Henry James
Preface to volume 23
of the New York edition
(containing : The golden bowl)
(1909)
Among many matters thrown into relief by a refreshed
acquaintance with
The golden bowl
what perhaps most stands out for me is the still marked inveteracy of a
certain indirect and oblique view of my presented action; unless indeed I
make up my mind to call this mode of treatment, on the contrary, any
superficial appearance notwithstanding, the very straightest and closest
possible. I have already betrayed, as an accepted habit, and even to
extravagance commented on, my preference for dealing with my subject matter,
for ‘seeing my story’, through the opportunity and the sensibility
of some more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly
interested and intelligent, witness or reporter, some person who contributes
to the case mainly a certain amount of criticism and interpretation of it.
Again and again, on review, the shorter things in especial that I have
gathered into this series have ranged themselves not as my own impersonal
account of the affair in hand, but as my account of somebody’s
impression of it – the terms of this person’s access to it and
estimate of it contributing thus by some fine little law to intensification
of interest. The somebody is often, among my shorter tales I recognise, but
an unnamed, unintroduced and (save by right of intrinsic wit) unwarranted
participant, the impersonal author’s concrete deputy or delegate, a
convenient substitute or apologist for the creative power otherwise so
veiled and disembodied. My instinct appears repeatedly to have been that to
arrive at the facts retailed and the figures introduced by the given help of
some other conscious and confessed agent is essentially to find the whole
business – that is, as I say, its effective interest – enriched
by the way. I have in other words constantly inclined to the idea
of the
particular attaching case plus some near individual view of it;
that nearness quite having thus to become an imagined observer’s, a
projected, charmed painter’s or poet’s – however avowed the
‘minor’ quality in the latter – close and sensitive contact
with it. Anything, in short, I now reflect, must always have seemed to me
better – better for the process and the effect of representation, my
irrepressible ideal – than the mere muffled majesty of irresponsible
‘authorship’. Beset constantly with the sense that the painter
of the picture or the chanter of the ballad (whatever we may call him) can
never be responsible enough, and for every inch of his surface and
note of his song, I track my uncontrollable footsteps, right and left, after
the fact, while they take their quick turn, even on stealthiest tiptoe,
toward the point of view that, within the compass, will give me most instead
of least to answer for.
I am aware of having glanced a good deal already in the
direction of this embarrassed truth – which I give for what it is
worth; but I feel it come home to me afresh on recognising that the manner
in which it betrays itself may be one of the liveliest sources of amusement
in
The golden bowl.
It ’s not that the muffled majesty of authorship
does n’t here ostensibly reign; but I catch myself again
shaking it off and disavowing the pretence of it while I get down into the
arena and do my best to live and breathe and rub shoulders and converse with
the persons engaged in the struggle that provides for the others in the
circling tiers the entertainment of the great game. There is no other
participant, of course, than each of the real, the deeply involved and
immersed and more or less bleeding participants; but I nevertheless affect
myself as having held my system fast and fondly, with one hand at least, by
the manner in which the whole thing remains subject to the register, ever so
closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters. The Prince,
in the first half of the book, virtually sees and knows and makes out,
virtually represents to himself everything that concerns us – very
nearly (though he does n’t speak in the first person) after the
fashion of other reporters
and critics of other situations. Having a consciousness highly susceptible
of registration, he thus makes us see the things that may most interest us
reflected in it as in the clean glass held up to so many of the ‘short
stories’ of our long list; and yet after all never a whit to the
prejudice of his being just as consistently a foredoomed, entangled,
embarrassed agent in the general imbroglio, actor in the offered play. The
function of the Princess, in the remainder, matches exactly with his; the
register of her consciousness is as closely kept – as closely,
say, not only as his own, but as that (to cite examples) either of the
intelligent but quite unindividualised witness of the destruction of
The Aspern papers,
or of the all-noting heroine of
The spoils of Poynton,
highly individualised though highly intelligent; the Princess, in
fine, in addition to feeling everything she has to, and to playing her part
just in that proportion, duplicates, as it were, her value and becomes a
compositional resource, and of the finest order, as well as a value
intrinsic. So it is that the admirably-endowed pair, between them, as I
retrace their fortune and my own method, point again for me the moral
of the endless interest, endless worth for ‘delight’, of the
compositional contribution. Their chronicle strikes me as quite of the
stuff to keep us from forgetting that absolutely no refinement
of ingenuity or of precaution need be dreamed of as wasted in that most
exquisite of all good causes the appeal to variety, the appeal to
incalculability, the appeal to a high refinement and a handsome wholeness
of effect.
There are other things I might remark here, despite its
perhaps seeming a general connexion that I have elsewhere sufficiently shown
as suggestive; but I have other matter in hand and I take a moment only to
meet a possible objection – should any reader be so far solicitous or
even attentive – to what I have just said. It may be noted, that is,
that the Prince, in the volume over which he nominally presides, is
represented as in comprehensive cognition only of those aspects as to which
Mrs Assingham does n’t functionally – perhaps all too
officiously, as the reader may sometimes
feel it – supersede him. This disparity in my plan is, however, but
superficial; the thing abides rigidly by its law of showing Maggie Verver at
first through her suitor’s and her husband’s exhibitory vision of
her, and of then showing the Prince, with at least an equal intensity,
through his wife’s; the advantage thus being that these attributions of
experience display the sentient subjects themselves at the same time and by
the same stroke with the nearest possible approach to a desirable vividness.
It is the Prince who opens the door to half our light upon Maggie, just as
it is she who opens it to half our light upon himself; the rest of our
impression, in either case, coming straight from the very motion with which
that act is performed. We see Charlotte also at first, and we see Adam
Verver, let alone our seeing Mrs Assingham, and every one and every
thing else, but as they are visible in the Prince’s interest, so to
speak – by which I mean of course in the interest of his being himself
handed over to us. With a like consistency we see the same persons and
things again but as Maggie’s interest, her exhibitional charm,
determines the view. In making which remark, with its apparently so limited
enumeration of my elements, I naturally am brought up against the fact of
the fundamental fewness of these latter – of the fact that my large
demand is made for a group of agents who may be counted on the fingers of
one hand. We see very few persons in
The golden bowl,
but the scheme of the book, to make up for that, is that we shall really
see about as much of them as a coherent literary form permits. That was my
problem, so to speak, and my
gageure
– to play the small handful of values really for all they were worth
– and to work my system, my particular propriety of appeal, particular
degree of pressure on the spring of interest, for all that this specific
ingenuity itself might be. To have a scheme and a view of its dignity is of
course congruously to work it out, and the ‘amusement’ of the
chronicle in question – by which, once more, I always mean the gathered
cluster of all the kinds of interest – was exactly to see what
a consummate application of such sincerities would give.
So much for some only of the suggestions of re-perusal
here – since, all the while, I feel myself awaited by a pair of appeals
really more pressing than either of those just met; a minor and a major
appeal, as I may call them: the former of which I take first. I have so
thoroughly ‘gone into’ things, in an expository way, on the ground
covered by this collection of my writings, that I should still judge it
superficial to have spoken no word for so salient a feature of our edition
as the couple of dozen decorative ‘illustrations’. This series
of frontispieces contribute less to ornament, I recognise, than if
Mr Alvin Langdon Coburn’s
beautiful photographs, which they
reproduce, had had to suffer less reduction; but of those that have suffered
least the beauty, to my sense, remains great, and I indulge at any rate in
this glance at our general intention for the sake of the small page of
history thereby added to my already voluminous, yet on the whole so
unabashed, memoranda. I should in fact be tempted here, but for lack of
space, by the very question itself at large – that question of the
general acceptability of illustration coming up sooner or later, in these
days, for the author of any text putting forward illustrative claims (that
is producing an effect of illustration) by its own intrinsic virtue and so
finding itself elbowed, on that ground, by another and a competitive
process. The essence of any representational work is of course to bristle
with immediate images; and I, for one, should have looked much askance at
the proposal, on the part of my associates in the whole business, to graft
or ‘grow’, at whatever point, a picture by another hand on my own
picture – this being always, to my sense, a lawless incident. Which
remark reflects heavily, of course, on the ‘picture-book’ quality
that contemporary English and American prose appears more and more destined,
by the conditions of publication, to consent, however grudgingly, to see
imputed to it. But a moment’s thought points the moral of the danger.
Anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of
being, while placed before us, good enough, interesting enough and, if the
question be of picture, pictorial enough, above
all in itself, does it the worst of services, and may well inspire
in the lover of literature certain lively questions as to the future of
that institution. That one should, as an author, reduce one’s reader,
‘artistically’ inclined, to such a state of hallucination by the
images one has evoked as does n’t permit him to rest till he has
noted or recorded them, set up some semblance of them in his own other
medium, by his own other art – nothing could better consort than
that, I naturally allow, with the desire or the pretension to cast
a literary spell. Charming, that is, for the projector and creator of
figures and scenes that are as nought from the moment they fail to become
more or less visible appearances, charming for this manipulator of aspects
to see such power as he may possess approved and registered by the springing
of such fruit from his seed. His own garden, however, remains one thing, and
the garden he has prompted the cultivation of at other hands becomes quite
another; which means that the frame of one’s own work no more provides
place for such a plot than we expect flesh and fish to be served on the same
platter. One welcomes illustration, in other words, with pride and joy; but
also with the emphatic view that, might one’s ‘literary
jealousy’ be duly deferred to, it would quite stand off and on its
own feet and thus, as a separate and independent subject of publication,
carrying its text in its spirit, just as that text correspondingly carries
the plastic possibility, become a still more glorious tribute. So far my
invidious distinction between the writer’s ‘frame’ and the
draughtsman’s; and if in spite of it I could still make place for the
idea of a contribution of value by
Mr A. L. Coburn
to each of these volumes – and a contribution in as different a
‘medium’ as possible – this was just because the proposed
photographic studies were to seek the way, which they have happily found,
I think, not to keep, or to pretend to keep, anything like dramatic step
with their suggestive matter. This would quite have disqualified them, to
my rigour; but they were ‘all right’, in the so analytic modern
critical phrase, through their discreetly disavowing emulation. Nothing in
fact could more have amused the
author than the opportunity of a hunt for a series of reproducible subjects
– such moreover as might best consort with photography – the
reference of which to novel or tale should exactly be not
competitive and obvious, should on the contrary plead its case with some
shyness, that of images always confessing themselves mere optical symbols or
echoes, expressions of no particular thing in the text, but only of the type
or idea of this or that thing. They were to remain at the most small
pictures of our ‘set’ stage with the actors left out; and what was
above all interesting was that they were first to be constituted.
This involved an amusing search which I would fain more
fully commemorate; since it took, to a great degree, and rather unexpectedly
and incalculably, the vastly, though but incidentally, instructive form of
an enquiry into the street-scenery of London; a field yielding a ripe
harvest of treasure from the moment I held up to it, in my fellow
artist’s company, the light of our fond idea – the idea, that is,
of the aspect of things or the combination of objects that might, by a
latent virtue in it, speak for its connexion with something in the book, and
yet at the same time speak enough for its odd or interesting self. It will
be noticed that our series of frontispieces, while doing all justice to our
need, largely consists in a ‘rendering’ of certain inanimate
characteristics of London streets; the ability of which to suffice to this
furnishing forth of my volumes ministered alike to surprise and convenience.
Even at the cost of inconsistency of attitude in the matter of the
‘grafted’ image, I should have been tempted, I confess, by the
mere pleasure of exploration, abounding as the business at once began to do
in those prizes of curiosity for which the London-lover is at any time ready
to ‘back’ the prodigious city. It was n’t always that I
straightway found, with my fellow searcher, what we were looking for, but
that the looking itself so often flooded with light the question of what a
‘subject’, what ‘character’, what a saving sense in
things, is and is n’t; and that when our quest was rewarded, it
was, I make bold to say, rewarded in perfection. On the question,
for instance, of the proper preliminary compliment to the first volume of
The golden bowl
we easily felt that nothing would so serve as a view of the small shop in
which the bowl is first encountered.
The problem thus was thrilling, for though the small
shop was but a shop of the mind, of the author’s projected world, in
which objects are primarily related to each other, and therefore not
‘taken from’ a particular establishment anywhere, only an image
distilled and intensified, as it were, from a drop of the essence of such
establishments in general, our need (since the picture was, as I have said,
also completely to speak for itself) prescribed a concrete, independent,
vivid instance, the instance that should oblige us by the marvel of an
accidental rightness. It might so easily be wrong – by the act of being
at all. It would have to be in the first place what London and chance and an
extreme improbability should have made it, and then it would have to let us
truthfully read into it the Prince’s and Charlotte’s and the
Princess’s visits. It of course on these terms long evaded us, but all
the while really without prejudice to our fond confidence that, as London
ends by giving one absolutely everything one asks, so it awaited us
somewhere. It awaited us in fact – but I check myself; nothing, I find
now, would induce me to say where. Just so, to conclude, it was equally
obvious that for the second volume of the same fiction nothing would so
nobly serve as some generalised vision of
Portland Place.
Both our limit
and the very extent of our occasion, however, lay in the fact that, unlike
wanton designers, we had, not to ‘create’ but simply to recognise
– recognise, that is, with the last fineness. The thing was to induce
the vision of Portland Place to generalise itself. This is
precisely, however, the fashion after which the prodigious city, as I have
called it, does on occasion meet halfway those forms of intelligence of it
that it recognises. All of which meant that at a given moment the
great featureless Philistine vista would itself perform a miracle, would
become interesting, for a splendid atmospheric hour, as only London knows
how; and that our business
would be then to understand. But my record of that lesson takes me too far.
So much for some only of the suggestions of re-perusal,
and some of those of re-representation here, since, all the while, I feel
myself awaited by an occasion more urgent than any of these. To re-read in
their order my final things, all of comparatively recent date, has been to
become aware of my putting the process through, for the latter end of my
series (as well as, throughout, for most of its later constituents) quite in
the same terms as the apparent and actual, the contemporary terms; to become
aware in other words that the march of my present attention coincides
sufficiently with the march of my original expression; that my apprehension
fits, more concretely stated, without an effort or a struggle, certainly
without bewilderment or anguish, into the innumerable places prepared for
it. As the historian of the matter sees and speaks, so my intelligence of
it, as a reader, meets him halfway, passive, receptive, appreciative, often
even grateful; unconscious, quite blissfully, of any bar to intercourse, any
disparity of sense between us. Into his very footprints the responsive, the
imaginative steps of the docile reader that I consentingly become for him
all comfortably sink; his vision, superimposed on my own as an image in cut
paper is applied to a sharp shadow on a wall, matches, at every point,
without excess or deficiency. This truth throws into relief for me the very
different dance that the taking in hand of my earlier productions was to
lead me; the quite other kind of consciousness proceeding from that
return. Nothing in my whole renewal of attention to these things, to almost
any instance of my work previous to some dozen years ago, was more evident
than that no such active, appreciative process could take place on the mere
palpable lines of expression – thanks to the so frequent lapse of
harmony between my present mode of motion and that to which the existing
footprints were due. It was, all sensibly, as if the clear matter being
still there, even as a shining expanse of snow spread over a plain, my
exploring tread, for application to it, had quite unlearned the old pace
and found
itself naturally falling into another, which might sometimes indeed more or
less agree with the original tracks, but might most often, or very nearly,
break the surface in other places. What was thus predominantly interesting
to note, at all events, was the high spontaneity of these deviations and
differences, which became thus things not of choice, but of immediate and
perfect necessity: necessity to the end of dealing with the quantities in
question at all.
No march, accordingly, I was soon enough aware, could
possibly be more confident and free than this infinitely interesting and
amusing act of re-appropriation; shaking off all shackles of
theory, unattended, as was speedily to appear, with humiliating
uncertainties, and almost as enlivening, or at least as momentous, as, to a
philosophic mind, a sudden large apprehension of the Absolute. What indeed
could be more delightful than to enjoy a sense of the absolute in such easy
conditions? The deviations and differences might of course not have broken
out at all, but from the moment they began so naturally to multiply they
became, as I say, my very terms of cognition. The question of the
‘revision’ of existing work had loomed large for me, had seemed
even at moments to bristle with difficulties; but that phase of anxiety,
I was rejoicingly to learn, belonged all but to the state of postponed
experience or to that of a prolonged and fatalistic indifference. Since to
get and to keep finished and dismissed work well behind one, and to have as
little to say to it and about it as possible, had been for years one’s
only law, so, during that flat interregnum, involving, as who should say,
the very cultivation of unacquaintedness, creeping superstitions as to what
it might really have been had time to grow up and flourish. Not least among
these rioted doubtless the fond fear that any tidying-up of the uncanny
brood, any removal of accumulated dust, any washing of wizened faces, or
straightening of grizzled locks, or twitching, to a better effect, of
superannuated garments, might let one in, as the phrase is, for expensive
renovations. I make use here of the figure of age and infirmity, but in
point of fact I had rather viewed the reappearance of the first-born
of my progeny – a reappearance unimaginable save to some inheritance of
brighter and more congruous material form, of stored-up braveries of type
and margin and ample page, of general dignity and attitude, than had mostly
waited on their respective casual cradles – as a descent of awkward
infants from the nursery to the drawing-room under the kind appeal of
enquiring, of possibly interested, visitors. I had accordingly taken for
granted the common decencies of such a case – the responsible glance of
some power above from one nursling to another, the rapid flash of an anxious
needle, the not imperceptible effect of a certain audible splash of
soap-and-water; all in consideration of the searching radiance of
drawing-room lamps as compared with nursery candles. But it had been all
the while present to me that from the moment a stitch should be taken or
a hair-brush applied the principle of my making my brood more
presentable under the nobler illumination would be accepted and established,
and it was there complications might await me. I am afraid I had at stray
moments wasted time in wondering what discrimination against the freedom of
the needle and the sponge would be able to describe itself as not arbitrary.
For it to confess to that taint would be of course to write itself
detestable.
“Hands off altogether on the nurse’s
part!” was, as a merely barbarous injunction, strictly conceivable;
but only in the light of the truth that it had never taken effect in any
fair and stately, in any not vulgarly irresponsible re-issue of anything.
Therefore it was easy to see that any such apologetic suppression as that of
the ‘altogether’, any such admission as that of a single dab of
the soap, left the door very much ajar. Any request that an indulgent
objector to drawing-room discipline, to the purification, in other words, of
innocent childhood, should kindly measure out then the appropriate amount of
ablutional fluid for the whole case, would, on twenty grounds, indubitably
leave that invoked judge gaping. I had none the less, I repeat, at muddled
moments, seemed to see myself confusedly invoke him; thanks to my but too
naturally not being able to forecast the
perfect grace with which an answer to all my questions was meanwhile
awaiting me. To expose the case frankly to a test – in other words to
begin to re-read – was at once to get nearer all its elements and so,
as by the next felicity, feel it purged of every doubt. It was the nervous
postponement of that respectful approach that I spoke of just now as, in the
connexion, my waste of time. This felt awkwardness sprang, as I was at a
given moment to perceive, from my too abject acceptance of the grand air
with which the term revision had somehow, to my imagination, carried itself
– and from my frivolous failure to analyse the content of the word. To
revise is to see, or to look over, again – which means in the case of a
written thing neither more nor less than to re-read it. I had attached to
it, in a brooding spirit, the idea of re-writing – with which it was to
have in the event, for my conscious play of mind, almost nothing in
common. I had thought of re-writing as so difficult, and even so absurd, as
to be impossible – having also indeed, for that matter, thought of
re-reading in the same light. But the felicity under the test was that where
I had thus ruefully prefigured two efforts there proved to be but one –
and this an effort but at the first blush. What rewriting might be was to
remain – it has remained for me to this hour – a mystery. On the
other hand the act of revision, the act of seeing it again, caused whatever
I looked at on any page to flower before me as into the only terms that
honourably expressed it; and the ‘revised’ element in the present
edition is accordingly these terms, these rigid conditions of re-perusal,
registered; so many close notes, as who should say, on the particular vision
of the matter itself that experience had at last made the only possible one.
What it would be really interesting, and I dare say
admirably difficult, to go into would be the very history of this effect of
experience; the history, in other words, of the growth of the immense array
of terms, perceptional and expressional, that, after the fashion I have
indicated, in sentence, passage and page, simply looked over the heads of
the standing terms – or perhaps rather, like alert winged
creatures, perched on those diminished summits and aspired to a clearer air.
What it comes back to, for the maturer mind – granting of course, to
begin with, a mind accessible to questions of such an order – is this
attaching speculative interest of the matter, or in vulgar parlance the
inordinate intellectual ‘sport’ of it: the how and the whence and
the why these intenser lights of experience come into being and insist on
shining. The interest of the question is attaching, as I say, because really
half the artist’s life seems involved in it – or doubtless, to
speak more justly, the whole of his life intellectual. The ‘old’
matter is there, re-accepted, re-tasted, exquisitely re-assimilated and
re-enjoyed – believed in, to be brief, with the same ‘old’
grateful faith (since wherever the faith, in a particular case, has become
aware of a twinge of doubt I have simply concluded against the matter itself
and left it out); yet for due testimony, for re-assertion of value,
perforating as by some strange and fine, some latent and gathered force, a
myriad more adequate channels. It is over the fact of such a phenomenon and
its so possibly rich little history that I am moved just fondly to linger
– and for the reason I glanced at above, that to do so is in a manner
to retrace the whole growth of one’s ‘taste’, as our fathers
used to say: a blessed comprehensive name for many of the things deepest in
us. The ‘taste’ of the poet is, at bottom and so far as the poet
in him prevails over everything else, his active sense of life: in
accordance with which truth to keep one’s hand on it is to hold the
silver clue to the whole labyrinth of his consciousness. He feels this
himself, good man – he recognises an attached importance –
whenever he feels that consciousness bristle with the notes, as I have
called them, of consenting re-perusal; as has again and again publicly
befallen him, to our no small edification, on occasions within recent view.
It has befallen him most frequently, I recognise, when the supersessive
terms of his expression have happened to be verse; but that
does n’t in the least isolate his case, since it is clear to the
most limited intelligence that the title we give him is the only title of
general application and convenience for those who
passionately cultivate the image of life and the art, on the whole so
beneficial, of projecting it. The seer and speaker under the descent of the
god is the ‘poet’, whatever his form, and he ceases to be one only
when his form, whatever else it may nominally or superficially or vulgarly
be, is unworthy of the god: in which event, we promptly submit, he
is n’t worth talking of at all. He becomes so worth it, and the
god so adopts him, and so confirms his charming office and name, in the
degree in which his impulse and passion are general and comprehensive –
a definitional provision for them that makes but a mouthful of so minor a
distinction, in the fields of light, as that between verse and prose.
The circumstance that the poets then, and the more
charming ones, have in a number of instances, with existing matter
in hand, ‘registered’ their renewals of vision, attests quite
enough the attraction deeply working whenever the mind is, as I have said,
accessible – accessible, that is, to the finer appeal of accumulated
‘good stuff’ and to the interest of taking it in hand at all. For
myself, I am prompted to note, the ‘taking’ has been to my
consciousness, through the whole procession of this re-issue, the least part
of the affair: under the first touch of the spring my hands were to feel
themselves full; so much more did it become a question, on the part of the
accumulated good stuff, of seeming insistently to give and give. I have
alluded indeed to certain lapses of that munificence – or at least to
certain connexions in which I found myself declining to receive again on
any terms; but for the rest the sense of receiving has borne me
company without a break; a luxury making for its sole condition that I
should intelligently attend. The blest good stuff, sitting up, in its myriad
forms, so touchingly responsive to new care of any sort whatever, seemed to
pass with me a delightful bargain, and in the fewest possible words.
“Actively believe in us and then you’ll see!” – it
was n’t more complicated than that, and yet was to become as
thrilling as if conditioned on depth within depth. I saw therefore what I
saw, and what these numerous pages record,
I trust, with clearness; though one element of fascination tended all the
while to rule the business – a fascination, at each stage of my
journey, on the noted score of that so shifting and uneven character of
the tracks of my original passage. This by itself introduced the charm of
suspense: what would the operative terms, in the given case, prove, under
criticism, to have been – a series of waiting satisfactions or an array
of waiting misfits? The misfits had but to be positive and concordant, in
the special intenser light, to represent together (as the two sides of a
coin show different legends) just so many effective felicities and
substitutes. But I could n’t at all, in general, forecast these
chances and changes and proportions; they could but show for what they were
as I went; criticism after the fact was to find in them arrests and
surprises, emotions alike of disappointment and of elation: all of which
means, obviously, that the whole thing was a living affair.
The rate at which new readings, new conductors of sense
interposed, to make any total sense at all right, became, to this wonderful
tune, the very record and mirror of the general adventure of one’s
intelligence; so that one at all times quite marvelled at the fair reach,
the very length of arm, of such a developed difference of measure as to what
might and what might n’t constitute, all round, a due decency of
‘rendering’. What I have been most aware of asking myself,
however, is how writers, on such occasions of ‘revision’, arrive
at that successful resistance to the confident assault of the new reading
which appears in the great majority of examples to have marked their course.
The term that superlatively, that finally ‘renders’, is a flower
that blooms by a beautiful law of its own (the fiftieth part of a second
often so sufficing it) in the very heart of the gathered sheaf; it is
there already, at any moment, almost before one can either miss
or suspect it – so that in short we shall never guess, I think, the
working secret of the revisionist for whom its colour and scent stir the air
but as immediately to be assimilated. Failing our divination, too, we shall
apparently not otherwise learn, for the simple reason that no revisionist I
can recall has ever been communicative. “People don’t do such
things,” we remember to have heard it, in this connexion, declared; in
other words they don’t really re-read – no, not really;
at least they do so to the effect either of seeing the buried, the latent
life of a past composition vibrate, at renewal of touch, into no activity
and break through its settled and ‘sunk’ surface at no point
whatever – on which conclusion, I hasten to add, the situation remains
simple and their responsibility may lie down beside their work even as the
lion beside the lamb; or else they have in advance and on system stopped
their ears, their eyes and even their very noses. This latter heroic policy
I find myself glancing at, however, to wonder in what particular cases
– failing, as I say, all the really confessed – it can have been
applied. The actual non-revisionists (on any terms) are of course numerous
enough, and with plenty to say for themselves; their faith, clearly, is
great, their lot serene and their peace, above all, equally protected and
undisturbed. But the tantalising image of the revisionist who
is n’t one, the partial, the piecemeal revisionist, inconsequent
and insincere, this obscure and decidedly
louche
personage hovers before me mainly, I think, but to challenge my belief.
Where have we met him, when it comes to that, in the walks of interesting
prose literature, and why assume that we have to believe in him
before we are absolutely forced?
If I turn for relief and contrast to some image of
his opposite I at once encounter it, and with a completeness that leaves
nothing to be desired, on any ‘old’ ground, in presence of any
‘old’ life, in the vast example of
Balzac.
He (and these things, as we know, grew behind him at an extraordinary rate)
re-assaulted by supersessive terms, re-penetrated by finer channels, never
had on the one hand seen or said all or had on the other ceased to press
forward. His case has equal mass and authority – and beneath its
protecting shade, at any rate, I move for the brief remainder of these
remarks. We owe to the never-extinct operation of his sensibility, we have
but meanwhile to recall, our greatest exhibition of felt finalities, our
richest and hugest inheritance
of imaginative prose. That by itself might intensify for me the interest
of this general question of the reviving and reacting vision –
did n’t my very own lucky experience, all so publicly incurred,
give me, as my reader may easily make out, quite enough to think of. I
almost lose myself, it may perhaps seem to him, in that obscure quantity;
obscure doubtless because of its consisting of the manifold delicate things,
the shy and illusive, the inscrutable, the indefinable, that minister to
deep and quite confident processes of change. It is enough, in any event, to
be both beguiled and mystified by evolutions so near home, without sounding
strange and probably even more abysmal waters. Since, however, an agreeable
flurry and an imperfect presence of mind might, on the former ground, still
be such a source of refreshment, so the constant refrain humming through
the agitation, “If only one could re-write, if only one
could do better justice to the patches of crude surface, the poor
morsels of consciously-decent matter that catch one’s eye with their
rueful reproach for old stupidities of touch!” – so that yearning
reflexion, I say, was to have its superlative as well as its positive
moments. It was to reach its maximum, no doubt, over many of the sorry
businesses of
The American,
for instance, where, given the elements and the essence, the long-stored
grievance of the subject bristling with a sense of over-prolonged exposure
in a garment misfitted, a garment cheaply embroidered and unworthy of it,
thereby most proportionately sounded their plaint. This sharpness of appeal,
the claim for exemplary damages, or at least for poetic justice, was reduced
to nothing, on the other hand, in presence of the altogether better literary
manners of
The ambassadors
and
The golden bowl
– a list I might much extend by the mention of several shorter pieces.
Inevitably, in such a case as that of
The American,
and scarce less indeed in those of
The portrait of a lady
and
The Princess Casamassima,
each of these efforts so redolent of good intentions baffled by a
treacherous vehicle, an expertness too retarded, I could but dream the
whole thing over as I went – as I read; and, bathing it, so to speak,
in that medium, hope that, some still newer and shrewder critic’s
intelligence subtly operating, I should n’t have breathed upon
the old catastrophes and accidents, the old wounds and mutilations and
disfigurements, wholly in vain. The same is true of the possible effect of
this process of re-dreaming on many of these gathered compositions, shorter
and longer; I have prayed that the finer air of the better form may
sufficiently seem to hang about them and gild them over – at least for
readers, however few, at all curious of questions of air and form.
Nothing even at this point, and in these quite final remarks, I confess,
could strike me as more pertinent than – with a great wealth of margin
– to attempt to scatter here a few gleams of the light in which some
of my visions have all sturdily and complacently repeated and others have,
according to their kind and law, all joyously and blushingly renewed
themselves. These have doubtless both been ways of remaining unshamed;
though, for myself, on the whole, as I seem to make out, the interest of the
watched renewal has been livelier than that of the accepted repetition. What
has the affair been at the worst, I am most moved to ask, but an earnest
invitation to the reader to dream again in my company and in the interest of
his own larger absorption of my sense? The prime consequence on one’s
own part of re-perusal is a sense for ever so many more of the shining
silver fish afloat in the deep sea of one’s endeavour than the net of
widest casting could pretend to gather in; an author’s common courtesy
dictating thus the best general course for making that sense contagious
– so beautifully tangled a web, when not so glorious a crown, does he
weave by having at heart, and by cherishing there, the confidence he has
invited or imagined. There is then absolutely no release to his pledged
honour on the question of repaying that confidence.
The ideally handsome way is for him to multiply in any
given connexion all the possible sources of entertainment – or, more
grossly expressing it again, to intensify his whole chance of pleasure. (It
all comes back to that, to my and your ‘fun’ – if we but
allow the term its full extension; to the production of which no humblest
question involved,
even to that of the shade of a cadence or the position of a comma, is not
richly pertinent.) We have but to think a moment of such a matter as the
play of representational values, those that make it a part, and
an important part, of our taking offered things in that we should take them
as aspects and visibilities – take them to the utmost as appearances,
images, figures, objects, so many important, so many contributive items of
the furniture of the world – in order to feel immediately the effect
of such a condition at every turn of our adventure and every point of the
representative surface. One has but to open the door to any forces of
exhibition at all worthy of the name in order to see the imaging and
qualifying agency called at once into play and put on its mettle. We may
traverse acres of pretended exhibitory prose from which the touch that
directly evokes and finely presents, the touch that operates for closeness
and for charm, for conviction and illusion, for communication, in a word,
is unsurpassably absent. All of which but means of course that the reader
is, in the common phrase, ‘sold’ – even when, poor passive
spirit, systematically bewildered and bamboozled on the article of his dues,
he may be but dimly aware of it. He has by the same token and for the most
part, I fear, a scarce quicker sensibility on other heads, least of all
perhaps on such a matter as his really quite swindled state when the pledge
given for his true beguilement fails to ensure him that fullest experience
of his pleasure which waits but on a direct reading out of the
addressed appeal. It is scarce necessary to note that the highest test of
any literary form conceived in the light of ‘poetry’ – to
apply that term in its largest literary sense – hangs back unpardonably
from its office when it fails to lend itself to viva voce treatment.
We talk here, naturally, not of non-poetic forms, but of those whose
highest bid is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and the
æsthetic vision, the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, an
incalculable art. The essential property of such a form as that is to
give out its finest and most numerous secrets, and to give them out most
gratefully, under the closest pressure – which is of course the
pressure
of the attention articulately sounded. Let it reward as much as
it will and can the soundless, the ‘quiet’ reading, it still
deplorably ‘muffs’ its chance and its success, still trifles with
the roused appetite to which it can never honestly be indifferent, by not
having so arranged itself as to owe the flower of its effect to the act and
process of apprehension that so beautifully asks most from it. It then
infallibly, and not less beautifully, most responds; for I have nowhere
found vindicated the queer thesis that the right values of interesting prose
depend all on withheld tests – that is on its being, for very pity and
shame, but skimmed and scanted, shuffled and mumbled.
Gustave Flaubert
has somewhere in this connexion an
excellent word
– to the effect that
any imaged prose that fails to be richly rewarding in return for a competent
utterance ranks itself as wrong through not being ‘in the conditions
of life’. The more we remain in them, all round, the more
pleasure we dispense; the moral of which is – and there would be fifty
other pertinent things to say about this – that I have found revision
intensify at every step my impulse intimately to answer, by my light, to
those conditions.
All of which amounts doubtless but to saying that as
the whole conduct of life consists of things done, which do other things
in their turn, just so our behaviour and its fruits are essentially one
and continuous and persistent and unquenchable, so the act has its way of
abiding and showing and testifying, and so, among our innumerable acts, are
no arbitrary, no senseless separations. The more we are capable of acting
the less gropingly we plead such differences; whereby, with any capability,
we recognise betimes that to ‘put’ things is very exactly and
responsibly and interminably to do them. Our expression of them, and the
terms on which we understand that, belong as nearly to our conduct and our
life as every other feature of our freedom; these things yield in fact some
of its most exquisite material to the religion of doing. More than that,
our literary deeds enjoy this marked advantage over many of our acts, that,
though they go forth into the world and stray even in the desert, they
don’t to
the same extent lose themselves; their attachment and reference to us,
however strained, need n’t necessarily lapse – while of the
tie that binds us to them we may make almost anything we like.
We are condemned, in other words, whether we will or no, to abandon and
outlive, to forget and disown and hand over to desolation, many vital or
social performances – if only because the traces, records, connexions,
the very memorials we would fain preserve, are practically impossible to
rescue for that purpose from the general mixture. We give them up even when
we would n’t – it is not a question of choice. Not so on the
other hand our really ‘done’ things of this superior and more
appreciable order – which leave us indeed all licence of disconnexion
and disavowal, but positively impose on us no such necessity. Our relation
to them is essentially traceable, and in that fact abides, we feel, the
incomparable luxury of the artist. It rests altogether with himself not to
break with his values, not to ‘give away’ his importances. Not to
be disconnected, for the tradition of behaviour, he has but to
feel that he is not; by his lightest touch the whole chain of relation and
responsibility is reconstituted. Thus if he is always doing he can scarce,
by his own measure, ever have done. All of which means for him conduct with
a vengeance, since it is conduct minutely and publicly attested. Our noted
behaviour at large may show for ragged, because it perpetually escapes our
control; we have again and again to consent to its appearing in undress
– that is in no state to brook criticism. But on all the ground to
which the pretension of performance by a series of exquisite laws may apply
there reigns one sovereign truth – which decrees that, as art is
nothing if not exemplary, care nothing if not active, finish nothing if not
consistent, the proved error is the base apologetic deed, the helpless
regret is the barren commentary, and ‘connexions’ are employable
for finer purposes than mere gaping contrition.
end of the prefaces
part of an etext edition of the
prefaces to the New York edition
of Henry James
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website