HENRY JAMES’S REPRESENTATION OF INNER CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEDITATION SCENES FROM THE LATE NOVELS Thesis for the, Degree of Ph. D. MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY BRUCE PHILIP TRACY 1971 'HES‘MS IIII IIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIII III II 39 2 This is to certify that the thesis entitled HENRY JAMES'S REPRESENTATION OF INNER CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEDITATION SCENES FROM THE LATE NOVELS presented by BRUCE PHILIP TRACY has been accepted towards fulfillment I of the requirements for AD..— degree in MEI-Eh— Major professor Date 2 0-7639 ABSTRACT HENRY JAMES'S REPRESENTATION OF INNER CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEDITATION SCENES FROM THE LATE NOVELS by Bruce Philip Tracy Recent studies have meticulously analyzed particular stylistic techniques which James developed and how they evolved throughout his career. Others have investigated James's creation of fictional "centres" of consciousness, including the matter of discriminating between James's own authorial mind and the inner worlds he creates for his characters. This study seeks to com- bine the two, applying quantitative measurement of James's stylis- tic strategies to the problem of distinguishing between the voice of omniscient creator consciousness and that of fallible created consciousness. So the problem had two parts: (1) deciding where in James's novels one might expect to find representations of inner consciousness; and (2) analyzing such passages to discover what features of his style contribute most directly to the illu- sion of having stepped inside a character's mind. For the first, I sought passages meeting the following four criteria: (1) Given James's consistent regard for the sen- sitive consciousness, it seemed most likely that he might represent the inner reflections of those characters who display a precise, Bruce Philip Tracy even painstaking perception into their own affairs and those of others. (2) The deepest revelations should come at times when such a character is most solitary, "motionlessly seeing," as James's preface described Isabel Archer before her fireplace. (3) Such moments typically occur in a place of quiet repose, like a garden or a church, by a fireside or on a spring hillside. And (4) we observe that these scenes often conclude with the character feeling some distinctive sense of enlightenment or decision. Samples from such passages--which I call "meditation scenes"--were tested in three late novels, as well as in three earlier novels for comparison. An equal number of non-meditative sentences from each novel (James's authorial voice in narration) were set against the test passages as a control; these were usually descriptions of scenes or persons, often from the beginnings of the novels befOre any central consciousness had been established. The measures performed on both test and control passages identified the following stylistic features which significantly distinguish James's meditation scenes in the late novels from authorial description. In terms of James's grammar, the meditations generally tended to (a) longer sentences and clauses; (b) more Complex and fewer Compound-complex sentences; (c) fewer sentences having two independent clauses and one dependent, more very long sentences having four or more independent clauses, and more sentence frag- ments; (d) more clauses using intransitive verbs or predicate nomi- natives, and fewer using copulatives or passive voice verbs; (e) Bruce Philip Tracy more adverbs in proportion to adjectives; (f) more third-person personal pronouns and fewer pronoun substitutes; and (g) more past- perfect verb tenses (in some novels) and slightly more uses of the verb‘tgqgg. In terms of James's rhetorical devices, the meditations generally tended to (a) more repetitions, particularly of nouns and verbs, and far fewer repetitions of adjectives; (b) slightly less parallelism overall, though more word and less clause parallelism; (c) more appositional expansions, with fewer phrases and more clauses in apposition; (d) slightly more parentheses, far fewer of them being simple phrases, and slightly more of them being words and complete predications; (e) more parentheses between clauses, more immediately after a main verb (between predicate and complement), and fewer before a main verb (between subject and predicate); and (f) occa- sional monologue guides, verbs of "mental activity" which suggest direct representation of inner consciousness. EXplicating brief selections from the meditations of Isabel Archer and Maggie Verver illustrated how his stylistic appa- ratus helps James communicate introspective fictional personalities credibly, how the particular features marking his style in medita- tion scenes work together to force the narrative back into the mind of his character. In other words, James creates a style in these scenes which consciously seeks to mirror the sequence and rhythms of thought. HENRY JAMES'S REPRESENTATION OF INNER CONSCIOUSNESS IN MEDITATION SCENES FROM THE LATE NOVELS Bruce Philip Tracy A THESIS Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DWTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1971 PREFACE This investigation, the neglected stepchild of stray week- ends snatched from teaching and other responsibilities, is scarcely the most inspirational study of James one might hope to write. The Master himself would almost certainly deplore it. To be sure, it quantifies some insights which sensitive James addicts have always shared. But hopefully it goes a bit further-~to illustrate what James's style can yield under new instruments, and how one's inklings about technique or influence can rather simply be put to the test. For patient encouragement along the variegated course of these and all my studies, I am indebted to a number of personal friends, who shall remain unnamed. To many academic mentors I owe the deepest gratitude, but especially to Bertha Munro and Clyde Henson. I should like to acknowledge as well the kind assistance of Rare Books librarians at Michigan State University, The Newberry I Library, and the University of California at Los Angeles. :/111 CONTENTS momenm.0.00.0....OOOOOCCOOOOOCOOO1 CHAPTER I. INNERCONSCIOUSNESS IN JAMES...........7 CHAPTER II. SELECTING THE PASSAGES............. 16 Criteria (16)--Roderick Hudson (20)--The American (22)--The Por- trait of a Lady (25)--The Ambassadors (25)--Thew mgs of— the— _D_o__ve _®--T_h_e _G___olden Bo__w_l 30 CHAPTER III. THE MEDITATION SCENE AND JAMES'S GRAMMAR . . 37 Sentence and Clause Length (37)--Independent and Dependent Clau- ses and their Patterns (38)--Clause Types (ML-Adjectives and Adverbs (Mb-Personal Pronouns (ASL-Main Verb Tenses (LI-6)"- Summary ('48 CHAPTER Iv. THE MEDITATION SCENE AND JAMES'S RHEI'ORIC . . 51 Repetition (51)--Parallelism (54)--Appositional Expansion (55)-- Parenthesis (55)--Verbs of Mental Activity (60)--Summary (62) CHAPTER V. ACASEINPOINT ................ 66 From Isabel Archer (66)--From Maggie Verver (69) ' CHAPTER v1. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS . . . . . . . . . . 81+ BMW OF "OMS C ITED O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O % iv LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. Average Sentence and Clause Lengths in Words . . . . . . 37 2. Complex and Compound-Complex Sentences as Percentages of Descriptive or Meditative Sentence Totals . . . . . . . 39 3. Clause Types 1, 2, and 5 as Percentages of Independent or Dependent Clause Totals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 A. Past and Past-Perfect Verb Tense Forms as Percentages of Descriptive or Meditative Verb Totals . . . . . . . . . A7 5. WOrd and Clause Parallelisms as Percentages of All Early or Late Descriptive or Meditative Parallel Totals . . . 55 6. Phrases and.Clauses in Apposition as Percentages of All Early or Late Descriptive or Meditative Appositional WSionTOtalS0.0000000000000000057 7. Five Parenthesis Positionings as Percentages of All Late Descriptive or Meditative Parenthesis Totals . . . . . 6O LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1 O P—L’ Sent ence 5 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 78 2. LL, Sent ence 1 O O O O O O O O I O O O O O O O I O O O O 78 3. G—B’ Sentence 7 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 79 vi Appendix A. Passages Selected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B. Word Totals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C. Average Sentence and Clause Lengths . . . . . . . . D. Totals of various Sentence Types by Clause Pattern . E. Totals of Various Clause Types . . . . . . . . . . . F. Averages of Adjectives Minus Adverbs . . . . . . . . G. Averages of Third-Person Personal Pronouns and of Sub- stitutes for Third-Person Personal Pronouns per Sen- tence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . H. Main Verb Tenses and the Verb EEHRS . . . . . . . . I. Averages of Repetitions, Parallels, Appositional Expan- sions, and Parentheses per Sentence . . . . . . . J. Units Repeated, Paralleled, and Set in Apposition . K. Parenthesis Totals, Length, and Relation to Context L. Parenthesis Position . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LIST ' OF APPENDICES vii Page 102 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 11I+ 115 116 INTRODUCTION A "new criticism" of fiction, like its counterpart in poetry, has established analysis of form as a valid critical occupa- tion. For a novel is not sociology or autobiography, or "life," but a deliberately woven fabric, a verbal texture. Herbert Read's des- cription of the plastic arts could be applied equally to fiction: The specifically aesthetic act is to take possession of a revealed segment of the real, to establish its dimensions, and to define its form. Reality is what we thus articulate, and what we arti ulate is communicable only in virtue of its aesthetic form. This really adds little to Mark Schorer's dictum for literature, that "technique alone objectifies the materials of art." 2 James E. Miller, Jr. called this critical shift a "revolu- tion," and so did David Lodge. 3 We might better term it an evolving awareness that "meanings vary persistantly with variations of words," to quote William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and his far-reaching contribution to the whole business of stylistics. N Richard Ohmann stated even more bluntly, "style is the hidden thoughts which accompany overt propo- sitions."-5 Of course, linguists have not yet established incontro- vertible correlations between certain ways of putting words together and precise evocative values. But even in the midst of what David Lodge is calling "the present uneasy and difficult period of transia . 6 O O O 0 tion," various critics have pOInted to correspondences between a 1 2 writer's particular stylistic tricks and dominant themes threading his works. For example, Cecil S. Emden notes of Samuel Johnson's prose that "a constant succession of balanced phrases is an appro- priate medium for the preceptor who is engaged in holding one set of moral balances after another." 7 Leodice Kissane saw "Dangling Con- structions in Melville's 'Bartleby'" reinforcing the "dissatisfaction and emotional unsureness" of the narrator. 8 Robert Zoellner con- cludes that there is generally "a profound aesthetic correspondence between the 'meaning' of Absalom, Absalom! and the tortured syntax "9 in which it is cast. And Robert Howard Sykes finds Hemingway's sentences "rhythmically constructed to match the action the sentences describe" (e.g., in the sleeping-bag scene in £33m 1:35 _B_e_ZLJ_._ 222.12% 1° John Spencer and Michael Gregory echo many such observa- tions when they say: "Phonology and graphology not only connect substance to form, they are themselves aspects of form, patterns which on occasions directly make substance meaningful in a situa- 11 tion." And Noam Cholmsky shares the same view: "It seems clear, then, that undeniable, though only imperfect correspondences hold between formal and semantic features in language." 12 If Hemingway rewrote the ending to _A_ Farewell _tg 3mg thirty-nine times, there- fore (as he told interviewer George Plimpton), 13 his readers have been learning to look for the layers of significance bred by such conscious fabrication. And formal studies of style are now tending to recognize specific rhetorical elements as the active agents res- ponsible for broad stylistic effects. 3 Some analyses have adopted the Continental tradition of explication'ggutgxtg, examining a small and carefully selected pas- sage for stylistic traits considered characteristic of the whole. Three of the nine studies in the English Institute Essays volume for 1958, for example, used short passages toward this end. And Ian Natt's often reprinted study of "The First Paragraph of The Ambassa- .QEEEI has thrust into prominence a technique first applied to James by Violet Paget, one which the present study adopts in Chapter V. 1h This method does help compensate for a major difficulty of novel criticism--the impossibility of remembering the whole, even after repeated readings. But it introduces its own critical limitations, stemming particularly from the fact, as Lodge puts it, that "the meaning of any passage in a novel is largely determined by its imme- diate and total contexts." 15 So we find more and more critics on the other hand who seek to measure an author's total text through precise and saphisticated statistical measures of the various phenomena determining an author's effects. Rebecca Posner's article, "The Use and Abuse of Stylistic Statistics," offers a useful survey, and so does Louis Tonko Milic's exhaustive discussion of "The Problem of Style." 16 Milic has read everything touching on stylistic studies of English literature, and his bibliography is far more complete and suggestive than Harold C. Martin and Richard Ohmann's "Selective Bibliography" at the end of the 1958 EngliSh Institute Essays. 17 Jacob Leed edited a collection of essays on Computers and Literary Anal sis, many dealing with attempts to determine authorship. 18 And finally, the recent Engl'sh 1+ Stylistics: IA_Bibliography has a pertinent section on "Statistical Approaches to Style." 19 Wimsatt sensibly cautioned that "it is beyond the scope of an analysis of style to prove that any qualities of style exist in writing." 20 Or as Rebecca Posner qualifies even more stringently, "I should not dare to claim that statistics can say anything about literary value. They can merely measure those elements that we re- cognize as valuable by other tests." 21 Conceptualization always comes first; and perhaps "statistics can never be more than a strictly ancillary technique in stylistic studies," as Stephen Ullmann has suggested. 22 Let the argument rest with the following justifications, the first offered by Milic: I would say in my defence that the process of measuring is not autotelic: its ends are literary, bound to a fundamen- tal interest in the writer and his work. And the mechanical process is always preceded by a knowledge of the text and accompanied by a devotion to its literary qualities. More- over, in this method, before anything is counted or measured, the same critical intellectual process, the same sort in- tuition, takes place, as in the usual literary study. Leo Hendrick's disclaimer is worth quoting as well: To avoid the implication of circularity, it should be empha- sized that these characteristics [e.g., density, complexity, irregularity] are not arrived at only after the style has been systematically studied. They (or some gfiher names for them) are apparant to most readers of James. Hopefully we may at last consider unfounded all fears that quanti- fying necessarily mechanizes criticism. Notes _t_o_ the Introduction 1 Icon and Idea: The Function 91 Art _ig the Development p_f_ Human.Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19555, p. 20. 2 "Technique as Discovery," Hudson Review, I (Spring 1948), 73. 3 Miller, "Preface" to Myth and Method: Modern Theories of Fiction, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Linco : University of Nebraska Press, 1960); Lodge, Langgage 2i Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Anal sis‘gfgthg English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966;, p. 2 . h The Prose Style gf'Samuel Johnson, Yale Studies in English, Vol. 9‘ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), p. 9. 5 "Prolegomena to the Analysis of Prose Style," Style in Prose Fiction, ed. Harold C. Martin, English Institute Essays. 7558 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 13. 6 Lodge, p. 57. 7 "Rhythmical Features in Dr. Johnson's Prose," Review 23 English Studies, XXV (January 19N9), 38. 8 American S eech, XXXVI (OctOber 1961), 200. 9 "Faulkner's Prose Style in Absalom, Absalom!" American Litera- ture, XXX (January 1959), 493. 10 "Ernest Hemingway's Style: A Descriptive Analysis," Disserta- tion Abstracts, xxx1v (1963), 20A}. 11 "An Approach to the Study of Style," Linguistics and Style, ed. John Spencer (London: Oxford University Press, 196ET: 71. 12 Syntactic Structures ('s-Gravenhage: Mouton & Co., 1963), P. 1010 13 "The Art of Fiction," Paris Review, XVIII (Spring 1958), 65- 1“ watt, Essays in_Criticism, X (July 1960), 250-274; Paget under the pseudonym Vernon Lee, English Review, V (June 1910), #34-4h1. 1S LOdge: P0 79- 6 16 Posner, Archivum Linguisticum, XV, 11 (1963), 111- 139; Milic, A uantitative A roach to the St le of Jonathan Swift (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 3__w_—1957), pp. -73.L 17 Milic, pp. 29h-308; Martin, ed., pp. 191-200. 18 Leed (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1966). 19 Richard W. Bailey and Dolores M. Burton, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: The M. I. T. Press, 1968), pp. 85-102. 20 Wimsatt, p. 2A. 21 Posner, p. 112. 22 Style 12 the French Novel (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964), p. 30. 23 Milic, p. 17. 2h'§225y_James: The Late andm 1y Styles (A Stylistics Stud d) (microfilmed Ph. D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1953, p. NR. CHAPTER I INNER CONSCIOUSNESS IN JAMES No novelist more insistently provokes our awareness of the formal qualities of language than Henry James. His critical prognos- tications and fictional practice continue to influence the whole literary fraternity; and his rise to posthumous fame reflects a cri- tical shift from theme-oriented to style-oriented scholarship. James was always eminently aware of his language, of course. As his amanuensis of the later years Miss Bosanquet records: He took pains to pronounce each pronounceable letter; he always spelt out homophonous words, no matter how clear the meaning in the given instance might be, and he never left any punctuation mark unuttered except sometimes by inadvertence that important point, the full stop. Therefore, as James himself phrased it, "everything counts, nothing is superfluous." 2 David Lodge summarized this carefulness very clearly: James, particularly the late James, was so self-conscious an artist, so zealous for the "grace of intensity," so scrupu- lous in maintaining a consistent tone, that the analysis of any passage selected at random is likely to reveal more reliable evidence about his method than would be the case with most novelists. So it is not unlikely that the analysis of passages selected as re- presentative of quite specific narrative postures in James should reveal significant stylistic distinctions. 7 8 What has already been done with James's style includes defenses of his eccentricities and broad explanations of how his devices are suited to his goals. A (More recently critics have begun to analyze the precise techniques which James deve10ped and how they evolved throughout his career.) 5 What has been done with James's matter, particularly his creating of fictional "centres" of consciousness, includes tracing levels of penetration into the minds of various characters, and discriminating between James's own au- thorial mind and the inner worlds he creates for his characters. What has never been done, however, is applying the tech- niques of stylistic analysis to this problem of accurately distin- guishing the two voices: creator from created. For James often seems to leave a very thin line between the omniscient narrator consciousness and the fallible character consciousness. And this line is the hair to be split. The scape of this study would not permit a thorough- going analysis of James's style, a task which remains to be some- day attempted, nor of his theory of consciousness. What I have chosen to do, however, is to take a specific literary phenomenon --James's "representation of inner consciousness"--and to devise specific technical measures to uncover its stylistic determinants. We have known for quite a while that James often wrote to represent speech, or at any rate, that he himself spoke as he 7 wrote. But since human speech mirrors thought, since "the only window through which the physiologist can view mental life is speech," 8 then the total colloquial effect, the speech-like qua- 9 lity of James's style, serves indirectly to represent inner con- sciousness. Anthony Burgess could thus comment that "the Jamesian sentence is a superb instrument for rendering the motions of the cautious, cultivated sensibility"; 9 and Harold T. McCarthy, that "in his major phase the enormous apparatus subserves beautifully the act of personal expression." 10 By the "representation of inner consciousness" I mean essentially that narrative technique which Rene Wellek and Austin Warren attributed to James and called "the 'objective' or 'dramatic' method, . . . the reader's living through the process with the char- acters." With this technique, their Theory. 3 Literature continues, James undoubtedly anticipated the stream-ofeconsciousness approach to fiction. 11 Here we are on the grounds Percy Lubbock has called "scene" (following James and his preface to 211.2. M2: 213 2935), versus the "picture" of narrative description. And here "the reader is now himself to be placed at the angle of vision; not an account, or a report, more or less convincing, is to be offered him, but a direct sight of the matter itself, while it is passing." 12 In Ehg' Ambassadors, for example, Lubbock figures "scene" as follows: No longer a figure that leans and looks out of a window, scanning a stretch of memory-~that is not the image sug- gested by Henry James's book. It is rather as though the reader himself were at the window, and as though the window opened straight into the depths of Strether's conscious existence. Such a "window" into the mind has usually gone under the name of "interior monologue," "stream-of—consciousness," "mental solilo- quy," or the like. 1O Critics use these terms variously. 1Q But one perceptive student of contemporary fiction, Keith Leopold, makes a useful distinction between interior monologue in the first person, and "erlebte Rede," a term he takes from German criticism (denoting there, technically, a substitution of the indicative for the sub- junctive mode) and uses for situations where "the narrator is . . . both there and not there: everything in 'erlebte Rede' is seen from the perspective of the character, but the use of the third person suggests a report by the omniscient author." 15 In speaking of James's representation of inner consciousness, therefore, I shall consider "interior monologue" to include this technique of "erlebte Rede." Two crucial assumptions underlie this project and determine its form, assumptions uniquely justified in the case of Henry James, I believe: First, that James does represent inner consciousness, in places at least. And second, that we can distinguish stylistically between his pure reporting of fallible created consciousness and James's own authorial voice in straight narration. Through a meta- phor from his 188# essay, "The Art of the Novel," James eloquently summarized the central relationship upon which my assumptions ultimately rest: "The idea and the form are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the needle, or the needle without the thread." 16 The discipline of James's style is indeed linked to his goal of representing inner consciousness. If Robert Marks has ac- curately simplified James's strategy as a "horror of uncontrolled 11 improvisation" and a "love of anything that makes for proportion and 17 perspective," the rationale for this may be found in John Henry Raleigh's summary--that James was forever trying "to impose form and meaning on the chaos of life." 18 Some see only sterile form ob- 19 while others see only the chaos of life rampaging across all appearance of form. 20 But both are scuring the life under analysis, vital to James--the thread and the needle. And so it is that our problem has two parts: not only when, but ha! does James represent inner consciousness. So too the solving will have two parts: First, we must decide 22233 in the novels we might expect to find representations of inner consciousness. And second, we must analyze such passages to discover'whgt.stylistic markers identify them. We shall consider each in turn, explaining in the process the experimental design devised for this study. Chapter II will describe the test and control passages and how they were selected; Chapter III will describe the experimental design and findings re- lating to James's grammar, and Chapter IV the same relating to his rhetoric; Chapter V will test the findings and explore their impli— cations by explicating a meditative passage in depth; and then Chapter VI will present my conclusions and point out further areas of investigation suggested by this study. 12 Notes _t_9_ Chapter _I_ Theodora Bosanquet, "Henry James," Fortnightly Review, N.S. CI (June 1, 1917), 1000. 2 3 Langgge 33 Fiction: Essays _i_n_ Criticism and Verbal Analysis g_f_‘_ the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 19 , p. 195. 1* Note especially the following studies, indispensable to any consideration of Henry James's style: Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work (London: Hogarth Press, 1921+); Richard Bridgman, "Henry James and Mark Twain," The Colloquial Style _in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 78-130; David Daiches, "Sensibility and Technique: Preface to a Critique," Kegyon Review, V (Autumn 1916), 569-579; Georgio Melchiori, "Two Mannerists: James and Hopkins," T_h_e_ Tightrope Walkers: Studies 93 Mannerism _i_1_1_ Modern Literature (London: Routledge 8: Kegan Paul, 1956) , pp. 13-33; Ezra Pound, "Henry James," Instigations (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 106-167; R. W. Short, "The Sentence Structure of Henry James," American Literature, XVIII (May 19%), 71-88; Arthur J. A. Waldock, James, Jo ce, _a_n_d_ Others (London: Williams and Norgate, 1937); Hisayoshi Watanabe, "Past Perfect Retrospection in the Style of Henry James," American Literature, XXXIV (May 1962), 165-181; and Ian Watt, "The First Paragraph of E Ambassadors: An EXplication," Essays in Criticism, X (July 1960), 250-274. 5 Foremost among studies into the minutiae of James's style are the following unpublished Ph.D. dissertations, each consulted on microfilm: Sister Ancilla M. Flory, S.B.S., Rhflhmic Fi ation _i_I_1_ 3313 Late Style .o_i; Henry James (Catholic University, 19 ; Leo T. Hendrick, Henry James: _Thg Late and Early Styles (A Stylistics Study) (University of Michigan, 195-3.); Sister Mary Carolyn McGinty, C.S.J., T_h_e_ Jamesian Parenthesis: Elements 2; Susmnsion i_1_1_ the Narrative Sentences .o_f. Henry James's Late Style (Catholic University, 1967+); Barry Harold Menikoff, Style 2.112 Point p_f_ View _i_r_i _t_h_e_ Tales 9—1; Henry James (University of Wisconsin, 1955); and Strother Beeson Purdy, The Lan e _c_>_i_‘_ Henry James with Ehn hasis 23 gig Diction i119. Vocabule' (University of Wisconsin, 1960). (The foregoing five dissertations were abstracted, respectively, in Dissertation Ab- stracts, XXVII, whim-3045A; XIII, 808-809; XXIV, ZI193; )OWIII, 3883138711; and XXI, 626.) 6 On James's theory of consciousness, see especially the fol- 13 lowing studies: Quentin Anderson, The_American Heggy James (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1957); David W. V (Spring 1963), 198-172; Oscar 053m, "'Th-e-Im'bassadors': A New View," PMLA, LXXV (September 1960), 439-952; Herbert Edwards, "Henry James and Ibsen," American Literature, XXIV (May 1952), 208-223; Dorothea Krook, _T_h_8_ Ordeal ef Consciousness _ie Hm James (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1962); Ernest R. Labrie, "Henry James's Idea of Consciousness," American Literature, XXXIX (January 1968), 517-529; John Henry Raleigh, Time, Place, e._n_d_ Idea: Es s on _t_he Novel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 19687?1R0bert F. Sayre, The_Ekamined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Heggy Adams, He James (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 19 ; and Austin Warren, "The New England Conscience, Henry James, and Ambassador Strether," Minnesota Review, II (Winter 1962), 1h9-161. 7 For detailed characterizations of James's mode of speaking, see Robert Herrick, "A Visit to Henry James," Yale Review, N.S. XII (July 1923), 72h-7h1; and Pound, Instigations, pp. 106-107. For specimens of that talk, see Elizabeth Jordan, .TE. Legend 2}; fie Master: He James, ed. Simon Nowell-Smith (New York: Scribner's, 1958), pp. 1 -17; and Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Scribner's, 1931+), pp. 212-243. For speculations on how James's practice of dictating influenced the style of the later novels, see Bosanquet, Hegay James e£_Work, p. 7; Bridgman, Colloquial Style, p. 78; Daiches, "Sensibility and Technique," p. 572; and H. G. Dwight, Hegy James: The Critical Herita e, ed. Roger Gard (London: Routledge 8: Kegan Fault—1.968) , pp. w.- 8 Chin Wu Kim, "The Neurophysiology of language," speech deli- vered to the Linguistics Club at Michigan State University on February 19, 1969. A similar assertion appears in William James, chholog: Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt, 1892), p. 162. 9 The Novel Now: A Student's Guide _t_9_ Contemporary Fiction (London: Faber 8: Faber, 1967), . 2E. 10 He James: The Creative Process (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1958), p. 1h}. 11 Wellek and Warren (New York: Harcourt, Brace 8: Co., 1956), pp. 213, 214. See my Chapter VI for further discussion of James's probable influence on twentieth century authors. 1‘2 Percy Lubbock, _The Craft 'o_f_ Fiction (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), pp. 252-253; also James, Critical Prefaces, pp. 299—302. On the distinction between "picture" and "scene,iI see also Leon Edel, _T_1_1e Prefaces 2; Henry James (Paris: Jouve et Cie., 1951), pp. 87 ff.; and J. A. Ward, The Search £95 Form: Studies _ie the Structure _o_f_ James's Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 31-38. 14 13 Lubbock, p. 146. 1“ For various applications of these terms to the work of Henry James, see the following: Leon Edel, "Introduction," We'll to the Woods No More, by Edouard Dujardin, tr. Stuart Gilbert (New— York. New Directions, 1957), pp. vii-xxvii; Katherine Fullerton Gerould, "Stream of Consciousness," Saturday Review, IV (October 22,1927), 233-235; and Robert Humphrey, 'Stream of Consciousness: Technique or Genre?" Philological Quarterly, XXX (1951), 434-437. Significant broader discussions of this range of terms include: Melvin J. Friedman, Stream of Consciousness: a Study_ in Literary Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955); Norman— Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept," PMLA, LXX (December 1955), 1160-1184; Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1959), especially pp. 1- 9 and 23-38; and H. A. LaKelly, S. J., "Consciousness in the Monologues of U1 sses," Modernh nggege Qgegterly, XXIV (March 1963), 3-12. 15 Leopold, "Some Problems of Terminology in the Analysis of the Stream of Consciousness Novel," AUMLA, No. 13 (May 1960), p. 27. Stephen Ullmann makes a similar distinction, giving to that form intermediate between the "he said" mode and first person interior monologue the name of "free indirect speech": Style_ in the French Novel (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964), pp. 110-119.— 6 Reprinted in The Future of the Novel: Es& &ys on the Art of Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 21.— 17'gggee_§ Later Novels: An Interpretation (New York: William- Frederick Press, 1960 ), p. 1 3. 18 Raleigh, Time, Place, 229 Idea, p. 4. On this dichotomy, see also: Sallie Sears, The Ne ative Imagination: Form egg_Perspective in the Novels of Heg£y_James (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. xi; and Ward, The Search for Form, pp. 419, 422. 19 For examples of this view, see: Gerould, "Stream of Conscious- ness," p. 233; Andre Gide, "Henry James," Yale Review, XIX (Spring 1930), 641-643; F. R. Leavis, The Great Trad1tion: Geor e Eliot, 'Heg£y_James, Joseph Conrad (New York: George Stewart m4 ), .186; and Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays (5 vols.; London: 1The Hogarth Press, 1966), II, 82. For a useful survey of James's shifting critical repute through time, see Leon Edel, "Introduction," Hem my James: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: —Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 3—10. 20 For examples of this view, see: Pound, Instigations, p. 120; Edmund Wilson, "The Ambiguity of Henry James," Psychoanalysis and American Fiction, ed. Irving Malin (New York: Dutton, 1965), pp. 143-186; and Rebecca West, Henry James (New York: Henry Holt, 15 1916), pp. 109-116. Parodies of James usually mimic the luxuriance of his infinite sentences, for example: Max Beerbohm, "The Mote in the Middle Distance," The Question_ of Heg£y_ James: A Collection Lf Critical Essays, ed. F. W. Dupee New York: Henry Holt, 1945), pp. 45-43; and H. G. Wells, Boon: The Mind Lf the Race, The Wild Asses of Lhe Devil, and _Th_e Last Trum—Tp New York: __Doran, 1‘1—57. see also the briefer parodies by Owen Seaman and Frank Colby, Gard, ed., Hem my James: 'ng Critical Heritage, pp. 309-316 and 341, respec- tively. CHAPTER II SELECTING THE PASSAGES This study sought from the start to investigate how Henry James represented inner consciousness in the later novels. But it seemed fitting to examine as well how he developed this device from the beginning of his career. 80 six major novels were chosen for analysis, three early and three late: Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877), E Portrait 2359331 (1881), 1113 Ambassadors (1903), _ngmgmpflg (1902), and _TE’. Golden all. (1904). 1 The primary decision made, it was necessary to choose passages for testing from each of the novels. Though this must be acknowledged to have been an essentially intuitive matter, an effort was made to select passages which met certain fairly precise criteria. What I required were passages in which James exhibits his characters "in the full violence of reflection." 2 Considerable evidence has amply documented James's great regard for the sensitive consciousness. He wrote to Grace Norton affirming "consciousness is an illimitable power." And in another letter he boasted to Henry Adams: "I am that queer monster, the artist, . . . an inexhaustible sensitivity." 3 To such a sensitiv- ity experience was not something one simply endured and somehow reduced to memories. The stuff of James's life came rather to con- 16 17 stitute for him "an immense sensibility," as he described it, "a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue." # And such is precisely the approach to experience employed by his central characters; Strether's evaluation of ex- perience exactly corresponds, in this sense, with "what James ex- pected from a novelist." 5 So in keeping with James‘s "religion" of consciousness, we should look, first, for those Jamesian characters who exhibit a precise, clear-sighted insight into their own minds and motives and into those of others. "We want it clear, goodness knows," he had written of his plots, "but we also want it thick, and we get the thickness in the human consciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and interprets it." 6 As we consider each novel, therefore, we shall first have to weigh the various consciousnesses and project which, like Rowland Mallet's, might be made "sufficiently acute in order to enable it, like a Set and lighted scene, to hold the play." 7 Second, we need to examine the Jamesian protagonist standing alone, not as a "centre" surrounded by "reflectors," de- fined solely by his interrelationships with others. Rather we want him when he is most solitary, "motionlessly seeing" as James de- scribed Isabel Archer cogitating by the fireplace. 8 For these moments we may use Dorothea Krook's term "meditative vigil," 9 or as I prefer to call it, the "meditation scene." In identifying such scenes, furthermore, we wish to find the character not only 18 alone, but also at some juncture in his life where he is facing a distinct and immediate problem, something upon which to meditate. Third, meditation scenes should be likely to occur in a significant setting, a place of quiet repose such as a garden or fireside, a church or spring hillside. 10 And fourth, we may expect that a meditation scene in James will typically conclude in some distinctive sense of enlightenment or decision. The entire process as just outlined bears a striking re- semblance to the "meditative poem," succinctly defined by Louis L. Martz, the historian of seventeenth century Poetry of Meditation, as a work that creates an interior drama of the mind; this dramatic action is usually (though not always) created by some form of self-address, in which the mind grasps firmly a problem or situation deliberately evoked by the memory, brings it forward toward the full light of consciousness, and concludes with a moment of illumination, where the speaker's self has, for a time, found an answer to its conflicts. 1 Such a description accurately suggests the experience of Isabel Archer before her fireplace, of Lambert Strether in the French coun- tryside, or of Maggie Verver in the first two chapters of "Book Second" in The Golden Bowl. Ensuring some reliability to this study required that the meditative passages selected for testing be weighed against non- meditative passages chosen no less rigorously for controls. We must now ask which of James's styles is least likely to mirror to any significant degree the inner consciousness of a created character. And for this purpose, clearly authorial descriptions of scenes and persons seemed a good choice, especially when such passages were 19 chosen near the beginnings of the novels, before any central con- sciousness had been established. The foregoing definitions of test and control passages assumes the existence of more or less distinguishable "blocks" in the novels, of sections possessing a unity of matter and manner sufficient for us to consider them in relative isolation from their contexts. But this is exactly what J. A. Hard's Search EEEHEEE! first observes of these works, that "virtually every one of James's novels and tales is marked by proportionate arrangement: of dialogue in relation to narration; of the internal and the external lives of the characters, locations, and 'blocks' of material of all kinds." 12 ward was at one with James in this, furthermore, for the author himself spoke of the "fun" . . . of establishing one's successive centres--of fixing them so exactly that the portions of the subject commanded by them . . . would constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass and carrying power; to make for construction, thgt is, to conduce to effect and to provide for beauty. Such are the blocks we seek to isolate for measurement. In constructing a quantitative instrument to measure a style, however, some practical limit needs to guide our selection of passages. How much of each novel can we expect to measure, and how little will preserve the reliability of our findings? For Josephine Miles's study of‘§£ylg”§ng.Prgportion, it was one thousand lines of poetry or eight thousand words of prose. Louis Milic decid- ed his samples from Jonathan Swift should contain at least one hundred of whatever he was counting--verbs, sentences, and so on. 20 Herman Struck, while computing norms for his charts in Better Eaggg, found that two hundred sentence openings or main clauses or whatever was being measured assured reasonably consistent percentages for his statistical tests of a style; the reliability of his findings, he dis- covered, was seldom significantly improved by measuring longer sam- 15 ples. Finally, Leo T. Hendrick's dissertation on James worked with selections which were twenty sentences in length--five such selections from each novel he studied. 16 As in a number of other particulars, I have chosen to follow Hendrick's general lead: mea- suring my passages by counting sentences (instead of clauses, or words), and seeking at least one hundred sentences from each novel. The object of my re-readings of these works thus became to select, from each novel, an equal number of ten-sentence samples in each category: descriptive and meditative. The passages qualify- ing as meditations generally constituted the limiting factor on how [many samples were studied. For all but two of the novels studied, five ten-sentence samples taken from meditation scenes were paralleled by five samples taken from descriptive material, for a total of one hundred sentences extracted from each of these novels for analysis. For the other two novels, one early (RH) and one late QEQ), a scar- city of clearly meditative scenes reduced the total extracted from each to eighty sentences, forty meditative and forty descriptive. The following discussions specify what passages were actually selected 17 from each novel and, very briefly, why. To begin with, Roderick Hudson offered few unmistakable 21 meditation scenes of the sort we find so richly scattered through The Portrait _o_f_ 21331, 1h}; Ambassadors, or 21.113 Golden B_owl. Of course, we know on James's own word that "the centre of interest throughout the novel lies in Rowland Mallet's consciousness, and that the drama is the very drama of that consciousness." 18 In his painstaking in- vestigation of the early novels, Richard Poirier bluntly states the simple truth, "that what happens to Rowland in life is more important than Roderick's death." 19 On at least four distinct occasions we observe Rowland alone in situations which suggest meditation. First, in Chapter 2, 20 Row- land has been discussing Roderick with Cecilia and Mrs. Hudson, Mary Garland, and Mr. Striker. He had just received Roderick's first inti- mations of indifference to Miss Garland in the conversation where Roderick described smashing Mr. Striker's bust. And as "he walked homeward," James says, Rowland was "thinking of many things" as "the great Northampton elms interarched far above in the darkness," illu- minated by the moon QEH, 62). 21 By the end of this walk Rowland sensed, of this town and of America, "that here was beauty too-- beauty sufficient for an artist not to starve upon it" (RH, 63). Second, in Chapter 8 Rowland had listened to Christina Light complain of the emptiness of her life in the Villa Borghese. And having left disgusted for a fortnight in Florence, he sat in his room, realizing for the first time how much Mary Garland was coming to mean to him. James then portrays how "toward morning he flung himself into a chair" and "resorted to several rather violent devices for diverting his thoughts" (RH, 284, 285). This meditation intro- 22 duces Rowland's "vision of Roderick . . . plunging, like a diver, from an eminence into a misty gulf" (RH, 285), and concludes with his acknowledging to himself his feelings of guilt over how the love he bears for Mary really conflicts with his concern for Roderick. In the beginning of the final chapter, for the third medi- tation, Mary Garland has just realized Roderick's continued passion for Christina. Reflecting on all this, Rowland "ventured to think it marked an era" (RH, 45k), and he wandered across the Swiss ridges to view the Jungfrau. He had a book and tried to read it, "but his page remained unturned; his own thoughts were more important" (RE, #5#). During these minutes Rowland at last realizes himself that Christina may not be done with Roderick yet, nor he with her; and that in short "he had been befooled on a gigantic scale" (RH, 455). The fourth and last meditation is the most obvious: Row- land's seven-hour vigil over the broken body of Roderick. At the end of this time, James tells us, "Rowland understood how exclu- sively, for two years, Roderick had filled his life. His occupa- tion was gone" (33, #80461). Against these meditations I have set a long selection from James's recitation of Rowland's upbringing and education (Chapter 1), and a shorter one from the opening of Chapter 2 describing the Villa Pandolfini where Mrs. Hudson and Mary spent their Florentine vaca- tion. In his preface to The American, James introduces for the first time his goal of striving for "that effect of a centre," with 23 "Newman's own intimate experience . . . being my subject, the thread of which, from beginning to end, is not once exchanged, however mo— 22 But this subject's consciousness mentarily, for any other thread." is so limited, nonetheless, that we continue to face many of the same problems which plagued our search through Roderick Hudson for medita- tion scenes. In a remarkably insightful article, Sigmund Hoftun summari- zed this dilemma: The American is perhaps the novel in Henry James' work where he sticks most closely to the technique of analytical dissection. However, this does not make The American a profound character study. There is no spiritual conflict since Newman does not perceive the discrepancy between the Bellegarde's high culture and the trick ghey are playing him. He is a dupe on his own honesty. 2 Or as Richard Poirier put it, Newman "cannot reflect for us, as Rowland could, the subtleties of other people's actions and the com- plicated moral possibilities behind their manners." 2h But if James's explaining voice intrudes more frequently into this narra- 25 tive than into others, we still find instances of inner reflec- tion which appear relatively unmarred by authorial interpolation. For instance, to begin with, after Newman has been told in Chapter 18 by the Bellegardes, in her presence, that he cannot marry Madame de Cintré, he "was too stunned and wounded for consecu- tive action." So he walks along the river "tapping the trees and lamp-posts fiercely with his stick and inwardly raging" (Am, 327). These inward ragings, thus recorded for us, conclude with Newman still convinced that his betrothed had not herself changed, and that undoubtedly "she was unhappy" (Am, 328). 2# Three chapters later, following Valentine's death and New- man's own final interview with Claire, he went to a public walk at Poitiers and "paced up and down this quiet promenade for the greater part of the next day" (Am, 368). In the course of these musings, which supplied twenty sentences for our study, Newman concluded for himself that "there was blood in the secret at the very last!" (Am, V 372). Finally, as Chapter 26 opens we observe Newman trying "to read the moral of his strange misadventure" (Am, #60). This exten- ded reflection bears fruit shortly when Newman, headed for home aboard the Liverpool steamer, "restored the little paper to his pocket-book very tenderly" (Ag, #63), having decided nOt to take vengence on the family which had wronged him. From these pages I selected one ten and two five-sentence samples for analysis. Against these meditations we may set James's initial des- cription of Newman from Chapter 1 (twenty sentences), his Chapter 3 portrait of Mrs. Tristram (twenty), and the ironic sketch (Chapter 13) of the "tall, lean, silent man" Mme de Cintré's visitors often found in her home during Newman's courtship. In sharp contrast to the two works just discussed, The Portrait 23514531 offers distinct representations of inner con- sciousness, including (in Chapter 42) one of the clearest touch- stones any consideration of the meditation scene in James is likely to find. This is the passage James himself called "obviously the best thing in the book," his heroine's "extraordinary meditative 25 vigil" at midnight, Isabel's "motionlessly seeing" as she sits before her dying fire. 26 Even if the Portrait occasionally dips into other consciousnesses, Ralph Touchett's, for example, or Gilbert Osmond's,£27 it is Isabel's portrait; and her consciousness thus becomes our focus in this study. From the first half of Chapter 42, where Isabel begins to consider how she really feels about her husband and why she had mar- ried him in the first place, I have selected four ten-sentence sam- ples, avoiding her reflections on her fortune and, later, her specu- lations about how Gilbert must be seeing their marriage. The fifth test passage came from Chapter #9 immediately following Madame Merle's unmistakable confirmation of Isabel's suspicions, in the conversation which culminated with Isabel's exclamation, "Oh Misery!" as she covered her face with her hands. 28 That afternoon she drove alone through the Roman countryside, James says, and "asked herself" whether her former friend and model were now to be called "wicked" (EL, #55). She now realizes, as Rowland Mallet had in the earlier novel, how she "had been befooled on a gigantic scale" (BE, #55). To set against these meditations, I selected two samples from James's Chapter 1 description of the Touchett country house. From the beginning of Chapter 22, in which we first meet Gilbert as he visits his daughter in a Florentine villa, I took the remaining three samples of narrative prose. As he thought back over the composition of The Ambassadors, Henry James remembered his joy in working with the "thickened motive 26 and accumulated character" which his "poor friend" Lambert Strether offered. 29 Even the narrative in this novel, which begins and ends with his name, seldom seems to pass outside the scope of Strether's inner eye; from the very beginning almost everything comprises the play of Strether's mind on scenes, costumes, events, motives. 30 Sharply different in this from all the other novels stud- ied, The Ambassadors presented unique difficulties in our search for samples of purely authorial consciousness divorced from Strether's. The distinction remains uncommonly fine here, since Strether "all but speaks for the author himself," to quote Oscar Cargill's sug- 31 and perhaps, as David.NOble has suggested, the " 32 In gestive article; novel itself "is indeed an essay in oblique autobiography. the face of all this I selected as control passages ten sentences from Chapter 1 delineating Strether and Maria Gostrey's appearance, twenty from Chapter 2 describing waymarsh, ten from Chapter 5 trac- ing Strether's stroll with waymarsh (immediately preceding Strether's meditation in the Luxembourg gardens), and ten from Chapter 7 telling of Strether's visit to Little Bilham's rooms. And for test passages, I took twenty sentences from Strether's Chapter 5 meditation, sitting alone on a bench in the Luxembourg with his letters. These long long paragraphs directly follow his vision of the "little brisk figures" around him "whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock" (522, 59). Skipping Strether's thoughts of the present, I selected his reminis- cences over that trip to Paris years earlier with his wife and his wrestling with what he had kept of those youthful dreams, a sequence 27 ending with his awareness, at this early stage in his adventure, of "'movements' he was too late for" and "sequences he had missed" Qgflg, 65) . The key meditation in this novel, a passage on the order of Isabel's midnight vigil before her fireplace, provided the remain- ing three samples. In Chapter 30 Strether leaves the city for a brief romantic sojourn in the French countryside, a respite which ends ironically in his coincidental observation of Chad with Mme de Vionnet--proof of their immorality and proof to Strether of how, as with Rowland Mallet and Isabel, he "had been befooled" (RH, 455). In particular, I selected his musings on the "Lambinet" composition he fancies the scenery falling into (an image offering a synecdoche of the entire novel, if not indeed of James's whole work), on his fears about liking Mme de Vionnet too greatly for ob- jectivity, and still later, on his anticipation of the dinner coming at the "Cheval Blanc" and what it symbolized to him. The fact that the general sense of confidence and well being which this meditation engendered in Strether was so soon to be shattered by the two lovers' appearance round the bend of the river in no way invalidates and in fact confirms Chapter 30 as a faithful representation of Strether's inner consciousness at that point. The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl are the only novels in this study for which we need seriously question which of their characters is most likely to indulge in inner meditation. The inception of the Wings lay, of course, in the haunting figure "of a 28 young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early strick- en and doomed, condemned to die under short respite." 33 But James's 34 Minny Temple story, so long in the back of his mind, included from the start more complete portraits, both of the young man who "wishes he could make her taste of happiness" and of his fiancee, 35 than James hinted at in his preface. There he developed a theory quite different from that controlling Thg_Ambassadors, one of "successive "36 centres" working "in arranged alternation, with the centers in this case being Kate Croy, Merton Densher, and Milly Theale. Critics differ over the relative importance of each. Yet not only the prime center of consciousness in the novel, but (after Milly's death) its center of interest, lies I believe in Den- sher. 37 The full picture of Kate Croy appears not to have developed in James's mind until after Densher had emerged as integral to the 38 plot; and throughout the novel, furthermore, James presents Den- sher's inner consciousness occasionally, but Kate's scarcely at all. Hardly the most sensitive "register" James had ever devised, however, Densher presents difficulties similar to those we encountered with ChristOpher Newman: there is so much he can't tell us about.- So we are limited in what we can point to in this novel as meditation. As it turned out, being able to select only forty sentences each of meditation and of narrative for this novel kept the arithme- tic simple when it came to comparing percentages of the various phe- nomena; for finally there were fourteen ten-sentence samples each of meditation and of narrative from the early novels, and fourteen each from the late. 29 From Emgthgygyg I chose, first, five sentences from Densher's Chapter 19 stock-taking, his metaphor of himself as "the watchful manager . . . in the depths of a box," and of Kate as "the poor actress in the glare of the footlights" (E2, II, 38). This brief fantasy helped Densher feel momentarily rather less used than in fact was the case. Next, from Chapter 26, another chapter devoted entirely to Merton's inner workings with the events embroiling him, I selected twenty-five sentences in which he analyzed just how deeply he had sunk in his machinations: "It was all doing what Kate had conceived fOr him; it was not in the least doing . . . anything he himself had conceived" (W2, II, 191). Densher concludes from this "inward drama" as James terms it (W2, II, 196), while his thoughts are turning from Kate to Milly, that his own will and not Kate's alone had landed him where he is. The last sample came from Chapter 32, just before Merton meets Sir Luke Strett, Milly's physician, at the railway station. As he walks through "the scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens" of a Venice autumn (W2, II, 320), he thinks of his responsibility to the dying girl and, pacing the platform, realizes that he feels afraid. By way of contrast, I selected ten sentences from Kate's Chapter 1 parading in front of her mirror just before she talks with her father, twenty from the Chapter 3 description of Merton's ap- pearance, and ten from Chapter 5 where James shows Susan Stringham following Milly along the Alpine paths with her Tauchnitz volume. 50 "successive" centers, five in this case according to Joseph Warren Beach. 39 In this most sophisticated of James's novels, nearly all overt action is subordinated to the conversations among its six central characters, with passages of meditation interpolated "with a rigour of economy not previously attempted." ho And while we might identify a good many more separate meditations in this novel than in any hitherto mentioned, I shall only select from among those occuring within Maggie's consciousness. James's preface scarcely does justice to Maggie, I believe, alluding to her role in "Book Second" only by comparing it with the Prince's earlier role: "the function of the Princess, in the re- mainder, matches exactly with his." “1 But I believe Maggie's devel- oping awareness of her true relations to her father and her husband constitutes the novel's dominant dramatic center. “2 This study draws specifically upon two of Maggie's medita- tions. First, of course, is the sporadic meditation with which Maggie's book begins. Chapter 25, opening with the image of her life as a garden dominated by a figured porcelain pagoda that she seeks to enter, ends with Amerigo's entrance. Even the report of their conversation continues the interior viewpoint: "Some such words as those were what didn't ring out" (EB, II, 19). From this chapter I selected Maggie's self-perusal immediately following her consciously becoming aware of the form her thoughts were taking: "It fell, fOr retrospect, into a succession of moments that were watchable still; almost in the manner of the different things done 31 during a scene on the stage" (GB, II, 11). Merton Densher as mono- logist leaped to the same metaphor in the first meditation we consi- dered from his consciousness. Then in Chapter 26, left alone again, Maggie finally senses how she is being managed by the others; and "she knew herself again in presence of a problem, in need of a solution for which she must intensely work" (GB, II, 32). Here I examined ten sentences from her metaphor for the family as a "coach . . . lacking its complement of wheels," for which Charlotte was only acting "ever so smoothly and beautifully, as a fourth" (GB, II, 2h). The remaining three samples come from Maggie's Chapter 36 meditation in the smoking room at Fawns. At the end of the preceding chapter, James had alluded to one of Maggie's "vigils" in which she realizes that she "understood the nature of cages" (9;, II, 236). Adam, Mrs. Assingham, the Prince, and Charlotte sat down that even- ing to bridge while Maggie stretched out on the sofa to read. As she lay there half asleep, watching her companions play, "the facts of the situation were upright for her round the green cloth and the silver flambeaux" (QB, II, 238). The intense drama of this setting generates a prolonged meditation concerning what her course of action should be. This sequence later ends in her confronting Charlotte on the terrace, a scene which climaxes Maggie's development and marks the emotional watershed of the novel. From the meditation immediate- ly preceding that confrontation, then, I selected thirty sentences for analysis. Two of the control passages came from Chapter # in James's 32 prefatory matter to Colonel and Mrs. Assingham's first dialogue in the novel. For the rest, I chose the first ten sentences each from Chapters 6, 7, and 11. Test and control passages in hand, we can now begin to ex- amine James's language to consider whether any features of his style lending themselves to interior monologues do indeed tend to aggregate in James's meditation scenes. 55 Notes 1:2 Chapter I; 1 These six novels will henceforth be designated by the following abbreviations respectively: .R_H, fl, Pi" £1113 , _W_]_D_, and _G_B_. Dates in parentheses here refer to the first date of book publication. On my placing fl before W_D_ throughout this study, note that A‘Lb. was actually written first, as described in F. O. Matthiessen, Henri James: ‘Thg Major Phase (New York: Oxford University Press, 19 4), p. 18, fn. 2 Barry Harold Menikoff, Style and Point 2_f_ View in the Tales of Henr James (microfilmed Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1966), p. 103. 3 The Letters 2; He James, ed. Percy Lubbock (2 vols.; New York: Scribner's, 1920), I, 13 ; II, 360. h "The Art of Fiction," reprinted in The Future 2£_the Novel: Essays.gg.the Art 2£_Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage Books, 1956): p. 12. 5 C. B. Cox, The Free Spirit: A Study _o_f_‘_ Liberal Humanism 3.2 the Novels 2: Geor e Eliot, Henry James, E. M. Forster, Vir inia Woolf, Anggs Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 5 . 6 The Art'gf'the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962), p. 256. (Hereafter this volume will be cited simply as Prefaces.) 7 Prefaces, p. 16. 8 Prefaces, p. 57. 9 The Ordeal _o_f_‘_ Consciousness _i_z_1_ Henry James (New York: Cambridge University Press, 19 2 , p. 7. 10 Note Northrop Frye's belief that in pastoral or peaceful set- tings, closely linked with the archetypic forms of all romance poetry, we witness "the dawn, spring and birth phase" of all the great cycli- cal myths of human and cosmic existence--which is just what we would expect the probings of a fictional character toward the pre-verbal layers of his consciousness to include. See Frye's essay "The Arche- ed. James E. Miller, Jr. Lifizoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), pp. 155-156. For a similar approach to the meditation scene from a James scholar, see J. A. Ward, The Search for Form: Studies 31+ in the Structure of James' 3 Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North.Carolina Press, 1967), pp. 42,186. 11 91mg Meditation: A S__tugy in English Religious____ Litera- ture of the Seventeenth Centggy (New Haven and London: Yale Univer- sity'PTess, 1962), p. 330. 12 "ad, P. 7. 13 Prefaces, p. 296. James also believed, and we should not for- get, that "A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts"; "The Art of Fiction," p. 15. 1“ Miles,S tyl e and Proportion: The'nggEggg'of Prose and Poetgy (Boston: Little, Brown and.Co., 1967): p. 1 Milic, A Quantitative A roach 33 the St 1e 21; Jonathan Swift (The Hague: Mouton 8: Co., 1387), bp. 28522 1. 15 Struck, personal letter. 16 M m: The Lte and Early Styles (5 Stylistics Stu ) (microfilmed Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1953 , pp. 6-7. 17 See Appendix A for page numbers and first lines of each pas- sage selected. 18 Prefaces, p. 16. 19 The Comic Sense of Hgg£y_James: A Stu of thg Early Novels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960, p.'42. For a discussion of how’James' s revisions ofyR§_seek to shift the reader's attention away from Roderick's death to Rowland's guilt and loss, see Sacvan Bercovitch, "The Revision of Rowland Mallet," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XXIV (September 1969), 210-221. Chapters in RH are cited from the first edition; in his revi- sion for a later printing, James split the original thirteen chap- ters to make twenty-six. 21 Quotations from the six novels studied will be identified in the text by abbreviated title, and volume and page numbers. All such citations are from the first editions as listed in the biblio- graphy. 22 Prefaces, pp. 37, 34. 23 "The Point of View in Henry James: The American," Edda, LXI, ii (1961), p. 173. 35 2“ Poirier, The Comic Sense, p. 47. 25 In this regard, note Arthur J. A. Waldock's discovery that in revising Am James sought primarily to rectify just this short- coming; and that in the New York Edition, "by countless minute changes of phrasing, the whole story is pressed back more fully into the mind of the hero Newman." James, Jo ce, and Others (London: Williams and Norgate, 1937), p. 26 Prefaces, p. 57. Nearly every student of James's representa- tion of inner states discusses Chapter 42 of PL; among the more in- teresting ones are the following: M. E. Grenander, Beverly J. Rahn, and Francine Valvo, "The Time-Scheme in The Portrait of a Lady," American Literature, XXXII (May 1960),127-135; Marion —Montgomery, "The Flaw in the Portrait: Henry James vs. Isabel Archer," Univer- sity_ of Kansas City Review, XXVI (March 1960), 215-220; and Tony Tanner, "The Fearful Self: Henry James' s The Portrait of a Lady," Critical.§Eg£terly, VII (Autumn 1965), 205— 219. 27 E. g., Elizabeth Drew, The N__o___vel: _A Modern Guide _tg Fifteen English Masterpieces (New York: Dell, 1963), p. 229. 28 James had certainly anticipated this "great scene," as he called it, which he took care to preserve in his final text. See T_h£ Notebooks 21; _H£n_ry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 17. (Here- after this volume will be cited simply as Notebooks.) 29 Prefaces, p. 310. 30 Of course the novel's point of view is not exclusively so lim- ited, as many critics are careful to note: see J. Davis, "Intention and Achievement in Narrative Technique: Henry James' 5 Lhe Ambassa- dors, " Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny, XII (1965), 247; D. W. Jefferson, Henry_ James (Edinburgh & London: Oliver and Boyd, 1960), pp. 94-95; Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York: Charles Scribner' 3 Sons, 1921), pp. 161-16 ; and John E. Tilford, Jr., "James the Old Intruder," Modern Fiction Studies, IV (Summer 1958), 158. 31 "'The Ambassadors': A New View," PMLA, LXXV (September 1960), 448. 32 Lhe Eternal Adam and the New World Garden: The Central M th in the American Nov____e_l _S___inoe 18 2 (New York: George Braziller, 19 , ‘13-.- 89. 33 Prefaces, p. 288. 3“ See Notebooks, pp. 61 and 81, for explicit references dating eighteen and fifteen years prior to the eventual publication of W2. 36 35 See Notebooks, pp. 169-171. 36 Prefaces, pp. 296, 301. 37 By the end of the novel, in fact, as Leo Bersani argues, "the boundaries between Densher's consciousness and James's have in many areas been obliterated; the two are fused into a single awareness"; "The Narrator as Center in Th__e_ Wiggs of Q Dove," Modern Fiction Studies, VI (Summer 1960), 132. And Ward cites this fact as one crucial weakness of the novel; The Search for Form, p. 173. For other possible centers, see Leon Edel, The Prefaces of Henr James (Paris: Jouve et Cie., 1931), pp. 78-79; Ernest Sandeen, The Wings of the Dove and The Portrait of a Lady: A Study of Henry James' 8 'Ster Pha—-s—e, " MT, LXIX (Decemb-e-r 1951+), 1061; and R. w. Short, 280mg Critical— Terms of Henry James," PMLA, va (September 1950), 71- 72. 38 See Notebooks, pp. 171-174. 39 The Twentieth Cent Novel: Studies in Tecm Migue (New York: Appleton-Century, 1932), pp. 193-199. #0 #1 Prefaces, p. 329. “2 This general belief is shared by a number of writers, e.g., Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element: A Study_ of Modern Writers and Beliefs (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1935); Hard, The Search for Form; and Hisayoshi Hatanabe, "Past Perfect Retrospec- tion in the Style of Henry James, " American Literature, XXXIV (May .1962),165-181. For expositions of other possible centers of con- sciousness, see the following. On Adam Verver: Jefferson, Hgggz James, and Stephen L. Mooney, "James, Keats, and the Religion of Con- sciousness," Modern Language Quarterly, XXII (December 1961) 399- 901. On Prince Amerigo: John A. Clair, The Ironic Dimension in the Fiction of He James (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne Univer- sity Press, 1955), and Krook, Ordeal'g£_Consciousness. Krook, Ordeal of. Consciousness, p. 236. CHAPTER III THE MEDITATION SCENE AND JAMES'S GRAMMAR The most obvious measures, of average sentence length (in words and in clauses) and average clause length, 1 revealed little save that James steadily increased all of them. For example, the average sentence jumped from 28.1 words in length in passages from the early novels to #1.1 words in the late novels, and from 5.0 to 3.6 clauses in length. And clauses themselves jumped from an av- erage 9.5 words to 11.5. 2 While measures of length generally revealed little about meditation, a curious pattern emerged in two of the novels: as Table 1 portrays, sentences and clauses in_§§ were significantly shorter in meditation scenes, while in GB the sentences and clauses TABLE 1 AVERAGE SENTENCE AND CLAUSE LENGTHS IN WORDS U . Descriptive Meditative nit Passages Passages £1; sentences 37.2 122.7 _Ifl clauses 11.1 7.5 §§_sentences 41.8 51.5 §§_clauses 10.9 15.1 in meditative passages were significantly longer. For the other 37 38 novels studied, these measures failed to discriminate significantly between meditation and description. The structure of James's sentences and clauses became my central concern because, as Louis Milic points out, "it's not in the words but in the structure that the stability of an author's style resides." 3 To investigate this structure, I first identified James's clauses, one per main verb (even if its subject is understood to be repeated from an earlier clause), not counting parallel verb forms as separate clauses. h Then I classified these as dependent or indepen- dent, and further classified according to the system of clause types devised by Herman Struck: 5 Type 1. Subject-verb Type 2. Subject-verb-complement Type 3. Subject-verb-predicate nominative Type #. Subject-verb-direct object Type 5. Subject-passive voice verb Thus we have relative proportions of independent and dependent clauses for each sample, and of each of the clause types; we have measures as well of the relative frequencies of all sentence patterns used. 0n the broadest level, James clearly preferred independent to dependent clauses in the earlier novels, dropping in the later novels from 58.3% independent clauses to 47.2%. 6 Other than that, no significant patterns emerged in which either type clause clearly dominated meditation or description in any novel. James's habits of combining dependent and independent clauses generally tended to favor Simple and Compound sentences in the earlier novels, and Complex and Compound-complex sentences in the later: sentences consisting only of independent clauses (i.e., Sim- 39 ple and Compound sentences) decreased from 34.3% to 16.8%, while sentences containing one or more dependent clauses increased, natu- rally, from 65.7% to 83.2%. 7 The percentage of Compound-complex sentences--always James's most frequent construction--showed the smallest change through time, increasing only from 38.9% to 42.1%. Interestingly enough, more of the losses in Simple and Compound sen- tences are made up in Complex sentence constructions containing only one independent clause, which increase from 26.8% in the early novels to 41.8% in the late, than are made up in.Compound—complex sentences. No comparable broad patterns emerged when I examined which sentence types predominate in meditation or in descriptive passages. The closest thing to a general trend involves the percentages of Complex and Compound-complex sentences in the late novels: here 35.7% of descriptive sentences are Complex, against 47.8% of the meditative sentences; and 45.7% of descriptive sentences are Com- pound-complex, against 38.6% of the sentences from meditation scenes. scenes. But on closer examination, as Table 2 shows, the bulk of TABLE 2 COMPLEX AND COMPOUND-COMPIEX SENTENCES AS PERCENTAGES 0F DESCRIPTIVE OR MEDITATIVE SENTENCE TOTALS Complex CompoundrComplex Sentences Sentences Novel Descriptive Meditative Descriptive Meditative Passages Passages Passages Passages Amb 48% 48% 34% 34% E" 32% 15% 40% 43% £52 26% 50% 58% 35% All late novels 35.7% 47.8% 45.7% 38.6% 40 this shift must be attributed to fig. Individual tabulations on passages from the other novels either showed no significant shifts or involved so few actual instances as to preclude reliability. ' An exhaustive listing of the number of independent and dependent clauses in individual sentences suggested, first of all, James's great variety. Chronologically, James continuously broaden- ed his stylistic range, using an average of 13.0 different sentence patterns in early novels against 15.? in the later. The meditation scenes, furthermore, revealed the same general increase in complex- ity: 14.5 patterns in the average novel, against 13.6 in the de- scriptive passages (13.7 against 12.3 in the early novels, and 16.3 against 15.0 in the late). These tabulations also revealed James's preferences. Here are his ten most favored combinations, ranked in order of the frequency of the appearance in all passages examined (the percentage of appearances given in parentheses): IID (15.4%) ID (13.5%) I (11.9%) II (11.3%) IDD (10.0%) IIDD (9.2%) IDDD (7.3%) IDDDD (4.4%) IIDDD (4.0%) IIID (4.0%) The other fourteen combinations which James uses at some time or another account for the remaining 8.8% of his sentences. This list of preferred sentence patterns includes several which suggest possible discriminators of meditation scenes. For ex- tn ample, James's most frequent pattern (IID) appears far less often in meditation, there being only 12 of these sentences in all the meditative passages from the late novels, against 18 in the descrip- tive passages; and 22 meditative, against 28 descriptive in the early novels. And the Simple sentence (I), James's third most com- mon construction, similarly tends to characterize descriptive rather than meditative passages, 24 to 18 in the early novels, though only 11 to 9 in the late. 0n the other hand, the pattern ranking eleventh in James's usage, IIIDD (2.9%), predominates in meditative scenes over descrip- tive, 6 to 2 in the late novels (4 to 3 in the early). Similarly, all the most extensive sentence types having four or more indepen- dent clauses occur far more often in meditation than in description, 7 to 2 in the late novels (though 3 and 3 in the early). Finally, unabashed sentence fragments, three in all, are the exclusive pro— vince of meditation scenes--two in Am and one in Amb. The further classification of clauses, according to Struck's five-fold scheme, revealed several interesting trends in James's chronological development. 9 For instance, clauses using intransitive verbs, or Type 1--such as "the light came out in vague shafts" (ED, II, 241)--increased from 24.2% in the early novels to 35.1% in the later. But clauses built around copulatives, or Type 2 --such as "the hour was moonless and starless" (g2, II, 241) or "the poor lady was very incomplete" (Am, 37)--decreased from the early novels to the later, from 23.0% to 18.9%, the most dramatic drop 42 appearing in the independent clause tabulations, from 26.2% to 20.4%. 10 And in the same way, passive voice clauses, or Type 5 --such as "he ES. kept. in the country for months together" (.1111, 12) --decreased: James's use of passives dropped from 6.4% to 4.6% overall, with the most striking decrease occurring among dependent Type 5 clauses, from 8.6% to 5.5%. 11 Predicate nominative clauses, or Type 3--such as "this _wgg but an episode in his growth" (all, 12) or "her own excuse was the want of encouragement in her immediate circle" (52, 36)--re- vealed no consistent pattern of chronological development, increas- ing among independent clauses from 10.1% to 14.8%, but decreasing from 8.4% to 5.3% of the dependent clauses. And clauses using transitive verbs, or Type 4--straightforward subject-verb-direct object constructions such as "She cultivated from this time forward a little private plot of sentiment" (fig, 13)--showed no significant chronological shifts, averaging roughly a third of all clauses, wherever tabulated. If we seek to discriminate between James's meditative and descriptive styles on the basis of the five clause types, clear differences emerge in the same three clause designs which varied through time: Types 1, 2, and 5. And in each case, the usage pre- dominating in meditation scenes corresponds to what I have just identified with James's late style. 80, for example, clause Type 1 is more likely to appear in meditation (33.2% against 27.0% in de- scriptive passages); and clause Types 2 and 5 are less likely to appear in meditative passages (respectively, 18.4% against 23.2%, 43 and 2.7% against 8.1%). When we examine independent and dependent clause averages separately for early and late samples, however, minor discrepancies But the broad do appear. Table 3 identifies these with an asterisk. tendencies are still unmistakable in the late style. TABLE 3 CLAUSE TYPES 1, 2, AND 5 AS PERCENTAGES OF INDEPENDENT 0R DEPENDENT CLAUSE TOTALS Independent Dependent Clause Clauses Clauses Type Descriptive Meditative Descriptive Meditative Passages Passages Passages Passages 1 early 19.6% 18.5% ' 25.1% 38.1% 1 late 23.3% 28.1% 39.1% 47.7% 2 early 27.2% 23.3% 18.4% 21.4% * 2 late 22.5% 18.4% 23.4% 12.4% 5 early 6.8% 2.8% 14.5% 2.4% 5 late 5.8% 1.3% 7.0% 4.2% As for the other two, Clause Type 3 does seem to character- ize the meditation scene in the late novels, predominating by an av- erage of 13.2% over 8.5% in descriptive passages. But no such clear trend marks Type 3 clauses in the earlier novels, nor any of the Type 4 totals either, with the exception of a surprising preponder- ance of independent Type 4 clauses in meditation scenes from the early novels, 44.2% over 28.5% in description, a statistic owing largely to the figures from EL. Three other purely grammatical measures were applied: the Lu, percentages of adjectives and adverbs; the number of first and third-person personal pronouns (and of substitutes for these pro- nouns); and the percentage of past, present, past-perfect, and present-perfect verb tenses, as well as of forms of the verb _t:_o_ :93. To a reader's criticisn of his "increasing passion for adverbial interpositiens" Henry James had replied, according to Theodora Bosanquet, "adjectives are the sugar of literature and ad- verbs the salt." 12 In keeping with James's announced belief in the utter necessity of adverbs, therefore, Hendrick's interest in how James increases his use of them in the late style more than he in- creases his use of adjectives suggested a possible discriminator for meditation scenes. 13 It was but a moment's work to count one-word adverbs and adjectives in each passage, excluding possessives. Then the difference between the number of adjectives and adverbs was ex- pressed as a percentage of all the words in the passage (in effect, the percentage of adjectives minus the percentage of adverbs). The smaller the percentage thus derived, therefore, the greater the num- ber of adverbs relative to adjectives in the passage. In seven of the fifty-six passages measured, a negative figure was derived, i.e., the number of adverbs exceeded the number of adjectives. These were all in meditation scenes, three in'flg, two in _GE, and one each in BE and 5gb. Such negative figures were sub- tracted from the others in computing average percentages for each novel. James steadily increased his use of adverbs relative to adjectives, the difference between their percentages decreasing from 45 15 4.8 in the early novels to 2.3 in the late. Even more striking, however, is the way in which meditation scenes favor adverbial modi- fication significantly more than descriptive scenes do. For the difference between the percentage of adjectives and that of adverbs narrowed from an average 5.8 in all descriptive scenes to an average 1.8 in the meditations, a tendency uniform among all the novels Studied. As with adverbs and adjectives, personal pronouns were counted because of Hendrick's interest in James's usage. The late style, he found, tended to use personal pronouns instead of proper names or other substitutes. 16 So I recorded all first and third- person personal pronouns referring either to the subject of the passage or to the author, excluding possessive forms--for example, "it was thanks to her direct talent for life, verily, that h£_was just where h_e_ was, and that he was above all just how h_e_ was" (112, II, 193). And every direct reference to the subject of a passage, referred to elsewhere by a personal pronoun (generally such references were proper names), was also recorded. 17 With virtually no citings of "the author" emerging, and only twenty-six first-person pronouns of any sort (generally an.I or we, referring to James alone or to author and reader), this first test yielded no reliable findings. Both third-person pronouns and substitutes for them, however, increased respectively from an average of 1.43 per sentence in the early novels to 1.73 in the late, and from 0.19 to 0.23. But what is even more significant, meditation 1,5 scenes were far more likely than descriptive passages to contain third-person pronouns (an average 1.89 per sentence, against 1.28) and far less likely to contain substitutes for such pronouns (0.13, against 0.20). These findings were relatively uniform for both late and early novels, the most extreme instances of both trends occurring, however, in the data from _P}: and 92. Finally, the classification of main verb tenses was inspired partly by Hendrick's passing mention but more by Hisayoshi watanabe's hypothesis that In his late works, James tends to enlarge the sphere of the past perfect tense and in complementary fashion to reduce that of the normal narrative tense, the past. . . . The inaction of past perfect is the corollary of a greater subjectivity in a world of remembgance, re- flection, impression, and interpretation. 1 So ignoring modal auxiliaries, the tense of each verb associated with one of the clauses already identified was recorded as past, present, past-perfect, or present-perfect. 19 And the totals for each tense were expressed, passage by passage, as a percentage of the total number of main verbs (equal to the total number of clauses, of course). James used very few present tense forms in the passages studied; and those recorded revealed no consistent patterns. Rough- ly two-thirds of his verbs were simple past tense, and just under one-fifth were past-perfect. The findings were not entirely conclu- sive, though, as Table 4 shows. Certainly James tended to use slightly fewer past tense forms and slightly more past-perfect forms 47 TABLE 4 PAST AND PAST-PERFECT VERB TENSE FORMS AS PERCENTAGES OF DESCRIPTIVE OR MEDITATIVE VERB TOTALS Verb Descriptive Meditative Tense Passages Passages Past - early 72.4% 63.1% Past - late 66.4% 61.7% Past-perfect - early 12.1% 19.9% Past—perfect - late 20.1% 20.3% in the late style. And he did occasionally favor the past-perfect tense in meditation scenes, especially inWEL.by 24.8% over 13.1% in description, and in _W_1_)_ by 19.5% over 5.6%. In fig, however, the novel of which Watanabe had said, "at once upon opening the book the reader finds himself in the world of the past perfect tense and retrospection," 20 my data show past- perfect tense forms actually declining in the meditation scenes, where they constitute only 20.9% of the main verbs, against 27.1% in the descriptive passages. Of course, in nearly any of James's other novels the 20.9% in meditation would have constituted an in— crease; so it may be that watanabe is literally correct, and that only the overall preponderance of past-perfect in §§_appears to vio- late the trend. James uses forms of the verb 22 be (and become) with equal frequency in both the early and the late novels: roughly 29% of all verbs. But in every novel examined, there are slightly more 23: forms in the meditation scenes, averaging 30.8% against 27.3% in 48 description in the early novels, and 31.4% against 25.9% in the late. To summarize, the following grammatical features generally may be said to characterize the meditation scenes in James's late novels: (a) longer sentences and clauses; (b) more Complex and fewer Compound-complex sentences; (0) fewer IID and more very long sentences having four or more independent clauses, and more sen- tence fragments; (d) more Type 1 and Type 3, and fewer Type 2 and Type 5 clauses; more adverbs in proportion to adjectives; (f) more third-person personal pronouns and fewer pronoun substitutes; and (g) more past-perfect verb tense forms (in some novels), and slightly more uses of the verb _tg .133. 49 Notes _tg Chapter III For my complete statistics on these measures, novel-by-novel, see Appendices B and C. 2 These figures are well in keeping with Lee T. Hendrick's find- ings, that sentences in James' 5 late style are about 50% longer and contain about 25% more clauses; Hem my_ James: The Late and Early Styles (A Stylistics Stud ) (microfilmed Ph. D. dissertation, Uni- versity of Michigan, 1953 , pp. 8,12. 3 A Quantitative A reach to the Style gf Jonathan Swift (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1967), p. 140. h The following was thus considered to contain two clauses: "Rowland passed for a child of ordinary parts, and certainly, during his younger years, was an excellent imitation of a boy who . . . " (BE, 12). On the other hand, this was considered to com- prise but one clause: "He had laughed and talked and braved it out in self-defence" (RH, 62). In all citations of examples for the phenomena being investigated, incidentally, I shall italicize the pertinent word or words which constitute the basis of my distinction; -at the same time, I have omitted James's own italics in the one or two places they occurred in my examples, simply to avoid confusion. 5 Better Prose: 'A_Method (Boston: Boughton Mifflin.Co., 1965), pp- 43-44 Hendrick too saw independent clauses declining roughly from 60% to 50% of the total in James's late style; pp. 14-15. 7 For my findings on specific clause combinations by novel, see Appendix D. Hendrick ranked James's favored constructions (considering the late style only) in a similar order: ID, IDD, IID, IIDD, II, IDDD, IIDDD, and IIID; pp. 129-130. 9 A complete listing of these data appears in Appendix E. 10 Type 2 clauses do not include be-forms used with a "dummy" subject which can easily be dropped from the sentence: e.g., "it was only then that he understood" (RH, 13), "it was in the light of his injury that the weight of Newman's past endurance seemed so heavy" (Am, 369), or "there were marks they made on things to talk about" (_fib, 20). These single clauses would be recorded as Types 1, 2, and—4 respectively. 50 11 Supplying an occasional relative pronoun not specified in the text often uncovered a passive voice construction, which was then so recorded: e.g., "no school could be found [that EEEJ conducted on principles sufficiently rigorous" (RH, 12), or "Mrs. Hudson's rooms opened into a small garden [which was] suppgrted on immense substructions" (RH, 1403). 12 Quoted in HggEyDJames‘ 3 Work (London: Hogarth Press, 192k), Pp. 16'170 13 Hendrick found 20% more adjectives in the late style than in the early, but 100% more adverbs; pp. 10-11. 1“ My data for the average differences for each novel between adjectives and adverbs are listed in Appendix F. 15 This parallels Hendrick's generalization that a 2%:1 ratio of adjectives to adverbs in the early style leveled to 1%:1 in the late; p. 16. 16 Hendrick, pp. 31-32. Barry Menikoff too had examined various pronoun forms as contributing to James's representation of conscious- ness, including reflexive pronouns, italicized pronouns, and "subjective" pronouns; Style a_ng_ Point 23 View i_n_ _tllg Tales _oi He James (microfilmed Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 196%), pp. 3#, 136, and 199A2OO respectively. 17 The novel-by-novel averages from these counts appear in Appen- dix G. 18 Hendrick, pp. #2—H3; Watanabe, "Past Perfect Retrospection in the Style of Henry James," American Literature, XXXIV (May 1962), p. 165. 19 The totals of.each tense form and of'ggyforms are listed by novel in Appendix H. 20 watanabe, p. 171. CHAPTER IV THE MEDITATION SCENE AND JAMES'S RHETORIC Turning from grammatical to rhetorical measures, we could probably consider nearly any device ever implicated in "poetic" prose as potentially suited to the representation of inner con- sciousness; and certainly, frequent comparisons of James's style with poetry have their point. 1 I shall only be looking specifi- cally, however, into how James uses repetition, parallelism, appo- sitional expansion, and parenthesis. "The abundance of energy and fertility that may be ex— pressed in seriation," Louis Milic says, "is too organic to be easily disposed into classes" for it flows into all categories of grammatical and rhetorical form. 3 In the broadest sense this cluster of devices includes several sorts of verbal corresponden- ces: of words (repetition), of form (parallelism), and of meaning (apposition). Repeated sounds definitely play their part in James's prosodic line, a function Sister Mary Carolyn McGinty's disserta- tion alludes to as follows: "Sounds, repeated and balanced, emphasize meaning, i.e., they pile up intensity by impressing the meaning upon the senses as well as the mind." A To be sure, his 51 52 characters frequently evolve a verbally linked, sticomythic dialogue scarcely distinguishable in its essential form from the familiar near-quatrains into which Hemingway's dialogue falls. 5 Though others have traced how these repetitions thread James's dialogues together, however, 6 no one has yet looked for similar effects in the inner meditations of his characters when alone. So I will identify exact verbal repetitions in these passages, within the following broad limits: repetitions shall have no more than two sentences intervening; they shall not in— clude repeated pronouns (except reflexive), articles, or the like, 7 nor simple cases of parallelism; but identical forms varying only in inflection will be considered repetitions. For example, the repetitions in the following sentence are underlined: Meanwhile the facts of the situation were upright for her round the green cloth and the silver flambeaux; the fact of her father's wife's lover facing his mistress; the fact of her father sitting, all unsounded and unblinking, between them; the fact of Charlotte keeping it‘up,,keeping‘gp.every- thing, across the table, with her husband beside her; the fact of Fanny Assingham, wonderful creature, placed opposite to the three and knowing more about each, probably, when one came to think, than either of them knew of either. ""'— "792, _‘II,"'238) These repetitions were tabulated according to part of speech (of the first use, if later inflected). One further classi- fication was made, of function, according to the following system based on Hendrick's work. 8 Repetitions were divided into: those which apparently reduplicate for sound value alone (including paro- nomasia); those which act to restate, refine or qualify in some way the original meaning (ploce and antistasis); those in which verbal 53 repetition is augmented by structural (conduplicatio); and finally repetitions of all these sorts which inflect or otherwise alter the unit being repeated (polyptoton). This set of distinctions yielded no benchmark for our investigation of James‘s meditation scenes, however, and will not be discussed further. There is no question, first of all, but that James used repetition far more often in the late style, with an average of 0.78 repetitions per sentence, than in the early with 0.37. More impor- tantly, repetition seems to be one unmistakable characteristic of James's meditation scenes, with the widest gap in passages from the late novels, where he used an average of 0.95 repetitions per sen- tence in meditation against 0.61; in the early novels, the figures were 0.## and 0.30 respectively. Of all the repetitions (I counted 325 in the fifty-six samples studied), h9.5% were of nouns, 28.5% of verbs, 15.2% of adjectives, and 6.8% of adverbs and other speech parts. In the late style James tended to repeat nouns less (h6.6% late, against 55.8% early) and verbs more (31.2%, against 23.1%). Considering only passages from the late novels, where over two-thirds of the repetitions were found, we may further gen- eralize with some safety to James's meditation scenes. There he tended to repeat nouns and verbs more often (#8.8% nouns in medita— tions, against 43.0% in description; and 3#.6% verbs, against 25.6% in description), all at the expense of repetition of adjectives (which declined to 9.0% in meditation scenes, against 23.3% in de- scription). Adverb repetition predominates slightly in meditation, but the figures are too small to be considered significant. 5# We may define parallelism as the linking of similar classes of meaning by syntax, by repetition, or by conjunctive or disjunctive particles. 9 The two sentences following contain a parallel cluster apiece: The place . . . contained a variety of those faded hangings of damask and tapestry, those chests and cabinets of carved and time-polished oak, those primitive specimens of pictor- ial art in frames pedantically rusty, those pev erse-looking relics 2f medieval brass and pottery, of which Italy has long been the not quite exhausted storehouse. . . . There were books in profusion, and maggz mes and newspapers, and a few— small modern ictm mes, chiefly in water~colour. (29. 198) Such parallel clusters were classified according to the number of units (four each in each example abOve), and the complexity of the units paralleled--words, phrases, or clauses. Simple doublets were omitted for they are difficult to segregate as clear parallelism. 10 While the overall distribution of the 114 parallel clusters thus identified was relatively even between the early and the late novels, the distribution in descriptive and meditative passages shifts curiously. James always tends to use parallelism less in me- ditation scenes (where an average of 0.17 clusters per sentence con- trasts with 0.2# in description). But chronologically his use per sentence in descriptive scenes declines from an average of 0.27 in the earlier novels to 0.21 in the later, while parallelism in medi- tation scenes simultaneously increased from an average 0.1# to 0.19 per sentence. In other words, the distinction is blurred progres— sively through time. Attempts to classify parallel clusters by their length un- 55 covered little of any significance. It is true that in the later style James avoids simple triplets (which decline from 74.2% of all parallel clusters in the early work to 57.9% in the late), and uses longer clusters more often. But no consistent trends marked these distinctions--or the other division of parallel clusters into word, phrase, and clause parallels. Table 5 lists the percentages of word and clause parallel- ism, revealing a shift in James's practice through time. The trends TABLE 5 WORD AND CLAUSE PARALLELISMS AS PERCENTAGES OF ALL EARLY OR LATE DESCRIPTIVE OR MEDITATIVE PARALLEL TOTALS Parallel Descriptive Meditative Length Passages Passages Words - early 57.8% h5.0% Words - late 50.0% 62.9% Clauses - early 26.3% “0.0% Clauses - late 30.0% 1h.8% seem to have been reversed, the early James favoring clause parallel- ism in meditative passages, and the later James favoring word paral- lelism there. This may correspond in some way to Hendrick's sugges- tion that, in the parallelism of James's later style, there is a "tendency away from regularity and evenness": 11 word parallelism (e.g., of adjectives) continues, while the more rigorous clause structuring, heavy with formal expectation, declines. What Hendrick called "the Jamesian device of restating an 56 idea in close context," McGinty termed "appositional expansion": 12 not really parenthesis, but an inbalanced (not parallel) re-phrasing, not linked by conjunctive or disjunctive elements, occasionally re- peating a word from what precedes it, and often introduced by a semi- colon, a colon, or a dash. For example: "Hadn't Charlotte . . . given her up as hopeless--hopeless by _a_ serious standard" (532, II, 14); or "with Merton Densher relegated to mere spectatorship, a paying place in front, BEER—1.116. as; expensive" (_W_I_)_, II, 38). These appositional eXpansions were tabulated according to whether the explanatory matter consisted of a word, a phrase, or a clause. The overall pattern here follows James's distribution of repetitions: both characterize the later style (appositions, by an average 0.32 per sentence, against 0.16 in the earlier style), 13 and both clearly predominate in meditation scenes (an average 0.28 per sentence, against 0.20 in descriptive passages). Every novel studied, in fact, shows more appositional expansions in its medita- tive than in its descriptive samples. Nearly all the 134 appositives recorded were phrases or clauses; and the early style favored clauses (77.2% of all apposi- tives, against 48.9% in the later works), the late style favoring phrases (by 46.6%, over 11.4% in the early style). As Table 6 de- tails, furthermore, the meditation scenes follow the early style in these trends. This constitutes a curious reversal of how meditations are associated overall with numerous features of James's late style. One final rhetorical feature which virtually every critic 57 of James's style describes is his use of the parenthesis 14 which, since it "achieves the rhetorical effect . . . of a restless mind, TABLE 6 PHRASES AND CLAUSES IN APPOSITION AS PERCENTAGES OF ALL EARLY OR LATE DESCRIPTIVE OR MEDITATIVE APPOSITIONAL EXPANSION TOTALS Length Descriptive Meditative Passages Passages Phrases - early 12.5% 1.1% Phrases - late 50.0% 44.0% Clauses - early 68.8% 82.1% Clauses - late 42.5% 54.0% perceptive but reluctant to pursue meanings to their ultimate subor- 15 dination," contributes so tellingly to James's representation of inner consciousness. I will limit parentheses here to syntactically discontinuous (or removable) elements preceded and followed by punc- tuation. For example: "It was what women did like, at their gage, after all; there always being, wh_e_n WEE-Haggai, some man, fiMfliflmv to get them out" (§_B_, I, 67). Each parenthesis was first categorized as either resump- tive, where the same or a similar meaning appeared in the immediate context, or as progressive, where it introduced a new meaning not in the context. Each was further categorized, second, by size (word, phrase, reduced predication, or complete predication). And third, I distinguished each interrupter according to what elements in a sentence it separated: a prepositional phrase from the main clause, the subject from the predicate, the predicate from the complement, 58 subject elements, principal verb elements (including a main verb followed by an infinitive form), a discontinuous dependent clause from the rest, a discontinuous clause sequence, or elements in a parallel cluster. 16 The 513 parentheses identified came far more often from the late novels (418) than from the early (95). 17 While parenthe- ses appeared less than half as often in meditative samples than in descriptive passages from the early novels, however, they appeared slightly more often in meditative samples from the late novels. In the extreme instances of these trends, the average number of paren- theses per sentence decreased in PE from 0.76 in description to 0.32 in meditation, while in fig the average frequency increased slightly, from 1.70 per sentence in description to 2.00 in meditation. Since the numbers from the early novels are so relatively small, as it happens, I shall be focusing throughout the following discussion on the late novels. First, the distinction was made between resumptive paren- theses, in which the same meaning appeared in the immediate context (including brief one-word qualifiers and authorial interpolations such as "I hasten to add," as in 22, I, 137), and progressive pa- rentheses which introduce a new idea to the sentence. Here the primary shift was between early and late, the resumptive parentheses increasing from 27.4% in the early novels to 37.6% in the late. 18 A small difference of 10.3 between early novel percentages for de— scription and meditation declined to an insignificant 2.9 in the late novels, rendering this measure virtually useless as a discriminator 59 of meditation scenes, especially since figures for individual novels, furthermore, contradict each other. The second test recorded how many of these interrupters were words, phrases, reduced predications, or complete independent clauses. Phrases overall accounted for 55% of the parentheses, and the other three types for roughly 15% each. 19 So the figures which show a decline of interpolated phrases in the later novels from 61.4% in description to 54.5% in meditation may indeed be significant, even though the opposite tendency appears in the numerically less impor- tant early passages. This trend in the late novels is matched by an increase in interpolated words and complete predications, from de- scription to meditation, 12.4% to 15.1%, and 13.4% to 17.4%, respec- tively. The third set of findings concerns the position of the parentheses. Here are the commonest points at which I found paren- thetical expressions inserted in the late style (each followed by the percentage it constitutes of all parentheses in the twenty-eight passages from the late novels): between a phrase (usually initial) and a main clause--25.2%, between two clauses--24.5%, between a subject and its predicate--16.9%, between a predicate and its comple- ment--15.2%, and between verb elements (including a main verb fol- lowed by an infinitive modifier, e.g., "the great side of the moun- tain appeared, $2215 _v_t_11_e_r_e_ she pulled up, to fall away altogether," 22, I, 137)--11.4%. The remaining 6.8% of the late style parentheses intervened within a dependent clause or between parallel elements or subject parts. 60 Table 7 lists the average percentages from these prime variables for late descriptive and meditative passages. The middle TABLE 7 FIVE PARENTHESIS POSITIONINGS .AS PERCENTAGES OF ALL LATE DESCRIPTIVE OR MEDITATIVE PARENTHESIS TOTALS ' . . Descriptive Meditative Position Passages Passages Phrase / Main clause 25.8% 24.8% Clause sequence 21.3% 27.5% Subject / Predicate 21.3% 12.8% Predicate / Complement 12.8% 17.9% Verb elements 10.9% 11.5% three listed are probably significant discriminators of meditation, especially the pair that suggests how meditation scenes favor paren- theses immediately after a main verb (separating predicate from com- plement), while descriptive scenes favor them immediately before main verbs (separating subject from predicate). This trend toward preserving the subject-predicate linkage in meditation is reflected as well in the predominance of parentheses between complete clauses. One final rhetorical feature was tabulated, though it appeared only in meditation scenes, almost by definition. This was the occurrence of monologue "guides," of verbs (especially with re- flexive pronouns) which strongly suggest that a character is thinking now and that it is his thoughts which are being recorded. McGinty's mention of verbs of "mental activity" in James's 61 parentheses--verbs such as knew, imagined, philosophized, thought, remembered, divined, fancied, judged, essed, gathered, saw, asked, and so forth—-suggested an adaptation of Hendrick's tabulation of "dialogue guides," the hg said's of all conversation reporting, and of his manner of classifying them: according to where they occurred in a sentence, initially, medially, or finally. 20 Although they appeared only in meditation scenes, of course, I recorded all these mental monologue guides in order to investigate their range and fre- quency, and to examine how far James intended open acknowledgement of meditation to characterize his representations of inner conscious- ness. The sixty-four cases I found of such verbs are dramatically illustrated in the following two sentences: The sight, from the window, of the group so constituted, told her why, told her how, named to her, as with hard lips, named straight at her, so that She must take it full in the face, that other possible relation to the whole fact which alone would bear upon her irresistibly. It was extraordinary: they positively brought home to her that to feel about them in any of the immediate, in- evitable, assuaging ways . . . would have been to give them up, and that giving them up was, marvellously, not to be thought of. (Eh, II, 243-244) Most were in the late novels (47 of the 64), about evenly distribu- ted among the three. The most frequently used verbs included saw (7); came to him (6)--including came home, came up, came back, and brought home; asked himself (5); struck him (5); felt (4); knew (4); thought (4); seemed to him (3); had a fancy or vision (2); named to himself (2); reflected (2); remembered (2); and told himself (2). (Numbers in 62 parentheses are the times these verbs occurred as "guides" in the twenty-eight passages of meditation examined.) Other particularly interesting usages included appeared to him, believed, fighhed for him, glowed for him, 0 ed, phrased to himself, and E222 to himself. In terms of their position relative to the meditative sentence being described, furthermore, three-fourths of these monologue guides (46) were in the initial position, with 15 in the medial and 3 in the final. To summarize, the following rhetorical features generally may be said to characterize the meditation scenes in James's late novels: (a) more repetitions, particularly of nouns and verbs, and far fewer repetitions of adjectives; (b) slightly less parallelism overall, though more word and less clause parallelism; (c) more appositional expansions, with fewer phrases and more clauses in apposition; (d) slightly more parentheses, far fewer of them being simple phrases, and slightly more of them being words and complete predications; (e) more parentheses between clauses, more immediately after a main verb (i.e., between predicate and complement), and fewer before a main verb (i.e., between subject and predicate); and (f) occasional monologue guides, verbs of "mental activity" which suggest direct representation of inner consciousness. 63 Notes 2 Chapter _IX 1 Significant general discussions of poetic qualities in prose include Paull F. Baum, "Prose Rhythm, " Encyclopedia of Poetry_ and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, et al. (Princeton, New Jersey: Prince— ton University Press, 1965), pp:_666- 667; Robert Bridges, "A Paper on Free Verse," North American Review, CCXVI (November 1922), 647— 658; E. K. Brown, Rhythm_ in the Novel ([Toronto, Ontario]: Univer- sity of Toronto Press, 1950); T. S. Eliot, "Introduction," Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1957), pp. vii- xiv; Helen Griffith, "Time Patterns in Prose: A Study in Prose Rhythm Based upon Voice Records," Psychological Monoggaphs, XXXIX, iii (1929); and George Saintsbury, A History_ of English Prose 3217 thm (Bloomington & London: Indiana_ University Press, 1912). On poetic qualities in James, specifically, see also Paull Franklin Baum, . . . the other harmohy_ of rose . . . : .22 essay i2 English rose rhyphm§_(IDurham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1952; Sister Ancilla M. Flory, S. B. S., Rhyphmic Figuration in the Late Style'ggvflem James (microfilmed Ph. D. dissertation, Catholic University, 1 ;Georgio Melchiori, "Two Mannerists: James and Hopkins," The Tightrope Walkers: Studies 2; Mannerism in Modern English Literatw we London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), pp. 13- 33; Morris Roberts, "Henry James and the Art of Foreshortening, " Review of English Studies, XXII (July 1946), 207-214; and Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element: A Stugy_ of Modern writers and Beliefs CBEEton & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 19 2 The various data upon which the findings reported in this chapter rest are tabulated in Appendices I, J, K, and L. 3 A Quantitative A roach _t_g_ the Style pi Jonathan Swift (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1967), p. 91. The Jamesian Parenthesis: Elements of Suspension in the Narra- tive Sentences of Hem_ngames' 5 Late Style —(microfilmed_ Ph. D. dis- sertation, Catholic University, 1964), p. 103 5 See both Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial St le in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 22 and Carlos Baker, Heminghgy: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 196—), pp. 183-184. 6 See especially R. W. Short, "The Sentence Structure of Henry James, " American Literature, XVIII (May 1946) 71-88; and Leo T. Hendrick, Henry James: The Late and Early Styles (A Stylistics Stu) (microfilmed Ph. D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1953 ’ Pp. 61-67. 64 7 Hendrick stated this rationale best: "The sort of repetition I mean is obtrusive and emphatic"; p. 27. 8 Hendrick, pp. 27-30. 9 Adapted from Hendrick, p. 33. 10 Hendrick excludes them because "the use of doublets is not distinctively Jamesian"; p. 32. 1‘ Hendrick, p. 35. 12 Hendrick, p. 37; McGinty, The Jamesian Parenthesis, p. 8. 13 In contrast to this, note Hendrick's finding five times as many appositives in the late style as in the early; p. 38. 1h See especially Joseph warren Beach, Th2 Method 23 Henry James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), p. 77; Pelham Edgar, He James: Lag-5:51 Author (Boston: Houghton MifflinCo», 1927), p. 207; wright Morris, ghg_Territo§z Ahead (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), pp. 96-97; Frank Swinnerton, The Gear 'an Scene: A Literary Panorama (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934;, p. 26; and Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American 0 ivil war"—('N'e"w""!" ork'?" ' Oxf'ol-rfld' 'U' 'niv'é'Fsity P" 're' s"s',' ' '1' $237 p . 665 . 15 McGinty, p. 85. 16 The entire scheme proposed here has been adapted substantially from Sister McGinty's dissertation, The Jamesian Parenthesis, pp. 19-35. She in turn had borrowed all three distinctions with few modifications from Hendrick, pp. 21-26. 17 Hendrick found only that "the late style averages well over twice as many total interruptions as the early"; p. 24. 18 Compare this with McGinty's classifying only 24.6% of all James's parentheses as resumptive, a discrepancy owing largely to her including in her tabulations only those parentheses which were complete predications; p. 78. 19 By contrast, McGinty's findings indicated words and phrases together comprising only 57% of the whole, with reduced predications at 34% and full predications at 9%. Evidently she and I draw the line somewhat differently between phrases and "reduced predications," a discrepancy which need not mitigate in any way against my using these distinctions to discriminate between description and medita- tion in James. 20 McGinty, pp. 48-50; Hendrick, p. 49. This device also corres- ponds to what Barry Harold Menikoff calls the "interior insertion in 65 Stxle and Point 93 View _ig the Tales 3: Henri James (microfilmed Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1953;, pp. 93-95. CHAPTER V A CASE IN POINT Chapter II evolved probable dramatic markers for the medi- tation scene in James, and used them to select such scenes. The in- tervening two chapters have uncovered a number of stylistic discri- minators which distinguish these meditations from other non-dialogue matter. Now we may inquire into the connection between the two: that is, how do the grammatical and rhetorical features which emerged from our statistical investigation (summarized on pages #8 and 62) contribute to the illusion of inner consciousness in the Jamesian meditation scene, as it was originally conceived (summa- rized on pages 17-18)? To illustrate how his apparatus helps James communicate his fictional personalities, I wish to explicate several sentences from Maggie Verver's Chapter 36 meditation in‘ghg_Goldenl§g!l, pre- facing this, however, with a briefer exploration of an equal number of sentences from Chapter ’42 of _'I_‘h_e_ Portrait 2: _a_ £0111. This selec- tion from Isabel Archer's meditation is quite distinct stylistically from the later meditation; yet it remains characteristic of the ver- bal and syntactical patterns of meditation, and thus offers an un- usual but promising contrast to Maggie's reflections. 66 67 (1) She knew she had too many ideas; she had more even than he supposed, many more than she had expressed to him when he asked her to marry him. (2) Yes, she had been hypocritical; she liked him so much. (3) She had too many ideas for her- self; but that was just what one married for, to share them with some one else. (4) One couldn't pluck them up by the roots, though of course one might suppress them, be careful not to utter them. (5) It was not that, however, his objec- ting to her Opinions; that was nothing. (6) She had no opin- ions--none that she would not have been eager to sacrifice in the satisfaction of feeling herself loved for it. (7) What he meant was the whole thing--her character, the way she felt, the way she judged. (8) This was what she had kept in reserve; this was what he had not known until he found himself--with the door closed behind, as it were--set down face to face with it. (BE, 375) This selection approaches what we have come to call "inte- rior monologue" as literally as anything we might find in James. None of it is likely to have come verbatim from Isabel's inner mus- ings, it is true. But these sentences nevertheless present only such insights as we can readily ascribe to her, even if the third person report suggests some omniscient author. 1 For one thing, the give-and-take arrangement of the argu- ment helps James convincingly establish his interior illusion. The first and second sentences humbly accept blame for what has happened, it would appear. With the "but" half-way through the third sentence, though, Isabel shifts to the defensive, switching back again just once with a brief "of course" in sentence four. But the "however" of the fifth sentence determines her position from that point on. It requires only the simple experiment of replacing each "she" with an "I" to reveal Isabel's true pose: of an indignant woman, con— scious of having been wronged, who is hopeful of maintaining credi- 68 bility with her adversary, yet compelled to plead her own case, if only at the bar of her mind. The tone is uniform throughout, of a lucid intelligence, distraught but fiercely logical, proposing arguments and smashing them in the same breath. Everything here comes from one mind, with none of the mingling of levels of consciousness so characteristic of James. 2 Small touches lodge the recital credibly within Isabel's reflection: "She knew" suggests her presently comprehending, while the interpolated "Yes" and "of course" reinforce this sense of a mind coming to grips with things. In keeping with such unity of effect, the passage utilizes a surprisingly simple style, easier to follow and with fewer obvious convolutions than James's notorious late style. Certainly we are not offered any of the "infinite sentences" or "interminable elabora- tion" 3 for which even his friends berated him. But the short straightforward sentences used here not only seem unusual for James, they are unusually controlled in themselves, fabricated toward spe- cific dramatic ends. This particular passage conveys Isabel's agitation through a whole series of verbal extravagances: breathless adverbial modi- fiers (e.g., "more gle_n_," "w more," "532. much," "jg what"); an exaggerated and almost confusing reliance on pronouns, particularly "she," "this," and "that"; and along with the pronouns, at least three transposed antecedents taking the form of appositional expan- sions (e.g., "_t.:_h_a_t_ was just what one married for, Ewfllflfl some one else"). 69 But after all, the mind knows its own logic and probably' thinks more in pronouns than formal exposition could tolerate, since one never fumbles over one's own pronoun antecedents. Requiring no elegant variation, furthermore, the mind won't edit out the repeti- tions which thread its productions together--so we have plays here on "many" and "more," on "ideas" and "opinions," on "this" and on "that," and on "had." In thus eschewing any sugared style, the mind avoids or at least frustrates formal parallel or antithetical con- structions: hence we have more wordy after-thoughts such as the first and last sentences display than the sort of triplet illustra- ted in the next to the last sentence. Comparing this with a meditation which James crafted twenty-three years later, we must remember that the interval between The Portrait _o_f_" a Lady and The Golden Bowl witnessed a number of Shifts in James's style, and also that Isabel's meditation typified neither James's early style nor, in some particulars, his medita- tion scenes. (1) She found herself, for five minutes, thrilling with the idea of the prodigious effect that, just as she sat there near them, she had at her command; with the sense that if She were but different--oh, ever so different!--all this high decorum would hang by a hair. (2) There reigned for her, ab- solutely, during these vertiginous moments, that fascination of the monstrous that temptation of the horribly possible, which we so often trace by its breaking out suddenly, lest [239/240] it should go further, in unexplained retreats and reactions. (3) After it had been thus vividly before her for a little that, springing up under her wrong and making them all start, stare and turn pale, she might sound out their doom in a sin- gle sentence, a sentence easy to choose among several of the lurid--after she had faced that blinding light and felt it turn to blackness she rose from her place, laying aside her 7O magazine, and moved slowly round the room, passing near the card-players and pausing an instant behind the chairs in turn. (4) Silent and discreet, she bent a vague mild face upon them, as if to signify that, little as she followed their doings, she wished them well; and she took from each, across the table, in the common solemnity, an upward recog- nition which she was to carry away with her on her moving out to the terrace, a few minutes later. (5) Her father and her husband, Mrs. Assingham and Charlotte, had done nothing but meet her eyes; yet the difference in these de- monstrations made each a separate passage--which was all the more wonderful since, with the secret behind every face, they had alike tried to look at her throggh it and in denial of it. (6) It all left her, as she wandered off, with the stran- gest of impressions--the sense, forced upon her as never yet, of an appeal, a positive confidence, from the four pairs of eyes, that was deeper than any negation, and that seemed to speak, on the part of each, of some relation to be contrived by her, a relation with herself, which would spare the indi- vidual the danger, the actual present strain, of the relation with the others. (7) They [2h0/2Q1] thus tacitly put it upon her to be disposed of, the whole complexity of their peril, and she promptly saw why: because she was there, and there just'g§_she was, to lift it off them and take it; to charge herself with it as the scapegoat of old, of whom she had once seen a terrible picture, had been charged with the sins of the people and had gone forth into the desert to sink under his burden and die. (8) That indeed wasn't their design and their interest, that she should sink under hers; it wouldn't be their feeling that she Should do anything but live, live on somehow for their benefit, and even as much as possible in their company, to keep proving to them that they had truly escaped and that she was still there to simplify. (_Gg, II, 239-241) We can immediately see why Ezra Pound called this one of James's "more cobwebby volumes," h for this passage most clearly suggests his devotion to "the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing." 5 Part of that way of doing which the later James used more and more, and a prime source of the seemingly greater tortuosity of this passage, involves the "happy symbolic complexi- ties" studding the whole of The Golden Bowl. 6 71 The only metaphor admitted into Isabel's disquisition on the liberated female, for example, was introduced quite self-con- sciously ("with the door closed behind, as it were"); and it is never developed. Maggie's reflections, on the other hand, are shot through with unqualified and exotic figures of all sorts--ranging from a common enough image of decorum hanging "by a hair," to the extravagant and suggestive notion of the ocular "separate passage" she momentarily embarks upon with each bridge player, and moving finally to "the scapegoat of old" which for their sakes she is becoming. Time and again James offers the reader a clever image at some crucial juncture within a meditation--from Rowland Mallet's vision of Roderick burning at the stake (RE, 286) to ambassador Strether's Luxembourg clock or Lambinet frame (egg..59, 398). Yet Maggie surpasses them all-~with the porcelain pagoda, the family coach, now the scapegoat (£2, II, 18, 24, 241), and many others. This particular difference between Isabel and Maggie's meditations need therefbre be little more than a difference in how James chose to develop the two. Whenever he is using extended metaphors in this manner, in meditation, James goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure that we credit the figure to the character himself, not the author. And even Maggie's vision, James would have us know, stems from "a ter- rible picture" she had once seen. Whether or not figurative language is a trait of meditation, however, a question which must wait for another study, we may note that metaphors implicated in James's 72 meditation scenes are always handled so as to further our illusion of being inside the fictional, created consciousness. Another obvious differenca'between the pacing of Isabel's and of Maggie's meditations, may be equally circumstantial. More happens in Maggie's it seems. Where Isabel stretches out ruminap tively, Maggie can't sit still: she picks up a magazine, tries to sleep, walks around the table, and goes out for air. This is partly due, of course, to pressures from the quadrumvirate of which Maggie is clearly conscious--to contrive relations (sentence 6), to lift a peril off them (sentence 7), to live "for their benefit" and prove to them "that they had truly escaped" (sentence 8). Is it any wonder she's restless? In terms of physical passivity, then, Isabel's musings may better typify the course of Jamesian medita- tion scenes; but to the extent that Maggie's meditation seems more firmly integrated into the action of the novel, this longer sample is more typical. In creating Maggie, James is dramatically wordier (50.1 words and 5.0 clauses per sentence, against 21.1 words and 3.3 clauses inugg). But the similarities of style still outweigh the differences. For example, personal pronouns dominate this medita- tion as uncompromisingly as they do in the passage a third its length from the Portrait. In the later passage James goes through over four-hundred words (even more, if we consider the context) with no identifying reference, direct or oblique, to the "she" of these reflections. Save an occasional reference to "the others," furthermore, James keeps to pronouns for the four peOple named in 73 sentence 5 as well. This stress on third-person personal pronouns has the same effect in both passages: of forcing the narrative flow as explicitly as James dares back into the mind of his character. By renouncing author-supplied tags, James manages to create the illusion of having crossed the threshold into Maggie's uncensored mental flow. Consider the consequences to that illusion if James had merely said, in the middle of sentence 3, "after she had faced that blinding light . . . Maggie rose from her place." The paragraph in the middle of this passage (sentences 3-5) contains considerable authorial reporting. But even there James gets the necessary information across while scarcely denting the mirror he claims to be holding up to Maggie's inner consciousness. Certainly the uniformity of pronouns plays a major part in keeping us unquestioning through the crucial paragraph. Fbr the rest, in- cidentally, we should notice how the pronouns often collaborate with occasional "verbs of mental activity." In such cases James attributes the word-stream directly to Maggie's own mind, e.g., "She £2922 herself . . . thrilling with the idea," "It all _l_._e_f_‘_t_ her . . . with the strangest of impressions-the sense,forced upon her," "she promptly _a_ag .why." Both selections suggest somewhat of a preference for past- perfects (13% inW§£.and 20% in‘§§)-—though the difference in simple past tense forms (80% in'gg, but only 60% in‘fig) is attributable less to past-perfects than to various modal modifications of present tense predications. But look at the placement of the eight past- 74 perfect forms we have in the later passage: two in sentence 3, two in sentence 5, and three in sentence 7, with the last in the last sentence. The two past-perfects in 5 clearly serve to keep the world of the table remote from Maggie's inner world; and the one in sentence 8 fulfills the same function, placing the report of the cardplayers' perceptions of Maggie at yet a further remove from her own perceptions--almost as though it were EEEDawareness of their Vawareness which we were seeing. (James was later to render such a distance literal in the person of Ralph Pendrel, whose m 3f the [235; generates "a complete double awareness of the past and of him- " 7 the illusion aided there too by the use of the self watching it, past-perfect tense.) Then, the past-perfects in sentence 3 appear only to com- plete the preposition "after"; but those in sentence 7 act more like the others. Here James cloaks the figure of the scapegoat in the past—perfect, thus pushing it into the remote distance-~the distance of timeless myth--and creating thereby the feeling that the 01d Tes- tament sacrifice and Maggie's might both have been consummated equally long ago, perhaps even (to extrapolate broadly) in some mind of the race or collective unconscious. Neither passage employs very many copulatives (Type 2 clauses--though in both,'§grverbs account for about 30% of the total); and those we find often merely identify pronouns (e.g., "which Eg§.all the more wonderful"). The only passive in these two passages refers to the scapegoat, who "11.22 2e_e_x_1_ charged with the sins of the people." And both passages rely heavily on intran- 75 sitive verbs, especially on Type 1 clauses such as "all this high decorum M hag by a hair" or "they 32.2 truly escaped." This broad emphasis on predicating rather than pointing verbs is matched by James's striking fondness for adverbs, used in these two passages just as frequently as adjectives. As we noted in the Portrait, he especially favors doubled adverbs for intensity: "jugt as," "gzgg so," "§_o_ often," "t_h1_1§ vividly," "£123.“; tacitly." Tracing such trends, it quickly becomes apparant that meditation is no sedentary, calming exercise for James's characters, but rather their most vigorous and profoundly demanding activity. Thisiig their reality, these are the moments which determine the shape of their lives. For the simple proportions of James's style do interact with its larger rhetorical strategy to create a manner which may be turned to the business of taking the reader within a fictional consciousness. When James wishes to delve into inner consciousness, clause and sentence structures complement repetition, apposition and parenthesis in a distinct and identifiable set of patterns emi- nently suited to his narrative goal. These particular rhetorical devices overlap and blend into what Sister Mary Carolyn McGinty has termed "a general exploitation of parataxis." We may consider parataxis the opposite of the periodic sentence (which is a sentence "not grammatically complete before the end"), 9 and close to Northrop Frye's "associative rhythm . . . in which the unit is a short phrase of irregular length and primi- tive syntax." 10 Parataxis is close too to that manifestation of 76 the "Senecan" manner which Morris W. Croll called the "curt" in his discussion of Baroque styles: "It has the four marks that have been described: first, studied brevity of members; second, the hovering, imaginative order; third, asymmetry; and fourth, the omission of the ordinary syntactic ligatures." 11 Croll considered that the curt style "preferred the forms that express the energy and labor of minds seeking the truth, not without dust and heat, to the forms that express a contented sense of the enjoyment and possession of it" 12 --which is just the search James's meditation scenes seek to portray. Despite the general feeling that involved styles provide the writer with a more flexible tool for his purposes, too exclu- sively periodic a texture often suggests artifice and pedantry. Parataxis on the other hand, Sister McGinty says, "achieves the rhetorical effect . . . of a restless mind, perceptive but reluc- tant to pursue meanings to their ultimate subordination--shying off from hypotactic systematization, preferring paratactic serializa- tion." 13 And Barry Menikoff adds, "the method of loose ligatures lends an air of reality to the mental process of the character." 1" Sometimes the absence of links even suggests a fragmenta— tion, disjointing, or unthreading, a failure to satisfy our implicit expectations of a sentence, which shakes the reader out of his com- placency. For example, James's parenthetic interpolations in the later meditation average a full 2.0 per sentence, regularly violating the flow of clauses and of verb modifiers. (James's dependence on pronouns throughout the meditations, it is true, requires preserva- 77 tion of the subject-verb bond, which is interrupted in only one of the sixteen parentheses here.) These interrupters run to predica- tions more than to single words, and are twice doubled to enhance the sense of suspension (e.g., "absolutely, during these vertigi- nous moments," and "across the table, in the common solemnity"). So paratactic structuring--spoken not literary, poetic not logical, an approximation of the actual flow of experience~~ indeed focuses on that chaos of inner consciousness whose represen- tation concerns us. But if the impact of a Jamesian sentence (in contrast, for example, with one of Dr. Johnson's) suggests "a com- plexity that is not that of idea, but of relationship between ideas," as R. W. Short said, 15 then its supreme use will be showing the act of interrelating as performed by the creative self-reflective mind. The healthy mind, we may assume, functions as a Gestalt; so the connections are there, as in any normal thought sequence. But in reflecting, the mind seldom needs to translate its own thought stream either into the abstract and objective language of forensics, or into the elegant, balanced patterns of euphuism. If extended parallelism tends to diminiSh in James's representations of inner consciousness, therefore, other sorts of structuring are still at work. A simple reprinting of a few sentences from my samples, lining up comparable levels of structure directly under one another, makes this clear. While the structure may be no more involved than Figure 1 shows, for example, it can reach the complexity shown in Figure 2 even in the abbreviated sentences of Isabel's meditation. 78 FIGURE 1 ‘29, SENTENCE 5 It was not that, however, his objecting to her opinions; that was nothing. FIGURE 2 2;, SENTENCE 1 She knew she had too many ideas; she had more even than he supposed, many more than she had expressed to him when he asked her to marry him. With the longer constructions of the later novel, doublets and re- petitions yield the intricate patterns of Figure 3. The thirteen "levels" of parallels identified in this last example reach an extreme, of course, matched in our two selections only by the third sentence from the.§2!l with fourteen. Such charting dramatically underscores the structural function repetitions can fulfill, in addition to their musical or hypnotic roles. Many repetitions here signal an appositional expansion ("different" inIEB, sentence 1; "sentence" in 3; "relation" in 6; 79 FIGURE 3 is, SENTENCE 7 They thus tacitly put it upon her to be disposed of, the whole complexity of their peril, and she promptly saw why: because she was there, and there just _a_s she was, to lift it off them and take it; to charge herself with it as the scapegoat of old, of whom she had once seen a terrible picture, had been charged with the sins of the people and had gone forth into the desert to sink under his burden and die. "line" in 8), while others clearly link thought structures (e.g., "after" in sentence 3, and "she was" and "charge" in 7). Further parallels unify this passage, particularly the paralleling of ideas in apposition, ranging from a delayed pronoun antecedent ("the whole complexity of their peril," all explaining "it" in sentence 7) to an 8O outright tautology such as "that fascination of the monstrous that temptation of the horribly possible." On the purely phonic level, incidentally, aside from obvious plays on face/faced and other repetitions, there is a con- siderable array of rhymes I haven't even begun to investigate. The sentences in Isabel's meditation were too brief for James to have begun many far-reaching sound schemes. But in Maggie's, an enor— mous variety of correspondences controls the line almost as tightly as one expects to find in poetry. Just in sentence 1, for instance, James offers the following instances of assonance and consonance: found/for five; different/decorum; high/113.11%; _t_h_e_13 ne_a_r_ 213m; Egggand/deggrug; and if we include the second sentence, prodigiggg/ vertiginggg/monstrggg. The conscious complexity of James's rhythms is further suggested by the sharp metrical contrast between "silEnt aid discréte she bent" and immediately after "a vague mild face." All this wealth, which could be traced at almost any length, emerged more and more toward the end of James's career. Yet for the most part, the same traits I have broadly identified with the late style always characterized his meditation scenes: a thickening of verbiage, but a slimming of elegance; a rhetoric characterized more by outright repetition than by formal parallels; an obfuscation depending upon richly elaborated parenthetic inter- polations and apposed expansions, combined with a cherishing of the subject-predicate bond and of the barefaced pronoun; in short, a style whose significance resides inseparably in its language, where manner controls matter and renders it credible, where words follow 81 the rhythms and convolutions of unverbalized reflection, always "approaching the centre," as one of James's prefaces puts it, "by narrowing circumvallations." 16 What implications these trends have for the larger directions of James's art are for Chapter VI to explore. 82 Notes to Chapter 1 1 On this technique, called "erlebte Rede," see p. 11 above. 2 Richard Bridgman perceptively traces such a mingling of levels, author's and characters', in a conversation between Pansy and Isabel; The Colloguial St le 23 America (New York: Oxford University Press, 198 9 PP. 95-9 0 3 Respectively, Thomas Hardy, quoted in The Legend_ of the Master: Hegay James, ed. Simon Nowell-Smith (New York: Charles Scribner' 3 Sons, 1938), p. 10; and a letter by William James, quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought_ and Character of William James (2 vols.; Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 19355, I, REL. h Instiggtions (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), p. 120. 5 Henry James (characterizing Joseph Conrad), Notes on Novelists and Some Other Notes (New York: 0. Scribner's Sons, 15153, p. 3E5. 6 Ian Watt, "The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Expli- cation," Essays _13 Critician, X (July 1%), 2 2. Oxford University Press , p. 135. 8 The Jamesian Parenthesis: Elements of Sn ension in the Narra- tive Sentences 21; Hey James's Late Styl? microfilmed_P-h.D. disser- tation, Catholic University, 196:7:7p. v. 7 F. 0. Matthiessen, He James: The Major Phase (New York: 9 19%) 9 William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard,.§.Handbook_ to Litera- ture (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1936), p. 307. 10 The Well-Tempered Critic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), p. 2h. 11 "The Baroque Style in Prose," Studies in.£!§g;___ milologz: A Miscellggy_ in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. Kemp Malone and Martin B. Ruud W( meapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1929), p- 435. 12 Croll, p. #28. 13 McGinty, The Jamesian Parenthesis, p. 85. 11+ Ming Mg; 17391.33 the Tales of Henry James (micro- filmed Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wigzonsin, 1966), p. 150. 83 15 "The Sentence Structure of Henry James," American Literature, XVIII (May 1946), 73- 16 The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. R. P. Blackmur CHAPTER VI CONCLUSIONS In“) IMPLICATIONS The conclusions of this study should be stated cautiously: that selections from certain of Henry James's meditation scenes, as defined in Chapter II, may be distinguiShed from certain other se- lections from James's non-dialogue narrative by the specific gramma- tical features outlined in Chapter III and the specific rhetorical features outlined in Chapter IV. 1 If the passages were selected uniformly and the findings evaluated judiciously, however, we Should be able to generalize to the two classes of narrative matter in James and to conclude something about his overall fictional strategy as well. The most explicit inferences we are justified in making, for instance, are that "meditation scenes" do exist in James, and that they are distinguishable from the rest by many of the same marks that broadly characterize his late style. In other words, James came more and more to value those features of language which most faithfully represent mental processes, a complex of devices which always reached peak intensity in James when he sought to mirror a particular character's inner consciousness. It thus appears that James's interest in representing human consciousness increasingly dominated his fictional practice 81+ 85 until in his maturity it lent its tones to all his writing. In contrast with J. A. Ward's view that the meditation scenes "have little to do with the immediate dramatic context," 2 then, I believe they have everything to do with it, more and more as James deve- loped. His stylistic career might thus be said to anticipate, in fact, the searches of many modern writers for verbal means of por- traying the mind. A great many contemporary critics do speak up for a James "who seems, in his courteous, over-civilized way, to Open the door on to the modern novel," 3 for a James who "occupies more than any other a pivotal position in the development of the twentieth-century novel." h Probably he can best be viewed as a bridge between such early probers of the self-reflexive mind as Jane Austen and George Eliot, and the twentieth-century "cinematographic" recorders of a character's pre-verbal flow of impressions; in that sense, we might consider ambassador Strether as a sort of "missing link" between Daniel Deronda and Leopold Bloom, 5 and the art of Henry James as an influence nudging the contemporary novel toward the stream-of- consciousness technique. While such experimenters as Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner sought to capture the stream in its flux, however, James never pre- tended fiction could become or even present reality. 6 So he focused always on how the telling of his stories might "re-present" most vividly events within consciousness, that "sequence of organically linked states" which constituted for him the ultimate interest in any of his donnees, or in any human happening whatever, actual or 86 fictional. 7 This is the sense in which Eliseo Vivas could say that Henry James's influence was deeply revolutionary. For the radical innovations in literary form which are involved in the work of writers who came after him, like Mrs. Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, follow, no doubt, the direction which he ointed in his own so magnificently successful experiments. To suggest one further possibility, in linking James's representations of inner consciousness with seventeenth-century "poetry of meditation" and with the pastoral interludes typical of romance poetry, 9 I have suggested that the meditation scenes of Henry James may somehow fuse the intention of the medieval romance with the form of all intro- spective literature down to the stream-of-consciousness novel of today. While these directions only emerged as incidental to my defining the meditation scene in James, they deserve further inves- tigation. Such a venture, tracing the origins and offspring of James's meditations, might lead in fact to the identification of a coherent group of stylistic elements employed by many writers toward corresponding ends, a group similar to the collection which the present study has uncovered in James. A thoroughgoing study of James's language might utilize the tests from this study to categorize other types of narrative within his fiction, perhaps even identifying several more broad clusters of stylistic devices which James employed toward various dramatic ends. Any further studies of James's meditations could expand the present instrument to include measures of imagery and of structural, verbal and auditory parallels in the prose, as sug- 87 gested in Chapter V. The clause measures might be refined to re- gister adjective clauses, adverb clauses, noun clauses, and so forth. I would also like to know more about James's intentions in using copulatives and the predicate nominative, and what the Egrforms may suggest about a character's perception of reality. Finally, a good deal of work needs to be done with verb tenses and with time relationships in general as they relate to James's representations of inner consciousness. These few suggestions only hint at the wide applicability of the two concepts underlying this study: the method of quantita- tive analysis of prose styles, and the fictional device of the medi- tation scene. But the purpose of both constructs equally has remained here to explore the richness of James's craftsmanship and the fidelity of his portrayals of human consciousness. 88 Notes _tg Chapter V; 1 Certainly the conclusions finally presented by Chapters III and IV were generally uniform for both periods, early and late, and for all the novels studied-—a wide diversity indeed. Significant exceptions to these findings were always noted, so the final lists describe a complex of stylistic devices which is probably linked with that style of James which seeks to represent inner conscious- ness most directly. In the absence of considerably more sophisti- cated statistical measures of significance than this research design incorporated, however, it is difficult to state my conclu- sions any more dogmatically. 2 The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's p. 139. 3 Anthony Burgess, The Novel Now: A Student's Guide £2_Contem- porary Fiction (London: Faber & Faber: 1957), p. 23. 4 Joseph Warren Beach, Egngwentieth Centur Novel: Studies in Technigue (New York: AppletonFCentury, 1932), p. 188. For other attributions of James's influence on modern fiction, see Joseph Warren Beach, "The Novel from James to Joyce," Nation, CXXXII (June 10, 1931), 631+; Richard Bridgman, _T_h_e_ Colloquial St le _i_r_1_ America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 1 7; Leon Edel, The Prefaces of Henry James (Paris: Jouve et Cie, 1931), pp. 81-82; Clinton Hartley Grattan, 313 Three Jameses: _A Famil _o_f_ Minds (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932), . 365; R. W. Lid, Ford Madox Ford: The Essence of His Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 193%), pp. 10, 17; David Lodge, Language of Fiction: ESEEZS in Criticism and Verbal Anal sis of 5113 En liE Novel (New York: '_C-olumbia Uni-\r—e-r-sity Press, 1935),— p. 28; Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element: A Study 23 Modern Writers and Beliefs (Boston 8: New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 19%), p. 12; and Austin Warren, "Myth and Dialectic in the Late Novels," Kenyon Review, V (Autumn 1943), 568. 5 Suggested by Roger B. Salomon, "Realism as Disinheritance: Twain, Howells, and James," American Quarterly, XVI (Winter 196A), 541 . Leon Edel distinguished Joyce "the recorder" from James "the interpreter" when they are engaged in representing inner mental processes; "James and Joyce: The Future of the Novel," Tomorrow, IX (August 1950). 55. 89 7 Gordon Overton Taylor, "Change in the Representation of Psycho- logical Process by American Novelists, 1870-1900," Dissertation Abstracts, XXIX (1968), 579A. 8 "Henry and William (Two Notes)," Kenyon Review, V (Autumn 1943), 594- 9 See above, p. 18 and p. 33, fn. 10. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED Primary Sources The following first editions of James's novels are further identi- fied by reference to the numbers (in parentheses) assigned in Edel and Laurence's Bibliography. They are arranged here by date of publication. Roderick Hudson. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1876. (A3a) The American. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1877. (Aha) The Portrait of a_Lady. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1882. (A16b) This first American edition, the only novel I consulted in an edition other than the first, is identical to the 1881 London edition printed by Macmillan and Co. (A16a), except for being set up as one volume, not three. The Wings of the Dove. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902. (A56a) The Ambassadors. London: Methuen & Co., 1903. (A58a) The Golden Bowl. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904. (A60a) Secondary Sources Anderson, Quentin. The American Heggy James. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1957. Bailey, Richard W., and Burton, Dolores M. English Stylistics: 'A Bibliography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M. I. T. Press, 1968. Baker, Carlos. Hemingyay: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, New 90 91 Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1963. Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood, with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1937. Baum,PaullFran.klin. . . .Qggthggharmogygfpgfig. . .: an gggay in English pggsg rhythm. [Durham, North Carolina]: Duke University Press, 1952. "Prose Rhythm." Encyclopedia _o_f Poetgy _a_n_d_ Poetics. Edited by Alex Preminger, _e_1_:_ g. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1965. Beach, Joseph Warren. The Method .93 _H_e_n£y m. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918. . "The Novel from James to Joyce," Nation, CXXXII (June 10, 1931), 634-636. . Th3 Twentieth Centgy M: Studies in Technigue. New York: Appleton-Century, 1932. Beams, David W. "Consciousness in James's _T;h_e_ gen—SE _o_f Ea East," Criticism, v (Spring 1963), 1h8-172. Bercovitch, Sacvan. "The Revision of Rowland Mallet," Nineteenth- Centgay Fiction, XXIV (September 1969), 210-221. Bersani, Leo. "The Narrator as Center in 2'th ggm," Modern Fiction Studies, VI (Summer 1960), 131-1h4. Bosanquet, Theodora. "Henry James," Fortnightly Review, N. S. CI (June 1, 1917), 995-1009. . Henry James _a_t_ Work. London: Hogarth Press, 1924. Bridges, Robert. "A Paper on Free Verse," North American Review, CCXVI (November 1922) , 6’+7-658. 92 Bridgman, Richard. LIES Colloquial Styli 3.}; America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Brown, E. K. Rhythm EQM. [Toronto, Ontario]: University of Toronto Press, 1950. Burgess, Anthony. 213 M3]; M: _A_ Student's M 52 Contemporary Fiction. London: Faber & Faber, 1967. Cargill, Oscar. "'The Ambassadors': A New View," PMLA, LXXV (Sep- tember 1960), 439-452. Cholmsky, Noam. Syntactic Structures. 's-Gravenhage: Mouton & Co., 1963. Clair, John A. TIE Ironic Dimension 2.1.1.22. Fiction EMM' Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1965. Cox, C. B. 3.112.332 Spirit: 5mg Liberal Humanism 1.3% Novels _o_f George M, Hen—ry Janis, E. M. Forster, Virginia M, 5252.5. Wilson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Croll, Morris W. "The Baroque Style in Prose," in Studies ig_English Philolog: A Miscellany Hi H2921; 2: Frederick Klaeber. Edited by Kemp Malone and Martin B. Ruud. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1929. Daiches, David. "Sensibility and Technique: Preface to a Critique," Kenyon Review, V (Autumn 1943), 569-579. Davis, J. "Intention and Achievement in Narrative Technique: Henry James's Thg_Ambassadors," Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny, XII (1965), 245-253. Drew, Elizabeth. The Novel: A Modern Guide to Fifteen English Mag: terpieces. New York: Dell, 1963. 93 Dujardin, Edouard. Ml _t_o_ 213 M N_o _Mo_r_e_, with an Introduction by Leon Edel. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: New Directions, 1957. Dupee, F. W., ed. T3 Question 9.229319%? _A_ Collection _o_f_ Critical Esgys. New York: Henry Holt, 1945. Edel, Leon. "James and Joyce: The Future of the Novel," Tomorrow, IX (August 1950), 53-55- . The Prefaces o_f Hegy James. Paris: Jouve et Cie, 1931. , ed. Hen—ry James: _A_ Collection _o_f_ Critical Esgys. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963. , and Laurence, Dan H. A Bibliography o_f My £51333. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957. Edgar, Pelham. MW: Eflm. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1927. Edwards, Herbert. "Henry James and Ibsen," American Literature, XXIV (May 1952), 208-223. Emden, Cecil S. "Rhythmical Features in Dr. Johnson's Prose," Review g_f_ Engl‘sh Studies, XXV (January 1949), 38-54. Flory, Sister Ancilla M., S.B.S. Rhythmic Figuration _i£1__1_:_l:1_e_£_aa_t_<_e_ m 2;; H_en_ry m. Microfilmed Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University, 1966. Friedman, Melvin J. Stream if Consciousness: _a_ Study _i_n_ Literary Method. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Friedman, Norman. "Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept,"_I14_LA;_, LXX (December 1955), 1160-1184. Frye, Northrop. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana 94 University Press, 1963. Card, Roger, ed. mm: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge 8c Kegan Paul, 1968. Gerould, Katherine Fullerton. "Stream of Consciousness," Saturday Review, IV (October 22, 1927), 233—235. Gide, Andre. "Henry James," Yale Review, XIX (Spring 1930), 641-643. Grattan, Clinton Hartley. 1113M Jameses: _A_ Family gm. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1932. Grenander, M. E.; Rahn, Beverly J.; and Valvo, Francine. "The Time- Scheme in Th3 Portrait _o_f_ _a_ fly," American Literature, XXXII (May 2960), 127-135. Griffith, Helen. "Time Patterns in Prose: A Study in Prose Rhythm Based upon Voice Records," Psychological Monographs, XXXIX, iii (1929). Hendrick, Leo T. .He_nry§in£_s_: Eflflm Styles (_A_ Stylis- EEEEHEEEQX . Microfilmed Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1953. Herrick, Robert. "A Visit to Henry James," Xglg_Review, N. S. XII (July 1923), 724-741. Hoftun, Sigmund. "The Point of View in Henry James: Izhg_American," ‘gggg, LXI, ii (1961). pp. 169-176. Humphrey, Robert. Stream o_f Consciousness _i_n t_h_e_ Modern Mil-3 Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959. "Stream of Consciousness: Technique or Genre?" Philolo— gical Quarterly, XXX (1951), 434-437. 95 James, Henry. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Edited by R. P. Blackmur. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962. . The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction. Edited by Leon Edel. New York: Vintage Books, 1956. . .T_hg_ Letters 23mm. Edited by Percy Lubbock. 2 vols. New York: Scribner's, 1920. . E Notebooks 93mm. Edited by F. 0. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947. . 191333 32 Novelists 212m 2113;; M2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914. James, William. Psychology: Briefer Course. New York: Henry Holt, 1892. Jefferson, D. W. Migrate—s. Edinburgh 8: London: Oliver and Boyd, 1960. Kelly, H. A., S.J. "Consciousness in the Monologues of Ulysses," Modern Langgage Quarterly, XXIV (March 1963), 3-12. Kissane, Leodice. "Dangling Constructions in Melville's 'Bartlebyf" American Speech, XXXVI (October 1961), 195-200. Krook, Dorothea. The Ordeal of Consciousness _13 My _J_a_m£s_. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1962. Labrie, Ernest R. "Henry James's Idea of Consciousness," American Literature, XXXIX (January 1968), 517-529. Leavis, F. R. [him Tradition: George _Eli_qt_, H_en£y§_a_nlaeaaeomoe Haa moo-. mmm an: or mm m- u-m are oa- mm mm ea oar mm mm mum 6mm nm- mam-6e wees mmm mwm mmm m- m- m wee am am mm er -: mm mm a: mom mn- em eaaeeeaees efimw 69 .3 mm a m m S mm mm mm 5 5 mm m- m ma .3 mm 2.3886... mm ma- an mm m a e a: mm em m- m :- mm or. mm w: an a- eeaeeeaeee1mp. use mm mm m m -1 am mm -m m- m 6- mm m m- as am mm eaaeeeaeee pea mm: mam cam em a- a- are no em -r er on -e- am an -m- mm mm eaaeaaeewee eymw mm- :9 mm 3 \- m mm mm R me n Me an mm 9 mm m: om 339.86% mm.- am- mm mm m m m mm m we w m 6 -m -m on mm a- me eeaeaaeemeeumm. are am om .m a -m am am an m- a we mm re a mm an em eaaeaaeemee pea 0mm mam mm: mm on mm mom ore nae mm mm m: ear mm mme eom mos mm maeaoe sages a-a mm- mam - a a mm- mm o-- o: m- mm am mm mm o- as we eeaeepaeee satmm mm- mm -m e -1 - me am -m m- m :- mm m m- on am we eeaeeeaeeeuwm nae mm mm m m a ma m- mm m- m w ma s- mm. mm or u- reapeaaeee.mm. m- a: me a m m N: me on w m e mm o- u- mm -m we eaaeeeaeee mm me: as- amm m: mm we ma- mm mm mm u- em so mm as em m: 6: eeaeaaeemee sammm mm- mm mm a- or a mm -m mm or w w am e- we we mm em eaaeaaeemeenwm aMe ma mm m n m or m- em. me 6 5 mm m- .an me a w eeaeaaeomee.mm m- a: mo om m- a on N- am m m m we a -e mm me me eeaeaaeemee mm V V V V G I G I U. I V G I G I U U U U um. m. m. .m m. m .m m. U .W W. m .m .w. mmmmmmmm pm MM "M mmwfiwHO mmmfimHO mama-“HO wwwswflo momfiwHO .m . . m ease a mass m ease m mama - ease . mange mmsjo mDOHmdS mo 3809 1..- m 5”szde 109 APPENDIX F AVERAGES OF ADJECTIVES MINUS ADVERBS Descriptive Meditative Novels Passages Passages _R_H_ 22.0 8. _A_m. 12.6 9.4 31; 51.4 4.0 All early 22.0 7.2 Amb 25.0 10.4 _W_12 8.2 2.7 g? 12.2 2.0 All late 15.7 5.2 All novels 18.8 6.2 110 APPENDIX G AVERAGES OF THIRDaPERSON PERSONAL PRONOUNS AND OF SUBSTITUTES FOR THIRD-PERSON PERSONAL PRONOUNS PER SENTENCE Third-person Personal Substitutes Novels Pronouns Descriptive Meditative Descriptive Meditative Passages Passages Passages Passages Eh. 1.25 1.03 0.23 0.23 A13 1.22 1.40 .20 .08 _P_I_.-_ 0.80 2.68 .36 .08 All early 1.08 1.79 .26 .12 Amb 1.54 1.46 .42 .10 .W2 1.35 2.18 .20 .13 _gg 1.50 2.36 .54 .18 All late 1.47 1.99 .33 .14 All novels 1.28 1.89 .20 .13 111 APPENDIX H MAIN VERB TENSES AND THE VERB '29..§§ Past Present Past- Present- Passages Perfect Perfect To be Tense Tense -- Tense Tense Eh descriptive 96 4 11 1 23 A§_descriptive 83 27 17 7 49 ‘22 descriptive 121 12 22 13 41 Early descriptive 300 43 5O 21 113 BE meditative 72 13 31 3 27 he meditative 90 17 14 24 55 ‘§h_meditative 99 11 38 5 46 Early meditative 261 41 83 32 128 Early novels 561 84 133 53 241 Amb descriptive 115 3 38 11 43 '32 descriptive 97 15 7 5 39 [fig descriptive 109 23 52 8 43 Late descriptive 321 41 97 24 125 Amb meditative 116 16 36 9 61 ‘!2_meditative 98 19 29 3 47 92 meditative 119 25 41 11 56 Late meditative 333 60 106 23 164 Late novels 654 101 203 47 289 All descriptive 621 84 147 45 238 All meditative 594 101 189 55 292 All passages 1215 185 336 100 530 * Also he become. 112 APPENDIX I AVERAGES OF REPETITIONS, PARALLELS, APPOSITIONAL EXPANSIONS, AND PARENTHESES PER SENTENCE m Average Average Average . . Average Passages Repetitions Parallels Appealtional Parentheses ExpanSIOns Rh descriptive 0.23 0.28 0.03 0.20 hm_descriptive .22 .20 .04 .42 ‘29 descriptive .44 .34 .26 .76 Early descriptive .30 .27 .11 .48 Rh meditative .33 .18 .13 .10 _A_m_ meditative .46 .14 .06 .16 [Ph_meditative .52 .12 .40 .32 Early meditative .44 .14 .20 .20 Early novels .37 .21 .16 .34 Amb descriptive .70 .26 .28 1.32 .WD descriptive .55 .18 .25 1.25 ‘§§_descriptive .58 .20 .32 1.70 Late descriptive .61 .21 .29 1.44 Amb meditative .82 .26 .28 1.40 ‘!2_meditative .98 .08 .38 1.20 ‘§B_meditative 1.06 .22 .42 2.00 Late meditative .95 .19 .37 1.56 Late novels .78 .20 .32 1.50 All descriptive .46 .24 .20 .93 All meditative .70 .17 .28 .88 All passages .58 .21 .24 .91 113 sm- mm mm are -m om mm mun mm as mm mm- memmmmma Haa we on mm a: me m mm mm? s- mm as so m>aemeaeme Haa mm mm mm am as er an wme 0 am mm mm reassessmee Haa cm a: me an me me mm mew s- mm mm mo- masses mesa om mm mm mm a m s- mmF or m- or me easemeaees mfimw E w 9 S m m m R m m me am 33388... mm... 3 a. w m - 1- n mm .. m 3 E. easemeaemsknb a- me m Mr V m m -a - a m- am easemeaems sea or s- mm on m m m- mm s om mm mm msaeaasomme mamw we a m oe m - a mm m a o- 6e maaeaasemme_mm. 6e 0 a a a e m mm a m w m meaeaasommmlma. as a 6e Mr N m 6 mm s m a mm aeaeaaaemme sea as an o- am we w -n mes m me am mm masses eases mm mm m om m m m as a o- m- mm apartments sammm om m- m m e m m mm m m m m- 83882.. mm. m m - a a - m mm m a s 0e easemeaems.mw m m - a m - a Me n 1- n a meaemeaems mm m- - m an or m mm ma m s e um meaeaasomme sammm m- m a E. m m we mm a n m 9 2.86888 mm m m - o- a - m e- e m e s m>aemasemme.mw s - e er a - m m 11 m m m reassessmee mm mmmMHnm o HMubB mmmdeO cw may-03 HmpOB mmwflwHO mmmwhfim m6h03 HMfiOB Hmflpo WU< Qum> goz mmmmmmmm seamsmmxm wheamsHo Hmsoflpwmoam< escapapemem zOHBHmOdda 2H saw 624 .amqmqasmaa HoHHMHmm .mmaammmm mast - s xHazmaas 114 awe own mm ms emm as mem mmmmmmma Haa am mme ma on mm- mm mam meaemeaems Has om use an ms was mm arm msaeaasemme Ada wm- omm me an arm mm m-: mam-es mass S Re mm mm m: R mew 8338...... 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