EXPERIENCE DISENGAGED:
HENRY IAMES’S USE
OF THE ROMANCE

Thesis for the Degree of Ph. D.

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
DENNIS S. GARN
1970

 

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EXPERIENCE DISENGAGED:
HENRY JAMES'S USE OF THE ROMANCE

presented by

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ABSTRACT

a EXPERIENCE DISENGAGED:
HENRY JAMES'S USE
OF THE ROMANCE

BY (x
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Dennis S’SQ‘ Garn

,- Henry James has long been regarded as an eminent

    
  
  
  
  
  
    
 
 
   
      

writer of American literary realism. What few readers and
critics have realized is that James makes quite explicit use
of the conventions of the romance. The focus of this study
is on James's use of the romance particularly as it shapes
his early fiction. The purpose of this paper is to illus-
trate: (1) that James uses elements of the romance in ways
that are essential to his works; (2) that the romance in
James's work is not limited to any specific period of his I
development--one can therefore find elements of the ro-
mance adding texture to the late or "vintage" James; (3)
that Jamea's realism is enhanced by his use of the romance

hicause at no time does James regard the realistic novel

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Dennis S. Garn

The basic method of analysis used in this study was
to apply James's own definition of the romance as "exper—
ience disengaged" to his fiction. The first chapter of the
study defines the problem of the artist having to reconcile
the demands of the romantic and realistic modes. Each of
the subsequent chapters is an attempt to show James working
toward that reconciliation. In the chapters on Roderick
Hudson, The American and The Europeans, the study shows
James using the conventions of the romance essentially as
structural devices with the emphasis upon incident and
action. The chapter on The Portrait of a Lady reveals an
important shift in James's art from an emphasis upon inci-
dent to an emphasis on character. Once the shift occurs
the romance in James's art becomes less a part of structure
or plot and much more a part of his development of charac—
ter through the point of view of a center of consciousness.
From this point on the conventions of the romance function
to give texture to James's art, not primarily to shape the
text.

The last chapter focuses on The Ambassadors and
The Golden Bowl as representatives of James's late style.
The purpose of looking at James's late novels is to support

;the thesis that James uses the elements of the romance
throughout his literary career. All his life James worked
at presenting a full picture of life. In his attempt to

reconcile the demands of the romantic and realistic modes,

life

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_ EN discovered that a full picture of life requires both

,.:“'lir of romance“ and the depiction of the "whole matter
ithe element of reality." Consequently the elements

I”? the romance are present in the later novels and their

’ ihnction is primarily to give texture to James's picture

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EXPERIENCE DISENGAGED: ‘
HENRY JAMES'S USE
or THE ROMANCE W “

By X

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Dennis S. Garn

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

1970

 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deepest and sincerest thanks go to Professor
Clyde Henson who has been more than a chairman of my com-
mittee; he has been a friend. It was largely-his own in-
terest in the broad patterns of the romance in fiction
that precipitated my study of James's use of the romance.
Certainly no one could have been better qualified to direct
such a study specifically in relation to James's fiction.

Additional appreciation and thanks go to Professors
Russell Nye and James Pickering for serving on my commit-
tee, for reading the thesis and for making helpful sugges-
tions. To Professor Delvin Covey, once a colleague of
mine, I give my warm regards for the innumerable ways in
which he encouraged and aided me during my study. And
finally, my special thanks to my wife, Beth Ann, for her
patient endurance and for her typing of all but the final

draft of the thesis.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

  
     

Chapter Page
I. THE ROMANCE DEFINED . . . . . . . . . l

RODERICK HUDSON: THE ROMANCE AS KUNSTLERRO-
MAN--THE DILEMMA OF THE ARTIST-HERO . . . 23

THE AMERICAN: PURE ROMANCE . . . . . . 58
IV. THE EUROPEANS: THE ROMANCE AS SOCIAL COMEDY. 97 ‘ 1‘.

V. THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY: THE ROMANCE IN TRAN- 9W:
SITION o o o c o o c c o a o o o 124 ; 1

VI. THE LATE NOVELS: THE ROMANCE--FROM TEXT TO ‘*1
TEXTUm . O D I O O I O O O O I I 14 8 ‘

CONCLUSIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
sssnrocnapny . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 N“

 

 

  

 

CHAPTER I

THE ROMANCE DEFINED

Critics of Henry James generally discuss him as a
writer of realistic fiction. Relatively few critics have
written about the non-realistic element in his fiction—-
the romance. Those who have written concerning the presence
of the romance generally fall into one of the following
categories: (1) Those who merely acknowledge the romance
as if it were a superficial part either of the work itself
or of the James canon in total; (2) those who regard the
romance in James as simply his use of traditions and con-
ventions directly or indirectly associated with the ro-
mance--for example, the Gothic tradition, pastoral imagery,
and conventional character types. These critics also tend
to regard the romance in James as the offspring of the
ghost story; (3) those who discuss the romance in a par-
ticular tale or novel-—for example The American——as excep-
tions in the canon to the Jamesian technique; (4) and those
who loosely designate anything as romantic that is not

part of the objective method of the realist.

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All of these definitions of the romance are of

course essentially accurate. I do not intend to discount
them and dogmatically redefine James's use of the romance.

I do intend, however, to add to these considerations James's
own definition and the patterns of experience his definition
suggests. In the Preface to The.American James defines the
romance:

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 pattern of the romance that is most consistent with
James's definition is a pattern that is both common to man
and symbolic of the experiences of mankind. In the terms

of Scholes and Kellog, James wants to "illustrate" reality
and, at the same time, "represent" reality.2 The connection
between the fictional world and the real world, as Scholes
and Kellog suggest, can be either representational or illus-
trative:

The images in a narrative may strike us at once as an
attempt to create a replica of actuality just as the
images in certain paintings or works of sculpture may,
or they may strike us as an attempt merely to remind
us of an aspect of reality rather than convey a total
and convincing impression of the real world to us, as
certain kinds of visual art also do. That kind of art,
literary or plastic, which seeks to duplicate reality
we will designate by the work 'represent' in its var—
ious forms. For that kind of art which seeks only to
suggest an aspect of reality we will use the word 'il-
lustrate.’

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Because James wants to give a full picture of life he uses
techniques that are representational and illustrative, or,
in other words, the techniques of the romance within his
realistic fiction.

The characteristics of the romance can be generally
defined in a way that is consistent with James's use of the
romance. The first criteria is a hero who is disenchanted
with his home or homeland. James typically describes the
hero briefly in his setting in order to provide a basis for
a later contrast with the lands the hero visits. Secondly,
when the hero leaves home he undertakes a trip during which
he inevitably encounters a strange environment. It is in
the new culture that the hero finds his strengths tested.
Without the familiar ties of his homeland, the hero is left
completely upon his own resources. In one sense, the ro-
mance is a study of the experiences of a person who has
disengaged himself from his familiar environment in order
to pursue his education elsewhere. In another sense, the
romance is a journey through life during which the hero
travels from youth to manhood, from innocence to experience.
Thirdly, the tests which the hero encounters (often three
in number) help him to discover himself and the nature of
experience. In more primitive forms of the romance such as
the fairy-tale the tests require the discovery of some
magical "key" before the hero is successful. In the ro-
mance the technique of the discovery still prevails. How-

ever, the discovery is less magical and more within the

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normal course of human capabilities. At any rate, the dis-
covery technique enables the hero to overcome the last ob-
stacle, at which point the plot of the story is soon re-
solved. Another essential part of the series of tests is
a retreat to nature during which the hero prepares for the
next encounter. The counterpart in James's work of the re-
treat to nature is the meditation scene--a scene very much
in keeping with the type of test James's heroes confront.
Finally, in the romance the hero tends to resolve his
series of tests in a successful, triumphant manner. Like
the comedy, the romance moves toward the integration of
the hero into a new society. characteristically, the mar-
riage is the appropriate symbol of the resolution of the
romance. Because James's hero does not encounter the con-
ventional physical foe, and encounters instead types of
experiences which test his moral and intellectual capaci—
ties, his triumph may best be understood as a moral one.
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate (1) that
James uses elements of the romance in ways that are essential
to his work; (2) that the romance in James's work is not
limited to any specific work or period of his development.
Therefore one can find elements of the romance in the late
or "vintage" James; (3) that James's realism is enhanced
by his use of the romance because at no time does James
regard the realistic novel and the romance as totally ex-

clusive literary forms. In his Preface to The American

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James says that "it is as difficult . . . to trace the
dividing-line between the real and the romantic as to
plant a milestone between north and south."4
At no time in this paper do I intend to make James
out to be only a writer of the romance. I intend to dis-
cuss James's use of the romance always as it complements
and relates to his realistic techniques. Never in his
literary career does James allow the romantic genre to dic-
tate the form his fiction was to take. He uses the romance,
as any superb craftsman should, as a means to imaginative
ends.
The greatest problem in discussing James's use of
the romance in its relation to the realism of the novel is
that of reconciling the subjectivity of the romance to the
objectivity of the realistic novel, and, at the same time,
illustrating how these two approaches to fiction writing can
serve to complement each other. The most difficult technical
problem for the writer of realistic fiction is to find the
way to objectify his material so that the reader has a di-
rect confrontation with the experience of the literature.
He must, in Joyce's terms, find a way of "refining himself
out of existence," of staying out of the world he is creat-
ing. It is a difficult problem because, in a sense, all
literature ultimately assumes an omniscient author. If the
realistic writer is going to objectify at all his role in
the presentation of a fictional world, he should therefore

avoid any technique that suggests an authorial intrusion.

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How can James possibly use the subjectivity of the
romance and meet the demands of realistic fiction at the
same time? All his life James sought to give a full pic-
ture of reality. To do so, he discovered that one needed
to use more than just the empirical approach of realistic
fiction. In order to convey a sense of "felt" experience,
James employs the subjectivity of the romance. In another
sense, the answer to the question is found in James's mas-
terful technique of allowing the romance and its conven-
tions to serve as an on—the-scene guide for the reader.
Because James adapts the romance and its conventions so
appropriately to the modern world and because the reader
Vrecognizes these familiar patterns of human experience, the
reader is led somewhat unsuspectingly through a strangely
familiar world. Even in The American, a novel in which
the point of view is often omniscient, James's use of the
romance and his certainty that the reader recognizes the
pattern of the romance allows him to fade into the back-
ground of the novel. In other words, James's employment
of literary conventions heightens his objectivity and en-
hances his picture of life.

Most of this paper is an analysis of the early
novels of James in which I attempt to show that James
relies quite heavily upon the romance and its conventions
for the structure of his novels. In Chapter II the empha-

sis is largely on Roderick Hudson as a kunstlerroman and

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Specifically as an enlargement of the type of dilemma faced
by the artist-hero Benvolio. Roderick has to choose between
two demands of art--the romantic and the realistic. To com-
plicate his dilemma he is part of a conventional love tri-

angle. The structure of the novel is built around the rela—

   
  
 
   
   
    
   
  
   
  

tions of the persons of the triangle. At the point in the
novel where the triangle changes to include Christina Light
instead of Mary Garland, there is a significant change in
Roderick's conception of his role as artist and his creation
of art. In effect, James uses a structural change in the
novel as an important device for characterization of Roder-
ick. When Roderick shifts his affections from Mary Garland,
the picture of Puritan simplicity and frugality, to the ad-
venturess Christina Light, he suddenly loses his innocence
of character and the integrity of his art. The pursuit of
the beautiful Christina leads to his spiritual and physical
disintegration. Christina turns out to be one of James's
American expatriates who has lost her native American inno-
cence; she has acquired the air of European sophistocation
without its substance. Mary Garland, on the other hand,
whose "earthiness" makes her a rather uninteresting charac-
ter, remains dutiful to the end and represents the potential
in James's fiction of the best possible love relation--one
which is based on freedom, not on demands and restrictions.
When Mary agrees to let Rowland Mallet take Roderick to

Europe with him, she admonishes him only with the statement,

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"make him do his best." This statement is best understood
when one sees the selfish demands of Christina Light and

recognizes her as one of the evil characters in James--one
of those whose livlihood thrives upon the souls of others.

Chapter III on The American is the longest chapter

      

in this paper because in this novel James comes the closest
to writing pure romance. In the Preface to The American
Janms discusses the definition of the romance, the role of
the romancer, and the relation between the romance and the
novel.

When the germ of The American came to him, James was
not aware, as he was to say later, that he had been plotting
"arch-romance."5 The germ came to him as that of "an aris-
tocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled
and betrayed, some cruelly wronged compatriot, the point
being that he should suffer at the hands of persons pretend-
ing to represent the highest possible civilisation and to
be of an order in every way superior to his own."6 The
structure of The American is built on a conventional roman-
tic situation--the affront done Christopher Newman as a
lover. Yet, James says, "not that done by his mistress
herself, since injuries of this order are the stalest stuff
of romance."7 Interestingly enough, James compares the
fate of Newman and Madame de Cintré to that of Romeo and

Juliet.

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The American illustrates his approach to the romance as
a genre that allows him a great deal of freedom. This free-
dom in the romance becomes apparent in James's emphasis
upon the archetypal nature of the experience with which
the romance deals. Hence, the romance contains a truth
tfliat is both common and real to the experiences of all man-
lcind. When James analyzes his role in The American as that
of the romancer, he implicitly suggests the need for both
the romantic and the realistic in his work:
The art of the romance is, 'for the fun of it,' insidi-
ously to cut the cable [of realistic experience], to cut
it without our detecting him. What I have recognized
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.
The rest of Chapter III deals with Christopher New-
man as a conventional romantic hero in typical romantic
trials, whose triumph over the Bellegardes is romantic in
spite of the realistic resolution of the plot. Newman's
triumph is romantic because his superior moral nature as-
serts itself in the end. The resolution is realistic be-
cause the novel does not end, as a romance should, with the
marriage of Newman and Madame de Cintré--much to the dismay
of the sentimental reader. It is realistic because it does
not have the conventional happy-ever-after ending.

The fourth chapter is an analysis of The Europeans

showing the unifying thesis to be that of the romance as

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social comedy. The structure of this novel is also essen-
tially romantic. It moves toward the integration of a
new society made up by a number of marriages which take
place only after the younger generation and the older gener-
ation can reconcile their differences. Most of the charac-
ters are conventional types. The setting is largely pas-
toral. The major theme is a reversal of James's usual
treatment of the international situation. It is a varia-
tion of the basic fairy tale of the country mouse going to
visit the city mouse, only the city mouse in this case hap-
pens to be the sophisticated Europeans going to visit their
country cousins. Within this framework James analyzes the
nature of experience when a traditional, sophisticated cul-
ture meets an innocent, rustic culture.

Because the balance between the romantic and the
real in The Portrait of a Lady is most delicate, Chapter V
is an important chapter. The controlling idea of this chap-
ter is James's art in transition. In some respects the
structure of The Portrait is like that of the conventional
romance. Isabel is the youngest of three sisters brought
up by their widowed father, who gives them a haphazard edu-
cation including three trips to Europe. very much like the
fairy godmother that she is, both in terms of authorial ma-
nipulation and her magic power, Mrs. Touchett, Isabel's aunt,
enters dramatically into Isabel's life. This event, con-

trived as it may be, shapes Isabel's destiny.

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ber in the romance and it is a significant part of the struc-
ture of The Portrait. Not only is Isabel one of three sis-
ters who take three trips to Europe, but her progress is
associated with three different houses and three different
suitors both of which function symbolically to characterize-
different points in Isabel's growth. However at some point
in the novel Isabel breaks out of the mold of conventional
"princess" and becomes one of the best portraits of the woman
in fiction. This breaking out is largely due to James's
handling of the delicate balance between the two forms--the
romantic and the realistic. Because of the subtle balance
between the romantic and the realistic in The Portrait there
is a tension created which the other novels lack in such
intensity. From another perspective the tension is seen

as arising from a situation with its overtones of the ro-
mance simplified to the extent that Isabel is free--disen-
gaged from debilitating conditions-—to pursue her liberty.
"The conception of a certain young woman affronting her
destiny" was the germ or general idea from which James's
story of Isabel Archer grew. The simplified plot structure
of the romance which the reader readily recognizes frees
him in turn so that his greatest attention can be devoted

to the reaction of Isabel to the different "types" of ex-
perience she encounters.

In the final chapter, the major theme is "the ro-

mance: from text to texture." In the analysis of the early

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novels the emphasis is, as I have said, upon James's use of
the romance in structuring and forming the text of his story.
In the later novels-~for example, The Ambassadors and The
Golden Bowl--when James uses the romance it is not primarily
to structure the novel. The elements of the romance are
there to add a romantic texture to the work. One sees the
romance in aspects of the novel other than the plot. Its
presence is there essentially in themes, figures and images.
In the Preface to The American James asks a question con-
cerning the different techniques involved in romantic fic—
tion and realistic fiction: "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?"9 It is the purpose of
this paper to help define the "air of romance" in James's
novels. In the later novels, James manages to retain the
"air of romance" and at the same time to create a desirable
tension in the work by "steeping the whole matter in the
element of reality."
Perhaps the best place to begin the analysis of

James's use of the romance is not with the novels but with
an early tale. Written in 1875, "Benvolio" is James's only
deliberate allegory of his long career. Because it was ex-

cluded from the New York Standard Edition and because of the

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V .. ' y;
b..& n V- _

sazew'nat play:
an ics have 1
they have ove:
icatce.

James
he Spent in N:
bring that t.
in his attex‘?
Place. The e;
diately after
Europe, Like
Ferment dema;
Sires the bal
mrica; for
aid SChOlasti
between the I"

It is
ever, that in
early as 1875
ants in his
tale which St
°fC°ntra3ts
tEChniques Of

to .‘ ‘
9119 his P

l3

somewhat playful tone and fairy-tale structure of the tale,
critics have tended to ignore "Benvolio." In doing so

they have overlooked its biographical and thematic signif—
icance.

James wrote "Benvolio" during the months of 1875 that

       

he spent in New York City. It was the only tale he wrote
during that time, although he published a number of reviews
iJI his attempt to live off the American literary market-
place. The experience was unsatisfactory, and it was imme-
diately after this period that James decided to settle in
Europe. Like Benvolio of his tale, James's artistic tem-
perament demanded the balance of contrasting cultures. For
James the balance was found in the cultures of Europe and
America; for Benvolio the contrast was found in the Countess
and Scholastica or, in a broader framework, in the contrast
between the romantic and realistic demands upon art.

It is the thematic significance of this tale, how-
ever, that interests us most, for it illustrates that as
early as 1875 James uses both romantic and realistic ele—
ments in his work. It is the allegorical quality of the
tale which suggests that, while Benvolio needs the balance
of contrasts to make his life worthwhile, James needs the
techniques of both the romantic and the realistic in order
to give his picture of life fullness.

The first striking feature of "Benvolio" is its

fairy-tale quality, indicated in a rather amusing way by

a: omiscient
':::e upon a t
was a very int
azi yet 0111‘ YC
L3' as any fai
:ale quality c
:are its basic
the romance, 1
of “Benvolio"
fairy-tale. 1
tica and Com
resemblance tc
ical appearan:
in; locks, re:
Sik’e smile th
as serviceabl
chanted ring,
Recromantic E
15 in the cor

She was ;
listed,
mration

14

an omniscient author-narrator in the opening paragraph:
"Once upon a time (as if he had lived in a fairy-tale) there

was a very interesting young man. This is not a fairy tale,

  
  
  
  
  

and yet our young man was in some respects as pretty a fel-

10 It is, moreover, this fairy-

low as any fairy prince."
tale quality of "Benvolio" that has led some critics to ig-
Iuare its basic seriousness. Like its related literary form,
idle romance, the fairy-tale is a serious art form. The rest
of "Benvolio“ conforms to the essential pattern of the
fairy—tale. The names of the characters--Benvolio, Scholas-
tica and Countess-~are suggestively allegorical. Benvolio's
resemblance to the fairy prince is underlined by his phys-
ical appearance: 'Benvolio was slim and fair, with cluster-
ing locks, remarkably fine eyes, and such a frank, expres—
sive smile that on the journey through life it was almost

as serviceable to its owner as the magic key, or the ens.
chanted ring, or the wishing—cap, or any other bauble of

11

necromantic properties." The Countess is presented to

us in the conventional rhetoric and imagery of the fairy
princess:

She was rich, extremely pretty, and free to do as she
listed. She was passionately fond of pleasure and ad-
miration, and they gushed forth at her feet in unceas—
ing streams. Her beauty was not of the conventional
type, but it was dazzlingly brilliant; few faces were
more expressive, more fascinating. Hers was never the
same for two days together; it reflected her momentary
circumstances with extraordinary vividness. . . .

James adds that "if a man could have half a dozen wives . . .

the Countess would do very well for one of them . . . but

“In J.
-
.n.‘

‘N

J
’ v .

‘ V -—
.w--—
"a.
.1. .—.
-—

she would no
:eea‘ed a corn;
Sdnlastic .
dicus, 'quie
fissor-fathe
grison.

Benv
his life be:

$fl.the ggie

What Char c":

aCterized in
dilidEd inte
CczplEtely c‘
flict in hi:
BGJVQliOvS }

One was
books: C
a multit
he Was ‘
alEOSt E
little 5
thumbed
telshEl:
gPaved I
t'lies .

Inthe Sump:

 

 

15

she would not serve for all seasons and all moods; she

needed a complement."13

Benvolio finds that complement in
Scholastica. As her name suggests, Scholastica is a stu—
dious, "quiet garden—nymph," who lives with her blind pro-
fessor-father in a house which looks like a convent or a
prison.
Benvolio, a young poet of immense talent, divides
his life between the elegant social world of the Countess
and the quiet secluded garden of Scholastica. Division is
what characterizes Benvolio's life. As long as he has the
advantages that divided interests offer him, he is able to
create significant art. The division in Benvolio is char-
acterized in a number of ways. First, of course, is his
divided interest in the Countess and Scholastica, and the
completely different worlds that they represent. The con-
flict in him is further symbolized by the two chambers in
Benvolio's house:
One was an immense room, hung with pictures, lined with
books, draped with rugs and tapestries, decorated with
a multitude of ingenious devices (for of all these things
he was very fond); the other, his sleeping-room, was
almost as bare as a monastic cell. It had a meagre
little strip of carpet on the floor, and a dozen well-
thumbed volumes of classic poets and sages on the man-
telshelf. 0n the wall hung three or four coarsely-en—
graved portraits of the most exemplary of these wor-
thies. These were the only ornaments.

In the sumptuously decorated room, Benvolio receives and

entertains guests, but he does his poetic composition in

the monastic cell.

‘-ruo

Cont)
Se needs the
in order to <
'a poet, in c
and terperazs;
[CC‘ntess--r<
for both are
geniusflb f
tencies. I n
Cintradictio:
lies in Benin
‘ I
‘my could (
h'm ‘

Sale Very cor

1131318 Co.
'r
“lac

16

 

Contrasts and division are necessities for Benvolio.
He needs the contrasts of life with some degree of balance
in order to create art. Krishna Vaid says of Benvolio that
"a poet, in order to do full justice to his poetic genius
and temperament, must achieve a balance between the world
[Countess—-romance] and the closet [Scholastica--realism]
for both are indispensible to the proper fruition of his

15

genius." The author—narrator describes Benvolio explic-

itly as a "young man . . . [who] was a mixture of inconsis-

tencies. I may say more exactly that he was a tissue of

16 The sole source of these contradictions

l7

contradictions."
lies in Benvolio's poetic imagination. "Everything that
fancy could do for him was done in perfection. It gave
him immense satisfactions: it transfigured the world; it
made very common objects radiantly beautiful, and it con-
verted beautiful ones into infinite sources of intoxica-

18

tion." Contradictions permeate Benvolio's whole nature.

"It was as if the souls of two very different men had been
placed together to make the voyage of life in the same
boat, and had agreed for convenience sake to take the helm
in alternation. The helm, with Benvolio, was always the
imagination, but in his different moods it worked very dif-

"19

ferently. His behavior was "all a matter of fancy; but

his fancy was a weather-cock, and faced east or west as the

"20

wind blew. Ironically it is precisely this vacillation

 

in life that gave Benvolio his creative powers. In James's

 

7 ”“Ru .‘ .-

__/
‘41—er

IS

on work it is
to his realist.
ani' intefESt W.
ing.

Krisha
iliation bet'*'e‘
to achieve a w
of the world a
to the POint w
ficult to 599
Feet, but a st'
Realism, who 0'
hit was most h!
chams of each
This statement
and realism iS
and direction <

Not on;
the romance an

C

aevices which i

The recurring :
‘irough lif '

e 15

0 1
f the romantic

 

 

17

own work it is the ability to adapt the romantic conventions
to his realistic demands that creates a desireable tension
and interest without which his works would surely be lack—
ing.

Krishna Vaid regards the moral of Benvolio's "vac-
illation between the Countess and Scholastica as his failure
to achieve a workable harmony . . . between the rival claims
of the world and the muse."21 Cornelia Kelley comes closer
to the point when she says of Benvolio that "it is not dif-
ficult to see that Benvolio represents Henry James, not a
poet, but a story teller who dallied between Romance and
Realism, who courted sometimes one, sometimes the other,
but was most happy when he was by himself, dreaming of the
charms of each and effecting a reconciliation of them."22
This statement on the problem of reconciling the romance
and realism is the most concise expression of the growth
and direction of Henry James's art.

Not only does "Benvolio" illustrate James's use of
the romance and realism, but it also contains a number of
devices which James was to develop more fully in his novels.
The recurring suggestion that Benvolio is on a journey
through life is a pattern which James often uses as part
of the romantic structure of his works. The symbolic jour-
ney through life is most explicitly seen in the water
imagery associated with Roderick Hudson; but, in a wider

usage, it is a pattern which is the basis of James's use

 

mu ' 1'” ""-

'q—T “
. , l

:f the interné
aszealistical
rtif helPS tc
Ill a general 5
from innocence
'Benvolio' is
bclize aspects
acterizes the
insight into t
ized by the rc
in The Aterice
garde clearly

of experience

Anothe
in"
BenVOlio"
" It is a

 

 

 

18

of the international theme. Consequently, even in a work
as realistically depicted as The Ambassadors, the journey
motif helps to explain the nature of Strether's experience.
In a general sense, Strether travels, like Roderick Hudson,
from innocence to experience. Another important device in
"Benvolio" is the way in which James uses objects to sym-
bolize aspects of his characters. By noting how James char-
acterizes the persons of his fiction, we have an excellent
insight into the nature of his art. Benvolio is character-
ized by the rooms he lives in. James uses this same device
in The American where the rooms of Newman and Valentin Belle-
garde clearly characterize the two men and the larger types
of experience they represent. In The Portrait of a Lady,
Madame Merle says that "one's house, one's furniture, one's
garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps,"23
are expressive of character. At the end of his career when
James writes The Golden Bowl, he still relies upon symbolic
objects for full characterization. Even though the Prince
and the Princess are presented to us as centers of conscious-
ness, it is entirely impossible to understand the nature of
their relationship without understanding the function of the
golden bowl.

Another means of characterization that James uses
in "Benvolio" is a pattern that persists throughout his
art. It is a pattern that helps to clarify his use of the

romance within the realistic novel. James characterizes

--—..~ '

 

ice Countess i
trance. He 3
pretty," her i
short, she is
Scholastica, l
thoughts of Be
character beca
Benvolio grows
acterizing exr
is presented 3:
Structure of 1
tion the way j
Claire and, at
153531. We Si:
5'9 Princess.
S‘ip is that C
that we watch
Presented to t
5&9 resembIES‘
Edits tells 115

"L1 .
LO ls COUrtec‘

 

 

19

the Countess in a style that is part of the conventional
romance. He tells us what she is. She is "rich, extremely
pretty," her beauty is not of the "conventional type." In
short, she is the conventional princess of the romance.
Scholastica, however, is characterized primarily in the
thoughts of Benvolio. She is a more realistically rendered
character because we are shown how her relationship with
Benvolio grows and changes. These different ways of char-
acterizing explain a number of relationships in James's art.
In The American, Newman's relationship with Claire de Cintré
is presented in the conventional manner. Since the basic
structure of the novel is romantic, we accept without ques-
tion the way in which James tells us that Newman courts
Claire and, at the end of six months, she accepts his pro-
posal. We simply expect the hero of the romance to marry
the princess. A much more realistically presented relation-
ship is that of Newman and Valentin. This is a relationship
that we watch develop. Isabel of The Portrait is actually
presented to us in two ways. In the first half of the book
she resembles, to a certain extent, the typical princess.
James tells us that she is the youngest of three sisters

who is courted by three suitors. After rejecting the first
two suitors because they do not meet her ideal expectation,
Isabel marries the third suitor. In the second half of the
book Isabel is characterized almost exclusively as a fine

central intelligence, whose consciousness, in effect, tells

 

 

I
J!

‘ L511.

ctr“
1. .

“2411" ,H

_. ‘l . . . . ,'
fiv-«mvwh- .—_._,-4.

the sne news
right statexe:
Isabel's the:
Final
even though 3
tains the ele
techniques--e
art in a way
realistic, 13;;

3f 9iVing a f

 

20

the story--a story which is nothing but what Isabel feels
concerning that which happens to her. Lord Warburton, of
the same novel, is characterized by Mrs. Touchett's forth-
right statement about his ideal qualities as well as by
Isabel's thoughts about him.

Finally, when we look at "Benvolio," we see that
even though James makes it deliberately romantic, it con-
tains the elements of both his romantic and realistic
techniques--elements that were to persist throughout his
art in a way that not only reconciles the romantic and the
realistic, but, at the same time, provides James the means

of giving a full picture of life.

 

"I.’2'W‘

a

,(‘Y‘F'fl‘ "

t 1‘ '-. ”pi-3A.”
'- ' M. fi-n-AA’--
«we.

fit. -

r' u

lfienr}
:f the Novel,
Elacmur, Pre

Reber
Q13 (OX

-;.'
10
H Hen:
5.1V 7:85, ‘
p. 351' (Heb

FOOTNOTES

1Henry James, “Preface to The American," in The Art
of the Novel, ed. by R. P. Blackmur (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1962), p. 33. (Henceforth referred to as
Blackmur, Preface to The American.)

2Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of
Narrative (Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 84.

3Ibid.

4Blackmur, Preface to The American, p. 32.

51bid., p. 25.

6Ibid., pp. 21-22.

71bid., p. 24.

8Ibid., p. 34.

91bid.

10Henry James, "Benvolio," in The Com lete Tales of
Hen James, ed. by Leon Edel, III (Philadelphia, 1962),
p. 351. (Henceforth referred to as "Benvolio.")

llIbid.

12Ibid., pp. 357-358.

l3Ibid., p. 361.

14Ibid., pp. 353-354.

15Krishna B. Vaid, Technique in the Tales of Henry
James (Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 151.

 

16"Benvolio," p. 352.

21

 

 

22

17Unlike Coleridge, James uses the terms "fancy"
and "imagination" interchangeably.

18"Benvolio," p. 352.

19Ibid., p. 353.

20Ibid.

21Vaid, p. 148.

_ 22Cornelia P. Kelley, The Early Development of
Henry James (University of Illinois, 1930), p. 233.

23Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, ed. by
Leon Edel (Riverside Edition"; Houghton Mifflin Co., 1963),
p. 173. (Henceforth referred to as The Portrait.)

 

CHAPTER II

RODERICK HUDSON: THE ROMANCE AS
KUNSTLERROMAN--THE DILEMMA

OF THE ARTIST-HERO

Roderick Hudson was Henry James's second novel but, M

 

in later years, he always spoke of it as his first, com— “1
pletely disowning the earlier Watch and Ward. That James , 1
acknowledged Roderick Hudson as his first novel is signifi- '
cant. It is his attempt to clarify for himself in fiction I
his concept of art and the function of the artist. Roderick
Hudson was, to borrow a phrase from Joyce, Henry James's
"portrait of the artist as a young man"--as an American
young man. As an American the Jamesian artist confronts
some difficult problems. The conflict in the life of Rod-
erick is a romantic one; it is essentially a conflict be-
tween the artistic life and the passionate life. Unfortu-
nately for Roderick, the two are not compatible and the
passionate life destroys his artistic ability.

In Roderick Hudson, as in "Benvolio," James reveals

 

the dilemma of his inner debate; what kind of artist should

23

 

 

 

  

 

 

24

he (James) be? What kind of artist could a young romantic
merican like Roderick Hudson become? What was the rela-
tionship between Europe, with its culture, traditions and
manners, and the United States where the culture, which
the American artist sought, was yet to come? Roderick Hud—
son does not, of course, provide James with all the answers,
nor does "Benvolio," the tale which immediately followed
the writing of Roderick Hudson. What Roderick Hudson does
Show is that James is aware of the tension between the ro-
mantic traditions of art in Europe and the realistic de-
mands on the individual in the United States. James was
to Work on the reconciliation of this dilemma in all of
his fiction up to and through The Portrait of a Lady. In
W the direction of his art suddenly seems to
beecme clear to James and the romantic mode in his fiction
beeches more and more subservient to his realistic demands.
HoWEVer, in Roderick Hudson the dilemma remains unsolved
for James. He is not yet consciously aware that the two
mcdes of fiction can so thoroughly enhance each other.

eon Edel says in his introduction to the Torchbook Edition

<3
15 Roderick Hudson, concerning James's handling of the two

 

modes, that "in the process of writing out the dialogue
of the Self, he created an early—-and significant--piece
of American romantic realism."1 Edel's description of
James's work as "romantic realism" is significant and

ace - -
Ill-ate. However, in reading the early novels

 

  

 

 

25

c>1f .Iames, in which he makes great use of the romance, and
1:11ee Prefaces to the same novels written between twenty
aazaci twenty-five years later, one has the distinct impres-
sszicarl that while James was writing the novels he was not
fully aware that he was making such thorough use of the
.J:<>rn£ance. As an apprentice learning his craft, James relies
111><>Ia the accepted, familiar conventions of the romance for
Shaping his early fiction.
At this point a synopsis should precede further
analysis of Roderick Hudson because in many ways the plot
(2’11111Line reveals James's use of the romance as a structural 1
‘flea‘fiuce. Roderick Hudson, a young American living at North- .
amp ton, Massachusetts, feels that he has a gift for the A
a*-"=‘tis.tic and idealistic representation of life, but does
:11‘<>1: J<now the significance of his talent. He receives the
<:>I?I?<>1'tunity of developing his talent when a new-found friend
iaur‘éi jpatron of the arts, Rowland Mallet, offers him the
<:flhlail'lcze to go to Europe, the home of art and culture. Rod-
eri ck happily goes, aware all the while that the journey
It‘ail? Ibe either a peril or an opportunity.
Although the story is about Roderick Hudson, it is
presented almost exclusively through the consciousness of
Iic;"3Land Mallet. Many critics, in fact, regard Rowland as
‘le‘ai real hero of Roderick Hudson. James himself said in
his . . .
Preface to the New York Edition of Roderick Hudson

fit "the centre of interest throughout 'Roderick' is in

 

. t.» rfi-“4.rfi.vc L.

  

26

Rowland Mallet's consciousness, and the drama is the very
drama of that consciousness. . . . "2 Rowland is one of a
number of Jamesian characters who has money enough to
assume a "habit of ease" and travel widely. In many ways
he is the counterpart to Roderick. He is a connoisseur
of the arts, yet is not an artist himself. He character-
izes himself as "a man of genius half-finished" in whom the
"faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expres-
Sion remains."3
Rowland first meets Roderick when he goes to North—

amPton to visit his cousin Cecilia a widow whose plight he i

Pities: "Her misfortunes were three in number: first she '7’“

‘._ i-..

had lost her husband; second, she had lost her money, or

the greater part of it; and third, she lived at Northampton,

Ma‘sSachusettsJA In the midst of what the author describes
as typical Puritan provincialism, Cecilia finds a diversion
£3301“ the drab life in her bright, young friend Roderick
Hudson. When Rowland meets Roderick he is immediately
s‘tlmck by how out of place Roderick seems in the quaint
P111'.'itan and utilitarian surroundings. Roderick completely
thlects his legal studies because, he says "there's some-
thing inside of me that drives me. A demon of unrest."5
It is this demon of unrest which distracts Roderick from
his legal studies to the art of sculpture. Rowland is

astounded at the proof of Roderick's genius in one of Rod-

erick's works--a statuette called "Thirst," representing a

 

 

  

27

  
 

youth drinking from the cup of experience. Rowland is con-
vinced that Roderick ought to pursue his studies in Rome
and he offers to subsidize his study abroad. It is not,
hcnwever, simply a matter of Roderick's accepting Rowland's
offer. Roderick's family and friends feel that Rowland is
meddling in their affairs. Before they consent to let Rod-
eri ck go to Rome, they ask that Rowland guarantee them not
orLl§r the development of the artist but the security of the
1na11 .as well. Mallet is aware of the risk but he thinks the
1318]: must be taken or the talent will not develop. Rowland
desCribes the risk in one of James's favorite metaphors:
"Of course if a silk balloon is inflated very suddenly and
Very fast there is always danger of its bursting."6
The person least opposed to Roderick's departure
for Rome is Mary Garland, the person who has the most to
gain by his staying home. She is the picture of Puritan
sinlplicity, virtue and innocence. Her self-sacrifice and
nnEiSEnanimity induce her to agree to Mallet's proposal. She
EisSks only for Rowland to "make him do his best." On their
Dassage to Rome Roderick announces to Rowland as an addi-
‘lional pledge of his purpose that he is engaged to Mary
(3arland: "I'm sure" he says, "that I shall run a smoother
and swifter course for knowing that there's a person so
good and clever and charming, to whom my success will make
the grand difference. . ."7
For some time after their arrival in Rome, it

appears that Roderick has both the strength of character

«a ‘AM ‘ an

 

  

28

and the command of genius that leads to great accomplishments.
No one ever "made a fairer beginning than Roderick." All
time great art in Italy excites his genius and he sculpts a
ljgfe-sized figure which he calls "Adam." It is a work which
asrtonishes everyone for its idealism and strength, but it is
a work which Roderick was "never afterwards to surpass."8
After his creation of "Adam" Roderick is a well—known fellow.
AS a result of his popularity, Roderick is introduced to a
View of Europe he had not seen before--a Europe of sensual
arui eegotistical realities which immediately appeals to the
PaSSionate life lying for so long dormant in him. His char-
aCtex quickly shows its flaws--too quickly as James himself
5“1ilirts out in the Preface--and with the loss of his innocence
(”f <=laaracter he loses the command of his genihs and the in-
tegrity of his art.

Roderick's disintegration quickly follows its course
di‘llfling a summer of dissipation in Baden—Baden and completes
i‘tself in a passionate, infatuated pursuit of the beautiful,
k3‘1“: dangerous, Christina Light. In many ways an antithesis

‘;<3 Mary Garland, Christina Light is not at all the virtuous
‘Voman her name suggests. However, she is sufficiently and
Esubtly ambiguous enough that Roderick never perceives her
as anything other than "ideal beauty." He does not realize

that she symbolizes everything in Europe that causes his
destruction.
Fearful that Roderick's "silk balloon" may burst

from breathing too deeply of experience, Rowland has

 

 

 

29

Mrs. Hudson and Mary come to Europe in hope that their pre-

sence will recall in Roderick his sense of duty to his art
and his obligation to Mary. The experiment fails, and
Roderick breaks all ties with his past. Although by now

Christina Light has been maneuvered by her mercenary mother
into marriage with an Italian prince, Roderick persists upon
his infatuated pursuit of her until his death, by accident

or suicide, during a storm in the Swiss Alps.
For the most part the plot of Roderick Hudson follows

the pattern of the conventional romance. Roderick is a

young man who, for a number of reasons, becomes disenchanted
With his homeland. His artistic temperament is thwarted by
the social milieu in general. His upbringing with its Puri-

tan emphasis on the work ethic, together with the American
meas ure of success expressed in pragmatic, materialistic
terras, completely alienate Roderick from the American way

of life. The only inhabitant of Northampton, Massachusetts

Dell‘ceptive enough to understand Roderick is Rowland Mallet's

Q':>\:lsin Cecelia. Her description of Roderick to Rowland pre—

Qisely reveals the nature of Roderick's dilemma and his

reaction to the American environment.

'He's hopelessly disenchanted, but he doesn't know

where to look for help. Then his mother, as she one

day confessed to me, has a holy horror of a profession
which consists exclusively, as she supposes, in making
figures of people divested of all clothing. Sculpture,9
to her mind, is an insidious form of immorality. . . .'

The ideal of manhood which is held up before Roderick is

Mr. Barnaby Striker, esq., a typical self—made American man

30

who has little use for artists. In talking to Rowland,
.Mru Striker's rhetoric completely characterizes himself
and all that appalls Roderick:

I'm a plain practical old boy, content to follow an
honourable profession in a free country. I didn't

go to any part of Europe to learn my business; no one
took me by the hand; I had to grease my wheels myself,
and such as I am, I'm a self-made man, every inch of
me! Well, if our young friend's booked for fame and
fortune I don't suppose his going to Rome will stop
him. But, mind you, it won't help him such a long way
neither. If you've undertaken to put him through
there's a thing or two you had better remember. The
crop we gather depends upon the seed we sow. He may
.be the biggest genius of the age: his potatoes won't
come up without his hoeing them. If he takes things
so almighty easy as-—we11, as one or two young fellows
<3f genius I've had under my eye--his produce will never
'gain the prize. Take the word for it of a man who has ‘2
lnade his way inch by inch and doesn't believe that we
‘nake up to find our work done because we have lain all
night a-dreaming of it: anything worth doing is plaguy
hard to do!10

Throughout the novel Roderick is described as a
rxbnnéintic hero. In a style similar to that used by James to
<1ۤSB<2ribe Benvolio, Rowland describes his first reaction to
IR£3<1erick:

Hudson was a tall slim youth, with a singularily mobile
and intelligent face. Rowland was struck at first only
with its responsive vivacity, but it had presently
affected him as full of a beauty of its own. The fea-
tures were admirably chiselled and finished, and a
frank smile played over them as gracefully as a breeze
among flowers.1

 

James apparently felt there was some of the fairy prince in
Roderick, because like Benvolio, Roderick's magic key on
his journey through life is his imagination. As a romantic
hero Roderick occasionally seems to possess extraordinary

traits. Rowland imagines that he is made up more of a

 

31

spiritual essence than of a physical essence. Like many
romantic heroes, Roderick has no father. Cecilia tells
luawland that Roderick "grew up a la grace de Dieu."12
She seems to suggest that his father may be God, not the
Crnristian God that his Puritan mother worships, but a god
unpare like the ancient muse that inspired poets to write.
The main reason Christina finds Roderick attractive is
because she suspects that he possesses the "sacred fire."
At the beginning of his novel, James has presented

a (ii.senchanted character and the setting which is the source
(’f' tzlne disenchantment. The description of the setting in
Particular will later prove significant in its contrast
Wthll. another setting in which the real nature of Roderick's
character is to be tested. What is always more important
ix; 'tihe romance than a disenchanted here in his early sur-
rcallrldings is what happens to the hero after his departure
from familiar terrain. In other words, the romance (in
criilnes particularly) is primarily concerned with the effect

of different experiences upon the hero once he has disen-

   
  

gaged himself from familiar ties. The hero characteristi-

 

t=ally travels from home and on his trip he encounters a
Series of tests or trials which he must overcome. Without
recourse to external support--without family or homeland--
the hero must rely entirely upon his inner strength. Rod-
erick's trip, like those in many romances, is presented

symbolically as a journey from adolescence to manhood. To

 

32

become a man he must overcome the series of trials along

the trip. Interestingly enough, James characterizes Rod-
eiaick's maturation process as that of a journey by sea.
Inaderick does literally journey by sea from the United States
tc> Europe but the journey by sea is an image that recurs so
:frwequently throughout the book that it not only contributes
tr) the structural unity of Roderick Hudson but it also sug-
gnassts quite explicitly that this is also a journey through
lirfee.

Rowland, in particular, conceives of their journey
as 61 voyage with symbolic implications. Once Roderick has
obtained permission to go to Europe Rowland discusses the
Inatltzer with Roderick in this fashion: "I've launched you,
as I may say . . ., and I feel as if I ought to see you
‘iIItICD port. I'm older than you and know the world better
Etrléi it seems well that we should voyage a while together."l3
Ihaiizer in Rome Rowland's reflections reinforce his earlier
‘:110ughts and image patterns. "Rowland's theory of his own

<11lty was to let him run his course and play his cards, only
11Olding himself ready to point out shoals and pitfalls and
'administer a friendly propulsion through tight places."l4
Because of his innocence Roderick's adjustment to a new cul-
ture is not entirely smooth; here and there as he went, the
author states, "he took on a reef in his sail." 5 Once
Roderick has become infatuated with the beautiful Christina,

he forgets about his need as an artist for some detachment

 

 

 

 

33

from life and "plunges" as Rowland says, into the "deep

sea" of experience. Although he is accustomed to the in-

tense life inspired by the sacred muse, Roderick is not pre-

pared for the intense life of the real world. Participation

in the real world threatens to engulf and destroy him. Row—

land, as always, is more aware of the danger than is Roder-

ick : "For forty-eight hours there swam before Rowland's

eyes a vision of a wondrous youth, graceful and beautiful

as he passed, plunging like a diver into a misty gulf. The

gulf was destruction, annihiliation, death."l6 Roderick's

desire for intense experience is likened to another, more .
fl

falnous, traveler. Rowland describes the situation as-—

"anOther case of Ulysses and the Sirens; only Roderick re-

fuges to be tied to the mast."17

Like the hero of the romance Roderick encounters a

seri es of tests on his voyage. However unlike the hero of

the romance, Roderick becomes increasingly less effective

as he encounters each new test. The first test Roderick

e . . . .
neoIlnters is shortly after his arrival in Rome and he

em . .
er‘ges, it seems, more or less successful. At a time

w .
hen his enthusiasm and idealism are never higher, Roderick

c
atQ-l'les his first glimpse of Christina Light. Roderick's

re
aQ‘tions fully reveal both his innate American innocence

an
a his naiveté. "'Immortal powers,‘ cried Roderick, 'what

a v. -
:L Sionl In the name of transcendent perfection who is
811
e} She's beauty's self--she's a revelation. I don't be-

lie
ve she's living--she's a phantasm, a vapour, an

.. 3 I .15
$151021.

cierick likE

 

Roderick is r
the remark is
dicted: "I
in common wi1
The first vis
Roderick fro:
to create sh<
However, at 1
cocpletely be
center with
his knowing

of his artis
ick wants to
idealism. u

only for be&

tion is to

 

 

 

34

illusion. "'18 Even the poodle which Christina has with her

Roderick likens to a "grotesque phantom, like the black dog

in Faust."lg The irony of Rowland's reply is something

Roderick is never able to appreciate and the accuracy of
the remark is something Rowland himself could not have pre—

dicted: "'I hope at least that the young lady has nothing
III20

in common with Mephistophles. She looked dangerous.
The first vision of the muse-in-flesh does not distract

Roderick from his artistic duty. In fact, it inspires him
to create shortly afterwards his greatest work, the "Adam."

However, at no time in the novel is Christina's influence

completely beneficial for Roderick. While the first en-

Col-Inter with Christina inspires Roderick, it also, without
his knowing it, misleads him into a dangerous misconception

of his artistic role. After he has seen Christina, Roder-

lck Wants to sculpt only those things that reflect his high

ldea.J.ism: "I mean never to make anything ugly. . . . I care

only for beauty of type."21 From this point on his inten-

tion is to produce "simply divine forms. They shall be

Beauty; they shall be Wisdom; they shall'be Power; they

shall be Genius; they shall be Daring."22 In addition,

R

ocietrick says, "I mean to do the Morning; I mean to do the
N.

lghtl I mean to do the Ocean and the Mountains, the Moon

an .
a West Wind. I mean to make a magnificant image of my

Na -
tIVe Land."23 These fantastic declarations are amusing

to I l
Gloriani represents

eanother artist, Gloriani.

 

_’.-

.t . ._._£.—.

I

(7'7'
.J‘ ..

£;i......-L-- ..

another side
illusioned a1
gives an art:
is Gloriani':
the picture 1

scne kind ad

sitting

empty ca
in vain

descend.
the fick
waste an
Suicide.
how to C

Rcderick ne\v
accept the t.
and Critic c
Which prOVeg
ROderiCk 991
is directed

35

aIKDther side of the artistic temperament. He is the dis-
ilJJJsioned artist, hardened by the treatment the world
gives an artist who starts with impossibly high ideals. It
is C§loriani's view of art which helps to give fullness to
the picture of the artist and his role. Gloriani offers

some kind advice to Roderick:

'My dear fellow, passion burns out, inspiration
runs to seed. Some fine day every artist finds himself
sitting face to face with his lump of clay, with his
empty canvas, with his sheet of blank paper, waiting
in vain for the revelation to be made, for the Muse to
descend. He must learn to do without the Muse! When
the fickle jade forgets the way to your studio, don't
waste any time tearing your hair and meditating on
suicide. Come round and see me, and I'll show you
how to console yourself.’2

Rode rick never does "come round" to Gloriani, nor does he
ac=C3€3L>t the warnings of Madame Grandoni, a long time patron
EH16: critic of the arts. She offers Roderick an anecdote
whi<2h proves altogether too accurate in its applicability.
Rocleansick gets the point but fails to see that the anecdote
is directed toward him personally. Upon looking at a pho-
tograph of Roderick's statuette called "Thirst" she remarks:

'It resembles . . . the things a young man used to
<30 whom I knew years ago, when I first came to Rome
- . . His name was Herr Schafgans. He never painted
éanything so profane as a man taking a drink, for none
(of his people had anything so vulgar as an appetite.
trhey were all angles and edges--they looked like dia-
sgrams of human nature. They were figures if you please,
lout geometrical figures. He wouldn't have agreed with
(Sloriani any more than you. He used to come and see
the very often, and in those days I thought his tunic
«and his long neck infallible symptoms of genius. His
‘talk was all of gilded aureoles and beatific visions;
Jae lived on weak wine and biscuits and wore a lock of
Saint Somebody's hair in a little bag round his neck.

 

 

j
a
.s ..
k .v ”ww—

all ~ s-u‘rw.

‘ifivfi

If he was
I hope wl
fine thin
the histo
high-flow
man fell

never sat
faced, hi
pale and

she looke
consentec
Rome. T?
afterwar:
His wife

He wore a
Madame he
and fete}
nately, 1
genius--1
the litt:

Roderick, of
flow Preteen:
Grandoni and
fall in 10%
to You for y;
With anYOne.
Roderick.s i:

culture, Un

does not Ope:
not evEr hav.
thEiI Sel‘ies
fin Subtle t-
thSiCal to 1
ceive Christi

fin more acu‘

 

36

If he was not a Beato Angelico it was not his own fault.
I hope with all my heart that Mr. Hudson will do the
fine things he talks about, but he must bear in mind
the history of dear Mr. Schafgans as a warning against
high-flown pretensions. One fine day this poor young
Inan fell in love with a Roman model, though she had
.never sat to him, I believe, for she was a boxom, bold-
faced, high coloured creature, and he painted none but
gpale and sickly women. He offered to marry her, and
she looked at him from head to foot, gave a shrug and
consented. But he was ashamed to set up his ménage in
Rome. They went to Naples, and there, a couple of years
afterwards, I saw him. The poor fellow was ruined.

His wife used to beat him, and he had taken to drinking.
He wore a ragged black coat and had a blotchy red face.
.Madame had turned washerwoman and used to make him go
and fetch the dirty linen. There was nothing, unfortu-
nately, to be done, in the 'doing-up' way, with his
genius--that wouldn't 'wash,‘ and he was getting his
living by painting views of Vesuvius in eruption on

the little boxes they sell at Sorrento.‘ 5

Fk>€1eerick, of course, has no vision of his work as "high-
:E1<>‘021 pretensions." He has listened impatiently to Madame
Grandoni and his reply shows his irritation: "Moral: don't
fall in love with a buxom Roman model. . . . I'm obliged

to You for your story, but I don't mean to fall in love
with anyone."26 Again James's use of irony reinforces
Rociearick's inability to cope with complexity of a different
cu:L‘tlure. Unlike the typical hero of the romance, Roderick
($36253 not openly combat a physical foe. James's heroes do
not: Gaver have to rely upon physical prowess for overcoming
th£3:i-1: series of tests. They must, however, be aware of
thfia isubtle types of evil that appear in forms other than the
phx?%:i.cal to test their strength. Roderick never does per-
ceive Christina as a woman who can destroy him. It takes

fl:
E: Inore acute sensibility of Rowland Mallet to see that

 

 

z:

I
an. _.1_....‘4.... "-4? '

she is surfacI
phiscication
perience--wi t
culture and c
forms of evil
Azericans whc
who uses the
to personal a
Each
series of te
Cant encount
sent on the
WIS]. is dWa
time Jams a
test by havj
his forces.
tIEat to ma.
SCEne is Ch
much inn—OS.
in James f0
each medita
tensity is
of the hove

and other e

 

 

 
 

37

she is surface without substance. She incarnates the so-

phistication of Europe-—its knowledge gained through ex-
perience--without the acquisition of the virtues of its
culture and civilization. She represents one of the worst
forras of evil in James's fiction: she is one of those
Americans who has lost all native innocence in Europe and

who uses the knowledge of evil that accompanies that loss

to personal advantage.
Each encounter with Christina Light is another in a

Series of tests of Roderick's character; and each signifi-

cant encounter is balanced in the novel by a counter-move-
,1
meht on the part of Roderick. The counter—movement in the ‘

nOVel is away from the confrontation with Christina. Each

time James appears to be preparing Roderick for another

test by having him retreat to nature for a regrouping of
his forces. Another way of characterizing Roderick's re-
treat to nature is as a meditation scene. The meditation
scene is characteristically a scene of little action and
much introspection-~the most suitable type of preparation

1 .
n Games for each new encounter. Immediately folloWing

e
aeh meditation scene is a highly dramatic scene whose in-

te - . . . . . . .
r13 lty 18 heightened by 1125 Juxtap051tion 1n the structure

Of
the novel with a meditation scene. In Roderick Hudson

an
a other early novels the meditation scene functions pri-
a~Il.y as a contrast to the highly dramatic scenes which
fo
J‘low; and since James did conceive of many of his inci-

de
Ii‘hs as dramatic scene, one might also View these meditation

scenes in the
lief for more
for example,

still very oi
asignificanl
ling of these
tion of the 1
meditation sc
device. J arse
WHY to off
scenes become
focus shows a
his Work. Jé
RCtion involx
effect of in;
Scenes that .
of the Effec
becomes 19.33
cemed With

and realisti
iStic,

Whil
RCdEriCk HUG
\
Counter in t

Christina.

 

38

scenes in the early novels as providing a bit of comic re-

lief for more intense action to come. In later novels--

for example, The Ambassador--the meditation scene, which is

still very often set as a retreat to nature, functions in

a significantly different manner. James's different hand-

ling of these scenes illustrate an altering in his concep-

tion of the function of his art. In the later works, the

meditation scenes do not function primarily as a structural
James does not use them in the later novels pri-

devi ce .

mari 1y to offset more dramatic scenes. The meditation

scenes become, in fact, the dramatic scenes. This shift in .
— O

. . . . 1

focus shows a Significant change in James's structure of
I

his Work. James becomes less and less concerned with the

a“rt-ion involved in an incident and more concerned with the

eflfect of incident upon character. It is in the meditation

scanes that James is able to analyze very closely the nature
When James

of the effect of an incident on a character.
bec-‘Omes less concerned with action in the plot and more con-
ce"(Tl-”led with growth of character the balance of the romantic
and realistic modes in his work tips more toward the real-
istic.

While it appears that the meditation scenes in
\Roqfirick Hudson should prepare Roderick for another en-
couIIter in the series of tests, they, in fact, do not. Iron-
J~Q§~J.ly Roderick is never prepared for another encounter with

Ch. .
blstina. Each time she comes upon Roderick he is caught

 

.~v~

‘ 3.2:...

Al:

surprise
iisintegra‘.
sear after

the second

threshold.
fall. Chr.
and during
infatuated
Cant encou
RCierick i
this Setti
sorts, Mrs
iiristina.
Sitting be
i298 very
lationshi]
mat Mr. .
Stard to

and Chris
Wood

' an

party. P

not thQ
is fully

’w‘:
en She

 

 

39

by surprise; and each encounter brings him closer to moral

disintegration and total physical destruction. Nearly a

year after Roderick has been in Rome he sees Christina for

the second time. This time in his studio, "the door of the

studio promptly flung open, and a lady advanced to the

threshold. . ."27 This incident begins Roderick's down-

fall. Christina has come to have a bust made of herself, .

and during the lengthy process, Roderick becomes hopelessly

infatuated with her. A few months later the next signifi-

cant encounter occurs in the wooded hills outside Rome where
Into

Roderick is dozing while Rowland sits by his side.
this setting come, quite by chance, Christina and her con-
SOrts, Mrs. Light, the Cavaliere and Prince Casamassima.
Ch~"=‘istina's remark, made partly in jest, upon seeing Rowland
Si"tilting beside the sleeping Roderick ironically character-

lzes very accurately the nature of the incident and the re-

lationship between Christina and Roderick: "Don't you know

that Mr. Mallet's Mr. 'Hudson's sheep dog? He was mounting

guard to keep away the wolves."28 Very shortly Roderick

and Christina leave the rest for a stroll together in the
w
006 , an action whose inpropriety shocks the rest of the

Party. Roderick, in fact, is the only one there who would

nC> . . . .
t have recognized the impropriety. Christina, of course,

is
fully aware of the effect of this stroll upon the others.

Wh
.3371 she and Roderick rejoin the party Christina says,

'Bless my soul, how they're all looking at us! One

Would think we were prisoners of the Inquisition!

_ ‘p
‘. .1... .

A1371? ‘

What is
ruined f

as if I
Not
Roderick's I
trayed. No
Ro'iland, hO'u
to Roderick.
and Mary, l(
the ”fine t<
id'lllic ret:
It was ;
PiCture
agreemez
ConsciO'
the bes
Clamben
The idyllic
of the nove
ture of the
thIEe Chapt
erick's las
thus far he
Significant

erick's enc

tina Light.

 

40

What is it, pray? Have I been very improper? Am I
ruined for ever? Dear Prince you're looking at me
as if I had committed the unpardonable sin!’

Not long after this Christina marries the Prince.

Roderick's balloon is burst, his good faith has been be-

trei§red. No longer will he ever think of trying to sculpt.

.Rova_and, however, wishes to restore the former enthusiasm

to Izoderick. He proposes that they, along with Mrs. Hudson

anti Mary, leave Rome for a sojourn in what he describes as

tile: "fine tonic climate" of Switzerland. At first the

ixi;rJ.lic retreat seems to work some magic even on Roderick.

It was impossible not to hang upon the perpetual rich
picture of Apennine and Alp, and there was a tacit
agreement among the travelers to sink every other
consciousness. The effect of this discretion was of
the best; it made them shipwrecked swimmers who had

clambered upon a raft.
flfl1ea idyllic retreat is the major one both in the structure

(”E ‘ZIIe novel and in the life of Roderick. Within the struc-

tullrei of the novel this last retreat to nature constitutes

tkIITEéea chapters and more than forty pages. It is also Rod-

elii-Cllc's last opportunity to prove himself. In every test

tilllss far he has failed. The length of the last retreat is

S. .. . .
:LSIIILLficant. It is preparation for the most severe of Rod-

e .
:r3‘<31<'s encounters with corrupt Europe, symbolized in Chris-

ti
ha Light.
In every previous encounter Roderick has been unaware

0f .. . ..
‘ZJhe danger Christina represented. Ironically his innocence

he
as ‘thus far been the source of his strength. Once Christina

maiz-
J‘?:ies, however, there is a drastic change in Roderick's

 

 

f: 55.1“

3
332.32."-

:erceptio:
“Ideal Bea
realizes

interests
With Chri
Roderick'
cones upc
less. "i
were jade
head to

eyes daz-
bY Chris

the triu

francs 1
Christi:
logs Of
kflows t‘
Christi
knO'Nled
that 1e
Such kn
Cent Yo

re - U
allt-J

k I
t‘te QXl

41

perception of her. Always before he conceived of her as
"Ideal Beauty," the "Muse in Flesh and Blood." He now
realizes that she is a mortal woman after all and that his
interests in her were not primarily artistic but passionate.
With Christina's last, unexpected appearance in the Alps
Roderick's moral disintegration is completed. When Roderick
comes upon Christina talking with Rowland he is left speech-
less. "He stopped short, astonished; his face and figure
were jaded, his garments dusty. He looked at Christina from
head to foot, and then, slowly, his cheeks flushed and his
eyes darkened."31 Once again Roderick is caught off guard
by Christina's unexpected appearance--a favorite tactic in
the triumph of a corrupt European over an innocent American.

The next morning Roderick asks to borrow a thousand
francs from Rowland. His unabashed intentions are to follow
Christina boldly across Europe. At this point Roderick's
loss of innocence is complete because for the first time he
knows the full implication of evil in his relation with
Christina, yet he still chooses to pursue her. It is this
knowledge of himself and of his relationship with Christina
that leads to Roderick's downfall. Roderick's reaction to
such knowledge of himself is strangely like another inno-
cent young man when he is first confronted with the stark
reality of evil. Like Billy Budd, Roderick is annoyed at
the existence of evil in one who appears to be so well-

meaning. Unlike Billy Budd, however, Roderick cannot strike

iii
:.

out at anyb it
which makes hi
when the hero
the “discover
helps him to

at the end of
Of providing

Roderick's p;
in a converse
ha‘lior. Rae:
tive of othe
51% course 0
a "remorsele
“I'm a rent
singlilar to:
301‘ inCredu

lent Curios

RCderick! S

42

out at anything other than himself. It is his own choice
which makes him evil. Usually what happens in a romance
when the hero faces his last and most difficult test is

the "discovery" of some important knowledge or aid which
helps him to overcome. James makes use of a discovery scene

at the end of Roderick Hudson but it is not for the purpose

 

of providing a somewhat artificial, external solution to
Roderick's problems. In the discovery scene, Roderick learns,
in a conversation with Rowland, the true estimate of his be-
havior. When Roderick first sees himself from the perspec-
tive of others he is both astonished and dismayed. During

the course of their last conversation Rowland calls Roderick

a "remorseless egotist." Such a charge surprises Roderick:
"'I'm a remorseless egotist?‘ He repeated the words in a
singular tone; a tone that denoted neither exactly indignation
nor incredulity, but (strange as it might seem) a sudden vio-

32

lent curiosity for news about himself." Rowland goes for

Roderick's "edification":

'You're selfish . . ., you think only of yourself and
believe only in your own history. You regard other
people only as they play into your own hands. You've
always been very frank about it, and the thing seemed
so mixed up with the nature of your genius and the
very breath of your life that often one was willing to
take the evil with the good and be thankful that, con-
sidering your great talent, you were no worse. But if
one was to believe in you as I've done one was to pay
a tax on one's faith.‘ 3

Never before this final encounter with Christina
c("J-1d Rowland speak in such a straight-forward manner to

Rocaeirick. Since, as James says, this novel is the drama of

.-3

L55

~r
~.
fim

:‘cwland's co
also has dis
and himself.
sees a new a
cut of a med
aficant con
for itself:

His
brating,
almost h
in this
These th
with ric
again be
ingenuit
marks in
Summate
make him
With SUf
bye to s
the Worj
had pla:I
"as liti
merCile:
Why in .
it was .
ROdericj
land's I
0ftEn b
hurt hi:
blimped
collaps
flOWing
at laSt
aWay at
dfedrin

ls Own
limit 0
peoPle'
he had

The

designated

43

Rowland's consciousness, it is not surprising that Rowland
also has discovered some things about Roderick, Christina
and himself. In fact the discovery scene in which Roderick
sees a new appraisal of himself by Rowland, grows directly
out of a mediation scene in which Rowland comes to some sig-
nificant conclusions. The scene is brief enough to speak
for itself:

His interview with Christina had left him all vi-
brating, and he was haunted with the memory of her
almost blameless bitterness and of something sinister
in this fresh physiognomy she had chosen to present.
These things were immensely appealing, and he thought
with richly renewed impatience of Roderick's having
again become acquainted with them. It required little
ingenuity to make it probable that certain visible
marks in him had also appealed to Christina. His con-
summate indifference, his supreme defiance, would
make him a magnificent trophy, and she had announced
with sufficient distinctness that she had said good-
bye to scruples. It was her fancy at present to treat
the world as a garden of pleasure, and if hitherto she
had played with Roderick's passion on its stem there
was little doubt that she would now pluck it with a more
merciless hand and drain it of its acrid sweetness. And
why in the name of common consistency--though indeed
it was the only consistency to have looked for--need
Roderick have gone marching back to destruction? Row-
land's meditations, even when they began in rancour,
often brought him comfort; but on this occasion they
hurt him as if they had been sharp-cornered objects
bumped against in darkness. He recognized a sudden
collapse of his moral energy; a current that had been
flowing for two years with a breadth of its own seemed
at last to submit to shrinkage and thinness. He looked
away at the sallow vapours on the mountains; their
dreariness had an analogy with the stale residuum of
his own generosity. At last he had arrived at the very
limit of the deference a sane man might pay to other
people's folly; nay, rather, he had transgressed it,
he had been befooled on a gigantic scale. 4

The scene which follows this--what I've already

designated as the discovery scene--in which Roderick learns

Hf“

“‘5‘1'3’s5fl u- '-

the truth of

During the CC

full to overf
into the sin;
'I'm not tall-
"Of course nc
“had as he s;
ROWland and 1
Ship: Roder.
land's long
In effect, t
all the comp
resolved to
tie only tin
At t
work in one
The discove]
to a rapid E
Ciseli’ at t]
that James ,
maIICe fOr t}
diSCoVer S:
resolution c
integraltion

his trials

44

the truth of himself is the emotional climax of the book.
During the course of the conversation both men become quite
angry. "Rowland suddenly felt the cup of his own ordeal
full to overflowing, and his long-gathered bitterness surged
into the simple clear passion of pain at wasted kindness."35
"I'm not talking for your entertainment," Rowland declares.
"Of course not, for my edification!" Roderick responds.
"And as he spoke the air seemed colder for his breath."36
Rowland and Roderick discuss many things in their relation-
ship: Roderick's nonchalant treatment of Mary Garland, Row-
land's long interest in Mary, and the future of Roderick.

In effect, this scene also serves as a dénouement in which
all the complications of the plot are pulled together and
resolved to the extent that they are openly discussed for
the only time by Roderick and Rowland.

At this point in his novel James can conclude his

work in one of two ways, romantically or realistically.

The discovery scene technically has presented him the means
to a rapid solution of Roderick's adventure. It is pre-
cisely at this point in the structure of each of his novels
that James chooses not to use the conventions of the ro-
mance for the resolution of the plot. In the romance the
discovery scene characteristically leads to the successful
resolution of the conflict by the hero and his subsequent

integration into the culture which has been the source of

hiEB trials.

The
different e
of himself
Like many t
ficult to l
burden of g
of Oedipus
SUggests t}
not eXplic.
hands. Ro:
Roderick t.
his death.
for SUbtle

Th
gave a
Consci
mOVe 0
'Oh. I
with n
haVe s
quite
find 0
StUpid
felt a
than a
Up ShQ

It

ROdEri ‘ .
w

craft of f
vention 0f
CQHVQHtiOn

the Silbtle.

45

The discovery scene in Roderick Hudson has had a

 

different effect upon Roderick. The newly learned truth
of himself has left him strangely passive and introspective.
Like many tragic heroes, Roderick finds the truth too dif-
ficult to bear. He feels he must purge himself of the
burden of guilt and in a manner that recalls the decision
of Oedipus to inflict self-punishment, Roderick's action
suggests that his death was suicide. James however does
not explicitly state that Roderick's death was at his own
hands. Rowland cannot justifiably see into the mind of
Roderick to show us exactly what Roderick is thinking before
his death. Their last moments together are notably handled
for subtlety of meaning and ambiguity of intention:
They were both silent a while, and at last Roderick
gave a long, subdued exhalation, the discharge of a
consciousness too suddenly overloaded, and began to
move off. 'Where are you going?‘ Rowland then demanded.
'Oh, I don't care! To walk, to look about, to "commune
with nature." You've given me an idea, and I nowadays
have so few that I'm taking this one with me. I don't
quite know what I can do with it, but perhaps I shall
find out. Leave me to try--though I've already been so
stupid." This seemed a salutary impulse, yet Rowland
felt a nameless doubt. 'That, you know, damns me more
than anything,‘ Roderick went on. 'Certainly I can shut
up shop now.'37
It is particularly in the handling of the ending of
ggderick Hudson that James proves himself the master of the
craft of fiction. Throughout the book he has used the con—
Verrtion of the romance. Yet the ending is not dictated by
convention; it is sufficiently ambiguous enough to reflect

the subtleties and complexities of reality. A reexamination

fir“

9!."

of the novel, 3
arecared for a
mtic ending
The journey mc
has had numerc
mt that Rode
storm. The c<
has been synb
he sculpts.
suggest the d
erick’s life.
North amp ton ,
Rowland Malls
and his naive
The stat‘
feet higj
gourd.
SQUarely
apart; h
baCk: hi
There We
head: a?
Straight
ROderickts C
salf‘POItraj
Health: hE'E
grand things
im
'lCe. Any:

hens drinkir

46

of the novel, however, reveals that James has carefully
prepared for a shift at the end from a conventional, ro-
mantic ending to a more open-ended realistic conclusion.
The journey motif, presented in the images of a sea voyage,
has had numerous references to shipwrecks. It is signifi-
cant that Roderick's death occurs during a violent rain
storm. The consequence of Roderick's journey through life
has been symbolically presented in the three principal statues
he sculpts. The symbolism of these three statues ironically
suggest the direction and conclusion of the course of Rod-
erick's life. The first work, done while Roderick is in
Northampton, Massachusetts, and completed before he meets
Rowland Mallet, is representative of Roderick's innocence
and his naive faith in the goodness of life.
The statuette, done in bronze, something more than two
feet high, represented a naked youth drinking from a
gourd. The attitude was perfectly simple. The lad was
squarely planted on his feet, with his legs a little
apart; his back was slightly hollowed, his head thrown
back; his hands were raised to support the rustic cup.
There was a loosened fillet of wild flowers about his
head, and his eyes, under their dropped lids, looked
straight into the cup. On the base was scratched the
Greek word . . . thirst.38
Roderick's description of the statuette is an excellent
self-portrait. "He's youth, . . . he's innocence, he's
health, he's strength, he's curiosity, yes, he's a lot of
grand things. . . . The cup is knowledge, pleasure, exper-

39

iefmce. Anything of that kind." Rowland's remark, "then

he ' s drinking very deep," is ironic because he is the one

the 01
course

ience

(3

H ’
(D J
H)

0)

0
H
(T)

47

who, in a sense, fills the cup and provides Roderick with

 

his chance to drink deeply from the cup of experience.

The second significant work is Roderick's "Adam"--
a statue which Roderick does shortly after his arrival in
Rome. It is during this period that his artistic powers
are at their height. Roderick has not yet become infatuated
with Christina, so his work reflects the innocence of pre-
lapsarian Adam. Ironically, this statue also foreshadows
the outcome of Roderick. Like Adam, the first man, whose
course of life reflects a passage from innocence to exper-
ience--Roderick is also due to suffer from the consequences
of a fall. And in both cases the fall involves a woman
whose intentions are ambiguously misleading.

The last creative work that Roderick ever does is
significantly different from all the rest of his work. It
is a bust of his mother. To Roderick the task is "a dis-

4O

charge of his filial debt." The bust strikes him as

hopelessly mundane and uninspired. Ironically, the one
most pleased by this work is Gloriani:

The bust of Mrs. Hudson touched Gloriani as he was
seldom touched; the beauty of it bloomed like a flower
that had grown in the night. The poor lady's small,
neat, timorous face had certainly no great character,
but Roderick had presented its sweetness, its mildness,
its minuteness, its still maternal passion, with the
most unerring art. The truth was all tenderness, the
tenderness all truth.41

Unfortunately Roderick cannot see beauty in the mundane
'neéilmn He must deal with grand romantic things; he cannot

create art from trivial, everyday items. Unlike Benvolio,

'V
'W‘”? "'- v

.2.
'J

ram, . 1

..1.vp-'N—-.- - ‘

‘the

|
.
p, a
“VHS

‘n

G
h‘»

48

Roderick cannot live with the contrast that the realistic
and romantic modes of art offer. Roderick is incurably ro-
mantic to the point of his own destruction. Like Benvolio
Roderick has two women completely antithetical to each
other, but Roderick never realizes the necessity for a
balance in what the two represent. His desire to pursue
only Christina, his total idealization of her is a fore-
shadowing of the ultimate fulfillment of his latent death
wish.

To simply state that James changes from the romantic
mode to the realistic at the end of his novels is an over-
simplification. The ironic manner in which Roderick's
death is foreshadowed creates an ambiguous ending. James
does not simply shift from the romantic to the realistic.
What does take place in the ending of James's novels is an
interesting mixture of the two modes. James never allowed
the conventions of fiction writing to dictate to the extent
that he was not free enough to represent life realistically.
Each of James's novels ends with a mixture of triumph and
defeat, although the sense of failure for his hero usually
seems predominant. The triumph is characterized as an as-
sertion of moral character which takes place after the dis-
mivery scene. In the case of Roderick, his triumph is ap-

Palflent to us only after his death. Even then it is not
antlirely clear to us because we do not know what goes on in

the mind of Roderick before he falls from the cliff to his

rafln AS als
sure of is flu
is as I've a
occurs in a v
sane storm is
lass uses to

He ha
singularlj
torrents '
as if the
strand. ‘
fatal fra
What Rowl
noble eXp
death, bu
the whole
away all 1
her ravag.
might hav~
50 innoce

In on
begins, with
Structured hi
to experience

mecovery sce

49

death. As always in James's ending the only thing we are
sure of is the irony and ambiguity of the situation. It
is, as I've already said, significant that Roderick's death
occurs in a violent rain storm. It is ironic that the

same storm is the instrument and source of imagery which
James uses to suggest a return to innocence in Roderick.

He had fallen from a great height, but he was
singularly little disfigured. The rain had spent its
torrents upon him, and his clothes and hair were wet
as if the billow of the ocean had flung him upon the
strand. An attempt to move him would attest some
fatal fracture, some horrible physical dishonour, but
what Rowland saw on first looking at him, was only a
noble expression of life. The eyes were the eyes of
death, but in a short time, when he had closed them,
the whole face seemed to revive. The rain had washed
away all blood; it was as if violence, having wrought
her ravage, had stolen away in shame. Roderick's face
might have shamed her; it was indescribably, and all
so innocently, fair.42

In one sense the journey of Roderick ends where it

begins, with his innocence. Around this journey, James has
structured his novel. Roderick has passed from innocence
to experience and with the aid of the purging both in the
discovery scene with Rowland and in the rains, Roderick re-
turns to innocence. He is perhaps a better man now for hav-
ing failed and, for realizing the nature of his limitations,
having the moral strength to inflict self-punishment. Like
Oedipus and Othello, Roderick is a wiser, better man after
1"! learns the truth of his limitations. And like them his
SeIlse of guilt leads to self-punishment. In choosing to

punish himself he salvages some triumph over the forces

that caused his defeat.

..~':" him

In ma
use of the ro
around the ri
sense, the ed
James CORCEil.
journey is pa
Roderick, how
very importa;
Roderick, but
title, James
in m
mess. The s
adventures 0
0f him. In
mantic and I
first of thC
SitUatiOn dr
develOped ti

det, his g]

novels 1 par‘

of the Cons

sttments.

to them,
f

T

0m of r03:

50

In many ways, then, James's first novel reveals his
use of the romance. The plot is conventional; it is built
around the rise and fall of Roderick Hudson or, in another
sense, the education of Roderick Hudson. In either case
Jarnes conceives of Roderick as a romantic hero and his
journey is patterned after the elements of the romance.
Roderick, however,is not the only hero of this novel. A
Very important part of the story does not directly concern
ROderick, but is the part of Rowland Mallet. Despite the
title, James wrote in the Preface that the center of interest
in gderick Hudson is the drama of Rowland Mallet's conscious-
ness . The subject of James's first novel is not only the

adVezntures of Roderick but Rowland's view and experience

 

of him. In effect, Roderick and Rowland represent the ro-
maI1"::i.c and realistic modes in James's work. Rowland is the
firSt of those characters through whose consciousness the
situation and the action of a novel are revealed. James
de\Teloped this technique to perfection and it becomes, in
fact, his greatest contribution to the novel. James's
r1(3‘fels, particularly those of the major phase, are dramas
0:5 the consciousness because the interest lies in the mind
01: the characters. The reader is privileged to experience
their reactions to impressions, to feel their sensitive ad-
justments, and share their analysis of what is happening
tQ them. This type of experience provided the greatest

f .
91111 of romance to James. To an extent, he conceives of the

 

 

d: “a of
delved ir
emerged a
chiefly 1‘
between 5
press his
experiem
play, bu.
victory .
Of the c
James's

sense pe
nation t
Prising

a StI‘Ugg
1655 ego
of the m

51

drama of consciousness in terms of the romance. As he
delved into the heart of his material the center of interest
emerged as a moral struggle. This was so because what
chiefly interested James about experience was the struggle
between good and evil. He proceeds in his fiction to ex-
press his sense of the struggle as it manifested itself in
experiences, bringing suspense, curiosity and anxiety into
play, building up tensions and posing the final question of
victory or failure. By directly sharing in the experience
of the character, the critical reader of James is aware of
James's consciousness shaping each event, of James's moral
sense pervading the work and shaping it towards some culmi-
nation that is morally beautiful. It is not entirely sur-
prising then that Rowland's role in the novel also involves
a struggle in which he accuses Roderick of being a "remorse-
less egotist," but also views Roderick's body at the foot
of the mountain in mental images that suggest Roderick's
return to innocence.

Rowland may be called James's choice of hero. With-
out Rowland there would be no story. Although such concern
is not a legitimate part of the critical study of literature,

it is interesting to conjecture what the book Roderick Hudson

 

would have been had James written it during his major phase.

Perhaps it would have been called Rowland Mallet? Every-

 

thing that happens in Roderick Hudson is seen as Rowland

 

sees it, is seen through Rowland. There is not a scene

inte
COTE

it

52

recorded in the book in which James does not have Rowland
present, even though his presence is sometimes rather awk-
ward or contrived. Between scenes Rowland thinks and the
story is given continuity. The technique of telling a

story through a center of consciousness was so attractive

to James that he frequently used it in the rest of his work.
It afforded him an aura of reality which he could not
achieve from the conventions of the romance alone. In ad-
dition, the centers of consciousness enable James to treat
the mind of one of his characters, to go, as he likes, be-
neath the surface and see the drama, just as interesting

as the outer action, which took place there. When James's
interest shifts to the drama of consciousness he has not
completely rejected the elements of the romance. In fact,
it is in the drama of consciousness that James finds a

more sophisticated form of romance, albeit without the great
show of action. When his career was in full stride, James
reached a point of permitting a gesture, a phrase, a chance
observation to do the work in which other novelists would
have lavished screams, wounds and the divorce courts. There
is one very effective example of this technique in Roderick
Hudson at the end of the book when Christina comes upon Row-
land and Roderick in the Alps. As she walks away from them
Roderick's "eyes followed her until she reached the door of

"43

her inn. Here she stopped and looked back at him. It

is this brief glance which causes Roderick to relinquish

tr-

all more
cross E

versatic

tatious,
he admit
the rome
ConVenti
Suggesti
angle cc
relatio:
early ir
ChriStir
land's 5
Sta“: fa
angle is

53

all moral restraints and determine to pursue her openly
across Europe. Rowland who has overheard the entire con-
versation between Roderick and Christina is astonished to
hear Roderick say that Christina has asked him to follow
her. "She has asked you?" Rowland says. "Yesterday, in
so many words," is Roderick's reply.

Because Roderick's romantic pursuits are so osten-
tatious, Rowland's romantic interests go unnoticed until
he admits them in the end to Roderick. Another part of
the romantic structure of the novel is built around the
conventional love triangle, handled by James without the
suggestion of illicit love. Early in the novel the tri-
angle consists of Roderick, Mary Garland, and Rowland. The
relationship between Roderick and Mary characterizes the
early innocence of Roderick. Later Roderick's interest in
Christina complicates the triangular love affair, but Row-
land's silent love remains faithful to Mary. The one con-
stant factor in all of the complications of the love tri-
angle is the theme of unrequited love. Mary's love for
Roderick eventually goes unheeded. Rowland's sense of pro-
priety will not allow him to pursue his love, and Roderick's
infatuation with Christina is abhoring to Mrs. Light and
the Cavaliere-~the father of the illegitimate Christina.
The reaction of the two heroes, Roderick and Rowland, to
their unrequited love clearly represents James's handling

of the two modes of fiction. Roderick's response is to

in pass
such a
never 1
and Ch:
and RC:
is DEV:
:ate 5

C0121; 1e
land,

escort

has be

zle he

54

fall into fits of melancholy and despair or to break out
in passionate outbursts. Rowland's reaction is handled in
such a subtle way in his conversations with Mary that she
never realizes his love. In a sense, the pair of Roderick

and Christina are the romantic lovers in Roderick Hudson,

 

and Rowland and Mary the realistic. Because Mary's love
is never passionately revealed to Roderick he never esti-
mates the true worth of her character. She is a much more
complex character than Roderick accords her. It is Row-
land, however, who brings the best out of Mary while he
escorts her around Rome. It is he, and not Roderick who
develops her sensibilities. By the end of the novel Mary
has been strongly affected by Europe. Its subtleties puz-
zle her and please her:
'I used to think,‘ she said to Rowland, 'that if
any trouble came to me I should bear it like a stoic.
But that was at home, where things don't speak to us
of enjoyment as they do here. Here it's such a mix-
ture; one doesn't know what to choose, what to believe.
Beauty stands there--beauty such as this night and this
place and all this sad strange summer have been so full
of--and it penetrates to one's soul and lodges there
and keeps saying that man wasn't made, as we think at
home, to struggle so much and miss so much, but to ask
of life as a matter of course some beauty and some
charm. This place has destroyed any scrap of consis-
tency that I ever possessed, but even if I must myself
say something sinful I love it.'44
Rowland's answer is one which describes reality in a fashion
that characterizes James's own view--a view which accounts
for his liberal use of the romantic and realistic mode in
his fiction: Rowland says, "We shouldn't be able to enjoy,

I suppose, unless we could suffer, and in anything that's

 

worthy of
the real
finest a:
could not
fullness

in Roderi

 

enhance 1
node of ;
ideas th;
true of 3

sent the

55

worthy of the name of experience--that experience which is
the real taste of life, isn't it--the mixture is of the

finest and subtlest."45

This is a perception Roderick
could not have had but it is a perception needed to give
fullness to James's view of reality. The view of reality

in Roderick Hudson is a complex thing; James attempts to

 

enhance that view by using both the romantic and realistic
mode of fiction. As always James presents his important
ideas through his development of character. The same is

true of Roderick Hudson where Roderick and Rowland repre-

 

sent the dual nature of man and the dual modes of fiction.

Torch:

Q
' r-
l

«is.

..a
«5
2

a...“

3

_ .2.
41

5

0
l

... .2 .2 .2 ‘2 .D D
6 7 oo 9 l 2

l

\ .D\ C\ .D\ D

I I I I
4 ..D 6 7
l l l l

FOOTNOTES

1Henry James, Roderick Hudson, ed. by Leon Edel
"The Torchbook Edition7fi1960, viii.

2

 

Blackmur, Preface to Roderick Hudson, p. 16.

 

3Roderick Hudson, p. 25.

 

4rbid., p. 21.

51bid., p. 32.

6Ibid., p. 50.

7Ibid., p. 69.

8Ibid., p. 87.

9Ibid., p. 38.

loIbid., pp. 57-58.

11Ibid., p. 34.

lzIbid., p. 37.

13Ibid., p. 47.

l4Ibid., p. 79.

lsIbid., p. 80.

16Ibid., p. 206.

l7Ibid., p. 144.

181bid., p. 76.

56

57

lg;p;g,, p. 77.
zoléié:
ZlIbid., p. 88.
22;p;g,, p. 89.
23£2£§.
24Ibid,, p. 93.
25;p;g,, p. 91.
2622;9-

27

Ibid., p. 108.

28Ibid., p. 159.

291bid., p. 171.

3°Ibid., p. 296.

31Ibid., p. 314.

3ZIbid., p. 322.

33Ibid., pp. 322-323.

34Ibid., pp. 315-316.

35Ibid., p. 321.

36Ibid., p. 323.

37Ibid., p. 325.

381bid., p. 31.

39Ibid., p. 36.

4°Ibid., p. 235.

411bid.

421bid., p. 332.

43Ibid., p. 314.

441bid., p. 292.

4SIbid.

I fo
Sias:
anot
rObu
CIUQ
PECi
PIEt
Sati
to h
how

Wool

CHAPTER III

THE AMERICAN: PURE ROMANCE

Within a year and a half of the serialization of

Roderick Hudson, Henry James began The American. It is

 

 

The American which represents most explicitly James's use

 

of the romance. The germ of the story came, James says, as:

. . . I was seated in an American 'horse-car' when
I found myself, of a sudden, considering with enthu-
siasm, 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 es-
pecial that he should suffer at the hands of persons
pretending to represent the highest possible civili-
sation 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. . . .1

In this statement one can see the essentials of James's con-
cept of the romance: He has first of all postulated a hero
who has disengaged himself from his homeland and leaves to
confront another culture. In the new culture the hero's
trials or "predicaments" arise. However, what is equally
important in James's germ is his interest in the effect

this experience would have on the hero. The use of the

58

romantic
which his
his the r
of consc:
reaction
Janes's I
mantic a:
an exper;
ing to p:
'the expe:
Center 0:
ESted in
miStI‘eSs
stalest ,
James f01

in hls w,

59

romantic mode provides for James the plot or situations in
which his hero will be tested, the realistic mode gives

him the means, with his particular emphasis upon the center
of consciousness used as point of view, to analyze the
reaction of the hero in each situation. In other words,
James's germ contains what amounts to the mixing of the ro-
mantic and realistic modes. In his interest in the effect
an eXperience has on his hero James is essentially attempt-
ing to provide for the reader a direct confrontation with
the experience of literature and life as told through the
center of consciousness. The fact that James is not inter-
ested in writing about the affront done to Newman by his
mistress because ". . . injuries of this order are the
stalest stuff of romance," seems to be further proof that
James found the elements of the romance functioning best

in his work when they complemented his realistic mode.

Like Roderick Hudson, Christopher Newman is not con-
fronted simply by a trial in the form of a lover. In each
case the trial represents the clashing of two conflicting
cultures. James was always free enough from the dictates
of conventions so that he could create imaginatively in
his fiction. In fact, James was not always fully aware of
the extent to which he used the conventions of the romance

in his fiction. In rereading The American after a number of

 

years James says "The thing is consistently, consummately--
and I would fain really make bold to say charmingly--roman-

tic; and all without intention, presumption, hesitation,

- . ll
contrition.

- ' ll
‘zoving it.
in novel we
lanes is not
de romance.

I O I a

unchalle

such hor
the cril
faculty

vaked u;

voked n;
dues seems
elements of
Knox: in 1115
he ' \
__£3£3§ sa‘
inclined to
and above t<
tives and d.
his study 0

was Com/inc.

represent t:

o.,t]
tiCe Re.
the Natl
Path of
Of the ;
tic! EH(
tive ph:
'0 fartl
libertie
WOUld he

Some

IonanCe will

 

60

contrition." "I had been plotting arch-romance without

knowing it."2 According to James the romantic effect of

the novel was ". . . equally undesigned and unabashed. . . ."3

James is not at all apologetic for his unintentional use of
the romance. Quite to the contrary, he feels:

. . . 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 inevitable and so thoroughly
waked up, the happiest season of surrender to the in-
voked muse and the projected fable.4

James seems to imply in this statement that his use of the
elements of the romance is an "instinctive" impulse. George
Knox, in his article on James's use of the romance in The
American says that "James was from the start a Romancer,
inclined to go below the surfaces of life to psychic depths,
and above to levels of ideals and principles. His narra-
tives and details are built solidly on fable bases."5 In
his study of James, Lyon Richardson indicates that James
was convinced that the novel was the best form of art to
represent the whole truth of life:
. . . though James defended Realism, he did not prac-
tice Realism in any narrow sense. He drew away from
the Naturalism of Zolé; he did not even follow the
path of Garland's 'veritism.‘ There was too little
of the reporter in him, too little of the social cri-
tic, and too much of the creative artist and specula-
tive philosopher for him to follow the way of Realism
to farthest limits. He accepted and used some of the
liberties and services of Romanticism, though he never
would have called himself a Romanticist.6
Some brief attention to James's own views of the

romance will perhaps clarify his reasons for using it along

43—131?” . manna“ umfii'fim

;
I
' with the ree
in terms of
. . . e:
disengaq
from the
it and,
and ope:
ticular
a measu:
communil
Like HawthOJ
"truth of t}
ience libera
it! it mUSt
mantic demar
SEHtEd must
Hawthorne wh

romance and

Preface to '1‘

When a w
be obser.
th as
have fEl-

 

61

vvith the realistic mode. James defines the romance broadly
.in terms of the kind of experience with which it deals:

. . . experience liberated so to speak; experience
disengaged, disembroilled, 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 relieve it, in a par-
ticular interest, of the inconvenience of a related,

a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar
communities.

Like Hawthorne, James felt that the romance must concern the
"truth of the human heart." Although it deals with exper-
ience liberated from the conditions we usually attach to
it, it must still satisfy "our general sense of the way
things happen." The balance between the realistic and ro-
mantic demands of fiction is subtle: the experience repre-
sented must be both individual and general. It was also
Hawthorne who recognized the different demands made by the
romance and the realistic work on the novelist. In his
Preface to The House of Seven Gables, Hawthorne wrote:
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly
be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude,
both as to fashion and material, which he would not
have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed
to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition
is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely
to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary
course of man's experience. The former--while, as a
work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws,
and while it sins unpardonable so far as it may swerve
aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a
right to present that truth under circumstances, to
a great extent, of the writer's own choosing. . . .
James distinguishes between the real and the roman-

tic in terms very similar to Hawthorne's:

 

62

The real represents to my perception the things we
cannot possibly ngt_know, sooner or later, in one way
or another . . . the romantic stands, on the other
hands, 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.9

The proper setting is important in both Hawthorne and James
for the working out of the balance between the romantic and
the real. In his Preface to The Blithedale Romance, Haw-
thorne states that "his present concern with the socialist
community is merely to establish a theatre, a little re-
moved from the highway of ordinary travel, where the crea-
ture of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics,
without exposing them to too close a comparison with the

"10 For his distinction be-

actual events of real lives.
tween the real and the romantic James chooses a metaphor
which describes art as a balloon floating above the earth,
to which it is tied by a cable:

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 the cable is out we are at large and un-

related.11
In James's fiction the balloon of experience has a rope of
"remarkable length" which allows him much latitude in his
use of artistic conventions. The art of the romancer, James
says is "'for the fun of it,‘ insidiously to cut the cable,

to cut it without our detecting him." In his discussion

of the in
Poirier‘:
ing that
'theatre'
from the
the art <
works:

Such
ence
close
EXple
the E
an of
'wooc
Each
reord
side

Pirat
selVe
tradi
mOVed
t0 ea
naril
from

lary

matic
one.

in ot
freed.
Jim h.
Huck':
'ball<
wOrds
bewilc
pulSes

Tl
the artiSt
itumst Pr
fliCt Prod

must not b

63

of the use of the romantic mode in James's works, Richard
Poirier indicates that he does not find it at all surpris-
ing that both James and Hawthorne needed to establish a
"theatre" or "balloon of experience" somewhat removed

from the travels of everyday life. This technique explains
the art of a number of important American artists and their
works:

Such a conception of the romantic removal of experi-
ence to a position where it will not be exposed to 'too
close a comparison with the actual events of real lives'
explains in large part the 'raft' of Huckleberry Finn,
the Pequod of Moby Dick, the screenedVToffice' within
an office of Melville's Bartleby, and, later, the
'woods' in The Bear and the 'bullring' in Hemingway.
Each of these places of removal sets the stage for a
reordering of the social hierarchies which exist out-
side it. The reordering is accomplished in terms of as-
pirations and achievements which cannot express them-
selves in a society based upon practical utility and
traditional manners. In every case, however, the "re-
moved stage' of action, the 'balloon' is, in fact, tied
to earth, to a society in which characters would ordi-
narily live. Huck's raft is not, for example, cut off
from civilization. He carries inside him the vocabu-
lary and the values of that civilization, and the dra-
matic excitement of the novel is partly a linguistic
one. There is a question of Huck's being so caught up
in other people's words that he will forfeit that
freedom of feeling which his idyllic existence with
Jim has given him. The novel is, in that sense, about
Huck's enslavement to the kind of world to which his
'balloon,‘ his raft, is tied in the hard knots of

words and phrases, and their attendant values, which
bewilder him whenever he tries to unravel his im-
pulses.12

 

 

The use of the romance presents special problems for
the artist. It must not stray from essential human truth;
it must present real experience and yet the sense of con-
flict produced by a confrontation with evil in the romance

must not be too specific or too clearly documented. It

‘*flllv’

must C
the on

crib in

those

fictio
vitali
value,
light c
not ex;
the ro:
its PIE
the pro
truth t
to SEQ

Save by

betWeen

IEmaI-kec

artist,
The

that
Met

64

must deal with a truth that is representative of all men;
the one way in which James manages to do this is by des-
cribing experience disengaged from limiting circumstances.
In describing the romance James sharply checked
those critics who insist upon the superiority of his early
fiction on the grounds of its allegedly greater reality or

vitality, by writing in the Preface to The American, "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."13 Although James admits that
the romantic element is discovered only in his retrospect,
its presence has served to enhance the work. In discussing
the problem of an artist giving a sense of fullness and
truth to his work, James states, ". . . I have ever failed
to see how a coherent picture of anything is preducible
save by a complex of fine measurements."l4
James never did try to make a complete distinction
between the romance and the novel. Many times, however, he
remarked about the necessity of both. For himself, as an
artist, a complete separation was unnecessary.
The novel and the romance, the novel of incident and
that of character--these clumsy separations appear to
me to have been made by critics and readers for their
own convenience, and to help them out of some of their
occasional queer predicaments, but to have little re-
ality or interest for the producer, from whose point
of View it is of course that we are attempting to con-
sider the art of fiction.15
Since both the realist and the romanticist are attempting

to present a truthful picture of human experiencev-the

' “W

 

these

time

w

65

question of artistic integrity is not, for James, one of
which mode to use. "I can think of no obligation to which
the 'romancer' would not be held equally with the novelist;
the standard of execution is equally high for each."16
The novel of incident and the novel of character,
these were not important separations for James. At one
time James posed the question, "What is character but the
determination of incident? What is incident but the illus-
tration of character?"l7In James's work the attention to
incident is synonymous with his use of the romance; the
emphasis upon the character's response to the incident is

James's particular contribution to the realistic mode. The

plot of The American is based upon incident--the adventures

 

of ChristOpher Newman. As always, however, the romantic
element serves James as a literary device toward the devel-
opment of a full picture of life. Merely to write of the
adventures of Christopher Newman was to overlook the subtle
refinements needed in order to give James's picture of life
fullness and a sense of reality. James's use of the ro-
mance merges with his use of the realistic mode at the
point where he records the effect, the impressions, and the
moral dilemmas posed by the incidents upon the consciousness
of his hero.

James's hero in The American is Christopher Newman

 

whose name suggests his character and whose actions and

rhetoric make him a representative of the general type of

{1‘

‘- m
"8 note

I

intenti
thirty-
little
man whc
he wisi
as a f:

runs a:

makes

intend
his mi
is on

help h
member
AS a Y
an Old

by her

66

th§_American. Throughout his early life, Newman's sole
intention has been to make money and by the time he is
thirty-five is a wealthy man. He has however thought very
little on the uses of money. He is an eminently practical
man who believes in himself and in his power to do anything
he wishes. After amassing a fortune, he has come to France
as a first step in enjoying his great wealth. In Paris he
runs across Tristram, a former acquaintance, and in the
hands of Mrs. Tristram Newman's adventures begin. Newman
makes his intentions perfectly clear to Mrs. Tristram. He
intends to see the world, to have a good time, to improve
his mind, and, if it suits his fancy, to marry a wife. It
is on the latter intention that Mrs. Tristram offers to
help him. She has a friend, Madame de Cintré, who is a
member of the ancient and aristocratic Bellegarde family.
As a young girl Claire de Cintré was coerced into marrying
an old count but now, a widow, Claire is being pressured

by her family into another distasteful marriage in order

to bring more money into the impoverished family. What
Newman wants is the ideal wife; he tells Mrs. Tristram that
his wife must be a "magnificent woman." Mrs. Tristram
arranges a meeting between Newman and Madame de Cintré which
terminates with an invitation to Newman to call at the
Bellegarde home. Although Claire belongs to the remnants
of an old noble family, Mrs. Tristram sees this difficulty

as merely added interest in the obstacles Newman will face

 

C5283“.

Amer

triu

67

in courting her. Like so many of James's characters

who for one reason or another cannot exploit their own
chances in life, Mrs. Tristram sees in the fortunate young
American someone in whose career she can enjoy a vicarious
triumph.

Newman first becomes aware of the obstacles to his
courtship of Claire when, on his first attempt to call, he
is told by a superior sort of person, who later proves to
be the Marquis de Bellegarde, that Madame de Cintré is not
in. Newman realizes that he may have a formidable, even
treacherous adversary. After a summer of travel throughout
Europe, Newman returns to Paris and with his characteristic
boldness he begins to court Claire. The Bellegardes dis-
approve highly of Newman because he is a "commercial per-
son," but his wealth is so great that they cannot afford
to object flatly. Claire's mother, the daughter of an
English earl, and Claire's older brother, Urbain, the head
of the family, are insanely proud of their nobility. Even
though Newman's natural qualities are apparent to them, the
Marquis and Urbain cannot completely accept Newman's lack
of noble birth. Although she is deeply disturbed that New-
man does not care for her mother or older brother, Claire
finally decides to marry Newman. The younger members of the
family--Claire's brother Valentin and her sister-in-law--like
Newman and favor the marriage. Upon hearing Claire's deci-

sion, Newman responds with immoderate happiness. His time

.=.._'.u..~_.-‘:

“mm“ ‘ "m

part:

her

and

Marc

68

for discretion is past, and true to his American type, he
telegraphs his good fortune to friends in America and an-
nounces to the Bellegardes his intentions of giving a great
celebration for them and his friends in his Paris lodging.
The Marquise is scandalized. She proclaims that since a
party seems necessary ghg_will give one, introducing him to
her friends.

It is the party which proves to be Newman's downfall.
With an air of happiness and arrogance he brazenly roams
through the house where all the old families are assembled,
and accepts his good fortune too noisily for the dignified
Marquise. During the party the Marquise and Urbain decide
that they cannot suffer the Bellegarde name to be tainted
by such an alliance. In all the long history of their
family, which goes as far back as the rule of Charlemagne,
there is "not a case on record of a misalliance among the
women." Consequently, old Madame Bellegarde uses her au-
thority and forces Claire to renounce her marriage plans.
The Bellegardes try to arrange a match between Claire and
a distant cousin, the wealthy Lord Deepmore, but Claire
refuses. In order to escape the disgrace that her mother
forces upon her, Claire enters a Carmelita convent and
becomes a nun.

A sub-plot which has been appearing at intervals
merges with the main plot at the point where the party is

given by the Marquise. The sub-plot functions mainly to

aphasi
and the
tween h
amuse t
gardes,
ities c
that nc
suit au
IECOgnj
i5 tho:
Plant \
from t:
first a
painti;
Later,
become:
gagemex
a man (
despite
leSSly
Gram cc
0f Vale
tin's (
which 5
appalls

saCrifi

69

emphasize the enormous difference between the American
and the Europeans. A fast friendship has developed be-
tween Newman and Valentin whose only part in life is to
amuse himself. More than any of the rest of the Belle-
gardes, Valentin represents the bright romantic possibil-
ities of the ancient family. He resents the restrictions
that nobility imposes upon him. He encourages Newman's
suit and envies his free and independent condition. He
recognizes that it is Newman, and not the Bellegardes, who
is thoroughly at home in the world. Newman hopes to trans-
plant Valentin to America, where he can begin a life free
from the restricted routines of the Bellegardes. When he
first arrived in Paris, Newman foolishly ordered some
paintings done by an inferior copyist, Noémie Nioche.
Later, Newman introduces her to Valentin who promptly
becomes interested in her. On the evening after the en-
gagement party, Valentin gets involved in a quarrel with

a man over Noémie. A challenge to a duel follows, and
despite Newman's attempt to interfere, Valentin goes reck-
lessly off to Switzerland to settle the affair. A tele-
gram comes to Newman in Paris calling him to the deathbed
of Valentin. Like Claire's escape to the convent, Valen-
tin's death is another sacrifice to the vain code of honor
which so rigidly binds the Bellegarde family. Newman is
appalled that two lives so close to him should have been

sacrificed by such an inconsequential thing as a code of

 

 

honor. Wha
versary thr
Erbain de E
honor.

Bef
of an apolc
secret whic
to marry Cl
garde house
and Urbain
legarde, wh
decrepit Ma
Mrs. Bread,
on his deat
ever, when
they IEfuse
the Manluis
even the th

gardes. A!

has been 9:

   
  
 
 

 

on all alc

OVEI' the B

he has NC

NC

pendeut c:

70

honor. What Newman does not realize is that his real ad-
versary throughout his adventures is not the Marquise or
Urbain de Bellegarde but the more formidable code of
honor.

Before he dies, Valentin tells Newman, in the form
of an apology for his family's behavior, of a dark family

secret which he can use to force the Marquise to allow him

 

r~1
to marry Claire. From an old English servant in the Belle-
garde household, Newman learns that old Madame Bellegarde
and Urbain hastened the death of the old Marquis de Bel- t

legarde, when he opposed the marriage of Claire to the
decrepit Marquis de Cintré. The English servant woman,
Mrs. Bread, gives Newman a note written by the late Marquis
on his death bed charging his wife with his death. How-
ever, when Newman threatens the Bellegardes with disclosure,
they refuse to allow his marriage to Claire, and imply that
the Marquis was insane when he wrote the note. Finally
even the thought of revenge seems repulsive to Newman be-
cause it places him on the same base level as the Belle-
gardes. At last he burns the letter. His magnamnimity
has been great enough to spare them, as they have counted
on all along. In the end, then, Newman seems to triumph
over the Bellegardes. His decision has been a moral one;
he has proven his nobility and their baseness.

Newman is one of James's free, economically inde-

pendent characters who can travel at will. "I've come to

 

Europe, to
Tristrams.
cw best pe
sense of f:
'I wan‘
get. 1
want t<
lakes,
church:
elegan‘
Jams freqz
a means of
3'1!- Babcocl
sees Nemax
Calls him 5
images tha1
qualities;
forth in h;
900: Corru;
The image (
in the boo}
marrying c.

'The SE
Tristre

71

Europe, to get the best out of it I can," he tells the

Tristrams. "I want to see all the great things and do what

18 Newman himself conceives of his

the best people do."
sense of freedom as a grand thing.

'I want the biggest kind of entertainment a man can

get. People, places, art, nature, everything! I

want to see the tallest mountains, and the bluest

lakes, and the finest pictures, and the handsomest

churches, and the most celebrated man, and the most

elegant women.19
James frequently uses the remarks of other characters as
a means of characterizing the romantic nature of Newman.
Mr. Babcock, an American minister travelling in Europe,
sees Newman as one of "nature's noblemen." Mrs. Tristram
calls him a "child of nature," and characterizes him in
images that suggest both his innocence and his heroic
qualities: "You're the great Western Barbarian, stepping
forth in his innocence and might, gazing a while at this
poor corrupt old world and then swooping down on it."20
The image of Newman's swooping to conquest appears again
in the book at the point where the Tristrams talk of his
marrying Claire:

'The spread eagle should use his wings,‘ said Mrs.

Tristram.

'He should fly to the rescue of the woman of whom ad-

vantage is being taken!‘

'To her rescue--?' Newman seemed to wonder.

'Pounce down, seize her in your talons and carry her

off. Marry her yourself.'2
In addition to being called throughout the book by the
omniscient narrator as "our hero," Newman's heroic quali-

ties are suggested by his large physical frame. To make

 

Emil?

 

himself con
stretches c
impressed 1:
However, be
seven-leagi
whose roma:
He comes ne
pling in p}
than any 01
opposition
of Physical
Newman is 1
being the I

Ne:
Prince. Hf
of the rom.
iEnce diSE]
is his air

freedOm.

 

 

72

himself comfortable in an unfamiliar situation, Newman
stretches out his long legs. Valentin, in particular, is
impressed by Newman's size. "The way you cover the ground!
However, being as you are a giant, you move naturally in
seven-league boots."22 Newman is the only Jamesian hero
whose romantic qualities are suggested by a large physique.
He comes nearer than any other Jamesian character to grap-
pling in physical combat with his opposition. And more
than any other of James's heroes, Newman conceives of his
opposition and the evil in his encounters solely in terms
of physical adversaries--the Marquise and her son Urbain.
Newman is the closest in James's conception of a hero to
being the prince of the pure romance.
Newman, however, is not simply a conventional
prince. He is conceived by James to represent the quality
of the romance that James most admired--the sense of exper-
ience disengaged. What Valentin admires most about Newman
is his air of being at home in the world; he envies his
freedom.
'What I envy you is your liberty,'Count Valentin found
occasion to observe;'your wide range, your freedom to
come and go, your not having a lot of people, who take
themselves all too seriously, expecting something of
you. I live,'he added with a sigh,'beneath the eyes
of my admirable mother. '23

The author has allowed Newman a rope of remarkable length

for his participation in experience. Again his freedom is

contrasted to Valentin's restriction: Valentin ". . . had

long been tied with so short a rope . . . that he had now

 

a mort
iously
my wai
balloc
be a 1
tin, C
man's

of the

73

a mortal grudge against family discipline."24 Quite ser—
iously Valentin adds, "I think I shall tie a rope around

25 Attached to James's

my waist and go into a monastery."
balloon of experience it is extremely important that there
be a long enough rope. In characterizing Newman and Valen-
tin, James's use of the rope imagery clearly relates New-
man's freedom and Valentin's restriction to his conception
of the romance.

One of Newman's reasons for coming to Europe is to
marry well. What Newman wants is the ideal wife. He con-
ceives of her in idealistic terms that suggest that she
must be the princess of the romance. "My wife must be a
pure pearl," Newman tells Mrs. Tristram. Fortunately Mrs.
Tristram happens to number among her friends "the finest
creature in the world." Newman makes the mistake of be-
lieving that such an ideal woman can be purchased:

'I want a great woman. I stick to that. That's the
one thing I can treat myself to, and if it's to be
had I mean to have it. What else have I toiled and
struggled for all these years? I've succeeded, and
now what am I to do with my success? To make it per-
fect, as I see it, there must be a lovely being
perched on the pile like some shining statue crowning
some high monument. She must be as good as she's
beautiful and as clever as she's good. I can give my
wife many things, so I'm not afraid to ask certain
others myself. She shall have everything a woman can
desire; I shall not even object to her being too good
for me. She may be cleverer and wiser than I can
understand, and I shall only be the better pleased.26
I want, in a word, the best article in the market.‘
Like the princess of the romance, Claire is not presented

as a complex, individual character. She remains a flat,

convention
attempt to
he ironica
the conver
is always
izes her.
a range 0;
streaked,
'What dimi:
View of h,
Claire's .
was . ,
0f as str
rhetoric L
him. She
the Islat
at least
that at t
Newman.s
grOWS, bu
HOWQVer'
flaw in t
manCes th
other eXp
B.
and roman.

74

conventional character throughout the book. In Newman's
attempt to elevate Claire to the level of the ideal princess,
he ironically diminishes her individuality and humanity by
the conventional manner in which he conceives of her. It

is always in grand, sweeping strokes that Newman character-
izes her. "Madame de Cintre's face had, to Newman's eye,

a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-
streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie."27
What diminishes her humanity even more is Newman's unwitting
view of her as "the best article on the market." One of
Claire's admirable qualities, Newman thinks, is that "she
was . . . as distinct as the big figure on a banknote and

28 Newman's business

of as straight-forward a profession."
rhetoric keeps Claire from becoming a real person even to
him. She always remains in abstract ideal. Furthermore,
the relationship between Newman and Claire does not develop;
at least the reader is unable to see it. James simply says
that at the end of six months of courtship, Claire accepts
Newman's proposal. We are told_that the relationship

grows, but we do not see it rendered to us realistically.
However, neither we nor James can feel this to be a serious
flaw in the book. It is one of the conventions of the ro-
mances that the hero and the princess fall in love. No
other explanation is needed.

Because Newman's view of Claire is so idealistic

and romantic and because James uses the conventions of the

romance so
reader is p
ending of t
to the char
of the book
long family
ficulty the
As a rule t
the I'ancier
which Neme
intention c
Courage Nev
aPpraisal c

'Three

elghtee

§£2‘~ac

'A laW\

aSked.‘
'A conc
did he!
COPhEti
like pa
to thi:

 

75

romance so explicitly, neither Newman or the sentimental '
reader is prepared for anything but the conventional happy
ending of the romance. There are, however, important clues
to the character of Claire and consequently to the outcome
of the book which Newman overlooks. In describing the
long family history to Newman, Valentin suggests the dif-
ficulty that Newman will face in attempting to marry Claire.
As a rule the Bellegarde family has always married into
the "ancient houses!" There have been some exceptions
which Newman feels will work entirely in his favor. The
intention of Valentin's remarks, however, are not to en-
courage Newman of his chances, but to provide a realistic
appraisal of what he confronts:
'Three of four Bellegardes in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centurie, took wives out of the bourgeoi-
sie--accepted lawyers' daughters.‘
IA lawyer's daughter--that's a come-down?‘ Newman
asked.
'A condescension. But one of us, in the Middle Ages,
did better: he married a beggar-maid, like King
Cophetua. That was really more convenient; it was
like pairing with a bird or a monkey; one didn't have
to think about her family at all. Our women have
always done well; they've never even gone into the

petite noblesse. There is, I believe, not a case on
record of a misalliance among ces dames.‘2

 

 

 

valentin advises Newman to be prepared for strange
things from so ancient a family: "We're fit for a museum
or a Balzac novel. My mother's strange, my brother's
strange, and I verily believe I'm stranger than either.
_ You'll even find my sister a little strange. Old trees

have crooked branches, old houses have queer cracks, old

races have
years old!"
advice as a
The
book that t
faces. Bo
character '
cerns Clai
Madame de
"Pounced u
widow, pus
typical of
she is bei
"In the co
to his [Ma
found so 1
Self and y
is a Visa}:
Her "WEIShi
her eSCape

T1”
dOte Or a

The tale

the “Com
serves to-
happy end

narrates .

76

races have odd secrets. Remember that we're eight hundred

years old!"30

Newman simply accepts this well-intended
advice as a challenge to be overcome.

There are two other significant incidents in the
book that should have warned Newman of the difficulty he
faces. Both of the incidents reveal something in Claire's
character that Newman overlooks. The first incident con-
cerns Claire's reaction to the irregular practices of
Madame de Cintré's relatives after his death. The family
"pounced upon his money, brought a lawsuit against his

'31 Claire's reaction is

widow, pushed things very hard.‘
typical of her response in a later difficult situation when
she is being ordered by her mother not to marry Newman.

"In the course of the suit some revelations were made as

to his [Marquis de Cintré's] private history which [Claire]
found so little to her taste that she ceased to defend her-

32 Claire

self and washed her hands of all her interests."
is a weak person who flees from embarrassing confrontations.
Her "washing her hands of all her interests" foreshadows

her escape to the Carmelite convent when some of her own
distasteful private history is uncovered.

The second incident appears in the form of an anec-
dote or a fairy tale which Claire tells to her neice Blanche.
The tale reinforces Claire's tendency to escape or flee from
the uncomfortable situations in her life. The tale also
serves to satisfy the sentimental reader's desire for a

happy ending. We hear only the last part of the tale Claire

narrates:

'But in '
Florabel
the Land
she forg
day of t
dred whi
Newman,

During their
the convent,
she is in t?
begins to se
has been his
Of his misux
Welcomes a I
tOne 90¢
judge m.
did me .
into yo
Cape~-n
o t . I
being u
Al
Should hav
Newman new»,Q
than the t

romanCe

 

view of he
is guilty
the CONSC’
hEr as a

gaVe d h‘

77

'But in the end the young prince married the beautiful

Florabella, and carried her off to live with him in

the Land of the Pink Sky. There she was so happy that

she forgot all her troubles and went out to drive every

day of the life in an ivory coach drawn by five hun-

dred white mice. Poor Florabella,‘ she mentioned to

Newman, 'had suffered terribly.'33
During their last conversation together before she goes into
the convent, Claire reveals to Newman what a weak creature
she is in the face of suffering. For the first time Newman
begins to see Claire in realistic fashion. In fact, it
has been his idealization of her that has been the source
of his misunderstanding her. Ironically, it is Claire who
welcomes a more realistic appraisal of her:

'One good at least has come of this; I've made you

judge me more fairly. You thought of me in a way that

did me great honour; I don't know why you had taken it

into your head. But it left me no loophole for es-

cape--no chance to be the common weak creature I am.

. . . I'm timid and cold and selfish. I'm afraid of

being uncomfortable.'34

Although Newman has had a number of clues which

should have warned him that the difficulty in courting
Claire concerned more than just strange family habits,
Newman never does conceive of his opposition as any other
than the typical physical adversary of the conventional
romance. His mental images of the Marquise suggest his
view of her. When Newman implies to the Marquise that she
is guilty of murdering her husband, the image pattern on
the consciousness of Newman's mind reinforces his idea of

her as a sinister, physical adversary: "the Marquise

gave a hiss that fairly evoked for our friend some vision

of a hunche
evil eyes.‘
c'evil-in-f
this type c
overcome a;
stand is t
and her so
in his att-
ferences i;
difference
Because he
NE’nman's f
dence in h
Calls for
fine sensi
not haVe t
CEiVe the
Th
is handled

descriptic

Asin the

 

78

of a hunched back, an erect tail and a pair of shining

evil eyes."3S

Newman has made the Marquise out to be the
devil-in-flesh. Ironically, Newman does not really fear
this type of evil. He is fully confident that he can
overcome any such adversary. What Newman does not under-
stand is that his opposition is not simply the Marquise
and her son Urbain. What is responsible for the failure
in his attempt to marry Claire is the irreconcilable dif-
ferences in manners, tastes and cultures. These are the
differences that Valentin has tried to make Newman see.
Because he does not understand that there are differences,
Newman's failure is one of shortsightedness and over-confi-
dence in his own ability. In "The Art of Fiction" James
calls for the serious participant in life to be a man of
fine sensibilities. Newman lives life intensely but does
not have the finely developed sensibilities needed to per-
ceive the subtle form of evil which confronts him.

The contrast between the two conflicting cultures
is handled very economically and explicitly by James in his
description of the rooms maintained by Newman and Valentin.
As in the tale "Benvolio," the choice of rooms precisely
characterize the men and furthermore represents the pre-
sence of the two modes of fiction in James's work.

It is characteristic of Newman to want the largest
or the grandest; this is his main criteria of quality.

Newman's rooms amuse Valentin for their size, their

ostentation:

 

One ev:
him a .
legard
his vi
greate
nice t
him, e
herent
ing at

Valentin )1
he states,
large. It
”That's wh
"the size .

Va

The pl.
With c'
Patric.
tor, a:
ancien
faded '
beasts
tribut.
art is
lookin
Which,
more 5
draped
comp le
Sions -

 

79

One evening very late . . . Newman's servant brought
him a card which proved to be that of young M. de Bel-
legarde. When a few moments later he went to receive
his visitor he found him standing in the middle of the
greatest of his gilded saloons and eyeing it from cor-
nice to carpet. Count Valentin's face it seemed to
him, expressed not less than usual a sense of the in-
herent comedy of things. 'What the devil is he laugh-
ing at now?‘ our hero asked himself.36

Valentin has come to visit and smoke, but as he looks about
he states, "Surely I mayn't smoke here." ". . . It's too
large. It's like smoking in a ball-room or a church."

"That's what you were laughing at just now?" Newman asked;
37

 

"the size of my room?"
Valentin's rooms are equally baffling to Newman:

The place was low, dusky, contracted, and was crowded
with curious bric-a-brac. Their prOprietor, penniless
patrician though he might be, was an insatiable collec-
tor, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and
ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in
faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of
beasts. Here and there was one of those uncomfortable
tributes to elegance in which the French upholsterer's
art is prolific; a curtained recess with a sheet of
looking-glass as dark as a haunted pool; a divan on
which, for its festoons and furbelows, you could no
more sit down than on a dowager's lap; a fireplace
draped, flounced, frilled, by the same analogy, to the
complete exclusion of fire. The young man's posses-
sions were in picturesque disorder, and his apartment
pervaded by the odour of cigars, mingled, for inhala-
tion, with other dim ghosts of past presences. New-
man thought it, as a home, damp, gloomy and perverse,
and was guzzled by the romantic incoherence of the fur-
niture.3

The two rooms reflect completely different ways of life;
one founded upon a pragmatic, utilitarian view, and the
other upon the ancient traditions of the romantic past.

In a slightly different vein, Max Schulz discusses

James's use of archetectural imagery as a means of

 

characteri:
tions of ti
gardes, gi
actions.
tiquated v
Newman the
do not mak
He never c
has on a f
achieved b
his use of
Wh
in the cul
the differ
their amuS
an Occasio
Newman tha
Claire the

This time

    
 
 
  
 

experiSe;
"marquise:
and jeSte
great Str
Play the
manner ir.

80

characterizing the Bellegardes: "The historical associa-
tions of the castle image, used in reference to the Belle-

gardes, gives them a context, a modus operandi, for their

 

actions. Mirrored thus in terms of 'antiquity' their an-
tiquated values appear more reasonable."39 However, to
Newman the historical associations of the castle imagery
do not make the Bellegardes' actions seem more reasonable.
He never can appreciate the weight of influence the past
has on a family founded in antiquity. What James has
achieved by the use of castle imagery is a way of giving
his use of a romantic convention an air of validity.

While Newman is not fully aware of the differences
in the cultures, the Bellegardes are extremely aware of
the differences. At first the differences are a source of
their amusement at the expense of Newman. Even at so solemn
an occasion as the dinner party where it is announced to
Newman that he is accepted as a candidate for the hand of
Claire the Bellegardes' amusement with Newman is apparent.
This time it is Valentin who enjoys the humor at Newman's
expense: "In the good old times," the young man said,
"marquises and counts used to have their appointed buffoons
and jesters to crack jokes for them. Nowadays we see a
great strapping democrat keeping one of 'us' about him to

40 Valentin is mocking the naively confident

play the fool."
manner in which Newman conducts himself. On a number of

times when Newman is the source of entertainment for the

 

Bellegardes
circus imag
at center 1
Claire has
harquis and
understand
vhelming.
clever acrc
At
Ml presen‘
Every c
lighte<
Of EXpe
quaint.
intens.
hand be
the Ma
fiCtio
thus 1
that t
NEhman him
being Put:
'Am I
I Ste;
Were E

thrOw
All of th

 

 

man is of
with the
Othel. ti:-

Situatio.

81

Bellegardes, James describes the situation in terms of
circus imagery. In each case, Newman provides the show
at center ring. When Newman announces to the family that
Claire has consented to marry him, Valentin responds: "The
Marquis and I are charmed. I can't marry myself, but I can
understand it in others when the inducements to it are over-
whelming. I can't stand on my head, but I can applaud a
clever acrobat when he brings down the house."41
At the engagement ball, Newman is 'exhibited' for
all present.
Every one gave Newman extreme attention, everyone
lighted up for him regardless, as he would have said,
of expense, everyone was enchanted to make his ac-
quaintance, everyone looked at him with that fraudulent
intensity of good society which puts out its bountiful
hand but keeps the fingers closed over the coin. If
the Marquis was going about as a bear-leader, if the
fiction of Beauty and the Beast was supposed to show
thus its companionpiece, the general impression appeared
that the bear was a very fair imitation of humanity.42
Newman himself has the uncomfortable feeling that he is
being put on exhibition:
'Am I behaving like a blamed fool?‘ he wondered. 'Am
I stepping about like a terrier on his hind legs?
. . . Am I holding my head too high and opening my
mouth too wide?‘ he demanded. 'Do I look as if they
were saying 'Catch' and I were snapping down what they
throw me and licking my lips?'43
All of this animal/exhibition imagery associated with New—
man is of a diminuitive nature. It is an ironic contrast
with the heroic/conquest imagery associated with him at
other times. The impression which James gives of Newman's

situation as the companion-piece of the fiction of the

Beauty and
phor is anc
the book.
who hopes t
marry the I
of course,
significan1
about makir
is made. I
ical trans:
is not wha1
Opposition
tion that ;
is Widened
understand.
theirs. J
in terms 0
fees. New
b61119 a fi
some tYPes

subilety .

 

tion. Ne

    

enough.

I“

1..

which cor
ceflCe an .

it.198 wh

‘

82

Beauty and the Beast is an apt one. In effect, this meta-
phor is another comment on the basic romantic structure of
the book. Newman is the beast--the great Western Barbarian--
who hopes that by some magic happening he will be able to
marry the Beauty--Claire de Cintré. The Bellegarde family,
of course, do not want such a marriage; consequently, it is
significant that it is the Marquis who is leading Newman
about making introductions when the comparison to the Beast
is made. Unfortunately for Newman there is no magic phys-
ical transformation. Furthermore, a physical transformation
is not what is needed, even though Newman conceives of his
«opposition solely as physical adversaries. The transforma-
tion that is needed for Newman to lose his beastly qualities
jus widened perception, greater sensibilities, and better
tnnderstanding of the differences between his culture and
1:1ueirs. James's heroes confront their greatest opposition
.iarl terms of subtleties, not in terms of obvious physical
‘15<:;es. Newman is an admirable physical specimen, and while
being a fine physical specimen is suitable preparation for
some types of opposition, he is entirely unprepared for the
£3VL113tlety and complexity which is the nature of his opposi-
‘tZJi-CDII. Newman is defeated, not because he isn't strong
eIICDIAgh, but because he isn't perceptive enough.
In each of the encounters in the series of tests
”hi Ch confront Newman, he is defeated because of his inno-

c go ’ o o o
ence and naivete. At the same time It is these same qual-

1 -
t1 es which eventually allow Newman to be morally triumphant.

83

In The American, as in Roderick Hudson, the ending is a

 

 

mixture of modes suggesting a combination of triumph in
defeat. Like Roderick Hudson, Newman's opposition con-
fronts him mainly in terms of a woman, or, more specifi-
cally, for Newman, in terms of a series of women. And
in each case the women symbolize, like Christina Light,
the mannerisms and habits that are part of the European
way of life.

Newman's first encounter is shortly after his ar-
rival in Paris. In fact his first experience shows him to
be foolishly unaware of Europe. Although he wishes to
cultivate the arts, Newman is pathetically lacking in ar—
tistic judgement. In Brussels Newman's first stoping
place after leaving Paris for a tour of Europe, Newman was
". . . greatly struck with the beautiful Gothic tower of
the H6te1 de Ville and wondered if they might n't 'get

44 When Newman

up' something like it in San Francisco."
encounters Noemié Nioche painting along the Louvre, he is
ironically attracted to her work because he is ". . . baf-
fled on the aesthetic question and guilty of the damning
fault of confounding the aspect of the artist with that of

his work."45

In other words, as James adds parenthetically,
Newman ". . . admires the squinting Madonna of the young
lady with the hair that somehow also advertises 'art,‘ be-
cause he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking."46

Newman pays a very high price for Mlle. Nioche's poor copy,

84

and shortly after, he engaged her to do copies of six of
the most beautiful paintings of the masters. At first
Mlle. Nioche sees this engagement as a lucrative business
venture, but after Newman casually selects six difficult
paintings, Mlle. Nioche cannot tolerate this folly any
longer.

'Ah, gs, I don't understand you,‘ she bravely broke
out. I don't understand how a man can be so ignorant.
. . . I paint like a cat; I can't draw a straight
line. I never sold a picture until you bought that
thing the other day.‘ And as she offered this sur-
prising information she continued to smile.

Newman met it with a grimace of his own. 'Why do you
make that statement?‘

'Because it irritates me to see a clever man so béte.
My copies are grotesque. . . . This commande of yours
is impossible, you know. What do you take me for?
It's work for ten strong men. You pick out the six
most difficult pictures in the place and you expect
me to go to work as if I were sitting down to hem a
dozen pocket handkerchiefs.'47

 

 

It is, however, precisely this naiveté and innocence which
eventually prevent Newman from being duped again by Noemié
Nioche in a much more serious proposition. Because Newman
is such a wealthy man, Noemié openly makes herself available
to him. Ironically, it is not Newman but Valentin who falls
victim to the devious designs of Mlle. Nioche.

Newman's most severe test comes at the hands of the
Marquise de Bellegarde. She is his most worthy and formid-
able adversary. When Newman confronts her with the letter
from Mrs. Bread in which the late Marquis charges his wife

with murder, Madame de Bellegarde remains surprisingly

-i. i. -- . haughty»?

85

collected. Her only concession to self-defense comes when
she asks if Mrs. Bread weren't the "accomplice in this
clumsy fraud." "You! re a mighty plucky woman, madam,"
Newman says to her. "It's a great pity you've made me your
enemy. I should have been one of your greatest admirers."48
When the Marquise leaves Newman, he sees her stoop and kiss
her grandchild: "'Damn it, she is pluckyl' he sighed; and
he walked home with a sense of having been almost worsted.
She was quite heroically impenetrable."49
Two days after the engagement ball, Newman returns
to the Bellegarde house to see Claire. Upon entering he
is approached by Mrs. Bread who tells him that Claire is
unexpectedly leaving town. Newman hastens to Claire's
room and there he finds her dressed for traveling and in
the company of her mother and Urbain. He instinctively
feels threatened: "He knew himself, as he entered, in the
presence something evil; he was as startled and pained as
he would have been by threatening cry in the stillness of

50 Newman accuses them of treachery. "You stab

51

the night."
me in the back . . . is it I who am offensive?" Newman's
greatest defeat is at the hands of the Marquise de Belle-
garde, but, ironically, the Marquise is not fully triumphant
for her daughter forsakes her and goes to the Carmelite
Convent rather than marry Lord Deepmore. Once Claire joins

the sisters in the convent, neither Newman nor the Marquise

ever see her again.

 

 

86

If John Clair's reinterpretation of The American

 

is at all noteworthy it is for its revelation that the
role of Mrs. Bread in the novel is far more devious than
the straight-forward wholesomeness her name suggests. The
last test of Newman's character is so concealed by such a
benevolent appearing person that he never suspects the im-
plications of Mrs. Bread's information. In a sense this
is the most serious test of Newman's character, for if he
follows Mrs. Bread's advice he will, in effect, prove him-
self no better than the treacherous, deceiving Bellegardes.
To accept the popular interpretation of the work as
a transparent story of the victimization of a 'good
natured' American by a Borgia-like Parisian family
seems to involve an oversight of much explicit and
implicit information in the novel, which suggests
that Mrs. Bread, the true mother of Claire de Cintré,
was a black-mailer claiming both Newman and the Mar-
quise de Bellegarde as victims; that Newman, by dint of
his characteristic American naivete and his opacity as
a judge of character, was completely 'taken in' by
her ruse; and that Claire's refusal to accept Newman
in marriage came as a direct result of her having been
informed by the Bellegardes of her true parents--the
Old Mar uis and his 'meanest of mistresses,‘ Catherine
Bread.5
Once again, however, Newman's innocence protects him from
choosing to do evil; he unwittingly triumphs in defeat.
His final instinct is to burn the evidence of their guilt
and forget his intentions of gaining revenge.
Newman's moral triumph in the end--what I have
called his triumph in defeat and what James calls Newman's

fate--is essentially a romantic resolution to the plot.

In his Preface to The American James describes the creative

 

process he followed in shaping Newman's fate:

87

. . . 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 was, however, that

my conception unfurled, with the best conscience in the
world, the emblazoned flag of romance.53

In large, sweeping strokes James resolves the adven-
tures of Newman, strokes that are not at all inconsistent
with the grand, heroic conception of his American. In fact,

at the end of the book, James turns to melodrama as a means

 

of heightening the texture of his romance. Within the course
of no more than two days, Newman learns that his engagement
has been canceled, that Valentin lies mortally wounded from

a duel, and that there is a dark family secret which, when

he is able to obtain it from Mrs. Bread, can be used to re-
venge the wrongs that the Bellegardes have done him. The
death-bed scene where Valentin tells Newman of a terrible
family secret strikes one at first as exaggerated and some-
what contrived. Were it not for the fact that James is
writing a romance, the author's creative hand appearing in

the work ex machina would seriously flaw the work. How-

 

ever, the melodramatic turn at the end is an appropriate
conclusion for a hero whose life has been fashioned after
a grand design.

In a story whose plot is largely based upon the
adventures of the hero, it is not unusual for the journey
to be used as an important structural device. In Roderick

Hudson the journey motif was used quite obviously in a

.....Q

.I

88

symbolic manner showing Roderick's passage through life.
In The American the plot is also structured by a journey.
At the beginning of the book Newman has just traveled to
Paris and in the end Newman leaves Europe to go back to

America. The journeys in The American function symbolically

 

to represent Newman's passage from innocence to experience
and back to innocence again. It is immediately after he
magnanimously burns the incriminating letter that Newman
returns to America. His moral triumph marks his passage
back to innocence. There have, however, been brief allu-
sions to two other journeys Newman takes which foreshadow
his final passage back to innocence. The brief allusions
serve mainly to give the final journey plausibility and the
structure of the plot artistic balance. The first allusion
is to a trip Newman made which proved to shape the rest of
his life. Newman had intended to 'get ahead of another
party on a big [business] transaction,’ when he realized
that his motive was entirely revenge. He has a sudden
"most extraordinary change of heart, a mortal disgust for

54

the whole proposition." This change of heart occurs on

his trip to Wall Street to carry out the transaction. New-
man narrates the rest of the incident to the Tristrams:

'We pulled up in front of the place I was going to in
Wall Street, but I sat still in the carriage, and at
last the driver scrambled down off his seat to see
whether his hack hadn't turned into a hearse. I
couldn't have got out any more than if I had been a
corpse. What was the matter with me? Momentary brain-
collapse, you'll say. What I wanted to get out of was

..P.»I .

9
«!

.cmnew‘

89

Wall Street. I told the man to drive to the Brooklyn
ferry and cross over. When we were over I told him

to drive me out into the country. As I had told him
originally to drive for dear life down town, I suppose
he thought I had lost my wits on the way. Perhaps I
had, but in that case my sacrifice of them has become,
in another way, my biggest stroke of business. I spent
the morning looking at the first green leaves on Long
Island. I had been so hot that it seemed as if I
should never be cool enough again. As for the damned
old money, I've enough, already, not to miss it--you
see how that spoils my beauty. I seemed to feel a new
man under my old skin; at all events I longed for a
new world. When you want a thing so very badly you
probably had better have it and see. I didn't under-
stand my case in the least, but gave the poor beast the
bridle and let him find his way. As soon as I could
get out of harness I sailed for Europe. That's how

I come to be sitting here.'55

Newman's choice in the business transaction foreshadows
another more important action at the end of the novel. It
is also significant that James has his hero's transformation
take place "among the green leaves on Long Island." James's
heroes characteristically retreat to nature for their most
serious meditation. George Knox claims that the transfor-
mation incident in the country side of Long Island pre-
figures a cycle of trials en route to Newman's spiritual
realization: "The loss of his egoistic, naive, vengeful,
and innocent selfhood, dramatized in a seasonal ritual of
metamorphosis, results in an unexpected kind of victory,
a gain in moral strength. In other words, our hero earns
his hitherto adventitious name."55
The second journey described is the short trip New-

man takes in Paris to visit for the last time the convent

of the Carmelite nuns. Although little has been made of

 

90

this incident by James's critics, this brief trip repre-
sents Newman's harrowing in Hell; it is symbolically a
trip into the Underworld:

Suddenly there arose from the depths of the chapel,

from behind the inexorable grating, a sound that drew

his attention from the alter--the sound of a strange,
lugubrious chant uttered by women's voices. It began
softly, but it presently grew louder, and as it increased
it became more of a wail and a dirge over their buried
affections and over the vanity of earthly desire. At
first he was bewildered, almost stunned, by the monstrous
manifestation; then, as he comprehended its meaning, he
listened intently and his heart began to throb. . . .

It was hideous, it was horrible; as it continued he felt
he needed all his self-control. He was growing more ag-
itated, the tears were hot in his eyes. At last, as in
its full force the thought came over him that this con-
fused, impersonal wail was all that he or the world she
had deserted were ever to hear of the breath of those
lips of which his own held still the pressure, he knew
he could bear it no longer. He rose abruptly and made
his way out.56

 

Strangely enough after this experience, Newman feels
somewhat purged of his anger. He leaves "with a heart lighter
than the one he had brought." Again Newman experiences a
miraculous rebirth. The imagery surrounding his return to
his Paris quarters is quite explicitly religious:

Everything was over and he too at last could rest. He
walked back through narrow, winding streets to the edge
of the Seine and there he saw, close above him, high
and mild and grey, the twin towers of Notre Dame. He
crossed one of the bridges and paused in the voided
space that makes the great front clear; then he went
in beneath the grossly-imaged portals. He wandered
some distance up the nave and sat down in the splendid
dimness. He sat a long time; he heard far-away bells
chiming off into space, at long intervals, the big
bronze syllables of the WOrd. He was very tired, but
such a place was a kingdom of rest. He said no prayers;
he had no prayers to say. He had nothing to be thank-
ful for and he had nothing to ask; nothing to ask be-
cause now he must take care of himself. But a great
church offers a very various hospitality, and he kept

 

” ......Hu. “an... ....m'.‘. .....t.‘

91

his place because while he was there he was out of the
world. The most unpleasant thing that had ever happened
to him had reached its formal conclusion; he had learnt
his lesson--not indeed that he the least understood it--
and could put away the book. He leaned his head for a
long time on the chair in front of him; when he took it
up he felt he was himself again. Somewhere in his soul
a tight constriction had loosened. He thought of the
Bellegardes; he had almost forgotten them. He remem-
bered them as people he had meant to do something to.

He gave a groan as he remembered what he had meant to
do; he was annoyed, and yet partly incredulous, at his
having meant to do it: the bottom suddenly had fallen
out of his revenge. Whether it was Christian charity or
mere human weakness of will—-what it was, in the back-
ground of his spirit--I don't pretend to say; but
Newman's last thought was that of course he would let
the Bellegardes go.57

 

The mood contrasts remarkably in its pensiveness and restful-
ness with Newman's frame of mind at the Carmelite chapel.
He walks back across the Seine--the river surrounding the
kingdom of the dead?--and immediately approaches Notre Dame.
James's use of juxtaposition is again structurally and sym-
bolically significant. The church offers him comfort and
peace; it is a place where he can be "out of the world."
In a meditation scene which balances with the transforma-
tion of Newman on the country-side of Long Island, Newman's
moral obligations once again become clear to him and he
earns once more the right to be called "Newman." His re-
birth is completed. The passage across the Seine symbolizes
his return to innocence. He is now ready to voyage back to
America.

In James's view of reality it is ultimately charac-

ter which matters most. In Roderick Hudson James presents,

 

in the two heroes, the dual nature of man. At the end of

92

The American James had Newman triumph over the Bellegardes.

 

But is Newman's final instinct purely an altruistic one?
Floyd Watkins analyzes Newman's instinctive glance back at
the fire to see if the note is burned:

Perhaps Newman turns to the fire for a last glance at
the burned symbol of the severe moral struggle which
he had undergone. Again, he may turn to see that all
the evidence is really destroyed. But he did turn
"instinctively," and this adverb seems to imply that
his final action is not so generous and unavenging
after all.53

In the revised version of The American, James has

 

Newman respond to the burning paper in a way that also sug-
gests that the decision was not without a moral struggle:
"Leaning against the chimney-piece [Newman] seemed to grasp
its ledge with force and to draw his breath a while in

59 In either the original or the revised version

pain."
James leaves Newman's final instinct ambiguous enough that
we are left wondering if Newman regrets having burned the
paper--or is simply facing the last part of a long moral
struggle.

James says in "The Art of Fiction" that "experience
is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense
sensibility. . . ."60 For this reason he cannot simply and
artificially resolve any of his works of fiction. In giv-
ing his picture of life fullness, James relies on both the
realistic and romantic mode. In his creation of incident

James felt he could use the extravagant or the extraordinary

which the romantic mode allowed, as long as his realistic

 

 

..... ...Di.

3‘

 

93

portrayal of the hero's reactions seemed plausible. In
other words, the extraordinary, romantic incidents of Ehg
American do not strike us as unusual so long as Newman's
reactions to them are reasonably enough presented. The

validity of James's use of the romance in The American de-

 

pends entirely upon his depiction of Newman. In his
Preface to The American James reflects on the importance
of his character's response:

If Newman was attaching enough, I must have argued,
his tangle would be sensible enough; for the interest
of everything is all that is hig vision, hig concep-
tion, hig interpretation: at the window of his wide,
quite sufficiently 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.61

Finally what we have in The American is a romanti-

 

cally conceived hero who encounters some unusual experiences
in life, but whose reactions are depicted by the author in

a convincing, realistic manner.

 

.. It...

w,.......... 4...”!

FOOTNOTES

Blackmur, Preface to The American, p. 22.

 

I.;I: a;.v‘3'
..
A

Ibid., p. 25.

Ibid.

.5 u» no ta

 

Ibid.

George Knox, "Romance and Fable in James's The
American," Anglia, LXXXII, 308.

6Lyon Richardson, Henry James: Representative Se-
lections (New York: American Book Co., 1941), xxxiii-
xxxiv.

 

7Blackmur, Preface to The American, p. 33.

8Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Preface to The House of
Seven Gables," p. 5.

9

 

 

 

Blackmur, Preface to The American, pp. 31-32.

10Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Preface to The Blithedale
Romance," p. 21.

11

 

 

Blackmur, Preface to The American, pp. 33-34.

 

12Richard Poirier, The Comic Sense of Henry James:
A Study of the Early Novels—TOxford University Press, 1967),
p. 34.

 

 

 

l3Blackmur, Preface to The American, p. 30.
l4l§i§-

15Richardson, "The Art of the Novel," p. 87.
lGlhi§,, p. 86.

17IEiQ-

94

.... . ,2W4.,.....%

95

18Henry James, The American (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1907), p. 29. (Henceforth referred to
as The American).

19

 

Ibid., p. 33.

2°1bid., p. 45.

211bid., p. 112.

22Ibid., p. 302.

231bid., pp. 134-135.

241bid., p. 134.

251bid., p. 136.

 

261bid., p. 49.

27Ibid., p. 183.

28Ibid., p. 145.

291bid., p. 154.

3°Ibid., p. 162.

3lIbid., p. 151.

321bid.

33Ibid., p. 216.

34Ibid., p. 411.

351bid., p. 489.

36Ibid., p. 126.

37Ibid., pp. 126-127.

381bid., p. 140.

39Max Schultz, ”Bellegarde's Feud with Christopher
Newman: A Study in Henry James's Revision of The American,"
American Literature, XXVII (March, 1955), 43.

40

 

 

The American, p. 222.

 

411bid., p. 277.

:Iudifi ,

96

421bid., p. 322.

43Ibid., p. 323.

44Ibid., p. 86.

45Ibid., p. 4.

46Ibid.

47Ibid., p. 81.

481bid., p. 496.

491bia.

5°Ibia., p. 362.

SlIbid., p. 373.

52J. A. Clair, "The American: A Reinterpretation,"
PMLA, LXXXIV (December, 1959), 613.

53

 

Blackmur, Preface to The American, p. 25.

 

54The American, p. 31.

 

551bid., pp. 31-32.

56Knox, p. 321.

57The American, pp. 480-481.

 

531bid., pp. 533-534.

59Floyd Watkins, "Christopher Newman's Final Instinct,"
Nineteenth Century Fiction, XII, 86.

6O

 

The American, p. 537.

 

61Richardson, "The Art of Fiction," p. 83.

62Blackmur, Preface to The American, p. 37.

 

CHAPTER IV

THE EUROPEANS: THE ROMANCE

AS SOCIAL COMEDY

 

The Europeans, the novel which followed The Amer—
ican, appeared for publication in The Atlantic in serial
form from July through October, 1878. James first revealed

his ideas for The Europeans in a letter to William Dean

 

Howells, dated March 30, 1877. Howells must have suggested
that James's readers had not been satisfied with the uncon-

ventional ending of The American and advised his contributor

 

to try a lighter, gayer touch. James's response shows that
he was apparently ready to comply, and already was consid-
ering an idea which would be suitably romantic:

Of course you couldn't have, for the present, another
evaporated marriage from me! I suspect it is the
tragedies in life that arrest my attention more than
the other things and say more to my imagination; but,
on the other hand, if I fix my eyes on a sunspot I
think I am able to see the prismatic colors in it.
You shall have the brightest possible sunspot for the
four-number tale of 1878. It shall fairly put your
readers' eyes out. . . . I agree to squeeze my buxom
muse, as you happily call her, into a 100 of your
pages. I will lace her so tight that she shall have
the neatest little figure in the world. It shall be
a very joyous little romance. I am afraid I can't
tell you at this moment what it will be; for my dusky
fancy contains nothing joyous enough: but I will in-
voke the jocund muse and come up to time. I shall

97

J

O

VI

98

probably develop an idea that I have, about a genial,
charming youth of a Bohemianish father, who comes

back from Foreign parts into the midst of a moulder-
ing and ascetic old Puritan family of his kindred . . .
and by his gayety and sweet audacity smooths out their
rugosities, heals their dyspepsia and dissipates their
troubles. hil_the women fall in love with him . . .,
but even for a happy ending he can't marry them all.
But he marries the prettiest, and from a romantic qual-
ity of Christian charity, produces a picturesque im-
borglio . . . under cover of which the other maidens
pair off with the swains who have hitherto been starved
out: after which the beneficent cousin departs for
Bohemia . . . in a vaporous rosy cloud, to scatter new
benefactions over man--and especially womankindll

The "joyous little romance" that James intended to write

turns out to be The Europeans. James's own attitude toward

 

The Europeans seems to have ranged from the casual and al-

 

most flippant through the defensive and somewhat touchy to
an abrupt dismissal of it from the New York Standard Edition
of his works. James apparently regarded the novel as an
experiment in literary form. When James received the criti-
cal opinion of his brother William, who seems to have felt
that Henry had not, this time, done himself justice, Henry
replies somewhat apologetically; "Being 'very artistic,‘ I
have a constant impulse to try experiments in form, in
which I wish not to run the risk of wasting or gratuitously
using big situations."2 Apparently no one except James

and Howells knew that James had promised his editor to

write a brief, cheerful romance. Not realizing that his
brother intended to experiment in literary forms, William,

by taking The Europeans too seriously was, perhaps, too

 

critical in his assessment of the book.

 

99

A synopsis of The Europeans reveals that the end
result of James's work was indeed a "joyous little romance."
As the novel opens, the Europeans, Felix and his sister
Eugenia, have just arrived in America to visit their only
living relatives, the Wentworths. The Europeans are ac-
tually of American descent but they have been born and
brought up in a rather uninhibited way in Europe. They are
a pair of fortune-hunters who come to America looking for
the opportunity to settle down with their rich American
cousins. Felix's imperturbably gaiety, an assurance that he
will not get involved in any serious complications, is a
guarantee of his eventual success. With his various enter-
taining talents he has managed to get through life in a
harmless, Bohemian way. Felix tells his cousin Gertrude,
"I am a species of Bohemian."3 When she asks what a Bo-
hemian is he tells her of his life's adventures:

He told Gertrude how he had walked over France and
Italy with a painter's knapsack on his back, paying
his way often by knocking off a flattering portrait
of his host or hostess. He told her how he had played
the violin in a little band of musicians--not of high
celebrity--who traveled through foreign lands giving
provincial concerts. He told her also how he had been
a momentary ornament of a troupe of strolling actors,
engaged in the arduous task of interpreting Shakespeare
to French and German, Polish and Hungarian audiences.4
The success of Eugenia is not quite so predictable as her
brother's. Because she is the morganatic consort of the
younger brother of a German princeling, Eugenia is held in

suspicion by her relatives in America. The Americans, in

fact, are not quite sure what a morganatic marriage is.

 

100

Mr. Wentworth, in particular, is bothered by what seems to
him to be a serious lapse of morals. "The strange word
'morganatic' was constantly in his ears; it reminded him

of a certain Mrs. Morgan whom he had once known and who had

been a bold, unpleasant woman."5

The morganatic marriage
does provide Eugenia with a title; in Europe she is known
as the Baroness Munster, but her place in the European
scale of social degrees is not very exalted nor very secure.
Her brother-in-law wants her husband to annul their mar-
riage and form a more illustrious union.

When the mercenary Europeans arrive in Boston, they
find the Wentworths to be typical New Englanders of the
upper class. Felix and Eugenia are quite unable to under-
stand the Americans because their social code, Puritanism,
makes them a pensive lot. Felix, who visits the Wentworths
first, reports to The Baroness that "they are a pensive
cast; they make things hard. I think there is something
the matter with them; they have some melancholy memory or

6 Mr. Wentworth is the oldest

some depressing expectation."
of the relatives and the most influenced by the Puritan
way of life. Of him Felix says, "Mr. Wentworth is a tre-
mendously high-toned old fellow; he looks as if he were
undergoing martyrdom, not by fire, but by freezing."7 Mr.
Wentworth's cold rigidity is difficult to be penetrated,

but Felix must eventually do so if he is to marry Gertrude

wentworth. The rest of the Wentworth family comprises

101

Charlotte who is pretty and very proper, but not at all
imaginative. Gertrude is not so pretty but is a source
of worry for the rest of the family because of her "dif—
ficult temperament"; she has too much imagination. The
youngest of the family, Clifford, has been dismissed from
Harvard for becoming intoxicated with alcohol. He is the
family reprobate. In addition to the Wentworths, the
Actons belong to the family circle--being also cousins of
the Wentworths, but on the other side of the house than
that related to the European cousins. Robert Acton is a
wealthy and traveled bachelor; his younger sister Lizzie
is a very pretty but impertinent girl.

The main business of the book is to exhibit the
comic efforts of the two parties to understand each other,
especially the efforts of the EurOpeans to ingratiate
themselves into the favor of the Americans. Because he is
genuine and likable, Felix succeeds. Eugenia, however,
fails to convince even the most worldly member of the com-
munity, Robert Acton, that she is to be trusted. When she
fails to snare him as promptly as she wishes, she tries
unsuccessfully to flirt with Clifford. When this also
fails, and Clifford becomes engaged to Lizzie Acton, she
hastily departs for Europe to patch up the affairs with
her husband. With the possible exception of Eugenia, none
of the characters in the novel have to suffer. Eugenia is

so capable of assuming different roles that her impatience

.. -£}f~

firfis'é'ni:

102

at the end to leave America for Europe does not affect us
as being out of character. Her vanity has been wounded by
Acton's refusal to propose to her, but she is returning
to Europe to salvage her marriage. Knowing the self-suf-
ficient Eugenia as we do by the end of the novel, we have
no reason to believe that she does not succeed in securing
her marriage and her title.

Eugenia's departure immediately clears the air for
a number of marriages. Felix proposes to Gertrude, forc-
ing Mr. Brand the local minister, to recognize that it is
Charlotte, and not Gertrude as he once thought, whom he
actually loves. Charlotte, who has urged all along that
Gertrude marry Mr. Brand, suddenly discovers that she loves
him and consents to marry. Clifford finally marries Lizzie
Acton, as everyone has assumed he would. The final line
of the novel remarks that Robert Acton eventually married
"a particularly nice yOung girl." Even Eugenia is accorded
some happiness by James, for her marriage to the German
princeling will apparently never be annuled. The four
marriages and the way they are brought about, none of them
involving a very complicated effort, account well enough
for the plot.

Viewed in several ways, one can see that the struc-

ture of The Europeans is essentially romantic. In his study

 

of James, J. A. Ward states that "any analysis of the

structure of The Europeans should begin with the observation

 

103

8

that it is essentially a comic novel." In structuring

The Europeans, James draws freely upon those conventions

 

of the comic mode whenever they can complement his "little
romance." Like the romance, the comic mode basically con-
stitutes a clash of opposing cultural sensibilities and
the eventual, successful resolution of the differences by
the hero. With the differences overcome, the hero trium-
phantly marries his lover and they are accepted into the
traditional society. Their acceptance, however, forces
upon the older members of the traditional society a fresher
view of life and an evaluation of sacred beliefs. The suc-
cessful resolution of both the romantic and comic modes is
usually symbolized by the marriage of the young lovers.
The marriage is a particularly appropriate symbol because
in it we see the end of the hero's struggle to overcome
his "tests" in order to be integrated into the new society,
and because the marriage also suggests a beginning. The
young lovers will eventually replace the older members of
the society and in so doing, "act out another part." Be-
cause of the fashion in which they present human experience,
both the romantic and comic modes are ultimately life-af-
firming and life-renewing.

The clash of opposing social groups provides the
central plot situation. The comic structure of the book,
rendered scenically, involves the attempts of Felix and

Eugenia to marry one of the Americans. Viewed in this

104

fashion Felix is the hero of the novel. He manages to
overcome the difficulties posed by the society of Americans.
His most formidable adversaries are, quite naturally, Mr.
wentworth who represents more than anyone else the Puritan
New England mind and Mr. Brand, a minister, who courts
Gertrude more out of a sense of duty to change her ways
than out of love. Felix's severest test comes in the "per-
suasion scene" where he asks Mr. Wentworth for Gertrude's
hand in marriage. Before he is successful, Felix has re-
ceived the "aid" of several others, without which he pro-
bably would have failed to convince Mr. Wentworth of his
own worthiness. Felix's aid comes from Charlotte whom he
has asked to plead his cause, and, not surprisingly, from
Gertrude who enters at the proper moment. What does sur-
prise Felix (and the reader) is the entrez of Mr. Brand
g§_machina. The persuasion scene is the longest, most
fully developed scene in the book. This scene, along with
the resolution of the book literally and symbolically with
four marriages, reinforces James's use of the comic mode

in structuring The Europeans. Before the resolution can

 

be completed, however, the opposition to the marriages
and the happy ending must be removed before a new society
can be formed. It is Eugenia who is excluded from a har-
monious resolution of the difficulties at the end. She
has proved to be the one who cannot be trusted. In the

language of ancient comedy, Eugenia is what Northrop Frye

Jim-£2“

'mafi

105

calls the pharmakosg-—the rascal who endangers the well—
being of society and who is driven out as a scapegoat in the
comic resolution of the drama. Eugenia, however, does not
simply embody the evil existent in the novel. In permitting
her expulsion, James is implicitly censoring the rigid moral
code of the New Englanders. Eugenia's expulsion results
more from her misunderstood European's manners than from

her lack of morals.

Eugenia's primary role in the comic structure of

 

the novel is not to provide for a happy ending but, by sym-
bolizing the manners of Europe, to create a sense of tension
in the novel. Because this novel contains a clash on man-
ners and not of morals, the presence of evil is notably
lacking. Felix, the hero in the comedy of manners, does

not have to overcome an evil adversary, not even in the
subtle forms that James's evil characters often appear.
Felix's greatest test is to ingratiate himself into the
favor of the Americans. His triumph is the triumph of
European manners over the American rigid view of life.

The difference in the European and the American
outlook on life can clearly be seen in the response to
situations which the Americans interpret morally and the
Europeans aesthetically. The Americans, with the excep-
tion of Gertrude, regard Eugenia's lying as morally evil.
To Eugenia, lying is merely a role one sometimes has to

play during social conversation. Consequently, when she

106

lies to Mrs. Acton in her son's presence, she is only being
courteous. Gertrude is the only American who responds to
the civilizing influences of the Europeans; one of the
clearest indications that Gertrude is not overly moralistic
and yet very imaginative is that she tells harmless lies.
Even Felix's flattering portraits of the Wentworth family
are basically lies. J. A. Ward discusses the differences
in the European and American outlooks on the questions of
moral and artful behavior:
The New Englanders can regard forms of artfulness only
in terms of ethics because they can express themselves
only by a moralistic rhetoric. But the Europeans con-
vert moral questions to aesthetic ones. Thus to Mr.
wentworth Clifford's alcoholism is a moral failing,
while to Eugenia and Felix it represents a lapse in
manners.10

That James conceived of the clash of cultures in

The Europeans in terms of manners and not in terms of morals

 

is significant. The Europeans is James's only novel in
11

 

which the presence of evil is notably missing. The comic
structure of the book creates a tension resulting from a
misunderstanding of manners. None of the characters is
morally evil. Consequently, the main difference in James's
use of the comic and the romantic mode in structuring his
novels is that in comic mode the hero confronts an adversary
who is different only in manners, while the hero of the ro-

mantic mode confronts an adversary who is morally evil. In

his Preface to The American James clearly states that one

 

of the necessary elements of the romance is the presence

of evil. ". . . I am not sure an infallible sign of the

”D“

t. "\
" L. I
M
.

 

107

latter [the romance] is not this rank vegetation of the

'power' of bad people that the good get into. . . ."12

There are no "bad people" in The Europeans; that the Ameri-

 

cans regard the Europeans' behavior as evil only indicates
that the Americans are narrow and self-righteous. The

point in the novel at which James's use of the comic and

 

E.
the romantic most overlap is in his handling of the reso-
lution. Here both the comic and the romantic mode reinforce
each other in the resolution of the hero's trials and his i

 

integration into the opposing society.
Viewed in another manner, however, one can see

that the structure of The Europeans is very much like that

 

of the pure romance. From this perspective the main con-
cern in the structure of the novel is with the relationship
of Felix and Gertrude. In fact, the reason that James does
not use pure romance for his primary structural technique
is that it concerns Felix and Gertrude almost to the exclu-
sion of our interest in the others.

The first glimpse of Gertrude creates the impression
that she is the forlorn princess who is awaiting the day
for her prince to come and sweep her away. One Sunday when
the rest of the family has gone to church, Gertrude stays
home and decides to read a book. James's allusions to the
romance are quite explicit:

She possessed herself of a very obvious volume--one
of the series of the Arabian Nights--and she brought

it out into the portico and sat down with it in her
lap. There, for a quarter of an hour, she read the

 

108

history of the loves of the Prince Camaralzaman and the
Princess Badoura. At last, looking up, she beheld, as
it seemed to her, the Prince Camaralzaman standing be-
fore her. A beautiful young man was making her a very
low bow--a magnificent bow, such as she had never seen
before. He appeared to have dropped from the clouds;
he was wonderfully handsome; he smiled--smiled as if
he were smiling on purpose. Extreme surprise, for a
moment, kept Gertrude sitting still; then she rose,
without even keeping her finger in her book. The
young man, with his hat in his hand, still looked at
her, smiling and smiling. It was very strange.13

Gertrude does not need to keep her "finger in her book,"
because the rest of this romance will enact itself in real
life. As Gertrude listens to Felix tell of his travels

in Europe, she "lived in a fantastic world; she seemed to

be reading a romance that came out in daily numbers."l4

Early in the story James describes Felix in a style
that recalls his conception of the romantic prince Benevolio:

He was eight and twenty years old; he had a short,
slight, well-made figure. Though he bore a noticeable
resemblance to his sister, he was a better favored per-
son: fair-haired, clear-faced, witty-looking, with a
delicate finish of feature and an expression at once
urbane and not at all serious, a warm blue eye, an
eyebrow finely drawn and excessively arched--an eyebrow
which, if ladies wrote sonnets to those of their lovers,
might have been made the subject of such a piece of
verse--and a light moustache that flourished upwards

as if blown that way by the breath of a constant smile.
There was something in his physiognomy at once benev-
olent and picturesque.15

Felix arrives to awaken Gertrude from a dreamy, wistful
reverie. She is a kind of Sleeping Beauty waiting only
for the right touch to bring her to life. It is, of course,
Felix the romantic hero who provides that touch. Charlotte
is amazed at the change Felix's appearance has made in

Gertrude: "Felix," she cried, "what have you done to her?"

 

 

H. a»... am:
a

109

"I think she was asleep; I have waked her up!"16 Later

when Felix describes Gertrude's difficult temperament to
Mr. Brand, he says, "she has always been a dormant nature.

She was waiting for a touchstone. But now she is begin-

l7

ning to awaken." Gertrude's own meditations reinforce

James's conception of Felix as a prince come to awaken the
Sleeping Beauty:

What had happened the day before seemed to her a kind
of dream. He had been there and he had changed every-
thing; the others had seen him, they had talked with
him; but that he should come again, that he should be
part of the future, part of her small, familiar, much-
meditating 1ife--this needed, afresh, the evidence of
her senses.

In the purely romantic structure of The Europeans

 

the source of interest of tension lies mainly in whether
or not Felix will be able to persuade Mr. Wentworth to let
him marry Gertrude. Consequently, the persuasion scene is
precisely placed to represent the greatest test Felix has
to face. The persuasion scene is also the point at which
the comic structure and the romantic structure meet. When
the persuasion scene is reached the comic and romantic modes
work together to bring about a quick resolution to the
plot complications. Felix confronts his opposition openly;
Mr. Wentworth, who symbolizes most thoroughly the rigid
Puritan morality, reacts to Felix's request to marry his
daughter "with a light in his face that might have been

19 The images of frigidity

flashed back from an iceberg."
that characterize Mr. Wentworth aptly represent the Puritan
antipathy toward the easy, carefree attitude with which Felix

enjoys life.

 

110

Mr. Brand also figures prominently into the romantic
structure of The Eurgpeans. It is Mr. Brand who has been
chosen by Mr. Wentworth to marry his daughter; he "had
always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a

younger daughter with a peculiar temperament."20

Felix's
greatest obstacle to marrying Gertrude is eliminating Mr.
Brand as his competition and then persuading Mr. Wentworth
to allow the marriage. Felix very cleverly convinces Mr.
Brand that Charlotte Wentworth loves him and it is she who
is most deserving of his love since she is more of his tem-
perament. She would make an excellent minister's wife. We
learn, quite unexpectedly, that Mr. Brand has been convinced
by Felix when he appears to the astonishment of everyone at
the wentworth's home precisely at the moment when Felix is
proposing. The drama of the persuasion scene is at its
height when Mr. Brand enters:
Gertrude turned to her father. '. . . I know what I
want; I have chosen. I am determined to marry this
gentleman.‘
'You had better consent, sir,‘ said Felix very
gently.
'Yes, sir, you had better consent,‘ added a very
different voice.'21
Like the romantic structure in James's other novels,
The Europeans also reaches its resolution with the "dis-
covery" or the aid of someone whose entrance into the plot
seems somewhat artificial and contrived. Mr. Brand's un-

expected entrance and change of heart is as surprising as

Valentin's announcement on his deathbed that Mrs. Bread

4.9.3.4.... «1334.3. ..HJQanumufl‘

111

has a letter which Newman can use to gain his revenge on
the Bellegarde family. Roderick Hudson also has a point in
its structure where the resolution is quickly reached by

the aid of an important "discovery." However, in Roderick

 

Hudson, as we have seen, the "discovery" is reached after
much introspection and meditation on the part of both Row-
land Mallet and Roderick. Consequently, the "discovery"
or aid to the hero in Roderick Hudson seems to be a more
organic, and hence, realistic part of the plot.

Once Felix has overcome the opposition of Mr. Went-
worth and Mr. Brand the novel ends very shortly. Further-
more, in the truly romantic fashion that James predicted
in his letter to Howells, the marriage of Felix and Ger-
trude precipitates several other marriages. Clifford went-
worth marries Lizzie Acton; this union, which has long been
expected by everyone, has needed but small encouragement
for its consumation. A short time later we are told that
Charlotte marries Mr. Brand. Robert Acton, who has been
disappointed by Eugenia, marries a "particularly nice

young girl." The ending to The Europeans comes closer than

 

any other of James's novels to being the conventional happy-
ever-after ending. Because its tension is built more upon

a conflict of manners than of morals, the novel lacks the
intensity and interest of the morally ambiguous endings of

James's other works. At the end of Roderick Hudson, we

 

are left wondering whether Roderick's death symbolizes moral

112

degradation or moral renewal. The end of The American

 

leaves us equally uncertain about Newman's moral character.
What exactly is Newman's final instinct? James does not
clearly resolve that question. Newman's moral character

remains somewhat ambiguous to us. Only in The Europeans

 

does James appear to use the conventional romantic ending
to such great extent.

The purely romantic plot of The Europeans seems to

 

exclude Eugenia from the happy ending but ironically it

is Eugenia who interests us most at the end because she is
the most ambiguous character in the book. Throughout the
book we have been led to believe that Eugenia's charms
would triumph and she would marry Robert Acton. When Eu-
genia meets Robert Acton for the first time she instinctively
feels that he is "intrinsically, the most important person
present." Robert Acton begins to call frequently on the
Baroness. When Eugenia goes to visit the home of Acton

she believes that she has finally found her fortune in
America. Acton has a large house, filled with treasures,
the product of his China trade. Acton's house is exactly
the kind of house Eugenia would have if she were to stay in

America: "Comme c'est bien!" . . . she had thought of just
22

 

such a house as this when she decided to come to America."
However, when she is taken by Acton to see his invalid
mother, Eugenia makes a bad blunder. Seeking to please,

Eugenia remarks that her son has talked immensely of his

 

. .

no. . ...-fl.

 

113

mother. Acton is vividly conscious that he has scarcely
mentioned her to the Baroness. Eugenia knows instantly
that her fibbing has disturbed Acton. "She had struck a
false note. But who were these people to whom such fibbing
was not pleasing? If they were annoyed, the Baroness was

equally so."23

From this point on Acton's feelings toward
Eugenia are ambivalent. He is charmed by her but, at the
same time, disturbed by her lying. In the end his rigid
Puritan view of lying wins out over his more natural in-
stincts and he never asks her to marry. Ironically, Acton
is the person most capable of appreciating Eugenia and
accepting her into the New England society, but it is he
who turns out to be the exorcist for the preservation of
the social order. Robert Acton becomes the champion of
the New England way of life and it is he who has seen the

world.

To view the structure of The Europeans as simply

 

comic or purely romantic is to overlook the interesting

portrayal James gives of Eugenia's character. She is much
more complex than either the comic or purely romantic modes
present her. In the comic mode she functions primarily as

the pharmakos whose presence in New England threatens the

 

social order. In the romantic mode, Eugenia's role seems
slight because she is the only one who appears to be left
out of the happy ending. James does, however, use the

character of Eugenia in a way that helps to structure the

novel--a structure that further illustrates James's

 

114

innovations with different elements of the romance. The
element of the romance that most informs the characteri-
zation of Eugenia is James's use of the pastoral romance.
It is the use of this aspect of the romance that brings
Eugenia to her rightful place in the forefront of our
interest in the novel. As James uses the pastoral romance F
it becomes a device for portraying Eugenia's mental land- a

scape. While the rest of the characters in The Europeans

 

 

are presented to us as types by an omniscient author, . u
Eugenia is, at times, James's center of consciousness. we ' 7
do not, however, see everything that happens to the Euro-

peans through the eyes of Eugenia; the novel is, after all,

called The Europeans. On the one hand, it is partly the

 

story of Felix's attempt to marry Gertrude. On the other
hand, James's method of characterizing Eugenia is by allow-
ing us to enter into her thoughts and to watch as she re-
flects on her surroundings.

The main body of the novel takes place during a
New England summer in a rural area seven or eight miles
from Boston. The mood is sunny and gay; the imagery is
predominately of the natural surroundings. During the
summer months in New England, Eugenia is essentially con-
tent. She enjoys the fresh change of life that America
offers: "She wrote to a friend in Germany that it was a
return to nature; it was like drinking new milk, and she was

"24

very fond of new milk. The imagery of the pastoral ro-

mance provides the clearest indication of Eugenia's frame

115

of mind. The long peaceful summer during which Eugenia is
largely content cannot, of course, last forever. When
Eugenia first arrives in America it is not yet summer, and
when she leaves the summer is over. The first images of

the book serve to characterize Eugenia and to contrast with
the later idyllic life at the Wentworths. Even in the first
paragraph of the novel James makes it quite explicit that
there is a connection between the natural landscape and
Eugenia's mental landscape:

A narrow grave-yard in the heart of a bustling, in-
different city, seen from the windows of a gloomy-
looking inn, is at no time an object of enlivening
suggestion; and the spectacle is not at its best when
the mouldy tombstones and funeral umbrage have re-
ceived the ineffectual refreshment of a dull, moist
snow-fall. If, while the air is thickened by this
frosty drizzle, the calendar should happen to indicate
that the blessed vernal season is already six weeks
old, it will be admitted that no depressing influence
is absent from the scene. This fact was keenly felt
on a certain 12th of May . . . by a lady who stood
looking out of one of the windows of the best hotel in
the ancient city of Boston. She had stood there for
half an hour--stood there, that is at intervals; for
from time to time she turned back into the room and
measured its length with a restless step.25

The depressing scenery is at once the source of
Eugenia's irritation and the objective correlative for her
frame of mind. "It is the darkest day of my life," she

26 If the

tells Felix, "and you know what that means."
weather does not get better she plans to return to Europe
at once. By evening a miraculous transformation in the

weather brings Eugenia and Felix out for a walk:

The sunset was superb; they stopped to look at it;
Felix declared that he had never seen such a gorgeous

 

116

mixture of colors. . . . Eugenia's spirits rose.
She surrendered herself to a certain tranquil gayety.
If she had come to seek her fortune, it seemed to her
that her fortune would be easy to find. There was a
promise of it in the gorgeous purity of the western
sky.2
The first trip to the Wentworth's coincides with the first
day of summer. The shift from urban Boston to the rural
home of the Wentworth's is like a change from winter to
summer. James accounts for a change in place as a change
consistent with a seasonal change: "If winter had suddenly

leaped into spring, the spring had for the moment as quickly
"28

 

leaped into summer. When the action shifts to the home
of the wentworth's the idyllic pastoral imagery becomes

the primary picture of the setting. It is a Sunday morning
and Gertrude Wentworth goes out of the house for a stroll
in the "spacious garden." "The flowering shrubs and the
neatly-disposed plants were basking in the abundant light
and warmth; the transparent shade of the great elms seemed
to thicken by the hour; and the intensely habitual still-
ness offered a submissive medium to the sound of a distant

church-bell."29

Felix, who has gone on ahead of Eugenia,
returns to tell her that the Pinhabitants are charming,"
and that the home and entertainment are "company for a
king." He describes the New Englanders' style of living;
"It's primitive; it's patriarchal; it's the E22.°f the

30 All of the wentworth circle are enchanted

golden age."
with their visitors and treat them royally throughout the

summer. When Gertrude tells her father that Eugenia must

 

117

have a private home of her own because "she is the wife of
a Prince," Mr. Wentworth replies, "we are all princes here

. . and I don't know of any palace in this neighborhood

that is to let."31

As long as the summer lasts Eugenia is in high
spirits. She playfully flirts with both Robert Acton and 9
Clifford Wentworth. Her playful mood changes, however, i

when Acton catches her lying to his mother. At this

 

point, the summer is over for her. She knows she has been

‘n‘.._..__
J

unsuccessful in her attempt to find her fortune by marry-
ing Robert Acton. A few nights later Felix comes in a rain

storm to find his sister in a pensive mood. "Les beaux

 

jours sont passés," she declares. She has decided to re-
turn to Europe. Eugenia's stay in America began with a
snow storm and is balanced at the end with a rain storm
which determines her departure. In between she has played
the part of a charming lady. With the summer over, Eugenia
feels that she cannot continue to play a role any longer:

_ ’My maid Shall pack up,' [she tells Felix].
'Bonté divine, what rubishl I feel like a strolling
actress; these are my "properties."'

'13 the play over, Eugenia?‘ asked Felix. She
gave him a sharp glance. 'I have spoken my part.’

'With great applausel' said her brother.

'Oh, applause--app1ausel she murmured. And
she gathered up two or three of her dispersed drap-
eries. And glanced at the beautiful brocade, and
then, 'I don't see how I can have endured it!‘ she
said.

From this point on in the novel, Eugenia's role is

explained best by the comic mode as the pharmokos driven

 

out by an unbending society. For a time, however, she has

. 1L1. M u. .. tuna?”

2...!

118

been the center of attention in the novel. Were it not for
the fact that James relies so heavily upon the different
conventions of the romance Eugenia could have developed into
a very interesting study of a center of consciousness. As
it is, however, the most we see of her consciousness is
presented to us largely in terms of the imagery of the
pastoral romance. k?
Although the comic mode, the pure romance and the

pastoral romance characterize the romantic structure of

 

 

The Europeans, James's does not limit his use of the romance
to structure alone. In fact, his definition of the romance
as "experience disengaged" refers as much to his conception
of character as it does to the romantic structure of his
novels. Once again, in The Europeans, James is interested
in presenting a portrait of the free, disengaged characters

who so preoccupy his novels. In his preface to The Spoils

 

of Poynton, James describes his disengaged characters as
the "free spirits' of life, and the fools as the "fixed
constitutants.":

We get perhaps a vivid enough little example, in the
concrete, of the general truth, for the spectator of
life, that the fixed constitutents of almost any repro-
ducible action are the fools who minister, at a par-
ticular crisis, to the intensity of the free spirit
engaged with them. The fools are interesting by con-
trast, by the salience they acquire, and by a hundred
other of their advantages; and the free spirit, always
much tormented, and by no means always triumphant, is
heroic, ironic, pathetic or whatever, and . . . for
instance, 'successful' only through having remained
free.

. ' 0
gas.

 

119

The free spirits in The Europeans are Felix and Ger-

 

trude. They are the only ones capable of being happy in
any situation. The Puritan outlook on life keeps the rest
of the New Englanders rigidly inflexible. Once the golden
age of the summer is over Eugenia cannot bear to stay in
America any longer. She feels free only so long as the
Americans do not see through the role she is playing.

What Mr. Wentworth has all along called Gertrude's
difficult temperament has merely been her desire to be
free from the oppressive Puritan morality. Felix comes
and provides the touchstone for her dormant spirit. "To
enjoy . . . to take life--not painfully, must one do some-

35 she asks Felix. "I don't think it's what

thing wrong?"
one does or one doesn't do that promotes enjoyment," her
companion answered. "It is the general way of looking at

life."36

Gertrude has been taught to see life as a "dis-
cipline." Felix suggests that she try "to look at it as

an opportunity." That Felix is able to convince Gertrude
to his way of seeing life is apparent when she chooses to

marry him rather than Mr. Brand; her choice is for op-

portunity and against discipline. Gertrude tries to explain

to Mr. Brand the reason she could not possibly marry him:

'I am trying for once to be natural,‘ cried
Gertrude passionately. 'I have been pretending, all
my life; I have been dishonest; it is you that have
made me so!’ . . . why shouldn't I be frivolous, if
it's one's nature. No, I don't care for the great

questions. I care for pleasure--for amusement. Per-37

haps I am fond of wicked things; it is very possible!

 

120

Mr. Brand's puzzled reply is simply, "I don't think you

know what you are saying!"38

There never has been any-
thing wrong with Gertrude's temperament; her family has
only insisted upon the wrong standard for judging her.

Mr. Brand has been teaching her to stifle her normal wish
for a different life; he has been assisting in the cruel
task of forcing conformity on a free spirit. Gertrude's
innocence, as with a number of James's characters, has been
the source of her strength. Innocence is not, as Blake
has shown us, a passive state, but a positive and lively
one, full of curiosity and essentially creative. By re-
maining free and innocent of the oppressive Puritan moral-
ity, Gertrude is able, with the help of Felix, to rebel
against the restrictions of her father's rigid way of life.
In a sense, all of James's heroes are free to the extent

that they are non-conformists. Neither Gertrude nor Felix

is the exception. They retain our interest in The Europeans

 

not merely because they are the main characters in a ro-
mantic plot, but because they are examples of James's char-
acters who lead a life of "experience disengaged."

It would perhaps have been a simple matter for

James to have made his novel The Europeans merely a comedy

 

of manners, or a pure romance, or a pastoral romance. It
is, however, his artistic use of all these different ele-

ments of the romance which makes The Europeans a successful

 

novel. Furthermore, at no point does the conventional

 

121

romance dictate the form for James to follow. It would
have been a simple matter for him to arrange the marriage
of Eugenia and Acton (as he arranged the unconvincing
acquiesence of Mr. Brand to Gertrude's marriage to Felix)
but James is unwilling to submit totally to the demands of
the romance for his resolution. He refuses to sacrifice
his artistic freedom to the §.priori requirements of a con-
ventional form. Although he employs elements of the ro-

mance, he refuses, as always, to employ them for their own

 

sake. His work must remain organic, not mechanical, if it
is to give a full picture of life. Perhaps the fact that
there are so many conventional comic and romantic devices
in The Eurgpeans explains James's later deprecation of

the novel. Never again was he to rely so heavily upon so

many conventions of the romance for structuring his novel.

FOOTNOTES

lLeon Edel, ed., The Selected Letters of_§enry
James (New York: Farrah, Strauss and Cudahy, 1955),

pp. 69-70.

2Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters of Henry James
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920, 2 volST), I,
pp. 65-66.

3Henry James, The Europeans (Houghton Mifflin Col,
1884), p. 106. (Henceforth referred to as The Europeans).

 

 

4;p;g,, pp. 107-108.
5;p;g,, p. 53.
6;hig,, p. 48.
71219-

8Joseph A. Ward, The Seargh for Form (University of
North Carolina Press, 1967). P. 95.

9Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton
University Press, 1957), see especially pp. 148-149.

10Ward, The Search for Form, p. 110.

 

11Evil in James's novels is by nature a social phe-
nomenon. James does not identify it with cosmic evil. For
a fuller discussion see page 154 of this text.

12Blackmur, Preface to The American, p. 37.

 

13The Europeans, p. 33.

 

14Ibid., p. 108.

lsIbid., pp. 9-10.

lGIbid., p. 251.

122

 

 

Preface to The Spoils of Poynton, pp.

 

l7;p;g,, p. 226.
la;p;g., p. 57
193h£§., p. 257.
201bid., p. 267.
21;p;g., p. 265.
22;p;g., p. 235.
23;p;g., p. 135.
241516., pp. 78-79.
251218;! p. l.
26£h£g., p. 6.
27;p;g,, p. 19.
28;pgg,, p. 23.
2932193! p. 29.
30£h£§,, p. 47.
31;hi§,, p. 71.
32;p;g,, p. 208.
331h£§,, p. 278.
34Blackmur,
129-130.
35The Europeans, p.
36;p;g,, p. 105.
37Ibid., p. 166.
38————

Ibid.

123

 

104.

 

CHAPTER V

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY: THE

ROMANCE IN TRANSITION

The beginning of the 1880's marked the end of
James's early fictional development. The appearance of

The Portrait of a Lady in Macmillan's Magazine and The

 

Atlantic Monthly from late 1880 to late 1881 represents a

 

change in James's fiction from an art that has been pre-
dominately a romantic conception to an art that is more
thoroughly realistic. In all of his work before The Por-
trait of a Lady James has relied heavily upon the conven-
tions of the romance for the shaping of his novels. He
has been more concerned with the creation of incident as
the means by which and from which he depicts character.
Hitherto his emphasis on incident has revealed his inclin-
ation, not always intentional, to use the conventions of

the romance. What happens in The Portrait of a Lady is

 

quite simply, but ultimately very significantly, a shift
in emphasis from James's conception of art based on inci-
dent to art based on character. This is not to say, how-
ever, that James excludes characterization from his earlier,

124

 

125

more romantically conceived works, nor that after The Por-
Eghih_James does not present his characters in romantic
situations. The insistence upon a difference between char-
acter and incident is, for James, a needless definition.
One is reminded again of what James says in "The Art of
Fiction":

1*
What is character but the determination of incident? 2]
What is incident but the illustration of character?
What is either a picture or a novel that is hgh_of .
character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? .
It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her
hand resting on a table and look at you in a certain ‘
way; or if it be not an incident I think it will be

hard to say what it is. At the same time it is the

expression of character.1

 

The Portrait of a Lady is not the first time that James uses
incident to reveal characterization. All of his previous
novels have been structured on this basic formula. Rode-
rick's character is revealed by his response to the life

in Europe. Newman is presented as a man who has been

"insidiously beguiled" by corrupt Europeans. In The Euro-

 

pghhg, character is revealed almost solely in terms of the
romantic plot of getting every one married. What makes
The Portrait of a Lady essentially different from the rest
of these early works is that characterization determines
incident. In other words, for the first time in his fic-
tion, James's use of the romantic conventions subserves
his greater realistic demands. From this point on James's
fiction can be described as realism extended into romance

rather than romance extended into realism. In the early

 

126

novels, romance had served quite adequately and explicitly

as a structural device. In The Portrait and after, the

 

romance becomes a quality in James's work that is dis-
tinguished only by looking more at the texture of the work
and less at the structure of the text.

In his Preface to Roderick Hudson and The American

 

 

James reveals his early conception--the germ--of those
works. It is significant that, in both, his emphasis is

upon incident rather than character. In The American,

 

James says he recalls the germ came to him "as the theme

of a 'story,‘ the situation, in another country and an aris-
tocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled
and betrayed, some cruelly wronged compatriot."2 The em-
phasis is upon the incidents surrounding the character of

Newman. In Roderick Hudson James says he is concerned with

 

the incidents that will illustrate the special gifts of
Roderick. Roderick's character is revealed almost entirely
through his various encounters in Europe. It is the char-
acter of Rowland Mallet, however, that points the way

toward The Portrait of a Lady. In another sense, Roderick

 

Hudson is about the drama of Mallet's consciousness. The
emphasis in characterizing Mallet is upon his reaction to

various incidents. The germ to The Portrait of a Lady

 

comes to James not as a vague idea concerning a story or

an incident. The germ comes to him "altogether in the sense

of a single character."3

 

127

In trying to recover the germ of his novel, James
says, "I see that it must have consisted not at all in any
conceit of a 'plot,' nefarious name, in any flash, upon the
fancy, of a set of relations, or in any one of those situa-
tions that, by a logic of their own, immediately fall, for
the fabulist, into movement, into a march or a rush, a

patter of quick steps."4

The germ is not at all conceived
first as incident. Its conception, James says, came "al-
together in the sense of a single character, the character
and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which
all the usual elements of a 'subject,' certainly of a set-

5 One of the reasons

ting, were to need to be super-added."
James elevates the sense of character to such high position
in his fiction is the influence of Ivan Turgenieff. Tur-
genieff's experience with the origin of his own fiction
"began for him almost always with the vision of some per-
son or persons who hovered before him, soliciting him, as
the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing
to him just as they were and by what they were."6 The
sense of character preceded the necessity of incident.
James continues to describe Turgenieff's creative process,
a process that is analagous to his own:

He saw them, in that fasion, as disponibles, saw them

subject to the chances, the complications of existence,

and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the

right relations those that would most bring them out;

to imagine, to invent and select and piece together

the situations most useful and favourable to the sense

of the creatures themselves, the complications they
would be most likely to produce and to feel.7

 

 

128

To find just the right situations most useful and favorable
for depicting Isabel is precisely what James must do. Be-

cause his emphasis is upon character, James says that "I'm

8

often accused of not having 'story enough.'" James, in

fact, desires to play down the role of incident in The
Portrait as much as possible:

I seem to myself to have as much as I need--to show my
people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for
that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I
see them come together, I see them laced, I see them
engaged in this or that act and in this or that diffi-
culty. How they look and move and speak and behave, al- ‘
ways in the setting I have found for them, is my account

of them--of which I dare say, alas, que cela manque

souvent d'architecture. But I would rather I think,

have too little architecture than too much.6

Irwi'
V' E ,. o.c'

 

 

 

A further look at James's Preface to The Portrait

 

clarifies how he attacked the problem of surrounding his
character with incidents without losing track of his pri-
mary emphasis upon character.

By what process of logical accretion was this slight
'personality,‘ the mere slim shade of an intelligent
but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with

the high attributes of a Subject?--and indeed by what
thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be
vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent
or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and
what is it open to their destiny to be, at the most,
that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of
its very nature an 'ado,' an ado about something, and
the larger the form it takes the greater of course the
ado. Therefore, consciously, that was what one was in
for--for positively organizing an ado about Isabel
Archer.10

To intensify the interest in Isabel, James "super-adds" the
proper incidents--incidents which describe her affronting
her destiny--and by so doing he enhances his story with

the quality of the romance.

129

The proper incidents James discovers, must be a
natural projection of the consciousness of Isabel Archer:

'Place the centre of the subject in the young woman's

own consciousness . . . and you get as interesting and

as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish, Stick to

that--for the centre; put the heaviest weight into that

scale, which will be so largely the scale of her re-

lation to herself. Make her only interested enough,

at the same time, in the things that are not herself, E
and this relation needn't fear to be too limited. Place
meanwhile in the other scale the lighter weight . . .:
press least hard, in short, on the consciousness of
your heroine's satellites, especially the male; make it
an interest contributive only to the greater one. See,
at all events, what can be done in this way. What
better field could there be for a due ingenuity?‘ll '

.‘W
v."' . ~..I
‘ .
I"

 

As one can see by the way James attacks the problem of
balancing character and incident the emphasis is predomi-
nantly upon the mind--that is, the character--of Isabel

Archer. At another point in the Preface to The Portrait

 

James describes this work as a house of fiction. It is a
work of very careful architecture which has many windows.
In effect, Isabel is his house of fiction and through the
windows of her sufficiently wide consciousness she presents
the incidents of the work. Isabel is the origin and center
of his architecture and over this magnificent edifice James
erects a "careful and proportioned pile of bricks that
arches over it and that was thus to form, constructionally

12

speaking, a literary monument." In later years, James

was to regard The Portrait of a Lady as the most proportioned

 

of his productions after that of The Ambassadors.

 

The incidents which James uses to portray Isabel

Archer are relatively easy to account for. The story opens

130

at an old English countryhouse where Isabel has been brought
from America by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett. Through a conver-
sation carried on by Mrs. Touchett with her son Ralph, we
learn a brief history of Isabel's background in America.
Like Roderick Hudson, Isabel has been brought to Europe by

a patronizing friend who feels that the native American
genius can best be expressed in the Opportunities found in
Europe. For the most part the rest of the portrait of

Isabel is her pursuit of those opportunities. James struc-

tures Isabel's opportunities around a series of courtships.
Each of the three gentlemen who court Isabel represent
different aspects of her encounter with experience. Isabel
rejects the first two suitors because to marry either of
them would cause her to relinquish her cherished sense of
liberty in finding her "destiny." When Isabel marries Gil-
bert Osmond, whom she feels will allow her the liberty to
follow her opportunities, the first half of the portrait of
Isabel comes to an end. The overall structure of the first

half of The Portrait, reveals a basically conventional ro-

 

mantic plot. In the second half of the book, Isabel's
story becomes closely involved with the future of her step-
daughter Pansy. Pansy's marriage is a matter of great con-
cern to Gilbert Osmond who has high hopes for his daughter,
and interestingly enough, some of Pansy's suitors are for-
mer lovers of Isabel. The romantic structure of the second

half of The Portrait essentially concerns the business of

 

131

getting Pansy married to someone who meets Osmond's high
expectations. Isabel is a somewhat different person in the
second half of the book. Once she has been removed from

the center of a conventional romantic plot, she is able to
understand Pansy's plight with much greater insight. Isabel
is of course the center throughout the novel, but in the
second half James places greater emphasis upon her mental
activity and, now that she is married, less emphasis upon
her romantic activities.

A closer look at the first half of The Portrait

 

shows how James establishes the appropriate situations, the
right chain of events, in short, the objective correlative,
for filling out the picture of his young lady. When we
first see Isabel, we learn that she is the youngest of three
sisters brought up by their widowed father, who gives them
a haphazard education including three trips to Europe. The
older sisters, of whom we know very little, have managed to
marry successfully. After the death of her father, Isabel
is left entirely alone. Into this situation Isabel's aunt,
Mrs. Touchett arrives and like the fairy godmother whisks
Isabel off to Europe to fulfill her destiny. That destiny
is presented romantically and symbolically by the three
different houses and three different suitors who function
to characterize different points of Isabel's progress.
Throughout the first half of the book, and indeed the whole

novel, the use of the romance is relegated to the background

 

132

where it provides a sense of coloring or texture to James's
picture of Isabel. It is always the developing conscious-
ness of Isabel that stays in the foreground. What James
achieves by using the simplified plot structure of the ro-
mance in the first half is a framework which the reader
somewhat easily recognizes, but which also frees the reader
so that his greatest attention can be devoted to the reac-
tion of Isabel to the different "types" of experience she

encounters.

 

Like the other Jamesian heroes in this study,
Isabel's progress is characterized by James as a growth
from innocence to experience; and, as in the other novels,
James presents Isabel's progress as a symbolic manner. The

first half of The Portrait, the half concerned with the

 

courtship and marriage of Isabel, is largely a study of
Isabel's innocence. The second half, after her marriage

to Osmond, is the record of Isabel's reaction to her loss
of innocence and her greater awareness of the evil surround-
ing her which she had overlooked before in her innocence.
Isabel is the first of James's characters whose life is
presented after she has lost her innocence. Before this
James ended his novels when each of his main characters--
especially Roderick Hudson and Christopher Newman--became
aware of the loss of innocence and, consequently, the state
of experience. In a sense, James's use of the romantic
mode corresponds to his depiction of his character's inno-

cence and his emphasis on the realistic mode implies a need

15!,

133

to present characters with greater awareness, that is, a
greater insight into the nature of experience. One of the

primary differences, then, between The Portrait and James's

 

earlier novels, is that in The Portrait James studies the

 

reactions of a character to the overwhelming recognition
of his own nature. For such a study, James needs a suffi-
ciently strong and intelligent character. Roderick's
recognition of his loss of innocence led directly to his
death; Newman's recognition led him to assert his moral
superiority over the Bellegardes but he also promptly re-

turned to America. It is in The Portrait that James com-

 

pletely breaks away from the restrictions of the romantic
mode. He finally realizes that to present the full picture
of the consciousness of his characters, he must continue
the portrait of Isabel beyond her state of innocence into
the greater knowledge and understanding that comes with
experience.

While, on the one hand, Isabel is the most realisti-
cally presented character in James's fiction, up to this
point she is, at the same time, perhaps the most romantic.
More than any of the earlier Jamesian characters, Isabel
cherishes her liberty. She is the clearest example of
James's conception of a character who leads a life of "ex-
perience disengaged." In creating Isabel, James's main
concern was to present her as one who desired to affront

her destiny. The most consistent characteristic of Isabel

134

throughout the first half of The Portrait is her desire for

 

freedom. To fulfill her desire for freedom Isabel feels
she must experience life. At the outset of the story,
Isabel confesses to Mrs. Touchett that she is very fond of
her liberty. Mrs. Touchett's decision to take Isabel abroad
is largely based on her approval of Isabel's independent
hearing. Isabel, who has "a great desire for knowledge,"
and an immense curiosity about life, finds that her "deepest
enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements
of her own heart and the agitations of the world."13 In
Mrs. Touchett Isabel sees a chance to live, to escape from
mere existence, which it seems would be her lot if she re-
mained in America and married Caspar Goodwood. To go with
Mrs. Touchett is to escape from the boredom and oppression
that faces all of James's young romantic heroes. After
Mrs. Touchett announces that she intends to take Isabel to
Europe, Isabel:
. . . was restless and even agitated; at moments she
trembled a little. The importance of what had happened
was out of proportion to its appearance; there had
really been a change in her life. What it would bring
with it was as yet extremely indefinite. . . . She had
a desire to leave the past behind her and, as she said
to herself, to begin afresh. This desire indeed was
not a birth of the present occasion; it was as familiar
as the sound of the rain upon the window. . . .14
When Caspar Goodwood comes to London to propose to Isabel,
she rejects him because, she says, "I like my liberty too
much. If there's a thing in the world I'm fond of . . .

15

it's my personal independence." Isabel, however, is not

fond of independence because of what it allows her to do:

tern

135

'I belong quite to the independent class. I've neither
father nor mother; I'm poor and of a serious disposi-
tion; I'm not pretty. I therefore am not bound to be
timid and conventional; indeed I can't afford such lux-
uries. Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to
judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to
judge at all. I don't wish to be a mere sheep in the
flock; I wish to choose my fate and know something of
human affairs beyond what other people think it compat-
ible with propriety to tell me.‘ 5

What impresses Ralph most about his cousin is her desire to %8
remain free to confront her destiny: 4
Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they

waited . . . for a man to come that way and furnish 1
them with a destiny. Isabel's originality was that ,

 

she gave one an impression of having intentions of her

own. 'Whenever she executes them,‘ said Ralph, 'may

I be there to see!‘17

Isabel rejects Lord Warburton's proposal for the

same reason that she rejects Goodwood's. She cannot relin-
quish her freedom. It is ironic that Isabel who has such
a romantic conception of her freedom should reject the
most conventionally romantic of her suitors. Mrs. Touchett's
description of Lord Warburton characterizes him as the
ideal prince:

'Lord Warburton's a very amiable young man--a very

fine young man. He has a hundred thousand a year.

He owns fifty thousand acres of the soil of this

little island and ever so many other things besides.

He has half a dozen houses to live in. He has a seat

in Parliament. He has elegant tastes--cares for lit-

erature, for art, for science, for charming young

ladies.'13
Isabel conceives of her romance, her destiny on a grander
scale even than that of marriage to a wealthy English Lord.

Her rejection of Lord Warburton's proposal, however, trou-

bles her: "Who was she, what was she, that she should hold

136

herself superior? What view of life, what design upon
fate, what conception of happiness, had she that pretended
to be larger than these large, these fabulous occasions?"19
James provides Isabel the chance to pursue her
destiny when old Mr. Touchett dies, leaving Isabel nearly
seventy thousand pounds. This stroke of James's pen ful-
fills the last requirement for his conception of the roman-
tic hero who encounters life as "experience disengaged."
He has provided Isabel with the economical means that all
his characters have in pursuing their desire for experience.
The thought of an inheritance overwhelms Isabel: "She had
never had a keener sense of freedom, of the absolute bold-
ness and wantonness of liberty. . . . The WOrld lay before
her--she could do whatever she chose. There was a deep
thrill in it all. . . ."20 With her new-found sense of
liberty, Isabel decides to travel: "Isabel travelled
rapidly and recklessly; she was like a thirsty person

draining cup after cup. Madame Merle meanwhile, as a lady-

in-waiting to a princess circulating incognita, panted a
"21

 

little in her rear. James uses the same figure of
speech to describe Isabel's desire for experience as he
used to describe Roderick's desire--the cup of experience.
It is also significant that here, as elsewhere, James asso-
ciates his hero drinking deeply from the cup of experience

with the romantic mode. Madame Merle is called the "lady-

in-waiting" to the "princess" Isabel. Isabel is a princess,

137

however, only in the general terms of James's use of the

romance--his definition of romance as "experience disengaged."
Isabel's innocence and the romantic structure of

The Portrait is suggested by the different houses in which

Isabel lives. The first house, her grandmother's house in

Albany, New York, is the source of Isabel's early romantic

views. "Even as a child she thought her grandmother's

22

home romantic." It is "a place which became to the child's

imagination, according to its different moods, a region of

"23

delight or of terror. It is in her grandmother's home

that Isabel's romantic views first become associated with
her desire to experience life. When Mrs. Touchett arrives
Isabel describes her feelings about the house:

'I like places in which things have happened--even

if they're sad things. A great many people have died

here; the place has been full of life.’

'Is that what you call being full of life?' [Mrs.
Touchett asks.]

'I mean full of experience--of pe0p1e's feelings

and sorrows.'
Most of the time that Isabel lives in England with the
Touchetts, she stays at their country estate, Gardencourt.
Isabel's stay at Gardencourt proves to be the happiest
period of her life. The affectionate tone with which James
describes Gardencourt in turn reflects Isabel's affection
for the home:

Her uncle's house seemed a picture made real; no re-

finement of the agreeable was lost upon Isabel; the

rich perfection of Gardencourt at once revealed a

world and gratified a need. The large, low rooms,

with brown ceilings and dusky corners, the deep em-
brasures and curious easements, the quiet light on

138

dark, polished panels, the deep greenness outside,
that seemed always peeping in, the sense of well-
ordered privacy in the centre of a 'property' . . .
these things were much to the taste of our young lady,
whose taste played a considerable part in her emo-
tions.

The order and harmony of Gardencourt gave Isabel a feeling
of security. The images of greenness that surround the
house reinforce Isabel's native innocence.

In the second half of The Portrait, when Isabel is

 

living in Osmond's house, her view of the house reveals not
only her own loss of innocence and internal distress over
an unfortunate marriage, but also Osmond's condescending,
oppressive view of his wife's desire for a life of fulfill-
ment. The four walls of Osmond's house "were to surround
her for the rest of her life. It was the house of darkness,
the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond's
beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond's beau-
tiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small window
and mock at her."26
Ralph, who finds himself completely fascinated and

puzzled by Isabel, contemplates her in imagery that rein-
forces James's use of houses as symbols of Isabel's pro-
gress:

He surveyed the edifice from the outside and admired it

greatly; he looked in at the windows and received an

impression of proportions equally fair. But he felt

that he saw it only by glimpses and that he had not

yet stood under the roof. The door was fastened, and

though he had keys in his pocket he had a conviction
that none of them would fit.27

It is nc

imagery
that in

asan

ment."

acteriz

 

thiri

AOWe.

139

It is not surprising that James uses the symbolism and
imagery of houses to characterize Isabel when we recall

that in his Preface to The Portrait, James describes Isabel

 

as an "edifice," and The Portrait, as his "literary monu-
ment." In fact, it is altogether typical of James to char-
acterize his characters by the objects that surround them.
This technique is simply another extension of his statement
that "what is character but the determination of incident
or incident but the illustration of character." It is the
words of Madame Merle, the "wisest woman in Europe," that
perhaps best describes James's technique of characterizing
by the use of surrounding objects and incidents:

'When you've lived as long as I you'll see that every
human being has his shell and that you must take the
shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole
envelope of circumstances. There's no such thing as
an isolated man or woman; we're each of us made up of
some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call
our 'self.‘ Where does it begin? Where does it end?
It overflows into everything that belongs to us--and
then it flows back again. I know a large part of my-
self is in the clothes I choose to wear. I've a
great respect for things! One's self-~for other
people--is one's expression of one's self; and one's
house, one's furniture, one's garments, the books

one reads, the company one keeps-~these things are all
expressive.‘2

we can see quite clearly in Madame Merle's views that she
thinks that incident expresses character. Isabel does not,
however, agree with Madame Merle:

'I think just the other way. I don't know whether I
succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing
else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is

any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a
limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Cer-
tainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear,
don't express me; and heaven forbid they should.'29

 

140

Both Madame Merle and Isabel represent James's own View
and style. While Madame Merle feels that incident is the
illustration of character, Isabel supports James's idea--
indeed the whole book supports James's idea--that character
is the determination of incident.

The appropriate culmination of the first half of

The Portrait is, of course, the marriage of Isabel to Gil-

 

bert Osmond. Isabel's most explicit motive in marrying
Osmond is the deluded notion that it will be a relationship
in which she will be able to retain her great desire for
freedom and dispense bounties to others. What attracts
Isabel to Osmond even more than the romantic Warburton or
the successful Goodwood is Osmond's air of not demanding
anything of her. It is interesting, and perhaps quite sig-
nificant that Isabel justifies her decision to marry Osmond
in a way that reminds one of James's justification for his

use of the romance in the Preface to The American:

 

She had told Ralph she had 'seen life' in a year or
two and that she was already tired, not of the act

of living, but of that of obserVing. What had become
of all her ardours, her aspirations, her theories,

her high estimate of her independence and her incipient
conviction that she should never marry? These things
had been absorbed in a more primitive need--a need the
answer to which brushed away numberless questions, yet
gratified infinite desires. It simplified the situa-
tion at a stroke, it came down from above life the
light of the stars, and it needed no explanation.

When Isabel decides to marry Osmond she sees it as the ro-
mantic fulfillment of her desire to shape her own destiny;
she describes that decision as a "primitive need." It is

also precisely at this point in The Portrait when Isabel

 

 

 

141

decides to consumate her romantic vision that the shift is
from the romantic mode to the realistic mode. James seems
to be suggesting that the romantic mode is the more "prim-

itive" impulse in his work. In his Preface to The American

 

James recalls writing The American during his "happiest

 

. 31 .
season of surrender to the invoked muse." What he env1es

is "the free play of so much unchallenged instinct." [Italics

 

mine] Isabel follows the "primitive need" to include the
romantic into her life and James envies the "unchallenged

instinct" which allows him to include the romantic mode in

 

his art.
Isabel's marriage to Osmond marks the end of the

romantic structure of the first half of The Portrait as

 

well as Isabel's innocence. It is the end of Isabel's in-
nocence not only because it is the loss of her virginal
chastity, but because it also forces Isabel to realize
that she has lived with a number of romantic illusions.
The greatest illusion Isabel has to face is her notion
that "the aristocratic life was simply the union of great
knowledge with great liberty; the knowledge would give one
a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of enjoyment."32
Ironically, her marriage to Osmond provides her great know-
ledge of a sort she never expected, but it accords her no
liberty. Marriage to Osmond widens her sensibilities, and
makes her much more perceptive of the evil in the world

which she has hitherto overlooked. She begins to see both

I Osmond and Madame Merle in a different light. During the

142

year of Osmond's courtship, "she had seen only half his
nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was
partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full

moon now--she saw the whole man."33

The recognition of
the evil in Osmond leads Isabel to a re—evaluation of
Madame Merle: "Madame Merle had ceased to minister to
Isabel's happiness, who found herself wondering whether .

the most discreet of women might not also by chance be the

34 O O 0
most dangerous." Because James carries his characteri-

 

zation of Isabel beyond her loss of innocence, he is able v
to endow her with a greater perception of evil than either
Roderick Hudson or Christopher Newman ever possesses. In

effect, the second half of The Portrait is the presentation

 

os Isabel's reaction to her more romantic impulses before
her marriage. James's use of the romance in the second

half of The Portrait is largely through the "subjective ad-

 

venture" of Isabel's dramatic awareness of the nature of
evil. Isabel's subjective adventure becomes thoroughly en-
tangled with another romantic development, however, in the
attempt to get Pansy married.

In the second half of The Portrait the element of
the romance presented in incidents surrounding Isabel's
life is slight. The romantic incidents of the second half
have to do almost entirely with Osmond's attempt to get
Pansy married. The romantic treatment of Pansy and Claire

de Cintré of The American is remarkably parallel. Like

 

 

143

Madame de Cintré, Pansy is courted by a young American who
makes his living in a commerbial way. Osmond cannot tol-
erate Ned Rosier and prefers his daughter to marry an
English lord, the former suitor of Isabel, Lord Warburton.
Like Claire de Cintre, Pansy is torn between her sense of
duty to family wishes and her desire to marry the man she r;
loves. When Osmond becomes insistent that Pansy cannot i
marry Rosier and Warburton returns to England, Pansy goes

into the convent. The melodramatic nature of the plot

 

involving Pansy, though not developed to the proportions y

of the intrigue in The American, serves as another incident

 

to make Isabel more aware of Osmond's evil nature. In the
second half of the novel the function of the romance is
clearly intended to illustrate the consciousness of Isabel,
it does not function in any particular way to structure the
text.

Perhaps the most conclusive way of illustrating
the functions of the romance in the second half of ghg
Portrait is done by looking at one of the novel's special
achievements, one which James himself singled out in his
Preface. The achievement to which James refers is the
famous chapter forty-two, which he calls Isabel's "extra-

35

ordinary meditative vigil." It is the presentation of

36 that "throws the action fur-

37

this Pexciting inward life"
ther than twenty 'incidents' might have done." This

presentation of Isabel's "inward life," James says, is

144

"obviously the best thing in the book."38 James never gets

quite so much inside Isabel's consciousness either before

or after this chapter. Chapter forty-two is the most realis-
tic, most prolonged appearance in an early novel of the de-
piction of a character's flow of consciousness. A closer
look at this famous chapter--a chapter that points the way Fa
to the later James style--shows that even when James is E i
most interested in characterization, he enhances his tech- i

nique with a sense of the romance. An extraction of some

 

i
of the central metaphors of this chapter will show how E
thoroughly the rhetoric of the romance had permeated
James's art:

. . her soul was haunted with terrors which crowded
to the foreground of thought as quickly as a place
was made for them. 39

. . . her short interview with Osmond . . . was a
striking example of his faculty for making everything
wither that he touched, spoiling everything for her
that he looked at. . . . It was as if he had had the
evil eye; as if his presence were a blight and his
favour a misfortune.40

She had had a more wondrous vision of him [before
their marriage.] He was like a sceptical voyager
strolling on the beach while he waited for the tide,
looking seaward yet not putting to sea. It was in

all this she had found her occasion. She would launch
his boat for him; she would be his providence; it
would be a good thing to love him.4

She could live it over again, the incredulous terror
with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling.
Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they
were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was
the house of darkness the house of dumbness, the

house of suffocation.a

145

Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity,
under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of
life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a
bank of flowers.
Each of these extracted quotes reinforces James's
conception that a hero of the romance, the one who leads
a life of "experience disengaged," will confront experi-

ences that teach him the nature of evil. One is again re-

minded that in his Preface to The American James discusses

 

the presence of evil in the romance as the "rank vegetation
of the 'power' of bad people that good get into. . . ."44
It is significant that James carries the portrait of Isabel
beyond the romantic structure of the first half of the book
to the point in the second half where Isabel can, in fact,
recognize the nature of evil. It is additionally signifi-
cant that James depicts Isabelfs recognition of evil in
metaphors that remind us of his use of the romantic mode.
From this point on in James's novels, the function of the
romance is to enhance the texture of James's work; James

does not rely any longer upon the conventions of the ro-

mance to structure his text.

 

FOOTNOTES

1
2

3

Richardson, "The Art of Fiction," pp. 86-87.

Blackmur, Preface to The American, p. 22.

 

Blackmur, Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, p.

Ibid.

Uloh

Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 42—43.

Ibid., p. 43.

ooqos

Ibid.

91bid.

1°1bid., p. 48.

11Ibid., p. 51.

121bid., p. 52.

13The Portrait, p.

 

141516., p. 39.

151516., p. 140.

lGIbid., p. 141.

17Ibid., p. 63.

18

1911316., p. 101.

2°Ibid., p. 267.

Ibid., pp. 71-72.

 

41.

146

42.

 

147
21Ibid., p. 268.

221bid., p. 32.

23Ibid., p. 33.

24Ibid., p. 35.

251bid., p. 56.

26Ibid., p. 353.

27Ibid., p. 63.

281bid., pp. 172-173.

29Ibid., p. 173.

301516., p. 291.

31Blackmur, Preface to The American, p.

 

32The Portrait, p. 354.

 

331bid., p. 350.

34Ibid., p. 396.

35

 

361bid., p. 56.

37Ibid., p. 57.

381bid.

39The Portrait, pp. 348-349.

 

40Ibid., p. 349.

41Ibid., p. 351.

421bid., p. 353.

43Ibid.

44Blackmur, Preface to The American, p.

 

--.T.’r
',

 

25.

Blackmur, Preface to The Portrait, p. 57.

37.

CHAPTER VI
THE LATE NOVELS: THE ROMANCE--

FROM TEXT TO TEXTURE

"Romance could weave itself, for Strether's sense, out
of elements mild enough." Henry James, The Ambassadors

 

The rest of James's novels after the publication of
The Portrait of a Lady are similar in their emphasis upon
James's preference for dealing with subject matter through
the consciousness of an intelligent character. Consequently,
rather than dealing with all of the rest of James's later

novels, I am selecting two--The Ambassadors and The Golden

 

 

Bow1--as representative of the late James period. More
than twenty years elapsed between the writing of The Por-

trait of a Lady and the writing of The Ambassadors and The

 

Golden Bowl. In the 1880's James began to deal with more
complicated matters such as social institutions and political
issues in such works as The Princess Casamassima, 1885; The

Bostonians, 1886; and The Tragic Muse, 1887. During the

 

1890's James turned for a time to writing for the theater.
This brief point in an otherwise brilliant literary career
was marked with noticeably bad luck. A very poor audience

148

149

reception of his play Guy Domville forced him back into

 

fiction. It was during this period, because James was con-
stantly experimenting in the desire to develop his technique,
that the reputation of James as a difficult writer first
arose. His longer, more complicated sentences became his
standard way of writing in this period-~a way that is evi-

dent in both The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. The

 

 

turn of the century marked for James what F. O. Matthiessen

1

calls "The Major Phase." With an enormous burst of energy

James wrote three major novels in this period: The Ambassa-

 

dors, 1903 (but completed in 1901); The Wings of the Dove,

 

1902; and The Golden Bowl, 1904. These are James's maturest

 

efforts; they are complex, massive, and difficult novels,
but they are among the best in the English language. It
was also during this period that James began editing his own
novels and writing his Prefaces for the New York Edition of

his works. Because The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl are

 

among James's maturest efforts, it is appropriate that they
be examined along with the early novels to see how James
uses the elements of the romance at the end of his career.
The purpose of this paper, as stated in the first chapter,
is to illustrate that James uses elements of the romance in
ways that are essential to his work. Therefore, the ro-
mance is not limited to any specific period in James's
[development of his technique. In the later novels when

James uses the romance it is not essentially a structural

150

device. James's later novels are structured around a
"centre of consciousness." Consequently, the "air of
romance" which James wishes to add to his "picture of

life" is presented as a texture of the mind of his center
of consciousness. In other words, it is an outgrowth or
extension of his realistic technique. Surprisingly enough,
James's use of the romance often coincides in the later
novels with scenes that are also most clearly examples of
his realistic technique. The discovery scene in The Am-
bassadors when Strether accidentally comes across Chad and
Madame de Vionnet--a scene that confronts us directly with
the interior of Strether's mind--is remarkably like Isabel's

famous meditation in chapter forty—two of The Portrait of

 

a Lady. The two scenes are alike in that both are clearly
among the best examples of James's realistic technique, but,
as we have already seen in the analysis of Isabel's reac-
tions, both scenes also reveal the presence of the elements
of the romance. It is particularly significant that James
should retain the elements of the romance--even if it is
only an "air of romance"--in scenes that are his most real-
istic.

While it is a realistic technique--the depictions

of a "centre of consciousness"--that shapes The Ambassadors,

 

the basic source of interest in that consciousness is
created by James's uses of the romance. Strether, in the

typical pattern of the romance, has disengaged himself

 

151

from the ties of his familiar society. Our interest in
Strether is a result of his encounter with an entirely

new social environment. One may even suspect that if we
were to see Strether presented only from within the bounda-
ries of Woolett, Massachusetts, we would find him rather
uninteresting. He readily admits himself that he has not
"lived." Strether, however, is not at all stupid. Our
interest in him increases as we watch his perception of

his Paris experiences expand his consciousness. The Paris
experiences are designed by James to test Strether in a way
that all of James's heroes have been tested. Strether is
relatively naive and innocent even though he is one of the
oldest of James's heroes. Simply speaking, Strether's test
is one which forces him to recognize the complex nature of
experience; he discovers that is more than life in WOolett,
Massachusetts.

Perhaps a significant insight into the necessity
for experience, and consequently James's emphasis upon it,
can be attained by looking at James's description of it in
"The Art of Fiction":

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete;
it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge Spiderweb
of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber
of consciousness, and catching every air-bourne par-
ticle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the
mind; and when the mind is imaginative . . . it takes
to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the

very pulses of the air into revelations.

What happens to Strether during the course of The Ambass-

 

adors is the developing awareness of experience. Strether

152

catches and retains our interest because he is an imagina-
tive mind; he does come to see life as an "immense sensi-
bility"; and he does "convert the pulses of the air into
revelations." In other words, Strether's empirical per-
ceptions are converted into romantic, subjective insights
by means of his imaginative mind. In this sense, it is not

surprising that James called The Ambassadors "quite the

 

best, 'all round,‘ of my productions."3 When James calls

The Ambassadors his best production he is speaking of more

 

than the rounded structure of the novel. He is referring
as well to the rounded, that is, fully presented character
of Strether. It is a full presentation because it is both
realistic and romantic.

The germ of The Ambassadors came to James in a way

 

that emphasizes the necesSity of experience. It is a germ
which subtly reflects James's definition of the romance as
"experience disengaged."

The whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Strether's
irrepressible outbreak to little Bilham on the Sunday
afternoon in Gloriani's garden, the candour with which
he yields, for his young friends' enlightenment, to
the charming admonition of that crisis. . . . The re-
marks to which he gives utterance contain the essence
of 'The Ambassadors': 'Live all you can; it's a mis-
take not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in
particular so long as you have your life. If you
haven't had that what have you had? I'm too old--too
old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one
loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the
illusion of freedom; therefore don't, like me today,
be with the memory of that illusion. I was either, at
the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have
it, and now I'm a case of reaction against the mis-
take. Do what you like so long as you don't make it.
For it Egg a mistake. Live, live!‘

 

153

What Strether regrets at the age of fifty-five is never
having disengaged himself from the restraints of a comfor-
table life in order to confront the romantic possibilities
of "experience disengaged." His greatest self-condemnation
is that his pattern of experience is somewhat atypical of
the rest of James's humanity. His character has never
really been tested; hitherto he has lived a life of experi-
ences which have been narrowly defined. Strether's desire
to break out of the narrow restriction WOolett, Massachu-
setts imposes on life is the beginning of the basic pattern
of the nature of experience in the romance. The first im-
pression that Strether has upon his arrival in Europe es-
tablishes as the basic pattern in the novel the pattern of
experience suggested by the romance:

. . . such a consciousness of personal freedom as he

hadn't known for years; such a deep taste of change

and of having above all for the moment nobody and

nothing to consider, as promised already, if headlong

hope were not too foolish, to colour his adventure

with cool success.5
That this impression is strange to Strether is suggested
by his reflections on the subject:

Nothing could have been odder than Strether's sense

of himself as at that moment launched in something

of which the sense would be quite disconnected from

the sense of his past and which was literally begin-

ning there and then.6
Strether's hesitant welcome of the impression of personal
freedom is a result of a deeply ingrained fear on the part

of the social milieu of Wbolett, Massachusetts that exper-

ience is somehow equated with evil. Ironically, a broad

154

definition of the nature of evil in James's fiction shows
that evil is the conservative impulse within any society
which limits or restricts the pursuit of one's own freedom;
or, in the terms of Isabel Archer, evil is what prevents
one from "affronting his own destiny." Consequently, the
greatest evil in James can be seen in those characters who
manipulate the lives of other characters in the fashion of
a Madame Merle or a Fanny Assingham. What characters of
this type are basically attempting to do is to create or
maintain a social order which they feel is best for them-
selves. To create or maintain such a social order requires
the presence of evil in the form of limiting the possibil-
ities of human freedom.

The uneasiness of Strether in his conversations
with Maria Gostrey, the "general guide to Europe," clearly
indicates the equation of evil with experience.

He looked repeatedly at his watch, and when he had
done so for the fifth time Miss Gostrey took him up.

'You're doing something that you think not right.‘

It so touched the place that he quite’changed
colour and his laugh grew almost awkward. 'Am I
enjoying it as much as that?‘

'You're not enjoying it, I think, so much as
you ought.‘

'I see'--he appeared thoughtfully to agree.
'Great is my privilege.‘

'Oh it's not your privilege! It has nothing to
do with $23 It has to do with yourself. Your
failure's general.

'Ah there you are!" he laughed. 'It's the fail-
ure of Woolett. That's general.

'The failure to enjoy,‘ Miss Gostrey explained,
'is what I mean.‘

'Precisely. Wbolett isn't sure it ought to
enjoy. If it were it would. But it hasn't, poor
thing.‘ Strether continued, 'anyone to show it how.
It's not like me. I have somebody.'7

155

Because evil is equated with experience in the social
milieu of Woolett there is an ironic tension created in
the novel. Strether is sent upon a mission which is to
save Chad from an evil woman. What happens to Strether is
that his empirical perceptions of Europe reveal that the
nature of experience is not at all consistent with the
narrow views of Woolett, Massachusetts. He shortly dis-
covers that the evils of Woolett are more explicit than
the evils of Europe. A double irony is created when
Strether equates for himself the aesthetic life of Europe
with moral life. The most severe test Strether faces is
the recognition of the subtle forms of evil in Europe.
It is toward this recognition that the novel moves; and
as we have seen, such a recognition is an essential ele-
ment in the pattern of the romance if the hero is not only
to be a worthy subject in the series of tests but also if
he is ever to be triumphant.

Strether is the only Jamesian hero in this study
who confronts evil so thoroughly both in the culture from
which he has come and the culture in which he finds him-

self. In the novels before The Ambassadors, James has

 

had his hero confront evil primarily in the new culture to
which he travels. Perhaps this is another sense in which

James meant The Ambassadors was the "best, all round" of

 

his works. Strether's situation is somewhat unique in

that his perception of evil in Europe grows out of his

156

earlier perception of evil in WOolett. Although Strether
does not have to confront directly the evil of Woolett,
he is never unconscious of the influence of Mrs. Newsome--
the symbol of the WOolett way of life. He feels her in-
fluence restraining and tempering all of his activities in
Europe. In fact, the primary reason that Mrs. Newsome does
not need to come to Paris is that she is the symbol of all
that Woolett stands for. Consequently, Strether feels as
restrained by the Pococks or by Waymarsh as if Mrs. Newsome
were in Paris herself. Though comic at first in their pro-
vincialism, the second ambassadors along with Waymarsh,
emerge in the course of the novel as sinister characters
whose distorted sense of values and perverted notion of
duty cause them to betray their friendship to Strether by
surreptitiously reporting his activities to Mrs. Newsome.
A short scene in which Strether attends a melodrama

with Maria Gostrey provides rather early in the novel a
concise comment upon the basic romantic pattern of the
novel:

It befell that in the drama precisely there was a bad

woman in a yellow frock who made a pleasant weak good-

looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the

most dreadful things. Strether felt himself on the

whole not afraid of the yellow frock, but he was

vaguely anxious over a certain kindness into which

he found himself drifting for its victim. He hadn't

come out, he reminded himself, to be too kind, or

indeed to be kind at all, to Chadwick Newsome.8

Maria Gostrey quite perceptively suspects that Strether

identifies the young man in the play with Chad:

 

157

'I seem with this freedom, you see, to have guessed
Mr. Chad. He's a young man on whose head high hopes
are placed at Woolett; a young man a wicked woman has
got hold of and whom his family over there have sent
you out to rescue. You've accepted the mission of
separating him from the wicked woman. Are you quite
sure she's very bad for him?'9
It is Maria Gosgrey's assessment of Strether's reactions
which gives a romantic interpretation of the nature of
Strether's mission. Later on she accurately guesses that
if Strether is successful in his mission--his test--he will
be rewarded by receiving the hand of Mrs. Newsome in mar-
riage. However, before that ever happens, Strether dis-
covers that Madame de Vionnet is not after all so "very

bad" for Chad.

In his analysis of The Ambassadors, Maxwell Geismar

 

comments upon the romantic melodrama in the novel and its
relation to the realistic technique:

Here [as in other James novels] . . . the central
figures of the novel are soon transfixed by their
'prearranged destinies.‘ They are trapped again by
the relentless coils of the romance melodrama. In
one sense indeed the three main figures can be viewed
as an aging, desperate and manipulative woman; a rich,
slippery and callous young American bounder; and a
perpetually adolescent, rather pruriently old-maidish
and inordinately 'innocent' middle-aged voyeur. For
Strether also 'spies out,' with a kind of childish
wonder, and a certain curious loverlike jealousy and
envy, all the 'intimate' sexual behavior of Chad and
Mme. de Vionnet. In a more realistic chronicle, this
after all barely more than middle-aged literary man,
completely entranced as he is by the maturing French
lady, might well have married her. And the well-
matched couple might then have left their wealthy,
handsome, cultivated and 'pagan' young American friend
to go his own way.10

The most important element of the romance in James's

novels after The Portrait of a Lady is the hero's recognition

158

of evil. The manner in which James handled this scene in

The Portrait became a favorite technique in later works.

 

Like Isabel, Strether recognizes the nature of evil in a
meditative scene during which James confronts us most
directly with the mind of Strether. Once again, in the

later novels as in The Portrait, the elements of the romance

 

are present at the same time that James's art is most real-
istic.

The presence of the romance in James's realistic
depiction of Strether's recognition of the true relationship
between Chad and Mme. de Vionnet adds a texture to James's
picture of life that could not be achieved by the realistic
mode alone. It is not surprising that what concerned James
most in his development of Strether as a center of conscious-
ness was a desire to perfect a device both for framing and
for interpreting experience. All art must give the effect
of putting a frame around its subject in order for us to
concentrate upon it without being distracted by irrelevant

details. The frame for The Ambassadors becomes the mind

 

of Strether; it is this frame which surrounds James's pic-
ture of life.

The scene in The Ambassadors which represents best

 

in miniature the whole of James's art is the scene in Book
Eleven where Strether leaves Paris for a day in the French
countryside. What the reader sees is a very convincing
picture of rural France; it is furthermore convincing be-

cause we know that it is the imaginative, perceptive mind

159

of Strether which is the frame of the picture. What is
equally significant is that Strether is prompted to visit
rural France because he had once seen a picture by Lambinet
of the French countryside. When Strether departs from his
train he discovers that he has selected the right spot.
Everything around him reminds him of Lambinet's picture in
real life:

The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines;

the poplars and willows, the reeds and river--a river

of which he didn't know, and didn't want to know, the

name--fell into a composition, full of felicity, within

them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish;

the village on the left was white and the church on

the right was grey; it was all there, in short--it was

what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France,

it was Lambinet.
It is Strether's desire to find a part of rural France which
reminds him of Lambinet's picture that precipitates his
journey into the countryside. However, what precipitates
Strether's desire to find a countryside in France that re-
minds him of Lambinet is basically a romantic impulse. "He
could thrill a little at the chance of seeing something
somewhere that would remind him of a certain small Lambinet
that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston dealer's

12

and that he had quite absurdly never forgotten." In other

words, as James says, "romance could weave itself, for

13 It is

Strether's sense, out of elements mild enough."
particularly significant that the ensuing scene in which
Strether's thoughts are never more clearly before us is a

scene which originates as a result of romance woven from

 

160

"elements mild enough." After James wrote The Portrait of

 

a Lady the use of incident in his work is secondary to
his use of character and the elements of the romance are
secondary to James's realistic techniques. However, the
elements of the romance are needed to give texture to
James's picture of life.

When we turn to The Golden Bowl and find that we

 

are presented with a real Prince and Princess, we are not
surprised to find other elements of the romance. The pre-
sence of a Prince and a Princess is not enough in itself

to say that James uses the elements of the romance. As
always, what is important in James is the type of experience

with which he deals. Because The Golden Bowl is one of the

 

most controversial of James's major works, there are a num-
ber of ways of reducing the plot structure of the novel so
that it resembles the conventional romantic plot. One of
the ways in which Maggie can be viewed is in terms of the
medieval allegory. This view makes Maggie virtually a
saint. She has never known evil before her marriage. She
gradually discovers the nature of evil as she becomes more
and more sure that her husband, Amerigo, is having an affair
with her close friend, and now stepmother, Charlotte.
Through the exercise of forgiveness and perfect love, Maggie
[leads her husband to repent and return to the ways of vir-
tue. Another simplified way of seeing Maggie is that she is
a good wife who finds that she is about to lose her husband

to a rival and so she sets out with all her skill to fight

 

I’ll.

.,
£3: -
"r
.

161

for her rights and the cause of virtue. She is justified
in doing so and the story ends with her success. Here the

plot of The Golden Bowl is reduced to the conventional

 

love triangle and the simple, expected victory of good over
evil in a conventional happy ending with the lovers' em-
brace. The danger of both of these simplified plot outlines
is the injustice done to James's novel. In the first case,
we see Maggie as someone who is incapable of evil in her-
self. Such a person in all of James's fiction does not
exist. Maggie is a much more complex figure than this. In
the second case, we must overlook the fact that Maggie is
largely responsible herself for the Prince and Charlotte
having so much time at their disposal. A good wife does
not sacrifice the needs of her husband to an affection for
her father. In neither of the simplified plot outlines can

one claim that the element of the romance in The Golden

 

Egg; is used as a structural device. To make such a claim
is to overlook some very important parts of the novel.

When both Adam and Mr. Assingham say that Maggie
has never known evil, they place her in the Garden of
Eden, and the only dramatic necessity is that she eat the
fruit of the tree of knowledge. In this framework Maggie
becomes a sensitive, innocent girl who is capable of under-
standing by stumbling her way through her ignorance to
knowledge of the nature of evil. In a sense, Maggie is

very much a part of the humanity that populates James's

 

 

162

fiction. The pattern of her experience is the pattern
from innocence to experience; or in other terms, Maggie's
experience is what James describes as "experience disen-
gaged." What happens to Maggie is what happens to all of
James's heroes who develop an awareness of the nature of
evil.

Throughout the book Maggie's innocence is contrasted
with her father, Adam Verver, whose name suggests his pri-
mal character. Although he is forty-seven years old at
the beginning of the story, Adam's youth is repeatedly in-
sisted upon throughout. He is an Adam, emphatically green,
in the sense of being perpetually fresh and full of vi-
tality. Like an earlier American, Christopher Newman,

Adam wants to buy the best articles that Europe has on the
market. However, unlike Newman, Adam Verver's innocence is
the source of his own evil. Always before in James's
novels, a character's innocence has ultimately been the
source of his greatest strength. It is this innate inno-
cence that allows most of James's characters to triumph in
spite of defeat. Repeatedly throughout the novel Verver's
innocence is associated with images of gold or golden ob-
jects. There are, for example, recurrent references to the
Golden Age. Adam and his daughter are often described in
terms suggestive of an ideal pastoral state prior to the
Fall of Man, especially in the scenes at Mr. Verver's

country estate, Fawns. Everything at Fawns is surrounded

 

163

by a "general golden peace." The association of Adam and
Maggie with prelapsarian innocence has an ironic effect.
Adam and Maggie are not, after all, living in a golden age,
but in a fallen world. All of their behavior is motivated
by a naive belief in human perfection to the point that
Adam buys for Maggie an ideal husband, Prince Amerigo.
Maggie explains her father's behavior to the Prince in a ii] 1‘
way that characterizes the danger of Adam's innocence: i I

"'You're . . . a part of his collection, . . . one of the

 

things that can only be got over here. You're a rarity, an LJ
object of beauty, an object of price. . . . You're what

'"14 Mr. verver's Osmond-like

they call a morceau dg_hh§§g.
appreciation of art is warped to the point that he dehu-
manizes all those around him with the exception of his
daughter Maggie. Mr. verver is proof that innocence in-
vested with power and riches can become a sinister, dan-
gerous thing; dangerous not in spite of but because of
that very innocence. In another sense, Mr. Verver's inno-
cence is dangerous because he is incapable of changing.
He is one of the few characters in James's work who is
never able to perceive the nature of evil. It is pre-
cisely because he does not comprehend the complexity of
experience that he is dangerous.

Maggie, on the other hand, is able to change in the

course of the novel. Her experience is more typical of

human experience and of all the main characters of this

 

"mm

164

study. Like Roderick Hudson, Christopher Newman, and Isabel
Archer, Maggie journeys from innocence to experience. The
knowledge of experience brings with it a sense of defeat,

but like the rest, Maggie is a better person after her recog-
nition of the nature of experience. At the end of the novel
Maggie had achieved a relationship with her husband that is Tm,
much more satisfactory and natural. Once Charlotte and i ?
Adam leave for America, Maggie and Amerigo can begin to

live as husband and wife. It is interesting that James

 

records Maggie's feelings as Adam and Charlotte depart in E} ‘
words that he uses to describe the romance as "experience

disengaged': "Yet hhig above all--her just being there as

she was and waiting for him to come in, their freedom to be

together there always--was the meaning most disengaged."15
In a sense Maggie is the most successful, the most trium-
phant of James's heroes because she has learned the nature
of experience and has managed to achieve a sense of freedom
that none of the others could achieve. While she is as
realistically presented as Isabel Archer, Maggie is, at the
same time, a more romantic character in the manner with

which she triumphs over evil.

In the Preface to The Golden Bowl, James reiterates

 

his concern for the realistic demands of his art:

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,

165

though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness
or reporter, some person who contributes to the case
mainly a certain amount of criticism and interpreta-
tion of it.15
As might be expected, James's art is primarily a depiction
of character; the romance is used only to enhance his
realistic picture of life. Once again, James comments on

the relation of the romance to his realistic demands when

he says in the Preface to The Golden Bowl: "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

17

and oblique view of my presented action." After The

Portrait of a Lady James's treatment of incident has

 

clearly been supplementary to his depiction of character.

Although The Golden Bowl is a clear example of James's

 

realistic art, it is a novel whose complex meanings are
lost without the complex symbolism surrounding the charac-
ters, especially the symbolism of the golden bowl. To
understand the symbolism of the golden bowl is to under-
stand somewhat the complex relationship of the principal
characters of the book. The bowl stands mainly for Maggie's
marriage. The flaw in the bowl represents the factor which
makes the marriage bad. To define the flaw is, in a sense,
to define not only the characters of the novel but the evil
as well. Once again, James's art gives us evidence that a
full picture of life could be presented only by combining
the subjective and the objective, the romantic and the

realistic.

 

 

166

When James asks himself in the Preface to The

American what is involved in giving a full picture of life

 

he realizes that the list of questions and concerns if for-
midable: "The who? the what? the where? the when? the

why? the how?--"18

to be able to answer these questions

is to be able to see experience as James describes it in

"The Art of Fiction" as "never limited," "never complete,"

an "immense sensibility," which "catches every air-bourne

particle" of meaning and "takes to itself the faintest

hints of life." All his life James worked at understanding

the complex nature of experience. When James asks, "by

what art or mystery, what craft of selection, omission or

commission, does a given picture of life appear to us to

surround its them, its figures and images, with the air or

romance while another picture close beside it may affect

us as steeping the whole matter in the element of reality."19

James answers his own question thus: "I have ever failed

to see how a coherent picture of anything is producible

save by a complex of fine measurements."20
Because James himself felt that a distinction be-

tween romantic and realistic fiction was unnecessary, per-

haps we all do him an injustice to call him simply a "re-

alist," or even a "romancer"; the most accurate acknowledge-

ment would be "Henry James: Writer."

FOOTNOTES

1F. O. Matthiessen, Henpy James: The Major Phase
(Oxford University Press, 1944).

2

 

Richardson, "The Art of Fiction," pp. 83-84.

3Blackmur, Preface to The Ambassadors, p. 309.
4

 

Ibid., pp. 307-308.

5Henry James, The Ambassadors (2 vols.; Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1909), p. 4. (Henceforth referred to as
The Ambassadors).

6

 

 

Ibid., Vol. I, p. 9.

71bid., pp. 16-17.

8151a., pp. 53-54.

9Ibid., p. 54.

loMaxwell Geismar, Henpy James and the Jacobites
(Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965). P. 98.

11

 

The Ambassadors, V01. II, p. 247.

 

121bid., p. 245.

13Ibid.

 

14Henry James, The Golden Bowl, V01. I (2 vols.;
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904), P. 12.

15

 

Ibid., Vol. II, p. 367.

16Blackmur, Preface to The Golden Bowl, p. 327.

 

l7Ibid.

18Blackmur, Preface to The American, p. 23.

 

167

 

168
191bid., p. 30.

2011616.

CONCLUS IONS

The purpose of this study has been to show that
James uses the elements of the romance throughout his
literary career in ways that enhance his art. The under-
lying principle of organization has been that James uses
the romance in his early novels as a rather obvious struc-
tural device, and that in the late novels he uses the ro-
mance to give a romantic texture to his picture of life.
In the early novels, as I have shown, James relies quite
heavily upon the elements of the romance for the shaping
of his fiction. It is perhaps not so surprising for an
apprentice artist to make use of the material with which
he is familiar. In fact, the emphasis in both the tale
"Benvolio" and the novel Rodepigk Hudpon is somewhat bio-
graphical. The dilemmas which Benvolio and Roderick Hud-
son face can be seen as James's attempt to reconcile the
demands of the realistic and romantic modes of fiction.
The characterization of Roderick is largely presented in
relation to the romantic structure of the novel, especially
to the external action or plot. In the late Jamesian
novels, characterization becomes structure as it is pre-

sented through the center of consciousness.

169

170

The analysis of The American shows that in this
novel James comes close to writing pure romance. The struc-

ture of The American is built on the conventional romantic

 

situation of the injustices done to the romantic lover.

The tension in the novel is an outgrowth of the romantic
structure. The tension is created by Newman's attempt

to "win" the approval of the Bellegarde family and Claire's

hand in marriage. As in Roderick Hudson, the romantic

 

structure of the novel serves to characterize the hero.
The hero is defined in terms of his relation or response
to a series of tests or external actions.

In The Europeans the emphasis is once again upon

 

James's use of the romance as a device for structuring his
text. James uses the romance in a number of different ways

to shape The Europeans. In writing The Europeans, James

 

 

seems to be consciously employing the various possibilities
of the romantic structure. James was perhaps much more
aware of the desire of the American reading audience for
romantic, even sentimental literature than most critics
will admit. His correspondence with William Dean Howells
reveals that he intends to experiment with a "joyous little
romance." The result is that the romance can be seen

structuring The Europeans in a number of different ways.

 

Viewed from different perspectives, the structure of The

Europeans can be seen as pure romance, the romance as

 

social comedy, pastoral romance or as James's concept of

"in

171

romance as "experience disengaged." In this novel, more
than in any other, James uses the romance to structure
his fiction.

Perhaps the most important chapter in this study

is the chapter on The Portrait of a Lady. In this novel

 

James finally seems to reconcile the demands of the roman-
tic and realistic modes and to use the romance henceforth
as a complement to his realistic technique. James no
longer uses the romance to structure his fiction. From
this point on, James's fiction is structured primarily
around character rather than around incident. The shift is
a significant one because the action of the novel, the ele-
ments of the romance are now presented as a part of the
sensibility or mental landscape of the novel's center of

consciousness. In the novels that precede The Portrait of

 

a Lady, James first conceives of the "germ" in terms of
incident or plot. The "germ" of The Portrait of a Lad ,
however, comes to him in the "sense of a single character."

Because the novels which follow The Portrait of a

 

Lady are similar in their emphasis upon James's preference
for dealing with subject matter through a center of con-

sciousness rather than by incident, The Ambassadors and

 

The Golden Bowl were chosen as representatives of the late

 

James novels. In these novels James uses the elements of
the romance primarily in themes, symbols and images in

ways that give texture to his realistically conceived art.

 

. 13.1.V.‘

172

James the mature artist does not have to rely upon the con-
ventions of the romance for shaping his text. He does
feel, however, that the "air of romance" is necessary if he
is to give his picture of life fullness.

As James progresses in his literary career he be-
comes increasingly more in control of his materials. There
are times in the early novels when James relies quite
heavily upon the conventions of the romance for shaping his

fiction. His retrospective view of The American suggests

 

that his reliance upon the romance was, at times, more than
he suspected. However, James, all his life, reconciles the
demands of the realistic and romantic modes. By the end of
his literary career James still uses the conventions of the
romance, but by this time he is clearly in control of his
material. He uses the romance in ways that enhance his
realistic fiction. When the romance functions artistically
to complement his realistic techniques, James is able to
present a full picture of life. In effect, he becomes

"Henry James: Writer."

 

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