Henry James
Preface to volume 2
of the New York edition
(containing : The American)
(1907)
The
American,
which I had begun in Paris early in the winter of 1875-76, made its first
appearance in
The Atlantic monthly
in June of the latter year and continued there, from month to month, till
May of the next. It started on its course while much was
still unwritten, and there again come back to me, with this remembrance, the
frequent hauntings and alarms of that comparatively early time; the habit of
wondering what would happen if anything should ‘happen’,
if one should break one’s arm by an accident or make a long illness or
suffer, in body, mind, fortune, any other visitation involving a loss of
time. The habit of apprehension became of course in some degree the habit
of confidence that one would pull through, that, with opportunity enough,
grave interruption never yet had descended, and that a special
Providence, in short, despite the sad warning of Thackeray’s
Denis Duval
and of Mrs Gaskell’s
Wives and daughters
(that of Stevenson’s
Weir of Hermiston
was yet to come) watches over anxious novelists condemned to the economy of
serialisation. I make myself out in memory as having at least for many
months and in many places given my Providence much to do: so great a variety
of scenes of labour, implying all so much renewal of application, glimmer
out of the book as I now read it over. And yet as the faded interest of the
whole episode becomes again mildly vivid what I seem most to recover is, in
its pale spectrality, a degree of joy, an eagerness on behalf of my recital,
that must recklessly enough have overridden anxieties of every sort,
including any view of inherent difficulties.
I seem to recall no other like connexion in which the
case was met, to my measure, by so fond a complacency, in which my subject
can have appeared so apt to take care
of itself. I see now that I might all the while have taken much better care
of it; yet, as I had at the time no sense of neglecting it, neither acute
nor rueful solicitude, I can but speculate all vainly to-day on the oddity
of my composure. I ask myself indeed if, possibly, recognising after I was
launched the danger of an inordinate leak – since the ship has truly a
hole in its side more than sufficient to have sunk it – I may not have
managed, as a counsel of mere despair, to stop my ears against the noise of
waters and pretend to myself I was afloat; being indubitably, in
any case, at sea, with no harbour of refuge till the end of my serial
voyage. If I succeeded at all in that emulation (in another sphere) of the
pursued ostrich I must have succeeded altogether; must have buried my head
in the sand and there found beatitude. The explanation of my enjoyment of
it, no doubt, is that I was more than commonly enamoured of my idea, and
that I believed it, so trusted, so imaginatively fostered, not less capable
of limping to its goal on three feet than on one. The lameness might be what
it would: I clearly, for myself, felt the thing go – which is
the most a dramatist can ever ask of his drama; and I shall here accordingly
indulge myself in speaking first of how, superficially, it did so proceed;
explaining then what I mean by its practical dependence on a miracle.
It had come to me, this happy, halting view of an
interesting case, abruptly enough, some years before: I recall sharply the
felicity of the first glimpse, though I forget the accident of thought that
produced it. I recall that I was seated in an American
‘horse-car’
when I found myself, of a sudden, considering with enthusiasm, as the
theme of a ‘story’, the situation, in another country and an
aristocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed,
some cruelly wronged, compatriot: the point being in especial that he should
suffer at the hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible
civilisation and to be of an order in every way superior to his own. What
would he ‘do’ in that predicament, how would he right himself, or
how, failing a remedy, would he conduct himself
under his wrong? This would be the question involved, and I remember well
how, having entered the
horse-car
without a dream of it, I was presently to
leave that vehicle in full possession of my answer. He would behave in the
most interesting manner – it would all depend on that: stricken,
smarting, sore, he would arrive at his just vindication and then would fail
of all triumphantly and all vulgarly enjoying it. He would hold his revenge
and cherish it and feel its sweetness, and then in the very act of forcing
it home would sacrifice it in disgust. He would let them go, in short, his
haughty contemners, even while feeling them, with joy, in his power, and he
would obey, in so doing, one of the large and easy impulses
generally characteristic of his type. He would n’t
‘forgive’ – that would have, in the case, no application; he
would simply turn, at the supreme moment, away, the bitterness of his
personal loss yielding to the very force of his aversion. All he would have
at the end would be therefore just the moral convenience, indeed the moral
necessity, of his practical, but quite unappreciated, magnanimity; and
one’s last view of him would be that of a strong man indifferent to his
strength and too wrapped in fine, too wrapped above all in other
and intenser, reflexions for the assertion of his ‘rights’. This
last point was of the essence and constituted in fact the subject: there
would be no subject at all, obviously, – or simply the commonest of the
common – if my gentleman should enjoy his advantage. I was charmed with
my idea, which would take, however, much working out; and precisely because
it had so much to give, I think, must I have dropped it for the time into
the deep well of unconscious cerebration: not without the hope, doubtless,
that it might eventually emerge from that reservoir, as one had already
known the buried treasure to come to light, with a firm iridescent surface
and a notable increase of weight.
This resurrection then took place in Paris, where I
was at the moment living, and in December, 1875; my good fortune being
apparently that Paris had ever so promptly offered me, and with an
immediate directness at which I now marvel
(since I had come back there, after earlier visitations, but a few weeks
before), everything that was needed to make my conception concrete. I seem
again at this distant day to see it become so quickly and easily, quite as
if filling itself with life in that air. The objectivity it had wanted it
promptly put on, and if the questions had been, with the usual intensity,
for my hero and his crisis – the whole formidable list, the who? the
what? the where? the when? the why? the how? – they gathered their
answers
in the cold shadow of the Arc de Triomphe,
for fine reasons, very much as if they had been plucking spring flowers for
the weaving of a frolic garland. I saw from one day to another my particular
cluster of circumstances, with the life of the splendid city playing up in it
like a flashing fountain in a marble basin. The very splendour seemed somehow
to witness and intervene; it was important for the effect of my friend’s
discomfiture that it should take place on a high and lighted stage, and that
his original ambition, the project exposing him, should have sprung from
beautiful and noble suggestions – those that, at certain hours and
under certain impressions, we feel the many-tinted medium by the Seine
irresistibly to communicate. It was all charmingly simple, this conception,
and the current must have gushed, full and clear, to my imagination, from
the moment Christopher Newman rose before me, on a perfect day of the divine
Paris spring, in the great gilded
Salon Carré of the Louvre.
Under this strong contagion of the place he would, by the happiest of hazards,
meet his old comrade, now initiated and domiciled; after which the rest
would go of itself. If he was to be wronged he would be wronged with just
that conspicuity, with his felicity at just that pitch and with the highest
aggravation of the general effect of misery mocked at. Great and gilded the
whole trap set, in fine, for his wary freshness and into which it would
blunder upon its fate. I have, I confess, no memory of a disturbing doubt;
once the man himself was imaged to me (and that germination is a
process almost always untraceable) he must have walked into the situation as
by taking a pass-key from his pocket.
But what then meanwhile would be the affront one would
see him as most feeling? The affront of course done him as a lover; and yet
not that done by his mistress herself, since injuries of this order are the
stalest stuff of romance. I was not to have him jilted, any more than I was
to have him successfully vindictive: both his wrong and his right would have
been in these cases of too vulgar a type. I doubtless even then felt that
the conception of Paris as the consecrated scene of rash infatuations and
bold bad treacheries belongs, in the Anglo-Saxon imagination, to the infancy
of art. The right renovation of any such theme as that would place
it in Boston or at Cleveland,
at Hartford or at Utica
– give it some local connexion in which we had not already had so much of
it. No, I should make my heroine herself, if heroine there was to be, an equal
victim – just as Romeo was not less the sport of fate for not having been
interestedly sacrificed by Juliet; and to this end I had but to imagine
‘great people’ again, imagine my hero confronted and involved with
them, and impute to them, with a fine free hand, the arrogance and cruelty,
the tortuous behaviour, in given conditions, of which great people have been
historically so often capable. But as this was the light in which they were
to show, so the essence of the matter would be that he should at the right
moment find them in his power, and so the situation would reach its highest
interest with the question of his utilisation of that knowledge. It would be
here, in the possession and application of his power, that he would come out
strong and would so deeply appeal to our sympathy. Here above all it really
was, however, that my conception unfurled, with the best conscience in the
world, the emblazoned flag of romance; which venerable ensign it had, though
quite unwittingly, from the first and at every point sported in perfect good
faith. I had been plotting arch-romance without knowing it, just as I began
to write it that December day without recognising it and just as I all
serenely and blissfully pursued the process from month to month and from
place to place; just as I now, in short, reading the book
over, find it yields me no interest and no reward comparable to the fond
perception of this truth.
The thing is consistently, consummately – and I
would fain really make bold to say charmingly – romantic; and all
without intention, presumption, hesitation, contrition. The effect is
equally undesigned and unabashed, and I lose myself, at this late hour, I am
bound to add, in a certain sad envy of the free play of so much unchallenged
instinct. One would like to woo back such hours of fine precipitation. They
represent to the critical sense which the exercise of one’s
whole faculty has, with time, so inevitably and so thoroughly waked
up, the happiest season of surrender to the invoked muse and the projected
fable: the season of images so free and confident and ready that they brush
questions aside and disport themselves, like the artless schoolboys of
Gray’s beautiful
Ode,
in all the ecstasy of the ignorance attending them. The time doubtless comes
soon enough when questions, as I call them, rule the roost and when the
little victim, to adjust Gray’s term again to the creature of frolic
fancy, does n’t dare propose a gambol till they have all (like a
board of trustees discussing a new outlay) sat on the possibly scandalous
case. I somehow feel, accordingly, that it was lucky to have sacrificed on
this particular altar while one still could; though it is perhaps droll
– in a yet higher degree – to have done so not simply because one
was guileless, but even quite under the conviction, in a general way, that,
since no ‘rendering’ of any object and no painting of any picture
can take effect without some form of reference and control, so these
guarantees could but reside in a high probity of observation. I must
decidedly have supposed, all the while, that I was acutely observing –
and with a blest absence of wonder at its being so easy. Let me certainly at
present rejoice in that absence; for I ask myself how without it I could
have written
The American.
Was it indeed meanwhile my excellent conscience that
kept the charm as unbroken as it appears to me, in rich retrospect, to have
remained? – or is it that I suffer the mere influence of remembered, of
associated places and
hours, all acute impressions, to palm itself off as the sign of a finer
confidence than I could justly claim? It is a pleasure to perceive how
again and again the shrunken depths of old work yet permit themselves
to be sounded or – even if rather terrible the image –
‘dragged’: the long pole of memory stirs and rummages the bottom,
and we fish up such fragments and relics of the submerged life and the
extinct consciousness as tempt us to piece them together. My windows looked
into the
Rue de Luxembourg
– since then meagrely re-named Rue Cambon – and
the particular light Parisian click of the small cab-horse on the
clear asphalt, with its sharpness of detonation between the high houses,
makes for the faded page to-day a sort of interlineation of sound. This
sound rises to a martial clatter at the moment a troop of cuirassiers
charges down the narrow street, each morning, to file, directly opposite my
house, through the plain portal of the barracks occupying part of the vast
domain attached in a rearward manner to one of the Ministères that
front on the
Place Vendôme;
an expanse marked, along a considerable stretch of the street, by one of those
high painted and administratively-placarded garden walls that form deep, vague,
recurrent notes in the organic vastness of the city. I have but to re-read ten
lines to recall my daily effort not to waste time in hanging over the window-bar
for a sight of the cavalry the hard music of whose hoofs so directly and
thrillingly appealed; an effort that inveterately failed – and a
trivial circumstance now dignified, to my imagination, I may add, by the
fact that the fruits of this weakness, the various items of the vivid
picture, so constantly recaptured, must have been in themselves suggestive
and inspiring, must have been rich strains, in their way, of the great Paris
harmony. I have ever, in general, found it difficult to write of places
under too immediate an impression – the impression that prevents
standing off and allows neither space nor time for perspective. The image
has had for the most part to be dim if the reflexion was to be, as is
proper for a reflexion, both sharp and quiet: one has a horror, I think,
artistically, of agitated reflexions.
Perhaps that is why the novel, after all, was to
achieve, as it went on, no great – certainly no very direct –
transfusion of the immense overhanging presence. It had to save as it could
its own life, to keep tight hold of the tenuous silver thread, the one hope
for which was that it should n’t be tangled or clipped. This
earnest grasp of the silver thread was doubtless an easier business in other
places – though as I remount the stream of composition I see it faintly
coloured again: with the bright protection of the Normandy coast (I worked
away
a few weeks at Êtretat);
with the stronger glow of southernmost France, breaking in during a stay at
Bayonne;
then with the fine historic and other ‘psychic’ substance of
Saint-Germain-en-Laye,
a purple patch of terraced October before returning to Paris. There comes
after that the memory of a last brief intense invocation of the enclosing
scene, of the pious effort to unwind my tangle, with a firm hand, in the
very light (that light of high, narrowish French windows in old rooms, the
light somehow, as one always feels, of ‘style’ itself) that had
quickened my original vision. I was to pass over to London that autumn;
which was a reason the more for considering the matter – the matter of
Newman’s final predicament – with due intensity: to let a loose
end dangle over into alien air would so fix upon the whole, I strenuously
felt, the dishonour of piecemeal composition. Therefore I strove to finish
– first in a small dusky hotel of the Rive Gauche, where, though the
windows again were high, the days were dim and the crepuscular court,
domestic, intimate, ‘quaint’, testified to ancient manners almost
as if it had been that of Balzac’s Maison Vauquer in
Le Père Goriot:
and then once more in the Rue de Luxembourg, where a black-framed Empire
portrait-medallion, suspended in the centre of each white panel of my almost
noble old salon, made the coolest, discreetest, most measured decoration,
and where, through casements open to the last mildness of the year, a
belated
Saint Martin’s summer,
the tale was taken up afresh by the charming light click and clatter, that
sound as of the thin, quick, quite feminine
surface-breathing of Paris, the shortest of rhythms for so huge an organism.
I shall not tell whether I did there bring my book to a
close – and indeed I shrink, for myself, from putting the question to
the test of memory. I follow it so far, the old urgent ingenious business,
and then I lose sight of it: from which I infer – all exact recovery of
the matter failing – that I did not in the event drag over the Channel
a lengthening chain; which would have been detestable. I reduce to the
absurd perhaps, however, by that small subjective issue, any undue measure
of the interest of this insistent recovery of what I have called attendant
facts. There always has been, for the valid work of art, a history –
though mainly inviting, doubtless, but to the curious critic, for whom such
things grow up and are formed very much in the manner of attaching young
lives and characters, those conspicuous cases of happy development as to
which evidence and anecdote are always in order. The development indeed must
be certain to have been happy, the life sincere, the character fine: the
work of art, to create or repay critical curiosity, must in short have been
very ‘valid’ indeed. Yet there is on the other hand no
mathematical measure of that importance – it may be a matter of
widely-varying appreciation; and I am willing to grant, assuredly, that this
interest, in a given relation, will nowhere so effectually kindle as on the
artist’s own part. And I am afraid that after all even his best excuse
for it must remain the highly personal plea – the joy of living over,
as a chapter of experience, the particular intellectual adventure. Here
lurks an immense homage to the general privilege of the artist, to that
constructive, that creative passion – portentous words, but they are
convenient – the exercise of which finds so many an occasion for
appearing to him the highest of human fortunes, the rarest boon of the gods.
He values it, all sublimely and perhaps a little fatuously, for itself
– as the great extension, great beyond all others, of experience and of
consciousness; with the toil and trouble a mere sun-cast shadow that falls,
shifts and vanishes, the result
of his living in so large a light. On the constant nameless felicity of this
Robert Louis Stevenson has, in an admirable passage and as in so many other
connexions, said the right word: that the partaker of the ‘life of
art’ who repines at the absence of the rewards, as they are called, of
the pursuit might surely be better occupied. Much rather should he endlessly
wonder at his not having to pay half his substance for his luxurious
immersion. He enjoys it, so to speak, without a tax; the effort of labour
involved, the torment of expression, of which we have heard in our time so
much, being after all but the last refinement of his privilege. It may leave
him weary and worn; but how, after his fashion, he will have lived! As if
one were to expect at once freedom and ease! That silly safety is but the
sign of bondage and forfeiture. Who can imagine free selection – which
is the beautiful, terrible whole of art – without free
difficulty? This is the very franchise of the city and high ambition of the
citizen. The vision of the difficulty, as one looks back, bathes one’s
course in a golden glow by which the very objects along the road are
transfigured and glorified; so that one exhibits them to other eyes with an
elation possibly presumptuous.
Since I accuse myself at all events of these
complacencies I take advantage of them to repeat that I value, in my
retrospect, nothing so much as the lively light on the romantic property of
my subject that I had not expected to encounter. If in
The American
I invoked the romantic association without malice prepense, yet with a
production of the romantic effect that is for myself unmistakeable, the
occasion is of the best perhaps for penetrating a little the obscurity of
that principle. By what art or mystery, what craft of selection, omission or
commission, does a given picture of life appear to us to surround its theme,
its figures and images, with the air of romance while another picture close
beside it may affect us as steeping the whole matter in the element of
reality? It is a question, no doubt, on the painter’s part, very much
more of perceived effect, effect after the fact, than of conscious
design – though indeed I have ever failed
to see how a coherent picture of anything is producible save by a complex of
fine measurements. The cause of the deflexion, in one pronounced sense or
the other, must lie deep, however; so that for the most part we recognise
the character of our interest only after the particular magic, as I say, has
thoroughly operated – and then in truth but if we be a bit critically
minded, if we find our pleasure, that is, in these intimate appreciations
(for which, as I am well aware, ninety-nine readers in a hundred have no use
whatever). The determining condition would at any rate seem so latent that
one may well doubt if the full artistic consciousness ever reaches it;
leaving the matter thus a case, ever, not of an author’s plotting and
planning and calculating, but just of his feeling and seeing, of his
conceiving, in a word, and of his thereby inevitably expressing himself,
under the influence of one value or the other. These values represent
different sorts and degrees of the communicable thrill, and I doubt if any
novelist, for instance, ever proposed to commit himself to one kind or the
other with as little mitigation as we are sometimes able to find for him.
The interest is greatest – the interest of his genius, I mean, and of
his general wealth – when he commits himself in both directions; not
quite at the same time or to the same effect, of course, but by some need of
performing his whole possible revolution, by the law of some rich passion in
him for extremes.
Of the men of largest responding imagination before the
human scene, of
Scott,
of
Balzac,
even of the coarse, comprehensive, prodigious
Zola,
we feel, I think, that the deflexion toward either quarter has never
taken place; that neither the nature of the man’s faculty nor
the nature of his experience has ever quite determined it. His current
remains therefore extraordinarily rich and mixed, washing us successively
with the warm wave of the near and familiar and the tonic shock, as may be,
of the far and strange. (In making which opposition I suggest not that the
strange and the far are at all necessarily romantic: they happen to be
simply the unknown, which is quite a different matter. The
real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not
know, sooner or later, in one way or another; it being but one of the
accidents of our hampered state, and one of the incidents of their quantity
and number, that particular instances have not yet come our way. The
romantic stands, on the other hand, for the things that, with all the
facilities in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all the wit
and all the adventure, we never can directly know; the things that
can reach us only through the beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our
thought and our desire.) There have been, I gather, many definitions of
romance, as a matter indispensably of boats, or of caravans, or of tigers,
or of ‘historical characters’, or of ghosts, or of forgers, or of
detectives, or of beautiful wicked women, or of pistols and knives, but they
appear for the most part reducible to the idea of the facing of danger, the
acceptance of great risks for the fascination, the very love, of their
uncertainty, the joy of success if possible and of battle in any case. This
would be a fine formula if it bore examination; but it strikes me as weak
and inadequate, as by no means covering the true ground and yet as landing
us in strange confusions.
The panting pursuit of danger is the pursuit of life
itself, in which danger awaits us possibly at every step and faces us at
every turn; so that the dream of an intenser experience easily becomes
rather some vision of a sublime security like that enjoyed on the flowery
plains of heaven, where we may conceive ourselves proceeding in ecstasy from
one prodigious phase and form of it to another. And if it be insisted that
the measure of the type is then in the appreciation of danger
– the sign of our projection of the real being the smallness of its
dangers, and that of our projection of the romantic the hugeness, the mark
of the distinction being in short, as they say of collars and gloves and
shoes, the size and ‘number’ of the danger – this
discrimination again surely fails, since it makes our difference not a
difference of kind, which is what we want, but a difference only of degree,
and subject by that condition to the indignity of a sliding scale and a
shifting measure. There are immense
and flagrant dangers that are but sordid and squalid ones, as we feel,
tainting with their quality the very defiances they provoke; while there are
common and covert ones, that ‘look like nothing’ and that can be
but inwardly and occultly dealt with, which involve the sharpest hazards to
life and honour and the highest instant decisions and intrepidities of
action. It is an arbitrary stamp that keeps these latter prosaic and makes
the former heroic; and yet I should still less subscribe to a mere
‘subjective’ division – I mean one that would place the
difference wholly in the temper of the imperilled agent. It would be
impossible to have a more romantic temper than
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary,
and yet nothing less resembles a romance than the record of her adventures.
To classify it by that aspect – the definition of the spirit that
happens to animate her – is like settling the question (as I have seen
it witlessly settled) by the presence or absence of ‘costume’.
Where again then does costume begin or end? – save with the
‘run’ of one or another sort of play? We must reserve
vague labels for artless mixtures.
The only general attribute of projected romance
that I can see, the only one that fits all its cases, is the fact of the
kind of experience with which it deals – experience liberated, so to
speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the
conditions that we usually know to attach to it and, if we wish so to put
the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it, in a
particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related, a
measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities. The
greatest intensity may so be arrived at evidently – when the sacrifice
of community, of the ‘related’ sides of situations, has not been
too rash. It must to this end not flagrantly betray itself; we must even be
kept if possible, for our illusion, from suspecting any sacrifice at all.
The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under
that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more
or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where
we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large and unrelated:
we only swing apart from the globe – though remaining as exhilarated,
naturally, as we like, especially when all goes well. The art of the
romancer is, ‘for the fun of it’, insidiously to cut the cable,
to cut it without our detecting him. What I have recognised then in
The American,
much to my surprise and after long years, is that the experience here
represented is the disconnected and uncontrolled experience –
uncontrolled by our general sense of ‘the way things happen’
– which romance alone more or less successfully palms off on us. It is
a case of Newman’s own intimate experience all, that being my subject,
the thread of which, from beginning to end, is not once exchanged, however
momentarily, for any other thread; and the experience of others concerning
us, and concerning him, only so far as it touches him and as he recognises,
feels or divines it. There is our general sense of the way things happen
– it abides with us indefeasibly, as readers of fiction, from the
moment we demand that our fiction shall be intelligible; and there is our
particular sense of the way they don’t happen, which is liable to wake
up unless reflexion and criticism, in us, have been skilfully and
successfully drugged. There are drugs enough, clearly – it is all a
question of applying them with tact; in which case the way things don’t
happen may be artfully made to pass for the way things do.
Amusing and even touching to me, I profess, at this time
of day, the ingenuity (worthy, with whatever lapses, of a better cause) with
which, on behalf of Newman’s adventure, this hocus-pocus is attempted:
the value of the instance not being diminished either, surely, by its having
been attempted in such evident good faith. Yes, all is romantic to my actual
vision here, and not least so, I hasten to add, the fabulous felicity of my
candour. The way things happen is frankly not the way in which they are
represented as having happened, in Paris, to my hero: the situation I had
conceived only saddled me with that for want of my invention of something
better. The great house of Bellegarde,
in a word, would, I now feel, given the circumstances, given the
whole of the ground, have comported itself in a manner as different
as possible from the manner to which my narrative commits it; of which
truth, moreover, I am by no means sure that, in spite of what I have called
my serenity, I had not all the while an uneasy suspicion. I had dug in my
path, alas, a hole into which I was destined to fall. I was so possessed of
my idea that Newman should be ill-used – which was the essence of my
subject – that I attached too scant an importance to its fashion of
coming about. Almost any fashion would serve, I appear to have assumed, that
would give me my main chance for him; a matter depending not so much on the
particular trick played him as on the interesting face presented by him to
any damnable trick. So where I part company with
terra-firma
is in making that projected, that performed outrage so much more showy,
dramatically speaking, than sound. Had I patched it up to a greater apparent
soundness my own trick, artistically speaking, would have been played; I
should have cut the cable without my reader’s suspecting it. I
doubtless at the time, I repeat, believed I had taken my precautions; but
truly they should have been greater, to impart the air of truth to the
attitude – that is first to the pomp and circumstance, and second to
the queer falsity – of the Bellegardes.
They would positively have jumped then, the Bellegardes,
at my rich and easy American, and not have ‘minded’ in the least
any drawback – especially as, after all, given the pleasant palette
from which I have painted him, there were few drawbacks to mind. My subject
imposed on me a group of closely-allied persons animated by immense
pretensions – which was all very well, which might be full of the
promise of interest: only of interest felt most of all in the light of
comedy and of irony. This, better understood, would have dwelt in the idea
not in the least of their not finding Newman good enough for their alliance
and thence being ready to sacrifice him, but in that of their taking with
alacrity everything he could give them, only asking
for more and more, and then adjusting their pretensions and their pride to
it with all the comfort in life. Such accommodation of the theory of a noble
indifference to the practice of a deep avidity is the real note of policy in
forlorn aristocracies – and I meant of course that the Bellegardes
should be virtually forlorn. The perversion of truth is by no means, I
think, in the displayed acuteness of their remembrance of ‘who’
and ‘what’ they are, or at any rate take themselves for; since it
is the misfortune of all insistence on ‘worldly’ advantages –
and the situation of such people bristles at the best (by which I mean under
whatever invocation of a superficial simplicity) with emphasis, accent,
assumption – to produce at times an effect of grossness. The picture of
their tergiversation, at all events, however it may originally have seemed
to me to hang together, has taken on this rococo appearance precisely
because their preferred course, a thousand times preferred, would have been
to haul him and his fortune into their boat under cover of night perhaps, in
any case as quietly and with as little bumping and splashing as possible,
and there accommodate him with the very safest and most convenient seat.
Given Newman, given the fact that the thing constitutes itself organically
as his adventure, that too might very well be a situation and a
subject: only it would n’t have been the theme of
The American
as the book stands, the theme to which I was from so early pledged. Since I
had wanted a ‘wrong’ this other turn might even have been arranged
to give me that, might even have been arranged to meet my
requirement that somebody or something should be ‘in his power’ so
delightfully; and with the signal effect, after all, of ‘defining’
everything. (It is as difficult, I said above, to trace the dividing-line
between the real and the romantic as to plant a milestone between north and
south; but I am not sure an infallible sign of the latter is not this rank
vegetation of the ‘power’ of bad people that good get into, or
vice versa.
It is so rarely, alas, into our power that any one gets!)
It is difficult for me to-day to believe that I had not, as
my work went on, some shade of the rueful sense of my affront to
verisimilitude; yet I catch the memory at least of no great sharpness, no
true critical anguish, of remorse: an anomaly the reason of which in fact
now glimmers interestingly out. My concern, as I saw it, was to make and to
keep Newman consistent; the picture of his consistency was all my
undertaking, and the memory of that infatuation perfectly abides
with me. He was to be the lighted figure, the others – even doubtless
to an excessive degree the woman who is made the agent of his discomfiture
– were to be the obscured; by which I should largely get the very
effect most to be invoked, that of a generous nature engaged with forces,
with difficulties and dangers, that it but half understands. If Newman was
attaching enough, I must have argued, his tangle would be sensible enough;
for the interest of everything is all that it is his vision,
his conception, his interpretation: at the window of his
wide, quite sufficiently wide, consciousness we are seated, from that
admirable position we ‘assist’. He therefore supremely matters;
all the rest matters only as he feels it, treats it, meets it. A beautiful
infatuation this, always, I think, the intensity of the creative effort to
get into the skin of the creature; the act of personal possession of one
being by another at its completest – and with the high enhancement,
ever, that it is, by the same stroke, the effort of the artist to preserve
for his subject that unity, and for his use of it (in other words for the
interest he desires to excite) that effect of a centre, which most
economise its value. Its value is most discussable when that economy has
most operated; the content and the ‘importance’ of a work of art
are in fine wholly dependent on its being one: outside of which all
prate of its representative character, its meaning and its bearing, its
morality and humanity, are an impudent thing. Strong in that character,
which is the condition of its really bearing witness at all, it is strong
every way. So much remains true then on behalf of my instinct of multiplying
the fine touches by which Newman should live and communicate life; and yet I
still ask myself, I
confess, what I can have made of ‘life’, in my picture, at such a
juncture as the interval offered as elapsing between my hero’s first
accepted state and the nuptial rites that are to crown it. Nothing here is
in truth ‘offered’ – everything is evaded, and the effect of
this, I recognise, is of the oddest. His relation to Madame de Cintré
takes a great stride, but the author appears to view that but as a signal
for letting it severely alone.
I have been stupefied, in so thoroughly revising the
book, to find, on turning a page, that the light in which he is presented
immediately after Madame de Bellegarde has conspicuously introduced him to
all her circle as her daughter’s husband-to-be is that of an evening
at the opera quite alone; as if he would n’t surely spend his
leisure, and especially those hours of it, with his intended. Instinctively,
from that moment, one would have seen them intimately and, for one’s
interest, beautifully together; with some illustration of the beauty
incumbent on the author. The truth was that at this point the author, all
gracelessly, could but hold his breath and pass; lingering was too difficult
– he had made for himself a crushing complication. Since Madame de
Cintré was after all to ‘back out’ every touch in the
picture of her apparent loyalty would add to her eventual shame. She had
acted in clear good faith, but how could I give the detail of an
attitude, on her part, of which the foundation was yet so weak? I preferred,
as the minor evil, to shirk the attempt – at the cost evidently of a
signal loss of ‘charm’; and with this lady, altogether, I
recognise, a light plank, too light a plank, is laid for the reader over a
dark ‘psychological’ abyss. The delicate clue to her conduct is
never definitely placed in his hand: I must have liked verily to think it
was delicate and to flatter myself it was to be felt with
finger-tips rather than heavily tugged at. Here then, at any rate, is the
romantic
tout craché
– the fine flower of Newman’s experience blooming in a medium
‘cut off’ and shut up to itself. I don’t for a moment
pronounce any spell proceeding from it necessarily the less workable, to a
rejoicing ingenuity, for
that; beguile the reader’s suspicion of his being shut up,
transform it for him into a positive illusion of the largest
liberty, and the success will ever be proportionate to the chance. Only all
this gave me, I make out, a great deal to look to, and I was perhaps wrong
in thinking that Newman by himself, and for any occasional extra inch or so
I might smuggle into his measurements, would see me through my wood.
Anything more liberated and disconnected, to repeat my terms, than his
prompt general profession, before the Tristrams, of aspiring to a
‘great’ marriage, for example, could surely not well be imagined.
I had to take that over with the rest of him and fit it in – I had
indeed to exclude the outer air. Still, I find on re-perusal that I have
been able to breathe at least in my aching void; so that, clinging to my
hero as to a tall, protective, good-natured elder brother in a rough place,
I leave the record to stand or fall by his more or less convincing image.
end of preface to volume 2
part of an etext edition of the
prefaces to the New York edition
of Henry James
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website