Old and New Masters — 11 - Ch.6.ii - Henry James: 2. The Artist at Work

2. THE ARTIST AT WORK.

Henry James's amanuensis, Miss Theodora Bosanquet, wrote an article a year or two ago in the _Fortnightly Review_, describing how the great man wrote his novels.

Since 1895 or 1896 he dictated them, and they were taken down, not in shorthand, but directly on the typewriter.

He was particular even about the sort of typewriter.

It must be a Remington.

"Other kinds sounded different notes, and it was almost impossibly disconcerting for him to dictate to something that made no responsive sound at all."

He did not, however, pour himself out to his amanuensis without having made a preliminary survey of the ground.

"He liked to 'break ground' by talking to himself day by day about the characters and the construction until the whole thing was clearly before his mind's eye.

This preliminary talking out the scheme was, of course, duly recorded by the typewriter.

"It is not that he made rough drafts of his novels-sketches to be afterwards amplified.

"His method might better be compared with Zola's habit of writing long letters to himself about characters in his next book until they became alive enough for him to begin a novel about them."

Henry James has himself, as Miss Bosanquet points out, described his method of work in _The Death of a Lion_, in which it is attributed to his hero, Neil Paraday.

"Loose, liberal, confident," he declares of Faraday's "scenario," as one might call it, "it might be passed for a great, gossiping, eloquent letter--the overflow into talk of an artist's amorous plan."

Almost the chief interest of Henry James's two posthumous novels is the fact that we are given not only the novels themselves--or, rather, the fragments of them that the author had written--but the "great, gossiping, eloquent letters" in which he soliloquized about them.

As a rule, these preliminary soliloquies ran to about thirty thousand words, and were destroyed as soon as the novel in hand was finished.

So delightful are they--such thrilling revelations of the workings of an artist's mind--that one does not quite know whether or not to congratulate oneself on the fact that the last books have been left mere torsos.

Which would one rather have--a complete novel or the torso of a novel with the artist's dream of how to make it perfect?

It is not easy to decide.

What makes it all the more difficult to decide in the present instance is one's feeling that _The Sense of the Past_, had it been completed, would have been very nearly a masterpiece.

In it Henry James hoped to get what he called a "kind of quasi-turn-of-screw effect."

Here, as in _The Turn of the Screw_, he was dealing with a sort of ghosts--whether subjective or objective in their reality does not matter.

His hero is a young American who had never been to Europe till he was about thirty, and yet was possessed by that almost sensual sense of the past which made Henry James, as a small boy, put his nose into English books and try to sniff in and smell from their pages the older world from which they came.

The inheritance of an old house in a London square--a house in which the clocks had stopped, as it were, in 1820--brings the young man over to England, though the lady with whom he is in love seeks to keep him in America and watch him developing as a new species--a rich, sensitive, and civilized American, untouched and unsubdued by Europe.

This young man's emotions in London, amid old things in an atmosphere that also somehow seemed mellow and old, may, I fancy, be taken as a record of the author's own spiritual experiences as he drew in long breaths of appreciation during his almost lifelong wanderings in this hemisphere.

For it is important to remember that Henry James never ceased to be a foreigner.

He was enchanted by England as by a strange land.

He saw it always, like the hero of _The Sense of the Past_, under the charm ...

of the queer, incomparable London light--unless one frankly loved it rather as London shade--which he had repeatedly noted as so strange as to be at its finest sinister."

However else this air might have been described it was signally not the light of freshness, and suggested as little as possible the element in which the first children of nature might have begun to take notice.

Ages, generations, inventions, corruptions, had produced it, and it seemed, wherever it rested, to be filtered through the bed of history.

It made the objects about show for the time as in something "turned on"--something highly successful that he might have seen at the theatre.

Henry James saw old-world objects in exactly that sort of light.

He knew in his own nerves how Ralph Pendrel felt on going over his London house.

"There wasn't," he says, "...

an old hinge or an old brass lock that he couldn't work with love of the act."

He could observe the inanimate things of the Old World almost as if they were living things.

No naturalist spying for patient hours upon birds in the hope of discovering their secrets could have had a more curious, more hopeful, and more loitering eye.

He found even fairly common things in Europe, as Pendrel found the things in the house he inherited, "all smoothed with service and charged with accumulated messages."

He was like the worshipper in a Spanish church, who watches for the tear on the cheek or the blood-drop from the wound of some wonder-working effigy of Mother and Son.

In _The Sense of the Past_, Henry James conceived a fantastic romance, in which his hero steps not only into the inheritance of an old house, but into 1820, exchanging personalities with a young man in one of the family portraits, and even wooing the young man's betrothed.

It is a story of "queer" happenings, like the story of a dream or a delusion in which the ruling passion has reached the point of mania.

It is the kind of story that has often been written in a gross, mechanical way.

Here it is all delicate--a study of nuances and subtle relationships.

For Ralph, though perfect in the 1820 manner, has something of the changeling about him--something that gradually makes people think him "queer," and in the end arouses in him the dim beginnings of nostalgia for his own time.

It is a fascinating theme as Henry James works it out--doubly fascinating as he talks about it to himself in the "scenario" that is published along with the story.

In the latter we see the author groping for his story, almost like a medium in a trance.

Like a medium, he one moment hesitates and is vague, and the next, as he himself would say, fairly pounces on a certainty.

No artist ever cried with louder joy at the sight of things coming absolutely right under his hand.

Thus, at one moment, the author announces:-- The more I get into my drama the more magnificent upon my word I seem to see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of possibilities in it that I positively quake in dread of the muchness with which they threaten me.

At a moment of less illumination he writes:-- There glimmers and then floats shyly back to me from afar, the sense of something like _this_, a bit difficult to put, though entirely expressible with patience, and as I catch hold of the tip of the tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but another admirable twist.

He continually sees himself catching by the tip of the tail the things that solve his difficulties.

And what tiny little animals he sometimes manages to catch by the tip of the tail in some of his trances of inspiration!

Thus, at one point, he breaks off excitedly about his hero with:-- As to which, however, on consideration don't I see myself catch a bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?...

No, no--no latch-key--but a rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big brass knocker.

As the writer searches for the critical action or gesture which is to betray the "abnormalism" of his hero to the 1820 world in which he moves, he cries to himself:-- Find it, find it; get it right, and it will be the making of the story.

At another stage in the story, he comments:-- All that is feasible and convincing; rather beautiful to do being what I mean.

At yet another stage:-- I pull up, too, here, in the midst of my elation--though after a little I shall straighten everything out.

He discusses with himself the question whether Ralph Pendrel, in the 1820 world, is to repeat exactly the experience of the young man in the portrait, and confides to himself:-- Just now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of mind, I let myself be scared, by a momentarily-confused appearance, an assumption, that he doesn't repeat it.

I see, on recovery of my wits, not to say of my wit, that he very exactly does.

Nowhere in the "scenario" is the artist's pleasure in his work expressed more finely than in the passage in which Henry James describes his hero at the crisis of his experience, when the latter begins to feel that he is under the observation of his _alter ego_, and is being vaguely threatened.

"There must," the author tells himself-- There must be sequences here of the strongest, I make out--the successive driving in of the successive silver-headed nails at the very points and under the very tops that I reserve for them.

That's it, the silver nail, the recurrence of it in the right place, the perfection of the salience of each, and the trick is played.

"Trick," he says, but Henry James resorted little to tricks, in the ordinary meaning of the word.

He scorns the easy and the obvious, as in preparing for the return of the young hero to the modern world--a return made possible by a noble act of self-sacrifice on the part of a second 1820 girl who sends him from her, yet "without an excess of the kind of romanticism I don't want."

There is another woman--the modern woman whom Ralph had loved in America--who might help the machinery of the story (as the author thinks) if he brought her on the scene at a certain stage.

But he thinks of the device only to exclaim against it:-- Can't possibly do anything so artistically base.

The notes for _The Ivory Tower_ are equally alluring, though _The Ivory Tower_ is not itself so good as _The Sense of the Past_.

It is a story of contemporary American life, and we are told that the author laid it aside at the beginning of the war, feeling that "he could no longer work upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life."

Especially interesting is the "scenario," because of the way in which we find Henry James trying--poor man, he was always an amateur at names!

--to get the right names for his characters.

He ponders, for instance, on the name of his heroine:-- I want her name ...

her Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have some bright combination with that; the essence of which is a surname of two syllables and ending in a consonant--also beginning with one.

I am thinking of Moyra Grabham, the latter excellent thing was in _The Times_ of two or three days ago; the only fault is a little too much meaning.

Consciousness in artistry can seldom have descended to minuter details with a larger gesture.

One would not have missed these games of genius with syllables and consonants for worlds.

Is it all an exquisite farce or is it splendidly heroic?

Are we here spectators of the incongruous heroism of an artist who puts a hero's earnestness into getting the last perfection of shine on to a boot or the last fine shade of meaning into the manner in which he says, "No, thank you, no sugar"?

No, it is something more than that.

It is the heroism of a man who lived at every turn and trifle for his craft--who seems to have had almost no life outside it.

In the temple of his art, he found the very dust of the sanctuary holy.

He had the perfect piety of the artist in the least as well as in the greatest things.