It is only offensive to tiresome realistic people, void of humour as they are void of imagination, this sweet psychological persiflage. To such persons it may even seem a little ridiculous that _everybody_ --from retired American Millionaires down to the quaintest of Hertfordshire old maids--should utter their sentiments in this same manner. But such objectors are too pig-headed and stupid to understand the rudimentary conventions of art, or those felicitous "illusions," which, as Charles Lamb reminds us in speaking of some sophisticated old English actors, are a kind of pleasant challenge from the intelligent comedian to his intelligent audience.
One very delicate and dainty device of Henry James is his trick of placing "inverted commas" round even the most harmless of colloquialisms. This has a curiously distinguished and refined effect.
It seems constantly to say to his readers.--"one knows very well, _we_ know very well, how ridiculous and vulgar all this is; but there are certain things that cannot be otherwise expressed!" It creates a sort of scholarly "rapport"--this use of commas--between the gentility of the author and the a.s.sumed gentility of the reader, taking the latter into a kind of amiable partnership in ironic superiority.
I say "gentility"--but that is not exactly the word; for there is not the remotest trace of sn.o.bbishness in Henry James. It is rather that he indicates to a small inner circle of intellectually detached persons, his recognition of their fastidiousness and their prejudices, and his sly humorous consciousness of the gulf between their cla.s.sical mode of speech and the casual lapses of ordinary human conversation.
In spite of all his detachment no novelist diffuses his personal temperament so completely through his work as Henry James does.
In this sense--in the sense of temperamental style--he is far more personal than Balzac and incomparably more so than Turgenief.
One does not, in reading these great authors, savour the actual style on every page, in every sentence. We have large blank s.p.a.ces, so to speak, of straightforward colourless narrative. But there are no "blank s.p.a.ces" in Henry James. Every sentence is penetrated and heavy with the fragrance of his peculiar grace. One might almost say--so strong is this subjective element in the great objective aesthete--that James writes novels like an essayist, like some epicurean Walter Pater, suddenly grown interested in common humanity, and finding in the psychology of ordinary people a provocation and a stimulus as insidious and suggestive as in the lines and colours of mediaeval art. This _essayist att.i.tude_ accounts largely for those superior "inverted commas" which throw such a clear s.p.a.ce of ironic detachment round his characters and his scenes.
On the other hand, what a man he is for concealing his _opinions!_ Who can lay his finger on a single formal announcement of moral or philosophical partizanship in Henry James? Who can catch him for a moment declaring himself a conservative, a liberal, a Christian, a pagan, a pantheist, a pluralist, a socialist, a reactionary, a single taxer, a realist, a symbolist, an empiricist, a believer in ideals, a materialist, an advocate of New Thought, an esoteric Buddhist, an Hegelian, a Pragmatist, a Free Lover?
It would be possible to go over this formidable list of angles of human vision, and find evidence somewhere in his books sufficient to make him out an adherent of every one of them. Consider his use of the supernatural for instance. Hardly any modern writer makes so constant, so artistic a use of the machinery of the invisible world; and yet who would have the temerity to say that Henry James believed even so much as in ghosts?
I know nothing of Mr. James" formal religious views, or to what pious communion, if any, that brooding forehead and disillusioned eyes were wont to drift on days of devotion. But I cannot resist a secret fancy that it was to some old-fashioned and not too ritualistic Anglican church that he sometimes may have been met proceeding, in silk hat and well-polished shoes, at the close of a long Autumn afternoon, across the fallen leaves of Hyde Park!
There is an unction, a dreamy thrill about some of those descriptions of town and country churches in conventional England which would suggest that he had no secularistic aversion to these modest usages.
Perhaps, like Charles Darwin, he would have answered impertinent questions about his faith by pointing to just such patient unexcluding shrines of drowsy controversy-hating piety.
I cannot see him listening to modernistic rhetoric. I cannot see him prostrated before ritualistic revivals. But I can see him sitting placid and still, like a great well-groomed visitor in "Egypt and Morocco,"
listening pensively to some old-fashioned clergyman, whose goodness of heart redeems the innocence of his brain; while the mellow sunshine falls through the high windows upon the fair hair of Nanda or Aggie, or Mamie or Nina or Maud, thinking quiet thoughts in front of him.
It is strange how difficult it is to forget the personal appearance of this great man when one reads his works. What a head he had; what weight of ma.s.sive brooding bulk! When one thinks of the head of Henry James and the head of Oscar Wilde--both of them with something that suggests the cla.s.sical ages in their flesh-heavy contours--one is inclined to agree with Shakespeare"s Caesar in his suspicion of "lean men."
Think of the hara.s.sed and rat-like physiognomy of nearly all the younger writers of our day! Do their countenances suggest, as these of James and Wilde, that their pens will "drop fatness"? Can one not discern the envious eye, the serpent"s tongue, the scowl of the aggressive dissenter, the leer of the street urchin?
How excellent it is, in this modern world, to come upon the "equinimitas" of the great ages! After all, in the confused noises of our human arena, it is something to encounter an author who preserves restraint and dignity and urbanity. It is something more to encounter one who has, in the very depths of his soul, the ancient virtue of magnanimity.
This American visitor to Europe brings back to us those "good manners of the soul" which we were in danger of forgetting; and the more we read the writings of Henry James, the more fully we become aware that there is only one origin of this spiritual charm, this aristocratic grace; and that is a sensitive and n.o.ble heart.
The movement of literature at the present time is all towards action and adventure. This is right and proper in its place, and a good antidote to the tedious moralising of the past generation.
The influence of Nietzsche upon the spiritual plane, and that of the war upon the emotional plane, have thrown us violently out of the sphere of aesthetic receptivity into the sphere of heroic and laconic wrestling.
Short stories, short poems, short speeches, short questions, short answers, short pity and short shrift, are the order of the day. Far and far have we been tossed from the dreamy purlieus of his "great good place," with its long sunny hours under misty trees, and its interminable conversations upon smooth-cut lawns! The sweet psychology of terrace-walks is scattered, and the noise of the chariots and the hors.e.m.e.n breaks the magical stillness where lovers philosophised and philosophers loved.
But let none of the strenuous gentlemen, whose abrupt ways seem encouraged by this earthquake, congratulate themselves that refinement and beauty and distinction and toleration have left the world forever, for them to "bustle in." It is not for long. The sun does not stop shining or the dew cease falling or the fountains of rain dry up because of the cruelty of men. It is not for long. The "humanism" of Henry James, with its "still small voice," is bound to return. The stars in their courses fight for it. It is the pleasure of the consciousness of life itself; of the life that, whether with Washington Square, or Kensington Park, or the rosy campaniles of the Giudecca, or the minarets of Sacre-Coeur, or the roofs of Montmartre, or the herbaceous borders and shadowy terraces of English gardens, as its background, must flow and flow and flow, with its tender equivocations and its suppliance of wistful mystery, as long as men and women have any leisure to love or any intelligence to a.n.a.lyse their love!
He is an aristocrat, and he writes--better than any--of the aristocracy; and yet, in the long result, is it of his well-bred levities and of his pleasantly-housed, lightly-living people, that one comes to think? Is it not rather of those tragic and faded figures, figures of sensitive men and sensitive women for whom the world has no place, and of whom few--even among artists--speak or care to speak, with sympathy and understanding?
He has, just here, and in his own way, something of that sheer human pity for desolate and derelict spirits which breaks forth so savagely sometimes, and with so unexpected a pa.s.sion, from amid the brutalities and sensualities of Guy de Maupa.s.sant.
No one who has ever lived has written more tenderly or beautifully of what Charles Lamb would call "superannuated people." Old bachelors, living in a sort of romantic exile, among mementoes of a remote past; old maids, living in an attenuated dream of "what might have been," and playing heart-breaking tricks with their forlorn fancies; no one has dealt more generously, more imaginatively with such as these. He is a little cruel to them sometimes, but with a fine caressing cruelty which is a far greater tribute than indifference; and is there not, after all, a certain element of cruelty in every species of tender love?
Though more than any one capable of discerning rare and complicated issues, where to the vulgar mind all would seem grey and dull and profitless, Henry James has, and it is absurd not to admit it, a "penchant" for the abnormal and the bizarre. This element appears more often in the short stories than the longer ones, but it is never very far away.
I sometimes think that many of the gentle and pure-souled people who read this amiable writer go on their way through his pages without discerning this quiver, this ripple, this vibration, of "miching mallecho." On softly-stepping feline feet, the great sleek panther of psychological curiosity glides into very perverse, very dubious paths.
The exquisite tenuity and flexibility of his style, light as the flutter of a feather through the air, enable him to wander freely and at large where almost every other writer would trip and stumble in the mud.
It is one of the most interesting phenomena in literature, this sly, quiet, half ironic dalliance with equivocal matters.
Henry James can say things that no one else could say, and approach subjects that no one else could approach, simply by reason of the grave whimsical playfulness of his manner and the extraordinary malleableness of his evasive style. It is because his style can be as simple and clear as sunlight, and yet as airy and impalpable as the invisible wind, that he manages to achieve these results. He uses little words, little harmless innocent words, but by the connotation he gives them, and the way in which he softly flings them out, one by one, like dandelion seeds upon swiftly-sliding water, one is being continually startled into sharp arrested attention, as if--in the silence that follows their utterance--somebody, as the phrase goes, "stepped over one"s grave."
How dearly one grows to love all his dainty tricks of speech! That constant repet.i.tion of the word "wonderful"--of the word "beautiful"--how beautifully and wonderfully he works it up into a sort of tender chorus of little caressing cries over the astounding tapestry woven by the invisible fates! The charming way his people "drop" their little equivocal innocent-wicked retorts; "drop" them and "fling them out," and "sweetly hazard" them and "wonderfully wail" them, produces the same effect of balanced expectancy and suspended judgment that one derives from those ambiguous "so it might seems" of the wavering Platonic Dialogue.
The final impression left upon the mind after one closes one of these fascinating volumes is, it must be confessed, a little sad. So much ambiguity in human life--so much unnecessary suffering--so many mad, blind, wilful misunderstandings! A little sad--and yet, on the other hand, we remain fortified and sustained with a certain interior detachment.
After all, it is soon over--the whole motley farce--and, while it lasts, nothing in it matters so very greatly, or at any rate matters enough to disturb our amus.e.m.e.nt, our good-temper, our toleration. Nothing matters so very greatly. And yet everything--each of us, as we try to make our difficult meanings clear, the meanings of our hidden souls, and each of these meanings themselves as we stammer them forth to one another--matters so "wonderfully," so "beautifully"!
The tangled thread of our days may be knotted and twisted; but, after all, if we have the magnanimity to let off lightly those "who trespa.s.s against us" we have not learnt our aesthetic lesson of regarding the whole business of life as a complicated Henry James story, altogether in vain.
We have come to regard the world as a more or less amusing Spectacle, without forgetting to be decently considerate of the other shadows in the gilt-framed mirror!
Perhaps, in our final estimate of him, what emerges most definitely as Henry James" _doctrine_ is the height and depth and breadth of the gulf which separates those who have taste and sensitiveness from those who have none. That is the "motif" of the "Spoils of Poynton," and I do not know any one of all his books more instinct with his peculiar spiritual essence.
Below every other controversy and struggle in the world is the controversy between those who possess this secret of "The Finer Grain" and those who have it not. There can be no reconciliation, no truce, no "rapport" between these. At best there can be only mitigated hostility on the one side, and ironical submission on the other. The world is made after this fashion and after no other, and the best policy is to follow our great artists and turn the contrast between the two into a cause of aesthetic entertainment.
Duality rules the universe. If it were not for the fools there would be no wisdom. If it were not for those who could never understand him, there could be no Henry James.
One comes at any rate to see, from the exquisite success upon us of this author"s method, how futile it is, in this world whereof the beginning and the end are dreams, to bind an artist down to tedious and photographic reality.
People do not and perhaps never will--even in archetypal Platonic drawing-rooms--converse with one another quite so goldenly; or tell the amber-coloured beads of their secret psychology with quite so felicitous an unction. What matter? It is the prerogative of fine and great art to create, by its shaping and formative imagination, new and impossible worlds for our enjoyment.
And the world created by Henry James is like some cla.s.sic Arcadia of psychological beauty--some universal Garden of Versailles unprofaned by the noises of the crowd--where among the terraces and fountains delicate Watteau-like figures move and whisper and make love in a soft artificial fairy moonlight dimmed and tinted with the shadows of pa.s.sions and misty with the rain of tender regrets; human figures without name or place. For who remembers the names of these sweet phantoms or the t.i.tles of their "great good places" in this hospitable fairy-land of the hara.s.sed sensitive ones of the earth; where courtesy is the only law of existence and good taste the only moral code?
OSCAR WILDE
The words he once used about himself--"I am a symbolic figure"
--remain to this day the most significant thing that can be said of Oscar Wilde.
It is given to very few men of talent, this peculiar privilege--this privilege of being greater in what might be called the _shadow of their personality_ than in any actual literary or artistic achievement --and Wilde possesses it in a degree second to none.
"My genius is in my life," he said on another occasion, and the words are literally and most fatally true.
In the confused controversies of the present age it is difficult to disentangle the main issues; but it seems certain that side by side with political and economic divisions, there is a gulf growing wider and wider every day between the adherents of what might be called the h.e.l.lenic Renaissance and the inert, suspicious, unintelligent mob; that mob the mud of whose heavy traditions is capable of breeding, at one and the same time, the most crafty hypocrisy and the most stupid brutality.
It would be hardly a true statement to say that the Renaissance referred to--this modern Renaissance, not less formidable than the historic revolt which bears that name--is an insurrection of free spirits against Christianity. It is much rather a reversion to a humane and cla.s.sic reasonableness as opposed to mob-stupidity and middle-cla.s.s philistinism--things which only the blundering of centuries of popular misapprehension could a.s.sociate with the sublime and the imaginative figure of Christ.
It is altogether a mistake to a.s.sume that in "De Profundis" Wilde retracted his cla.s.sic protest and bowed his head once more in the house of Rimmon.
What he did was to salute, in the name of the aesthetic freedom he represented, those enduring elements of human loveliness and beauty in that figure which three hundred years of hypocritical puritanism have proved unable to tarnish. What creates the peculiar savagery of hatred which his name has still the power to conjure up among the enemies of civilisation has little to do with the ambiguous causes of his final downfall. These, of course, gave him up, bound hand and foot, into their hands. But these, though the overt excuse of their rancour, are far from being its real motive-force. To reach that we must look to the nature of the formidable weapon which it was his habit, in season and out of season, to use against this mob-rule--I mean his sense of humour.
The stupid middle-cla.s.s obscurantism, so alien to all humane reasonableness, which, in our Anglo-Saxon communities, masquerades under the cloak of a pa.s.sionate and imaginative religion, is more sensitive to ridicule than to any other form of attack, and Wilde attacked it mercilessly with a ridicule that cut to the bone.
They are not by any means of equal value, these epigrams of his, with which he defended intelligence against stupidity and cla.s.sical light against Gothic darkness.
They are not as humorous as Voltaire"s. They are not as philosophical as Goethe"s. Compared with the aphorisms of these masters they are light and frivolous. But for this very reason perhaps, they serve the great cause--the cause of humane and enlightened civilisation--better in our age of vulgar mob-rule than more recondite "logoi."