presses up against the sense—more acute to Olive, of course, but also present to Verena in their many conversations—of the



38

39

city’s political shortcomings. Because her pleasure is at odds with their politics, Verena realizes that her unmediated enjoyment is a secret she must keep not only from Olive but also perhaps from herself. “Very likely, as Olive said, it wasn’t their real life, and people didn’t seem to have such a grip of the movement as they had in Boston; but there was something in the air that carried one along, and a sense of vastness and variety, of the infinite possibilities of a great city, which—Verena hardly knew whether she ought to confess it to herself—might in the end make up for the want of the Boston earnestness” (288). It would appear that Verena’s pleasure in such things is even more scandalous to an ideological outlook than her reflections would allow: not only do the pleasures of the great city appear to make up for its political shortcomings, but the pleasure Verena experiences in the streets of New York is possible precisely because of her temporary lapse from doctrine. The conflict between ideology and receptivity is most apparent during the scenes of the long day that Verena spends in Basil Ransom’s company in New York. Although Olive had conceded to the outing on ideological grounds—the two women had agreed that “Verena was quite firm enough in her faith to submit to [Ransom’s] visit” (298–99)—Verena’s enjoyment of New York rests precisely on her freedom from ideological constraints. Wandering around New York with Basil Ransom, Verena finds it easy to forget about Olive and the political cause that has engaged them both. “Once Verena was fairly launched the spirit of the day took possession of her; she was glad to have come, she forgot about Olive, enjoyed the sense of wandering in the great city with a remarkable young man who would take beautiful care of her, while no one else in the world knew where she was. It was very different from her drive yesterday with Mr. Burrage, but it was more free, more intense, more full of amusing incident and opportunity. She could stop and look at everything now, and indulge all her curiosities, even the most childish” (319). Though she is maturing and the world is beginning to darken with difficulties as she recognizes the painful impossibility of pleasing everyone, Verena finds pleasure in this childlike return to spontaneous (nonideological) enjoyment. Verena indulges her taste and feels most free, least constrained, when she is able to treat her senses to a random and unfettered encounter with the city, without reference to what this experience might mean to her political commitments. Her experience of Central Park, while ideologically fitting for a suffragist, gives her pleasure not because of its easy fit with her principles but precisely because she experiences it as a matter of taste, not doctrine. On the previous day she had taken a carriage through the park with a wealthy suitor, but on this occasion





she accompanies Basil Ransom, who cannot afford a carriage. “To wander there with a companion, slowly stopping, lounging, looking at the animals as she had seen the people do the day before; to sit down in some out-of-the-way part where there were distant views, which she had noticed from her high perch beside Henry Burrage—she had to look down so, it made her feel unduly fine; that was much more to her taste, much more her idea of true enjoyment” (316). I want to emphasize that the content of the experience does not determine its value to James or to his characters; rather, it is the experience itself, and whether it is experienced ideologically, according to some idea of what is good or necessary, or in a different epistemological way, a way we might call impressionistic or sensational, a way that is relatively free from the grip of ideas. When Olive insists on taking a streetcar because her politics require her to mix with the people, she is experiencing the world of public transit as an idea rather than as the manifold of sensory impressions given to her as she jogs along the city streets in a streetcar. Nor is Olive incapable of the kind of spontaneous and personal experience that we see in Verena’s encounters with the city. We have seen her impatience with abstract ideas, and while she seems to live her life always in the light of her ideas about equality and feminism, the truth is that her responses are often governed by personal preference. When these personal responses do not conflict with her ideas, they free Olive—if only momentarily—from the grip of her ideas and put her in a more charming light. Her initial response to Verena is a combination of something ideological and something much more personal and idiosyncratic: It was just as [Verena] was that [Olive] liked her; she was so strange, so different from the girls one usually met, seemed to belong to some queer gipsy-land or transcendental Bohemia. With her bright, vulgar clothes, her salient appearance, she might have been a rope-dancer or a fortune-teller; and this had the immense merit, for Olive, that it appeared to make her belong to the “people”, threw her into the social dusk of that mysterious democracy which Miss Chancellor held that the fortunate classes know so little about, and with which (in a future possibly very near) they will have to count. Moreover, the girl had moved her as she had never been moved, and the power to do that, from whatever source it came, was a force that one must admire. Her emotion was still acute, however much she might speak to her visitor as if everything that had happened seemed to her natural; and what kept it, above all, from subsiding was her sense that she had found here what she had been looking for so long—a friend of her own sex with whom she might have a union of soul. (101)



40

41

Here we see Olive alternate between a sense that Verena is curious, strange, and sui generis—her queer, vulgar, transcendental qualities that “dropped straight from heaven” rather than passing from her vulgar parents (104) placing her in a position almost beyond classification—and the more ideological conviction that this strange creature is best suited to advance the cause that Olive has embraced. Though Olive is immediately and spontaneously drawn to the “queer” Verena, is more deeply moved than she has ever been, and promptly begins thinking of a “union of soul” with the young woman, she also lapses into political ideas, calculating that Verena’s affiliation with “the people” will help her to overcome the economic segregation that has marred her own politics. But when Olive begins to describe her political plans more explicitly to Verena, the depiction that emerges is intensely personal even though the content is political: “We will work at it together—we will study everything,” Olive almost panted; and while she spoke the peaceful picture hung before her of still winter evenings under the lamp, with falling snow outside, and tea on a little table, and successful renderings, with a chosen companion, of Goethe, almost the only foreign author she cared about; for she hated the writing of the French, in spite of the importance they have given to women. Such a vision as this was the highest indulgence she could offer herself; she had it only at considerable intervals. (107)

The mention of French writers indicates the tension Olive feels at times between her tastes and her principles, and in the case of French writers, her principles give way to her tastes and signal her even stronger personal feelings for Verena. In spite of her account of their program of study as “work,” Olive sees it as the highest of private pleasures, an “indulgence” that she rarely takes. Her friendship with Verena, like her passion for Goethe, is compatible with both her politics and her personal taste, but when Olive “pant[s]” with the vision of what she describes, she is feeling the personal pleasures of the scene, not the doctrine of her politics. And when Verena responds passionately to Olive’s overtures, she is animated, likewise, not by political ideas but rather by an intense and deeply personal sensation, one that defies political categorization: Olive had taken her up, in the literal sense of the phrase, like a bird of the air, had spread an extraordinary pair of wings, and carried her through the dizzying void of space. Verena liked it, for the most part; liked to shoot upward without an effort of her own and look down upon all creation, upon all history, from such a height. From this first




42


Although Verena’s thoughts here touch briefly on the topic of history, which is central to Olive’s convictions about the women’s movement, she is really observing the sensations of an entirely new experience rather than the political or historical content of that experience. Just as Olive is excited by the strangeness of this girl who might have been a “ropedancer” (101), so is Verena intoxicated by the feeling of being launched high in the air. Wai Chee Dimock has argued that The Bostonians is “as tantalized as any text can be about the limits of explanation: about its inadequacy, its built-in hazards, and its potential tyranny” (27). Reading James’ novel as a critique of what Weber, Adorno, and Horkheimer call “disenchantment”—the light of modernity that illuminates everything uniformly—Dimock argues that The Bostonians offers narrative moments that refrain from explaining, where characters are incalculable and inexplicable. I have been arguing something similar about James’ depiction of experience itself: submitted to an ideological framework, experience can appear familiar, easily explained, and either dismissed or embraced. When Olive grimly throws herself into an omnibus, she is trying to experience the world in this politically organized, demystified way, though her rebel sensibilities will not let her accept the “democratic” experience as she thinks she should. When Verena, in contrast, turns her senses to the crowds of Manhattan, she is experiencing the world in the epistemologically opposite way. The ideological discomfort that these open spaces present to an earnest reformer like Olive is reflected as well in the many interior spaces that represent human culture, and once again readers may observe how James introduces the artifacts of culture as objects that may be experienced either personally or ideologically and impersonally. When Basil Ransom remarks on his cousin’s “elegant home,” Olive “flushe[s] quickly” and reveals that he has “touched her at a tender point.” We quickly learn that however much she might personally value and enjoy the cultural objects that fill her living space, they also make an ideologically uncomfortable point, and Olive “disliked to be reminded of certain things which, for her, were mitigations of the hard feminine lot” (53). Olive’s surroundings are not sybaritic or decadent; rather, they represent both “organized privacy” (45) and a long tradition of human wisdom and civilization. Basil Ransom, looking around him, discovers “an interior that was so much an interior”



interview she felt that she was seized, and she gave herself up, only shutting her eyes a little, as we do whenever a person in whom we have perfect confidence proposes, with our assent, to subject us to some sensation. (100)

43

that it expresses not only the comfort of an upper-class existence but also the “habits and tastes” that a shy spinster might not otherwise be able to express (45). Of course, Olive’s interior expresses not only her own interiority but also the cultural and intellectual traditions she has mastered and embraced, as Basil notes with admiration and envy: He had always heard Boston was a city of culture, and now there was culture in Miss Chancellor’s tables and sofas, in the books that were everywhere, on little shelves like brackets (as if a book were a statuette), in the photographs and water-colours that covered the walls, in the curtains that were festooned rather stiffly in the doorways. He looked at some of the books and saw that his cousin read German; and his impression of the importance of this (as a symptom of superiority) was not diminished by the fact that he himself had mastered the tongue (knowing it contained a large literature of jurisprudence) during a long, empty, deadly summer on the plantation. (45)

Why does Olive find her home and her tastes so ideologically embarrassing? Perhaps she fears that Matthew Arnold’s conservative distinction between “culture” and “anarchy” rules out the possibility of high culture for those who believe in democracy, or it may be that Miss Birdseye’s barren rooms have suggested to Olive this dire conclusion. Miss Birdseye, that is, inhabits a boardinghouse whose entrance hall has “a peculiar look of being both new and faded—a kind of modern fatigue—like certain articles of commerce which are sold at a reduction as shop-worn” (54). These surroundings seem massproduced, as if a social movement that insists on political equality for all must eliminate every other kind of distinction as well. Miss Birdseye’s commitment to abstract equality doesn’t simply extend to her private relations but extinguishes them, so that she offers to Basil “a delicate, dirty, democratic little hand, looking at him kindly, as she could not help doing, but without the smallest discrimination as against others who might not have the good fortune (which involved, possibly, an injustice), to be present on such an interesting occasion” (56). The narrator mentions a rumor that sheds more light on Miss Birdseye’s impersonal politics than on her meager existence: “There was a legend that an Hungarian had once possessed himself of her affections, and had disappeared after robbing her of everything she possessed. This, however, was very apocryphal, for she had never possessed anything, and it was open to grave doubt that she could have entertained a sentiment so personal. She was in love, even in those days, only with causes, and she languished only for emancipations” (56). If Miss Birdseye is touchingly noble in her humble life and her impassioned political





work, there is also something troubling about the complete extinction of her every personal feeling, especially as her face, like her undistinguished surroundings, reflects nothing of her interior. Her “long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually washing away their sharpness, their details” (55). Perhaps wishing to emulate her older friend, Olive tries to be scrupulously impersonal, forbidding herself the emotion of hatred “as directed to individuals” (41), but insisting on her policy of hating men “as a class, anyway” (51). While Miss Birdseye seems constitutionally incapable of lapsing into personal feelings and motives, Olive has a more difficult time maintaining her rigid impersonality. James puts considerable pressure on the occasions when Olive’s political principles require her to sink her aesthetic feelings, which are also the occasions when James’ readers can best measure the cost of an impersonal politics. James registers that cost through the eyes of Basil Ransom, a poor man who lacks the means to acquire the experiences and artifacts of high culture but not the capacity to value them. When walking through Boston on the day of Verena’s much-anticipated lecture at the Music Hall, Basil discovers the tokens of Verena’s popularity and of Olive’s attempts further to expand her fame. At a shop selling “shockingly bad” photographs of Verena and “a sketch of her life, which many people seemed to be reading,” he buys these things in spite of their failure to capture any part of the woman he loves. “Verena was not in the least present to him in connexion with this exhibition of enterprise and puffery; what he saw was Olive, struggling and yielding, making every sacrifice of taste for the sake of the largest hearing, and conforming herself to a great popular system. Whether she had struggled or no, there was a catch-penny effect about the whole thing which added to the fever in his cheek and made him wish he had money to buy up the stock of the vociferous little boys” (415). Surely Ransom is right to think that Olive does not enjoy the task of turning Verena into a publicly available commodity priced for the masses; she had responded with contempt to Matthias Pardon’s “base . . . proposal that they should constitute themselves into a company for drawing profit from Verena” (156), and if her drawing room embodies “organized privacy,” so does her political work with Verena, which takes the shape of private history lessons during “winter nights secure from interruption” (184). The tokens they sell to promote Verena’s lecture, moreover, are mechanically produced trinkets like



44

45

the “shop-worn” items that decorate Miss Birdseye’s lodgings and utter “a kind of modern fatigue” (54). Does James mean to indicate that radical, democratic politics and refined taste are necessarily at odds, that any political system insisting on equality of opportunity must also do away with aesthetic sensibilities and the distinctions of taste that they recognize?8 This is the question that Olive asks herself on several occasions when the refinements of civilization tempt her to lay aside her political struggle. The difficulty is apparent with respect to her own economic status, since the wealth that makes her cultured life possible sits uneasily with her reform-minded efforts and with her theory of the suffering of women. But it also emerges during a visit to the Burrage household in New York. Henry Burrage’s kind manners—he is obviously “a gentleman and a good fellow” (164)— impress Olive as “so easy a grace” that she loses track of her impersonal reasons for disliking him and sits “dumbly shaking her conscience, like a watch that wouldn’t go, to make it tell her some better reason why she shouldn’t like him”(164). She is appealing here to her ideology, but that ideology has fallen silent in the stronger sense of Burrage’s kindness, good manners, and refinement. She is even more powerfully affected by marks of his class identity that appeal deeply to her aesthetic and emotional sensibilities, the very instincts that she cannot rein in under her political principles. The narrator reveals her lapse from these principles in a long account that begins almost apologetically: I must add, however, that there was a moment when she came near being happy—or, at any rate, reflected that it was a pity she could not be so. Mrs. Burrage asked her son to play “some little thing,” and he sat down to his piano and revealed a talent that might well have gratified that lady’s pride. Olive was extremely susceptible to music, and it was impossible to her not to be soothed and beguiled by the young man’s charming art. One “little thing” succeeded another; his selections were all very happy. His guests sat scattered in the red firelight, listening, silent, in comfortable attitudes; there was a faint fragrance from the burning logs, which mingled with the perfume of Schubert and Mendelssohn; the covered lamps made a glow here and there, and the cabinets and brackets produced brown shadows, out of which some precious object gleamed—some ivory carving or cinquecento cup. It was given to Olive, under these circumstances, for half an hour, to surrender herself, to enjoy the music, to admit that Mr. Burrage played with exquisite taste, to feel as if the situation were a kind of truce. Her nerves were calmed, her problems—for the time—subsided. Civilization, under such an influence, in such a setting, appeared to have done its work; harmony ruled the scene; human life ceased to be a battle. She went so far as to ask herself why one should




H e n r y J a m e s ’ N a r r at i v e T e c h n i q u e have a quarrel with it; the relations of men and women, in that picturesque grouping, had not the air of being internecine. In short, she had an interval of unexpected rest . . . At moments Mrs. Burrage bent her countenance upon [Verena] and smiled, at random, kindly; and then Verena smiled back, while her expression seemed to say that, oh yes, she was giving up everything, all principles, all projects. Even before it was time to go, Olive felt that they were both (Verena and she) quite demoralized . . . (166)

Because Olive’s moral and political principles depend on her opposition to organized injustice, anything that helps her to forget her rage against this injustice can only appear to her as demoralization; hence, though she loves many of the products of civilization and takes pleasure in their soothing effects, her pleasure is a guilty, ambivalent, conflicted feeling, arousing emotions as difficult as those she feels when she recognizes her distaste for the effects of lowbrow culture. But Olive’s feelings of attraction and revulsion are powerful instincts, and if she can dismiss them as the fugitive effects of demoralization, it is more difficult for James’ readers to do so. The novel even offers us moments when high culture and radical politics seem able to coexist without contradiction, though Verena, like Olive, is troubled enough after their evening at the Burrages to ask whether this is possible. Verena wonders “whether taste and art were not something,” and “Miss Chancellor, of course, had her answer ready. Taste and art were good when they enlarged the mind, not when they narrowed it” (163). There may be something ideological in the promptness of Olive’s reply: she clearly has been musing on the question before Verena poses it, and the care with which she has prepared her answer indicates her fear that Verena, too, will become demoralized. On the other hand, her answer sounds very Jamesian, which is to say it sounds Paterian. If we remember Pater’s distinction between “points of view, instruments of criticism” that “help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us,” on the one hand, and systems or theories that require “of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience” (189), we might hear a kind of authorial approval in Olive’s answer. Olive’s conservative, bourgeois sister drifts toward “spiritual death” as she sinks (to Olive’s more earnest eyes) “into mere worldly plumpness, into the last complacency, the supreme imbecility, of petty, genteel conservatism” (172). Mrs. Luna’s love for the things of civilized society is a narrowing aestheticism, but hers is not the only kind. Olive, in contrast, finds a way to merge aesthetics with politics, finding an aesthetic sensibility that is also moral and, concerned with the morality of her society, is furthermore deeply political. If we are



46

47

meant to see Verena’s speeches as political utterances, they are no less artistic performances. Olive thinks of their collaboration as a charmed combination of history, logic, statistics, and music, the “partnership of their two minds” making “an organic whole.” While Olive embodies historical understanding, she “flash[es]” this “divine idea” to Verena “like a jewel in an uncovered case,” and Verena “kindle[s], flame[s] up, [takes] the words from her friend’s less persuasive lips, resolve[s] herself into a magical voice, bec[omes] again the pure young sibyl. Then Olive perceived how fatally, without Verena’s tender notes, her crusade would lack sweetness, what the Catholics call unction; and, on the other hand, how weak Verena would be on the statistical and logical side if she herself should not bring up the rear” (169–70). The dryness of political speech devoid of music and feeling is represented in Mrs. Farrinder, who “viewed with suspicion certain romantic, aesthetic elements which Olive and Verena seemed to be trying to introduce” into the women’s movement. “They insisted so much, for instance, on the historic unhappiness of women; but Mrs. Farrinder didn’t appear to care anything for that, or indeed to know much about history at all. She seemed to begin just today, and she demanded their rights for them whether they were unhappy or not” (175).

Historical Thoughts and Ideas Mrs. Farrinder’s impersonal, ahistorical, antisentimental, and peremptory political discourse highlights another element of this political scene that, when expressed dogmatically, is just as narrow as the narrowest bourgeois embrace of culture, but when expressed and experienced personally, seems as necessary to the moral life of this novel as do other thoughts and feelings. I mean, of course, the sense of history, which Mrs. Farrinder dismisses with contempt but which animates Olive’s political passion and provides “unction” to Verena’s speeches. Olive’s historical sense derives from her own fragile character. What William James said of philosophical outlooks is equally true of historical outlooks: “temperament really gives [these outlooks] . . . a stronger bias than any . . . more strictly objective premises” (Pragmatism 8). When Verena points to her friend’s “fearful power of suffering” (289), she identifies the quality that most strongly determines Olive’s historical sensibility. Temperamentally fragile, with a nature “like a skiff in a stormy sea” (40), Olive regards history primarily as a series of cruelties to defenseless women; she looks on world history through the eyes of her defeated and wronged sisters. Olive may be “morbid,” as Basil discovers (41), but she feels these things deeply, and as





the effect of authentic feelings, her historical sense is superior to an ideological view of history. Because Olive’s feelings about history happen to conform to her ideas about political and social injustice, they do not trouble her as her aesthetic feelings do. But we see a difficult contradiction when Verena tries to share Olive’s ideas about history without also sharing her feelings. Verena, that is, does not share Olive’s susceptibility to pain, so her complaints about the wrongs of women fail to ignite her in the way they ignite Olive. During the winter they spend reading history together, Verena and Olive find “a source of fortifying emotion” in the wonderful insight they had obtained into the history of feminine anguish. They perused that chapter perpetually and zealously, and they derived from it the purest part of their mission. Olive had pored over it so long, so earnestly, that she was now in complete possession of the subject; it was the one thing in her life which she felt she had really mastered. . . . All the bullied wives, the stricken mothers, the dishonoured, deserted maidens who have lived on the earth and longed to leave it, passed and repassed before her eyes, and the interminable dim procession seemed to stretch out a myriad hands to her. She sat with them at their trembling vigils, listened for the tread, the voice, at which they grew pale and sick, walked with them by the dark waters that offered to wash away misery and shame, took with them, even, when the vision grew intense, the last shuddering leap. (191)

Verena tries to see and feel history as Olive does, but even when the narrator describes Verena as “responsive,” there is evidence that her response falls far short of Olive’s: Olive poured forth these views to her listening and responsive friend; she presented them again and again, and there was no light in which they did not seem to palpitate with truth. Verena was immensely wrought upon; a subtle fire passed into her; she was not so hungry for revenge as Olive, but at the last, before they went to Europe (I shall take no place to describe the manner in which she threw herself into that project), she quite agreed with her companion that after so many ages of wrong (it would also be after the European journey) men must take their turn, men must pay! (192)

It is difficult to read that “subtle fire” except ironically. When we consider not only the narrator’s dry asides about Verena’s interest in her upcoming European journey, but also Verena’s own formulation of the deeper historical truths she has learned from Olive—“men must



48

49

pay!”—, we must doubt whether Verena really does share the fire of Olive’s historical sense or has only mastered some catchphrase that imperfectly conveys its theme. While Olive’s sense of history takes the form of a moving panorama, Verena can only offer up a petty and childish demand for retribution. Because Verena’s temperament is nothing like Olive’s—as Olive tells her friend, “You were not made to suffer” (289)—the younger woman’s historical sense is much different and, in spite of Olive’s hopeful and infatuated vision, Verena really does fail to kindle in the presence of Olive’s influence. She studies history with her mentor, but even after long and studious hours together she has difficulty feeling the truths that she learns to master intellectually. When Olive assures her that she feels history “as a deep, unforgettable wrong . . . as one feels a stain that is on one’s honour,” Verena compares her own relative unresponsiveness: “Do you know, Olive, I sometimes wonder whether, if it wasn’t for you, I should feel it so very much!” (168). Olive accepts this confession as evidence of “the closeness and sanctity of our union,” but perhaps James’ readers should see it as troubling evidence that Olive is applying ideological pressure that Verena feel the world according to an idea that is alien to the younger woman’s more natural thoughts and feelings. We see the form of ideology rising up as the women bend over their history books and Olive tries to inspire Verena with her view of history: There were some nights of deep snowfall, when Charles Street was white and muffled and the door-bell foredoomed to silence, which seemed little islands of lamplight, of enlarged and intensified vision. They read a great deal of history together, and read it ever with the same thought—that of finding confirmation in it for this idea that their sex had suffered inexpressibly, and that at any moment in the course of human affairs the state of the world would have been so much less horrible (history seemed to them in every way horrible) if women had been able to press down the scale. Verena was full of suggestions which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the fact that a good many women in the past had been intrusted with power and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens, the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private misdemeanors of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very satisfactorily classified. If the influence of women in the past accounted for every act of virtue that men had happened to achieve, it only made the matter balance properly that the influence of men should explain the casual irregularities of the other sex. (185–86)





Olive is not wrong to see history as a repetition of suffering enacted upon women by men; nor is Verena wrong not to see it in this light. The difficulty is that Olive, failing to inspire Verena with her own thoughts and feelings, turns to ideology. To draw upon Eliot’s distinction, Olive fails to insist that Verena think with her feelings; instead, she corrupts Verena’s feelings with ideas. The extent of this corruption is evident in the scene where Verena takes Basil on a tour of Harvard. Verena instinctively admires the buildings at Harvard, telling her guest, “Oh yes, you ought to see them—they have improved so much of late. The inner life, of course, is the greatest interest, but there is some fine architecture, if you are not familiar with Europe” (238). At first it would appear that Verena shares her visitor’s appreciation for the college campus, not simply because she insists that the architecture is “fine” and worth a visit, but because she has served as tour guide for other appreciative guests eager to see the university: Verena Tarrant knew her way round, as she said to her companion; it was not the first time she had taken an admiring visitor to see the local monuments. Basil Ransom, walking with her from point to point, admired them all, and thought several of them exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular structures of old red brick especially gratified his eye; the afternoon sun was yellow on their homely faces; their windows showed a peep of flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains; they wore an expression of scholastic quietude, and exhaled for the young Mississippian a tradition, and antiquity. “This is the place where I ought to have been,” he said to his charming guide. (243)

Verena’s ideological reaction might seem aimed to thwart Ransom’s deep appreciation; she all but dismisses Harvard as a “place where ancient prejudices are garnered up” (243–44). But her attempt to impose an antagonistic idea onto the scene is both halfhearted and ineffectual, because it is immediately overwhelmed by the narrator’s appreciation for the scene, a response that in turn gives way to Ransom’s equally awed but much more personal response. Here they are, for instance, in the Harvard library, which the narrator introduces to readers as if he shares equally in Basil’s appreciation: This edifice, a diminished copy of the chapel of King’s College, at the greater Cambridge, is a rich and impressive institution; and as he stood there, in the bright, heated stillness, which seemed suffused with the odour of old print and old bindings, and looked up into the high, light vaults that hung over quiet book-laden galleries, alcoves and tables,



50

51

and glazed cases where rarer treasures gleamed more vaguely, over busts of benefactors and portraits of worthies, bowed heads of working students and the gentle creak of passing messengers—as he took possession, in a comprehensive glance, of the wealth and wisdom of the place, he felt more than ever the soreness of an opportunity missed; but he abstained from expressing it (it was too deep for that). (244)

Basil’s reaction to the buildings of Harvard is deeply personal even though they were not built expressly to provoke that particular personal response. The building that James foregrounds in this scene is a building that was constructed especially for the sake of provoking and preserving personal and national memories about the war in which Ransom fought. Memorial Hall, built to honor Harvard’s Union dead, invites at first an aesthetic response from Basil—he thinks it “the finest piece of architecture he had ever seen” (245)—but also a personal one, as he knows “what memories it enshrined, and the worst that he should have to suffer there” (245). Of course, as a former Confederate soldier who has “surrendered the remnants of his patrimony to his mother and sisters” and migrated north with “a gnawing hunger in his heart” (43), Basil’s response will be inevitably personal and emotional. But it is hardly unorthodox, and James’ narrator apparently shares not only Basil’s esteem for the architectural beauty of Memorial Hall, but also his deep susceptibility to the feelings enshrined there: The Memorial Hall of Harvard consists of three main divisions: one of them a theatre, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim, and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War. Ransom and his companion wandered from one part of the building to another, and stayed their steps at several impressive points; but they lingered longest in the presence of the white, ranged tablets, each of which, in its proud, sad clearness, is inscribed with the name of a student-soldier. The effect of the place is singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honour, it speaks of sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of them had fallen; this simple idea hovers before the visitor and makes him read with tenderness each name and place—names often without other history, and forgotten Southern battles. For Ransom these things were not a challenge nor a taunt; they touched him with respect, with the sentiment of beauty. He was capable of being




52


If the narrator insists on the impossibility of visiting this site “without a lifting of the heart,” what are we to make of Verena’s hostile remarks about the building and its sinful aims? Though she admires its noble architecture, she rejects its historical impulse. “It is very beautiful−” she tells Basil, “but I think it is very dreadful! . . . It’s a real sin to put up such a building, just to glorify a lot of bloodshed. If it wasn’t so majestic, I would have it pulled down.” Ransom chortles at her “delightful feminine logic!” and predicts that “when women have the conduct of affairs, [if] they fight as well as they reason, surely for them too we shall have to set up memorials.” Verena, for her part, is confident that women “would reason so well they would have no need to fight—they would usher in the reign of peace.” Once again, the important difference here is not the content of the historical sense, whether it arouses pleasure or displeasure. For James, the authenticity of feelings is measured not in the degree to which they resemble some proper response, but in the emotional content of those feelings, measured in Pater’s unit of the “single sharp impression” (188). If we assess their responses by the depth of feeling, Basil Ransom’s historical sense as he wanders through Memorial Hall is every bit as authentic as Olive’s as she pores over her historical texts. Verena, in contrast, can only repeat the same platitudes she has learned from Olive about the superior moral status of women, and these platitudes prevent her from responding freely to the power of Memorial Hall, though she recognizes its beauty. Experiencing Memorial Hall in the light of his thoughts and feelings, Basil needs more time to absorb his impressions; he leaves Verena briefly because “he wished to take another look at the inscribed tablets, and read again the names of the various engagements, at several of which he had been present” (246).

Political Thoughts and Ideas When we turn from the novel’s treatment of history to its regard for politics, we might expect to see nothing but rigid ideology if we believe that James held politics in contempt. Readers of The Bostonians have persisted in taking James’ satire of political movements for his



a generous foeman, and he forgot, now, the whole question of sides and parties; the simple emotion of the old fighting-time came back to him, and the monument around him seemed an embodiment of that memory; it arched over friends as well as enemies, the victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph. (245–46)

53

rejection of all political thought.9 But Eliot’s contempt for “the political idea” implies the possibility of its opposite, political thought or feeling, and for all the novel’s episodes of political ideology, James offers us other examples of politics taking just as central a role as history and culture in the moral and experiential lives of his characters. Indeed, the novel shows us the vitality of political thought through the vision of its most earnest character, Olive Chancellor. Leslie Petty has recently illuminated the significance of James’ novel for feminist reform communities of the late nineteenth century: the novel demonstrates the importance of a “personal” politics, an activism that “grows out of . . . individual experiences and affective relationships” (171). In spite of our inclination to see James’ political novels as hostile to political thought, his insight was shared by some of the feminist reform communities that were most active in his day. Petty makes a persuasive case that James understood the value of personal affections to political activity, and though she goes further than I would, claiming that both of James’ political heroines neglect the importance of the personal—a point I will discuss in the following pages—she is right to underscore the failure of a strictly abstract or ideological politics. We have seen Olive’s impatience with the impersonal way that Verena’s friends and associates speak about the young woman’s political speech, a form of expressiveness that strikes Olive as charming and entirely idiosyncratic. Still, for all of her Jamesian impatience with abstraction, Olive also at times falls into ways of thinking and speaking that seem more abstract than personal. She succumbs immediately to Verena’s charm in part because of an idea that has long governed her life: “she had long been preoccupied with the romance of the people. She had an immense desire to know intimately some very poor girl” (62). How can we tell when Olive is animated by thought and feeling rather than by ideas, especially when her expressions sometimes resemble familiar political ideas? “Romance of the people” seems an abstraction, an idea that implicitly elevates the poor over people of other classes. When Olive asks Basil Ransom whether he “care[s] for human progress” (49) or “believe[s] . . . in the coming of a better day—in its being possible to do something for the human race” (52), her use of familiar expressions might cause us to doubt her sincerity. Is her viewpoint, to quote Eliot again, “untouched by the parasite idea” (46)? Petty argues that Olive is not untouched, that her “flaw,” like Verena’s, originates from “a belief in the impersonal nature of





feminist ideals” (172). I want to explore Olive’s political experience in the same way that we have examined cultural and historical experience in this novel, to see its ideological and non-ideological incarnations. Taking Pater’s measure again, we can only know the value of a viewpoint—its freedom from ideology—if we see it from within and locate (or fail to locate) the “inward world of thought and feeling” (187) that generates it. Let us see what happens when Olive observes the sacred cause that she has embraced. Mrs. Farrinder has just invited Olive to contribute money to the women’s movement. We have already seen how abstractly Mrs. Farrinder regards the movement, and her impersonal account of the cause is unlikely to rise above the “parasite idea.” But Olive’s earnest imagination translates Mrs. Farrinder’s idea into her own sensations and thoughts, and as it does so it transforms the tawdry setting and the movement itself into something almost transcendent: The barren, gas-lighted room grew richer and richer to her earnest eyes; it seemed to expand, to open itself to the great life of humanity. The serious, tired people, in their bonnets and overcoats, began to glow like a company of heroes. Yes, she would do something, Olive Chancellor said to herself; she would do something to brighten the darkness of that dreadful image that was always before her, and against which it seemed to her at times that she had been born to lead a crusade—the image of the unhappiness of women. The unhappiness of women! The voice of their silent suffering was always in her ears, the ocean of tears that they had shed from the beginning of time seemed to pour through her own eyes. Ages of oppression had rolled over them; uncounted millions had lived only to be tortured, to be crucified. They were her sisters, they were her own, and the day of their delivery had dawned. This was the only sacred cause; this was the great, the just revolution. (64)

A similar transformation takes place in the figure of Miss Birdseye, one particular emissary of the sacred cause. In the narrator’s more objective view, Miss Birdseye appears as a “poor little humanitary hack” (64). We know that the older woman’s viewpoint is “infested” (Eliot’s phrase again) with ideas, and James rarely gives us direct access to her mind except to show us how deluded she really is.10 But Miss Birdseye assumes a very different shape—not at all a shape conforming to any idea—through Olive’s eyes, charmed by her own intense imagination. Olive is thinking about how she might best serve the cause, and as she does so she saw the matter through a kind of sunrise-mist of emotion which made danger as rosy as success. When Miss Birdseye approached, it



54

55

transfigured her familiar, her comical shape, and made the poor little humanitary hack seem already a martyr. Olive Chancellor looked about her with love, remembered that she had never, in her long, unrewarded, weary life, had a thought or an impulse for herself. She had been consumed by the passion of sympathy; it had crumpled her into as many creases as an old glazed, distended glove. She had been laughed at, but she never knew it; she was treated as a bore, but she never cared. She had nothing in the world but the clothes on her back, and when she should go down into the grave she would leave nothing behind her but her grotesque, undistinguished, pathetic little name. And yet people said that women were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested! (64–65)

The point here is not the accuracy of Olive’s view but rather its sincerity, the “exquisite passion” with which she experiences it, the “pulses,” as Pater said, “of a variegated, dramatic life” (189, 188). James wants us to care about how Olive experiences her friend Miss Birdseye, even if his narrator has a startlingly different view. The depth of her feeling is apparent when we contrast it with some of her cousin’s more ideological responses. Basil Ransom is quick to arrive at conclusions, and because he is governed by firmly-held ideas (that, for instance, “the simplest division it is possible to make of the human race is into the people who take things hard and the people who take them easy,” 41), he is an inadequate center of consciousness; too often the wiser, more intuitive narrator must supplement Basil’s conclusions. Here is a moment when Basil, attempting to assess his newfound cousin, categorizes Olive as “visibly morbid; it was plain as day that she was morbid” (41). But the narrator must step in to override Basil’s conclusion: Poor Ransom announced this fact to himself as if he had made a great discovery; but in reality he had never been so “Boeotian” as at that moment. It proved nothing of any importance, with regard to Miss Chancellor, to say that she was morbid; any sufficient account of her would lie very much to the rear of that. Why was she morbid, and why was her morbidness typical? Ransom might have exulted if he had gone back far enough to explain that mystery. (41)

Basil, himself given to ideological thought, is unable except on rare occasions to break through those ideas and intuit something strange or rare about another character. When he learns from Adeline Luna (bound by her own ideological views) that Olive has a “mania for reform” (49), he concludes that “she would never understand





him” (49), even though, as we shall see, she is capable of perceiving something he is too proud to disclose. Olive, that is, has an imagination that extends even to possible enemies, and James’ narrator relies on her imagination to offer insight into characters rather than taking a more direct approach. The following passage begins with an account of Olive’s conscience, but it moves almost imperceptibly into Basil’s emotional life: It was her nature to look out for duties, to appeal to her conscience for tasks. This attentive organ, earnestly consulted, had represented to her that [Basil] was an offshoot of the old slave-holding oligarchy which, within her own vivid remembrance, had plunged the country into blood and tears, and that, as associated with such abominations, he was not a worthy object of patronage for a person whose two brothers—her only ones—had given up life for the Northern cause. It reminded her, however, on the other hand, that he too had been much bereaved, and, moreover, that he had fought and offered his own life, even if it had not been taken . . . Basil Ransom had lived, but she knew he had lived to see bitter hours. His family was ruined; they had lost their slaves, their property, their friends and relations, their home; had tasted of all the cruelty of defeat. He had tried for a while to carry on the plantation himself, but he had a millstone of debt round his neck, and he longed for some work which would transport him to the haunts of men. The State of Mississippi seemed to him the state of despair; so he surrendered the remnants of his patrimony to his mother and sisters, and, at nearly thirty years of age, alighted for the first time in New York, in the costume of his province, with fifty dollars in his pocket and a gnawing hunger in his heart. (42–43)

Here Olive is able to imagine and narrate not only the bare facts of Basil’s postwar existence, but also the more subtle emotional weight of his experiences. As his political enemy (in both the abolition and women’s movements), she might be expected to regard his feelings from a hostile vantage point, but her compassion allows James’ narrator to suspend his own perspective while extending the task of narration to Olive’s intuitions. In spite of Olive’s uncanny nature and her sometimes fanatical devotion to her political cause, then, she seems the closest thing in this novel to James’ ideal because she has the least ideological viewpoint. Her point of view offers the center of consciousness so important to James’ novels of this period. Olive’s emotional depth is registered not only in these moments of narration but also by Verena, who thinks herself a serious proponent of feminism but cannot rise to Olive’s level of passion. In describing Olive to her mother, Verena explains, “She just quivers when



56

57

she describes what our sex has been through. It’s so interesting to me to hear what I have always felt. . . . she’s the most emotional woman I have met, up to now. She wants to know how I can speak the way I do unless I feel; and of course I tell her that I do feel, so far as I realize. She seems to be realizing all the time; I never saw any one that took so little rest” (119). In qualifying her own response—“so far as I realize”—Verena points to the central distinction between Olive and herself: Verena’s words are expressions of ideas, not of “realized” feelings.11 Olive, of course, misreads the emotional depth of Verena’s expressions, and again we can attribute her mistake to an excess of feeling on her own part. Olive wants to know the origins of Verena’s strong feelings about the suffering of women, because it does not occur to her that such apparently inspired words can be empty of meaning. Readers, less infatuated than Olive, might see evidence of ideology in Verena’s unsatisfactory explanation; Verena could give very little account of herself. This was very visible when Olive asked her where she had got her “intense realization” of the suffering of women; for her address at Miss Birdseye’s showed that she, too (like Olive herself), had had that vision in the watches of the night. Verena thought a moment, as if to understand what her companion referred to, and then she inquired, always smiling, where Joan of Arc had got her idea of the suffering of France. This was so prettily said that Olive could scarcely keep from kissing her; she looked at the moment as if, like Joan, she might have had visits from saints. Olive, of course, remembered afterwards that it had not literally answered the question; and she also reflected on something that made an answer seem more difficult—the fact that the girl had grown up among lady-doctors, lady-mediums, lady-editors, lady-preachers, lady-healers, women who, having rescued themselves from a passive existence, could illustrate only partially the misery of the sex at large. (105–6)

Olive’s curiosity about the origins of Verena’s political convictions indicates her implicit belief that an authentic politics must originate in the sensations of experience, thought, and feeling rather than indoctrination. At her most insecure moments she forgets this insight—or deliberately ignores it—in the hope that she can work upon Verena’s political feelings with assiduous study and insistence. Subjecting Verena to repeated lessons, she makes some headway but cannot create a single-minded pupil in her own sober image. Verena persists in being interested in Olive’s frivolous but fashionable sister, Adeline Luna, and Olive must compete for Verena’s attention, taking





up her lessons only “after Adeline had left them—the subject, of course, which was always the same, the subject of what they should do together for their suffering sex. It was not that Verena was not interested in that—gracious, no; it opened up before her, in those wonderful colloquies with Olive, in the most inspiring way; but her fancy would make a dart to right or left when other game crossed their path, and her companion led her, intellectually, a dance in which her feet—that is, her head—failed her at times for weariness” (126–27). Worrying that Verena’s fancy, her fugitive tastes, threaten her political seriousness, Olive works sternly with her young friend to cultivate the kind of devotion that can resist the lure of romance. She uses a marriage proposal as the occasion for a lesson on political commitment: “He promises you success. What do you call success?” Olive inquired, looking at her friend with a kind of salutary coldness—a suspension of sympathy—with which Verena was now familiar (though she liked it no better than at first), and which made approbation more gracious when approbation came. Verena reflected a moment, and then answered, smiling, but with confidence: “Producing a pressure that shall be irresistible. Causing certain laws to be repealed by Congress and by the State legislatures, and others to be enacted.” She repeated the words as if they had been part of a catechism committed to memory, while Olive saw that this mechanical tone was in the nature of a joke that she could not deny herself; they had had that definition so often before, and Miss Chancellor had had occasion so often to remind her what success really was. (159)

Whether or not James deliberately inverted the meaning of one of Pater’s most famous passages, alert readers who note the verbal echoes here can see how far Olive has lapsed from the nonideological. If “success” for Olive can here be summed up with a formulaic phrase, it takes the very opposite meaning that it does in the “Conclusion” of Pater’s Renaissance, where “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits” (189). Olive’s formula, which even Verena recognizes as indoctrination (however true it may have originally felt to either woman), is a habit of mind that she would like to impress upon Verena, and her willingness to suppress Verena’s fancy in favor of this doctrine is a measure of how desperate she is not to lose her young friend. Surely Olive, herself quickened



58

59

with a political imagination, should understand what would be lost if Verena’s fancy were driven down the narrow road of their political efforts. In her less distracted moments, Olive recognizes the importance of Verena’s freedom, not merely from marriage but from all forms of ideological pressure, including pressure from Olive herself. In a calmer mood, she admits as much to her young friend: “You must be safe, Verena—you must be saved; but your safety must not come from your having tied your hands. It must come from the growth of your perception; from your seeing things, of yourself, sincerely and with conviction, in the light in which I see them; from your feeling that for your work your freedom is essential, and that there is no freedom for you and me save in religiously not doing what you will often be asked to do” (152). Although she finally loses her friend to marriage and to Basil Ransom, Olive’s insight is one that James’ narrative confirms again and again. Leslie Petty has located the source of Verena’s political inadequacy in the absence of an “existential moment” of reflexive subjectivity to shape her political outlook (173). Olive clearly understands this difficulty, for she recognizes “the growth of [Verena’s] perception” as fundamental to her friend’s salvation and success. The implied author, though arguably uninterested in what is required for successful political activism, is clearly concerned as well with Verena’s developing consciousness, which finally becomes the novel’s own focal point as the competition for the young woman’s affections and loyalties intensifies in the final chapters. Basil Ransom has come, unannounced and uninvited, to spend a month on Cape Cod, where Verena and Olive have retreated to prepare for Verena’s great debut lecture and for the imminent death of Miss Birdseye. In the tense weeks of this confrontation, Olive suspends her lessons with Verena, and the action of James’ novel nearly stops as the narrator turns for the first time to Verena’s emotional life. With this first sign of narrative interest in Verena’s thoughts and feelings, the announcement of a point of view in the young woman that cannot be summed up with political platitudes, readers must measure the difference. This change takes place as the narrative turns to and lingers on what Olive does not and cannot know: the transformation in Verena’s thoughts and feelings since her encounter with Basil in New York. Ideas, as we have seen, do not undergo such transformations, but James, who constructed his novel around the triumph of thought and feeling over ideas, places the drama of his novel in the mind. As Eliot noted, “James is dramatic . . . It is in the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and





explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that James is unequalled. Compared with James’, other novelists’ characters seem to be only accidentally in the same book” (45–46). At the beginning of Chapter 38, when James’ narrator leaves Olive behind because her thoughts are not capable of penetrating Verena’s troubled mind, we learn that Verena’s mind has undergone a chemical reaction very similar to what Eliot describes: The change that had taken place in the object of Basil Ransom’s merciless devotion since the episode in New York was, briefly, just this change—that the words he had spoken to her there about her genuine vocation, as distinguished from that hollow and factitious ideal with which her family and her association with Olive Chancellor had saddled her—these words, the most effective and penetrating he had uttered, had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there. She had come at last to believe them, and that was the alteration, the transformation. They had kindled a light in which she saw herself afresh and, strange to say, liked herself better than in the old exaggerated glamour of the lecture-lamps. She could not tell Olive this yet, for it struck at the root of everything, and the dreadful, delightful sensation filled her with a kind of awe at all that it implied and portended. (374)

We have not had such an intimate interior view of Verena before this point, perhaps because her utterances, mostly ideas she has learned from others, are not complicated enough to warrant deeper examination. Her new feelings, constituting true beliefs rather than mere principles, imply and portend much more: not simply an impending break with Olive, but a new self-assessment, as Verena discovers a new self whom she likes “better” than in the earlier, “exaggerated” contexts of her ideological life. The difference is that the things she believes now share the passion, the pulsation, that she had once felt for things and places—city streets or parks, for example—that had no relationship to her principles. As the declared enemy of her political cause, Basil Ransom threatens her mission in a way that the streets of New York or Boston never could, and unlike Olive, who generally chooses her ideology over her feelings when they conflict, Verena is choosing for her passion: [Y]es, decidedly, by this time she must admit it to herself—she meditated [treachery]. It was simply that the truth had changed sides; that radiant image began to look at her from Basil Ransom’s expressive eyes. She loved, she was in love—she felt it in every throb of her being. Instead of being constituted by nature for entertaining



60

61

that sentiment in an exceptionally small degree (which had been the implication of her whole crusade, the warrant for her offer of old to Olive to renounce), she was framed, apparently, to allow it the largest range, the highest intensity. It was always a passion, in fact; but now the object was other. Formerly she had been convinced that the fire of her spirit was a kind of double flame, one half of which was responsive friendship for a most extraordinary person, and the other pity for the sufferings of women in general. Verena gazed aghast at the colourless dust into which, in three short months, . . . such a conviction as that could crumble; she felt it must be a magical touch that could bring about such a cataclysm. (374–75)

It would be easy to claim—as many of James’ readers have done—that the deepening of Verena’s consciousness, taking place as her political loyalties wane, indicates James’ hostility to politics and his clear preference for psychology. But such a reading is tenable only if we assume that politics and psychology are necessarily at odds, that politics can only be ideological and never impassioned. As Leslie Petty has shown, a successful politics—one that would have appealed to James as well as to his feminist contemporaries—“must be suffused with sincere passion” and be relevant to actual experience (171). It is not so strange that this insight, shared by feminists as well as aesthetes, would strike a responsive chord in James as well. The Bostonians indicates James’ recognition that politics, like culture and history, could be vital only by rising above the ideological.







4

Hyacinth Robinson’s Demora liz ation

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. . . . The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. —Walter Pater, The Renaissance (1868)

W

e have been considering T. S. Eliot’s famous claim that Henry James was exempt from the assault of ideas. Turning now to one particular form that ideas took in James’ day, I want to reflect on G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of history and the influence it had on James’ developing response to ideological thought. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, the “fundamental idea”1, or what he elsewhere called “World Spirit,” guides the world toward a rational outcome. William James chose Hegel for detailed discussion in A Pluralistic Universe, where he noted Hegel’s thoroughgoing rationalism: “The only whole by which all contradictions are reconciled is for him the absolute whole of wholes, the all-inclusive reason to which Hegel himself gave the name of the absolute Idea . . .” (98). For Hegel, individual passions were only the “tools” (PH 28) that the fundamental Idea



Chapter 2


used to achieve its end goal, perfect freedom. Henry James’ father, an auxiliary member of the St. Louis Hegelians,2 introduced his son to the idea of an overriding truth to which particular consciousnesses must always be subordinated.3 And of course Hegel’s philosophy—a strong influence on Marx—was much in the air among the European revolutionaries who captured James’ attention in 1885 as he was writing The Princess Casamassima. This novel of historical change, one of James’ most political works, is set against the backdrop of the industrial, social, and political revolutions spreading through Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, revolutions that owed much of their impetus to Hegel and Marx.4 Rapid industrialization throughout Europe had placed the question of rewarding human labor at the center of these revolutions. Hegel acknowledged “the infinite right of the subjective individual, to satisfy himself in his activity and work” (PH 25). Marx elaborated, noting that whereas “the animal produces only what is immediately necessary for itself or its young,” the human being “produces free of physical need and only genuinely so in freedom from such need” (EPM 64). Though human labor is necessary in order to provide for the survival of the laborer and his family, more than mere survival is involved in truly human production, where the laborer “beget[s] life” (63) by engaging in “free conscious activity” (63), creating according to standards of his own choosing, including perhaps the standard of beauty. This “free spontaneous activity,” Marx argued, defines human beings and distinguishes them from animals. But the factory system, by controlling the conditions of labor and specifying the product to be made, alienates the laborer from his creation and ultimately from his very humanity. The factory worker “does not affirm himself in his work but denies himself, feels miserable and unhappy, develops no free physical and mental energy but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind” (61–62). The work that was available to the working classes in industrialized Europe not only failed to satisfy the worker but increasingly failed even to provide the means of his survival, “alienat[ing]” him, in Marx’s words, “from human nature” (64). James’ hero, Hyacinth Robinson, is “one of the disinherited” (131), the illegitimate son of a French dressmaker and the English aristocrat who abandoned her. He traces his deeply conflicting feelings—his “impulses toward social criticism” warring against his attachment to “many things in the world as it was constituted”—to the blood of his parents, his “passionate, plebeian mother” and his “long-descended, super-civilised sire” (479). His mother, herself the child of a revolutionary who was martyred “in the blood-stained streets of Paris” (167),



64

65

murdered her faithless lover and was imprisoned for life. Hyacinth saw her only once, as a small child at his mother’s deathbed surrounded by the “unspeakable, irremediable misery” of Millbank Prison (127). If Hyacinth inherits his revolutionary impulses from his distraught, murderous mother, he also learns them from the economic conditions he observes, particularly the tenuous hold of middle-class artisans in this industrializing world. His foster mother, a “humble dressmaker” who had known his mother years before (53), fancies herself a source of “fashionable” clothes, as the “attractive blazonry” on her shopsign proclaims (74). But in truth her shop is but a room in a “small black-faced house,” miles from the fashionable district of London (74), a cramped and dingy place that smells “of poverty and failure” (93). Though Miss Pynsent’s business had once been brisk enough to allow her to hire assistants (“she had even, once, for a few months, had a ‘forewoman,’” 98), throughout most of Hyacinth’s childhood and later years she has had to take lodgers and even then “had a strain to make two ends meet” (74). Hyacinth’s friend Millicent, who grew up in the neighborhood but escaped into a more secure middle-class livelihood working at “a great haberdasher’s” near Buckingham Palace (96), feels only contempt for the dressmaker who “knew so little what was to be got out of London” and who failed so obviously to use “the resources of the metropolis” (91). But Millicent, who works in the jacket and mantel department of a large establishment, doesn’t understand the economic pressure inflicted by department stores and other corporations on the lone artisan. Miss Pynsent’s “shrunken industry” is partly the result of her failing health (97) but partly the effect of competition with these more modern and industrialized clothing makers who can afford to mass-produce garments by offering low wages for the work. While James’ novel does not focus its attention on the factory workers who suffer under the system that Marx called wageslavery, we do see in some detail the effect of factories on the skilled tradespeople of the shrinking middle class. Miss Pynsent’s dressmaking concern has suffered the decline that Marx observed in nearly all small businesses: The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. (165)



H y a c i n t h R o b i n s o n ’s D e m o r a l i z at i o n


As Hyacinth looks back on his aged guardian’s life, he is struck by the difficult economic conditions under which Pinnie has struggled. Looking around at her faded and crowded house as the woman is dying in an upstairs room, Hyacinth confronts the meaning of his aunt’s life: her professional obsolescence, her lifelong torment and great toil, “her limited, stinted life, the patient, humdrum effort of her needle and scissors, which had ended only in a show-room where there was nothing to show and a pensive reference to the cut of sleeves no longer worn” (358). A dressmaker of the old-fashioned cottage industry type, Pinnie has been squeezed out by the popular and increasingly dominant department stores and by the factories that sustain them. Hyacinth feels acutely the pain of his aging guardian, but he should worry about his own economic future as well. Miss Pynsent has taken great care not to set him up in a “vulgar ‘business,’” steering him instead toward the “charming handicraft” of bookbinding, which her neighbor and counselor considers “the most delightful of the mechanical arts” (119). Under the tutelage of a master bookbinder, Hyacinth acquires not only a professional training but also an “education of the taste,” instruction in “the finest discriminations, in the perception of beauty and the hatred of ugliness” (157). Appealing as the work may be to Hyacinth, however, such an apprenticeship at his particular historical moment can only be a cruelty since, as Margaret Scanlan points out, “by 1885 bookbinding was itself an anachronism” (385). The decade in which James’ novel was published reshaped the bookmaking industry as thoroughly as it affected garment manufacturing. Michael Anesko notes that “the transformation of the industry was so rapid and far-reaching that by the late 1880s there was not a single process in the traditional sequence of operations in hand binding that could not be done by machine” (112). In 1879 William Morris expressed the fear that in many places, the popular art of handicrafts was dead, “and the commerce of modern civilization has slain it” (37). James does not provide a character like Morris to articulate the connection between the preservation of beauty and resistance to capitalist excess, but in choosing bookbinding as Hyacinth’s profession, he seems to want to remind us of Morris, who as early as 1856 was illuminating manuscripts and trying to emulate the great printers of medieval days (Dunlap). When Hyacinth complains about the “insipid productions of an age which has lost the sense of quality” (163), he is worrying primarily about the blow to cultural taste that inevitably results from mass-produced goods. But he should worry, as well, about the economic wellbeing of artisans like himself, whose



66

67

products cannot compete with the merchandise supplied by factories. Although Hyacinth cannot forge a logical link between the aesthetic, the economic, and the political, James himself was not ignorant of these connections. As we shall see, The Princess Casamassima is deeply committed to political and aesthetic thought—as distinct from ideas—and the shadowy presence in the novel of William Morris, who ruminated on these same matters, will help us to evaluate the extent to which the political thoughts in this novel were kept free from the framework of an ideology.

Hyacinth’s Semialienated Labor The tragedy of industrialization and the impending extinction of trades are particularly evident in a character like Hyacinth, who not only learns to make a modest living as an artisan in the “precious tradition” of bookbinding (120) but also exhibits to a profound degree the ability to take satisfaction in his craft. He learns his trade from Eustache Poupin, an exiled Frenchman who teaches the young man the “religion of conscientious craftsmanship” (124) along with the religion of socialism. Though the job will never allow Hyacinth to live as his aristocratic father had lived, it does allow him to express his discriminating taste, the sole legacy of his dead father. In spite of the squalid atmosphere in the bookbindery, Hyacinth can escape into his work and “disengage a little beauty” from his surroundings (271). Though Marx would have seen Hyacinth as one of the relatively fortunate working poor—one who is allowed a certain degree of latitude in the work he undertakes, making his own choices about technical representation—still the bookbinder’s satisfaction is limited. Although he enjoys modest control over the process of his own invention (and makes bindings in his leisure time to offer as gifts to his wealthy friends), his work is often a torment to him because he lacks the means to buy (or even to read) the books he binds. “He knew the exasperation of having volumes in his hands, for external treatment, which he couldn’t take home at night, having tried that system, surreptitiously, during his first weeks at Mr. Crookenden’s and come very near losing his place in consequence” (137). Scanlan mentions the contradiction that Hyacinth must borrow books from his aristocratic friends even while “reproduc[ing] manuscript conditions for the poems of Tennyson” (386); the contradiction is nothing that Marx himself had not observed when he noted that factory workers are not afforded the luxury of buying their own products.5 While Hyacinth takes substantial satisfaction in creating products of his own





invention, he is unable to find complete contentment in his work. Tracing his taste and discrimination to his aristocratic blood, he sees himself doomed to “look at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window” (337). Our nearly exclusive lens on the world of working-class London in James’ novel, Hyacinth offers readers a perspective on late nineteenthcentury urban life that is deeply sympathetic to the motives that fueled socialism. As Julian Markels has shown, the novel is “sharply specific” in its documentation of the suffering masses (43), and such documentation contributes to a “respect for socialism” that runs throughout the novel (38). The novel even accepts without irony, as James Seaton argues, the beliefs of socialism: the wealth of the rich is based on the misery of the poor. The wealthy are engaged in a conspiracy to keep the good things of the world for themselves and to prevent the poor from getting them. The rich, therefore, are one and all morally responsible for the suffering of the poor. No punishment, therefore, could be more than the rich deserve. And in the world of The Princess Casamassima such views seem plausible enough. (17)

James gives the realistic elements of this novel their most important task in detailing the hardships of the working poor, particularly during the “terribly hard” winter when Hyacinth draws closest to the socialist movement.6 In all of these details the novelist seems to defend the feelings and doctrines of socialism. Given that apparent sympathy, what are we to make of the “insurmountable limitations” to the vision of James’ revolutionaries (Seaton 17)? If we accept Seaton’s characterization, we should seek the reasons not in what some critics call James’ own “ignorance” about revolutionary activity (Lucas 208). As Lionel Trilling pointed out long ago in an essay that has not yet been surpassed, “there is not a political event” in James’ novel, “not a detail of oath or mystery or danger, which is not confirmed by multitudinous records” (157).7 In the following pages I will argue that the limitations of James’ revolutionaries are not the limitations of a Marxist sensibility but rather of a view of world history that very closely resembles G. W. F. Hegel’s view. John Carlos Rowe argues persuasively that James’ novel “indict[s] an anarchism that would employ its terrorism solely for the sake of preserving the illusion of its revolutionary solidarity,” which he identifies as “ideological mystification” (186). Rowe’s “illusion” is very like the Hegelian idea, which James’ novel reveals as an empty if



68

69

dangerous abstraction, one that is perfectly distinct from the Marxist details about class relations that lend the novel its realistic poignancy. The Marxist view of history that informs James’ depictions of the grim social conditions endured by Hyacinth and his companions also preserves a deep respect for the act of human creation, a respect that sometimes collides with the revolutionary sentiments expressed by Hyacinth’s most radical associates. To understand the full effects of his conflict, we should consider the very different outlook that drives James’ most radical characters. Unlike Hyacinth, these characters are motivated by an ideological outlook very like Hegel’s own.8

James’ Hegelian World History Through Hyacinth’s friendship with Eustache Poupin, the young bookbinder is drawn toward a group of revolutionaries who cherish a Hegelian view of world history. We might almost say that their view is Marxist, for it aims at the bourgeoisie and promises salvation to the poor. But the ideas of these revolutionaries lack not only Marx’s regard for human aesthetic productions but also the specificity of his economic and political theory. In their abstractness, meanwhile, they resemble Hegel’s world history.9 Even the revolutionaries themselves are conscious of this flaw in their efforts; Schinkel accuses his associates at “The Sun and Moon” of doing nothing more than “exchanging abstract ideas, however valuable, with . . . friends in a respectable pot-house” (287).10 For Hegel, human history consists of “an advance from the imperfect to the more perfect” (60). Poupin and his socialist associates share Hegel’s view that world history is moving inexorably toward a more perfect future, a “luminous reality” of “the revendication, the rehabilitation, the rectification” (122), a day in which “accounts” will be “settle[d]” (126). Though Hyacinth sometimes thrills to the words of his friends, he has only the vaguest notion of what this revolution will look like. His reticent friend Paul Muniment gives the impression that he is in close contact with what Hyacinth can only call “the thing itself” (151), and Hyacinth longs for the day when Paul “chooses to exert his influence” so that “the good they strove for in a blind intellectual bog would pass from crude discussion into irresistible reality” (281). In moments like these, Hyacinth accepts Hegel’s contention that most individuals are unconscious of the goals of World Spirit; though their own actions inadvertently advance that goal, “in world history,” Hegel writes, “the outcome of human actions is something other than what the agents aim at and





actually achieve, something other than what they immediately know and will” (30). Only exceptional individuals like Paul, whom Hegel calls “world-historical individuals,” enjoy insight into “the necessary next state of the world” and bring the World Spirit “to consciousness for the rest of us” (PH 33). Though only partly aware of the progress of history and having “no consciousness of the Idea at all” (33), for Hegel these men possess “the insight into what was needed and what was timely” (33) in order to advance history; these world-historical individuals “are those whose aims embody a universal concept of this kind,” a “moving force of the productive Idea” (32), and while they cannot foresee the end-goal of history, they do envision a better future state than can be grasped by most people. Hyacinth does not seem to qualify as one of these world-historical individuals, not least because he cannot clearly see the two sides of the impending revolution, though he quickly masters its vocabulary. He knows that the proletariats are generally referred to as “the people” while the bourgeoisie, seldom named, are “they,” but he has difficulty deciding who falls into each category: He knew that “they,” in their phraseology, was a comprehensive allusion to every one in the world but the people—though who, exactly, in their length and breadth, the people were was less definitely established. He himself was of this sacred body, for which the future was to have such compensations; and so, of course, were the Frenchman and his consort, and so was Pinnie, and so were most of the inhabitants of Lomax Place and the workmen in old Crookenden’s shop. But was old Crookenden himself, who wore an apron rather dirtier than the rest of them and was a master-hand at “forwarding,” but who, on the other side, was the occupant of a villa almost detached, at Putney, with a wife known to have secret aspirations toward a page in buttons? Above all, was Mr Vetch, who earned a weekly wage, and not a large one, with his fiddle, but who had mysterious affinities of another sort, reminiscences of a phase in which he smoked cigars, had a hat-box and used cabs— besides visiting Boulogne? . . . It would make a difference . . . whether he were of the people or not, inasmuch as in the day of the great revenge it would only be the people who should be saved. (123–24)

Hyacinth is troubled about his employer, the master-bookbinder who has accumulated more money than his workers, because Crookenden presents an ambiguous case. But he is more anxious about his neighbor and old friend Mr. Vetch, who has always been kind to him. A Hegelian might argue that Hyacinth’s confusion about revolutionary doctrine is the effect of his imperfect knowledge rather than a defect



70

71

in the doctrine itself.11 But as the examples of Crookenden and Vetch suggest, class status depends on more than the ability to amass capital and exploit the worker; one’s “place in the list of the sacrificial” (360) seems tied in mysterious ways to one’s taste for art and the products of culture. Anastasius Vetch, second violinist in the Bloomsbury Theatre Orchestra, is the “most distinguished friend” of Hyacinth’s Aunt Pinnie, who admires him for his “cleverness and knowledge of the world” and the “purity of his taste in matters of conduct and opinion” (66). Though he earns almost as little as Pinnie herself and he occupies “a single back-room, in a house where she had never seen a window washed” (67)—though indeed he has “worked all [his] days like a knife-grinder” (462), Mr. Vetch nevertheless represents to his impressed neighbor “the glamour of reduced gentility and fallen fortunes” (67). Mr. Vetch, assuring Hyacinth that he is a “Bohemian” rather than a “bourgeois,” gives his young friend little comfort, “for it was by no means definite to [Hyacinth] that Bohemians were also to be saved” (124). The revolutionary rhetoric of his friends does not allow for the kind of human diversity of tastes and occupations that Hyacinth observes in himself and in his acquaintances; while the language of revolution simplifies the world into two clear categories of people, exploiters and exploited, Hyacinth is by no means sure that his own experiences follow these pure alignments. As Henry James’ historically situated creature—a working-class artisan living in London toward the end of the nineteenth century— Hyacinth Robinson clearly sees the historical changes of industrialization and the human effects of these changes. He does not dispute the Marxist complaints of his comrades, and at times he feels them with an even more intense bitterness, a “paralysing melancholy” (163) that eclipses the passion of his more studied socialist friends.12 The content of Hyacinth’s thoughts and observations do not conflict at any point with what his comrades claim to see in the world. He is forever aware that “the flood of democracy was rising over the world; that it would sweep all the traditions of the past before it; [and] that, whatever it might fail to bring, it would at least carry in its bosom a magnificent energy” (478). But if the content of Hyacinth’s feelings and observations remains steady, the moods from which he regards this content do not. At times he anticipates the revolution with the ardor of a Marxist, satisfied that the coming democracy will be heroic, splendid, inspiring; at such moments, “there was joy, exultation, in the thought of surrendering one’s self to the wave of revolt, of floating in the tremendous tide, of feeling one’s self lifted and tossed, carried higher on the





sun-touched crest of billows than one could ever be by a dry, lonely effort of one’s own” (478). In different moods, he suspects the idea of redistribution to be motivated by the basest of passions, the “ulcer of envy—the passion of a party which hung together for the purpose of despoiling another to its advantage” (405), and it sickens him to think he has pledged his life to such an ignoble cause.13 Seeing the inevitable march of human history toward revolution, “Hyacinth regarded this prospect, in different moods, with different kinds of emotion” (478). Unlike his revolutionary friends, Hyacinth cannot look upon the world from the standpoint of some absolute, Hegelian truth; though he acknowledges the inevitability and nearness of the day “when these two mighty forces would come to a death-grapple” (165), he cannot see that struggle from a single point of view. Like Paris itself, which he regards as both “the most brilliant city in the world” and “the most blood-stained” (380), everything that Hyacinth considers he sees in the light of his different moods. Looking at the London sky from the Muniments’ crowded and dingy flat, he considers how it must look from another vantage point: “The sky was the same that, far away in the country, bent over golden fields and purple hills and gardens where nightingales sang; but from this point of view everything that covered the earth was ugly and sordid, and seemed to express, or to represent, the weariness of toil” (216). He will later see that same sky from the Princess’s house in the country, where he finds a “world enchantingly new,” “inexpressibly refreshing to him,” a “world to be revealed to him”; taking his “first steps” in this dew-covered landscape, Hyacinth resembles Adam in Eden, unaware of the necessity of weariness and toil (299). These two landscapes are part of the same land, presided over by the same natural laws, and yet he understands the impossibility of permanently shedding one viewpoint for another. Envying his friend Paul’s “healthy singleness of . . . vision” (446), Hyacinth nevertheless cannot disparage his own multiple viewpoints as illusory: “whatever he saw, he saw (and this was always the case), so many other things beside” (445). Hyacinth’s pluralistic perspective suggests that he will never act as a world-historical individual, since to do so requires regularity of action if not conscious belief in a singular, Hegelian view of the world, a universal outlook that disregards individual points of view. Hyacinth is too inconsistent in his outlook to be able to advance any abstract idea, since he represents the flux of the phenomenal world rather than the permanence of the “real” world.14 But there are moments when he is tempted by the Hegelian view of world history.



72

73

As he draws near the center of revolutionary activity, his initiation into the movement fails to offer him complete insight into the goals or methods of world history or even a clear sense of who must die to advance it. But his experience opens his eyes to the presence of mysterious forces that had previously operated beyond his notice. The “innermost sanctuary” of the movement, he marvels, “is more strange than I can say. Nothing of it appears above the surface; but there is an immense underworld, peopled with a thousand forms of revolutionary passion and devotion. The manner in which it is organized is what astonished me; I knew that, or thought I knew it, in a general way, but the reality was a revelation” (330). Hyacinth has agreed to become an actor in world history, drawing his aim, as Hegel explains, “from a source whose content is hidden and has not yet matured into present existence” (PH 32–33). He does not understand the “inner Spirit that is as yet hidden beneath the surface” (PH 33); he will continue to occupy a relatively unenlightened position on the continuum of world-historical knowledge, where even apparently progressive individuals cannot fully understand the aims of World Spirit. And though Hegel promises that the day will one day come when “we comprehend the rich product of creative Reason that is world history” (18), this day never arrives for Hyacinth. His friend Paul enjoys a more enlightened view of world history; he demonstrates that he understands at least what Hegel calls the “true end-goal of the world” (PH 18) even if he does not know precisely how that end will come about. But in the meaningful matter of Paul’s own role in the revolution, he confesses profound ignorance.“I don’t know what [my job] is,” he says, “but I expect to be instructed” (503). More perfect consciousness of World Spirit belongs to the German exile Hoffendahl, in whom Hyacinth immediately recognizes “the very incarnation of a programme” (328) and “the very genius of a new social order” (332). Inspired by what appears to him “the thing itself,” Hyacinth pledges to sacrifice his life whenever Hoffendahl calls on him to perform some (yet unspecified) revolutionary errand. Hyacinth’s pledge is characterized by “blind obedience” (333) to a leader and a plot that will always remain obscure to him. He meets Hoffendahl only once, and during that brief encounter the revolutionary leader makes Hyacinth “see, . . . feel, . . . [and] do, everything he wanted,” (330). Hoffendahl extracts a promise that Hyacinth should hold himself ready, for the next five years, to do, at a given moment, an act which would in all probability cost him his life. The act




74


The would-be assassin’s role does not involve evaluating the justice of his deed: “whether the individual should deserve it or should not deserve it was not Hyacinth’s affair . . . He shouldn’t judge; he should simply execute” (333–34). In accepting his mission and his ignorance of an overall plan that must be part of his compliance, Hyacinth agrees to serve the Fundamental Idea as an unthinking instrument, confident that “at headquarters they knew what they were about” (334). Even before consenting to his role in the revolution, Hyacinth at times regards himself as only a tool in the inevitable course of world history. In a moment of Hegelian modesty, he claims to be only “one of thousands of men in my class in whom certain ideas are fermenting. There’s nothing original about me at all” (197), and in disparaging his originality he conforms to Hegel’s contention that the moving force of world history is the Fundamental Idea, not individual human actors. We might think at first that James endorses that view, for on the night that Hyacinth gives his fatal pledge to the revolution, James’ narrator allows the young radical to disappear into the mystery of historical events without offering to illuminate his motives or to depict the step he is about to take. Hyacinth has been present at a meeting at the “Sun and Moon,” where discontented laborers regularly meet to discuss social conditions “in a kind of eternal dirty intellectual fog” (281). On this particular occasion, angered by the taunt of a fellow laborer who accuses the assembly of cowardice, Hyacinth announces to the crowd that he is “ready to do anything that will do any good” (294). We see that his words impress Paul Muniment, but that is nearly all we see: the scene ends with Hyacinth “sitting silent” in a moving cab. The cab takes him to a place where a historical event is being plotted, but the novel gives us almost no insight into Hyacinth’s state of mind; if he is about to become an actor in world history, he is singularly without intention or insight. We know what he knows: only that “the cab jogged along murky miles, and by the time it stopped Hyacinth had wholly lost, in the drizzling gloom, a sense of their whereabouts” (296). If James’ narrator endorses a Hegelian view of world history that considers “individuals . . . of slight importance compared to the mass of the human race” (23), he has no reason to provide more information about Hyacinth’s motives



was as yet indefinite, but one might get an idea of it from the penalty involved, which would certainly be capital. The only thing settled was that it was to be done instantly and absolutely, without a question, a hesitation or a scruple, in the manner that should be prescribed, at the moment, from headquarters. (333)

75

or desires. World history, set on a course of inevitable progress, will unfold according to plan by using Hyacinth and these other actors to actualize itself, and the fate of individuals is none of our concern. Hyacinth, only “one of thousands,” as he himself has said, is swallowed up in the indeterminate ending of Book Two. But James, of course, was no Hegelian, and if the “parasite idea” is indeed to triumph over Hyacinth’s consciousness, it will not do so without a struggle. Readers who wish to know what happened to their hero on that night must wait until Hyacinth discovers, in the bothersome re-emergence of his feelings, that he has made a terrible mistake in subordinating his private consciousness to the Fundamental Idea, that in entrusting his future to a world-historical individual, he has traded something precious for an abstraction. When we once again find ourselves in the presence of his subjectivity, we learn what he has already discovered: that he has sold out his “fine” mind, as Eliot might say, to some mere “idea.” That idea, to be sure, often appeals to the dispossessed bookbinder, particularly when he is overcome by bitter thoughts about all he lacks, “moods in which the sense of exclusion from all that he would have liked most to enjoy in life settled upon him like a pall” (163). The idea is also embodied, sometimes movingly, by his friend Eustache Poupin, the “ardent stoic” who carries with him “humanitary and idealistic” reminders of the Revolution of 1848 (114). Poupin speaks with authentic passion about the impending revolution; as Paul puts it, Poupin “warms one up; he has got a spark of the sacred fire” (139). For the expatriate and his wife, the “day of justice” hangs always before their eyes in “luminous reality” (122). Poupin’s words are at times stirring, to be sure, but at these moments Hyacinth is moved less by an abstract idea than by Poupin’s passionate expression of his own feelings of exile and dispossession. At his best moments the excitable Poupin is a rarity among his comrades, whose ideas show no spark of imagination, only thoroughgoing familiarity with some party agenda. Hyacinth obtains much of his political education at the “Sun and Moon,” where “every one, with two or three exceptions, made an ass of himself, thumping the table and repeating over some inane phrase which appeared for the hour to constitute the whole furniture of his mind” (280). Even Poupin often falls short of his most imaginative revolutionary speeches and sinks into the predictable vocabulary and tiresome consistency with which he usually discusses his “constant theme” (122). Paul Muniment observes that the Frenchman “hasn’t had a new idea these thirty years. It’s the old stock that has been withering in the window” (139).





And for all his passion, Hyacinth himself often slips into conventional rhetoric, using “all the silly bits of catchwords” that he has learned “out of the newspapers” (151). At times he seems to stand above the Poupins, confident that he is different from them even though he “knew their vocabulary by heart, and could have said everything, in the same words, that on any given occasion M. Poupin was likely to say” (123). At other times he finds that even his private thoughts mimic Poupin’s doctrine in the Frenchman’s own words. “In the day of the great revenge,” Hyacinth reflects, “it would only be the people who should be saved. It was for the people that the world was made: whoever was not of them was against them; and all others were cumberers, usurpers, exploiters, accapareurs, as M. Poupin used to say” (124). Though often the “social question bore[s]” Hyacinth (123), he is occasionally embarrassed to discover in himself signs of ideological imprinting. “We don’t call [the upper class] the people,” he says to a new acquaintance, while “reflecting the next instant that his remark was a little primitive” (140). And of course he is not the only one to notice this ideological sameness: after what he thinks is an impassioned rhetorical question, he provokes a “fit of laughter” in Paul’s sister. “You say that just like a man that my brother described to me three days ago,” she tells him; “a little man at some club, whose hair stood up—Paul imitated the way he glowered and screamed. I don’t mean that you scream, you know; but you use almost the same words that he did” (148).

Hyacinth’s Impressions If Hyacinth draws near his socialist friends and their great plans, he does so less because he shares their ideology than because their passion for the revolutionary cause stirs his youthful imagination with the same “interest,” “excitement,” and appetite for “horizons . . . fresh and vast” (159) that he had experienced during his very earliest excursions into the streets outside his London flat. As a small child Hyacinth had been drawn to popular romances—although then, as later, he could only enjoy these things from the other side of a “smallpaned, dirty window,” where he stood “admiring the obligatory illustration in which the noble characters (they were always of the highest birth) were presented to the carnal eye” (54). Although as an adult he will learn from his political comrades that the “bloated luxury” of “the pampered classes . . . begets evil, impudent desires” (207), as a child his imagination is touched by these illustrations and he spends his small pocket money as eagerly on illustrated ballads as on “stale



76

77

sugar-candy” (54). If his long experience of deprivation makes him receptive to the ideological interpretation of the world that he learns from Paul Muniment and Eustache Poupin, that opposite side of his nature, composed of his impressions and feelings, prevents him from seeing the world in a purely ideological light. Because his imagination is so susceptible to the many influences that press upon it, Hyacinth cannot share his comrades’ glee over the certainty of revolution and the fate reserved on that day for the bourgeoisie, as they “go down into their cellars and hide, pale with fear, behind their barrels of wine and their heaps of gold!” as Poupin predicts with predatory delight (125). Hyacinth responds imaginatively to his French mother, “her suffering in an alien land, the unspeakable, irremediable misery that consumed her, in a place, among a people, she must have execrated” (127). But he is also touched by his aristocratic father’s tragic end: “his father . . . also [Hyacinth] felt in his mind and his body, when the effort to think it out did not simply end in darkness and confusion” (127). The same sensibility that leads Hyacinth to yearn for cheap romances in shop windows and to embrace the “sweet deception” of a popular melodrama (177), that enables him to look upon luxury and recognize that “there was no possible good fortune in life of too ‘quiet’ an order for him to appreciate” (164), also fills his mind with “images and strange speculations” (232) prompted by the private histories of both parents. His troubled and conflicting allegiances are hostile to any one theory about social conditions, while, as we have seen, the revolutionary ideology he has encountered—an ideology that, in some moods, strikes him deeply—tends to discount the feelings and impressions of the individual. In spite of his identification with the dispossessed and his occasional lapse into the vocabulary of socialism, Hyacinth Robinson is an unlikely martyr to the revolution. Though he is “poor and obscure and cramped and full of unattainable desires, it may be said of him that what was most important in life for him was simply his impressions” (157–58). When he consents to Hoffendahl’s request for a foot soldier, he does so not out of ideological conviction but because his impressions have moved him deeply on the evening of his encounter with the German radical. He frequently finds himself in absorbed contemplation of the struggling masses, who “had the power to chain his sympathy, to make it glow with a kind of ecstasy, to convince him, for the time at least, that real success in the world would be to do something with them and for them” (160). Like the theater that dazzles his sight, the thought of the “groaning, toiling millions” (148) sometimes stirs his imagination so that what





he regards as inspired is not the ideological agenda of “the party of immediate action” (292) but really only his own impassioned consciousness. Hyacinth’s consciousness is especially attenuated during the particularly difficult winter in which he meets Hoffendahl. During those cold months, the sounds of London life are saturated for him with the strains of misery (283), and his visits to the “Sun and Moon” often thrill him. On such occasions, “nights of intenser vibration” (283), even the most tiresome revolutionaries “seemed to him wiser then” (284). It is after one of these sessions that Hyacinth meets Dietrich Hoffendahl and agrees to do his bidding. On this occasion the stale ideas usually circulated at the “Sun and Moon” give way to a “genuine emotion” that infects Hyacinth with the “contagion of excited purpose” (291). Passionate enough in his solitude, in the company of this agitated community Hyacinth passes into a “state of inward exaltation”: he was seized by an intense desire to stand face to face with the sublime Hoffendahl, to hear his voice, to touch his mutilated hand. He was ready for anything: . . . a breath of popular passion had passed over him, and he seemed to see, immensely magnified, the monstrosity of the great ulcers and sores of London—the sick, eternal misery crying, in the darkness, in vain, confronted with granaries and treasure-houses and places of delight where shameless satiety kept guard. (291–92)

Hyacinth’s rapturous response to Hoffendahl is not the fruit of the formulaic phrases he hears on this night and every other night he spends at the “Sun and Moon,” but rather the effect of his own finely-tuned imagination as he sees the worsening social conditions around him. As he soon learns, his pledge to Hoffendahl is a mistake, requiring him to sacrifice to the great cause not only his life but, more achingly, his feelings and imagination, the things most central to his very character. Hyacinth learns from the most devoted radicals who surround him that personal feeling is a distinct liability to one’s ideological qualifications. Although Hegel recognized the value of individual passion to all human progress, contending that “nothing great has been accomplished in the world without passion” (26), Paul Muniment seems actively to avoid such passion. While the Princess (surely signaling her unfitness as a revolutionary) concedes that she is looking for “keen emotion,” Paul replies that he wants “as little of it as possible” (497). This more seasoned radical strikes Hyacinth as “singularly enviable” in his entire triumph over personal feelings, his “absence of



78

79

passion, his fresh-coloured coolness, his easy, exact knowledge.” But “most enviable of all was the force that enabled him to sink personal sentiment where a great public good was to be attempted and yet keep up the form of caring for that minor interest” (391). As Paul explains to the Princess, “in the line [we] have chosen, our affections, our natural ties, our timidities, our shrinkings . . . All those things are as nothing, and must never weigh a feather beside our service” (503). Even Paul’s sister, whose life and his own, he says, “are all one” (499), cannot discern the object of his affections, though she cannot conceive of his caring for nothing at all. “What my brother really cares for,” she tells Hyacinth, “—well, one of these days, when you know, you’ll tell me” (149). If Paul is an ideal member of his party, then he “really cares” for nothing not explicitly endorsed by his party’s platform. As Hyacinth learns to his deep alarm, the party cares nothing for personal affections, for aesthetic or moral feelings, or for the capacity to see the world as in a state of flux, idiosyncratic, and surprising—a world that resists arranging itself into broad and discrete categories. For the democracy, reality is clear, categorical, and abstract, and private feelings count for nothing. Hyacinth’s most heartbreaking discovery of such ideological inflexibility results from his friendship with Paul Muniment.

Hyacinth’s Affections Hyacinth’s admiration for Paul begins almost at the moment he first sees the young chemist and only grows more ardent as their friendship develops. Wishing to know “superior people,” Hyacinth takes an immediate interest in Paul, who at a glance seems to him “a distinguished young savant in the disguise of an artisan” (128), a man who would not concern himself with anything that was not important (126). As they spend more time together, Paul steps into a place that Hyacinth had long ago prepared for him: the young bookbinder “had always dreamed of having some grand friendship” (206), and in his solitary life with his guardian he has not had opportunities for intimacy with a superior person. Never yet having found an object worthy of his “religion of friendship” (394), Hyacinth develops an “unlimited belief” (206) in his new friend. The bookbinder’s belief undergoes considerable strain as he discovers in his new friend the characteristics of ideology itself. When Hyacinth first meets Paul at the Poupin residence, the men are discussing in cryptic terms something that Hyacinth thinks must be a “plot—a conspiracy” (129); as he learns more about his new friend





and about the movement that so absorbs his attention, Hyacinth comes to think of Paul as the rational embodiment of that movement. Later, when Hyacinth will become confused about his own loyalties, he continues to admire Paul’s “healthy singleness of . . . vision” (446), a singleness that enables Paul to keep faith with the movement and not be seduced by competing interests or scruples. Like Hegel’s World Spirit, Paul is remote from feeling and other details of individual existence; these do not grasp World Spirit, and though they may at times work to bring about the next stage of world history, they may just as often impede its progress. Paul Muniment is unlike ordinary mortals and more like the abstract ideology of the revolution, moving always “in a dry statistical and scientific air in which it cost Hyacinth an effort of respiration to accompany him” (391). Paul harbors neither resentment nor pity, and he seems a bit bewildered by Hyacinth’s personal loyalty and feelings of betrayal. Paul’s rational nature is sometimes vexing to Hyacinth, who thinks his esteem for “logic and criticism” reaches “a degree that was hostile to free conversation” (205). And Hyacinth—who, as we have seen, is driven more fiercely by his emotions than by his reason—is sometimes uneasy about the place of his feelings in his friendship with the superior Paul: Hyacinth thought himself obliged, at present, to have reasons for his feelings; his intimacy with Paul Muniment, which had now grown very great, laid a good deal of that sort of responsibility upon him. Muniment laughed at his reasons, whenever he produced them, but he appeared to expect him, nevertheless, to have them ready, on demand, and Hyacinth had an immense desire to do what he expected. (165)

Like the movement itself, Paul will tolerate private feelings only if they are in keeping with—and strictly subordinate to—reason. Hyacinth’s reasons are laughable because they are not the source of his feelings but only the veneer with which he covers those feelings in order to justify himself to his logical and dispassionate friend. We might wonder why Paul strikes Hyacinth as superior after all, since he is so apparently untouched by the emotion that drives Hyacinth and that attracts him to the other people he admires: the Princess, who seems to conceal a “suppressed tremor of passion” (200), and Millicent, whose “primitive passions” retain Hyacinth’s admiration even after he begins to move in more sophisticated circles (387). But in spite of Paul’s admitted preference for reason over passion, he is much more than a textbook in socialism; this “strangely good-natured”



80

81

(205) man impresses Hyacinth with his mixture of “merriment” and “tremendous opinions” (139). On at least one occasion Paul’s merriment triumphs dramatically over his opinions: the two are enjoying a sixpenny pantomime at Astley’s Theatre when Hyacinth is moved to “a kind of elder-brotherly indulgence by [Paul’s] open-mouthed glee and credulity” at the “tawdry spectacle” (205–6). On the one hand it should come as no surprise that Paul appreciates the drama of this crude popular performance, where characters speak in rhymed couplets and enact hackneyed plots, repeating, as Charles Dickens marveled, “precisely the same jokes . . . night after night, and season after season” (65). Because Paul has never pretended to aesthetic sophistication, he is unlikely to have aesthetic objections to these dramas, which the playwright W. S. Gilbert considered “hardly worth criticism.” But in a man with Paul’s political seriousness, his childlike delight in a childish spectacle at Astley’s—the theatre that most “strongly” recalled “recollections of childhood” for Dickens—is a bit surprising (64). In its hybrid form the pantomime provoked many of the senses that Paul and his fellow ideologues claim to eschew. In the words of the Victorian critic William Archer, “The ideal pantomime should charm the senses, stimulate the imagination, and satisfy the intelligence” (quoted in Booth, 4). This man of important ideas who has repeatedly expressed his disgust for sensations is relishing the sensual spectacle of nonsense. Pantomime, moreover, catered to its audience’s desire to escape into a world of fantasy. As the London Times wrote in the nineteenth century, “it were a queer world and a sad if two and two were four inevitably and at all periods of the year; and if the impossible and fantastic were not at certain epochs allowed to strut about in the guise of the possible and the real” (quoted in Frow, 186). Paul’s brief lapse from his dispassionate revolutionary character suggests not only that he, like Hyacinth, is tempted by passion even though he rarely succumbs to it, but also that there are good reasons why an ideologue might wish to resist sensations. The power of this sensational spectacle over Paul is perhaps the only way of explaining why Paul, usually so attentive to the details of class struggle, should fail to see the pantomime as another arena in which laborers wrestle with poverty. Dickens took note of the material conditions endured by “the lower class of actors,” those who perform just such pantomimes as Paul and Hyacinth enjoy (111). Calling our attention to a seedy character lurking near the theatre, Dickens urges us to Look at the dirty white Berlin gloves, and the cheap silk-handkerchief stuck in the bosom of his threadbare coat. Is it possible to see him for




H e n r y J a m e s ’ N a r r at i v e T e c h n i q u e an instant, and not come to the conclusion that he is the walking gentleman who wears a blue surtout, clean collar, and white trousers, for half an hour, and then shrinks into his worn-out scanty clothes; who has to boast night after night of his splendid fortune, with the painful consciousness of a pound a-week and his boots to find; to talk of his father’s mansion in the country, with a dreary recollection of his own two-pair back, in the New Cut; and to be envied and flattered as the favoured lover of a rich heiress, remembering all the while that the ex-dancer at home is in the family way, and out of an engagement? (66)

The pantomime actor as Dickens describes him resembles Marx’s alienated laborer, the worker who does not have access to the goods he produces—in this case, the fantasy of a comfortable existence. The measure of his alienation can be taken in the wide difference between his theatrical role and his ordinary life: “We could not believe,” Dickens concludes, “that the beings of light and elegance, in milkwhite tunics, salmon coloured legs, and blue scarfs, who flitted on sleek cream-coloured horses before our eyes at night, with all the aid of artificial flowers, could be the pale, dissipated-looking creatures we beheld by day” (67). Paul’s eager absorption in the pantomime perhaps constitutes his single blunder into inconsistency, and in failing for once to confine himself to ideas he wins the affection of Hyacinth, who is also deeply captivated by popular theatrical spectacles and infinitely “friendly to the dramatic illusion” (178). Hyacinth, never terribly engaged by abstract ideas, turns Paul into an incarnation of “the people,” that abstraction that must come alive in his imagination in order for him to feel any deep loyalty to it.15 Even when he loses faith in the democracy, Hyacinth still sees Paul as an impressive figure of the people at their best. Paul struck his comrade as such a fine embodiment of the spirit of the people; he stood there, in his powerful, sturdy newness, with such an air of having learnt what he had learnt and of good-nature that had purposes in it, that our hero felt the simple inrush of his old, frequent pride at having a person of that promise, a nature of that capacity, for a friend. (446)

Like Hyacinth’s private and passionate response to the suffering people of London, his flood of affection and pride in Paul springs not from politics but from simple emotion; he loves his flesh-and-blood companion, not his ideas. Though his esteem for Paul may prompt a political gesture—Hyacinth’s consent to do something helpful for



82

83

“the people”—it begins and ends in the kind of private feeling that is a matter of indifference to Paul’s political movement. Hyacinth is disappointed to find that Paul does not return his unlimited faith; he feels “a certain helpless, patient longing” that Paul will one day trust him with his political secrets (292). The ardency that drives the bookbinder to agree to Hoffendahl’s mission seems rooted here, in his wish to prove himself to his friend (coupled, as we have seen, with a passion for the suffering masses that Paul represents for Hyacinth), rather than in any real endorsement of the revolution and its principles. During that difficult winter that precedes his vow, Hyacinth wonders whether Paul might not be the redeemer of the masses, “and it was the first article of [Hyacinth’s] faith that to help him carry [the burden of redemption] the better he himself was ready for any sacrifice” (283). Here Hyacinth seems more passionate about Paul than about the “rescue of the proletariat” (293); on the night of his vow he longs for an opportunity to prove his own “superiority” to his superior friend (293). Much later, Hyacinth thinks he has been inconsistent because he has ceased to believe in the cause that brought him to Hoffendahl’s, but he has not been inconsistent at all: from first to last, his primary devotion has been to the objects of his passion, not to the ideology of those who inspire that passion. As he admits to Paul in their last recorded conversation, “I don’t know that I believe exactly what you believe, but I believe in you, and doesn’t that come to the same thing?” (446).

Hyacinth’s Aesthetic Feelings If the progress of World Spirit toward freedom does not take account of personal feelings, does it have any use for the things that stir aesthetic feelings? The question is important to Hyacinth, who at an early age discovers that the world of imagination, available to him in museums and theaters, blunts the grim anxiety of his existence. Like Schopenhauer, the philosopher he most admires, Hyacinth finds respite from suffering in the contemplation of beauty. As a youth, “some of the happiest moments of his life had been spent at the British Museum and the National Gallery” (245). During his brief visit to Paris he “haunt[s]” the Louvre, unable to “look enough at certain pictures” (382). He suspects that “in this world of effort and suffering life was endurable, the spirit able to expand, only in the best conditions, and that a sordid struggle, in which one should go down to the grave without having tasted them, was not worth the misery it would cost, the dull demoralisation it would entail”





(163–64). Among his political friends he finds those who share his aesthetic sensibility: Anastasius Vetch, who knows better than anyone “the difference between the common and the rare” (115); Eustache Poupin, a lover of art and a “brilliant craftsman” (115); Lady Aurora, a faded aristocrat devoted to charity but also to the belief that “we ought to make the world more beautiful” (412); and the Princess Casamassima, whose “innumerable bibelots” reveal “not only whole provinces of art, but refinements of choice, on the part of their owner” (244). Hyacinth cannot imagine why anyone with access to the “highest fruit of civilisation” (222) would want to “leave all those beautiful things” in order to spend time with the poor, as Lady Aurora does (220). Art stirs his imagination and offers him rare and intense subjective experiences that allow him to forget the dingy and violent world around him, allowing him, in William Morris’s words, to “mak[e his] labour sweet” to him (46).16 But precisely because art allows Hyacinth to blot out the world that provokes so many grievances, his politically engaged friends, who may share his responsiveness to the world of art, resist it as assiduously as he embraces it. While the most prosaic revolutionaries at the “Sun and Moon” proudly hold that they “don’t care for the imagination” (285), the case is less simple for Hyacinth’s friends, who share his aesthetic susceptibility but struggle against his understanding of beautiful things as “ameliorating influences” (413). Rather, they insist on seeing such things as distractions from their revolutionary principles. Because Poupin is disconcerted that his beloved Paris owes any of its beauty to that “arch-fiend of December,” Napoleon III (405), he cannot allow himself to hear of the beautiful streets built under that regime. The Princess sells most of her bibelots to give her money to the poor, defending her choice by insisting that the world “will be beautiful enough when it becomes good enough” (413). Hyacinth is most dismayed at this gesture, which suggests not only that a true revolutionary must mortify the spirit as well as the flesh (417), but more troubling, that the revolution will force upon European culture a universal repetition of the Princess’s self-denying deed. Musing on the Princess’s rare and curious artifacts, now all sold, he thinks: “If the Princess could give them up it would take very transcendent natures to stick to them” (478). Unfortunately, a sweeping sacrifice will be even worse than the Princess’s private renunciation, for Hyacinth is sure that Hoffendahl “wouldn’t have the least feeling for this incomparable, abominable old Venice. He would cut up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that every one might have a little piece” (396–97). Where the precious things of the past are



84

85

concerned, Hyacinth fears, the revolution cannot redistribute without destroying. What has come between Hyacinth and his friends in their radically different appreciation of the imaginative products of human society is not politics but instead the “parasite idea,” here resembling an ideology much like Hegel’s. Hyacinth and these friends are all alike susceptible to aesthetic feelings, but the bookbinder refuses to let ideological impulses intrude on his esteem for the fruits of civilization.17 Hegel, who did not dismiss art altogether, believed that art like everything else was subordinate to the Idea. Fine art, he maintained, “only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy and has become simply a mode of revealing to consciousness and bringing to utterance the divine nature” (On Art, 29). Hegel believed that in his own age art had reached the limit of its capacity to bring the Idea to full consciousness, and the best art could do was demonstrate the history of the Idea’s development. Bound up as it was in material matters, Hegel believed, art could only gesture toward some more perfect expression of Idea in religion and philosophy. This is what Poupin seems to have in mind when, conflicted over his feelings for Parisian art, he settles the question in an ideologically acceptable way: “Ah, yes, it’s very fine, no doubt,” he responds, “but it will be finer still when it’s ours!” (405). The “fine” boulevards of the second Empire are to an ideologue only a sign of an earlier stage of world history, one that will give way to another, more progressive stage after the revolution when these things change ownership and belong to “the people.” In this way these historical and artistic creations merely serve to chart the progress of world history: when the people finally own such treasures, their value will increase. Their worth is not determined by anything in the treasures themselves or in the feelings they inspire in the receptive spectator. Though he is himself an artisan, in his ideological moods Poupin sees art as a commodity, whose value inheres not in the thing itself or in the feelings it inspires but rather in its exchange-value. For the revolutionaries, all things that can be owned are reducible to their value as exchangeable things. When the Princess sells her bibelots, she is selling something with a private value, something that, Hyacinth thinks, reveals “complications of mind” and even (almost) “terrible depths of character” in their owner (244). When she sees them through the lens of her political ideas, though, everything specifically human and creative about these objects vanishes, and they serve only to mark her class identity. To her newly ideological understanding,





she is a mere owner of things that laborers can enjoy only in museums and other public places—and these things, in turn, merely identify her as a member of the bloated class. Once she sells her artifacts, she hopes, she will take her place among “the people.” This—to Hyacinth—narrow sense of the value of art constitutes a kind of demystification much different from the kind Marx aimed at in his economic writings.18 Unlike commodities, private experiences cannot be quantified and exchanged. When the Princess converts her bibelots into money so that she can give it to Paul Muniment, who spends it on revolutionary activities, she destroys an important trace of her aesthetic sensibilities. Worse still, the ideologue to whom she makes this sacrifice does not value the Princess herself, neither her aesthetic nor her political sensibilities. Believing that she has divested herself only of her precious but inessential things, she discovers that for Paul, her value and identity inhere in the things she owns (and relinquishes). Once Paul runs through her money, he all but tells her that she has lost all value for him and for the revolutionary cause. “I do consider,” he tells her, “that in giving your money—or, rather, your husband’s—to our business you gave the most valuable thing you had to contribute” (579). The Princess’s mistake has been to allow her private estimation of the things she cares for to be replaced by a socially determined one, to let the use-value of her artifacts give way to their exchange-value. The result has been not only that she sees her fine things reduced to their market value, but tragically that she, too, is now valued solely in terms of her exchange value. Once her capital is gone, she herself has no worth. In contrast, the value of Hyacinth’s aesthetic feelings generally outweighs any price he can get for the commodity, if it can indeed be sold. Though he thinks his wages pitifully small, he is able to take pleasure in his work, converting his impressions of European cities into the very forms of the bookbinder’s craft (403). His “vision of true happiness” is to be locked in the Princess’s (noncirculating) library for several months so that he can admire and inspect the many “rare bindings” (303). His sometimes ecstatic responsiveness to the world of beauty, his “rare sensations and impressions” (254), are of a kind that cannot with justice be reduced to their exchange-value, and so Hyacinth keeps them to himself, musing over them in solitude. At times, to be sure, he thinks in the economic terms of his socialist friends when reliving his experiences in Europe. Having used his small inheritance from Pinnie to visit Europe, he returns with nothing tangible to show for it and feels “poorer than he had ever felt before, inasmuch as he had had money and spent it, whereas in previous



86

87

times he had never had it to spend.” And yet he easily moves beyond the logic of market values: “He never for an instant regretted his squandered fortune, for he said to himself that he had made a good bargain and become master of a precious equivalent. The equivalent was a rich experience—an experience which would become richer still as he should talk it over” with an understanding friend (401). Though he uses the vocabulary of an economist, his “equivalent” is clearly only a private exchange with himself, not something that he can trade for another commodity. Its very value lies in its personal, idiosyncratic meaning for Hyacinth—and perhaps for a sympathetic companion. Though on rare occasions he admires and longs for the items displayed in shop windows, his most intense admiration for precious things has nothing to do with their market value. The most precious thing he makes is a binding for a volume of Tennyson’s poems, a book he intends as a gift for the Princess. Finding “a morsel of delicate, blue-tinted Russian leather,” he works in his leisure hours with “passion, with religion, and produce[s] a masterpiece of firmness and finish” that even the accomplished bookbinder Poupin admires (254). When Hyacinth fails to deliver the book, he carries it away with a sense of its true value that could never be grasped by a stranger, however much one might pay for it. The book seemed to create a sort of material link between the Princess and himself . . . Rare sensations and impressions, moments of acute happiness, almost always, with Hyacinth, in retrospect, became rather mythic and legendary; and the superior piece of work he had done after seeing her last, in the immediate heat of his emotion, turned into a kind of proof and gage, as if a ghost, in vanishing from sight, had left a palpable relic” (254).

This “relic” has meaning only for Hyacinth himself, for it records by reification his private, unexpressed, and perhaps inexpressible feelings about an experience now in the past. This relic, like the many other beautiful things that speak to him from disembodied history, has a value altogether different from that of a commodity. Hyacinth is understandably dismayed to learn that the revolution only scoffs at such artifacts, valuing them merely as commodities, not as inspired voices from the past to receptive sensibilities of the present. It is appropriate that he cannot deliver his gift to the Princess, who would fail to value the book as Hyacinth does. The difference between Hyacinth and his ideological friends depends on the difference within aestheticism that Jonathan Freedman





has so lucidly explored. While Hyacinth embraces what Freedman describes as a Paterian form of aesthesis—one that values a subjective state of awareness that, contrary to sterile aestheticism, “emphasizes. . . embeddedness in historical process, . . . [and] participation in the human community” (165), Hyacinth’s socialist friends cannot see aestheticism as unrelated to the commodity culture they deplore and that, Freedman argues, James also disliked. Regina Gagnier’s explanation of how different forms of aestheticism were often conflated into a single notion of “The Aesthetic” is also helpful in understanding why Hyacinth’s friends condemn his artistic imagination and why he, in turn, finally rejects their socialist views even though they are also his own. As Gagnier explains, the “aesthetics of taste or consumption” (which socialism denigrates as bourgeois) is not identical with the “aesthetics of production,” concerned with “the conditions of creativity and production.” This latter aesthetics, embodied by Ruskin and Morris as well as by the implied author of The Princess Casamassima, valued “the conditions for producers whose work would be emotionally, intellectually, and sensuously fulfilling and whose societies would be judged by their success in cultivating creators and creativity” (123). The problem for James is not as simple as the familiar distinction between politics and aesthetics, but is rather one of further refinements within these categories.19 Aesthetics, like politics, can be approached either ideologically or empirically through thoughts and feelings.

Hyacinth’s Moral Feelings Perhaps the most serious threat that revolutionary ideology poses to the world of feeling is the way it dismisses private morality. The novel is framed by two grave and literally consuming ethical questions: whether Pinnie should take the young Hyacinth to see his dying mother, and whether the adult Hyacinth should carry out his mission to the revolution, though that mission involves the assassination of a duke perhaps very like his own dead father. I call these decisions “consuming” because Pinnie, deeply convinced of her “hideous mistake” in taking the boy to the prison that houses his mother, falls into a “grievous debility” (98) from which she never recovers; even after her physical resurgence, “nothing was the same again, and she knew it was the beginning of the end” (99). As for Hyacinth, his ethical dilemma proves to be so perplexing that he chooses suicide rather than the betrayal of one part of his nature for the other. A third ethical choice appears halfway through the novel, when Anastasius Vetch explains his reasons for not recalling Hyacinth from



88

89

his visit with the Princess in order to see the dying Pinnie. Although this third moral problem is more minor—Hyacinth discovers that the thought of Pinnie’s death has lost its significance since he has pledged his own future to the revolution—it does serve to underscore the private, domestic quality of these other moral questions. As if to emphasize that connection, Pinnie’s dying words take her back to the scene at Millgate Prison and the “haunting sense that she herself might have acted differently” all those years ago (370). These are all questions of familial (or quasi-familial) loyalty: should Hyacinth be brought to see his dying mother? What effect will the sight of the disgraced woman have on her young boy? Shouldn’t a prison be the last place to take an innocent child? Will he “curse me when he grows older?” Pinnie wants to know (72). And what of the mother herself? Does Florentine have the right to see her young child one last time? The sensitive Pinnie cannot “close [her] eyes to that poor woman lying there and moaning just for the touch of his little ‘and before she passes away” (71). It was a “terrible, heart-shaking question, with which Miss Pynsent’s unaided wisdom had been unable to grapple” (70). Though she finally chooses to bring Hyacinth to the prison because she cannot rid herself of the vivid mental picture of the dying Florentine (“She wants him and cries for him; that’s what keeps coming back to me,” 76), Pinnie later suffers under the equal weight of Hyacinth’s feelings: “It was a most improper place to have brought him, no matter who had sent for him and no matter who was dying” (83). This modest dressmaker, who has, Mr. Vetch tells her, “the intellectual outlook of a caterpillar” (68), nevertheless appreciates the difficulty of moral decisions. Pinnie’s central but unspoken question seems to be this: How might we diminish human suffering, especially among those who have the greatest claim on our care? Though she gets muddled trying to balance one kind of anguish against another, her calculus is at least more complex than that of Eustache Poupin, who believes that all human suffering can be traced to “the imperfect organisation of society” (121). “We must all suffer,” he laments, “so long as the social question is so abominably, so iniquitously neglected” (122). For all her ignorance, Pinnie understands that private suffering is not likely to disappear after the revolution. When the scene is repeated years later, Mr. Vetch and Lady Aurora turn over similar questions: must they respect the wishes of Hyacinth’s second dying “mother,” Pinnie herself? “No responsibility, in the course of my life,” Vetch assures Hyacinth, “ever did more to distress me” (358–59). In weighing the question, Pinnie’s caretakers “thought it right to consider what she urged upon us” (356).





The necessity of consideration indicates what the novel forcefully demonstrates: that such moral questions are never uncomplicated, though in his exasperation Hyacinth contends that he “can imagine nothing more simple. When people’s nearest and dearest are dying, they are usually sent for” (359). The question is never as simple as choosing the usual thing, particularly when strong and conflicting feelings are involved. Nor is it always a case of choosing between virtue and selfish interest, as Pinnie’s agonizing deliberations in the novel’s early pages suggest. The dressmaker earnestly wants to do the best thing for Hyacinth and his unfortunate mother, but she simply cannot reconcile their interests; nor can she predict the effect of their meeting as Hyacinth grows older. Knowing that the “shrinking and sensitive” (61) Hyacinth would retain a vivid memory of a prison visit and a deathbed scene—that he “would take everything in and keep it” (63)—she is herself haunted by a “panorama of figures and scenes” (66) representing the scandal of Florentine’s crime and the shame of Millgate Prison. And yet Mr. Vetch assures her that, however painful the encounter, it will one day be “useful” for Hyacinth to know “the state of the account between society and himself” (75), and in any case no decent person, however impressionable, should be “sorry for having gone to his mother when, in her last hours, she lay groaning for him on a pallet in a penitentiary” (75). Mr. Vetch has a few ideological reasons of his own for urging his friend to bring Hyacinth to the prison. Though he has never embraced socialism, he does harbor “blasphemous republican, radical views” and a “just resentment” of the British social order (67). Pinnie follows her feelings in deciding to take Hyacinth to see his mother in part because she cannot comprehend her friend’s “extraordinary” reasons (based on his “dreadful wild theories,” 76). When she hopes that Vetch will think her worries are “natural and just” (69), she underestimates his ideological blindness to the vexed problem of morality. Mr. Vetch questions the very idea of virtue, asking her what she has to do with “the right.” Pinnie is bewildered by his logic: “Please, then, what am I to go by?” (73). Her friend’s social criticism seems hostile to moral thought; as a critic of society, he believes it “a great gain, early in life, to know the worst” (73) and so he dismisses the possibility of an “only right” in order to advance the theory that what is most “useful” (in a narrowly political sense) is also the best course of action. It will help to foster Hyacinth’s dissatisfaction later in life, Vetch reasons, if he knows the miserable story of his parentage. In this respect Anastasius Vetch resembles Hegel himself, whose esteem for private morality—which, the philosopher acknowledged,



90

91

“can be very pure” (74)—did not prevent him from discounting it in the context of world progress. Hegel claimed that conscience, “the seat of volition, resolution, and action, . . . embracing the responsibility and worth of the individual,” nevertheless “still has something higher above it. The claim of the World Spirit supersedes all particular claims” (39–40). Because “world history moves on a higher level than that on which morality properly exists,” he argued, “the end-goal of Spirit . . . transcends the obligations . . . that fall upon individuals in regard to their ethical conduct” (70). What does this mean in practical terms? When Mr. Vetch suggests to Pinnie that she should not be concerned with the “right,” he seems to indicate that the claims of World Spirit—and, specifically, the development of Hyacinth’s political consciousness once he discovers his origins—supersede all concern about feelings, either Hyacinth’s or anyone else’s. Mr. Vetch, like Hegel, seems to think that the course of historical events depends on reason rather than on feeling. And of course the revolutionaries in Hyacinth’s circle share this conviction, expressing it rather strongly at times. Paul Muniment, as we have seen, accepts that the leaders of the movement will assign him his role when the time comes; he is untroubled about the morality of any mission he is ordered to undertake. In particular, he relinquishes moral considerations regarding his own efforts to secure Hyacinth’s role. Having put Hyacinth up to the job of sacrificing himself for the cause, Paul continues to treat his friend with the same easy freedom they had enjoyed before Hyacinth undertook his terrible servitude. Hyacinth wonders at his friend’s apparent stoicism: “It seemed to Hyacinth that if he had introduced a young fellow to Hoffendahl for his purposes, and Hoffendahl had accepted him on such a recommendation, and everything had been settled, he would have preferred never to look at the young fellow again” (391). But Hyacinth accepts that the “weakness” is his own (391). If he cannot act as a world-historical individual, he does at least recognize Hegel’s claim about the subordinate role of private morality in the face of World History. As Hegel notes, as if in response to Hyacinth’s bitter thoughts of betrayal, “moral claims must not be raised against worldhistorical acts and those who do them, as those claims do not apply here. The litany of private virtues—modesty, humility, love of humanity, charity—must not be raised against them. World history could altogether ignore the circle comprising morality” (71). But of course human beings are not themselves World Spirit, though they may at times be infected by it, and it is difficult for them to lay aside the concerns of private feelings and morality.





Hyacinth cannot divest himself of the “strange, inexpressible heartache” concerning his relations with Paul (390). Anastasius Vetch comes to regret his earlier advice to Pinnie on moral grounds—on the consideration, that is, that Hyacinth has suffered because of his advice—and as Hyacinth grows older, Vetch wants to persuade his young friend to “like [the world] better” in order to be happy in it (374). Even Eustache Poupin, who had a hand in introducing Hyacinth to Hoffendahl, seems “confused and embarrassed” (366), as if he has something on his conscience and cannot wholeheartedly accept Hegel’s contention that such a thing as private conscience is not to be heeded in the case of world events. If it is true, as James’ revolutionary protagonists suggest, that in a revolutionary world old-fashioned moral values no longer carry the weight they once did, it is also true that James does not endorse the Hegelian view that morality itself is irrelevant to individuals caught up in world history. As Robert Pippin argues, James’ sense of the shifting ground beneath modern moral deliberation did not end for the novelist in moral skepticism; rather, he considered that moral agency still must take account of the claims of others, particularly those closest to us. For James’ most conscientious characters, as we have seen, this one imperative is often problematic; as Pippin rightly notes, “even with the best of will, we simply cannot often evaluate or reason well about a possible course of action, cannot come to terms with it until well into the future, and then only retrospectively” (7). James’ own comments on his protagonist—that he was interested in a character who was both “finely aware and richly responsible” (35)—suggest at the outset that Hyacinth’s ethical choices will be complicated by his awareness of details that perhaps escape the ideologue. Like Pinnie, Hyacinth longs for an uncomplicated rule of conduct. He wants “to get hold of the truth and wear it in his heart. He believed, with the candor of youth, that it is brilliant and clearcut, like a royal diamond” (479). But also like Pinnie, he is conflicted: while he wants to believe in this abstract truth, he also considers that morality depends not on the movement of World Spirit but rather on the feelings of individuals. He is thwarted in his search for a clear-cut truth because he cannot dissociate his choices from his dead parents: in whatever direction he turned in the effort to find [the truth], he seemed to know that behind him, bent on him in reproach, was a tragic, wounded face. The thought of his mother had filled him, originally, with the vague, clumsy fermentation of his first impulses toward social criticism; but since the problem had become more complex



92

93

by the fact that many things in the world as it was constituted grew intensely dear to him, he had tried more and more to construct some conceivable and human countenance for his father—some expression of honour, of tenderness and recognition, of unmerited suffering, or at least of adequate expiation. To desert one of these presences for the other—that idea had a kind of shame in it, as an act of treachery would have had; for he could almost hear the voice of his father ask him if it were the conduct of a gentleman to take up the opinions and emulate the crudities of fanatics and cads. (478)

Like the moral questions we have already considered, Hyacinth’s choice of conduct—though of course a political matter unlike the others—takes the form in his imagination of a domestic, familial drama, a drama peopled by various individuals with competing and equally compelling interests. Unable to choose the claims of one parent over another, Hyacinth loses himself in these “dim broodings” that were “a constant element in his moral life” (480). In the most theoretical of Hyacinth’s revolutionary friends, in their most ideological actions, and in the revolution itself—which, as we have seen, creates a dilemma that Hyacinth can only escape by means of suicide—James seems to be considering the effects of Hegelian abstraction on human beings. In spite of his obvious interest in ideas, then, James’ focus on the human costs of abstraction suggests that in the contest between the Hegelian Idea and something we might identify as a Nietzschean or Paterian emphasis on concrete reality, including the reality of human affections, James takes the side of the concrete and empirical. Hyacinth’s “dim broodings” may not be representative of his class or his neighborhood in London—perhaps indeed they are not shared by anyone else in his world—but they nevertheless matter to James’ narrator, who stands poised to defend his attention to the tangle of Hyacinth’s feelings: The reader will doubtless smile at his mental debates and oscillations, and not understand why a little bastard bookbinder should attach importance to his conclusions. They were not important for either cause, but they were important for himself, if only because they would rescue him from the torment of his present life, the perpetual laceration of the rebound. (478–79)

In the disorder of Hyacinth’s feelings of morality, aesthetics, politics, friendship and romantic love—all of them, as we have seen, disqualified by Hegelian idealism—James’ narrator presents us with an inconsistent but deeply felt view of the world, a view that, in its





perpetual changeability, contrasts starkly with the permanent but empty concepts of ideology. It is James’ greatest irony that in order to reject the life-denying requirements of abstraction, Hyacinth must end his own life; and yet the bookbinder comes to think of his suicide as the most life-affirming alternative open to him, a “grim arrangement” undertaken not only in “the interest of peace” (570), but also in order “really [to] help” the people (573). Henry James probably had no similar moral view in mind in writing his novel, if by that we mean a book that will “help” its readers. And yet he seems to have been thinking in similar ways of the lifeaffirming principle of particular and concrete reality, the reality of the private feelings of his creations. James’ challenge, he announces in his preface, was to invent a character who will “feel enough to be interesting without his feeling so much as not to be natural” (35). To be “interesting” and “natural” is to have feelings, and to have feelings (even—perhaps especially—disobedient ones) is to be alive, as James suggests again and again. His character, though invented, takes shape not as a concept but as an organic being, the novel a thing “born” of James’ own “impressions” (33). Though Hyacinth develops “opinions” and takes “vows,” his “sharpest . . . torments” arise not from these but from his uncontrollable passions and instincts, his misfortune of “fall[ing] in love with the beauty of the world, actual order and all” (44). We do not know whether James was drawn to the novel as a genre because of his concern for the particulars of human feeling, or whether his attachment to the novel as an experimental form led him to appreciate individual affective experience over abstraction. He did recognize that even the most accomplished novelists could err on the side of empty concepts; George Eliot, whose work he deeply admired, was “charged . . . with having on occasion . . . left the figure, the concrete man and woman, too abstract by reason of the quantity of soul employed” (42). But in general the novel as it was developing in the late nineteenth century was moving away from abstractions and toward particular experience. Michael H. Levenson charts this development in A Genealogy of Modernism, where he shows the evolution from an omniscient narrator (a narrative presence that we might be tempted to identify with Hegelian World Spirit, a consciousness that knows all and that uses particular reality in order to unfold a larger narrative truth) to a more particularized reality, one that includes both visual and subjective impressions. The “general situation of early modernism” (2), Levenson argues, was exemplified by Conrad’s novels, where “Devotion to the visible universe stands at some point in



94

95

need of a witnessing consciousness which can organize surface reality and ratify its meanings” (9). Of course, if this witnessing consciousness is not an omniscient narrator but a limited character, his sense of meaning and value will be limited by and to his personal experience; the “truth” he arrives at will be psychological and idiosyncratic rather than transcendent. “Human subjectivity,” writes Levenson, “will become the foundation and support for a range of threatened institutions” (13). Though James’ narrator never strays from what Pater called “the inward world of thought and feeling,” Hyacinth must learn to abandon the political imperatives of his revolutionary friends in order to embrace his incoherent, inconsistent, flickering feelings, to “make a dash at the beautiful, horrible world” in order to acknowledge the “hundred confused reverberations” that press upon him (383).20

Hyacinth’s “Demoralisation” Because his associates can only understand his sensibilities as part of a will to bourgeois consumption and identity, Hyacinth never learns that his aesthetic and moral feelings are entirely compatible with his political feelings, and while he grows more attached to his private feelings, he cannot help but regard them as traitorous. These feelings become most unruly in Venice, where, as he confesses with conscious irony, he becomes most “demoralised” by his impressions, most estranged from his revolutionary ideology (395).21 James gives us only a brief and oblique glimpse of Hyacinth’s sojourn in Venice —it comes in the form of a letter Hyacinth writes to the Princess, whose “principal passages” the narrator reproduces for us (394)—but in those few pages we see the way that Hyacinth’s aesthetic, moral, and historical sensibilities conflict tragically with the ideological imperative of his London comrades. The measure of Hyacinth’s fall from the revolutionary idea and toward his own private impressions and feelings can be found in his description of the view from his Venetian room, an account resembling what was probably a familiar painting of the day, John Singer Sargent’s 1882 “Sortie de l’église, Campo San Canciano, Venice” (Figure 2.1). The piece was one of several Venetian scenes that Sargent had painted during his visits to Venice in 1880 and 1882 and exhibited in Paris and London.22 The painting depicts three women walking across a Venetian campo, having apparently just departed the church featured in the background. Behind them is an ancient fountain,





Figure 2.1 John Singer Sargent, Sortie de l’église, Campo San Canciano, Venice (c. 1882). Courtesy of Marie and Hugh Halff.

the polished stones of the campo occupying much of the fore- and middle ground. The painting may have been one of the “two or three little subject-pictures” of which James “retain[ed] a grateful memory” (“Sargent” 689). Like another Sargent painting that caught the novelist’s eye, “Sortie” “evokes all the small familiar Venetian realities” with a “wonderfully light and fine . . . touch” (“Sargent” 689). The scene that Hyacinth describes to the Princess not only resembles this painting but also demonstrates the bookbinder’s own fine touch and his commitment to material detail: Dear Princess, what an enchanted city, what ineffable impressions, what a revelation of the exquisite! I have a room in a little campo opposite to a small old church, which has cracked marble slabs let into the front; and in the cracks grow little wild delicate flowers, of which I don’t know the name. Over the door of the church hangs an old battered leather curtain, polished and tawny, as thick as a mattress, and with buttons on it, like a sofa; and it flops to and fro, laboriously, as women and girls, with shawls on their heads and their feet in little wooden shoes which have nothing but toes, pass in and out. In the middle of the campo is a fountain, which looks still older than the church; it has a primitive, barbaric air, and I have an idea it was put there by the first settlers . . . I bend a genial eye on the women and girls . . . as they glide, with a small clatter and with their old copper



96

97

water-jars, to the fountain. The Venetian girl-face is wonderfully sweet and the effect is charming when its pale, sad oval (they all look underfed), is framed in the old faded shawl. They also have very fascinating hair, which never has done curling, and they slip along together, in couples or threes, interlinked by the arms and never meeting one’s eye . . . dressed in thin, cheap cotton gowns, whose limp folds make the same delightful line that everything else in Italy makes. (394)

Hyacinth provides a painterly scene, offering visual impressions while attempting to provoke the other senses as well. Although he describes the content of the spectacle, the sensual elements draw his attention: the warmth he feels as he looks upon it and the “same delightful line” he sees everywhere in Italy. When he confesses to having “lost sight of the sacred cause,” it is no accident that he uses a visual metaphor, for the sensual sights before him have dethroned the revolutionary ideal that motivates Hyacinth’s socialist friends, just as the dazzling sight of the Princess in her finery once eclipsed the sight of the play he had gone to see on the night of their first encounter (190–91). Hyacinth’s impressionistic word-painting of this Venetian scene, in short, ignores Hegelian truths about World History and refrains from making socialist pronouncements about the exploitation of labor—finding, for instance, the working women of Venice appealing even though they look “underfed.” Like the painter whom James admired, Hyacinth’s description neglects ideology in favor of sensation. “It is,” James wrote of Sargent, “as if painting were pure tact of vision, a simple manner of feeling” (“Sargent” 684). Adeline Tintner has catalogued the many appearances of Sargent’s works in James’ fiction after the novelist reviewed the painter for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1887. Tintner argues that James’ form of tribute was, in the novelist’s words, to “write it over in my own way, handle the subject from my own sense of it” (Henry James letter, quoted in Tintner 128). I am suggesting here that in 1886, the year before his Sargent review appeared in print, James was honoring the painter in Hyacinth Robinson’s rapturous letter. More important still, James was extolling the visual arts themselves and human susceptibility to emotional and aesthetic impressions, drawing on the work of an artist identified with Impressionism in order to distance his hero from Hegel—who, as Naomi Schor observes, disparaged painting as an inferior art slavishly devoted to detail23—and to position Hyacinth as a Paterian or Nietzschean artist who casts his lot with individual feeling, sensation, and impression rather than with “the parasite





idea.” Hyacinth doesn’t know it when he writes his letter, but the Princess has already sold all her fine things, relics of her own feelings and impressions. Hyacinth’s letter, like the book of Tennyson’s poems that he binds as a gift to her, is a token of his fleeting but acute impressions, an almost visual artifact that can be passed on even though the impressions themselves are evanescent. Although he forwards his letter to his friend in London, he might well wonder how successfully he conveys his impressions—or, rather, how receptive she is to his remarkable emotional experience. Like the book he fails to deliver to her, this word painting also most likely misses its mark. The developing fissure between the Princess’s new ascetic life and Hyacinth’s absorption in his aesthetic experiences only underscores the hostility between ideology and feeling. We see that hostility brought into relief when we consider that while Hyacinth is painting an impressionistic scene with his words, the Princess Casamassima is laying her individual impressions aside in favor of abstract theory. We lose sight of her during Hyacinth’s visit to Europe, but not long after his return we catch a glimpse of her in her new residence, a “mean and meager and fourth-rate” place that, Hyacinth reflects, must mortify the spirit as well as the flesh (417). On this later occasion the Princess is not dressed regally, as she is when Hyacinth first meets her at the theater, and she is not surrounded by the artistry of civilization. She has sold her “beautiful things” in order “to give to the poor” (416); “When thousands and tens of thousands haven’t bread to put in their mouths,” she declares, “I can dispense with tapestry and old china” (412). She has not merely relinquished what she loves but has abandoned her very sensibility; she professes to care nothing for “the artists” (411). Like the ascetic described by Nietzsche, “imprisoned . . . behind nothing but sheer terrifying concepts” (67), the Princess has intensified her involvement in ideas in proportion as she has dropped her interest in the arts. On this occasion she is holding in her hand “a volume of a heavy work on Labour and Capital” (448). Adrian Dover speculates that this work might be Charles Morrison’s 1854 Essay on the Relations between Labour and Capital.24 But Morrison’s book, which defends the British economic system and argues that laissez-faire capitalism adequately serves the interests of all members of industrialized societies, is an unlikely choice of reading for the princess, who has thrown herself into the revolutionary cause. It is far more likely that this “heavy” work is volume one of Karl Marx’s Kapital, published in 1867. The English edition did not appear until 1887, after James had published The Princess Casamassima, but there



98

99

is no reason to suppose that the princess is not holding the original German edition. She has traveled extensively through Europe, “speaks three or four languages” (Roderick Hudson 154), has read the philosophy of Schopenhauer and has met with the revolutionary German leader, Dietrich Hoffendahl. Given her curiosity about the ideas behind the movement that so intrigues her, moreover, it makes sense that she would go to the source of revolutionary ideology, Karl Marx’s writings on capital. If (revolutionary) ideas are necessarily hostile to feelings, then the princess’s advance can be measured by her thoroughgoing rejection of the things that stir Hyacinth’s aesthetic feelings and that, he supposes, once marked her own “refinements of choice” and “complications of mind.” The Princess seems to share Hyacinth’s suspicion that “the democracy” won’t care for aesthetic objects and experiences, for she “gave up these things in proportion as she advanced in the direction she had so audaciously chosen” (478). James seems to want to highlight this conflict as well, for he puts the Princess in a chair with a text about political theory—a text that, if we identify it with Marx, urges the view that history is progressing toward a classless society and that cultural institutions that reflect the values of capitalism will be destroyed along with capitalists themselves.25 But if we consider James’ choice of profession for Hyacinth, we might ponder for a moment the unexpressed presence of William Morris in this novel. Morris was both the most visible proponent of the popular arts movement and a committed socialist. His Hopes and Fears for Art, published three years before The Princess Casamassima, makes available Morris’ lectures to the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design, where he tirelessly advanced a vision that might have helped Hyacinth, had James’ young bookbinder encountered someone who shared Morris’ beliefs. Morris defended art against those who mistakenly suppose that all art is the class-bound art of the aesthetic movement, the “art for art’s sake” that held itself aloof from social experience.26 Morris might have been speaking directly to people like Eustache Poupin and the Princess when he dismissed the commitment to a socially detached art as “a narrow, cowardly life” (39). Morris himself defined “real art” as “the expression by man of his pleasure in labour. I do not believe he can be happy in his labour without expressing that happiness” (42). Since Morris believed that true art depends on an affinity between the worker and his labor, he affirmed that true art could not survive under oppressive economic conditions. Genuine art, for Morris, could never be a necessary element of bourgeois society.





The important distinction here—and the conflict in the novel—is not, as many have claimed, between the personal and the political, for many of Hyacinth’s most private feelings are also deeply political. His passion for the suffering poor is of a piece with his passion for beautiful women, for artistic treasures of the past, for his own exquisitely bound books, and for the private sentiments they immortalize. When he feels with the working poor, his feelings are not at all in conflict with the political forces his associates believe will carry the day, though those feelings, of course, do not rule out affections for other things that are not so eagerly embraced by “the democracy.” Indeed, Hyacinth’s feelings for the beautiful efforts of earlier artists fill him with loyalty to the “inestimably precious and beautiful” products of civilization that the revolution will likely destroy (396). His instinctive recoil from the disgrace of his mother’s crime, his pity for both his slain father and his miserable mother, prevent him from fulfilling his revolutionary mission, a deed whose consequences would fall not only to World History but also to the memory of his mother, whose “own forgotten, redeemed pollution [would thereby be placed] again in the eye of the world” (583). Above all, his loyalty to his own feelings prevents him from allowing an organization to decide for him what is right. Hyacinth is not guilty of inconsistency here, though he maintains that he has been “fickle” for wanting to defend the beautiful products of civilization (529) and for regretting his vow. He has always been “willing to lay down [his] life for anything that will really help” the people (573), although away from the messianic lure of Hoffendahl, Hyacinth believes that he alone can best decide what that thing will be; the “grim arrangement” of suicide finally strikes him as more helpful than the assassination of a duke (570). Why does James offer his hero no escape from his bind, no way of enlisting his feelings in the service of his politics? James could easily have turned to Ruskin or Morris as contemporary models for the coexistence of aesthetic feeling and political righteousness, even action; he had met them both during his first solo visit to England in 1868, and he remained acquainted with their work. We know, of course, that James was put off by Ruskin’s “queer provincialities and pruderies” (“Venice” 3), that he regarded Ruskin’s “extraordinary aesthetic sensitivity,” in Adam Parkes’ fine formulation, as “severely constrained by an intractable moralism, which diverts his generous emotional resources from their proper object” (603). Still, James well knew that the aestheticism of Ruskin and Morris reflected their socialist beliefs, and had Eustache Poupin known the works of these men, he might have offered his pupil at the bookbindery a way of loving



100

101

the artifacts of civilization while working toward a more equitable society. Perhaps we must see the novel’s terrible logic—and the tragic choice it inflicts upon Hyacinth—as James’ one capitulation to ideology in this work. A middle way for Hyacinth might have made the threat of the ideological seem less dire. Instead, Hyacinth concludes that he must choose between an unforgiving political consciousness, exemplified by his political associates, and an aesthetic sensibility that, he fears, has no place in the new social order they envision. The moral sensibility of British aestheticism lingers in the shadows of this novel— most notably in Hyacinth’s profession, which powerfully recalls the figure of William Morris, as well as in Hyacinth’s inspired response to Venice, which no less inevitably invokes John Ruskin.27 And yet James stops short of presenting Hyacinth with a mentor who will lead him to a place that unifies art and social conscience. Venice fails to address Hyacinth with the Ruskinian lesson of corruption that he might have deployed for social reform; instead, it calls up the bookbinder’s most powerful impressions and impels him to live, like Walter Pater, in the “present hour” (395) with its many tangible attractions rather than in the hope of some more perfect and abstract future state. As if to distinguish most starkly between the political feeling of men like Ruskin and Morris and the political ideas of Hegelian socialists, James allows Hyacinth to remain ignorant of such alternatives, forcing him to choose between his feelings and the ideas of his companions, between an ecstatic present and a just future. The choice he imposes on Hyacinth, it seems, is a false one. Even Hegel himself was incapable of consistently choosing the abstract over the particular, if we are to believe William James’ characterization of the German philosopher. That is, James lamented that Hegel was so corrupted by the prejudices of rationalism that he employed the language of absolutes for what was really empirical observation. In spite of his “perverse preference for the use of technical and logical jargon”—James here means the language of abstract ideas—Hegel’s “mind is in very truth impressionistic” (Pluralistic Universe 87). What Hegel calls “ideas” or “concepts,” James argues, were “not . . . the static self-contained things that previous logicians had supposed, but were germinative, and passed beyond themselves into each other by what he called their immanent dialectic” (91–92). William James delivered these lectures long after his brother wrote his novel about anarchism and artistry, and in any case (as we have seen), Henry was not a systematic reader of philosophy. But I have been arguing here that the novelist might easily have imagined for Hyacinth a middle way between bourgeois complacency and





despair, a way that allowed his compassion with the laboring classes to mingle freely and guiltlessly with his aesthetic responsiveness. When the novelist allows his hero to lose all hope that he can escape the impasse between his political and artistic feelings, killing himself in his Westminster lodgings, James signals his own flagging faith in a political sensibility that embraces true thought and feeling. Hyacinth’s demoralization, it would seem, is finally James’ own.



102

4

But Ha lf the Mat ter : Pictur ing Thought and Feeling in T H E W I N G S O F T H E D OV E

Like Hyacinth Robinson, whose pledge to serve the revolution

makes exquisitely real Walter Pater’s reminder that we all live “under sentence of death” (190), the main character of James’ 1902 novel, The Wings of the Dove, also has an abbreviated time to live and is therefore perfectly suited to demonstrate Pater’s ideal existence, to “see” in her limited “number of pulses . . . all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses” (188). The dying Milly Theale, like the desperate and committed Hyacinth Robinson, is therefore poised to represent the superiority of “experience” in all its empirical details over the fixed ideas that can, as we have seen, defeat pure experience. Critics of the novel have read it as a demonstration of Pater’s injunction to live, to gather impressions rather than “make theories about the things we see and touch” (189). Jonathan Freedman observes that “one of the most remarkable qualities of this remarkable novel is its encyclopedic range of allusions to—and its highly resonant and sophisticated deployment of—the entire imaginative achievement of British aestheticism” (205). More specifically, he notes that “Milly’s course of action through the novel can be understood as an extension of James’ own highly Paterian exploration of the powers attained by a consciousness facing its own impending demise—the central conceit of the Conclusion to The Renaissance, and one which, when fully explicated by James in the Preface to Wings, sounds as if it could have been directly lifted from Pater’s text” (206). James’ title, moreover,



Chapter 3


echoes the epigraph to The Renaissance, drawn from Psalm 68: “Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove,” a reference to some great treasure (“covered with silver”) found among the spoils of war. We have been exploring the ways that Pater and his fellow aesthetes Baudelaire, Ruskin, and Morris, as well as empiricist philosophers, represented for James an attractive alternative to abstract and ideological thought. If, as I have been arguing here, James preferred the experiential realm of thought to the a priori realm of abstract ideas, then we might expect the presence of Pater in this late novel to bear the full weight of James’ admiration. And yet, as Freedman points out, the novel’s ending is “hauntingly ugly,” as Milly’s surviving friends rewrite the dead woman’s beautiful generosity into something tawdry and cruel, and as the novel itself resists “the kind of aestheticization Milly strives for” (227–28). That the logic of the novel steers away from Milly’s own experiential approach to the world suggests a potential problem with her Paterian outlook. The pure experience that Pater endorses and Milly accepts as “the freshness of response” assuming the form of a “flood . . . bearing her up” (132) may be more beautiful but only slightly more palatable, finally, than the more rigid world of abstract ideas. If critics are beginning to appreciate the importance of (Paterian) experience to this novel, they have been slower to consider the presence in Wings of its opposite, what I have been calling “ideas.” But indeed the novel is as interested in the interplay between impressions and ideas as it is in impressions themselves. James introduces the topic of this interplay in his preface, where he describes the origin of his story as both a “motive”—an impression or impulse prompting action—and an “idea.” The “motive,” he tells us, has always been “vividly present” to him (3); the “idea” that he describes in his preface is the stark plot of his novel, a plot that he recounts in strikingly Paterian terms: The idea, reduced to its essence, is that of a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world; aware moreover of the condemnation and passionately desiring to “put in” before extinction as many of the finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived. (3)

Even this Paterian plot is only crude, and as James explains, “the image so figured would be, at best, but half the matter; the rest would be all the picture of the struggle involved, the adventure brought about, the gain recorded or the loss incurred, the precious experience somehow compassed” (3). In these reflections James indicates that



104

105

ideas and impressions might be compatible, supplementing each other’s deficiencies, and that while an idea gives structure to artistic execution, it is nothing without the “experience” to fill it out. Once again we see the insufficiency of unadulterated ideas in the novel itself, where they arise only to be rejected by James’ most imaginative characters. Milly Theale, of course, sits at the center of this image: she is the impressionable young woman whom James describes as the “heir of all the ages” (6), a woman who, in her desire to live, “clutch[es]” at the world “to the last moment of her strength” (5). Her “impulse to wrest from her shrinking hour still as much of the fruit of life as possible” (5), James further remarks, is an impulse that draws in the people around her, those who love her, who want to help her live, and who discover that they have something to give her even as she may be able to help them. Milly’s appeal for these people is most apparent in the famous scene in which she encounters her likeness in a Bronzino portrait, a scene that also highlights for her the terror of mental fixity. Gazing at the portrait, Milly recoils not only from the thought of death but also—perhaps more terrifying to her—from the deadness of existence. At Lord Mark’s Matcham estate, where she finds herself surrounded by dull eyes, she recognizes “the particular bland stare” as the “mark” of “civilisation at its highest” (138). Many of the people she encounters, though kind, seem hardly alive. The feeling is amplified when she looks at the portrait and immediately recognizes in it not Bronzino’s subject, a woman whom she resembles, but rather the condition of inevitable mortality: not only of our bodies but even of our subjective experiences. The woman, of course, is “dead, dead, dead”; she looks out from her frame with “eyes of other days” under a “mass of hair” that has “fad[ed] with time.” But what seems to trouble Milly is not simply that she herself, like her counterpart in the portrait, will one day be dead, but that even during her own lifetime she will outlive her moments of transcendent thought and feeling. Milly knows that the woman in the portrait was alive when her likeness was painted, and yet the painting fails to convey any idea of the woman’s subjectivity. The closest Milly comes to knowing what the woman was feeling is to know what she lacks: she is “unaccompanied by a joy.” The woman’s “recorded jewels” seem to stand in for the entire portrait, which is merely a record of some once-living being. If the portrait conveys anything to the immensely yearning Milly, it is the mortality rather than the former life of its subject. Milly reanimates this portrait with her own lively feelings, her tears lending the image the animation it lacks, making it “so strange and



B u t H a l f t h e M at t e r


fair.” Her one remark on the painting is both relevant and irrelevant to Bronzino’s subject: Milly “recognized her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. ‘I shall never be better than this’” (139). The words are beside the point because they concern Milly, not Bronzino’s subject; by “this” Milly seems to mean “this moment,” not “this woman in the painting.” And yet her words “recognized [the portrait] exactly” because they identify what the portrait captures: the impossibility of preserving human subjectivity. Whatever she once was, the woman in Bronzino’s painting is “dead, dead, dead.” Although readers of this scene are right to understand it as dramatizing Milly’s anxieties about death—she is, after all, the last survivor in her family, and her health has been precarious—its echoes of Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address (“The American Scholar”) point out another possible reading. Emerson’s essay, that is, distinguishes between the dead records of earlier ages and the “quick thought” that can revive these inert forms. Emerson observed that the artifacts of the past—books, art, and institutions—constitute the “form” in which a deceased “mind is inscribed” (EL 56) but do not constitute thought itself. Like the Bronzino figure’s “recorded jewels,” these forms merely mark the place once occupied by life and thought. The living mind, however, reawakens these old forms by receiving them and reflecting on them. Emerson distinguishes between the mere taking in of “dead fact” (the words on a page, for instance, or in Milly’s case the image of the woman in the painting) and the more active imaginative thought that occurs when the attentive and fully receptive reader invites the past to live again in her own quickened consciousness. Emerson regards the words on a page as mere remnants of former thoughts and deeds—what he calls “dead fact” (56) or a “record” of some great thought (57). On the other hand, the process taking place as the receptive mind encounters these same artifacts—the transformation from “dead fact” to “quick thought” (56)—is for Emerson a nearly sublime event: “There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise” when we encounter a living mind in a dead text; then “the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion” (59). Milly’s gloss on the painting and on herself reiterates Emerson’s insight that a thought or feeling—unlike an idea, which is fixed forever—never outlives the moment of its incarnation. Milly knows that she must live entirely in the present, as she will “never be better than this.” Lady Aldershaw, a guest in Milly’s company, confirms Milly’s thought when she recognizes the superiority of the living woman over the dead masterpiece. She “look[s] at Milly quite as if Milly had been the Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly” and murmurs her



106

107

admiration for the living subject: “‘Superb, superb’” (141). If the woman in the painting is “dead, dead, dead,” like the “dead fact” on Emerson’s page, Milly transforms it into her own “quick thought.” Lady Aldershaw’s admiration mirrors the narrator’s charmed attention to Milly and forecasts the involvement of the other characters in her emotional life. As James explains in his preface, Milly’s “longing can take effect only by the aid of others” (5), and since these others also have longings of their own, their entanglement in her story promises to serve their interests as well as hers. Foremost among these participants are Kate Croy and Merton Densher, the secretly betrothed couple who, lacking money, also lack the means to a prompt marriage. Kate’s aunt Maud Lowder, who wants to see these young lovers separated, is also interested in what Milly can do for her plans, as is Lord Mark, who wishes to make a superior marriage of his own. Susan Stringham, Milly’s traveling companion, is prepared to do nearly anything to allow her young friend to “live.” If Milly is the character whose longings are described in the most relentlessly Paterian terms, her companions operate all along the continuum between impressions and ideas. Aunt Maud is no simpleton: she is “afraid of nothing—not even, it would appear, of arduous thought” (38), but she often lapses from thought into “ideas.” She has, for instance, “her own idea about Kate” that she expresses to Densher: Kate is an “investment” that has “appreciate[d]” and Maud will negotiate her neice’s transfer only to “a high bidder” (65). Although Densher has qualities that have secured Kate’s love and her promise to marry him, he also sees that Aunt Maud’s idea is much narrower than Kate’s feelings: “on Mrs. Lowder’s basis, the only one in question,” he recognizes himself as “a very small quantity” (66). During their first encounter, Densher thinks of Maud as “the car of Juggernaut” (70). The Hindu idol Juggernaut, which crushed its worshipping devotees beneath the wheels of its car, by Densher’s day had come to signify any notion that required blind and self-destructive devotion. Maud therefore represents to Densher an inflexible and dangerous idea, one by which he and Kate will likely suffer. Kate later has occasion to remind her lover that “when [Aunt Maud] adopts a view she . . . fairly terrorizes with her view any other, any opposite view, and those, not less, who represent that. I’ve often thought success comes to her . . . by the spirit in her that dares and defies her idea not to prove the right one” (290). Maud’s defiance carries her idea to the point of ideology. Lord Mark, the man Maud has chosen to marry Kate, has a less formidable mind than Maud and is even more inclined toward fixed





ideas. Kate describes him as “a person with so many ideas that it’s particularly hard to simplify for him” (172), but the problem is not the quantity of his ideas but their rigidity. Milly discovers this rigidity on her first meeting with the nobleman, when she is struck by the stark contrast between her own charmed impression of the world she has just discovered and her new companion’s world-weariness. For Milly, the scene at Maud Lowder’s dinner party is “really romantic,” so charmingly new “that she scarce even then knew where she was” (98). She has plunged into the current of a “positively rich and strange” life (99), but she recognizes immediately that Lord Mark wouldn’t understand any such description of these circumstances. He is prevented, she sees, by the posture he has chosen to take on this occasion: “his line would be to be clever” (100). While he shares Milly’s sense that Kate Croy is incalculable, he gives Milly the distinct impression that he already knows everything about Milly herself because he has assigned her to a fixed type, the American girl. Though Milly is “a stranger and an American,” Lord Mark treats her as if “she and her like were the chief of his diet. He took her, kindly enough, but imperturbably, for granted . . . he would have . . . more to tell her than to learn from her” (102). While Milly experiences the world inductively, seeing and feeling the elements in the current that surrounds her and suspending conclusions until she has seen and felt enough, Lord Mark operates in the opposite mode, beginning with ideas and submitting his new experiences to the fixed types that constitute the content of those ideas. He thinks he can draw simple conclusions about Milly because he has visited her native land on three occasions and thinks he knows how all her compatriots will respond to a given situation. He even shares this unflattering view with Milly, observing to her that “she was already . . . thinking what she should say on her other side—which was what Americans were always doing” (103). Milly, of course, understands how Lord Mark thinks, understands that she will never extend, for him, beyond the idea to which he has reduced her: “she was more and more sharply conscious of having—as with the door sharply slammed upon her and the guard’s hand raised in signal to the train—been popped into the compartment in which she was to travel for him” (105). And while she is slower to resent Mark’s “use of her” in this way than “many [another] girl” might have been (105), she does chastise him for his complacency and call attention to the simplicity and error of his fixed ideas. “You know what you’re used to, and it’s your being used to it—that, and that only—that makes you. But there are things you don’t know” (107).



108

109

Milly has in mind the different grasps of these different cognitive modes, induction and deduction. “You’re blasé,” she tells her companion, “but you’re not enlightened. You’re familiar with everything, but conscious really of nothing. What I mean is that you’ve no imagination” (108). In invoking the imagination as a cognitive feature missing from Lord Mark’s deductive view of the world, Millie implicitly introduces a distinction that John Ruskin had drawn in Modern Painters II (1846), the distinction between intuition, which is imaginative, and reasoning, which Ruskin believed cannot penetrate to the depth of things. As Ruskin explains in his chapter, “Of Imagination Penetrative,” the virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze, (not by reasoning, but by its authoritative opening and revealing power,) a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things. I repeat that it matters not whether the reader is willing to call this faculty imagination or no, I do not care about the name; but I would be understood when I speak of imagination hereafter, to mean this, the true foundation of all art which exercises eternal authority over men’s minds; . . . the base of whose authority and being is its perpetual thirst of truth and purpose to be true.1

Paul Sawyer notes that Ruskin’s theory of the imagination “discloses an emotional rather than an intellectual unity” (67), and certainly the emotional power of Ruskin’s preferred mode, imagination, resembles the impression as we have been tracing it, a perception deriving from feelings or sensations rather than ideas. In contrast, Ruskin’s category of “reasoning,” which appears to stop short “at the surface of things,” resembles David Hume’s “idea,” a concept perhaps based on some earlier impression but, Hume warns us, perhaps not: it might be just an empty concept with no original feeling to support it, a kind of counterfeit notion. When Milly complains to Lord Mark that he knows only the things he has encountered many times and is incapable of making a discovery about something unfamiliar to him, she is less interested in the origins (and thus authenticity) of his familiar ideas than in his apparent habit of relying only on ideas, never on new impressions. Worse yet, she implies, he cannot recognize the unfamiliar when he sees it. Lord Mark may be “conscious really of nothing,” but that doesn’t prevent his ideas from having an invidious hold on the people on whom he inflicts these ideas. Milly knows herself well and resists Mark’s characterization of her, but still she wishes “to get away from him, or indeed, much rather, away from herself so far as she was present to him” (108). His ideas have forced





this young woman—even in her own self-conception—into an alien image of herself. Readers expect more from Merton Densher, the young man who represents to Kate “the high dim things . . . of the mind,” whose intellectual capacities are “rich for her and mysterious and strong” (48). The narrator, trying to describe Densher’s character, observes that “[y]ou would have got fairly near him by making out in his eyes the potential recognition of ideas” (46), though this description remains vague about what these particular ideas might be or where they originate: does Merton Densher cling to his own ideas or only recognize ideas in others? Densher himself identifies with Eliot’s more favorable term, “thought”: he acknowledges his “weakness . . . for life” and his “strength merely for thought” (48). Though he is a man of thought, his weakness for life and his sense that Kate is strong precisely where he is not subject him to her influence where his better judgment might have urged him to resist. When Kate concocts the “idea” of persuading Maud Lowder to consent to her marriage to Densher, he recognizes the “fatuity” in the idea and watches in embarrassment “their still clinging to their idea” even though it seems more fatuous still in the presence of Maud, her great wealth, her great power, and her own fixed ideas (62). If the inadequacy of these ideas is not obvious in their direct presentation, it becomes apparent in the light of more nuanced thought, which throws into relief their crudeness. Kate Croy, identified by her lover as enjoying the gift for life that he lacks, relies for her vitality on a freedom from convention that is closely linked to free thought. Far from sneaking around with her lover to avoid Maud Lowder’s disapproval, she is direct with her aunt because she is “highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free” (51). While Densher is too poor and she is too attached to comfort for them to marry immediately, both of these young people understand that “the realm of thought at least was open to them. They could think whatever they liked about whatever they would—in other words they could say it” (956). One of Kate’s bold and unconventional views is that life is not a zerosum game; she believes that she can do something self-interested for herself and her lover while also doing something generous for the people who will serve her interests. She surprises her lover by seeming to believe that she can keep him without suffering any consequences from those who disapprove of the match. Densher finds it “already strange enough that she reasoned, or at all events began to act, as if she might work [her possession of him] in with other and alien things, privately cherish [him] and yet, as regards the rigor of it, pay



110

111

no price” (54). He wonders whether her desire to please her aunt will harm his own interests, but she assures him that she has calculated carefully: “I shan’t sacrifice you. Don’t cry out till you’re hurt. I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that’s just my situation, that I want and that I shall try for everything” (60). Densher is puzzled because he cannot see the possibility of satisfying such various and conflicting interests, but Kate is confident—without laying out a specific plan— that “if we avoid stupidity we may do all” (61). The precise content of Kate’s thoughts is unclear here, both to Densher and to James’ readers. Because she withholds the details of her plan, her fiancé has very little idea what precisely she has in mind and must rely on his great faith in her superiority and her freedom from convention. But he has reservations in spite of his compliance: “He would do as she liked—his own liking might come off as it would” (61–62). James’ readers, meanwhile, are left to wonder whether Kate’s mind is one of those superior minds driven by thought and feeling, or whether it isn’t just a subtler version of Lord Mark’s and Aunt Maud’s. On the one hand, her formidable mind affects even the complacent Lord Mark with bewilderment; as Milly observes, while he finds everyone else around him transparent, “It was the handsome girl alone, one of his own species and his own society, who had made him feel uncertain” (110). Milly too finds Kate “not wholly calculable” (123); in Kate’s presence she feels herself “on the edge of a great darkness. She should never know how Kate truly felt about anything such a one as Milly Theale should give her to feel. Kate would never—and not from ill will nor from duplicity, but from a sort of failure of common terms—reduce it to such a one’s comprehension or put it within her convenience” (123). On the other hand, because Kate is so “cryptic,” as Densher tells her (310), he and we can only guess at the contents of her mind. The insufficiency of fixed ideas is clearer when we view these ideas in contrast to the mind of Milly Theale, James’ central character whose consciousness, through much of the novel, is exposed and vibrating with thought and feeling. Book Fourth opens with a chapter devoted entirely to Milly’s impressions of her new London friends, the first direct view into the mind of this young American, whom readers first meet through the consciousness of her traveling companion, Susan Stringham. Here Milly discovers not only Lord Mark’s preconceived notions of her character, but also “his idea” of her “success,” an idea “into which at present . . . she wouldn’t go” (107). Instead, we see not Lord Mark’s ideas, nor even the dinner party itself, but rather Milly’s idiosyncratic experience of the party, which appears to her as





a “fairy-tale” (98). Her “quickened perceptions” (98) both enliven and oppress her, but she decides “neither to seek nor to shirk,” nor even “to wonder too much, but . . . to let things come as they would, since there was little enough doubt of how they would go” (98–99). Her disposition is Emersonian here as she abandons herself to the impressions this event will make on her consciousness. In this extended account of Aunt Maud’s dinner party, Milly’s consciousness registers only obliquely the objective details of the scene; instead, we see her fanciful, supersensitive perceptions taking in the scene as if it were an aesthetic experience, alternating between musical performance and theatrical and visual representations: She thrilled, she consciously flushed, and all to turn pale again, with the certitude—it had never been so present—that she should find herself completely involved: the very air of the place, the pitch of the occasion, had for her both so sharp a ring and so deep an undertone. The smallest things, the faces, the hands, the jewels of the women, the sound of words, especially of names, across the table, the shape of the forks, the arrangement of the flowers, the attitude of the servants, the walls of the room, were all touches in a picture and denotements in a play; and they marked for her moreover her alertness of vision. She had never, she might well believe, been in such a state of vibration; her sensibility was almost too sharp for her comfort . . . (100)

Here readers glean that Aunt Maud has provided flowers and servants for her bejeweled guests, but Milly’s emphasis presses not on these details but on her own thrilled and vibrating response. At times we follow the words that she and Lord Mark exchange, but at other times the objective facts of their conversation disappear entirely, fully effaced by Milly’s subsequent impression of what Lord Mark has said and done: “It was one of the things she afterwards saw—Milly was for ever seeing things afterwards—that her companion had here had some way of his own, quite unlike any one’s else, of assuring her of his consideration. She wondered how he had done it, for he had neither apologised nor protested. She said to herself at any rate that he had led her on; and what was most odd was the question by which he had done so” (104). Indeed, Milly’s perceptions are so at odds not only with the objective facts, which fail to interest the narrator here, but also with what the other characters take in that she marvels at what escapes her companions: “Positively while she sat there she had the loud rattle in her ears, and she wondered during these moments why the others didn’t hear it” (105).



112


113

These were immense excursions for the spirit of a young person at Mrs. Lowder’s mere dinner-party; but what was so significant and so admonitory as the fact of their being possible? What could they have been but just a part, already, of the crowded consciousness? And it was just a part likewise that while plates were changed and dishes presented and periods in the banquet marked; while appearances insisted and phenomena multiplied and words reached her from here and there like plashes of a slow thick tide; while Mrs. Lowder grew somehow more stout and more instituted and Susie, at her distance and in comparison, more thinly improvised and more different—different, that is, from every one and every thing: it was just a part that while this process went forward our young lady alighted, came back, taking up her destiny again as if she had been able by a wave or two of her wings to place herself briefly in sight of an alternative to it. (106–7)

The narrator registers the material details of this ritual: the changing of plates, the presentation of dishes, the various “periods” of the banquet being marked. But to Milly, the experience is much denser and more figurative: the objective facts recorded by the narrator reach her “like plashes of a slow thick tide,” already translated by her imagination into something far different from the scene in which she actually participates. While the stages of the banquet advance, another “process” is going forward in Milly’s mind, as her companions change shape to match her impressions of their characters and their roles in this elaborate scene, Maud’s growing stoutness indicating her indispensable presence in a complicated social network, and Susie’s thinness suggesting her superior aloofness from it. At the same time, while Milly watches the scene and even takes part in the conversation, she steps outside it long enough to imagine an alternative destiny. If her impressions are prompted by the details of her surroundings, they rise far above those details and even, at times, seem weirdly out of alignment with them. When, for example, Milly briefly catches the eye of Kate Croy at the opposite end of the table, she reads the look as evidence of a relationship she intuits but can’t quite identify. Milly has been speaking with Lord Mark about Kate when Kate looks at her as if to “guess at Lord Mark’s effect” on Milly. “If she could guess this effect what then did she know about it and in what degree had she felt it herself? . . . Nothing was so odd as that she should



James’ narrator pauses to remind us of the wide gulf between the (perhaps trivial, if extravagant) material details of this scene and the much more extraordinary imagination that he follows as Milly absorbs her surroundings:


have to recognise so quickly in each of these glimpses of an instant the various signs of a relation” (106). Milly’s temptation to invest these glances with a personal history makes sense, especially given the insincerity she has already noticed in Lord Mark and her eagerness to discover the truth about these people. But the narrator suggests that Milly’s next step might be to advance her perceptions in a radical new direction: the “anomaly” of discovering “signs of a relation” in these glimpses, “had she had more time to give to it, might well, might almost terribly have suggested to her that her doom was to live fast. It was queerly a question of the short run and the consciousness proportionately crowded” (106). What is the narrator implying in this last dark hint? If Milly’s consciousness is indeed as “crowded” as this first depiction of her mind might indicate, why does the narrator imply that such a consciousness is therefore doomed to “live fast”? Does the narrator suggest that any crowded consciousness must necessarily belong to a person destined, like Pater’s aesthete, to a short existence? Or does he mean to say that Milly’s morbid mind would draw that terrible conclusion were she to give herself time to inquire into the matter? If we cannot identify the agent of this possibly morbid leap, we learn that Milly is indeed capable of drawing similarly illogical conclusions from her flickering perceptions and feelings. When she does so, she reveals to us the opposite extreme of Lord Mark’s fixed ideas: that impressionistic thought is not without its own odd risks. To be sure, there is something psychologically and aesthetically appealing in narratives that erupt from impressions, and James often advances his plots with just such a maneuver, bringing an image to life and suggesting an unspoken history. James regarded the famous episode in Portrait of a Lady where Isabel Osmond muses on a remembered image of her husband and Madame Merle as “obviously the best thing in the book” (55), and readers of his novels will recall other moments where an image generates an impression and then a story, as if not only to confirm James’ Ruskinian belief in the superiority of penetrative imaginations, but also to illustrate the narrative value of a “finely aware and richly responsible” sensibility (PC 35). As James advises a beginning novelist, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”2 And yet, as we will see when Milly Theale exercises her penetrative imagination, the appeal of impressionistic, intuitive thought may not extend to its accuracy or even its advisability. On two important occasions in the novel, Milly draws conclusions from her impressions that not only fail to explain the past that has been obscured from



114

115

her but also propel her into inappropriate (and even deadly) action. The first takes place during her consultation with Sir Luke Strett, the distinguished physician who refrains from diagnosing her complaint, and the second during her first encounter with Kate and Densher. In both cases, Milly draws an illogical conclusion based on a powerful feeling. On the first occasion—or rather, two occasions occurring so closely together that they nearly constitute a single episode—Milly visits Sir Luke in his London office. Her first meeting lasts a mere ten minutes, but because the doctor is scrupulously attentive in that brief time—“so crystal-clean [is] the great empty cup of attention that he set between them on the table” (144)—Milly receives an “impression” that she has “interested him even beyond her intention” (144–45). She learns almost nothing at all about her health from the visit; when Kate asks if the doctor allows that Milly is ill, Milly replies, “I don’t know what he allows, and I don’t care . . . He asked me scarcely anything— he doesn’t need to do anything so stupid” (145). But the impression of his interest in her stays with Milly, so that when she again meets with Sir Luke two days later, she is certain that in the intervening time “her acquaintance with him had somehow increased and his own knowledge in particular received mysterious additions” (147). She is sure, that is, that he has “found out, she meant, literally everything” about her. Something about Sir Luke’s kind manner during this second, longer meeting deepens Milly’s impression that he is interested in her and leads her to believe that his interest is more than medical, although once again James’ narrator gives us almost nothing of the objective facts of this scene, only Milly’s impression: It was strange and deep for her, this impression, and she did accordingly take it straight home. It showed him—showed him in spite of himself—as allowing, somewhere far within, things comparatively remote, things in fact quite, as she would have said, outside, delicately to weigh with him; showed him as interested on her behalf in other questions beside the question of what was the matter with her. She accepted such an interest as regular in the highest type of scientific mind—his own being the highest, magnificently—because otherwise obviously it wouldn’t be there; but she could at the same time take it as a direct source of light upon herself, even though that might present her a little as pretending to equal him. Wanting to know more about a patient than how a patient was constructed or deranged couldn’t be, even on the part of the greatest of doctors, anything but some form or other of the desire to let the patient down easily. When that was the case the reason, in turn, could only be, too manifestly, pity; and when




116


In Milly’s complex train of thought, she recognizes Sir Luke’s personal interest in her as both customary in a man of such intelligence and, at the same time, evidence of something physically wrong with her. Simultaneously, too, she notes that his interest in other questions beyond her physical condition proves something ominous about her physical condition. The words and phrases she uses to sew her thoughts together into some logical order—“because otherwise,” “but,” “even though,” “the reason, in turn,” “and when . . . what was the inference but?”—indicate a tortuous deductive process that, for all its measured movement from one premise to the next, ends in an absurd conclusion: pity can be the only cause of Sir Luke’s interest, and that pity can only be accounted for by Milly’s visible, impending mortality. Though her logic begins in an impression, not a fixed idea, it ends in an idea that is fixed in a menacing image that will not leave her: the head of a slaughtered aristocrat bobbing before her on a pike. Milly’s conclusion remains with her as she enters Regent’s Park after leaving the doctor’s office: She had been asking herself why, if her case was grave—and she knew what she meant by that—he should have talked to her at all about what she might with futility “do”; or why on the other hand, if it were light, he should attach an importance to the office of friendship. She had him, with her little lonely acuteness . . . in a cleft stick: she either mattered, and then she was ill; or she didn’t matter, and then she was well enough. . . . Her prevision, in fine, of just where she should catch him furnished the light of that judgment in which we describe her as daring to indulge. And the judgment it was that made her sensation simple. He had distinguished her—that was the chill. (157)

Milly is fixated on her own mortality because she has interpreted Sir Luke’s kindness and interest as a grim diagnosis, though she reflects that “he hadn’t after all pronounced her anything” (156). But because of her powerful first impression and her penetrative imagination, her doctor’s advice about “what she might . . . ‘do’” strikes her as futile. The difficulty comes not only from Milly’s morbid reading of the scene but also from her doctor’s equivocation over the word “live.” His parting words provide the content for her meditations as she strolls through Regent’s Park. When Milly wonders how she should take care



pity held up its telltale face like a head on a pike, in a French revolution, bobbing before a window, what was the inference but that the patient was bad? He might say what he would now—she would always have seen the head at the window . . . (150)

117

of herself, Sir Luke advises, “‘Well, see all you can. That’s what it comes to. Worry about nothing. You have at least no worries. It’s a great rare chance.’” Anxious about whether she will “suffer,” Milly also wonders whether she will “live,” and Sir Luke replies, “‘My dear young lady, . . . isn’t to “live” exactly what I’m trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?’” (153). In Milly’s usage, of course, to “live” means to survive; and it is precisely the question of her survival that her doctor evades, advising her instead on how she might spend or enjoy her remaining time, unquantified though that time might be. He answers her medical question, in short, as if it were an ethical or even an aesthetic question, and his advice not only resembles Pater’s injunction at the conclusion of The Renaissance, but it also anticipates the oft-quoted advice of Lambert Strether in a passage that James would publish the following year in The Ambassadors: “Live all you can;” Strether tells Little Bilham; “it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?” Strether’s passionate words, of course, do not indicate that Bilham suffers from a mortal illness, though they do spring in part from Strether’s perception that he has missed out on much of life and has only a limited time left: This place and these impressions—mild as you may find them to wind a man up so; all my impressions of Chad and of people I’ve seen at his place—well, have had their abundant message for me, have just dropped that into my mind. I see it now. I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh, I do see, at least; and more than you’d believe or I can express . . . Don’t at any rate miss things out of stupidity. . . . Live! (Ambassadors I. 217–18)

Strether’s words, like Pater’s and Sir Luke’s, imply a distinction between living and merely existing, and the imperative to realize and act upon this distinction is informed not by mortal illness but by what Martha Nussbaum calls a “new moral attitude”: the realization that to be “really alive” is to be immersed in impressions, to live a life that is “richer, fuller of enjoyment, fuller too of whatever is worth calling knowledge of the world” (181). In some ways Milly takes her doctor’s advice as if it had come from an aesthete rather than a physician, as the “instant application” of his words “had opened out there before her” in the square outside his office: [S]he went forward into space under the sense of an impulse received—an impulse simple and direct, easy above all to act upon. She was borne up for the hour, and now she knew why she had wanted to





come by herself. No one in the world could have sufficiently entered into her state; no tie would have been close enough to enable a companion to walk beside her without some disparity. She literally felt, in this first flush, that her only company must be the human race at large, present all round her, but inspiringly impersonal, and that her only field must be, then and there, the grey immensity of London. (153–54)

In acting on an “impulse” rather than a theory or idea, and moreover in desiring to immerse herself in London’s impersonal crowd, Milly behaves as Baudelaire’s flâneur or “passionate spectator,” for whom it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. (9)

Effacing herself in a crowd, abandoning herself to an “ebb and flow” she cannot control, being “borne up” in an “inspiringly impersonal” crowd, Milly acts upon Sir Luke’s advice to “worry about nothing,” advice that also echoes an Emersonian description of the perfect way of life: “it is by abandonment.”3 If we read Sir Luke’s advice and Milly’s initial response against Emerson’s description of ideal existence—if we see these things, that is, as “healthy-minded” immersions in the world rather than evidence of a “sick soul”4 preparing to depart it—then we can regard Milly not as a dying woman but as a living woman throwing herself into the stream of life. As Emerson notes in “Circles,” “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why” (414). Like Walter Pater, Milly seems to recognize that the “ecstasy” of existence can be maintained only while we remember the limited “number of pulses . . . given to us” (Pater 188). For this reason, she leaves Sir Luke’s office in a mood that combines that ecstatic energy with a prevision of her own doom, with a consciousness mixed and tasting at one and the same time of what she had lost and what had been given her. It was wonderful to her, while she took her random course, that these quantities felt so equal: she had been treated—hadn’t she?—as if it were in her power to live; and yet one wasn’t treated so—was one?—unless



118

119

it had come up, quite as much, that one might die. The beauty of the bloom had gone from the small old sense of safety—that was distinct: she had left it behind her there for ever. But the beauty of the idea of a great adventure, a big dim experiment or struggle in which she might more responsibly than ever before take a hand, had been offered her instead. It was as if she had had to pluck off her breast, to throw away, some friendly ornament, a familiar flower, a little old jewel, that was part of her daily dress; and to take up and shoulder as a substitute some queer defensive weapon, a musket, a spear, a battle-axe—conducive possibly in a higher degree to a striking appearance, but demanding all the effort of the military posture. (154)

Milly’s response again turns on the equivocal uses of the word “live”: it may indeed be “in her power to live” even though it is also true that she “might die.” Here the two senses of the word “live” do not pose a problem or a paradox for her; like Pater, she can sense both “the splendour of [her] experience and . . . its awful brevity” (Pater 189), understanding even that her limited lifetime is precisely the element that provides for the “great adventure” she confronts for the first time. Recognizing, for instance, that for the first time in her life “nobody in the world knew where she was,” Milly feels the spell of her new condition and reflects on her past existence that “that hadn’t been a life” (155–56). But if she responds in a healthy minded way to Sir Luke’s explicit advice, her reaction to the impression she takes from his kindness is in a very different vein. Meditating morbidly on what he means by “live,” and thinking of his pity, which still looms before her like a head on a pike, she glides from the possibility that she “might die” to the probability that she will. The “great adventure” of life becomes the “practical question of life,” a very different problem when she looks around her and identifies with the strangers populating the “shabby grass” in the center of Regent’s Park, away from the “pompous roads” where expensive carriages pass: here doubtless were hundreds of others just in the same box. Their box, their great common anxiety, what was it, in this grim breathingspace, but the practical question of life? They could live if they would; that is, like herself, they had been told so: she saw them all about her, on seats, digesting the information, recognising it again as something in a slightly different shape familiar enough, the blessed old truth that they would live if they could. (155)

Though these two expressions of existence resemble each other rhetorically, they are not simply “slightly different[ly] shape[d]” versions





of the same idea; the first is an expression of possibility and freedom, the second a grim and dispirited confession of fatality. That Milly can slip so easily from a Paterian outlook to its starkest opposite suggests how permanent a feature that head on a pike has become in her consciousness. From there it doesn’t take long for her not only to believe in but even to prefer this grimmer articulation of her condition: She looked about her again, on her feet, at her scattered melancholy comrades—some of them so melancholy as to be down on their stomachs in the grass, turned away, ignoring, burrowing; she saw once more, with them, those two faces of the question between which there was so little to choose for inspiration. It was perhaps superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible in short, that one would live if one could. (157)

Perverting Pater’s endorsement of the ecstatic life, Milly embraces the impossibility of living, finding more inspiration in the grim view of her mortality than in any method to “make as much as possible of the interval that remained,” as Pater put it (190). If, when describing the dinner scene, James’ narrator hesitates to tell us whether Milly or he is the source of the idea that “her doom was to live fast” (106), here we see that the notion is Milly’s own. I have been arguing here that Milly’s impressionistic approach to the world, which allows her to absorb a fleeting image and draw a conclusion from the feeling it instills, is responsible in this case for her deadly conviction of physical doom. Not only does Sir Luke refrain from ever pronouncing Milly sick with a fatal disease, but James’ narrative itself never confirms the cause of her death: does she die because she has been suffering from a fatal disease, or because she loses her desire to live? Would she have lived if she could, or could she have lived if she would? We never learn the truth, but we do learn that, to the extent that volition plays any role in Milly’s survival, her impressionistic response to these first consultations with Sir Luke is part of her eventual decline, even though the doctor gives her a reason to live and a means of doing so. In another pivotal episode, Milly draws from her impressions a conclusion that differs sharply from the truth of things; this immediate and unwavering conclusion generates a fiction about Kate and Densher even before anyone explicitly or implicitly lies to her. She has been alone to the National Gallery, where she encounters Merton Densher, just back from his visit to the United States, in



120

121

the company of Kate Croy. Knowing instinctively that she is being “handled” and “dealt with” in Kate’s company, “made” to “take everything as natural” (179), and that Kate has gotten herself out of some unspecified “predicament” (180), Milly nevertheless takes an impression that determines the course of her conduct and feelings for the rest of the novel and—if we allow that she lives by volition— results in her eventual death when she learns her mistake. Her conclusion is that Kate is not, in fact, in love with Densher, but it comes about from a mere impression that, as we have seen before, acts as a premise in a syllogism leading to an inaccurate conclusion. After their meeting at the Gallery, Milly invites the couple to her hotel for lunch, and when Kate Croy acts kindly toward Milly’s friend Susan, whom she has treated dismissively in the past, Milly reads more into Kate’s conduct than she might, incorrectly ascribing to Kate an attitude of indifference to Densher. In truth, Kate has been surprised during a tryst with her lover, and as part of her handling of the scene, she allows Densher to sit with Milly while she herself sits with Susan Stringham. Milly sees a “positive beauty” in Kate’s kindness to Susan, which she understands as a deviation from the handsome girl’s previous courses. Susie had been a bore to the handsome girl, and the change was now suggestive. The two sat together, after they had risen from the table, in the apartment in which they had lunched, making it thus easy for the other guest and his entertainer to sit in the room adjacent. This, for the latter personage, was the beauty; it was almost, on Kate’s part, like a prayer to be relieved. If she honestly liked better to be “thrown with” Susan Shepherd than with their other friend, why that said practically everything. It didn’t perhaps altogether say why she had gone out with him for the morning, but it said, as one thought, about as much as she could say to his face. (182)

Milly moves from observing this “suggestive” change in Kate’s behavior and seeing it figuratively—“it was almost . . . like a prayer to be relieved”—to concluding that Kate prefers Susan’s company to Densher’s. And from there she investigates the “probabilities” and arrives at a narrative that will account for her later susceptibility to the deceit of her friends: Little by little indeed, under the vividness of Kate’s behaviour, the probabilities fell back into their order. Merton Densher was in love and Kate couldn’t help it—could only be sorry and kind: wouldn’t that, without wild flurries, cover everything? Milly at all events tried it as a cover, tried




122


Like Milly’s earlier responses to Kate’s brief glance across the dinner table or to Sir Luke’s obvious interest in her, here she builds a story around a single “suggestive” change in Kate’s behavior toward Susan, though the truth of Kate’s affections is very different from what Milly concludes in her impressionistic mind. Does the novel offer any alternatives to Lord Mark’s fixed ideas or Milly’s dangerously impressionistic thoughts? Kate Croy might suggest an appealing middle ground, since her mind works in unconventional but logical and disciplined ways. Unlike Lord Mark’s hackneyed ideas, which so thoroughly demystify his world that his surroundings and companions bore him, Kate’s free and modern logic bewilders her friends, in particular Merton Densher, the person with whom she shares it most unreservedly. Densher, as we have seen, is no fool, but still he finds himself marveling at the turns that Kate’s mind takes. Overwhelmed on one particular occasion by “the sense of his good fortune and [Kate’s] variety, of the future she promised, the interest she supplied,” Densher erupts with an expression of his enchantment: “All women but you are stupid,” he tells her; How can I look at another? You’re different and different—and then you’re different again. No marvel Aunt Maud builds on you—except that you’re so much too good for what she builds for. Even “society” won’t know how good for it you are; it’s too stupid, and you’re beyond it. You’d have to pull it uphill—it’s you yourself who are at the top. The women one meets—what are they but books one has already read? You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut. (222)

Kate never disputes her lover’s assessment; at times she even accuses him of being too obtuse for her. “Men are too stupid—even you,” she tells him. “There are refinements . . . of consciousness, of sensation, of appreciation” that elude even the cleverest of men, who “know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them” (75). Densher doesn’t protest against this charge, but recognizes in his lover “perceptive flights he couldn’t hope to match” (215). Kate puts her plan for Milly into action long before she articulates it to Densher, who is nevertheless a major participant in the scheme. The strangeness of this experience—taking part in a production whose goal has never been revealed to him—magnifies Densher’s sense of his own stupidity and of Kate’s cunning. Kate says as much



it hard, for the time; pulled it over her, in the front, the larger room, drew it up to her chin with energy. If it didn’t, so treated, do everything for her, it did so much that she could herself supply the rest. (182)

123

to him when she leaves him in the dark: “if you’ll leave it to me—my cleverness, I assure you, has grown infernal—I’ll make it all right” (195). As Densher gropes for an account of what his fiancée is up to, he arrives at the explanation that Kate plans to enlist Milly in their secret: if Milly “weren’t a bore she’d be a convenience. It rolled over him of a sudden, after he had resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate had meant. The charming girl adored her—Densher had for himself made that out—and would protect, would lend a hand, to their interviews” (195). The alternative, that Kate plans to deceive Milly for the sake of her own secret love affair, is more difficult for him to accept, but because Kate evades a clear explanation of her plan he wonders whether she’s not up to something much less simple than he would like to believe. When Kate exhorts Densher to let Milly “be nice to you,” she withholds some of her reasons for urging such conduct. “I’ll tell you another time,” she says (201). When he asks her “what good” it will do him to visit Milly (203), she will only tell him, “Try it and you’ll see” (204). Densher is bewildered. “It took indeed some understanding” (201) because Kate offers only the most oblique explanations. And when he attempts to persuade himself that she has good reasons for her undisclosed plan, he can only beg the question of whether he can trust her ethics and ability, since all she does is repeat the obscure things she has already told him. Her reiteration “might have been irritating had she ever struck him as having in her mind a stupid corner . . . Well, since she wasn’t stupid she was intelligent; it was he who was stupid—the proof of which was that he would do what she liked.” Making one “last effort to understand” (204), he asks Kate for clarification in a way that strikes her as “gross,” for she replies with impatience: “I verily believe I shall hate you if you spoil for me the beauty of what I see!” (204). Merton Densher cannot see the beauty in Kate’s plan, can only see its obscurity, and though he longs to trust her and hates to think that with his inferior understanding he is defiling her fine design, his instincts warn him against perfect compliance. Though he “judge[s] it rather awkwardly gross to urge” Kate to abandon her scheme and simply marry him publicly, he cannot deny his instincts, which make him “wonder at her simplifications, her values” (54). The awkwardness of his opposition derives from the source of his instinct: an unmitigated sexual desire for Kate that only grows as they postpone their plans to marry and continue to conceal their relationship: His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night





before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity. He hadn’t in other words at any point doubted he was on his way to say to her that really their mistake must end. Their mistake was to have believed that they could hold out—hold out, that is, not against Aunt Maud, but against an impatience that, prolonged and exasperated, made a man ill. He had known more than ever, on their separating in the court of the station, how ill a man, and even a woman, could feel from such a cause; but he struck himself as also knowing that he had already suffered Kate to begin finely to apply antidotes and remedies and subtle sedatives. It had a vulgar sound—as throughout, in love, the names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared with love itself, horribly vulgar; but it was as if, after all, he might have come back to find himself “put off,” though it would take him of course a day or two to see. (191)

In her subtleness, Kate urges her lover to suspend his desires and wait with her, promising that their payoff will be worth the delay. But as long as she refuses to articulate her idea, Densher cannot know what the payoff will be nor decide for himself if it is worth deferring his romantic satisfaction. While he tries to stifle his maddening desire to be alone with her, “Kate showed so well how she could deal with things that maddened. She seemed to ask him, to beseech him, and all for his better comfort, to leave her, now and henceforth, to treat them in her own way” (191). But if Densher often feels unsure of himself in the presence of his superior lover, his instincts—because they are natural, immediate, and unrehearsed—triumph over his self-doubts to convince him that Kate’s notions, though they may be more complicated than Lord Mark’s fixed ideas, are nevertheless deeply wrong. This “waiting,” he concludes, is “the game of dupes. . . . His final sense was that a woman couldn’t be like that and then ask of one the impossible” (192). While he does not actually express his waning faith in Kate, then, his instincts undermine his confidence that her mind is really superior to his own. And though Kate appears initially as a woman of unconventional thought, later in the novel the word “idea” is increasingly applied to her plan for Milly and Densher. Kate’s belief that Milly is in love with Densher—the basis for her scheme that he “propose to a dying girl” (313)—seems to him one of Kate’s “most precious ideas” (201). And if readers need evidence that Densher shares his creator’s suspicion of ideas, we can find that evidence in the way he perceives what his lover offers him: “Kate showed him at this the cold glow of an idea that really was worth his having kept her for” (309).



124

125

Kate remains remarkable to him in what she accepts without protest, but her idea’s “cold glow” suggests that something about it unnerves Densher. Is the difficulty that her idea prevents her from noting and responding to other stimuli that under other conditions she would have perceived? On one early visit with Susan Stringham, when Milly stays at home because she is feeling unwell, Densher is anxious because Milly is the unceasing topic of conversation. He is uneasy that everyone “seem[s] desirous to fasten on him” a more intimate history with the young American than accuracy allows (210). And he notes that Susan, too, is uncomfortable with the conversation—a fact he perceives in her “mute communion” with him—though he suspects that her uneasiness escapes Kate: He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out; though it was not indeed till much later on that he found himself, in thought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from the things she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs. Stringham’s discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her. Her own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl’s prominence as a feature of the season’s end, to keep Densher in relation, for the rest of them, both to present and to past. (211)

Kate’s determination to keep her lover at the center of Milly’s publicly available emotional life damages her otherwise subtle perceptions, as Densher recognizes with alarm when he takes note of the many things Kate’s consciousness fails to register. This new obtuseness in his lover, moreover, impugns Kate’s celebrated idea about the role that Milly will play in his own romantic life with Kate. Being a man of intellect, his faith in Kate’s idea wavers still more when he notes her inability to explain her inconsistency over this idea. When she tells him that she risks everything for her plan, he challenges her with her earlier contention that she risks nothing. “It was the first time since the launching of her wonderful idea that he had seen her at a loss” (295). If, as we have seen, James clearly marks the limitations of Lord Mark’s mind and even Aunt Maud’s, Kate’s is harder to assess: neither a dogmatist nor a conventional villainess preying on innocence, she is rather a complicated woman whose care for Milly Theale is genuine even as she works out a way to use Milly for her own needs. Upon first perceiving that the sick young heiress is in love with Merton Densher, Kate wonders at Milly’s stubborn refusal to speak of her illness and contradict “her systematic bravado” (265). The first flicker of Kate’s “wonderful idea” ignites with the thought





of Milly’s frightened distinction “between her fortune and her fear” (265) and the desire to help muffle that fear with a powerful motive for living. James’ narrator makes a point of “declar[ing] for Kate” that her feelings for Milly from the outset have been genuine: “her sincerity about her friend, through this time, was deep, her compassionate imagination strong; and . . . these things gave her a virtue, a good conscience, a credibility for herself, so to speak, that were later to be precious to her” (265). If her plan is brazen, it is also morally complex, and one sign of her “good conscience” (as well as her modernity) is that she does not flinch from her plan when it moves from the realm of abstract thought to that of vulgar language. She accepts her lover’s description of her intentions, though she tells him that she will not provide all the explicitness. “If you want things named you must name them,” she tells him (311). And when he puts it as crudely as clarity demands—“Since [Milly’s] to die I’m to marry her . . . So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course have money” (311)—Kate meets his statement “with no wincing nor mincing” (311). Nor does she hesitate to make a remarkable sacrifice in the service of her arrangement. Not coincidentally, in the same scene where she suffers Densher to articulate her plan, she also agrees to meet him for a sexual encounter. Because, as a woman without fortune or social standing except under her aunt’s mantle, Kate must count her good name and sexual purity among her few assets, her consent to this meeting in Densher’s rooms testifies to her confidence in her scheme, even after Densher’s bare articulation of it strips it of any romance it might have worn for her. Given that confidence and Kate’s clear intellectual independence, the novel’s consistent references to her design as an “idea” alert us that this plan takes its place alongside other fixed beliefs and in opposition to more flexible modes of cognition. Among its other effects, Kate’s idea seems to compel a similar form of intellectual fixity in the otherwise undogmatic Densher. Although he has been suffering from unrelieved sexual longing, his long-delayed sexual possession of Kate comes about less as an act of passion than as a calculated, strategic maneuver against Kate, whose designs for him have made him ashamed at his own passivity. His plan, as we have seen, is to ask her for a testimony of her fidelity: If she will join him for a single sexual encounter, he promises to “tell any lie you want, any your idea requires” (297). That his own plan is similarly rigid is clear in the symmetry with which he places it next to Kate’s: “Idea for idea, his own was thus already, and in the germ, beautiful” (297). His plan, that is, may be “beautiful,” but he regards



126

127

it as an idea rather than a thought and places it strategically opposite Kate’s own. Readers might overlook the origin of his scheme when, long after Kate has surrendered her virginity and taken leave of Venice, Densher comes to see her deed as yet another means of “provid[ing] for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much as he was in it” (333). Resenting the escape that Kate’s sacrifice has afforded her, Densher forgets that he has not always been the unwilling and unwitting dupe of her designs but has countered with a design of his own. Having felt bitterly his increasing passivity in the presence of Kate and her female friends, he conceived of his own plan as a “test by which he must try” whether he had any will left, asking Kate to perform this one difficult office and determined no longer to do her bidding should she refuse (284). He invents his own counterplot as a kind of trap for her, a means of holding Kate to him, of testing her loyalty and reasserting his own battered manhood. When he insists that Kate meet him in his private apartment, Densher deploys his sexual power over her as a condition of his further participation in her plan for him and Milly. As he prepares for their tryst, he regards his design as a tactical response to Kate’s clever manipulations. He rents an apartment before asking her to join him there, but he secures it with the intention of asking this service from Kate as part of his own counterattack. Seeing that she has not guessed his motives for renting these rooms, he enjoys the sense of a “beginning of the advantage he had been planning for” (285), recognizing in her “a weakness of vision by which he could himself feel the stronger” (285–86). When she agrees to meet him he “taste[s]” in her consent “the vividness with which he saw himself master in the conflict” (314). Densher’s plan, then, begins as an idea commensurate with Kate’s, an idea he uses against her in a kind of ideological warfare. He aptly imagines the fixity of this idea when he identifies it as the small Venetian apartment that he will rent for the purpose of meeting Kate there in private: “Since a proof of his will was wanted it was indeed very exactly in wait for him—it lurked there on the other side of the Canal” (284). The “proof of his will” is his plan to seduce Kate, but here it takes the distinct form of an apartment that he will lease for a definite period. Although his figurative thought does have some basis in reality—Densher is thinking metonymically, identifying a real apartment with the intimacy he hopes actually to enact within it—his substitution of the enclosed space for an experience that cannot actually be reduced to the four walls of this space aligns him with Lord Mark, whose understanding of Milly, as we have seen, amounts to





a train compartment into which the young woman feels thrust, “the door sharply slammed upon her” (105). Densher, however, does not remain comfortable with this epistemological fixity; immediately after Kate meets him for a sexual encounter and then departs for London, his interest in his apartment passes from plan to memory and “completely engage[s] and absorb[s] him” (315). His idea, that is, gives way to a memory that transforms it from a reified object to a sentient being. “What had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and in every object. . . . It remained, in a word, a conscious watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckoned with, in face of which the effort of detachment was scarcely less futile than frivolous” (315). Densher marvels at the transformation that his idea has undergone: the “fact of the idea” has been “converted from a luminous conception into an historic truth,” Kate’s fulfilled pledge now “a treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of finding in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy old key in the lock. The door had but to open for him to be with it again and for it to be all there; so intensely there that . . . no other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the hallucination, of intimacy” (315). Although his idea of a sexual encounter with Kate had obsessed him in its own way, his earlier obsession had been a matter of instincts rather than of abstract thought. Here, though, Densher’s obsession unfolds into a kaleidoscope of sensations, impressions and memories, a living thing that stirs his senses, awaits him while he is absent from his rooms, and demands his attention whether he is there with it or away. Its embodiment as a living, conscious thing marks it as something more than a mere idea. Merton Densher may be slow to comprehend Kate’s meaning, but he is not unimaginative. Like Milly, he can take an impression and be intensely moved by what he sees. One of his deepest impressions strikes him when he watches Kate’s movements while in her aunt’s presence. The impression frightens and then sickens him with the discovery that his lover is much less free than he has believed. Like Milly’s impressions, it unveils details of a relationship that would otherwise have eluded him. The impression comes from a mere look that Aunt Maud throws at Kate—a “straight look, not exactly loving nor lingering, yet searching and soft. . . . It took her in from head to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made poor Densher again the least bit sick: it marked so something with which Kate habitually and consummately reckoned” (206). As we have seen with



128


129

That was the story—that she was always, for her beneficent dragon, under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to the “value” Mrs. Lowder had attached to her. High and fixed, this estimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; so that he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, the plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress. As such a person was to dress the part, to walk, to look, to speak, in every way to express, the part, so all this was what Kate was to do for the character she had undertaken, under her aunt’s roof, to represent. . . . Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall at the play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor actress in the glare of the footlights. . . . He struck himself as having lost, for the minute, his presence of mind—so that in any case he only stared in silence at the older woman’s technical challenge and at the younger one’s disciplined face. It was as if the drama—it thus came to him, for the fact of a drama there was no blinking—was between them, them quite preponderantly; with Merton Densher relegated to mere spectatorship, a paying place in front, and one of the most expensive. This was why his appreciation had turned for the instant to fear—had just turned, as we have said, to sickness . . . (206–7)

Densher’s impression of Aunt Maud’s look belies the character he has attributed to his fiancée, the character of a modern and free woman with a talent for “life.” Having perceived in Aunt Maud the demeanor of a stage manager, he must revise not only his estimation of Kate’s freedom but also the authenticity of her every act when in her aunt’s company. According to his impression, Kate has agreed not just to live with her aunt and do her bidding, but more deeply she has agreed to “represent” a character that conforms to Aunt Maud’s “artistic idea.” His impression, moreover, tells him something about himself: that for all his intelligence, he is constrained to do nothing but watch this performance. Having discovered, he thinks, that Kate will not dispute her aunt’s sense of her value, will only throw herself into the task of representing that value in its most perfect form, Densher concludes from this glance that he must be a mere spectator to the production even as he knows that Kate is precious on an entirely different scale than the one Aunt Maud has used to appraise her. In this one glance and in Densher’s reflections on it, we see how much he has in common with Milly, who also allows her impressions,



Milly’s impressions, this picture tells Densher a story too horrible for words—and it is the horror that gives the impression its credence:


as we have seen, to float her to a conclusion that might seem untenable. If readers later blame Densher for his complicity in what they may regard as Kate’s cruel scheme to defraud Milly, they can trace that complicity to this one impression, where Densher concludes not only that he is a “mere” spectator but also that he will be among those spectators who pay the most for their show. Feeling fear and nausea at the inkling that he is powerless to change the course of what he sees as a scripted production, Densher prepares himself for the passivity to which he will later cling for his self-justification. Though he resembles Milly Theale, Densher is at first nearly as obtuse to her value as Lord Mark, perhaps because his capacity to appreciate her is dulled by the fullness of his absorption in Kate. Once again James uses a spatial metaphor to account for mental attention.5 Because Densher anticipates his sexual tryst with Kate, he cannot bear to think of Milly visiting him in the rooms he has rented for a very different purpose: “Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms for, he had not recovered them to receive Milly Theale” (286). He is less capable of entertaining the idea of Milly’s presence there after his intimacy with Kate has taken place: if the part of Kate that “survived” that encounter “couldn’t have [been] banished if he had wished” (315), neither is there room there for Milly, since Densher “couldn’t for his life, he felt, have opened his door to a third person” (316). His inability literally to “open his door” to Milly or to “receive” her in his rooms extends to his inhospitable mental space, which simply has no room for Milly. We have seen how Lord Mark’s narrow notions about Milly have the effect of stuffing her into a small mental compartment. Merton Densher, too, is capable of fixed ideas about the people around him, and for a time Milly is once again the object of a reductive gaze. It might not be too much to claim that Milly, while she lives, is a “dead fact” to Densher. She is certainly not the bewildering creature who inspires romantic passion, though Densher’s companions do their best to promote that fiction. James devotes only a very few pages to the three weeks that occupy Densher between Kate’s departure from Venice—a departure that announces Densher’s formal position as Milly’s suitor—and the moment when he is refused entrance to Milly’s palace. His apparent thoughts and feelings during those weeks confirm that he is not in love with Milly. He is careful and highly conscious about his movements and their likely effect on her. He is diligent about being gentle, “careful also to talk pleasantly” (325), but if he is overcome by a passion it is fear for Milly’s safety—and an uneasy consciousness about his own responsibility for her danger.



130

131

Though he gradually relaxes a bit, he does so only into the provisional relief that he has so far “avoid[ed] a mistake” (326). In those three weeks Densher primarily recognizes in Milly her “deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn’t would have close reference to her life, which was thus absolutely in his hands” (324). Because it occurs to Densher that “he might kill her,” that “a single false motion might . . . snap the coil,” he begins to practice “going on tiptoe” (324). This means primarily that he must “simply . . . be kind” (324) and practice “perfect tact” (325). The perilously poised Milly resembles nothing to Densher so much as she does the “pale personage on the wall” in Bronzino’s portrait (141): a figure fixed forever in his imagination as Bronzino’s subject is fixed in her “recorded jewels” and “livid . . . hue” (139). Indeed, Densher thinks of himself during these days as a person “shut up to a room on the wall of which something precious was too precariously hung. A false step would bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible” (324). The false step, of course, is the appearance of Lord Mark, whose brief meeting with Milly brings on the crash that marks the beginning of Milly’s end. Densher has been paying daily visits to Milly’s palazzo, shutting the ghost of Kate in his rooms when he leaves and knowing that the “conscious watchful presence” of their intimacy will be there “in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy old key in the lock” (315). But on the day that he finds Milly’s door closed to him he takes a “sudden sharp” impression that something has happened to bring about “the rupture of peace” (328). After that rupture he can do nothing but wait, until the third day when Milly’s friend Susan brings him news in the form of a picture: “She has turned her face to the wall” (334). Susan’s picture operates on Densher as the picture of Kate’s submission to her aunt’s gaze had done for him, as the imagined figure of a head on a pike had done for Milly. A vivid if unexplained image—Susan cannot tell him whether Milly’s new posture means “she’s worse” (334)—this picture of Milly displaces the “hallucination” of intimacy with Kate that had admitted no other person (315). When Susan repeats the sentence she conjures again a figure at which Densher can only stare: “The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the larger. . . . He saw it with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences, they were simply so leaving what he saw. . . . Milly’s ‘grimness’ and the great hushed palace were present to him” (337). As Milly’s figure looms before him, “Kate’s presence affected him suddenly as having swooned or trembled away” (341).





Waiting in Venice for word of Milly’s condition, and later in London for news of her death, Densher has time to contemplate this new image and what it means for him. Although on first discovering that Lord Mark was the source of Milly’s crash he approaches “exhilaration” at feeling “remarkably blameless” about the crisis (331), Susan’s picture of Milly works on him differently, making him for the first time afraid of himself (341) and of the shame still in store for him. He has comforted himself all along with the thought that his part in the drama has remained that of an interested if reluctant spectator, but he fears that he will be asked to perform a more central role; he is most afraid that Milly will ask him to lie about his engagement to Kate. When she doesn’t—when, instead, she invites him to visit her so that she can assure him of her forgiveness and take a last, gentle leave of him—he finds that his feelings for her have changed. The change takes him unawares: rather than experiencing these feelings, he observes them as from a distance and only later recognizes them as his own subjective state. Later, in Aunt Maud’s company, he regards himself as he had once regarded Kate, remotely and as a represented figure rather than a living person: He himself for that matter took in the scene again at moments as from the page of a book. He saw a young man far off and in a relation inconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but half understanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding himself painfully together not to lose it. The young man at these moments so seen was too distant and too strange for the right identity; and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher had known. He had known then at the same time what the young man had been conscious of, and he was to measure after that, day by day, how little he had lost . . . The essence was that something had happened to him too beautiful and too sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered sense, forgiven, dedicated, and blessed. (373)

Densher’s self-discovery here is oblique and complicated. If he is like a character in a book, that character is “but half understanding,” only “dimly conscious” of the new feelings that he must stay motionless to keep. The reader of the book, though—Densher’s more detached other self—“know[s] . . . what the young man had been conscious of.” Densher knows this figure to be himself not because he recognizes his own feelings and thoughts, but more remotely because he knows his own face. Even more than Kate, he depends for his identity on some outside agent: unlike Kate, who performs a role assigned to her by her manager, Densher cannot even recognize his feelings until



132

133

his “recovered sense” informs him that Milly has forgiven him for the treachery she knew him to be party to. In his strangeness to himself, Densher discovers his dissatisfaction with ideas, even the ideas of a superior mind. He returns to London and to Kate with a deep sense of the change within him, even if he can neither explain nor account for it. Hoping that Kate will accept his change of heart and agree to marry immediately, he learns instead that her “system” (356) remains as firm as ever. Begging her to abandon their plan and marry immediately, before Milly can die and leave him her money, he can only explain his change of mind as evidence of weakness: unlike her, he has been broken by their joint gamble. “Something in me has snapped, has broken in me,” he tells her, “and here I am. It’s as I am that you must have me” (376). Kate challenges him on the grounds of consistency with her original idea: “I don’t see, you know, what has changed.” From her “original point of view,” she tells him, their work has been “perfect”: “I’m just where I was; and you must give me some better reason than you do, my dear, for your not being” (376). Densher’s weakness has been his inability to face the details of a plan whose broad strokes he has agreed to; Kate’s strength has been her capacity to see that plan through even in its grimmest particulars. Even as he marvels at her strength, Densher recoils from Kate’s seeming indifference to these particulars: “He took in while she talked her imperturbable consistency . . . He had brought her there to be moved, and she was only immovable—which was not moreover, either, because she didn’t understand. She understood everything, and things he refused to; and she had reasons, deep down, the sense of which nearly sickened him.” Densher experiences that same sensation of sickness that had overcome him as he watched Kate perform for her aunt, and his repeated feeling of nausea marks his distrust of disciplined conformity to an intellectual system. Like an actress staying faithful to her script, that is, Kate has not wavered even in the face of Lord Mark’s defeated but deadly vengeance, Milly’s grief, and Merton’s shame; she is as bravely consistent after being suspected of treachery as she had been in the early days when, confident that she would not be discovered, she laid her plans for an inheritance from Milly. As the systematic Kate tries to understand her unsystematic lover, this time it is she who is bewildered. When Densher accuses her of simplifying his feelings, she responds as he had once done with her: “I of course can’t, with no clue, know what [your meaning] is. . . . One doesn’t, with the best will in the world, understand” (387). She tells him that she can’t judge his new idea “till I know what you’re talking about” (388). The narrative does not follow Kate’s thoughts





here; James’ attention remains fixed in Densher’s mind in this scene, in which Densher reveals that he has received a letter from the dead Milly. But if readers get to see the private view of his mind that he withholds from Kate, we are nearly as bewildered as she because Densher himself seems to know his mind as little as he knows the figure of himself he had regarded as a character in a book. The novel, that is, has almost nothing to say about his idea of himself here: has he indeed fallen in love with Milly? Is he so ashamed of himself that he can no longer follow through on Kate’s plan? To put the case so simply is to wish for a statement of Densher’s state of mind that James withholds, perhaps because Densher himself does not know his own condition. To be sure, there are things he cannot tell Kate, but there seem also to be things he cannot confront on his own. “I suppose I’m in trouble,” he admits; “I suppose that’s it” (388). James’ readers follow his tortured speech and movements almost as helplessly as she does: “Kate’s attention, on her side, during these minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus familiarly presented—rested as with a view of their expression, a reference to things unimparted, links still missing and that she must ever miss, try to make them out as she would” (389–90). Kate makes out, in fact, about as much as her lover had made out for himself, that he is “afraid of [him]self” (397). We readers know that there is something he has been keeping back from her, not only his secret correspondence with Susan Stringham (“he liked his secret” 399), but also the sense of deep shame for both of them, a shame that prevents him from speaking to Kate of the one thing that has meant anything for them as a couple. Avoiding this one dishonorable topic, they have nothing but trivial things to discuss. And if these characters avoid any explicit mention of what they have together accomplished, James’ novel also avoids explicit ideas in favor of thought. This means—since Densher, as our center of consciousness, is ashamed of himself and unable to confront his feelings except obliquely—that his thoughts remain impressionistic, painting us a picture that conveys a powerful affect rather than explaining a state of mind. We have seen how Milly and Densher both draw powerful feelings from an image, moving from their impressions to a story of a relation. So it is with Densher, who offers Kate the freedom to do what she wants with Milly’s unopened letter only to see her throw it into the fire without examining its contents. The consequences of that act are significant for Densher, but the “idea” of their significance hardly begins to account for the prominence they assume in his mind. If we recall James’ distinction in his



134

135

preface between the “idea, reduced to its essence,” and “the picture of the struggle involved, the adventure brought about, the gain recorded or the loss incurred, the precious experience somehow compassed,” we will recall that the novelist regarded the idea as “at best, but half the matter” (3). If we are to reduce Densher’s culminating emotional experience to its simple idea, we can say he feels regret for the lost contents of Milly’s letter. But because James’ novel is more interested in conveying experience itself rather than its outlines, the picture of Densher’s regret at “the loss incurred” constitutes one of the novel’s most dramatic scenes. As we have seen before in this novel, the scene establishes the expressive urgency of a thought. While Milly’s most plaintive thought expresses itself as the figure of a head on a pike, and Densher’s most haunting thought about her to this point has been the image of her face turned to the wall, here his thought expands beyond a mere image into a sentient, embodied thing, very like the figure of intimacy that had taken Kate’s place after her departure from his rooms. Although he identifies this being as “only a thought,” his adjective “only” is made ironic by the attention given by James’ narrator to that thought. For one thing, unlike the ideas and plans that he has shared with Kate, this “thought was all his own”; he treasures its privacy and is incapable of sharing it with Kate. For another, like the experiences that, as Pater tells us, owe their piquancy to their brief existence, this thought partakes “of such freshness and such delicacy as made the precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time” (402). Densher’s thought, like Milly herself, is precious precisely because it is doomed to a brief existence. He thinks of it as “something rare” that is in the process of dissolving with the “melt[ing]” days he spends awaiting the conclusion of his courtship with Kate (401). If, as we have seen, precarious health is the metaphor for precious Paterian experience, it should come as no surprise that the figure Densher imagines for his fragile thought should be that of a maimed child that he cherishes for himself. The figure might be startling, since it stands for the unpleasant emotional experience of regret, a feeling that we might imagine he wants to escape. And yet Densher treasures this feeling, guarding it jealously and wanting to keep it for himself: He kept it back like a favourite pang; left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as




136


If the “idea” here has to do with his tormented curiosity and regret regarding the contents of Milly’s letter, the form it takes in his consciousness fills it out so that rather than being left with nothing, his imaginative obsession with what he’s lost constitutes a kind of collaboration with Milly, replacing her lost letter with the figure of a living being that represents his lamentation. Kate, who suspects that her fiancé has fallen in love with Milly, has been anxious to destroy Milly’s letter, the last material trace of the woman who in life had been so vibrant in spite of her fragile physical condition. She seems to think of the letter as a metonymy for Milly’s physical, sexual self, and Densher shares this notion. They speak awkwardly about Densher’s familiarity with Milly’s penmanship, as Kate asks whether he has “had many letters from her” and Densher rushes to assure her that Milly’s notes have been few and “very, very short ones” (389). Though he has not opened her final letter, Densher has “touched it” (390), has spent a “mercilessly wakeful” night “intensely engaged” with both the thought and the material presence of the letter (378). As he tells Kate the next day, “I feel as if, ever since, I’d been touching nothing else . . . I quite firmly . . . took hold of it” (390). Kate is astonished to learn that he has not yet “broken the seal” (395) and turns “inordinately grave” at the idea that she might “break the seal of something to [Densher] from her” (396). That Merton, too, thinks of this “seal” as sexual as well as epistolary is confirmed when, searching for a “sacrifice” he can make to Kate in payment for her earlier sexual offering to him, he turns to the letter and offers it to her “to do what [she] like[s] with it” (397). Their tentative and embarrassed exchanges about this letter, which clearly stands in not for Milly’s character but rather for her physical self, suggest that she is still present to them both. Kate declines to open the letter, announcing that “to hold it . . . is to know” (397). When she decides the fate of Milly’s letter and tosses it into the fire without first breaking its seal and reading its message, Kate perhaps thinks that she will thereby destroy its power over her imaginative lover. Its material form annihilated, she hopes it will leave no ghost. But a ghost is precisely what the letter does leave for Densher. Like Milly herself, unmentioned by the couple but present nonetheless— she lingers around their conversations “only by the intensity with



a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child. But so it was before him—in his dread of who else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly’s letter. (401–2)

137

which [she] mutely expressed [her] absence” (398)—the letter leaves its trace for Densher in his rooms, exactly as the ghost of his encounter with Kate had lingered in Venice. Like a ghost, it resides in his wounded memories like a “maimed child,” and although Densher thinks of it as “only a thought” (402), he knows how powerful thought can be, how distinctly material a presence it can assume. Like “a favourite pang,” it is part of his own bodily impressions. But like the reified memory of Kate that resided in his Venetian rooms, it also has its own substance and identity, like the ghost of a departed soul. Though it is independent of Densher, he nevertheless thinks of it as something all his own, something that remains in his private rooms even in his absence. If it were “only a thought,” he would not be troubled that someone else should see it, but this weird thought, like the most vital thoughts in this novel, seems to have a physical, embodied character. His dread of its being seen suggests that this thought is not a mere memory or hope but something with an objective and palpable reality, something both of him (like a child) and separate from him. Densher’s thought has detached itself from his mind and lingers about his rooms whether he wants it or not. Having a presence (if not a consciousness) of its own, this thought appears like the impossible offspring of Milly and Densher, and in a way it is precisely that: a collaboration between her intention and his imagination. The thought derives its ghostliness from the way it represents as present a thing that is fully absent, and in representing pure lack, in reminding him of the thing he will never know, it haunts him with its own uncanny self, entwining itself in his consciousness about what he has missed: The intention announced in it he should but too probably know; only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined. It made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes—his pledge given not to save it—into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it—doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it. (402)





Unable to bear the thought of the precise expression and sentiment of what he has missed in Milly’s letter, Densher’s imagination fills out that gaping loss. He can endow his loss only with form, not with content, but the form he bestows gives us some hint about the value of what he has lost. To his grieving imagination, Milly’s lost words are a “priceless pearl,” a “sentient and throbbing” sacrifice, something whose distant lament marks the loss without specifying what was lost. His life seems to have been riven with an actual hole, to be filled only by imagining the reified form, but not the content, of the vanished. James’ readers may indeed judge Densher harshly, as Robert B. Pippin does when he condemns the man’s “pathetic attempt at passivity” as a “studied, deceitful avoidance” of responsibility for the plan that he has helped to enact (179). But the language James uses to describe Densher’s thoughts—whatever we might think of his character— suggests a tenderness for thought itself, as distinct from ideas. And of course in using such vivid language to distinguish the lost expression from the retained idea, James comments on his own narrative technique: Densher’s belief that the “intention . . . would have been . . . the least part” of Milly’s letter (402) echoes the explanation in James’ preface that the idea behind his story “would be, at best, but half the matter” (3). When Densher remembers certain thoughts that “at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures” (348), he conveys his creator’s sense of wonder at the charm of human thought—as distinct, always, from ideas.



138

4

Passi onate Pilgr images : Ja mes’ Travel in Italy and the United States

I

n 1869, the young Henry James embarked on his first independent tour of Europe. His pilgrimage took him to England, France, Switzerland, and Italy, where he followed in the footsteps of countless other Americans making a similar grand tour. His tour was not worryfree, and in some ways it was hardly independent, as his parents, writing frequently from Cambridge, put constant and considerable pressure on their son to economize. During his fifteen-month sojourn abroad, James spent £400 of his family’s money, roughly one-fifth of his father’s yearly income. Some of James’ letters home describe his health problems in order to explain why he was staying as long and spending as freely as he was,1 as if he needed to persuade his parents that they had not invested frivolously in his travels. In March 1870, while living in Malvern, England, James received word from his family that his beloved cousin Minny had died of tuberculosis, and in May of that same year he returned to Cambridge with his Aunt Kate, who had been traveling through Europe and met him in London to escort him home. Although Walter Pater would not publish his famous book, The Renaissance, for another three years, we can imagine that James felt acutely the temporal anxieties of those who are forced to cram as many experiences as possible into one too-brief interval of time, particularly when traveling to foreign places where he knew he could only be a visitor. As Pater would write in 1873, quoting Victor Hugo,



Chapter 4


“we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve— . . . we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more” (90). When James reflected on his doomed cousin, who had intended to visit Europe the following year, he may have thought of tourism and his own cherished visit to Europe as just an exaggerated form of the human condition itself. As he wrote the following month, while contemplating his imminent departure for home, leaving Europe was “a good deal like dying.”2 James’ experiences as a tourist—first in Europe and then, many years later, in the United States where he felt no more at home after long years of exile than he had ever felt on the continent—were deeply bound up with his musings on experience, and in visiting exotic places he was again aware of the temptations of ideological thought. In Henrietta Stackpole, a minor character from The Portrait of a Lady, he depicted the convenience of sharply drawn views, which bring with them the certainty of what one will find, see or feel. Henrietta’s “cherished desire had long been to come to Europe and write a series of letters to the Interviewer from the radical point of view—an enterprise the less difficult as she knew perfectly in advance what her opinions would be and to how many objections most European institutions lay open” (70). The popularity of the grand tour, and the proliferation of tourist literature in the nineteenth century, helped to establish this expectation of certainty on the part of both experienced and unseasoned tourists. As James Buzard notes in his fine account of European tourism, “Two main observations recur frequently” in the written accounts of nineteenth-century tourists: “first, that the Continental tour seemed to be surrounded and regulated by a variety of guiding texts; and second, that by writing one’s own travel record one had to work within the boundaries mapped out by those prior texts or somehow to stake out new territories within one’s own text” (156). Even James himself, on guard against ideological thought, acknowledged the impossibility of what Emerson had called “an original relation to the universe.”3 Writing of Venice in 1882—in an essay that would later become the first chapter of Italian Hours (1909)—James noted the “impudence” of “pretending to add anything” to the record of Venice. “Venice has been painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities of the world is the easiest to visit without going there” (7). And yet, unlike Henrietta Stackpole, James stopped short of predicting his response to the place he had already encountered in texts and printed images. If he thought that the objective facts of Venice were indisputable, that “there is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about



140

141

our local thoroughfare” (7), the subjective experience of Venice was still bound to be enchanting, and he held “any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme” (7). For James, the objective facts of Italy were perhaps the least of its enchantments. His own earliest impressions of Italy, as we have seen, were entangled with his experiences of loss, his temporal anxieties, and his certainty that the sweetest impressions could not last long. They were also wrapped up in the knowledge that the enchantment of travel was not available to all travelers. Musing on the tragedy of his cousin’s early death and her own eagerness to visit Europe, James worried about his comparative insensibility to the charms of what lay before him: Minny was to have come abroad this next summer—but one little dream the more in a life which was so eminently a life of the spirit—one satisfied curiosity the less in a career so essentially incomplete on its positive side—these seem to make her image only more eloquent and vivid and purely youthful and appealing. She had a great fancy for knowing England.—Meanwhile here I sit stupidly scanning it with these dull human eyes!4

James’s words echo Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” whose speaker laments both his inability to see the beauty spread before him (“And still I gaze,—and with how blank an eye!”) and his emotional insensibility (“I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!”). James understood the subjective element of perception, knew that the quality of one’s travels derived utterly from one’s receptivity to impressions, and recognized that receptivity depended not only on temperament but also on one’s ability to let go of fixed ideas. His 1871 tale “A Passionate Pilgrim” appeared the year after he returned from his European tour. When he republished it late in life in the New York Edition of 1908, he identified it as one of the stories that was “documentary for myself.”5 The story resurrected memories not only of the author’s “never-to-be-forgotten thrill of a first sight of Italy,” but also of his despondent “return to America at the beginning of the following year, [which] was to drag with it, as a lengthening chain, the torment of losses and regrets” (xxi). James’s Italian essays, published piecemeal between 1872 and 1909 and collected for the first time in 1909 as Italian Hours, as well as The American Scene, published in 1907 and based on his American travels of 1904–1905, both reflect the tension we have been considering between ideological thought and epistemological openness. This tension is perhaps most evident in Italian Hours, whose composition



Pa s s i o n at e P i l g r i m a g e s


history coincides with both James’s growth as a subject, writer, and observer, and with the complicated process of modernization that he witnessed during his many visits to Italy during those thirty-seven years. As he observes the modernization of Italy, James records not just the changing landscape and social relations, but also the changes to his own consciousness that are in part driven by the external elements of modernity. As his depictions of the tourist’s mind reveal, these subjective changes are only possible in the absence of tenacious ideas about Italy. James playfully recounts his own mistaken preconceptions of Italy (derived, very likely, from his Romantic readings) after observing the “enviable ability” of the Italian race “not to be depressed by circumstances.” As if imagining the response of some impoverished Italian, he notes that “[o]ur observation in any foreign land is extremely superficial, and our remarks are happily not addressed to the inhabitants themselves, who would be sure to exclaim upon the impudence of the fancy-picture” (106). James immediately follows this reflection with an incident involving a real Italian who corrects the writer’s romantic impression. He encounters the peasant in an out-of-theway and overgrown road that has been supplanted by a more modern road. Perhaps because of the remoteness of the location, the man reminds James of a “cavalier in an opera”; Like an operatic performer too he sang as he came; the spectacle, generally, was operatic, and as his vocal flourishes reached my ear I said to myself that in Italy accident was always romantic and that such a figure had been exactly what was wanted to set off the landscape. It suggested in a high degree that knowledge of life for which I just now commended the Italians. (107)

When these two strangers fall into conversation, James is surprised to discover that the young man acknowledged himself a brooding young radical and communist, filled with hatred of the present Italian government, raging with discontent and crude political passion, professing a ridiculous hope that Italy would soon have, as France had had, her “’89,” and declaring that he for his part would willingly lend a hand to chop off the heads of the king and the royal family. He was an unhappy, underfed, unemployed young man, who took a hard, grim view of everything and was operatic only quite in spite of himself. This made it very absurd of me to have looked at him simply as a graceful ornament to the prospect, an harmonious little figure in the middle distance . . . Yet but for the accident



142


143

If James is able to correct his mistake this time, he cannot be confident that misconceptions will always be so easily overcome; on another occasion he sighs over “the depth upon depth of things . . . that would have to change” before “observers of different . . . points of view” might approach each other (236–37). Language, habit, national identity, and economic relations often frustrate the kind of communication that helps James to overcome his fixed idea about blithe Italians. Italian Hours worries at times about Pater’s recognition that “Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us . . .” (187). James’ travel narrative emphasizes consciousness, not the objective facts of Italy, and his title highlights the temporal units that concerned Pater as well when he drew his readers’ attention not to “the fruit of experience, but experience itself,” measured in “a single moment” (188). “Experience itself” sits at the heart of Italian Hours, as its author-tourist wanders Italy among the crowds of other tourists and natives. As we shall see, James struggles with the temptation to see Italy ideologically, and though he finds temporary refuge in the idle pose of the flâneur, he ultimately finds that pose incompatible with his anxieties about the rapid passage of time.

The Anti- Ideological Impulse in I TALIAN H OURS “Venice: An Early Impression,” one of the first chapters James wrote for Italian Hours (1873), is impressionistic indeed; noting that “[t]he mere use of one’s eyes in Venice is happiness enough” (52), James underscores the sensual details of his scene, pointing to the “slimy brick, marble battered and befouled, rags, dirt, decay” (52). Like the young painter “unperplexed by the mocking, elusive soul of things and satisfied with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape” (52), James records the impressions that Venice makes on his retina and refrains, for the most part, from getting at their meaning. In this early chapter he remarks of John Ruskin, perhaps the most famous of his predecessors writing about Venice, that his “eloquence in dealing with the great Venetians sometimes outruns his discretion” (55–56). He elaborates in a later chapter, “Italy Revisited,” originally published in 1878, where he and a companion read Ruskin’s Mornings



of my having gossiped with him I should have made him do service, in memory, as an example of sensuous optimism! (107).

144


that there are a great many ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing most beautiful and interesting things, and that it is very dry and pedantic to say that the happy vision depends upon our squaring our toes with a certain particular chalk-mark. We see Florence wherever and whenever we enjoy it, and for enjoying it we find a great many more pretexts than Mr. Ruskin seems inclined to allow. . . . Nothing in fact is more comical than the familiar asperity of the author’s style and the pedagogic fashion in which he pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads toward this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to stand in corners and giving them Scripture texts to copy. . . . For many persons [Ruskin] will never bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, where art, so long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, joyous, irresponsible. (116)

Frequently in Italian Hours James sounds this note of spontaneity as opposed to fixity, of irresponsibility as opposed to moral accountability; comical authority figures come under frequent satire as he promotes liberty in the face of narrow behavioral codes. Four years later, when writing “Venice,” the chapter that he would choose to introduce Italian Hours, James has still more to say about Ruskin, who stands as a foil to his own antidoctrinaire posture toward his subject. James has been reading The Stones of Venice, which Ruskin wrote in order to help tourists appreciate the architecture of the ancient city, and he again finds Ruskin’s tone unbearably strident, his directives insufferably narrow. The book, he complains, is “pitched in the nursery-key, and might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess.” Ruskin’s tone is especially dismaying because James finds the book “all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just.” But as for Ruskin’s presentation, James finds “an inconceivable want of form in it, though the author has spent his life in laying down the principles of form and scolding people for departing from them”; the younger writer laments “the narrow theological spirit, the moralism ‘a tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies” that run through Ruskin’s otherwise inspiring book (8). James’ encounters with Ruskin do not protect him from his own occasional Ruskinian rigidity: he finds himself at times “in the humour, for which I was not to blame, which produces crabbed notes. . . . I went through all the motions of liberal appreciation . . . but my



in Florence in that city and find the writer “insufferable” because he insists that visitors to Florence who do not share his taste for simple ornament and color “can never see” the great city. James and his companion agree

145

imagination . . . refused to project into the dark old town and upon the yellow hills that sympathetic glow which forms half the substance of our general impressions” (255). Abashed by the complaints of his own “priggish discrimination” that “Montepulciano was dirty, even remarkably dirty” (290), James blames his surliness on the local wine that he has “quaffed . . . too constantly.” When he recognizes a Ruskinian tendency in himself to narrow judgments, he mocks his mood and seems to repent, because his encounters with Ruskin have taught him that narrow judgments are out of place when experiencing art. As he notes when turning away from Ruskin’s “insufferable” remarks on Florence, Art is the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. To justify our presence there the only thing demanded of us is that we shall have felt the representational impulse. In other connections our impulses are conditioned and embarrassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are consistent with those of our neighbors; with their convenience and well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, their rules and regulations. Art means an escape from all this. Wherever her shining standard floats the need for apology and compromise is over; there it is enough simply that we please or are pleased. . . . A truce to all rigidities is the law of the place; the only thing absolute there is that some force and some charm have worked. (117)

Rejecting all rigidity except the rigid expectation of freedom, James here voices the one doctrine he would maintain throughout his life: the doctrine of absolute aesthetic liberty. In 1899 he would repeat the doctrine, this time with reference to fiction rather than the visual arts. “The form of the novel that is stupid on the general question of its freedom is the single form that may, a priori, be unhesitatingly pronounced wrong.”6 In contrast to Ruskin’s narrow aesthetic criteria, James presents a Paterian openness to aesthetic susceptibility. He does not say that Ruskin adds nothing to this susceptibility; indeed, “it is Mr. Ruskin,” James contends, “who beyond any one helps us to enjoy” (8). Ruskin’s firm opinions of art seem to resemble theory as Pater describes it: theory (we will recall) “may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us,” and in this sense might, to quote James, help us “to enjoy.” But the moment this theory “requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience,” in Pater’s words, it loses its claim on us (189). At times James discovers himself the “victim” of Ruskin’s narrow judgments: “We feel at such times as if the eye of Mr. Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and lose our confidence” (42). But with the help of a Paterian aesthetic, he




146


having been on his first acquaintance with pictures nothing if not critical, and held the lesson incomplete and the opportunity slighted if he left a gallery without a headache, he had come, as he grew older, to regard them more as the grandest of all pleasantries and less as the most strenuous of all lessons, and to remind himself that, after all, it is the privilege of art to make us friendly to the human mind and not to make us suspicious of it. We do in fact as we grow older unstring the critical bow a little and strike a truce with invidious comparisons. We work off the juvenile impulse to heated partisanship and discover that one spontaneous producer isn’t different enough from another to keep the all-knowing Fates from smiling over our loves and our aversions. We perceive a certain human solidarity in all cultivated effort, and are conscious of a growing accommodation of judgement—an easier disposition, the fruit of experience, to take the joke for what it is worth as it passes. We have in short less of a quarrel with the masters we don’t delight in, and less of an impulse to pin all our faith on those in whom, in more zealous days, we fancied that we made our peculiar meanings. (254–55)

“Unstring[ing] the critical bow a little,” James learns through his pleasure in art to unfix his ideas about beauty and genius, to leave his ideas behind altogether in favor of the impulse to take pleasure in cultural beauty wherever he finds it rather than regard it as exercise for his critical acuity. James’s Paterian approach to Italy enables him not only to let go of critical demands for a certain kind of art, but also to resist the pressure to make his time in Italy profitable—a mode of tourism that his anxious parents at home urged upon him during his first independent visit when their funds were limited.7 Once again James turns to Ruskin as an illustration of a disciplined and industrious response to Italy, one that he rejects by embracing instead an idle and passionate receptivity. Noting that Ruskin and other writers “take [St. Mark’s Cathedral] very seriously,” he explains that it is only because there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it . . . [I]t is almost a spiritual function—or, at the worst, an amorous one—to feed one’s eyes on the molten colour that drops from the hollow vaults and thickens the air with its richness. . . . Beauty of surface, of tone, of detail, of things near enough to touch and kneel upon and lean against—it is from this the effect proceeds. (14–15)



embraces a more liberated disposition toward art and urges readers to “take our ease” in its presence. Strolling through Florence’s Pitti Palace, James agrees with his “nameless companion” that,

147

In contrast to more serious approaches to the great cathedral, James absorbs its sensual details and makes no effort to find a deeper meaning; the “amorous” function of his visual feast is one of the “superficial pastimes” (9) that he urges upon his readers when he encourages them to “give [Venice] a chance to touch you often” (10). As a writer, James learns that one of the things he must forego in embracing “superficial pastimes” is his authorial work ethic. In Venice he discovers that “your old habits become impracticable and you find yourself obliged to form new ones of an undesirable and unprofitable character” (10). If Venice “isn’t in fair weather a place for concentration of mind,” if “all nature beckons you forth and murmurs to you sophistically that such hours should be devoted to collecting impressions” (17), the responsive tourist soon learns to abandon his work habits and “invite [the] exquisite influence [of Venice] to sink into [his] spirit” (11). In Florence he learns “to woo illusions and invoke the irrelevant” because “I could think, in the conditions, of no better way to meet the acute responsibility of the critic than just to shirk it” (71). Like Baudelaire, who admires the child’s “faculty of keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial,”8 when James “surrender[s] to the gaping traveller’s mood,” he is “content to become [a child] again. We don’t turn about on our knees to look out at the omnibus-window, but we indulge in very much the same round-eyed contemplation of accessible objects. Responsibility is left at home or at the worst packed away in the valise, relegated to quite another part of the diligence with the clean shirts and the writing-case” (93). Even the opportunity to explore the Siena archives cannot tempt this author-turned-idler. When the custodian of the archives gives James a glimpse and an opportunity to visit, the writer declines the offer and does, “instead of this, a much idler and easier thing: I simply went every afternoon, my stint of work over, . . . for a musing stroll upon the Lizza” (234). The Anglo-Saxon (and specifically American) idea of profitable labor is one of the first things James learns to discard during his Italian journey: instead he admires Florence, grateful for its lack of “actuality or energy or earnestness or any of those rugged virtues which in most cases are deemed indispensable for civic cohesion” (110). “[T]o a son of communities strenuous as ours are strenuous, the most salient characteristic of the so-called Latin civilizations” is the ability to take great pleasure in small occasions. This faculty charms him and vexes him, according to his mood; and for the most part it represents a moral gulf between his own temperamental and





indeed spiritual sense of race, and that of Frenchmen and Italians, far wider than the watery leagues that a steamer may annihilate. But I think his mood is wisest when he accepts the ‘foreign’ easy surrender to all the senses as the sign of an unconscious philosophy of people who have lived long and much, who have discovered no short cuts to happiness and no effective circumvention of effort, and so have come to regard the average lot as a ponderous fact that absolutely calls for a certain amount of sitting on the lighter tray of the scales. (249)

For James, the allure of this “easy surrender” to the senses derives partly from his reaction to fixed ideas of all sorts and perhaps in particular to those represented to him by three nagging voices: those of his parents, insisting that he economize and make his time in Europe count for something, and that of John Ruskin, whose prescriptions of what a lover of Italy should note and appreciate clearly irritated James as he found other paths to appreciation. But the appeal of “surrender” had more than cultural implications for James; it also offered an epistemological alternative to the kind of grasping intellect that, as we have seen in his father, prevents openness to other modes of thought and experience. We have considered Emerson’s preference for passive intuition (what he called “abandonment”) over active intellection, and Italian Hours exhibits a similar enthusiasm for contingencies rather than control. Venice, James tells us, “is always interesting and almost always sad; but she has a thousand occasional graces and is always liable to happy accidents” (11). Like some of his most memorable characters—Isabel Archer, who enjoys the “dangers” of a crowd and on occasion “lost her way almost on purpose, in order to get more sensations,”9 and Milly Theale, who for the sake of an adventure in the “unknown streets” of London “only wanted to get lost”10—James values the “unexpected” (63), especially when exploring unfamiliar territory. In Venice on one occasion—he can’t recall the thing they were looking for “without much success”— he and his companions accidentally encounter three sisters. “Nothing requires more care,” James admits, “as a long knowledge of Venice works in, than not to lose the useful faculty of getting lost. I had so successfully done my best to preserve it that I could at that moment conscientiously profess an absence of any suspicion of where we might be” (66). The chance encounter becomes an episode in James’ narrative, so that his planned excursion and its aborted goal disappear in the presence of the serendipitous. If James the tourist finds pleasure in passive receptivity to random events, James the writer also draws on this randomness when compiling his own narrative; in recounting



148

149

his visit to the neighborhoods around Rome, he explains, “I jumble my memories as a tribute to the whole idyll—I give the golden light in which they come back to me for what it is worth” (201). In his travels through Europe, James has had access to many forms of classification, both in John Ruskin’s aesthetic hierarchies, in the literature available to tourists, and in the many museums he has visited, like the Museo Civico, “where a thousand curious mementoes and relics of old Venice are gathered and classified” (48). Even so, he tends to prefer random experiences, which dominate not only the content but also even the form of Italian Hours.

James’ F LÂNERIE It is easy to see, as many critics have pointed out, that James’ travel narratives are indebted to an aimless and modern model of urban movement that he may have learned from Charles Baudelaire. Ross Posnock describes this model as it appears in James’ late writings, which counsel “acceptance of the limited, precarious powers of a cultural analyst or novelist to order experience”; for Posnock’s James, “relaxing the will to dominate and surrendering to the accidents of digression constitute the mode of being and representation that allows the ‘latent vividness’ of urban experience to flower.” James’ sense of urban experience, Posnock points out, resembles “the meandering peregrinations of the flâneur.” 11 We can see the presence of this figure in Italian Hours where, after reading Ruskin in Florence, James describes his feelings by using the French word flâneur: “Indeed I lost patience altogether, and asked myself by what right this informal votary of form pretended to run riot through a poor charmed flâneur’s quiet contemplations, his attachment to the noblest of pleasures, his enjoyment of the loveliest of cities” (115). We have come to identify this French term with Baudelaire, and although it is not clear when James read Baudelaire, the original version of this passage, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1878, uses language far less identifiable with the French decadent writer: “Indeed,” James writes in that earlier version, “I lost patience altogether, and asked myself by what right this garrulous cynic pretended to run riot through a quiet traveler’s relish for the noblest of pleasures,—his wholesome enjoyment of the loveliest of cities.”12. James’ choice sometime between 1878 and 1909 to replace “quiet traveler” with “poor charmed flâneur” makes sense given Jonathan Freedman’s observation that while “The young James habitually condemned” the aestheticism of Baudelaire and Swinburne “often in language that made him sound a little like an urbane prig” (141), “the decadent turn of the aesthetic movement”





represented by Baudelaire among others is “fully reflected” in James’s later work (203). Though Baudelaire did not coin the term, Posnock points out that the French writer is the “prototype” of the flâneur: “Baudelaire is exemplary in his willingness to dwell in rather than resist the disorienting urban world. . . . The flaneur is a figure of wandering curiosity and of indeterminacy; an 1866 French description of flânerie calls it ‘that eminently Parisian compromise between laziness and activity’” (100). James’ reference in Italian Hours to the flâneur recalls Baudelaire’s essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), where the flâneur might be identified as a philosopher “if his excessive love of visible, tangible things, condensed to their plastic state, did not arouse in him a certain repugnance for the things that form the impalpable kingdom of the metaphysician.”13 Baudelaire’s resistance to abstraction resembles James’ resistance to ideas, as it also reminds us of Pater’s suspicion of theory when the subject is in the grasp of experience: What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. “Philosophy is the microscope of thought.” The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us. (219)

Both Pater and Baudelaire preferred the immediate, the particular, and the tangible over the abstract or theoretical, and we can see why James would recoil from the abstract, particularly when, as Sara Blair argues, in James’ day it took the form of the fixed idea of cultural superiority and contempt for Latin races. Blair notes that in his travel narratives James attempts to free himself from the “project of cultural mastery” so widespread in the wake of nineteenth-century Anglo-American imperialism. Quoting Italian Hours, she explains that James finds escape from cultural mastery in “the aimless flânerie which leaves you free to follow capriciously every hint of entertainment” (10). Embracing “purposeless activity” and “idle curiosity” (27), James “puts in abeyance racialized and nationalized norms of acquisition and control” (48). We have been considering James’ resistance to ideology and the reasons for this resistance that ranged from temperamental openness to perhaps unhappy experience with the dogmatism that he encountered



150

151

in his father and in other writers. Blair is surely right to identify cultural mastery as one of the nineteenth-century dogmatisms that James resisted, although I have been arguing that he struggled against all kinds of dogmatism, not any one particular form. Like Pater, he certainly saw all doctrinaire beliefs as hostile to authentic experience. It is also likely that James, too, recognized the brevity of life and the fleetingness of precious experiences as further reasons to forego ideology and instead embrace more immediate encounters. Pater connects his aestheticism with a pressing awareness of the rapid passage of time: “with this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch” (219). For Pater, because our moments are numbered, the best we can do is ensure that each brief interval is precious: “For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” If the flâneur offers James a model for immersion in immediate and material reality—which, as we have seen, provided the American expatriate a welcome alternative to the dogmatism he so fiercely resisted—there may have been something about that “aimless flânerie” that also troubled him, precisely because of his temporal anxieties. If at times James “Adopt[ed] the style of languor and belatedness,” as Blair contends (50), we can also see in Italian Hours (as well as in his earlier letters from Europe) a deep worry about the rapid passage of time. While in 1869 he lamented the end of his European travels, in 1909 he expressed his sense of urgency about capturing his memories before they slip into vagueness. “Other Tuscan Cities,” a late chapter in the collection first published in 1909, attempts to recount an excursion “in the very middle of dim Etruria” but almost immediately renounces the attempt: James was “kindled” with “the spirit of exploration, but with results of which I here attempt no record, so utterly does the whole impression swoon away, for present memory, into vagueness, confusion and intolerable heat. . . . What we were doing, or what we expected to do, at Montepulciano I keep no other trace of than is bound up in a present quite tender consciousness that I wouldn’t for the world not have been there” (289). Other passages are more poignant in the obvious regret that James shares with his readers about unrecovered or only poorly recovered memories. Not only as a tourist trying to recapture his own lost time but also as a writer hoping to convey something about these rapidly disintegrating bits of consciousness, James seems to lament the weakness of his grasp on past events. “There are times and places that





come back yet again,” he writes in one chapter from 1899, “but that, when the brooding tourist puts out his hand to them, meet it a little slowly, or even seem to recede a step, as if in slight fear of some liberty he may take. Surely they should know by this time that he is capable of taking none. He has his own way—he makes it all right” (61). Writing in 1901 of an earlier visit to Naples, he tries to convey his “impression of what the summer could be in the south or the south in the summer” (303). Like all impressions, this one is fleeting, even though it is an experience in his very near past, and the travel writer tries to capture it on paper before it escapes him completely. The “picture” of the Bay of Naples in June struck me—a particular corner of it at least, and for many reasons—as the last word; and it is this last word that comes back to me, after a short interval, in a green, grey northern nook, and offers me again its warm, bright golden meaning before it also inevitably catches the chill. Too precious, surely, for us not to suffer it to help us as it may is the faculty of putting together again in an order the sharp minutes and hours that the wave of time has been as ready to pass over as the salt sea to wipe out the letters and words your stick has traced in the sand. Let me, at any rate, recover a sufficient number of such signs to make a sort of sense. (303)

James resembles Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life,” Monsiuer G., whose artistic execution involves both “an intense effort of memory that evokes and calls back to life,” and “a fire, an intoxication of the pencil or the brush, amounting almost to a frenzy. It is the air of not going fast enough, of letting the phantom escape before the synthesis has been extracted and pinned down” (17). James’ writings here assume the impressionistic form of an image depicted in the rapid strokes and blunt “signs” laid down before the light changes and destroys the original scene. In “Other Tuscan Cities,” first published in Italian Hours in 1909, James recalls two visits to the Tuscan city of Lucca, which he first visited years before—he doesn’t specify the year in Italian Hours, but notes that his first visit had taken place before the construction of the railroad—and then again while the railroad was being built but still at some time years previous to his writing his travel narrative.14 James admits that even in the moment of his Luccan visit he mistrusts his perceptions; fearing that his first two impressions had been mistakes, and that a third visit would reveal a less-than-charming reality, he vows on his second visit that “I wouldn’t, as a brooding analyst, go within fifty miles of it again” (284). The temporal movement in this



152


153

After we crossed the Serchio that beautiful day we passed into the charming, the amiably tortuous, the thickly umbrageous, valley of the Lima, and then it was that I seemed fairly to remount the stream of time; figuring to myself wistfully, at the small scattered centres of entertainment—modest inns, pensions and other places of convenience clustered where the friendly torrent is bridged or the forested slopes adjust themselves—what the summer days and the summer rambles and the summer dreams must have been, in the blest place, when “people” (by which I mean the contingent of beguiled barbarians) didn’t know better, as we say, than to content themselves with such a mild substitute, such a soft, sweet and essentially elegant apology, for adventure. One wanted not simply to hang about a little, but really to live back, as surely one might have done by staying on, into the so romantically strong, if mechanically weak, Italy of the associations of one’s youth. It was a pang to have to revert to the present even in the form of Lucca—which says everything. (286).

If his willingness to “remount the stream of time” and linger in a past memory recalls the leisure of the flâneur, it also indicates an uneasiness with the immediate material reality that James knows those surroundings have since assumed, and it also betrays anxiety about the rapid changes that Lucca (and other cherished places) have undergone in the years since the railroad was completed and the automobile popularized. Wanting “really to live back” in time rather than “revert to the present,” James registers his psychic difficulty with the unhurried pace of the flâneur, which seems to ignore the “sentence of death” that, Pater cautions, hovers over all of us. There is ample evidence in Italian Hours to support Sara Blair’s claim that James “adopt[s] the style of languor and belatedness” (50) in his travel narrative. And yet, when we consider the worries that press upon the author, anxious to record his memories before they dissolve into the stream of time, we can also see a competing style here, a style more urgently responsive to the modern pace of life even in this morally relaxed, old-world country. James characterizes “this blessed Italy” as “reluctantly modern in spite alike of boasts and lamentations” (262), and his own narrative voice alternates between lamentations and a different effect, something we might think of as a more enthusiastic modernism.



chapter between memories of his earlier sojourn and his more recent (but still remote) visit gives James’ account a fluid form made more vivid by his metaphor of reawakened memories; here he is recalling his more recent visit and the way it brought to mind the earlier one:


As we have just seen, James betrays his own nostalgia for a lost Italy, and in this respect he is hardly different from the many western tourists before and after him who expect Italy always to resemble the place of the classics they have read. He sounds a lot like Ruskin when he notes, in a chapter first published in 1882, that the Lido beach, just south of Venice, “has been spoiled” (29) and “has been made the victim of villainous improvements” (30) meant to attract foreign tourists. And yet, as with his reaction to Ruskin’s other comments on Italian art and culture, James is wary of the ideological foundations beneath the objections voiced by Italy’s “English critics and censors” (114). Though he regrets the collapse of any “great tradition”—it brings on “something of the pain with which we hear a stifled cry”—he wishes to distinguish between “regret” and “resentment” (113). Once again, John Ruskin embodies the ill-tempered response, and James reacts with irritation to Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence because “it savours of arrogance to demand of any people, as a right of one’s own, that they shall be artistic” (114). He takes wry note of the restorations to St. Mark’s Cathedral, whose “dark and rugged old pavement” has been “straighten[ed] out” and where, in places, “the idea imitated by the restorers” seems to be based on “the floor of a London club-house or of a New York hotel,” but worse than these restorations is the reaction of foreigners: when, a year ago, people in England were writing to the Times about the whole business and holding meetings to protest against it the dear children of the lagoon—so far as they heard or heeded the rumour— thought them partly busy-bodies and partly asses. . . . It never occurs to the Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble may be worth taking; the Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a state of existence in which personal questions are so insipid that people have to look for grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble. (14)

Musing on Florence seventeen years later, James puzzles over the same dilemma: though he cares for the authenticity of these ancient Italian cities, he cares more for the right of Italians to decide their own future. The “terribly actual Florentine question” is, “as all the world knows,” a battle-ground, today, in many journals, with all Italy practically pulling on one side and all England, America and Germany pulling on the other: I speak of course of the more or less articulate opinion. The “improvement,” the rectification of Florence is in the air, and the problem of the particular ways in which, given such desperately delicate



154


155

Though James shares his fellow tourists’ nostalgia for a vanished old world, he is also uncomfortably aware that this same nostalgia accounts for the tourist’s efforts to master Italian culture. While he does not deny his own feelings of regret at the specter of an “improved” Italy—“to no more distressing necessity,” he laments, “have people of taste lately had to resign themselves” (13)—he distances himself from Ruskin and others who make their feelings for old Italy into a quarrel with new Italy: “we admit,” he explains, that our complaint is a purely sentimental one. The march of industry in united Italy must doubtless be looked at as a whole, and one must endeavor to believe that it is through innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply interesting country is groping her way to her place among the nations. For the present, it is not to be denied, certain odd phases of the process are more visible than the result, to arrive at which it seems necessary that, as she was of old a passionate votary of the beautiful, she should to-day burn everything that she has adored. It is doubtless too soon to judge her, and there are moments when one is willing to forgive her even the restoration of St. Mark’s. (13–14)

Owning his own nostalgia and feelings of regret at a modernizing Italy, James nevertheless refrains from turning these feelings into an ideological justification for attempts to control the nation’s future, particularly since he recognizes that the country’s aesthetically deplorable changes offer it the only chance at a political future “among the nations.” Although, as we have seen, he cannot really adopt an Italian point of view—if such a single perspective existed, it would be too remote from James’s own angle of vision for him to claim it—he does attempt to lay aside his aesthetic preoccupations long enough to inhabit a more political, economic, and modern vantage point. These attempts to experiment with other perspectives bring about ruptures with the conventional tourist’s view of simple regret or even resentment for Italy’s improvements. For one thing, they sometimes bring James to accept responsibility (on behalf of all foreign tourists) for the regrettable changes that Italy has undergone in the late nineteenth century. Reading the long history of Venice on the “faded, conscious



cases, these matters should be understood. The little treasure-city is, if there ever was one, a delicate case—more delicate perhaps than any other in the world save that of our taking on ourselves to persuade the Italians that they mayn’t do as they like with their own. They so absolutely may that I profess I see no happy issue from the fight. (71)

156


These things at present are almost equally touching in their good faith; they have each in their degree so effectually parted with their pride. They have lived on as they could and lasted as they might, and we hold them to no account of their infirmities, for even those of them whose blank eyes to-day meet criticism with most submission are far less vulgar than the uses we have mainly managed to put them to. We have botched them and patched them and covered them with sordid signs; we have restored and improved them with a merciless taste, and the best of them we have made over to the pedlars. Some of the most striking objects in the finest vistas at present are the huge advertisements of the curiosity-shops. (37)

It is possible, of course, that in inhabiting the “we” as distinct from the ancient buildings of Venice, James is simply claiming affiliation with all humans, including Italians, and offering his repentant observations on the aesthetic effects of human history. But as a tourist he is also claiming responsibility for the “sordid signs” and the advertisements that attract travelers like himself. James offers these observations as part of a sympathetic approach to the buildings of the Grand Canal, whose signs of ruin represent to him an almost human suffering: “disfigured and dishonoured as they are, with the bruises of their marbles and the patience of their ruin, there is nothing like them in the world” (37). If, here, his apparent feelings for the silent buildings allow him to judge the works of his own race, elsewhere in Italian Hours we see how his efforts to inhabit other points of view introduce some of his most sustained defenses of the modern. Sometimes these defenses are reluctant, as when James reflects on Italy’s political and economic present and future. The meditation begins as a comment on the regrettable aesthetic changes that he observes in “Italy Revisited,” a chapter he wrote in 1874 and revised in 1883 and again in 1909. Though the title might refer to those revisions, it may also refer not only to the fact that James had already visited Italy once, in 1869, by the time he returned in 1874, but also to the truth (to which he alludes in the very first chapter of Italian Hours) that any writer considering Italy can only “revisit” what has already been more famously treated in other travel books, like Ruskin’s. Like any return to Italy in an age of modernization, James’ visit brings him face to face with “the contrast between the fecundity of the great artistic period and the vulgarity there of the genius of



faces” of the palaces that line the Grand Canal, he traces their ruin through the ages:

157

to-day” (102). The “oddest” question to perplex him is this question of contrasts: “That the people who but three hundred years ago had the best taste in the world should now have the worst; that having produced the noblest, loveliest, costliest works, they should now be given up to the manufacture of objects at once ugly and paltry.” James cannot hide his sadness that the “flower of ‘great’ art” is nowhere more “drooping and withered” than “in the shadow of the immortal embodiments of the old Italian genius”: upon departing from the exquisite interior of a church or gallery, the tourist encounters a tawdry modern world that affects him as “a very bad joke” where lodgings are appointed with “vulgar material,” shops sell “trumpery,” and everything seems hopelessly frivolous and base. “[A]ll this modern crudity runs riot over the relics of the great period.” And yet this tourist keeps his good cheer when he abandons his aesthetic viewpoint for a more modern one. “It is certain,” he observes, . . . that a visitor who has worked off the immediate ferment for this inexhaustibly interesting country has by no means entirely drained the cup. After thinking of Italy as historical and artistic it will do him no great harm to think of her for a while as panting both for a future and for a balance at the bank; aspirations supposedly much at variance with the Byronic, the Ruskinian, the artistic, poetic, aesthetic manner of considering our eternally attaching peninsula. (102)

In the meditation that follows, James concedes that the “actual aspects and economics” may not be aesthetically pleasing: they may in fact be “ugly, prosaic, provokingly out of relation to the diary and the album.” (103). But his optimism derives from his willingness to lay aside the aesthetic point of view in favor of a different outlook. “[M]odern Italy,” he notes, “in a manner imposes herself. I hadn’t been many hours in the country before that truth assailed me; and I may add that, the first irritation past, I found myself able to accept it.” Noting that the young republic, “preoccupied with its economical and political future,” must be irritated at being admired only for its beautiful cultural productions, James sympathizes with the country’s resentment of “our insufferable aesthetic patronage” and predicts for it great political and economic feats: “I see a new Italy in the future which in many important respects will equal, if not surpass, the most enterprising sections of our native land. Perhaps by that time Chicago and San Francisco will have acquired a pose, and their sons and daughters will dance at the doors of locande” (103).





James, to be sure, cannot be entirely pleased at the aesthetic sacrifices that must be made to Italian progress; he notes here that he “won’t pretend . . . to ‘like’” the cosmetic effects of this progress (103). Elsewhere he registers the visible evidence “of the standing quarrel between use and beauty” (95), or the fact that towns often become “ugly” when they become “prosperous” (109). But on balance, as his long discussion of Italy’s political future indicates, he is interested in seeing the modernization of this otherwise unfortunate country. Some of his most impassioned defenses of the modern, however, come when he turns from the political and aesthetic to the epistemological. In these moments, like the writer we are by now familiar with—the one who valued passive receptivity to impressions above the tenacious grip of an idea—James looks to the forms of modernity to provide a mode of experience unlike anything he has encountered. The form that most engages his attention in these essays is transportation; in revisiting Italy and adding to his written observations over the course of thirty-seven years, James has the opportunity to observe and experience some of the most visible changes to Italy in the form of the various mechanisms used to travel. At times he uses these forms only metaphorically, as when he notes the evidence of young Italy’s modernization: “He has established a line of tramcars in Rome, from the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and it is on one of these democratic vehicles that I seem to see him taking his triumphant course down the vista of the future” (103). At other times he uses them literally, almost journalistically, to demonstrate the eagerness of Italians for modernization. The conductor of a horsedrawn coach, for instance, surprises him in his eagerness for the railroad to be finished. James observes that the conductor smiles in the face of the somber fact that the Saint-Gothard tunnel is scraping away into the mountain, all the while, under his nose, and numbering the days of the many-buttoned brotherhood. But he hopes, for long service’s sake, to be taken into the employ of the railway; he at least is no cherisher of quaintness and has no romantic perversity. (94)

In both of these passages, this peripatetic writer looks to modern modes of transportation, the tram and the railroad, for emblems of the tracks that modernity is carving across the Italian countryside. James often observes the various modes of transit that he encounters as a tourist; in many cases he takes note of them as objective features of the Italian landscape that indicate Italy’s progress along the



158


159

Of the beautiful free stroke with which the gondola, especially when there are two oars, is impelled, you never, in the Venetian scene, grow weary; it is always in the picture, and the large profiled action that lets the standing rowers throw themselves forward to a constant recovery has the double value of being, at the fag-end of greatness, the only energetic note. The people from the hotels are always afloat, and, at the hotel pace, the solitary gondolier (like the solitary horseman of the oldfashioned novel) is, I confess, a somewhat melancholy figure. (39)

The gondolas share the Venetian canals, however, with the much more recent vaporetti, motorboats that serve the same function of transporting Venetians and tourists, but that fall short of the gondola’s picturesque function: The churning of the screw of the vaporetto mingles with the other sounds—not indeed that this offensive note is confined to one part of the Canal. But just here the little piers of the resented steamer are particularly near together, and it seems somehow to be always kicking up the water. . . . It is obvious that if the vaporetti have contributed to the ruin of the gondoliers, already hard pressed by fate, and to that of the palaces, whose foundations their waves undermine, and that if they have robbed the Grand Canal of the supreme distinction of its tranquillity, so on the other hand they have placed “rapid transit,” in the New York phrase, in everybody’s reach, and enabled everybody—save indeed those who wouldn’t for all the world—to rush about Venice as furiously as people rush about New York. (48)

These observations, first published in 1892, chronicle the dramatic departure that Venice has taken from the days when the European Grand Tour first gained popularity among American and British travelers. Elsewhere, too, James records the objective view of these developments as either scars on the cultural landscape or refinements of the Italian “composition” (202). Roman neighborhoods are characterized by bicycles: the “age of the bicycle” has made Fiumincino “the handy Gravesend or Coney Island of Rome” (201) and James admires the “ardent cyclists” of Rome, youths “with a great taste for flashing about in more or less denuded or costumed athletic and romantic bands and guilds”; the roads of Rome are “swarmed with the patient wheels and bent backs of these budding cives Romani quite to the effect of its finer interest” (202). In Florence he comes



path of modernization. In Venice, the gondola represents the ancient city and the aesthetic beauty of its traditions:


close to agreeing with Ruskin that the city “is now too ghastly and heart-breaking to any human soul that remembers the days of old”; he observes that the square in front of the cathedral is now crowded with omnibuses and hackney-coaches and that “a cab-stand is a very ugly and dirty thing, and Giotto’s Tower should have nothing in common with such conveniences” (114). Entering Italy from Switzerland, he laments that “the main channels of egress are terribly choked” with tourists, “chiefly English” (88–89). If James is ambivalent when he chronicles these technological changes from an objective point of view, his enthusiasm for modernity is hard to contain once he turns to a subjective rendering and conveys the experience of these newer modes of transit. Since any mode of transit alters the subject’s outlook on this land that has captured his imagination during the course of many years, James frequently offers careful renderings of these subjective experiences, whether he is floating on a gondola as others have done for hundreds of years or taking an express train or automobile across Italy. Noting that the tourist’s “impressions” depend on the man he chooses for his gondolier (18), James explains that the many gondolas contribute to the “note of Venice.” Writing here before the advent of the vaporetti, he tells us that “there is no noise there save distinctly human noise; no rumbling, no vague uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs” (18). The tourist’s experience of Venice depends largely on the quiet movements of the gondolas; “exile” in Venice is “agreeable and soothing” in part because of the rhythmic movements of the gondola. “Its movement is an anodyne, its silence a philtre, and little by little it rocks all ambitions to sleep” (41). The epistemological effect of the gondola is so intense that at times the objective facts of Italy, of the traveler’s actual destination, disappear altogether. “The little closed cabin of this perfect vehicle,” James writes, “the movement, the darkness and the plash, the indistinguishable swerves and twists, all the things you don’t see and all the things you do feel—each dim recognition and obscure arrest is a possible throb of your sense of being floated to your doom, even when the truth is simply and sociably that you are going out to tea” (62). James focuses here on the immediate sensations of travel by gondola rather than the destination or even the sights one sees along the way. “Hold to it,” he advises, “that to float and slacken and gently bump, to creep out of the low, dark felze and make the few guided movements and find the strong crooked and offered arm, and then, beneath the lighted palace-windows, pass up the few damp steps on the precautionary carpet—hold to it that these things constitute a preparation of which the only defect is that it



160

161

may sometimes perhaps really prepare too much. It’s so stately that what can come after?” (63). Above all else, the effect of travel by gondola on Venetians and tourists alike is a cognitive and temperamental effect: in Venice there is “absolutely no rushing” (63), and the habit of traveling by gondola instills the habit of contemplation or deliberation. Other old-fashioned modes of transit serve this same function for James, encouraging a disposition very much in keeping with the idle, strolling gait of the flâneur. When James recalls an earlier visit to Lucca, he remembers his time there as a “pair of jogging hours” and an “old jogging relation,” underscoring not only the leisurely pace of travel (in his case, by horse-drawn carriage) but also the general ease of the age. The “jogging hours” of that time call to mind the “quite Arcadian air and the comparatively primitive scale” of life in Tuscany during the 1860s (285–86). Given the correspondence between these older modes of transit and the flâneur’s leisured gait, and given, as we have seen, James’ ambivalence for modern innovations to the Italian scene, we might expect that when he turns to more modern modes of travel he does so unhappily, or at best grudgingly. This may be the case when he looks objectively at these innovations, as when he deplores the vaporetti that have undermined the tranquility of Venice. But once again we should note a distinction between these things as objects of James’ eye and ear, on the one hand, and as the promptings of his novel subjective experiences, on the other. The experiential and epistemological differences between older and more modern modes of transportation are nowhere more clear than in the chapter, “Siena Early and Late,” part of which was published in 1874 and part which appeared only with the publication of Italian Hours in 1909. In that chapter James alternates between memories of Siena explored from a single horsedrawn carriage and more recent experiences of Italy from the seat of a motorcar. He is recalling a long-distant summer day when he traveled a rural road by horsecar, and recalling, as well, that in the intervening years he has developed a fondness for the automobile. While the speed of the more modern vehicle allows him to indulge his “landscape lust,” taking in more of the land in less time without damaging the quality of his hours, he also knows that the growing popularity of this mode of travel will make such extraordinary experiences commonplace in the years ahead: The long-drawn rural road I refer to, stretching over hill and dale and to which I devoted the whole of the longest day of the year—I was in





a small single-horse conveyance, of which I had already made appreciative use, and with a driver as disposed as myself ever to sacrifice speed to contemplation—is doubtless familiar now with the rush of the motor-car; the thought of whose free dealings with the solitude of Monte Oliveto makes me a little ruefully reconsider, I confess, the spirit in which I have elsewhere in these pages, on behalf of the lust, the landscape lust, of the eyes, acknowledged our general increasing debt to that vehicle. For that we met nothing whatever, as I seem at this distance of time to recall, while we gently trotted and trotted through the splendid summer hours and a dry desolation that yet somehow smiled and smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of the whole impression—the impression that culminated at last, before the great cloistered square, lonely, bleak and stricken, in the almost aching vision, more frequent in the Italy of to-day than anywhere in the world, of the uncalculated waste of a myriad forms of piety, forces of labour, beautiful fruits of genius. However, one gaped above all things for the impression, and what one mainly asked was that it should be strong of its kind. (235–36)

The charm of the automobile is that it allows the tourist to break into the solitude of remote places in Italy, but as James recalls the charm of his day in the horse-drawn carriage, it consisted of the lonely impression that he alone had found the means to visit the Benedictine monastery, Monte Oliveto. The pang of that “lonely, bleak and stricken” place, bereft alike of visitors and worshippers, is part of its beauty, and James knows that while the automobile gives its passengers once-rare access to remote places, its growing popularity guarantees that access will be less rare with every elapsing year. Depending on one’s point of view—passenger or objective observer—the automobile is either a charming innovation or a deplorable interloper into quiet places. His later chapters present a more nuanced depiction of the motorcar. “A Few Other Roman Neighborhoods,” published in 1909, begins with a lament that the old Rome he’d first encountered is now lost forever to him. Like the Roman landscape, itself overlaid with the artifacts of earlier generations, James’ “impression of Rome was repeatedly to renew itself for the author of these now rather antique and artless accents; was to overlay itself again and again with almost heavy thicknesses of experiences” (194). The more recent accretions to this impression initially give James a sense of bereavement for what they bury: The actual, the current Rome affects him as a world governed by new conditions altogether and ruefully pleading that sorry fact in the ear of the antique wanderer wherever he may yet mournfully turn for



162


163

When James considers, though, that “[n]o one who has ever loved Rome as Rome could be loved in youth . . . wants to stop loving her,” he “resign[s]” himself to motoring out to a remote monastery that he had never been able to reach before the automobile. Indebted in this latter day “to the last new thing,” he is surprised by the “unchallenged felicity” of his excursion, “float[ing] to Subiaco on vast brave wings” (195), and he recalls his earlier visits to Rome when he studied a book of Italian Benedictine monasteries, “taking piteously for granted that I should get myself somehow conveyed to Monte Cassino and to Subiaco at least” (196). Part of the charm of the automobile, of course, is simply the access it grants to places where access had once been difficult or impossible. James gratefully mentions “the immense growth of every sort of facilitation—so that people are much more free than of old to come and go and do, to inquire and explore, to pervade and generally ‘infest’; with a consequent loss, for the fastidious individual, of the blest earlier sense, not infrequent, of having the occasion and the impression, as he used complacently to say, all to himself” (199–200). But the charm is not limited to improved access, and as his reference to the “fastidious individual” suggests, increasing convenience for the tourist also has the effect of depreciating his experience. Under the “amazing extension” of opportunity to explore remote places, James acknowledges, “Curiosity has lost . . . its salutary renouncements perhaps; contemplation has become one with action and satisfaction one with desire—speaking always in the spirit of the inordinate lover of an enlightened use of our eyes. That may represent, for all I know, an insolence of advantage on which there will be eventual heavy charges, as yet obscure and incalculable, to pay, and I glance at the possibility only to avoid all thought of the lesson of the long run, and to insist that I utter this dithyramb but in the immediate flush and fever of the short” (317). If the question of improved access leaves James with mixed feelings, the case is different when he begins to convey his charmed impressions of automobile travel without indulging in either regret for past or apprehension about future experiences; what absorbs his interest in these passages is the way this modern mode of transit transforms



some re-capture of what he misses. The city of his first unpremeditated rapture shines to memory, on the other hand, in the manner of a lost paradise the rustle of whose gardens is still just audible enough in the air to make him wonder if some sudden turn, some recovered vista, mayn’t lead him back to the thing itself. (194)


the tourist’s perceptions of travel. Though his travels through Italy have always brought about a mingling of present perceptions and past memories, a union of direct experience with impressions he has encountered in other (mostly written) sources, he finds a new kind of “fusion” in the perceptions he forms while traveling the land at faster speeds: Seen thus in great comprehensive iridescent stretches, it is the incomparable wrought fusion, fusion of human history and mortal passion with the elements of earth and air, of colour, composition and form, that constitutes [Italy’s] appeal and gives it the supreme heroic grace. The chariot of fire favours fusion rather than promotes analysis, and leaves much of that first June picture for me, doubtless, a great accepted blur of violet and silver. The various hours and successive aspects, the different strong passages of our reverse process, on the other hand, still figure for me even as some series of sublime landscape-frescoes—if the great Claude, say, had ever used that medium—in the immense gallery of a palace; the homeward run by Capua, Terracina, Gaeta and its storied headland fortress, across the deep, strong, indescribable Pontine Marshes, white-cattled, strangely pastoral, sleeping in the afternoon glow, yet stirred by the near sea-breath. (318)

The “fusion” rather than “analysis” that results from automobile travel is an impressionistic form of cognition, an early stage that Kant described and Emerson preferred, where the mind takes in sensations passively without processing them more than to notice them as they pass. As James notes on another occasion made possible by the motorcar, the drive to the ancient town of Tivoli impresses him as “a wondrous romantic jumble” (198), fused together by the rapid movement of the tourist during his “run” to Subiaco. “All the elements of the scene,” he observes, “melted for me together” (199). In comparing the experience of traveling by car to a series of landscape frescoes upon the wall of a palace, James indicates his position as passive observer—more passive here, with the rapidly changing scenery, than in an actual gallery where the observer can pause before a painting and make minute observations. Forced to observe at this quickened pace, the tourist has scarcely time to form ideas but must instead note his impressions before they vanish. Once again the words of Walter Pater seem to gloss this scene: “we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch” (219). James does introduce the word “idea” in a passage that describes this more modern mode of experience, but it serves a peculiar function, meaning something quite different from the conventional use



164


165

The way in which the Italian scene on such occasions as this seems to purify itself to the transcendent and perfect idea alone—idea of beauty, of dignity, of comprehensive grace, with all accidents merged, all defects disowned, all experience outlived, and to gather itself up into the mere mute eloquence of what has just incalculably been, remains for ever the secret and the lesson of the subtlest daughter of History. All one could do, at the heart of the overarching crystal, and in presence of the relegated City, the far-trailing Mount, the grand Sorrentine headland, the islands incomparably stationed and related, was to wonder what may well become of the so many other elements of any poor human and social complexus, what might become of any successfully working or only struggling and floundering civilisation at all, when high Natural Elegance proceeds to take such exclusive charge and recklessly assume, as it were, all the responsibilities. (316)

James’s use of “idea” in this context does not resemble the “idea” as we have been considering it—something akin to “theory” or even “dogma.” In the sense we have been exploring (more pejorative to James’ mind), the idea precedes and often defies experience, forcing it to adjust itself to some a priori notion of reality. Here, on the other hand, the idea emerges directly from experience, as accidents are merged rather than erased. If defects are “disowned,” the “transcendent and perfect idea” to emerge from experience does at least begin in actual experience and perception rather than in empty concepts: the idea “gather[s] itself up into . . . what has just . . . been.” James does not explain why the Italian scene composes itself in just this way, why the accidents merge into some transcendent idea, but it may well have something to do with the fact that the automobile has radically transformed his experiences, and therefore his perceptions, in a way that he could not have predicted before climbing in for a dash from one Italian city to another. The “idea” of this scene is not an abstraction preceding experience but rather a blurring or melting together of the many sensuous details that his rapid pace prevents him from observing in isolation. Having mused on the extraordinary gains and the regrettable losses of modernization, James confides that his last hour in Rome was “indeed a reconciling, . . . an altogether penetrating, last hour” (204). While the convenience of the automobile may in small ways



of “idea” that we have been exploring. Here is his description of the Italian scene as experienced at the turn of the twentieth century during that same excursion that included the drive to Naples from Rome:


have contributed to this reconciliation, I am arguing that this student of psychology is more intensely penetrated by the new possibilities that this modern form had made available to consciousness. James is more explicit about these possibilities in his extended meditation on this “ugliest and most monstrous aid to motion,” for he is measuring his new enthusiasm against the old certainty that Italy has nothing more extraordinary to show him: It was odd, at the end of time, long after those initiations, of comparative youth, that had then struck one as extending the very field itself of felt charm, as exhausting the possibilities of fond surrender, it was odd to have positively a new basis of enjoyment, a new gate of triumphant passage, thrust into one’s consciousness and opening to one’s use; just as I confess I have to brace myself a little to call by such fine names our latest, our ugliest and most monstrous aid to motion. It is true of the monster, as we have known him up to now, that one can neither quite praise him nor quite blame him without a blush—he reflects so the nature of the company he’s condemned to keep. His splendid easy power addressed to noble aims makes him assuredly on occasion a purely beneficent creature. I parenthesise at any rate that I know him in no other light—counting out of course the acquaintance that consists of a dismayed arrest in the road, with back flattened against wall or hedge, for the dusty, smoky, stenchy shock of his passage. To no end is his easy power more blest than to that of ministering to the ramifications, as it were, of curiosity, or to that, in other words, of achieving for us, among the kingdoms of the earth, the grander and more genial, the comprehensive and complete introduction. (317)

The automobile, as a means of “achieving . . . complete introduction” to the “kingdoms of the earth,” offers access to actual places; but perhaps James’ enthusiasm is most provoked by the inroads this mechanism makes into that other kingdom, his consciousness, as it offers new “possibilities of fond surrender” where he thought he would find no more. This seasoned tourist, who thinks his curiosity can never again be awakened to restlessness, finds in the automobile a return to his earlier, childlike curiosity—the state of “curiosity newkindled” that Emerson attributed to the human spirit.15 If we compare the complacency of Henrietta Stackpole, at times John Ruskin, or other ideological travelers who encountered little that they had not expected to find, we can see why James, especially in his later years, is eager to make the acquaintance of an invention that will rekindle his curiosity and extend new possibilities to consciousness. The automobile, “our wonder-working agent,” now “flings the firm



166

167

straight bridge” into those previously unreachable “goals of delight and dreams of desire” (317). Though he concedes that “some hard grain of difficulty [is] always a necessary part of the composition of pleasure” (317) and wonders what will replace this hard grain now that the automobile has removed “the element of uncertainty, effort and patience” (318) from the modern tourist’s experience of foreign lands, James teases his readers with the possibility that the sensitive and thoughtful tourist has something in his private arsenal to replace what the automobile has removed. If “the seated motorist” misses the difficulties that guaranteed earlier tourists their many impressions, he proposes—though he offers no details—that “his aesthetic (let alone his moral) conscience may supply him with some artful subjective substitute; in which case the thing becomes a precious secret of his own” (318). The substitute, we know, is “subjective,” not the objective and observable difficulties of movement, and because James’ discussion turns next to the “great accepted blur” of the landscape, we might wonder whether the substitute he mentions isn’t precisely this phenomenological change to the traveler’s perspective. While James, as we have seen, has elsewhere resisted the “blur” that time puts on his memories, an impressionistic blur that accurately captures his freshest perceptions is perhaps as exciting a change as he can hope his “composition of pleasure” to undergo. What he calls the “feast of scenery” (318) that greets him during his automobile journey has a distinctly modern feel. James is explicitly enthusiastic about the presence of the modern— or, more accurately, about the effect of modern forms as they assume their places alongside more ancient and familiar ones. Taking note of one charming day spent among the ruins of Ostia, an “idyllic afternoon” that “left no chord of sensibility that could possibly have been in question untouched,” he particularly mentions the sensation of “see[ing] our car ferried across the Tiber, almost saffron-coloured here and swirling towards its mouth, on a boat that was little more than a big rustic raft and that yet bravely resisted the prodigious weight.” The passage ends with a paean to this concurrence of the ancient with the modern: “What shall I say, in the way of the particular, of the general felicity before me, for the sweetness of the hour to which the incident just named, with its strange and amusing juxtapositions of the patriarchally primitive and the insolently supersubtle, the earliest and the latest efforts of restless science, were almost immediately to succeed?” (200). This image, like the many other “innumerable ‘signs of the times,’ unmistakable features of the new era” that “succeeded in ministering to a happy effect,” contains elements not only of the





Roman landscape, but also of James’ own consciousness: it exposes layers of history so that the perceptive traveler can see the past and the present at the same charmed moment. If the Henry James of Italian Hours does not exactly resemble Baudelaire’s flâneur—if, as we have seen, he is too troubled by the rapid passage of time to throw himself carelessly into the flâneur’s idle peregrinations—he does at these moments closely resemble Baudelaire’s depiction of Monsieur G., the “painter of modern life” who “has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur’” (12). Baudelaire’s painter is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call “modernity”; for I know of no better word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory. . . . By “modernity” I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable . . . This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract and indeterminate beauty . . . (12–13).

While James at times joins Ruskin and other western tourists in “despis[ing]” the modern elements of this rapidly changing country, at his most anti-ideological he embraces these same elements, understanding perhaps that they are part of the material details of the scenes laid out before him, and that to neglect them is to accept an obsolete abstraction, perhaps even an abstraction that was never a true account of Italy.

The Allure of the Modern in THE A MERICAN S CENE The epistemological allure of the modern greets James also in the United States, which in some ways presents him with similar conditions when he visits his native land in 1904 after an absence of more than twenty years. Traveling the country he encounters immigrants who are at times even less accessible to him than the Italians he had met in Italy, and the many modern innovations since his last visit make this once familiar place seem strange and alien. Feeling curious about this exotic land and its elusive nature, James sets out to discover the “features of the human scene” but concludes that “newspapers, reports, surveys and blue-books” are “powerless to ‘handle’” these



168

169

features and that even his “own pair of scales,” kept clear of other things during the ten months of his journey, cannot fairly weigh what he finds.16 Describing himself as an “ancient contemplative person,” he laments that “the human, the social question always dogging [his] steps” never resolves itself, only makes him “wish really to get into the picture” that he observes (AS 384). But as he discovers, “the human interest and the human charm lay in wait” (628). Missing the existence of religious faith in the people of Richmond, for example, James describes them as a faceless population: “You liken it perhaps not so much to a meal made savourless by the failure of some usual, some central dish, as to a picture, nominally finished, say, where the canvas shows, in the very middle, with all originality, a fine blank space.” Although his specific topic is the lack of religion, his metaphor suggests the larger problem of the traveler’s inability to recognize the human character in his compatriots: “What is the picture, collectively seen, you ask, but the portrait, more or less elaborated, of a multitudinous People, of a social and political order?—so that the effect is, for all the world, as if, with the body and the limbs, the hands and feet and coat and trousers, all the accessories of the figure showily painted, the neat white oval of the face itself were innocent of the brush. . . . You wonder how he would look if the face had been done” (667). When James admits that Richmond “looked to me simply blank and void” (658), he is speaking of the people of that city as well as the city itself, and his experience of Richmond repeats itself again and again as he tries—and fails—to grasp the national character of this now-alien country. “Every obligation lay upon me to ‘study’” the people, he laments, “and I did my utmost, I remember, to render them my respect; yet when I now, after an interval, consult my notes, I find the page a blank, and when I knock at the door of memory I find it perversely closed” (727). While James’ passions fail to kindle in his encounters with the people of his native land, his most extensive and ardent responses to the American scene emerge, surprisingly, in his encounters with institutions and other cultural constructions: the libraries, museums, and colleges of this postwar nation as well as its more recent structures, its skyscrapers, hotels, and Pullman railroad cars. We should ask why this reversal of interest should be true for a writer well known for his interest in psychology, one who sets out to discover “the manners,” “the social mystery, the lurking human secret” that seems so “shy” in this strange land (385). The answer may be precisely because the only human manners he encounters—with one important exception—are the exaggerated and dominant manners of the business class, which





represents for James the “unvarying American” (635). If the people are elsewhere faceless, the “arriving visitor” is “assault[ed]” by “the overwhelming preponderance, wherever he turns and twists, of the unmitigated ‘business man’ face” (409). The businessman represents to James the “crudity of wealth” that strikes him “with so direct a force” (365). Finding the social scene organized according to a “crude democracy of trade,” James notes that “the usual” in this society “is the new, the simple, the cheap, the common, the commercial, the immediate, and, all too often, the ugly” (411). In short, because the manners produced by commerce appear formulaic and unappealing, James turns away from them in search of more interesting human content. Any exception to this uniformity, “any human product that those elements fail conspicuously to involve or to explain, any creature, or even any feature, not turned out to pattern, any form of suggested rarity, subtlety, ancientry, or other pleasant perversity,” he maintains, “prepares us for a recognition akin to rapture” (411). James is therefore nearly rapturous when he encounters an exception to this terrible regularity in the city of Washington, where the influence of business is scarcely perceptible and where men, consequently, have recovered their manhood from the tyrannical pattern of business. Unlike conditions in the rest of the nation, where manners are determined by commercial transactions, James finds the people of Washington “engaged perpetually in conversation” (633). Finding their own forms of self-expression in conversation, the residents of this city deliberately undertake the production of their manners and their identity, demonstrating “one of the most thorough, even if probably one of the most natural and of the happiest, cases of collective self-consciousness that one knows” (636). He is eager to witness this “so fresh experiment of constitutive, creative talk,” where the tone of “conscious self-consciousness” guarantees him a view of the only society in the United States “in which Men existed” (637). Apart from this exceptional city, where all of its members deliberately and constantly undertake the construction of their culture, James finds American society so uniform as to be nearly faceless. If the “lurking human secret” (385) cannot be told in these less subtle contexts, James looks to other human constructions—buildings and modern inventions—for a more articulate and authentic expression of national character. When looking at the nation’s capital, he understands that “the Washington to come” will express itself in “multitudinous and elaborate forms” beyond mere “gold and silver, stone and marble and trees and flowers” (648), and the question of what it might



170

171

say and with what materials gives this “restless analyst . . . a thrill” (648). While other civilizations express themselves in monuments, Washington draws on conversation for its most enduring form of selfdetermination and presents the spectacle “of a numerous community in ardent pursuit of some workable conception of its social self, and trying meanwhile intelligently to talk itself, and even this very embarrassment, into a subject for conversation” (636). Other institutions perform this same function of self-expression rather than capitulation to a business model, and James admires them in proportion to their resistance to this model. “The Universities and the greater Libraries,” he notes, “. . . have the incalculable value that they represent the only intermission to inordinate rapacious traffic that the scene offers to view” (644). Of public libraries he observes that “It is to the inordinate value, in the picture, of the non-commercial, non-industrial, non-financial note that they owe their rich relief; being, with the Universities, as one never wearied of noting, charged with the whole expression of that part of the national energy that is not calculable in terms of mere arithmetic” (674).

The “Hotel Spirit” and the Pullman Railroad Cars Libraries and universities, of course, are old forms whose European counterparts were familiar to James; he explains that they “repeat . . . the note of the old thick-walled convents and quiet cloisters” of Europe (644). When he looks to other human constructions in the new world, he finds some of the most thrilling (if also at times distressing) forms of expression in the modern innovations that have been introduced to American society since his last visit twenty years earlier. If he cannot find a “face” to express the American spirit and waits in vain for the “features of the human scene” to reveal themselves (354), he does observe that the most “ubiquitous American force,” gregariousness, is clearly expressed in a number of commercial institutions (443), primarily those devoted to travel. The many hotels where he stays during his tour of the United States demonstrate to him both luxury and entrapment, and as he sees so many American citizens embracing the conditions of large hotels, he comes to think of the hotel as representing something about the character of this nation: he sees “the whole housed populace move as in mild and consenting suspicion of its captured and governed state, its having to consent to inordinate fusion as the price of what it seemed pleased to regard as inordinate luxury. Beguiled and caged, positively thankful, in its





vast vacancy, for the sense and the definite horizon of a cage” (717), these people reveal their national character of gregariousness—which outweighs the alleged national love of freedom—in the ubiquitous institution of the luxury hotel. While Europeans enjoy “a multitudinous complicated life,” in the United States “the richest form of existence” is compressed into the world of the hotel (688). So dominant is the hotel in the United States that James identifies it as the animating force of national life: “the sublime hotel-spirit,” he notes, “is an omniscient genius, while the character of the tributary nation is still but struggling into relatively dim self-knowledge” (715). James’ language here resembles G. W. F. Hegel’s in The Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807 but not translated into English until 1910, three years after the publication of James’ American Scene. Though James could not have read Hegel’s Phenomenology, the similarities of language and theme are remarkable, especially the notion that the human spirit or genius is traceable in the collected life forms of a civilization, which offer that spirit the means to realize itself. As James remarks, “the American spirit has found so unprecedented a use and a value” for the hotel, “leading it on to express so a social, indeed positively an aesthetic ideal, and making it so, at this supreme pitch, a synonym for civilization, for the capture of conceived manners themselves, that one is verily tempted to ask if the hotel-spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and finding itself” (440). What dismays him, though, is the suspicion that these forms are not the expression or realization of the human spirit but rather the tyrants of humanity: “The hotel was leading again, not following— imposing the standard, not submitting to it” (719). Though he has a bit less to say about the Pullman railroad cars that take him from hotel to hotel, these, too, express something of the American spirit and character to this curious visitor. The hotels and Pullmans are alike in crowding travelers together in luxurious quarters, and James notes (in another Hegelian observation) that both these institutions—“the Pullmans that are like rushing hotels and the hotels that are like stationary Pullmans—represent the stages and forms of your evolution, and are not a bit, in themselves, more final than you are” (689). Both these human creations strike him as “the supreme social expression,” and the trains in particular “affected me ever, . . . as carrying . . . at least almost all the facts of American life” (688). What are these facts, and what in particular does the Pullman car express to James? If the omnipresent businessman is particularly prevalent on trains—James notes that this “ubiquitous commercial



172

173

traveler” can be found on Southern trains and in Southern inns in such quantities as “to threaten to block out of view almost every other subject” (702–3)—the trains also express a business-like will to growth, a relentless force that the traveler sees in northern cities as well as the southern regions that he visits by means of the railroad. In New York he notices the consummate monotonous commonness, of the pushing male crowd, moving in—its dense mass with the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights. It appeared, the muddy medium, all one with every other element and note as well, all the signs of the heaped industrial battlefield, all the sounds and silences, grim, pushing, trudging silences too, of the universal will to move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price. (425)

James identifies this “will to grow,” “everywhere written large, and to grow at no matter what or whose expense” (400), as an effect of commerce, where the inflation of extravagance (embodied in luxurious hotels and Pullman cars) moves people to consume ever greater quantities, to spend in larger amounts and to push beyond the horizons of the “expensive”: the “expensive . . . is like a train covering ground at maximum speed and pushing on, at present, into regions unmeasurable. . . . Here was the expensive as a power by itself, a power unguided, undirected, practically unapplied, really exerting itself in a void that could make it no response” (363). If this will to move and to grow is written everywhere on the American scene, it assumes perhaps its most irrefutable form in the shape of the Pullman car, whose “great monotonous rumble” “ravage[s]” the “solitude” of James’s visit (734). Perhaps because the Pullman is a new character on the American scene, James sees it as one of the more obvious forms of the “American spirit” that he observes. Another cultural monument to have sprung up on the American landscape and engaged James’s interest since his last visit is the skyscraper, the “rose of interminable stem” that has blossomed all over his native land (420). Like the other modern cultural forms he encounters, these skyscrapers are in part appalling, since they, too, embody an unrelenting force that has serious and irreversible repercussions for the country of James’ memory. Like the businessman whose face and manners eclipse all other characteristics of the social scene, the skyscraper has “no other uses save the commercial at any cost” (420) and therefore has a homogenizing effect on the culture. When the restless





analyst considers the various aesthetic and historical contributions that architectural structures typically introduce, he mordantly concludes that the skyscraper is an exception; its “multiplied floors and windows . . . , ranged in this terrible recent erection, were going to bring in money— and was not money the only thing a self-respecting structure could be thought of as bringing in?” (434). The skyscraper joins modern modes of transit in clamoring for economic growth at all costs: if “the expensive . . . is like a train covering ground at maximum speed and pushing on, at present, into regions unmeasurable” (363), and if “money . . . operates [in America] too often as the great puffing motor-car framed for whirling [the traveler], in his dismay, quite away from” his interest in the scene (648), all of these forms help to determine the character of the culture itself, especially in its newer cities. New York, for instance, is unable to convince James “that she is serious, serious about any form whatever, or about anything but that perpetual passionate pecuniary purpose which plays with all forms, which derives and devours them, though it may pile up the cost of them in order to rest a while, spent and haggard, in the illusion of their finality” (447). In its refusal to admit other sources of interest, its single-minded pursuit of wealth, New York represents the dogmatic character of American culture that so unnerves James, the “economic idea” that dominates the experience of any visitor to the postwar country (435). This obsession with economic gain is only one unpleasant meaning that James reads into the skyscraper’s form and sees inscribed on the American scene. A counterpart of the American obsession with creating wealth is the country’s apparent neglect for history, and James sees this neglect represented in the very design of the urban landscape, where buildings are only relevant until taller buildings replace them. Skyscrapers, he notes, are “[c]rowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history”; these buildings “are simply the most piercing notes in that concert of the expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself” (420). Comparing these recent structures to the storied buildings and monuments of Europe, he concludes that American skyscrapers speak primarily for impermanence: They never begin to speak to you, in the manner of the builded majesties of the world as we have heretofore known such—towers or temples or fortresses or palaces—with the authority of things of permanence or even of things of long duration. One story is good only till another is told, and sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written. . . . [T]he consciousness of



174


175

The “market,” another form that expresses the “will to grow” that James saw “everywhere written large” (400), crowds out all sense of the past, whose dangerous nostalgia can only interfere with the impulse to growth. The “great city” of New York “is projected into its future as, practically, a huge, continuous fifty-floored conspiracy against the very idea of the ancient graces” (432). James draws this bleak conclusion about the defeat of the ancient graces—social intercourse, manners and culture—after a visit to his boyhood home in Washington Square, where the destruction of his birthplace and other buildings of his youth affects him as if he has been “amputated of half my history” (431). Having nursed a historical sense during his long years of exile from his native land, he is shocked to find that these buildings have vanished with no mark to record their ancient existence: “This was the snub, for the complacency of retrospect, that, whereas the inner sense had positively erected there for its private contemplation a commemorative mural tablet, the very wall that should have borne this inscription had been smashed as for demonstration that tablets, in New York, are unthinkable” (431). Nor is he simply personally affronted to find all traces of his boyhood home erased from the neighborhood. Though this American exile writhes under the “horrible, hateful sense of personal antiquity” (422) that confronts him in Washington Square, he also laments the absence of any general historical sense: the cultural preference for skyscrapers over older buildings, or even buildings of a more modest size, all but rules out the possibility of a publicly documented historical sensibility. Noting the conspicuous absence of historical markers and tablets, James invites his reader to gasp properly with me before the fact that we not only fail to remember, in the whole length of the city, one of these frontal records of birth, sojourn, or death, under a celebrated name, but that we have only to reflect an instant to see any such form of civic piety inevitably and forever absent. . . . [I]s it not verily bitter, for those who feel a poetry in the noted passage, longer or shorter, here and there, of great lost spirits, that the institution, the profit, the glory of any such association is denied in advance to communities tending, as the phrase is, to ‘run’ preponderantly to the sky-scraper? Where, in fact, is the point of inserting a mural tablet, at any legible height, in a building certain to be destroyed to make room for a sky-scraper? And from where, on the other hand, in a façade of fifty



the finite, the menaced, the essentially invented state, twinkles ever, to my perception, in the thousand glassy eyes of these giants of the mere market. (420)

176


In identifying the most conspicuous forms to be absent from this landscape, James locates his native country’s most essential characteristic, the restless modernity that has no time for historical contemplation. In its profit-seeking efforts and in the architectural forms that both enable and express these efforts, James finds a dismayingly brazen regard for the present at the expense of the past. This, then, is how the “economic idea” strikes him, as well as the architectural forms that serve that idea. And yet, as with the modern forms of transit that he encounters in Italy, James makes an important distinction between the idea behind these forms—the doctrine that they single-mindedly represent—and the impression that they provoke in him. The impression, we will recall, is that feeling or sensation that precedes an idea and is instilled by sensations rather than abstractions or a priori conclusions. In the very passage where he laments the sense of “personal antiquity” that all this modernity inflicts upon him (422), James turns from the idea presented by the ever-effacing modernity of his childhood home to the impression made upon him by its forms. Having all but dismissed the skyscrapers as violent usurpers of his tender memories, he reconsiders their effect through the lens of his impressions. “Yet was it after all,” he muses, “that those monsters of the mere market, as I have called them, had more to say, on the question of ‘effect,’ than I had at first allowed?—since they are the element that looms largest for me through a particular impression . . .” (422). Whatever the intended purpose of these skyscrapers or their most dominant message to the bewildered tourist, when James consults his impressions he begins to suspect that these monstrous buildings might have something to say on a different topic than commerce. He learns, for instance, that the skyscrapers make up a visual image that he regards as artistic—he explains that they “hav[e] a message for the eyes” (423)—but he also senses that their aesthetic effects extend to other artistic forms. These effects might have engaged James himself had he not left his native land so long ago and remained absent so many years. He feels and sees lower Manhattan “from the inside,” dwelling deliberately on the topic of feeling to refer, all presumptuously, [to] a relation to matters of magnitude and mystery that I could begin neither to measure nor to penetrate, hovering about them only in wonder, staring at them as at a world of immovably-closed



floors, does one “see” the pious plate recording the honour attached to one of the apartments look down on a responsive people? We have but to ask the question to recognize our necessary failure to answer it as a supremely characteristic local note . . . (432)


177

Far from being bored by the single-minded idea embodied by these buildings, James is surprised by a contrary mood, the “sense of a baffled curiosity, an intellectual adventure forever renounced” (422). He recognizes his inability as a foreigner to understand much of the scene around him and yet explains that “the picture, as it comes back to me, is, for all this foolish subjective poverty, so crowded with its features that I rejoice, I confess, in not having more of them to handle. No open apprehension . . . can carry more than a certain amount of life, of a kind; and there was nothing at play in the outer air, at least, of the scene, during these glimpses, that didn’t scramble for admission to mine” (423). The skyscrapers, in short, suggest myriad aesthetic possibilities to James, possibilities that may be foreclosed by the “economic idea” behind them but that blossom as they exist in more immediate impressions. Once again, then, in his transition from an ideological way of receiving the forms of his surroundings to a more impressionistic and receptive mode of response, James comes to appreciate the very signs of modernity that at first seem deplorable. Although the comparison between the architectural structures of historical Italy and those of modern New York initially strikes him as entirely in favor of Italy, he soon complicates this conclusion: Such a structure as the comparatively windowless bell-tower of Giotto, in Florence, looks supremely serene in its beauty. You don’t feel it to have risen by the breath of an interested passion that, restless beyond all passions, is for ever seeking more pliable forms. Beauty has been the object of its creator’s idea, and, having found beauty, it has found the form in which it splendidly rests. (420)

James of course finds something reassuring in the serene beauty of the bell tower—a serenity expressive of the culture’s satisfaction with such forms, a serenity that assures the viewer of the relative permanence of such structures as this bell tower by Giotto. And yet the alternative embodied by the New York landscape, a “passion” that is “for ever seeking more pliable forms,” also appeals to this literary artist who looked to the novel for a similar accommodation of artistic ambition. As he had written in 1899, “The novel is of all pictures the most comprehensive and the most elastic. It will stretch anywhere—it will take in absolutely anything. All it needs is a subject



doors behind which immense “material” lurked, material for the artist, the painter of life, as we say, who shouldn’t have begun so early and so fatally to fall away from possible initiations. (422)


and a painter. But for its subject, magnificently, it has the whole human consciousness.”17 If James’ historical sensibility is dismayed by the “unattempted, impossible maturity” of New York, where the “powers above” insist that “there’s no step at which [the city] shall rest, no form” in which it can (448), the aesthetic sensibility of this “restless analyst” also finds something deeply compatible in the modern structures of this city, whose “huge constructed and compressed communities, throbbing, through [their] myriad arteries and pores, with a single passion, . . . testified overwhelmingly to the character of New York—and the passion of the restless analyst, on his side, is for the extraction of character” (424). Again James highlights the important distinction between impressions and ideas. While the Waldorf-Astoria “speaks . . . as a temple builded, with clustering chapels and shrines, to an idea,” the idea of “publicity as the vital medium organized with the authority with which the American genius for organization, put on its mettle, alone could organize it” (442–43); while skyscrapers express the “economic idea” (435); and while the sterile and vulgar drummer dominates train travel with his “single type” (705); James finds enchanting details even in these often monotonous forms. When he frees himself of what he considers the ideological import of these cultural institutions, he recognizes elements in the American scene that might otherwise have escaped him, and the artist in him is enchanted by the aesthetic possibilities presented by the modern cultural landscape. Moving empirically, not dogmatically, from these forms to what they seem to represent, James discovers and describes the spirit of the age, which, he demonstrates, is best seen in the myriad ever-evolving institutions that cover the land. Finding similar meanings in such diverse cultural forms as Pullman railroad cars, hotels, skyscrapers and even conversation, James arrives at an almost Hegelian reading of his native country. For Hegel, the stages of a cultural spirit can be traced in its collected life forms, or what Marx called the “inorganic body of man.”18 We saw in our consideration of The Princess Casamassima that in 1886 Hegel represented for James some a priori idea that forced particular circumstances into conformity with it. Later in life, the novelist seems to have come to a more earnest embrace of Hegelian thought, taking seriously the notion that a national, cultural or temporal spirit can assume various forms and that those forms are worthy of scrutiny. Two years later, the novelist’s brother would admire the restlessness inherent in Hegel’s system that made this rationalist philosopher seem almost a radical empiricist: “This dogging of everything by its negative, its fate, its undoing, this perpetual



178

179

moving on to something future which shall supersede the present, this is the Hegelian intuition of the essential provisionality, and consequent unreality, of everything empirical and finite” (Pluralistic Universe 89). While William James could not agree that the provisional was therefore unreal, he seemed to applaud Hegel’s “vision of a really living world” (92), which set the German apart from other rationalists. So, too, does Henry James here recognize that faith in some larger “spirit of the age” does not preclude careful attention to the details surrounding him that indicate the realization of that spirit; indeed, his keenest cultural insights to develop during his travels are those that are born not of his preconceived ideas about his native land—nor even of the ideas that seem to have generated the many forms he observes—but rather from his impressions of those forms. Hegel’s claim about the relationship between human forms and the spirit of the age, like James’ response to it, may indeed be abstract, but unlike the “Idea” that we have traced in the political movement depicted in The Princess Casamassima, it is not ideological. In his later travel writings James recognizes and demonstrates that the idea about cultural forms can be implemented in an empirical rather than merely a dogmatic way, and that even a Hegelian sensibility can rise above the fixed ideas of some of the tourists James least admired.







Introduction 1. Stanley J. Kunitz notes that this comment “is declared to have originated with William’s students at Harvard” (351). 2. Susan Griffin’s fine study The Historical Eye falls into the first category, while Richard Hocks’ Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought falls into the second. Hocks argues that William’s pragmatism “is literally actualized as the literary art and idiom of his brother Henry James” (4); his book investigates the active nature of cognition as both Jameses described it. Griffin, comparing the brothers’ interest “not in some ‘real,’ prior self, but in the experience of identity over time” (5), sees William’s Principles of Psychology as an important influence on Henry’s depictions of perception (6). Sharon Cameron, on the other hand, sees the novelist’s depictions of consciousness as strikingly different from those of his brother. 3. The faculty that produces ideas “may mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses,” Hume writes, but these ideas “never can entirely reach the force and vivacity of the original sentiment” (Enquiry Section II, “Of the Origin of Ideas,” p. 15 in Essays and Treatises). 4. Hegel writes in Introduction to the Philosophy of History that “the universal Idea subsists as the substantial totality of things” (29) and is realized in “immediate actuality” (31). I will take up Hegel’s influence on James more completely in chapters 2 and 4. 5. Hume considered his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) an attack on abstract speculation and hoped to “undermine the foundations of an abstruse philosophy, which seems to have hitherto served only as a shelter to superstition, and a cover to absurdity and error!” (“Section 1: On the Different Species of Philosophy,” p. 14 in Essays and Treatises). 6. In “Emerson—the Philosopher of Democracy,” for instance, Dewey complains that “distinctions and classifications,” to “most philosophers [,] are true in and of and because of their systems” (409). 7. In his preface to The American, James writes that the subject of romance should be “experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it. . . .” In The Art of Criticism, 280.



Notes

N ot e s

8. “Powers and Laws of Thought,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (hereafter CW) vol. 12, p. 12. 9. As he asked in his 1841 address, “The Method of Nature,” “who could ever analyze it?” In Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, vol. 1 of CW, 199. 10. “Intellect,” in CW vol. 2, 330. 11. The St. Louis Hegelians formed after the end of the Civil War. In 1867 they founded their own publication, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, to which both men contributed, making them “auxiliary” members of this group whose core members believed “they had found the key to the universe” in Hegelian philosophy (Perry 10). 12. See in particular the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, originally a series of lectures that Hegel delivered in 1830–1831. It was assembled posthumously from the notes of his students and later reedited by Hegel’s son, who referred to his father’s lecture and manuscript notes. In his Phenomenology of Mind (hereafter Phenomenology) Hegel elaborates on this idea, describing historical development as the process whereby “the concrete actual world-spirit” reaches knowledge of itself (443). 13. Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 28. 14. In his review of The Secret of Swedenborg, C. S. Peirce pointed out that James may not have understood the conventional meaning of the term “idealism,” for he “uses terms so peculiarly that we stumble at the commonest words, which often receive meanings apparently quite unrelated to those we are accustomed to attach to them.” Consequently, “we find it difficult to comprehend our author’s opposition to idealism until he gives us as its synonyme [sic], ‘the invention of the world of things-in-themselves.’ So incessant is this cryptic use of terms, that the reader finally comes to lose all assurance that the commonest word is used in a sense analogous to its usual one” (467). 15. Peirce again points out (in spite of James’ apparent hostility to idealism) that “[w]hat Mr. James calls the form [in Swedenborg] is the Platonic idea or form” (466), and that other topics in James’ account of Swedenborg “are doctrines which are to be found both in this book and in Plato or Plotinus” (467). 16. “Self-Reliance” 1841. Reprinted in Emerson, EL, 260. 17. This argument appeared in Society, the Redeemed Form of Man (1879). I discuss James’ beliefs about the individual and his relation to society in Sympathy in American Literature 171–75. See also Andrew Taylor’s thorough account in 61–123. 18. Henry James, Sr., What Constitutes the State? 19. Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother 1914. Reprinted in Autobiography, 333. 20. Young claims that Wilkinson was “by far the most intelligent critic that James ever had” (313). Unlike many English Swedenborgians, whom he considered excessively interested in Swedenborg’s popular



182

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

183

spiritualism, Wilkinson sought to encourage readers of Swedenborg— including his friend James—to develop a “scientific” reading of the mystic (64–65). What James came up with was as disappointing to Wilkinson as it has been confounding to trained philosophers. More amusing evidence that the elder James was cryptic is found in the letters of Charles Eliot Norton. Writing to his son Eliot in 1907, Norton describes a “quick bit of wit” from William Dean Howells: “I was speaking to him of Dr. [William] James’ new book, and said that it was brilliant but not clear. ‘Like his father,’ said Mr. Howells, ‘who wrote the Secret of Swedenborg and kept it.’” In Letters of Charles Eliot Norton II, 379. The philosopher Stanley Cavell warns us against accepting mainstream Anglo-American philosophy’s dismissal of American writers like Emerson and Thoreau, whom philosophy looks upon as “amateurs” while, Cavell claims, in fact “they propose, and embody, a mode of thinking, a mode of conceptual accuracy, as thorough as anything imagined within established philosophy, but invisible to that philosophy because based on an idea of rigor foreign to its establishment” (45). Cavell wants to emphasize the common ground that Emerson and Thoreau share with Kant, Hegel, and other philosophers not commonly identified with them. For traditional philosophers, the standard mode of philosophical discourse is argument. Cavell claims that Thoreau and Emerson’s “other philosophical way”—the way of “reading” or “philosophical interpretation”—lies parallel to argument and satisfies a comparable standard of intellectual rigor. Without contesting Cavell’s claim about equality here, I want to call attention to the difference he highlights: his observation that literature and philosophy draw on alien notions of rigor, as if they cannot speak to one another except in foreign tongues. The essay was part of Letters and Social Aims, reprinted in CW volume 8. Habegger and Feinstein (in Book 2) tell this story in exhilarating detail. Cavell points to Emerson’s “epistemology of moods” (11) in “Thinking of Emerson,” reprinted in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. The philosopher’s temperament, James wrote, “really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises” (Pragmatism 8). For an excellent discussion of their personal and philosophical differences, see Chapter 2, “Reading the ‘Man without a Handle’: Emerson and the Construction of a Partial Portrait,” in Taylor’s Henry James and the Father Question. James, Society, the Redeemed Form of Man, 47. Here James resembled Hegel in believing that individuals could achieve true freedom through rather than from the State. Both regarded the



N ot e s

N ot e s

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

State as a form of redemption (though Hegel used the secular—and idiosyncratic—term, “Aufhebung”). Hegel’s quasi-religious vocabulary for the perfect future state of human society (his contention that “the state is the divine Idea, as it exists on earth” 42), became in James’ writings a thoroughgoing theology. For James, society presented itself as “the redeemed form of man,” a mass of humanity that includes God but excludes individualism (Society, the Redeemed Form of Man). “A Nightmare, Mr. Henry James Subpoenaed as Psychological Expert in a Cause Célèbre,” Caricature by Max Beerbohm. Courtesy of the Henry James Collection (#6251-K), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library. Portrait of a Lady 70. The text I use here is the New York Edition, volume 12. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908. The text I use here is from the New York Edition, volume 17. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909. Hume contended that such abstract principles are mere verbal inventions without meaning: “When we entertain . . . any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea, (as is but too frequent,) we need but inquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion” (Enquiry, Section 2: “Of the Origin of Ideas,” 20 in Essays and Treatises). In A Pluralistic Universe, for instance, James sounds a dogmatic note when he claims that “the notion of a truth that should prove incontrovertible” is the “dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy” (100–101). Preface to The Princess Casamassima, 37.

Chapter 1 1. Boudreau, “Narrative Sympathy.” 2. Pragmatism, 14. 3. “Typology,” Breitwieser writes, “takes up a concrete experience of a person (including oneself), thing, or event, highlights a trait that reveals the referent’s participation in a preordained and historically repetitive category, and then declares the referent’s other traits (those that might make the referent’s emblematicity seem partial, unimportant, secondary, or derived) to be inconsequential for determining the referent’s state of being—at best, pleasantly ornamental, at worst a blurring or obfuscation of the true” (24). 4. Freedman, 133. Chapter 3 of Freedman’s Professions of Taste is devoted to James’ “Discovery of Aestheticism” through his literary encounters with Pater.



184

185

5. Adam Parkes’ fine essay, “A Sense of Justice,” explores the tensions between morality and sensation that confronted James as he sought to find his own place within the aesthetic movement. James felt the “imperative to resist total abandonment” to the “impulses” of pure sensation, Parkes argues; “His sense of freedom is perpetually implicated in an awareness of the need for moral and aesthetic law, and of the way that freedom itself constitutes a certain kind of lawfulness, which counterpoints but also complements the need for discipline” (609). 6. Janet Gabler-Hover, for instance, identifies Olive’s “tragic flaw” as her personal tastes: her “personal prejudice, her hatred and fear of male sexuality, and her resultant contempt for a large portion of humanity.” Gabler goes on to note that “since she needs to perceive herself as ethical, she tyrannizes politically, turning private conviction into public dogma” (48). 7. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 8. 8. According to Linda Dowling, this question was much on the minds of James’ aesthetically and politically sensitive contemporaries. 9. Leslie Petty notes that very few readings of the novel give “more than perfunctory attention to its relationship to the historical woman’s rights movement” (209 n. 3). The probable reason is that most readers don’t take seriously James’ interest in politics or actual political movements. 10. Until the end of her life Miss Birdseye clings to the infatuated belief that Ransom will be a “great addition” to the women’s movement (353). Her only evidence of his conversion is her longstanding conviction that Verena “has acted on so many” (226). 11. Here I differ from Petty in thinking that there is a significant distinction between Verena’s and Olive’s political experiences: while Petty thinks that Olive’s commitment to feminism is just as abstract, just as “grounded in rigid ideas,” as Verena’s (172), I am arguing that Olive lapses only occasionally from a thoughtful and affective politics.

Chapter 2 1. Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 8. Future references will be to PH. 2. The St. Louis Hegelians formed after the end of the Civil War. In 1867 they founded their own publication, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, to which the elder James contributed. As a contributor he also became an auxiliary member of the organization, a group of individuals who believed “they had found the key to the universe” in Hegelian philosophy (Perry 10). 3. As we have seen, the elder James maintained that individualism was the “curse of mankind,” whereas he believed (with Hegel) that



N ot e s

N ot e s individuals could achieve freedom through rather than from the State. Both wrote in quasi-religious terms about the perfect future state of human society: While Hegel contended that “the state is the divine Idea, as it exists on earth” (42), James considered human society to be “the redeemed form of man,” a mass of humanity that includes God but excludes individualism (Society, the Redeemed Form of Man). Herbert W. Schneider calls James’ philosophy a kind of “Spiritual Socialism” (263); James, writes Schneider, “conceiv[ed] political democracy as an expression of faith in human nature and in the progress toward a society in which law, government, ‘and all private differences are bound to disappear’” (264). Schneider’s formulation (“Spiritual Socialism”) underscores James’ Hegelian belief in a World Spirit that presides over human activity. For more on Hegel’s influence on James, see Fogel (3–4); for Hegel’s more general influence on James’ immediate literary predecessors, see Abrams, particularly 225–37. 4. As Abrams notes, Hegel himself was passionately absorbed in the early stages of the French Revolution, which he understood as a “worldhistorical” event, as he recollected from his later years: It was a glorious dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of the epoch. A sublime emotion ruled that age, an enthusiasm of the spirit thrilled through the world, as though the time were now come of the actual reconciliation of God with the world. (Vorlesungen, quoted in Abrams 352.) 5. Marx called this phenomenon “alienated labor,” explaining that the worker impoverishes himself by creating a commodity that he can never himself possess: “The life he has given to the object confronts him as hostile and alien” (60). 6. James may have literally shared some of the misery of his proletarian characters—at least the miserable weather. The winter in which he wrote much of the book, DeVine tells us, “had been one of the worst for the working classes in London in a difficult decade. That year unemployment was high due to depressed trade, and the weather had been unusually severe, putting an end to outside work” (61). Hyacinth feels the lure of socialism during a difficult winter, when “the season was terribly hard; and . . . the deep perpetual groan of London misery seemed to swell and swell and form the whole undertone of life” (283). 7. As Anesko notes, Trilling was “well versed in the history of European radicalism” 108. 8. Lionel Trilling rightly argues that James’ radicals are not really Marxists: “There is no organized mass movement” among these characters; “there is no disciplined party but only a strong conspiratorial center. There are no plans for taking over the state and almost no ideas about the society of the future. The conspiratorial center plans



186

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

187

only for destruction, chiefly personal terrorism.” James, in short, “is giving a very accurate account of anarchism” (158). Though it is not my intent to explicate the political differences between Marxism and anarchism, I do think that these differences have philosophical counterparts in the distinction between Marxist and Hegelian ideas about progress and history, a distinction which, as I am arguing, informs James’ novel. Marx’s criticism of Hegel applies equally to James’ radicals: “The mystical feeling which drives a philosopher from abstract thinking to intuiting is boredom, the longing for a content” (94). Meanwhile, “only naturalism” (or the search for material causes) is able to comprehend the act of world history” (87). Even Hyacinth’s revolutionary mission—to assassinate a duke—fails concretely to illustrate how the revolution will proceed. Paul’s vague explanation comes closest to specifying the desired effect of the deed: “It will help the democracy to get possession that the classes that keep them down shall be admonished from time to time that they have a very definite and determined intention of doing so” (444). The assassination, then, is to be a warning of revolution, but even Paul cannot say how such warnings will “help” to bring about that revolution. As I have suggested, this is the criticism often leveled against James himself. Irving Howe, George Woodcock, Maxwell Geiser and Margaret Scanlan have all charged James with ignorance and error in his depiction of anarchism (Scanlan 383). As Anesko suggests, Hyacinth’s professional despair, his inability to make a comfortable living at the thing he most loves, was James’ despair as well, and yet more evidence that James shared with his creation a sense of the unfairness of class relations (115). Hyacinth’s suspicion that socialism’s insistence on redistribution is motivated, at bottom, by envy suggests that James was more drawn to Nietzsche than to Hegel. Nietzsche rails against “Socialist rabble,” who make the worker “envious, who teach him revengefulness . . . Injustice never lies in unequal rights, it lies in the claim to ‘equal’ rights” (The Anti-Christ 191). Nietzsche’s criticism is echoed by James’ skeptical Vetch, who complains that his socialist friend Poupin “wants folks to be equal, heaven help him; and when he has made them so I suppose he’s going to start a society for making the stars in the sky all of the same size” (467). Even Hyacinth doubts the possibility of true equality, wondering “by what wizardry [the “horrible” masses] could ever be raised to high participants” (481). Both Hyacinth and Vetch share Nietzsche’s suspicion that the doctrine of equality is both impractical and ultimately selfish. Here again James signals his affinity for Nietzsche rather than Hegel. Nietzsche denounced philosophers like Hegel who dismissed appearance as illusory and deceptive, who advanced instead some less visible but allegedly more permanent and true “reality” beneath it.



N ot e s

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

N ot e s He castigated their “highest concepts” (for instance, Hegel’s “World Spirit”) as “the emptiest concepts” and charged them with discounting “Change, mutation, becoming in general” as mere appearance (Twilight 47). “The grounds upon which ‘this’ world has been designated as apparent,” he maintained, “establish rather its reality— another kind of reality is absolutely undemonstrable” (49). Hyacinth also makes Millicent represent “the people” in his imagination, even though she is completely indifferent to his democratic notions and fails to see herself as one of the commoners, whom “she simply loathed . . . because they were so dirty” (160). Hyacinth also hates dirt, and so his beloved “people” take the form in his imagination of the glowing Millicent and the clean Paul. Millicent “laughed with the laugh of the people, and if you hit her hard enough she would cry with its tears” (160). Hyacinth’s passionate “absor[ption] in the struggles and sufferings of the millions whose life flowed in the same current as his” is “never so vivid to him as when he was in Millicent’s company” (160). As Firebaugh has shown, Hyacinth’s esteem for Schopenhauer can be observed in the way that he finds respite from suffering in the contemplation of beauty. Nietzsche, a relentless critic of Hegel, maintained that anything (like art) that affirmed the passions thereby affirmed life. “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist,” he wrote, “a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication” (82). In his insistence on intoxication, Nietzsche insists on a condition that makes clear thinking impossible—another sign of the deep hostility between aestheticism and ideology. Marx sought to demystify the process whereby capital comes to assume the power that properly belongs to labor. “Mystification” in his view was a systematic obfuscation of the course of exploitation, and he tried to explain the process in order to show how the devaluation of the working poor was an effect of capitalism, not a natural condition. “The worker becomes a cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces,” Marx wrote (59). It should be clear from this discussion that I cannot agree with Mark Seltzer that James’ politics take the form of an aggressive exercise of narrative power over his readers. Here I must disagree with Collin Meissner, who argues that Hyacinth represents the worst of aestheticism, a “futile” artist and “impotent copyist . . . characterized by the proliferation of impressions whose numbers overwhelm but whose substance is ridiculous” (54). Meissner draws on the brilliant work of Jonathan Freedman, who has carefully delineated both the allure of aestheticism for James and the novelist’s need to transform it into something else. As Freedman demonstrates, aestheticism was never a monolithic movement; the flamboyant Wilde was matched by the grave and moral figure of



188

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

189

Ruskin. James, moreover, never dismissed even the frivolous aesthete; he “remodeled the figure,” Freedman writes, “into that of the Jamesian high-art novelist—a figure, like the aesthete, of supple and ample consciousness . . . but one who, unlike the aesthete, is capable of acts of sustained and disciplined creativity and dedicated professionalism” (xxv). Hyacinth’s professional devotion to the art of bookbinding cannot be read, as Meissner reads it, as an “aestheticist preoccupation with superficial design and beauty, with spectacle and pose over the deeper substantive value of art” (58), especially if we consider Anesko’s claim that James’ “fastidiousness as an artist did not stop at the fashioning of his prose style, but extended to the creation of the finished volume as a cultural artifact” (113). Moreover, Anesko and Trilling both mention the historical connection between union activity, socialism, and tradesmen in the printing industry: further evidence that if James wished to endow Hyacinth with a frivolous profession, bookbinding was not the one he would have chosen. As we have seen before, here again Hyacinth is using a word favored by his revolutionary friends, this time deliberately, as we can see from his use of scare quotes. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was coined during the French Revolution, when it (along with other revolutionary political language) was denounced by the reactionary critic Jean-Francois de La Harpe. “Words, like things, have been monstrosities,” La Harpe wrote (quoted in Lynn Hunt). This work was among Sargent’s Venetian paintings exhibited at the Société internationale de peintres et sculpteurs in Paris in December 1882. James, in Boston for his father’s funeral, missed the exhibit, but he may well have seen it later in London, where both men resided and where Sargent’s paintings were displayed at the Royal Academy and the Grosvener Gallery. It is likely that James saw “Sortie” when he encountered Sargent’s other Venetian paintings, which he praised enthusiastically in his 1887 review of the artist. In Hegel’s words, “painting by its nature enters especially in this respect upon detail more than any other art does” (Aesthetics 1:254–5). Schor notes, however, that Hegel sometimes overlooked this flaw. “In short,” she writes, “as long as the clauses of a certain aesthetic contract are respected—avoidance of the contingent, maintenance of the guarantors of a classical order (simplicity, regularity, symmetry)—the proliferation of details is authorized, even encouraged” (29). Dover has compiled an electronic text version of James’ first edition of the novel at http://www.henryjames.org.uk/pcasa/textnote.htm. Revolutionary iconoclasm derives not from Marx but from the French Revolution that he draws on in his history of class struggle. As Dario Gamboni argues, revolutionary authorities “were anxious to give iconoclasm a legal frame of justification, execution and control. It had an aesthetic component, with the critique of art as luxury— unnecessary, even pernicious for mankind—to which Jean-Jacques



N ot e s

N ot e s

Rousseau had particularly contributed on a theoretical plane and which could be summarized with the iconoclastic formula ‘monument of vanity destroyed for utility’” (35). 26. Freedman makes the important point that while European aestheticism embraced this aloofness, its British counterpart “never fully abandoned either [the] social commitment or [the] understanding of the political obligations of the artist” that John Ruskin urged upon his fellow artists (12). 27. By “trac[ing] the lines” of Venetian history through its architecture (13), Ruskin hoped to chart the decline of Venice from a noble to a corrupt European state (25) in order that “the London of the nineteenth century may yet become as Venice without her despotism” (247).

Chapter 3 1. John Ruskin, “Of Imagination Penetrative,” from Of the Imaginative and Theoretic Faculties. In The Works of John Ruskin, 188–89. 2. “The Art of Fiction,” in Veeder and Griffin, 173. 3. “Circles” (1841). In EL, 414. 4. These terms come from Williams James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. 5. See Jill Kress’ superb study of consciousness for a fuller discussion of such metaphors.

Chapter 4 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

See Lewis, 207–16. To Grace Norton, 28 April 1870. In Henry James, Letters, vol. 1, 233. Nature. 1836. In Essays and Lectures, 7. Letter to Grace Norton, 1 April 1870. In Edel, Letters, vol. 1, 232. Henry James, New York Edition vol. 13, xxiii. Henry James, “The Future of the Novel,” 248. In a letter to Henry dated 23 April 1869, William James says this: We are all alarmed at what you write of spending £60, in 2–3 weeks in a tour of England. Father tells me to suggest that it seems a pity to let such a sum go bang in a single escapade when hereafter on the continent you may need it so much more. I know if I were abroad now I shd. feel uncomfortable about staying a day in a land so expensive, without some definite sanitary hope such as Malvern affords. I wd. postpone the enjoyment of E. to my back trip, when you hope to be better and perhaps to be in writing trim. A pound with exchange & gold is worth now abt. 8 dols., and you can get so much more for it on the continent that it seems a pity not to. In The Correspondence of William James, vol. 1, 66.



190

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

191

“The Painter of Modern Life,” 8. The Portrait of a Lady, 273. The Wings of the Dove, 154. Posnock, 151. Posnock draws on the essays of Walter Benjamin, who derived his understanding of modern urban experience from Baudelaire’s flâneur. Henry James, “Recent Florence,” 590. Reprinted in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 9. This account of time juggles three distinct periods: that of the first visit, that of the second, and that of a period years later when James sits to record his memories. He mentions the “jogging hours” of his first visit, when he traveled by horse-drawn carriage, and then advances to a “not so inordinately remote past”: “I speak of that age, I think of it at least, as easier than ours, in spite of the fact that even as I made my pilgrimage the mark of modern change, the railway in construction, had begun to be distinct, though the automobile was still pretty far in the future” (285). Emerson, “The Divinity School Address.” 1838. In Essays and Lectures, 75. The American Scene (hereafter AS), 354. “The Future of the Novel,” 244. In his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx explains that “plants, animals, minerals” and other natural elements “form a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art”; in their transformation from external things through the process of human labor, they “also form in practice a part of human life and human activity” (63).



N ot e s




Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Anesko, Michael. “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” 1863. Reprinted in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press, 2006, 1–41. Blair, Sara. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Booth, Michael. Theatre in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Boudreau, Kristin. “Narrative Sympathy in The Bostonians.” Henry James Review (Spring 1993): 17–33. ———. Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Breitwieser, Mitchell R. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Cavell, Stanley. “The Philosopher in American Life (Toward Thoreau and Emerson).” In In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Reprinted in Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, edited by David Justin Hodge. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 33–58. ———. “Thinking of Emerson.” In Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, edited by David Justin Hodge. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, 10–19. DeVine, Christine. “Revolution and Democracy in the London Times and The Princess Casamassima. Henry James Review 23 (2002): 53–71. Dewey, John. “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us.” 1939. In John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988, 224–30.



Bibliography

Bibliography

Dewey, John. “Emerson—The Philosopher of Democracy.” International Journal of Ethics 13.4 (1903): 405–13. Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz. 1836. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1839. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Gender, the Market, and the Non-trivial in James.” Henry James Review 15.1 (1994): 24–30. Dover, Adrian. The Princess Casamassima (electronic text). http://www. henryjames.org.uk/pcasa/home.htm (accessed October 9, 2006). Dowling, Linda. The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Dunlap, Joseph R. “Morris and the Book Arts Before the Kelmscott Press.” Victorian Poetry 13 (Fall–Winter 1975): 141–57. Eliot, T. S. “In Memory.” Little Review 5 (1918): 44–47. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centenary Edition, 12 vols. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–21. ———. Essays and Lectures, edited by Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983. ———. “Greatness.” In Letters and Social Aims. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centenary Edition, 12 vols. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1903–1904, vol. 8. ———. “Immortality.” In Letters and Social Aims. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centenary Edition, 12 vols. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1903—1904, vol. 8. ———. “Inspiration.” In Letters and Social Aims. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centenary Edition, 12 vols. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1903–1904, vol. 8. Feinstein, Howard M. Becoming William James. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Firebaugh, Joseph J. A Schopenhauerian Novel: James’s The Princess Casamassima. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 3 (December 1958): 177–97. Fogel, Daniel Mark. Henry James and the Structure of the Romantic Imagination. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Frow, Gerald. “Oh, Yes It Is!” A History of Pantomime. London: The British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985. Gabler-Hover, Janet. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Bostonians, and Henry Ward Beecher: Discourse on the Idealization of Suffering.” South Central Review 5.4 (1988): 42–52. Gamboni, Dario. The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Geismar, Maxwell. Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. Gilbert, W. S. “Getting up a Pantomime.” London Society (January 1868): 50–57.



194

195

Griffin, Susan M. The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. Habegger, Alfred. The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. ———. Introduction to The Philosophy of History. 1837. Translated by Leo Rauch. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1988. ———. On Art, Religion, and the History of Philosophy: Introductory Lectures, edited by J. Glenn Gray. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1970. ———. The Phenomenology of Mind, translated by J. B. Baillie. 1910. New York: Dover, 2003. ———. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, edited by Georg Lasson. Leipzig: Meiner, 1919. Hocks, Richard A. Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought: A Study in the Relationship Between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974. Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. New York: Meridian Press, 1957. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 1748. Reprinted in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. Edinburgh: James Walker, 1825, vol. 2. Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907–1909. ———. The American Scene. 1907. Reprinted in Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America, edited by Richard Howard. New York: Library of America, 1993, 351–736. ———. The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, edited by William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. ———. Autobiography, edited by Frederick W. Dupee. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. ———. The Bostonians. 1886. London: Penguin Books, 1986. ———. “The Future of the Novel.” 1899. Reprinted in The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and Practice of Fiction, edited by William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 242–56. ———. Italian Hours. 1909. Reprint edited by John Auchard. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. ———. Letters. 4 vols. Edited by Leon Edel. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974–1984. ———. “Recent Florence.” Atlantic Monthly 41.247 (May 1878): 586–93. ———. The Reverberator, Madame du Mauves, A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales. Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 13. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908.



Bibliography

Bibliography

James, Henry. “John S. Sargent.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 75.449 (October 1887): 683–91. ———. The Portrait of a Lady. 1882. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908. ———. The Princess Casamassima. 1886. Reprint edited by Derek Brewer. London: Penguin, 1987. ———. Roderick Hudson. 1875. Penguin, 1986. ———. “The Beast in the Jungle.” In The Novels and Tales of Henry James: The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, vol. 17. ———. “The Turn of the Screw.” In The Novels and Tales of Henry James: The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908, vol. 12. ———. The Wings of the Dove. 1902. Edited by Richard A. Hocks. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. James, Henry, Sr. The Nature of Evil Considered in a Letter to the Rev. Edward Beecher, D. D. Author of “The Conflict of Ages.” New York: Appleton, 1855. Facsimile reprint New York: AMS, 1983. ———. The Secret of Swedenborg: Being an Elucidation of His Doctrine of the Divine Natural Humanity. Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Co., 1869. ———. “The Social Significance of Our Institutions.” Address delivered in Newport, RI, 4 July 1861. Reprinted in American Philosophical Addresses 1700–1900, edited by Joseph Blau. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946, 234–56. ———. Society, the Redeemed Form of Man, and the Earnest of God’s Omnipotence in Human Nature, Affirmed in Letters to a Friend. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, and Co., 1879. ———. What Constitutes the State? A Lecture Delivered Before the Young Men’s Association of the City of Albany. New York: John Allen, 1846. James, William. The Correspondence of William James. Vol. 1. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. ———, ed. The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1885. ———. A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy. 1909. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ———. Pragmatism. 1907. Reprint edited by Bruce Kuklick. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1981. ———. Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. 1911. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ———. Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Longman’s, Green, and Co., 1902. Kress, Jill M. The Figure of Consciousness: William James, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. New York: Routledge, 2002.



196

197

Kunitz, Stanley J., ed. Authors Today and Yesterday. New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1933. Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908—1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991. Loebel, Thomas. The Letter and the Spirit of Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Justice, Politics, and Theology. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Lucas, John. “Conservatism and Revolution in the 1880s.” Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century: Essays, edited by John Lucas. London: Methuen, 1971, 173–220. Markels, Julian. “Socialism-Anxiety: The Princess Casamassima and Its New York Critics.” College Literature 27.2 (Spring 2000): 37–56. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. 1844. Reprinted in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by Lawrence H. Simon. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994. Meissner, Collin. “The Princess Casamassima: ‘A Dirty Intellectual Fog.’”Henry James Review 19 (1998): 53–71. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. “The Inward Revolution: Sexual Terrorism in The Princess Casamassima.” Henry James Review 24 (2003): 146–67. Morris, William. “The Art of the People. Delivered Before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design, February 19, 1879.” In The Collected Works of William Morris. Hopes and Fears For Art, vol. 22. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910–1915, 28–50. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin, 1990. Norton, Charles Eliot. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913, vol. 2. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Parkes, Adam. “A Sense of Justice: Whistler, Ruskin, James, Impressionism.” Victorian Studies 42.4 (1999): 593–629. Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. 1868, 1873, 1893. Reprint edited by Donald L. Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Peirce, C. S. “The Fixation of Belief.” Popular Science Monthly 12 (November 1877): 1–15. ———. “Review of Henry James, Sr., The Secret of Swedenborg.” North American Review 110 (April 1870): 463–68. Perry, Charles M., ed. The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy: Some Source Material. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930. Perry, Ralph B. The Thought and Character of William James. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935, vol. 1. Petty, Leslie. Romancing the Vote: Feminist Activism in American Fiction, 1870–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.



Bibliography

Bibliography

Pippin, Robert B. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Rowe, John Carlos. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. 1853. Edited and abridged by J. G. Links. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1960. Ruskin, John. The Works of John Ruskin. 1889. New York: J. Wiley and Sons. Sawyer, Paul. Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Scanlan, Margaret. “Terrorism and the Realistic Novel: Henry James and The Princess Casamassima.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 380–402. Schneider, Herbert W. A History of American Philosophy. 1946. Second edition, New York: Columbia University Press, 1946. Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, 1987. Seaton, James. “Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima: Revolution and the Preservation of Culture.” In The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics, edited by Henry T. Edmonson III. New York: Lexington Books, 2000, 15–25. Simon, Linda. “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: William James’s Feeling of ‘If.’” In The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, edited by Joshua Landy and Michael Saler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 38–55. Snider, Denton J. A Writer of Books in His Genesis. St. Louis: Sigma Publishing, 1910. Taylor, Andrew. Henry James and the Father Question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Tintner, Adeline R. “Sargent in the Fiction of Henry James.” Apollo 162.102 (August 1975): 128–32. Trilling, Lionel. “The Princess Casamassima.” 1948. Reprinted in The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000, 149–77. Veeder, William, and Susan M. Griffin, eds. The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Woodcock, George. “Henry James and the Conspirators.” Sewanee Review 60 (1952): 219–29. Young, Frederic Harold. The Philosophy of Henry James, Sr. New York: Bookman Associates, 1951.



198

abandonment 4, 18, 112, 118, 148, 149, 166, 185 n.5 Abrams, M. H. 186 n. 3–4 Adorno, Theodor 42 aestheticism (aesthetics) 36–38, 44–46, 48, 50–52, 61, 64, 66, 67, 69, 71, 79, 81, 83–88, 93, 95–104, 112, 114, 117, 145, 146, 149–50, 151, 155–59, 172, 174, 176–78, 184 n. 4, 185 n. 5, 188 n. 17, 189 n. 20, 190 n. 26 Ambassadors, The 117 American, The 181 n. 7 American Scene, The 141, 168–79, 191 n. 16 Anesko, Michael 66, 186 n. 7, 187 n. 12, 189 n. 20 appearances (see “phenomena”) Archer, William 81 Arnold, Matthew 43 Baudelaire, Charles 38, 104, 118, 147, 149, 150, 152, 168, 185 n. 7, 191 n. 8, n. 11 Beast in the Jungle, The 26–29 Beerbohm, Max 24–5, 184 n. 30 Benjamin, Walter 191 n. 11 Blair, Sara 150–51, 153 Bloom, Harold 12 Booth, Michael 81 Bostonians, The 31–61, 185 n. 6 Boudreau, Kristin 32, 182 n. 17, 184 n. 1

Breitwieser, Mitchell R. 184 n. 3 Buzard, James 140

35,

Cameron, Sharon 181 n. 2 Cavell, Stanley 18, 21, 28, 183 n. 22, n. 25 center of consciousness xii, 38, 55, 56, 95, 105, 113, 134 Chesterton, G. K. 2 cognition xi, xii, 24, 109, 126, 161, 164, 181 n. 2 Coleridge, S. T. 141 concept (see also “idea”) 11, 26, 70, 98, 101, 109, 165, 188 n. 14 Conrad, Joseph 94 consciousness xi, xii, 1, 2, 27, 37, 59, 61, 64, 70, 75, 78, 85, 91, 94, 95, 101, 103, 106, 108–9, 111–12, 114, 118, 120, 122, 125, 128, 130, 132, 136, 137, 142, 143, 151, 166, 168, 170, 178, 181 n. 2, 189 n. 20, 190 n. 5, 191 n. 18 curiosity 38, 39, 57, 150, 163, 166, 177 Descartes, René 21 DeVine, Christine 186 n. 6 Dewey, John 5, 6, 181 n. 6 Dickens, Charles 81–82 Dimock, Wai Chee 42 doctrine (see “ideology”)



Index

Index

dogmatism (see also “ideology”) 4–6, 15, 24–26, 28, 29, 36, 37, 47, 125, 150–51, 174, 178, 179, 184 n. 35 Dover, Adrian 98, 189 n. 24 Dowling, Linda 185 n. 8 Dunlap, Joseph R. 66 Eliot, George 94 Eliot, T. S. xi, xii, 1–6, 11, 16, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 50, 53, 54, 59–60, 63, 75, 110 Emerson, Ralph Waldo xi, xii, 6–10, 12–14, 16–24, 28–29, 36, 106, 107, 112, 118, 140, 148, 164, 166, 181 n. 6, 182 n. 8, 183 n. 22 Emerson, works: “The American Scholar” 16, 20, 21, 106 “Circles” 118, 190 n. 3 “Country Life” 16 “The Divinity School Address” 17, 19, 191 n. 15 Essays: First Series 7 “Experience” 18, 21, 22 “Greatness” 17 “Immortality” 18 “Inspiration” 13 “Intellect” 6, 14, 29, 182 n. 10 Letters and Social Aims 183 n. 23 “The Method of Nature” 182 n. 9 “Montaigne; or, The Skeptic” 19 “Natural History of the Intellect,” xii, 16, 182 n. 8 Nature 8, 13, 16, 21, 190 n. 3 “The Oversoul” 8 “The Poet” 16, 18 Representative Men 12–13, 17 “Self-Reliance” 10, 182 n. 16 “Spiritual Laws” 23 “Swedenborg” 9, 17, 21–2 “The Transcendentalist” 7 emotion (see “feeling”)

empiricism xi, xii, 2–6, 24, 25, 28, 88, 93, 101, 103, 104, 108, 178–79 epistemology 4, 24, 33, 38, 40, 42, 128, 141, 148, 158, 160, 161, 168, 183 n. 25 experience 2–6, 10, 18, 19, 29, 31, 33, 35–40, 42, 44, 46, 47, 52–57, 61, 73, 76, 77, 84, 86, 87, 94, 95, 98, 99, 103, 104, 105, 108, 111–12, 113, 119, 122, 127, 132, 135, 139, 140, 143, 145, 148–51, 158, 160, 161, 163–65, 167, 174, 181 n. 2, n. 7, 184 n. 3, 185 n. 11 feeling xi, xii, 2–5, 11, 19, 22, 25–27, 30, 32, 35–38, 41, 42, 44–57, 59–61, 63, 64, 68, 71, 72, 75–83, 85–95, 97–102, 105–9, 111, 114, 115, 121, 130, 132–35, 176, 177, 181 n. 3, 185 n. 11, 188 n. 15 Feinstein, Howard M. 183 n. 24 Firebaugh, Joseph 188 n. 16 flâneur 118, 143, 149–53, 161, 168, 191 n. 11 Fogel, Daniel Mark 186 n. 3 Freedman, Jonathan 35, 87–8, 103, 104, 149, 184 n. 4, 188–89 n. 20, 190 n. 26 Frow, Gerald 81 “The Future of the Novel” 190 n. 6, 191 n. 17 Gabler-Hover, Janet 185 n. 6 Gagnier, Regina 88 Gamboni, Dario 189 n. 25 Geiser, Maxwell 187 n. 11 Gilbert, W. S. 81 Goethe, J. W. 41 Griffin, Susan M. 181 n. 2 Habegger, Alfred 13, 23, 183 n. 24 Harpe, Jean-Francois de la 189 n. 21



200

201

Harris, William Torrey 8 Hedge, Frederick H. 7 Hegel, G. W. 2, 7–9, 11, 12, 63, 64, 68–70, 72–75, 78, 80, 85, 90–94, 97, 101, 172, 178–89, 181 n. 4, 182 n. 11, n. 12, 183 n. 22, 183–84 n. 29, 185 n. 1, 186 n. 3–4, 187 n. 8–9, 188 n. 14, 189 n. 23 history 8, 14, 37, 42, 47–50, 52–53, 61, 63–64, 68–70, 72–75, 80, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 99–100, 114, 168, 174–75, 176, 178, 182 n. 12, 186 n. 4, 187 n. 8, 189 n. 20 Hocks, Richard A. 181 n. 2 Horkheimer, Max 42 Howe, Irving 187 n. 11 Howells, William Dean 183 n. 21 Hugo, Victor 139–40 Hume, David 4, 26, 28, 109, 181 n. 3, n. 5, 184 n. 34 Hunt, Lynn 189 n. 21

176–79, 182 n. 15, 185 n. 6, 187 n. 13, 188 n. 17 idleness 146, 147, 150, 161, 168 imagination 59, 75–78, 81–84, 88, 93, 105, 106, 109, 113, 114, 116, 128, 131, 136–38, 145, 160, 188 n. 15, 190 n. 1 impression 2, 26, 27, 31, 36, 38, 40, 52, 77, 86, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 103–5, 107–9, 111–17, 119–22, 128–31, 134, 137, 141–43, 145, 147, 151, 152, 158, 160, 162–64, 167, 176–79, 184 n. 34, 188 n. 20 individualism (see also “self-reliance”) 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 23, 30, 60, 70, 72, 74, 79, 80, 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 97, 182 n. 17, 183 n. 29, 184 n. 29, 185–86 n. 3 industrialization 64–67, 71, 98 institutions 106, 169, 171, 172, 178 Italian Hours 140–68

idea xi, xii, 1–4, 6, 7, 9, 11–12, 16, 18–19, 21, 23, 25–28, 31–33, 35–37, 40, 41, 47–50, 53–55, 57, 59–60, 63, 67–70, 72, 74, 75, 78, 81, 82, 85, 93–95, 97–99, 101, 103–11, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124–30, 133–36, 138, 141–43, 146, 148, 150, 158, 164–65, 174, 176–79, 181 n. 3, 184 n. 29, 185 n. 11, 186 n. 3 idealism 2, 6–9, 11–12, 20, 21, 23, 93, 182 n. 14, n. 15 ideology, (see also “dogmatism”) xi, 2, 4, 5, 10–12, 18, 19, 23, 25, 30, 31, 33, 36–43, 45, 46, 48–50, 52–57, 59–61, 63, 67–69, 71, 75–81, 83–88, 90, 92–95, 97–99, 101, 104, 107, 127, 140, 141, 143, 145, 150, 151, 154, 155, 165, 166, 168,

James, Henry, Sr. xi, 2, 6–7, 9–11, 12–16, 22–24, 28, 30, 36, 64, 151, 182 n. 14, n. 15, n. 17, n. 18, 183 n. 20, n. 29, 185 n. 2, 186 n. 3, 189 n. 22 James, Henry, Sr., works: Nature of Evil, The 23 Secret of Swedenborg, The 12, 13, 15, 16, 24, 182 n. 14, 183 n. 21 Society, The Redeemed Form of Man 182 n. 17, 183 n. 28, 184 n. 29, 186 n. 3 Substance and Shadow 7 What Constitutes the State? 182 n. 18 James, Mary Walsh 11 James, William xi, xii, 1–5, 11, 16, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 33, 47, 63, 101, 178–79, 181 n. 1, 183 n. 21, 190 n. 7



Index

Index

James, William, works: Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, The 16 Pluralistic Universe, A 2, 4, 6, 63, 101, 178–79, 184 n. 35 Pragmatism 11, 24, 47, 183 n. 26, 184 n. 2 Principles of Psychology 181 n. 2 Some Problems of Philosophy 11, 24 Varieties of Religious Experience 190 n. 4 “John S. Sargent” 96, 97 Kant, Immanuel 7, 12, 17, 28, 164, 183 n. 22 Kress, Jill 190 n. 5 Kunitz, Stanley J. 181 n. 1 Levenson, Michael H. 94–95 Lewis, R. W. B. 190 n. 1 Loebel, Thomas 35 Longenbach, James xii Lucas, John 68 Markels, Julian 68 Marx, Karl 64, 65, 67–69, 71, 82, 86, 98–99, 178, 186 n. 5, 187 n. 8–9, 188 n. 18, 189 n. 24, 191 n. 18 Meissner, Collin 188–89 n. 20 modernism 126, 142, 149, 153, 155–68, 171–79, 191 n. 14 modernity (see “modernism”) modernization (see “modernism”) Montaigne, Michel de 19 morality 17, 21–25, 30, 37, 46, 47, 53, 79, 88–94, 95, 100, 101, 117, 126, 144, 185 n. 5, n. 6 Morris, William 66, 67, 84, 88, 99, 100, 101, 104 Morrison, Charles 98 narrative xi, xii, 32, 35, 42, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56, 59, 60, 74, 75, 93–95, 104, 112–13, 114,

115, 120, 121, 133–34, 135, 138, 148–49, 188 n. 19 Nietzsche, Friedrich 93, 97, 98, 187–88 n. 13–14, 188 n. 17 Norton, Charles Eliot 183 n. 21 Norton, Grace 190 n. 2, n. 4 Notes of a Son and Brother 11, 182 n. 19 Nussbaum, Martha C. 28–30, 117 Parkes, Adam 100, 185 n. 5 “A Passionate Pilgrim” 141 passion (see “feeling”) Pater, Walter 35–37, 46, 52, 54, 55, 58, 63, 88, 93, 95, 97, 101, 103–4, 107, 114, 117–20, 135, 139–40, 143, 145–46, 150, 151, 153, 164, 184 n. 4 Peirce, C. S. 4–5, 12, 15–16, 24, 182 n. 14 perception 3–5, 10, 11, 25, 27–29, 59, 112, 114, 117, 122, 125, 141, 152, 164, 165, 167, 181 n. 2, n. 3 Perry, Charles M. 182 n. 11, 185 n. 2 Perry, Ralph B. 12 Petty, Leslie 53–54, 59, 61, 185 n. 9 phenomena 17, 72, 167, 187–88 n. 14 philosophy xi, xii, 1–12, 15, 20, 22, 24, 28–30, 36, 47, 63, 64, 83, 85, 99, 101, 150, 181 n. 5, 182 n. 11, 183 n. 20, 184 n. 35, 186 n. 3, 187 n. 8 Pippin, Robert B. 92, 138 Plato 2, 9, 182 n. 15 Plotinus 182 n. 15 Portrait of a Lady, The 6–7, 24–25, 114, 140, 148, 166, 184 n. 31, 191 n. 9 Posnock, Ross 149, 150, 191 n. 11



202

pragmatism 2, 4, 5, 11, 181 n. 2 Princess Casamassima, The 63–102, 103, 178, 179, 184 n. 36, 186 n. 6 psychology 1–3, 24, 61, 95, 114, 166, 169 rationalism xi, 2–6, 11, 24, 25, 33, 36, 63, 101, 178–79, 184 n. 35 “Recent Florence” 191 n. 12 receptivity 17, 18, 36, 39, 98, 106, 141, 146, 158, 164, 177 Roderick Hudson 35, 98 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 189–90 n. 25 Rowe, John Carlos 68 Ruskin, John 88, 100, 101, 104, 109, 114, 143–46, 148, 149, 154–56, 160, 166, 168, 189 n. 20, 190 n. 26, n. 27, 190 n. 1 St. Louis Hegelians 7, 8, 64, 182 n. 11, 185 n. 2 Sargent, John Singer xiii, 95–97, 189 n. 22 Sawyer, Paul 109 Scanlan, Margaret 66, 67, 187 n. 11 Schneider, Herbert W. 186 n. 3 Schopenhauer, Arthur 83, 99, 188 n. 16 Schor, Naomi 97, 189 n. 23 Seaton, James 68 selfhood (see “individualism”) self-reliance (see also “individualism”) 7, 10, 14, 21, 24 Seltzer, Mark 188 n. 19 sensation 2, 5, 16, 26, 27, 33, 39–42, 54, 57, 81, 86, 97, 109, 122, 128, 133, 143, 147, 160, 164, 165, 167, 176, 181 n. 3, 185 n. 5

203

Simon, Linda 3, 4 skepticism 4, 24–26, 28, 36, 92 Snider, Denton J. 8 socialism 67–69, 71, 75–77, 80, 81, 86, 88–90, 97, 99–101, 186 n. 3, 187 n. 13, 189 n. 20 subjectivism (see also “experience”) 3, 10, 13, 59, 64, 75, 88, 94, 95, 105, 106, 112, 132, 141, 142, 160, 161, 167, 177 surrender (see “abandonment”) Swedenborg, Emanuel 6, 8–23, 28, 30, 182 n. 15, n. 20 Swinburne, A. C. 149 Taylor, Andrew 6–7, 10, 22, 182 n. 17, 183 n. 27 Temple, Minny 139–41 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 67, 87, 98 theory 17, 35–37, 45, 46, 58, 69, 77, 90, 93, 98, 99, 103, 118, 145, 150, 165 Thoreau, Henry David 28, 183 n. 22 thought xi, xii, 1–6, 11, 18–20, 25–28, 30, 32, 33, 36, 37, 47, 49, 50, 52–54, 57, 59, 60, 67, 71, 88, 95, 102, 104–7, 110, 111, 116, 126, 127, 130, 132, 133–34, 135, 137, 138, 148, 185 n. 11 Tintner, Adeline R. 97 tourism 139–79 passim 190 n. 7, 191 n. 14 transportation 158–67, 172–73, 176, 178, 191 n. 14 travel (see “tourism”) Trilling, Lionel 68, 186–87 n. 7–8, 189 n. 20 Turn of the Screw, The 26 typology 35, 184 n. 3



Index

Index

value (exchange, market, private) 44, 85–87, 88, 107, 129, 130, 138, 172, 174, 188 n. 18 “Venice” 100 Veronese, Paolo 84 Walsh, Catharine (“Aunt Kate”) 139 Weber, Max 42 Wilde, Oscar 188 n. 20

Wilkinson, J. J. Garth 12, 13, 182–83, n. 20 Wings of the Dove, The 103–38, 148, 191 n. 10 Woodcock, George 187 n. 11 World Spirit 2, 8, 9, 11, 63, 69, 70, 73, 80, 83, 91, 92, 94, 97, 186 n. 3, 187 n. 14 Young, Frederic Harold

182 n. 20



204

Henry James' Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition

Cognition, Computation, and Consciousness

Cognition, Computation, and Consciousness

Cognition, Computation, and Consciousness

Consciousness and Cognition

Consciousness and Cognition

Consciousness and Cognition

Henry James

Perception and cognition of music

Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics

Narrative, Perception Language and Faith

Neurodynamics of Cognition and Consciousness

Henry James and his Prose

Henry James and Queer Modernity

Henry James and the Supernatural

Henry James, Women and Realism

Perception of Space and Motion (Handbook Of Perception And Cognition)

Perception of Space and Motion (Handbook of Perception and Cognition)

Death in Henry James

Perception, Causation, and Objectivity (Consciousness & Self-consciousness Series)

Connectionist Models of Cognition and Perception II

Artificial Intelligence (Handbook Of Perception And Cognition)

Seeing (Handbook of Perception and Cognition)

Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture

Memory (Handbook of Perception and Cognition)

Artificial Intelligence (Handbook Of Perception And Cognition)

Perception, Cognition, and Language: Essays in Honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman

Perception, Cognition, and Language: Essays in Honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman

Henry James: The Writer and His Work

Henry James and the Father Question

Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure

Henry James' Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition

Cognition, Computation, and Consciousness

Cognition, Computation, and Consciousness

Cognition, Computation, and Consciousness

Consciousness and Cognition

Consciousness and Cognition

Consciousness and Cognition

Henry James

Perception and cognition of music

Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics

Narrative, Perception Language and Faith

Neurodynamics of Cognition and Consciousness

Henry James and his Prose

Henry James and Queer Modernity

Henry James and the Supernatural

Henry James, Women and Realism

Perception of Space and Motion (Handbook Of Perception And Cognition)

Perception of Space and Motion (Handbook of Perception and Cognition)

Death in Henry James

Perception, Causation, and Objectivity (Consciousness & Self-consciousness Series)

Connectionist Models of Cognition and Perception II

Artificial Intelligence (Handbook Of Perception And Cognition)

Seeing (Handbook of Perception and Cognition)

Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture

Memory (Handbook of Perception and Cognition)

Artificial Intelligence (Handbook Of Perception And Cognition)

Perception, Cognition, and Language: Essays in Honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman

Perception, Cognition, and Language: Essays in Honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman

Henry James: The Writer and His Work

Henry James and the Father Question

Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure

Recommend Documents