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THE EMERGING CONSCIOUSNESS: A STUDY
OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CENTRE
OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF
HENRY JAMES

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Arthur W1 lliam Biddle

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ABSTRACT

THE EMERGING CONSCIOUSNESS: A STUDY
OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CENTRE
OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE
EARLY NOVELS OF
HENRY JAMES

BY
Arthur William Biddle

Many critics have, over the years, treated Henry
James's idea of the centre of consciousness. This method
of narration was at first hailed as not only the best but
also the only modern way of telling a story, or rather
showing a story; "show, don't tell" became the cry. Natu-
rally an adverse reaction set in against such a senseless
limitation of the freedom of the novelist until today
"point of view" has, in some circles at least, become al-
most a disreputable term. James himself was never as dog-
matic as his supporters have become. Furthermore, he devel-
oped a far broader conception of the values and limitations
of the centre of consciousness and the objective method
than most critics who came after him.

The general objective of this study, then, is to
focus critical and scholarly attention on the process of
development of James's fictional theory and practice as it

evolved in the years from 1864 to 1881, with special

Arthur William Biddle

attention given to the growth in subtlety and scope of the
centre of consciousness. This study falls into two parts.
The first is based upon James's own critical pronounce-
ments as found in his reviews, letters, notebooks, and

Hawthorne, all written before 1882, and is supplemented

 

with the Prefaces, which were composed 1907-1909 for the
collected "New York" edition of his works. This section
examines James's early search for a theory of realistic
expression and demonstrates the way in which that search
was influenced by his ambivalent attitudes toward his na-
tive land and toward EurOpe. The manner in which the
centre of consciousness developed both from James's reali-
zation of the shallowness of the "surface" realism of his
time and from his basic interest in character and human
relationships is traced. This first part of the essay
also treats the relationship between "felt life," the ob-
jective method, and the centre of consciousness. Defini-
tions are offered of such key terms as centre of con-
sciousness, commanding centre, confidant, reflector, and
objective method. Despite the claims of a number of
critics, James gave to the centre of consciousness a role
that reached beyond merely aiding in the disappearance of
the narrator; the several other functions of the centre
are examined and illustrated from the fiction.

The second part of this essay consists of a study

of James's use of the centre of consciousness in three

Arthur William Biddle

novels of this period: Roderick Hudson (1876), The

 

American (1877), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The

 

centre of consciousness is simply one element, albeit an
important one, of James's objective method in these nov-
els. When it is employed most successfully, it operates
in close conjunction with the confidant, the reflector
system, the interior monologue, and the self-effacing
narrator. It is important for an understanding of James's
method and his fiction not to accept the erroneous belief
that his major goal as a writer was the total elimination
of the narrator or the rendering of a story exclusively
through dialogue. What James did seek and find was a way
of portraying the inner life, a means of dramatizing con-
sciousness. He wrote as if consciousness were the dis-
tinguishing characteristic of the human condition, as if
events were real and meaningful only as they were per-
ceived by someone. James chose to reveal the reality that
he experienced through the objective method. This ap-
proach is virtually an epistemological system, for like
such a system it presents a theory of knowledge. A man
learns about his fellow men in certain ways, none of them
like the way the reader learns about characters in the
fiction of most novelists before James's time. What James
sought to achieve in his fiction, then, was a represen-
tation of the process of human perception in terms that

duplicated life as nearly as possible.

THE EMERGING CONSCIOUSNESS: A STUDY
OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CENTRE
OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE
EARLY NOVELS OF
HENRY JAMES

BY

Arthur William Biddle

A THESIS

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

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1970

/- 97'7/

PREFACE

The publication within the last decade of a com-
plete Henry James bibliography, three additional volumes
of a proposed five volume biography, and several major
studies of themes and individual novels as well as the re-
issue of the "New York Edition" of the novels and tales are
all testimony to a continuing academic interest in a writer
whose popularity has waxed and waned several times in the
last one hundred years.

Many critics and scholars have, over the years,
treated James's idea of the centre of consciousness. This
method of narration was at first hailed as not only the
best but the only modern way of telling a story, or rather
showing a story. "Show, don't tell" became the cry. Nat-
urally an adverse reaction set in against such a senseless
limitation on the freedom of the novelist until today
"point of view" has, in some circles at least, become al-
most a disreputable term. James himself was never as dog-
matic as his supporters have become. Furthermore, he devel-
oped a far broader conception of the values and limitations
of the centre of consciousness and the objective method

than most critics and many novelists after him.

ii

The general objective of this study, then, is to
focus critical and scholarly attention on the process of
development of James's fictional theory and practice as
it evolved in the years from 1864 to 1881, with special
attention given to the growth of the use of the centre of
consciousness. This essay is intended to be expository
rather than argumentative and to offer a definition and
an explanation of the development and the functions of the
centre of consciousness in the so-called "early period."

To be shown are the ways in which: the centre of con-
sciousness developed from James's realization that "sur-
face" realism was shallow and from his basic interest in
character and human relationships; the centre of conscious-
ness as James created it functions; James's use of the
centre of consciousness grew in subtlety and scope.

The groundwork for this study has been prepared
by two exceptional critics, James himself and Percy Lubbock.
James's comments are perceptive but sometimes sketchy and
usually scattered throughout his writings; although he was
a fine critic, he was not always a systematic one. Further-
more, the best of his criticism (to be found in the Pref-
aces) was written thirty years after the fact. This study
does make extensive use of the Prefaces, but, as much as
possible, relies more on his critical expressions from
1864 to 1881 and the novels themselves. Thus the focus

is intentionally on the development, rather than the

iii

fully-realized theory of the later years. Lubbock's

work, The Craft of Fiction, as far as its chapters on

 

James are concerned, deals with the fully-dramatized con-
sciousness of two of the later novels, The Ambassadors

and The Wings of the Dove. Lubbock's unconcealed bias in

 

favor of the unobtrusive narrator has greatly influenced
modern fictional theory and in recent years provoked a
number of reactions to that bias, such as that expressed

by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Although this

 

groundwork is used in the present study, this essay
approaches the technique of the centre of consciousness
more from the other end--that is, from the viewpoint of
the early texts, both critical and fictional. It is an
attempt to go beyond recent dogmatic criticism to the
sources themselves to examine James's theory and practice
during the seminal period of his creative lifetime. Thus
this study draws most heavily on two groups of sources.
First, James's own critical pronouncements as found in his

reviews, letters, notebooks, and Hawthorne, all written

 

before 1882. Supplementing these sources are the Prefaces
which were composed 1907-1909 for the collected "New York
Edition" of his works. The second group of sources are

three early novels, Roderick Hudson, The American, and

 

The Portrait of a Lady.

 

iv

Because the nature of this dissertation is essen-
tially expository, it does not admit to simple generaliza-
tions. It therefore seems advisable to characterize the
contents of each chapter.

Chapter I examines James's early search for a
theory of realistic expression. James's attitudes toward
his native land and toward Europe have a bearing on his
early ideas about realism and are connected with his dis-
satisfaction with what might be called "surface realism."
Inherent in his concept of realism is the morality of the
work, produced most effectively through its "felt life."
The variety of realism that most appealed to him was that
realism which derived from characterization and dramatiza-
tion. Major sources are the many book reviews that he
wrote between 1864 and 1882 and the full-length study,

Hawthorne (1879). Also consulted are the letters written

 

during this period. Here James is in the process of form-
ulating the critical theories of literary realism as well
as working out his own approach to the writing of fiction.
A study of these reviews and letters, by showing what he
admired and what he deplored in the works of other writers,
reveals the artistic goals that James sought from the be-
ginning of his career, many of which goals he came to
achieve through a skillful use of the centre of conscious-

ness .

Chapter II treats the relationships between "felt
life," the objective method, and the centre of conscious-

ness. In a discussion of Flaubert's Madame Bovary (in

 

French Poets and Novelists, 1878), a work which many con-

 

temporaries regarded as somewhat scandalous, James writes:
"Every out-and-out realist who provokes serious meditation
may claim that he is a moralist; for that, after all, is
the most the moralist can do for us." Thirty years after
penning this comment about Flaubert, when he came to write

the Preface to The Portrait g£_§ Lady, he put it this way:

 

"Recognizing so promptly the one measure of the worth of
a given subject, the question about it that, rightly an-
swered, disposes of all others--is it valid, in a word, is
it genuine, is it sincere, the result of some direct im-
pression or perception of life? . . . There is, I think,
no more nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion

than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral' sense

 

9§_§_work of art gg_the amount of felt life concerned in

 

 

producing it." [emphasis added] The second chapter ex-

 

amines James's use of the centre of consciousness to
produce "felt life" in his early novels. It also defines
the objective method and the centre of consciousness and
explores the notion of the register of impressions. The
chapter concludes with a description of the kind of char-
acter required to provide an accurate, sensitive registra-

tion and to function effectively as a central intelligence.

vi

Chapter III analyzes the functions of the centre of
consciousness. The centre of consciousness is at once a
technical and structural method or strategy and a subject.
It involves both form and content. As an element of form,
the centre of consciousness is a pair of eyes, a window in
the house of fiction, a secondary narrator. As content,
it is the very subject of the novel. In the case of The

Ambassadors, for example, the plot is mainly internal and

 

is Strether's View of things (including himself) and his
growing awareness of the possibilities of life. Form and
substance, technique and subject, the dual nature of the
centre of consciousness submits to many finer gradation.
It may perform a number of precise, though sometimes over-
lapping, functions in the work of fiction. The use of the
centre of consciousness may give to the novel:

1. unity

2. structure

3. dramatic intensity

4. a view and a meaning of action and characters

5. an escape for the assumed author

6. greater reader involvement

7. a subject
Chapter III defines and illustrates these functions.

Chapter IV treats Roderick Hudson (1876). In this

 

first novel that he wanted to preserve, James struggles

with the problem of reconciling a somewhat intrusive

vii

narrator with the necessity of keeping the balance in the
center of Rowland Mallet's consciousness. Even this early
in his career James is tentatively feeling his way toward
dramatizing consciousness and producing that "felt life"
that he believed to be so important. Although his success
is limited in this novel, his experiments are valuable to
the emerging of consciousness in the development of his
work.

Chapter V examines The American (1877). As The

 

American opens, the first person narrator stands between
the reader and the scene and alternately faces one, then
the other, seeming to include the reader as a confidant.
The effect is to place narrator and reader above and
somehow superior to the characters of the fiction. Through-
out the novel, James seems to be attempting to change this
relationship. He reveals his goal in the Preface:
If Newman was attaching enough, I must have argued,
his tangle would be sensible enough; for the interest
of everything is all that it is his vision, his con-
ception, his interpretation: at the window of his
wide, quite sufficiently wide, consciousness we are
seated, from that admirable position we 'assist.’
He therefore supremely matters; all the rest matters
only as he feels it, treats it, meets it.
This chapter addresses itself to an investigation of that
not-always-successful struggle to reduce the presence of

the assumed author and to dramatize the consciousness of

Christopher Newman.

viii

Chapter VI discusses The Portrait of a_Lady (1881).

 

In this the last novel of the group under consideration,
James achieves a measure of success in the form that he was
not destined to match for nearly twenty years--until he

wrote The Ambassadors. His success is due in large part to

 

his growing skill in dramatizing consciousness and in the
use of the objective method generally. This book, he de-
clares in the Preface, is to focus on Isabel's adventures
in EurOpe. But he recognizes that these are, in themselves,
quite mild. "Without her sense of them, her sense for
them, as one may say, they are next to nothing at all; but
isn't that beauty and the difficulty just in showing their
mystic conversion by that sense, conversion into the stuff
of drama or, even more delightful word still, of 'story'?"
Chapter VI examines the manner in which James creates this
"stuff of drama" through his use of the centre of conscious-
ness and the reflector system which works so well here.

It is indeed a pleasure to acknowledge the debts
of gratitude incurred while preparing this thesis. It
has been said that a teacher's influence never stops.
There are a number of teachers who over the years by their
example of wisdom and honesty exerted unacknowledged in-
fluence. It is impossible to name them here and proffer
individual appreciation. I can only let several teachers
serve as their representatives. Professors Russel B. Nye,

James H. Pickering, and Clyde Henson, all of the Michigan

ix

State University English Department, have in their own
ways been most helpful. Professor Nye's interest en-
couraged me to continue when I was most in doubt. Pro-
fessor Pickering, who as graduate chairman has led the
way through the thicket of requirements and regulations,
has as a member of my thesis committee offered valuable
advice and suggested needed revisions. Professor Henson
has served long and well, through courses and seminars,
and beyond the call of duty in Florentine repasts. His
unselfish devotion to the highest principles of education
has most often found its expression in his concern for
his students. For this, much thanks. To my fellow stu-
dents in the English department and my colleagues at
Lyman Briggs College goes my gratitude for helping to
create a Jamesian milieu and for showing that they cared.
Professor Kristen Lauer deserves special recognition just
for being herself.

My greatest debt, however, is owed to my family,
especially my wife, Evelyn. Without their help and sac-

rifice, this thesis could not have been written.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

CHAPTER PAGE
I THE SEARCH FOR A THEORY OF REALISM:

1864-1881 . . . . . . . . . . . 1

II "FELT LIFE" AND THE OBJECTIVE METHOD . . 32
III THE FUNCTIONS OF THE CENTRE OF CONSCIOUS-

NESS . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Iv RODERICK HUDSON . . . . . . . . . 88

v THE AMERICAN . . . . . . . . . . 109

VI THE PORTRAIT g§_A Egg; . . . . . . . 13o

 

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . 153

BIBLIOGRAPHY O O O O I O O O C O 157

 

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CHAPTER I

THE SEARCH FOR A THEORY OF REALISM: 1864-1881

The path that Henry James traveled in his appren-
ticeship in the art of fiction was uniquely his own. One
of a long line of New World expatriates, he never completely
shook off his American heritage in the process of absorbing
a different one. Yet, because he was a man of the world,
he was doomed to be a man without a country. So often an
outsider, he was forever seeking to penetrate beneath the
surfaces of life to the underlying realities. He was
never satisfied as an artist with merely reconstructing
the appearance of reality--of barking dogs and sunny
garden parties, of teeming slums and the ruins of ancient
cities. Instead he sought ways of expressing that inner
reality.

Although he experimented with his art throughout
his lifetime, it was during the years between 1864 and
1881 that he was most actively engaged in the process of
formulating his critical theory of literary realism as
well as working out his own approach to the writing of
fiction. His non-fictional writings during this period

(reviews, letters, notebook entries), by showing what he

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admired and what he deplored in the works of other writers
and the way he felt about his own life and work, illuminate
his search for a theory of realistic expression.

James's feelings toward his native land as a home
and a source for American writers would seem to reflect
his developing attitudes as a writer. James was twenty—
four and living with his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts
when he wrote to his boyhood friend, Thomas Sergeant Perry:
" . . . We young Americans are (without cant) men of the
future. I feel at least, that my only chance for success
as a critic is to let all the breezes of the west blow

through me at their will. We are Americans born--il faut

 

gn’prendre son parti." One cannot but remark the striking

 

juxtaposition in the last sentence, his turning to the
French language even while proclaiming his pleasure in

his American birthright. The great advantage, as he sees
it, is that the American has "no national stamp" and is
thus free to absorb what he will of other cultures, per-
haps to forge "a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis

of the various tendencies of the world." But like Emerson,
Whitman, and so many other American writers before him,

he also hOped to see a purely American literature develop.
"We must of course have something of our own-—something
distinctive and homogeneous-~and I take it we shall find
it in our own moral consciousness, our unprecedented spir-

itual lightness and vigour."l As early as 1867 then,

 

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the young writer saw his American background in terms both
positive and negative--the liberating freshness of the new
world which permitted him to see with undimmed vision.

As the years passed, James was less apt to dwell upon
these advantages, and more likely to emphasize the effects
on the writer of the negative qualities of the American
scene.

Two years after James wrote this letter, he trav-
eled to Europe for the first time as an adult (he had
lived there with his family from 1855 to 1858, but he was
a youth at the time). The fifteen months that he spent
there in 1869 and 1870 were like a rebirth; he found more
than enough to fill his blank slate. The richness of the
arts, the manners, the people, the landscape was almost
too much for the young artist to bear. In the Preface to
"The Reverberator" James recalls how, during several weeks
in England, he had become re-acquainted with that land
and how he "had, perceptively and aesthetically speaking,
taken the adventure of my twenty-sixth year 'hard,' as
'A Passionate Pilgrim' quite sufficiently attests." This
whole trip was a bittersweet one for the young man, uncer-
tain as he was of his future. Looking back nearly forty
years the older James remembers it well:

A part of that adventure had been the never-to-be—
forgotten thrill of a first sight of Italy, from
late in the summer of 1869 on; so that a return to

America at the beginning of the following year was
to drag with it, as a lengthening chain, the torment

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of losses and regrets. The repatriated victim of
that unrest was, beyond doubt, acutely conscious
of his case: the fifteen months just spent in
Europe had absolutely determined his situation.
The nostalgic poison had been distilled for him,
the future presented to him but as a single intense
question: was he to spend it in brooding exile, or
might he somehow come into his 'own'?--as I liked
betimes to put it for a romantic analogy with the
state of dispossessed princes and wandering heirs.

2
It was with great reluctance that Henry James returned
home to Cambridge in the spring of 1870.

James was restless and unhappy during the next two
relatively dreary years that he passed in the United States
(1870-1872). In his biography of James, Leon Edel develops
the parallel between the dispossession felt by Clement
Searle in "A Passionate Pilgrim" and that experienced by
James during those long months when his greatest desire
was to return to the spiritual wealth of the Old World.
James was a double exile, Edel maintains, with "his sense
of being an outsider at home, his fear of being an outsider

3 Finally in May of 1872 he accompanied his

in EurOpe."
sister Alice, whose delicate health was the reason for the
trip, and his Aunt Kate on a summer's tour to Europe.

When the ladies returned to Cambridge in the fall, Henry
remained, prolonging his stay as long as possible. During

the next year and one-half, James wrote prolifically--

short stories and art criticism for Atlantic Monthly,

 

travel sketches for The Nation, and dozens of book reviews

 

for a welter of periodicals. So productive was he during

this period that he could in 1875 bring out in book form

two collections assembled from these materials: A_Passion-

ate Pilgrim and Other Tales and Transatlantic Sketches.

 

 

It was in the spring of 1874 in Florence that this burst
of creative energy began to yield even more solid results,

the novel Roderick Hudson. Family and financial pressures

 

to return home were mounting, but he was determined to
get a good start on this novel which was under contract
to the Atlantic. That fall he returned to Cambridge be-
fore trying life in New York City for several months. It
was during this winter that he published a review of his

friend William Dean Howells' new work, A_Foregone Conclu-

 

gigg. "A most characteristically American talent" is the
way he described Howells. But by now, eight years after
the letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, James had begun to
recognize the limitations of the United States as a home
for the artist. Howells "reminds us how much our native-
grown imaginative effort is a matter of details, of fine
shades, of pale colors, a making of small things do great
service. Civilization with us is monotonous . . . we have
to take what we can get." James does not deny that there
is some value, perhaps, in this state of events: "All
this refines and sharpens our perceptions, makes us in

a literary way, on our own scale, very delicate, and stim-

"4 Perceptions

ulates our sense of proportion and form.
sharpened, James still required something to feed them.

And what he saw about him in Cambridge and New York was

mighty poor fare. In Europe it could be so different!

He had given his homeland one last try and found that it
had little to offer him as an artist. In August of 1875

he convinced the editor of the New York Tribune that he was
just the man to be the paper's Paris "correspondent"; he
offered to write sketches (at $20 gold each) on French

life and manners. This connection assured him of a regu-

lar income, not princely perhaps, but sufficient he felt

to allow him to live in Europe independent of his parents.5

Before he sailed in October, he wrote a review
essay about the definitive edition of Balzac. One passage
is especially revealing:

A monarchical society is unquestionably more pictur-
esque, more available for the novelist than any other,
as the others have as yet exhibited themselves; and
therefore Balzac was with glee, with gusto, with imag-
ination, a monarchist. Of what is to be properly
called religious feeling we do not remember a sugges-
tion in all his many pages; on the other hand, the
reader constantly encounters the handsomest compli-
ments to the Catholic Church as a social re ime.

A hierarchy is as much more picturesque tHan a "con-
gregational society" as a mountain is than a plain.
Bishops, abbés, priests, Jesuits, are invaluable
figures in fiction, and the morality of the Catholic
Church allows of an infinite Chiaroscuro.6

 

Although Balzac is the subject here, James seems to be
giving, in part at least, his own rationale for going to
Europe. As a writer he felt that he needed the complexity
of relationships to be found there, perhaps too a kind of
moral ambiguity unlike the simpler morality that he be-
lieved to characterize relationships in New England and

New York. Whether he was aware of it at the time or not,

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this move was to be in effect a permanent one, for through-
out the rest of his life he was to return to the United
States only occasionally and then only for what amounted
to short visits.

The next few years in Europe were fruitful ones
for James, as if to prove that he was accurate in his

assessment of the writer's needs. In 1876 Roderick Hudson

 

was published in book form. The following year The

American made its appearance, and The Europeans and French

 

 

Poets and Novelists in 1878. Of course, he was writing a

 

large number of shorter pieces as well--reviews, "letters,"

tales. "Daisy Miller" and Hawthorne came out in 1879.

 

This last work, a marvelous, low-keyed study of the best-
known serious man of American letters, acknowledges James's
debt to Hawthorne. It also provides the opportunity for
James to evaluate from the vantage point of Europe the
benefits and limitations of his native soil for the writer.
James explains the difficulties in a well-known passage.
Hawthorne's work teaches

a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of

art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes

a great deal of history to produce a little litera-

ture, that it needs a complex social machinery to set

a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto

had other things to do than to produce flowers . . . .7
James believes that Hawthorne has achieved a great deal and
that what he has achieved is directly attributable to his

New England roots which do penetrate "a crevice of that

immitigable granite." James explains to his English

readers that while a town such as Salem may seem young to
them it had, for Hawthorne, a sense of the past, limited

as that past might be in comparison to the Old World. For
Hawthorne this was important: ". . . He [Hawthorne] goes
on to say that he has never divested himself of the sense
of intensely belonging to it--that the spell of the contin-
uity of his life with his predecessors has never been

"8

broken. As a man and an artist, James lacked the strong

Puritan heritage and sense of place and past which he sees
motivating and stimulating Hawthorne; hence he could not
have emulated Hawthorne, even had he wished to do so. Hav-
ing spent his formative years in such varied places as
New York City, the continent, Albany, Newport, and Cam-
bridge, James was denied the roots to a place and to an
ancestral past that Hawthorne had inherited. Furthermore,
James notes that Hawthorne's work, perhaps because of the
cultural limitations noted above, lacks a realistic quality
that is of growing importance to himself. Of these cul-
tural limitations, he writes:
. . . One might enumerate the items of high civili-
zation, as it exists in other countries, which are
absent from the texture of American life, until it
should become a wonder to know what was left. No
State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed
barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no
court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church,
no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country
gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor
old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched
cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys,

nor little Norman churches; no great Universities
nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow;

no 1i
no pC
or A:
of t]

'Everyth
indicate
there is
any vari
This lac

what paj

have im]
lesson

heritag
to ch00
for as

just as
the Ame
dEal RC

This be

no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures,
no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom
or Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up
of the absent things in American life--. . . 9

Even the life that Hawthorne led was barren:
"Everything in the Notes [Hawthorne's published notebooks]
indicates a simple, democratic, thinly-composed society;
there is no evidence of the writer finding himself in
any variety or intimacy of relations with anything."10
This lack of a complexity of relationships is, perhaps,
what pained James himself the most.

James's attitudes toward his native land, then,
have important lessons for him as a writer. The first
lesson is the advantage of being without a significant
heritage-~both literary and otherwise. Thus he is free

to choose and synthesize. Indeed, he must synthesize

for as James observes in his Notebooks in November 1881,

 

just as The Portrait of a Lady was appearing in book form,

 

the American writer, unlike his European counterpart, must
deal not only with his own land, but with EurOpe as well.11
This belief is reflected in the themes he chose to treat

in his fiction. It may be seen in the international

aspects of Roderick Hudson, The American, and The Portrait

 

 

 

gf_a Lady, for example. The second lesson is that because
of the paucity of culture in the United States the American
writer must pay the closest attention to external detail.
The second of these lessons has a significant bearing on

the development of his fiction and criticism.

10

Virtually from the beginning of his career, James
had some definite ideas about realism as it was developing
in the practice of his contemporaries and its limitations
in their works. In an early (1865) review of a novel by
Anthony Trollope he writes of the "virtues" of the work,
but clarifies his intention: "We use this term advisedly,
because its virtues are all virtues of detail: the vir-
tues of the photograph. The photograph lacks the supreme
virtue of possessing a character. It is the detail alone
that distinguishes one photograph from another."12 In
choosing to compare this variety of realism to the photo-
graph, James is establishing a distinction that he will
continue to make with ever-increasing force as his art
developed. He sees in such photographic, or surface,
realism some definite problems and limitations if the
art of fiction is to continue to be a significant element
in human affairs. The following year (1866) he again

castigates Trollope, this time for his novel, The Belton

 

Estate. Once more he pays due respect to Trollope's
powers of observation, but writes that he has searched
in vain for anything more. "He [Trollope] is apparently
as incapable of disengaging an idea as of drawing an
inference. All his incidents are, if we may so express

it, empirical. He has seen and heard every act and
"13

 

every speech that appears in his pages. Even James's

friend, William Dean Howells, is not spared on this count

 

but is

eye for
life, w
from ad
Jmess
their e
their i
Howells
the "pr
ever, [
eyes ha
Norton

cated' ‘
than th
tion, J.
him-~rei
Satisfi,
fiction‘
tions t}
for the

HOWell t
out all

c0urts,

Mr‘J'aime
we have 1

11

but is damned with faint praise: "Mr. Howells has an

eye for the small things of nature, of art, and of human
life, which enables him to extract sweetness and profit
from adventures the most prosaic. . . . " 14 Howells and
James shared a rewarding friendship during the years of
their early development as novelists and critics, and yet
their ideals were not always the same. James grieves for
Howells and for the great talent that he sees wasted on
the "prosaic." "He seems to have resolved himself, how-
ever, [into] one who can write solely of what his fleshly
eyes have seen," James confides to his friend Charles
Norton in 1871, "and for this reason I wish he were 'lo-
cated' where they would rest upon richer and fairer things

"15 In offering this solu-

than this immediate landscape.
tion, James can think only of the remedy that worked for
him--removal to Europe. Howells, for his part, is quite
satisfied with the American scene as a source for his
fiction, and is sometimes rather sensitive to any sugges-
tions that the United States provides impoverished fare

for the novelist. In a review entitled "James's Hawthorne"
Howell takes exception to James's notions: "After leaving
out all those novelistic 'properties,‘ as sovereigns,
courts, aristocracy . . . [etc.], by the absence of which
Mr. James suggests our poverty to the English conception,

we have the whole of human life remaining, and a social

structure presenting the only fresh and novel opportunities

12

left to fiction, opportunities manifold and inexhausti-

ble."16

In a subsequent letter to Howells James continues
the disagreement but then soothes Howells' feelings: "I
should say we had just so much less of it ['the whole of
human life'] as these 'paraphernalia' represent, and I
think they represent an enormous quantity of it. . . . I
must add, however (to return for a moment to this), that
I applaud and esteem you highly for not feeling it; i.e.
the want. You are certainly right--magnificently and
heroically right--to do so, and on the day you make your
readers--I mean the readers who know and appreciate the
paraphernalia-—do the same, you will be the American
Balzac."17
A letter that James wrote to his friend Grace
Norton in 1870 contains the kernel of James's objections
to the growing employment of surface realism. More frank
here than he is in published reviews, he bemoans Howells'
treating of "subjects belonging to 13 223i; littérature."
It simply is not worthy of him. "The more I think of it
the more I deprecate the growing tendency--born of the
very desperation of the writer--to transfer directly and
bodily, without any intellectual transmutation, all the
crude accidents of his life as they successfully befall

"18

into the subject matter of literature. Yet later

James praises another aspect of Howells' realism--his

 

character
fictional

national

server 0:
ternal d
a garden
newspape
filled V
and the:
is awar
the air
the nec
0f the
James i
one.
Clear

Printe

l3

characterization. He is especially pleased with Howells'
fictional females who are so real that they have "a
national aroma."19
Let no mistake be made: Henry James is an ob-
server of life, he frequently concerns himself with ex-
ternal details-~a woman's dress, a family's drawing room,
a garden. Often he finds the names for his characters in
newspaper accounts. His Notebooks and his Prefaces are
filled with gossip that he picked up at dinner parties
and then developed into plots for tales and novels. James
is aware of the value of the right realistic detail and
the air of verisimilitude. But he is also cognizant of
the necessity of intellectual and artistic transmutation,
of the role played by the consciousness of the artist.
James was not a photographer and had no desire to become
one. He was a painter, instead. He makes this abundantly

clear in a review of the work of Gustave Flaubert, re-

printed in French Poets and Novelists:

 

 

M. Flaubert's theory as a novelist, briefly expressed,
is to begin on the outside. Human life, we may ima-
gine his saying, is before all things a spectacle, an
occupation and entertainment for the eyes. What our
eyes show us is all that we may be sure of; so with
this we will at any rate begin. As this is infinitely
curious and entertaining, if we know how to look at
it, and as such looking consumes a great deal of time
and space, it is very possible that with this also we
may end. We admit nevertheless that there is some-
thing else, beneath and behind, that belongs to the
realm of vagueness and uncertainty, and into this we
must occassionally dip. It crOps up sometimes irre-
pressibly, and of course we do not positively count
it out. On the whole we will leave it to take care
of itself and let it come off as it may.20

 

 

Milli f! 4!. I, sun's» . . l

 

14

James proceeds to describe the "pictorial," that is the
descriptive element, in Flaubert, especially the "disa-
greeable." Then he concludes, "Realism seems to us with
'Madame Bovary' to have said its last word." What he means
is that this aspect of realism--rendering the outside of
things, especially disagreeable things in the pictorial
mode--has been done well, probably as well as can be done.
James, of course, is interested in pushing beyond the
mere representation of the outside of things, although he
is capable of doing that too; he is more concerned with
that "something else."

Sometimes in the hands of a talented artist sur-
face realism can be made to contribute to a larger end
than the mere mechanical reproduction of detail. And
when this occurs, James is ready to acknowledge the success.
Ivan Turgenev, whose work James admires most highly, is
such a talented artist: " . . . his object is constantly
the same--that of finding an incident, a person, a situa-
tion, morally interesting. This is his great merit, and
the underlying harmony of his apparently excessive atten-

tion to detail."21

Perhaps the major reason that James
regards Turgenev as one of the world's finest writers is
that the Russian surmounts the banality of a profusion of
detail: 'It is life itself,' we murmur as we read, 'and

not this or that story-teller's more or less clever

"arrangement" of life.‘ M. Turgénieff deserves this praise

in its lar
very far i
dents, as
grimly pat
ment of cc
falls Of 1
Ji
dishearte:
calls éni
indecency
are conce
in M. 201
allusions
to be‘rne
it is the
Call thai
tiOn, mi
Sent hat
the hOus
Point:
Real
ls l
his}
Its,
aff:

one

€ij
taci
age

15

in its largest application; for 'life' in his pages is

very far from meaning a dreary liability to sordid acci-
dents, as it seems to mean with those writers of the

grimly pathetic school who cultivate sympathy to the detri-

"22 Thus Turgenev avoids the pit-

ment of comprehension.
falls of the naturalist.

James finds the developing trends of naturalism
disheartening. For instance, he is troubled by what he
calls Emile Zola's "uncleanness" in Nana: "Decency and
indecency, morality and immorality, beauty and ugliness,
are conceptions with which 'naturalism' has nothing to do;
in M. Zola's system these distinctions are void, these
allusions are idle. The only business of naturalism is
to be--natural. . . . " The problem here as James views
it is that all this decadence is not natural: "Does he
call that vision of things of which Nana is a representa-
tion, nature? . . . On what authority does M. Zola repre-
sent nature to us as a combination of the cesspool and
the house of prostitution?" Then James comes to the real
point:

Reality is the object of M. Zola's efforts, and it
is because we agree with him in appreciating it
highly that we protest against its being discred-
ited. . . . The real has not a single shade more
affinity with an unclean vessel than with a clean
one, and M. Zola's system, carried to its utmost
expression, can dispense as little with taste and

tact as the floweriest mannerism of a less analytic
age.

16

George Eliot also falls victim to James's critical

wrath: " . . . Middlemarch is too often an echo of

 

Messrs. Darwin and Huxley." He complains of the many

discursive passages in which Eliot seems anxious "to

recommend herself to a scientific audience."24
James has warned against surface realism with its

emphasis on the exterior of life. The excesses of natural-

ism are the results of his warnings going unheeded, in

that surface realism may be seen as leading almost in-

evitably to the indecent and unnatural, as in Zola, and

heavy-handed determinism, as in Eliot. These results

lead away from the variety of realism that James found

most valuable as both a reader and a writer of fiction

and ignore the treatment of the "morally interesting"

that he prized as such a valuable attribute of the works

of Turgenev.

It is in a deeper variety of realism that James
sees great possibilities for the treatment of moral truth.
The task of the realist is not an easy one, as he points
out in a review of Alexandre Dumas' novel, Affaire

Clémenceau: "To be completely great a work of art must

 

lift up the reader's heart; and it is the artist's secret
to reconcile this condition with images of the barest and
sternest reality."25 This double responsibility of the

novelist is not easily or often met. James does discover

in that old
seeks but 1
their sons
James is p
their inte
than the n
face OCCU]
that, he 4
his way, i
T

Chology a
instead 6
In 1880 1
real hum.
This
arti
[the

are
haVe
Perc

the
Wor}

thos

reat
l“Ga.

are Sub
for his
James I
Value c

Subjecy

17

in that old romantic, Hawthorne, a quality that he often
seeks but cannot find in his contemporaries, despite
their concern with "real life." Of Hawthorne's tales,
James is pleased to report that "They are moral, and
their interest is moral; they deal with something more
than the mere accidents and conventionalities, the sur-
face occurences of life. The fine thing in Hawthorne is
that, he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in
his way, he tried to become familiar with it."26
The naturalists often overlook this deeper psy-
chology and the moral truth available to it, and rely
instead entirely on empirical truth, according to James.
In 1880 he criticizes Zola (in Nana) for not creating
real human beings:
This is what saves us in England, in spite of our
artistic levity and the presence of the young ladies
[the typical readers of novels]--this fact that we
are by disposition better psychologists, that we
have, as a general thing, a deeper, more delicate
perception of the play of character and the state of
the soul. This is what often gives an interest to
works conceived on a much narrower program than
those of M. Zola--makes them more touching and more
real, although the apparatus and the machinery of
reality may, superficially, appear to be wanting. 7
The "play of character and the state of the soul"
are subjects worthy of the artist's attention and it is
for his treatment of the "morally interesting" that
James recommends Turgenev. "He believes in the intrinsic

value of 'subject' in art; he holds that there are trivial

subjects and serious ones, that the latter are much the

18

best, and that their superiority resides in giving us
absolutely a greater amount of information about the
human mind."28
James does not insist on strict adherence to any
given moral code. He does not ask that works of fiction
become object lessons in conduct for the middle class.
His open-mindedness is made abundantly clear in an obser-
vation on the works of Balzac: "He had no natural sense
of morality, and this we cannot help thinking a serious
fault in a novelist. Be the morality false or true, the
writer's deference to it greets us as a kind of essential

n29

perfume. This open-mindedness is even better shown

in James's attitude toward Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

 

According to James, the novel was actually prosecuted for
immorality but subsequently acquitted. Although he
finds limitations in Flaubert's style of realism, he de-
fends the work in the final analysis for an interesting
reason: "Every out-and-out realist who provokes serious
meditation may claim that he is a moralist; for that,
after all, is the most that the moralists can do for us.
They sow the seeds of virtue; they can hardly pretend to
raise the crop."30
It seems strange that contemporary critics so
frequently point to Henry James as an example of the man
who lived for art and who was concerned with form more

than substance. James himself would deny such character-

izations. He believed that art could not be divorced from

life and t
he points
Sportsman'
contains 1
who are fl
art.‘ It
a sense t
James was
relations
1
comments
0f the i
0f ficti
art. In
for the
1909: JE
the Wrii
Rec.
Of .
ans!
W01-
50m
The
tru
deg

on
it_

James lE

19

life and that form and substance were inextricable, as
he points out in a comment on Turgenev's "The Memoirs of a
Sportsman": "It would be difficult to name a work that
contains better instructions for those heated spirits
who are fond of taking sides on the question of 'art for
art.‘ It offers a capital example of moral meaning giving
a sense to form and form giving relief to moral meaning."31
James was to devote a good deal of concentration to this
relationship in his own work.

More than thirty years after he penned those
comments on Turgenev, he once more considers the question
of the integral relationships of the elements in a work

of fiction and the place of the moral sense in a work of

art. In the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, written

 

for the collected "New York Edition" of his works in 1907-
1909, James codifies what has been his life's practice in
the writing of fiction:

Recognizing so promptly the one measure of the worth
of a given subject, the question that, rightly
answered, disposes of all others--is it valid, in a
word, is it genuine, is it sincere, the result of
some direct impression or perception of life? . . .
There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive
truth in this connexion than that of the perfect
dependence of the 'moral' sense of a work of art

on gge amount of felt life concerned in producing
it.

This statement clarifies what James believed to
be the real relationship between realism and moral value.

James's brand of realism was to be based to a large extent

upon this i
of a work

moral me ar

T
his works
to the de
own art.
tually f1
1866 rev;
its ince
of the f
thinge.
Of what
fEEbleni
niZed e.

to be C

benefit
book. a
relishE
which t
mere ré
reaSOnE
that J5

and "SC

20

upon this notion of the importance of the "felt life"
of a work of art as well as the belief that form and

moral meaning were mutually dependent.

The several ways in which James sought to infuse
his works with this "felt life" are of great significance
to the development of one stream of realism and of his
own art. He had a good sense of what was involved vir-
tually from the beginning of his writing career. His
1866 review article of the works of George Eliot shows
its inception: "Her observation, I think, is decidedly
of the feminine kind: it deals, in preference, with small
things. This fact may be held to explain the excellence
of what I have called her pictures, and the comparative
feebleness of her dramatic movement."33 Thus James recog-
nized early the value of dramatization, of what has come
to be called showing rather than telling.

In 1873 James advises Howells in a letter of the
benefits of dramatization. He refers to Howells' latest

book, A_Chance Acquaintance: "Your fifth part I extremely

 

 

relished; it was admirably touched. I wished the talk in
which the offer was made had been given (instead of the
mere résumé), but I suppose you had good and sufficient

d."34 This is the distinction

reasons for doing as you di
that James was to make between what he called "picture"

and "scene." Simply stated, in a "picture" the assumed

author or r
and the ac1
haps after
he the "ré:
hand is a i
rectly at ‘
James is C
talk in wh
Actually t
later disc
clarificat

Chalpter Of

21

author or narrator interposes himself between the reader
and the action and reports that action to the reader, per-
haps after it has taken place. An example of this would
be the "résumé" that Howells uses. A "scene" on the other
hand is a dramatic occurence with the reader looking di-
rectly at the action. It is scene or dramatization that
James is calling for when he tells Howells, "I wished the
talk in which the offer was made had been given . . . ."
Actually these distinctions are over-simplified; James
later discovered a method of dramatizing picture, but a
clarification of this modification must wait until another
chapter of this study.

James notes that Turgenev is often saved from
dullness by his use of dramatic form. Of Turgenev's
"Helene," which James regards as one of his most success-
ful tales, James writes: "The scene, the figures, are as
present to us as if we saw them ordered and moving on a
lamp-lit stage; and yet, as we recall it, the drama seems
all pervaded and colored by the light of the moral world."
James finds evidence here in Turgenev of the possibility
of combining dramatic presentation and moral truth. It
is not necessary to use a narrator's résumé to imbue the
work with a moral tone; this can be lent with greater cre-
dence dramatically. James continues on the subject of
Turgenev's skill: "Everything with him takes the dramatic

form; he is apparently unable to conceive anything

independe:
ideas; an
ual. . .

I
in his Oi
iculty i.
letter w
his prob
fault 0:
being t
dramati
writing
comPlaj
Want 0:

marria

22

independently of it, he has no recognition of unembodied

ideas; an idea with him is such and such an individ-

ual . . . ."35
Although James had striven toward dramatization

in his own work for several years, he sometimes had diff-

iculty in actually achieving the ideal. Leon Edel cites a

letter written in the summer of 1874 that sheds light on

his problems of composition. James was at work on

Roderick Hudson when he wrote to Mrs. Sarah Wister: "The

 

fault of the story, I am pretty sure, will be in its
being too analytical and psychological, and not sufficiently
dramatic and eventful . . . ."36 Again in 1880 when he was

writing The Portrait g£_a Lady for serial publication, he

 

complains to himself in the Notebooks: "There has been a

 

want of action in the earlier part leading up to Isabel's
marriage, and it may be made up here." James had been

writing and publishing The Portrait g£_a Lady in install-

 

ments, so that it began to appear in the Atlantic before

 

he had finished writing it. When he says that the short-
coming "may be made up here," he means in the second half
of the work. He continues: "The weakness of the whole
story is that it is too exclusively psychological--that

it depends too little on incident; but the complete un-
folding of the situation that is established by Isabel's
"37

marriage may nonetheless be quite sufficiently dramatic.

The idea of dramatizing is one that remained with James

23

throughout his creative lifetime. It, probably as much
as the lure of financial rewards, led him to work in the
theatre later in his career.

Still a second way of instilling a sense of "felt
life" is through characterization. Dramatization and
characterization are closely related as James points out
in a discussion of Hawthorne's treatment of character in

The House of the Seven Gables: " . . . Hepzibah Pyncheon

 

 

is a masterly picture. I repeat that she is a picture,
as her companions are pictures; she is a charming piece
of descriptive writing, rather than a dramatic exhibi-

"38 Although James admires Hawthorne's insight into

tion.
character and study of the "deeper psychology," he believes
that Hawthorne fails in the dramatization of the people he
creates.

Once more it is Turgenev who masters the problem.
James admires Turgenev's "portraits" which "have each
something special, something peculiar, something that
none of their neighbors have, and that rescues them from
the limbo of the gracefully general." James also notes
the Russian's "preference for a theme which takes its

"39 This approach is so much

starting-point in character.
like his own that it is no wonder that James feels him to
be a kindred spirit. As James points out several times
in the Prefaces, the Letters, and the Notebooks, his

"germ" for a work is often a character. In the Preface

to 1313 35
here, fOl
have con:
nefarious
single cl
lar enga.
of a 'su]
super-ad.
with. I
his work

life tha

the role
simply b
Although
questior
at 19asi
Called 1
of Jame:
Um tel
Dickens
Passi0n
tation

Superio
underSt

follOwe

24

to The Portrait 9; a Lady, he explains: "Trying to recover

 

here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see it must
have consisted not at all in any conceit of a 'plot,'
nefarious name, . . . but altogether in the sense of a
single character, the character and aspect of a particu-
lar engaging young woman, to which all the usual elements
of a 'subject,’ certainly of a setting, were to need to be
super-added."40 Thus it is character that James begins
with. It is also character that he dramatizes to give to
his work the air of realism, the moral sense, and the felt
life that he so earnestly seeks.

A third part of his program of realism involves
the roles of the author, the assumed author (who may
simply be an unidentified narrator), and the narrator.
Although the chapters which follow will deal with this
question in detail, it seems advisable to discuss it here,
at least briefly. For want of a better name, it might be
called the principle of the disinterested observer. One
of James's first formulations concerning the position of
the teller of the tale was written in 1865 in a review of
Dickens' work: "A story based upon those elementary
passions in which alone we seek the true and final manifes-
tation of character must be told in a spirit of intellectual
superiority to those passions. That is the author must

.41

understand what he is talking about.‘ In the years that

followed James refined this principle. In an 1875 review

he writes
senting t
zation Of
experienc
manner .

of disin'

above ab
he himse
William
Which he

Howells

/

52
:3‘
(D
H

[a

In

Old
and
con

his
Per
Pre
S tc
noi
thi
We:
thi
ab<

By the
Years

PreSeh
to Cri

Enslis

25

he writes of Balzac: "His strength was to lie in repre-
senting the innumerable actual facts of the French civili-
zation of his day--things only to be learned by patient
experience. . . . [But] The great general defect of his
manner . . . is the absence of fresh air, of the trace
of disinterested observation . . ."42
How peculiar it seems, then, given James's remarks
above about the value of the disinterested observer, that
he himself is taken to task by his friend and critic,
William Dean Howells, for committing the same crime for

which he convicts Balzac. It is 1875, the same year, that

Howells writes in his review of A Passionate Pilgrim and

 

Other Tales:

 

In the whole course of the story ["A Romance of Certain
Old Clothes"] nothing is urged, nothing is dwelt upon;
and all our story-tellers, including Mr. James himself,
could profitably take a lesson from it in this respect.
At other times he has a tendency to expatiate upon

his characters too much, and not to trust his reader's
perception enough. For the sake of a more dramatic
presentation of his persons, he has told most of the
stories in this book as things falling within the
notice of the assumed narrator; an excellent device;
though it would be better if the assumed narrator

were able to keep himself from seeming to patronize

the simpler-hearted heroes, and from openly rising
above them in a worldly way.43

By the time he published Criticism and Fiction sixteen

 

years later, Howells was certain of the value of dramatic
presentation and a self-effacing author. He finds grounds
to criticize Balzac, Trollope, and virtually all of

English criticism for employing and condoning the intrusive

author 1‘
however,

tizing t

suffici
interes
more ef
this wc
izatioz

lects

develc
him w:‘
the 1
Of pe
with
matic
with
Skiri
rest1
ical
intO
ins .
tice
the

and

26

author in works of fiction. Nowhere in that volume,
however, does he feel the necessity of once more chas-
tizing Henry James for that lapse.44

At this point in this study it will perhaps be
sufficient to state that the use of the principle of dis-
interested observation enables the writer to dramatize
more effectively and more often. The precise way in which
this works and its reciprocal relationship with character-
ization, a moral sense, and felt life--these are the sub-
jects of the chapters that follow.

During the years between 1864 and 1881 Henry James
developed an approach to realistic expression that provided
him with a method of treating life as he experienced it,
the life that throbs beneath the surface appearances--
of people and their relationships with one another and
with their own souls. This approach is essentially prag-
matic, thus avoiding the hazards of doctrinaire realism,
with its empirical focus on the exterior of life, while
skirting the pitfalls of literary naturalism, with its
restrictions of human freedom through a belief in biolog-
ical and social determinism. His realism never degenerates
into photography; his morality never escalates into preach-
ing. He is saved from both dangers by putting into prac-
tice his theory of realistic expression, which relies on
the introduction of characters of depth and moral interest

and the use of those characters dramatically, letting

Be reads
working c
flat Jami
that he I

In e
and
much
ill,
the
make
the
make
a se
the
pro

27

the reader see the character in situations and hear him
working out his own life. It is by means of this approach
that James was able to penetrate to the heart of a secret
that he discovered at the very beginning of his career:
In every novel the work is divided between the writer
and the reader; but the writer makes the reader very
much as he makes his characters. When he makes him
ill, that is makes him different, he does no work;
the writer does all. When he makes him well, that is,
makes him interested, then the reader does quite half
the labour. . . . The grand point is to get him to
make it. I hold that there is a way. It is perhaps
a secret; but until it is found out, I think that
the art of story-telling cannot be said to have ap-
proached perfection.45
The single technique that James developed that
enabled him to fully realize these three qualities of
dramatization, characterization, and disinterested ob-
servation was the technique of the central intelligence
or centre of consciousness. It was the development of
this approach that freed him from the limitations of the
old romances, the newer surface realism, and the newest
naturalism; it is this method that characterizes his own
special variety of realistic expression. Through the
employment of the centre of consciousness as the dominant
focus of his works, James was able to explore new depths
of the human mind formerly inaccessible to the novelist

and to transform the more-or-less ordinary relationships

between people into the stuff of drama.

PP- 51-

(New Yc

1870-1i

m

(New h

NOTES TO CHAPTER I

1Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1955),

 

pp. 51-52.

2The Art Of The Novel, ed. Richard P. Blackmur

 

(New York, 1934), pp. 194-195.

3Leon Edel, Henrnyames: The Conquest of London,

 

1870-1881 (Philadelphia, 1962), p. 37.

 

4"Howells's A Foregone Conclusion," Literary Eg-

 

views and Essays 92_American, English and French Litera-

 

ture, ed. Albert Mordell (New York, 1957), p. 214.

5Edel, Conquest g£_London, pp. 197-199.

6"Honoré de Balzac," French Poets and Novelists

(New York, 1964), p. 86.

7
Hawthorne (Garden City, N.Y., n.d.), p. 10.

 

8Hawthorne, p. 19.

 

9Hawthorne, p. 43.

 

loHawthorne, p. 44.

 

llThe Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen

 

 

and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1961), p. 24.

28

12

Mass., 192

130-131.

and Essay
——~;

(New Yorj

(New YOI

Revi
w

p. 217.

29

12"Miss MacKenzie," Notes and Reviews (Cambridge,

 

Mass., 1921), p. 74.

"The Belton Estate," Notes and Reviews, pp.

 

130-131.

4 . . . .
"Howells's Italian Journies," Literary Rev1ews

 

and Essays, p. 198.

 

lsggggggg of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock

 

(New York, 1920), I, p. 30.

l6"James's Hawthorne," Discovery 2:,3 Genius:

 

William Dean Howells and Henrerames, ed. Albert Mordell

 

(New York, 1961), p. 96.

17EEEEE£§ 2: Henry James, 1: PP- 72‘73-

 

18Cited by Leon Edel, Conquest gbeondon, p. 23.

19"Howells's A Foregone Conclusion," Literary

 

Reviews and Essays, p. 211.

 

20"Charles de Bernard and Gustave Flaubert,"

French Poets and Novelists, pp. 201-202.

 

21"Ivan Turgénieff," French Poets and Novelists,

 

p. 217.

22"Ivan Turgénieff," p. 222.

3O

3"Nana," The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel

 

 

(New York, 1956), pp. 91, 92, 93.

4
"George Eliot's 'Middlemarch,'" The Future of the

 

Novel, p. 89.

25 .
"The Last French Novel," Notes and Rev1ews,

 

 

pp. 225-226.

26Hawthorne, p. 59.

 

27"Nana," The Future of the Novel, p. 96.

 

 

28"Ivan Turgénieff," French Poets and Novelists.

 

p. 217.

"Honoré de Balzac," French Poets and Novelists,

 

p. 89.

30
"Charles de Bernard and Gustave Flaubert,"

French Poets and Novelists, p. 201.

 

l , . .
"Ivan Turgenieff," French Poets and Novelists,

 

p. 221.

32The Art of the Novel, p. 45.

 

33"The Novels of George Eliot," Views and EEI

 

views (Boston, 1908), p. 26.

34
Letters cf Henry James, I, p. 34.

 

31

35"Ivan Turgénieff," French Poets and Novelists,

 

 

p. 224.

6
The Conquest of London, p. 170.

 

37The Notebooks of Henry James, p. 15.

 

 

38Hawthorne, p. 108.

 

39uIvan Turgénieff," French Poets and Novelists,

 

 

pp. 213,223.

40The Art of the Novel, p. 42.

 

41"The Limitations of Dickens," Views and Reviews,

 

 

p. 161.

2 .
"Honoré de Balzac," French Poets and Novelists,

 

"Recent Literature: James's Passionate Pilgrim

and Other Tales," Atlantic Monthly, XXXV (April 1875), 494.

 

44(Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 19-20, 75-77.

45"The Novels of George Eliot," Views and Reviews,

 

 

CHAPTER II

"FELT LIFE" AND THE OBJECTIVE METHOD

Perhaps the major way that James chose to imbue his
works with that sense of "felt life" that he believed to
be so important is what has come to be called the indirect
approach or, as James believed and Welleck and Warren sug-
gest, the objective method. This method also enabled him
to overcome those shortcomings of which Howells complained
in l875--of expatiating "upon his characters too much" and
not trusting his "reader's perception enough." As James
developed and refined this indirect approach, it enabled
him to solve some of the most serious of technical problems:
the author's relations to the work and to his audience, the
audience's relations to the work, techniques of revelation
and presentation, and the selection and treatment of real-
istic subjects.

The aim of the indirect approach is "to make the
presented occasion tell all the story itself . . . ." James
liked to think of this method as objective: "This objec-
tivity, . . . when achieving its ideal, came from the im-
posed absence of that 'going behind,‘ to compass explana-

tions and amplifications, to drag out odds and ends from

32

33

the 'mere' storyteller's great property-shop of aids to
illusion . . . ."1 This approach seeks to make the narrator
less obtrusive in his treatment of character and in his
position before the reader by becoming something of a dis-
interested observer, to enlist the reader in actively aid-
ing in the creative synthesis, and to present the felt life
of personal relationships and inner experience in a real-
istic fashion.

Richard P. Blackmur, in his introduction to the
collected Prefaces, describes the indirect approach:
"The characterizing aspect of the Indirect Approach is
this: The existence of a definite created sensibility
[the centre of consciousness] interposed between the
reader and the felt experience which is the subject of the
fiction. James never put his reader in direct contact
with his subjects; he believed that it was impossible to
do so, because his subject was not what happened but what
someone felt about what happened and this could be directly

known only through an intermediate intelligence" (The Art

of the Novel, xvii-xviii). Although it may be quibbling,

 

it would seem that actually the reader is in direct contact

with the subject, at least in such a work as The Ambassadors,

 

because the subject often is the sensibility of that "inter-
mediate intelligence." This objection may become clearer
in a later discussion of James's meaning and use of "cen-

tres." Blackmur concludes his description of the indirect

34

approach: "The Dramatic Scene was the principal device
James used to objectify the Indirect Approach and give

it self-limiting form" (The Art of the Novel, xviii).

 

But as René Welleck and Austin Warren explain:

The objective method must not be thought of as limited
to dialogue and reported behavior. . . . Such limita-
tions would bring it into direct and unequal rivalry
with the theatre. Its triumphs have been in the pres-
entation of that psychic life which the theatre can
handle but awkwardly. Its essentials are the voluntary
absence from the novel of the 'omniscient novelist'
and, instead, the presence of a controlled 'point

of view.‘ James and [Percy] Lubbock see the novel as
giving us, in turn, 'picture' and 'drama,' by which
they mean some character's consciousness of what is
going on (within and without) in distinction from a
'scene,‘ which is partly at least in dialogue and
which presents, in some detail, an important episode
or encounter. The 'picture' is as objective as the
'drama,' only it is the objective rendering of a spe-
cific subjectivity--that of one of the characters
(Madame Bovary, or Strether), while the 'drama' is

the objective rendering of speech and behavior.2

Lubbock makes the distinction between the pictorial
method and the dramatic method as a matter of the relation-
ship of author, audience, and work: " . . . in one case
[the pictorial] the reader faces towards the story-teller
and listens to him, in the other [the dramatic] he turns
toward the story and watches it."3 Lubbock prefers the

self-effacing narrator and his work; The Craft of Fiction

 

is a tribute to that species of narrator, especially in
James. He takes writers like Thackery to task for their
intrusions. "There is nothing more disconcerting in a

novel," he writes, "than to see the writer changing his

35

part in this way--throwing off the character into which

he has been projecting himself and taking a new stand

outside and away from the story."4

A more recent critic, Wayne Booth, seeks to
correct what he believes is Lubbock's undue emphasis on
the disappearance of the narrator: "James's interest in
realism never led him to the notion that all signs of the
author's presence are inartistic. . . . His interest is
not negative-~how to get rid of the author--but positive:
how to achieve an intense illusion of reality, including
the complexities of mental and moral reality."5

Henry James himself had something to say in this
dispute. The statement is lengthy but it seems worth re-
producing here, not only for the light it sheds on the
question of the disappearance of the narrator, but also
for its illumination of James's notion of the indirect
approach. It is taken from the Preface to The Golden Bowl:

Among many matters thrown into relief by a re-
freshed acquaintance with "The Golden Bowl" what per-
haps most stands out for me is the still marked in-
veteracy of a certain indirect and oblique View of
my presented action; unless indeed I make up my mind
to call this mode of treatment, on the contrary, any
superficial appearance notwithstanding, the very
straightest and closest possible. I have already be-
trayed, as an accepted habit, and even to extravagance
commented on, my preference for dealing with my
subject-matter, for "seeing my story," through the
opportunity and the sensibility of some more or less
detached, some not strictly involved, though tho-
roughly interested and intelligent, witness or re-
porter, some person who contributes to the case
mainly a certain amount of criticism and interpreta-
tion of it. Again and again, on review, the shorter

36

things in especial that I have gathered into this
Series have ranged themselves not as my own imper-
sonal account of the affair in hand, but as my
account of somebody's impression of it--the terms

of this person's access to it and estimate of it
contributing thus by some fine little law to intens-
ification of interest. . . . My instinct appears re-
peatedly to have been that to arrive at the facts
retailed and the figures introduced by the given
help of some other conscious and confessed agent is
essentially to find the whole business--that is, as
I say, its effective interest--enriched by thg_way,
I have in other words constantly inclined to the
idea of the particular attaching case plus some near
individual View of it; that nearness quite having
thus to become an imagined observer's, a projected,
charmed painter's or poet's--however avowed the
"minor" quality in the latter--close and sensitive
contact with it. Anything, in short, I now reflect,
must always have seemed to me better--better for the
process and the effect of representation, my irre-
pressible ideal--than the mere muffled majesty of
irresponsible "authorship." (Thg_A£t of the Novel,
pp. 327-28)

With this passage in mind it would appear that
neither Lubbock nor Booth is entirely correct and that
the truth must lie somewhere between their positions.
The disappearance of the narrator i§_important to James's
conception of the indirect approach, but it is only one
aspect of that approach. It is probably best characterized
as one means to the end of "an intense illusion of reality."
Regardless of whether the problem be attacked from the
view of technique or from the view of effect, one thing
is clear-~that at the very heart of the indirect approach
is the centre of consciousness, which actually subsumes

both views for it may be at the same time a technical de-

vice and a subject.

37

The centre of consciousness, then, is to play a
large role in the evolution of James's indirect approach.
The term, centre, by itself is often used in two related
but confusing senses, both by James and by his critics.
The first use of the term is the broader of the two.

In his Preface to Roderick Hudson he describes this first

 

kind of centre: "It [the novel] remains in equilibrium

by having found its centre, the point of command of all
the rest. From this centre the subject has been treated,
from this centre the interest has spread, and so, whatever
else it may do or not do, the thing has acknowledged a
principle of composition and contrives at least to hang

together" (The Art 9f the Novel, p. 15). The centre in

 

this sense may be called the commanding centre. It is the

point d'appui which is, at the same time, the subject or

 

matter to be treated.
R. P. Blackmur in his introduction to The Art 9;

the Novel discusses the commanding centre as a principle

 

of composition: "The whole question is bound up with
James's exceeding conviction that the art of fiction is
an organic form, and that it can neither be looked at
all round nor will it be able to move on its own account
unless it has a solidly posed centre" (xxiii). This

commanding centre may be inanimate, as in The Spoils of

 

Poynton, which is concerned with the struggle of a mother

and her son for possession of a collection of fine furniture

38

and works of art. In the Preface to this short novel,
James relates how he began with the conception of the
spoils themselves, the furniture, as the commanding
centre: "The real centre, as I say, the citadel of inter-
est, with the fight waged round it, would have been the
felt beauty and value of the prize of the battle, the
Things, always the splendid Things, placed in the middle
light, figured and constituted, with each identity made
vivid, each character discriminated, and their common con-
sciousness of their great dramatic part established."

But these things, of course, are not directly articulate,
and while they could be the objects of a fiction, they
could not be the subjects, the movers. And so, as James
puts it, Fleda Vetch "marked her place in my foreground

at one ingratiating stroke. She planted herself centrally,
and the stroke . . . was the simple act of letting it be

seen she had character" (The Art of the Novel, pp. 126-127).

 

Most frequently in James's longer works, the
commanding centre is a character. He had earlier observed
in the works of Turgenev, whom he regarded as one of the
masters, a deep and humane concern for mankind. James
notes that the Russian "believes in the intrinsic value of
'subject' in art; he holds that there are trivial subjects
and serious ones, that the latter are much the best, and
that their superiority resides in their giving us abso-

lutely a greater amount of information about the human

39

mind."6 For James, too, information about the human mind

came to assume an ever-increasing importance as his art
developed. He makes another telling comparison between
his own method and Turgenev's by noting that the Russian
almost always began with the idea of a character "who
hovered before him, soliciting him." "I was myself,"
James continues, "so much more antecedently conscious of
my figures than of their setting"--or plot, it might be

added (The Art of the Novel, pp. 42-44). The Notebooks

 

and the Prefaces are full of accounts of what James calls
his "germs," the seeds of ideas that were to grow in due
time into the tales and the novels. Perhaps one of the
most interesting and instructive of such accounts is that

of the germ for The Portrait gfya Lady, which James recol-

 

 

lects in the Preface to that work. According to James,
Isabel Archer sprang full blown into his awareness. He
had his corner-stone or, to put it another way, his com-
manding centre. Often this was the case with James--a
character would appear to him or be suggested in an anec-
dote recounted by a dinner partner.

The fact that James more often than not began
with the germ of a character, rather than a plot, that
he was more interested in a person's reactions to external
events than in those events themselves, led him to the
development of a special kind of commanding centre--the

centre of consciousness. This second use of the term

40

"centre" grows out of the first. If the commanding centre
is a compositional hub as well as a subject, the centre of
consciousness is, or at least may be, a particular kind of
commanding centre which performs special functions. These
special functions will be treated at length in the next
chapter. The present object is to define the centre of
consciousness, to examine the kind of character called for
to fulfill that role, and to explore briefly a few other
related elements of the indirect approach such as the
ficelle, the confidant, and the register.

The center of consciousness is the mind and aware-
ness of a character which functions as the focal point
of the fiction. Sometimes called the central intelligence,
it is the point of view from which the story is told.
What the character sees and hears, what he feels, his con-
fusions and illuminations, these are what the reader is
shown. The author as narrator remains mostly out of the
sight and the hearing of the reader. Although James wrote
very little in his Notebooks and letters about this method
during the early years of its development, he was to treat
it extensively in the Prefaces, written for the collected
New York Edition of his works (1907-1909). To a certain
extent he attributes, especially to the earlier works, a
more strongly controlled central consciousness than they
actually have. He seems at times to be treating them in

the light of a fully-developed indirect approach which was

41

in the years of Roderick Hudson, The American, and The

 

 

Portrait 9i 2 Lady (1875-1881) just evolving. At any

 

rate, what he has to say in those Prefaces is valuable in
understanding his final conception of the centre of con-
sciousness as well as in evaluating his growing skill in

its use. In the Preface to Roderick Hudson he describes

 

the role of the central consciousness, Rowland Mallet:

. . . But as what happened to him was above all to

feel certain things happening to others, to Roderick,

To Christina, to Mary Garland, to Mrs. Hudson, to

the Cavaliere, to the Prince, so the beauty of the
constructional game was to preserve in everything

its especial value for him (The Art hi the Novel, p. 16).

 

 

His next major work was The American. Of its centre of

 

 

consciousness, Christopher Newman, James writes:

If Newman was attaching enough, I must have argued,
his tangle would be sensible enough; for the interest
of everything is all that it is hig vision, his con-
ception, hi5 interpretation: at the window Of-his
wide, quite sufficiently wide, consciousness we are
seated, from that admirable position we "assist."

He therefore supremely matters; all the rest matters
only as he feels it, treats it, meets it (2E§.§£E.2£
the Novel, p. 37).

 

James's comments about Isabel Archer in the Preface to

The Portrait 9i 2 Lady show the relationship of the

 

commanding centre and the centre of consciousness:

"Place the centre of the subject in the young
woman's own consciousness," I said to myself,

"and you get as interesting and as beautiful a
difficulty as you could wish. Stick to that--

for the centre; put the heaviest weight into

that scale, which will be so largely the scale

of her relation to herself" (The Art of the Novel,
p. 51 .

42

Because of his success in accomplishing this goal of
placing the centre of the subject in Isabel Archer's con-
sciousness, James believed this novel to be "the most pro-
portioned of his productions after 'The Ambassadors'--which
was to follow it so many years later and which has, no

doubt, a superior roundness" (The Art hi the Novel, p. 52).

 

Each of the preceding passages proclaims the
ideal toward which James was working in his development of
the centre of consciousness. In none of these early novels,

with the possible exception of The Portrait 2£.3 Lady, does

 

he completely fulfill these aims. As he indicates in the

Preface to the The Portrait 23.2 Lady, ideally, the centre

 

of consciousness and the commanding centre are the same
in any given work. It seems that James's art reaches
its highest level when he accomplishes a fusion of these
elements. The work in which this occurs most perfectly

and most profoundly is probably The Ambassadors, which is

 

undoubtedly one of the reasons that he considered that
novel to have "a superior roundness." Wayne Booth in

The Rhetoric 9i Fiction describes the unity of centre of

 

consciousness and subject (or commanding centre) in much

of James's best fiction as a "seamless web of observation
and experience." He asserts rightly: " . . . We tell our-
selves that the old-fashioned question, 'Who is the pro-
tagonist?‘ is a meaningless one. The convincing texture

of the whole, the impression of life as experienced by an

43

observer, is itself surely what the true artist seeks."
Sometimes this unity can create problems, however, if the
fusion is imperfectly made, resulting in "a double focus
that seems to spring from an incomplete fusion of original
subject with the new subject that develops once a seriously
flawed narrator has been created to reflect the original."7
Often, however, the problem is less one of incomplete

fusion than one of distance and reliability (as in The

Sacred Fount or "The Turn of the Screw").

 

It was stated earlier that as James's theory of
fiction matured he tended more and more to emphasize not
a series of external events (for so long the pattern of
narrative), but rather a character's view of those events.
In a notebook entry made in 1879, for example, James re-
cords an idea for "A story told in letters written alter-
nately by a mother and her daughter and giving totally
different accounts of the same situation."8 Although the
epistolary form had been employed many times before,
James's interest in it was as another experiment in the
indirect approach and in a method of focussing on the
characters' views of their experiences.

The difference between James's indirect approach
featuring a central intelligence and other modes of narr-
ation is one of kind, not of degree. Percy Lubbock, one
of James's earliest critics points out that with the in-

direct approach " . . . all the picture of life is still

flififlfiivflflg Eflilf
p

44

rendered in the hero's terms. But the difference is that
instead of receiving his report we now see him in the act
of judging and reflecting; his consciousness, no longer
a matter of hearsay [as with the intrusive, omniscient
narrator], a matter for which we must take his word [as
with the first person narrator] is now before us in its
original agitation. , . . A distinction is made between
the scene which the man surveys, and the energy within him
which converts it into the stuff of his own being."9 What
James created and perfected is a new point of view for the
novel.

In the years that followed the popular success of
"Daisy Miller" in 1879, there were many readers who came to
feel that James's fiction, by its increasing stress on con-
sciousness and awareness, was losing interest and excite-
ment. James was aware of this growing disaffection. To
those readers who, for the sake of "the economy of interest,"
say give us the experience, the doings, and omit the feel-
ings, James would plead " . . . the unreality of the sharp
distinction, where the interest of observation is at stake,
between doing and feeling." He justifies his attitude
thusly: "What a man thinks and what he feels are the
history and the character of what he does; on all of
which things the logic of intensity rests. Without inten-
sity where is vividness, and without vividness where is

presentability?" (The Art hi the Novel, pp. 64, 65, 66).

 

45

This belief is at the heart of James's method and his
selection of subjects and centres. It is, in fact, his
rationale for the use of the centre of consciousness.
The matter of the kind of character required to
satisfy the heavy demands of a central intelligence was
one to which James gave careful thought. It is in the

Preface to The Princess Casamassima that he observes

 

that " . . . the figures in any picture, the agents in
any drama, are interesting only in proportion as they
feel their respective situations; since the consciousness,
on their part, of the complication exhibited forms for

us their link of connexion with it." Thus it is "the
acute, the intense, the complete" who " 'get the most'
out of all that happens to them and who in so doing en-
able us, as readers of their record, as participators by
a fond attention, also to get the most." The success

of this method depends completely on what James called
the register. The register is a record, like a hotel
register, a record, in this case, of impressions made
upon a character's consciousness. It is not sufficient
for the centre of consciousness to show emotional re-
sponses to his situation; a fairly high degree of in-
telligence and articulateness is also called for. "The
interest of the attitude and the act would be the actor's
imagination and vision of them, together with the nature
and degree of their felt return upon him. So the intell-

igent creature would be required and so some picture of

46

his intelligence would be involved." (The Art hi the Novel,

 

pp. 62, 63). Awareness, intensity, acuteness, intelli-
gence, and articulateness--these are the qualities a char-
acter must have to bear the burden of the central con-
sciousness of one of James's fictions.

One may ask, what of the other kinds of characters
that have populated imaginative literature since its be-
ginnings? They, too, have their places still. James ac-
knowledges the human value even of "fools" in literature.
But he must draw a line: "At the same time I confess I
never see the leading interest of any human hazard but in
a consciousness (on the part of the moved and moving crea-
ture) subject to fine intensification and wide enlargement."
Even fools then might be used in a novel but not as a cen-
tre of consciousness. The fool would, instead, be mir-
rored in that consciousness. "This means, exactly, that
the person capable of feeling in the given case more than
another of what is to be felt for it, and so serving in
the highest degree to record it so dramatically and objec-
tively, is the only sort of person on whom we can count
not to betray, to cheapen or, as we say, give away, the

value and beauty of the thing" (The Art hi the Novel,

 

p. 67). James also explains why he does not employ such
majestically heroic figures as Hamlet or Milton's Satan;
it has to do with "the rule of an exquisite economy. The

thing is to lodge somewhere at the heart of one's

47

complexity an irrepressible appreciation, but where a

 

light lamp will carry all the flame I incline to look

 

askance at a heavy" (ghg Art Q; the Novel, p. 129).
Later, James was to engage in an occasional experiment
in which he violated these rules, but only for a special

purpose. One example is to be found in What Maisie Knew

 

in which he uses a young girl as the central intelligence.
Here he makes the child's early confusion then growing
awareness of the relationships of her divorced parents
into the heart of the story.

For the most part, however, James follows his own
observations on the necessity for a fine consciousness.
Sometimes, the danger lies in the other extreme--that of
making the central intelligence Egg fine. The problem,
he knew, was one of balance, a delicate balance between
having the centre of consciousness "feel enough and 'know'
enough . . . for his maximum dramatic value without feel-
ing and knowing too much for his minimum verisimilitude,

his proper fusion with the fable" (The Art 2: the Novel,

 

p. 69). If the balance tips, making the intelligence
too fine, the results are disasterous. The character be-
comes unnatural and atypical. He loses credence and com-
passion. The reader, in turn, loses "bewilderment"--sus-
pense and interest (The Art of the Novel, pp. 64-64).

An excellent example of this problem of balance

may be seen in two reactions to Christopher Newman in

48

The American. James, in a passage from the Preface cited

 

earlier, writes of Newman, the central intelligence:
" . . . the interest of everything is all that it is his
vision, his conception, his interpretation; at the window

of his wide, quite sufficiently wide, consciousness we

are seated . . . " (The Art hi the Novel, p. 37). James

 

appears to be satisfied that he struck the balance here.
One of his generally sympathetic critics, however, is

not. Joseph Warren Beach feels that the balance is missed:
"A story in which the main character is so uninitiated

can bear no very close resemblance to the story of Isabel
Archer or Lambert Strether. There is no revelation of
anything through Newman's consciousness--nothing depends

upon his understanding. There is in fact no spiritual

 

dilemma. That is why the book is not among the greatest

of its author's."lo

A device that James developed to further the in-
direct approach is the figure of the ficelle. The ficelle,
the French word for "thread" or "string," is a character,
usually subordinate, whose major purposes are to advance
the progress of the plot and to aid the reader. James
distinguishes between "true agents" and ficelles: "It is
a familiar truth to the novelist, at the strenuous hour,
that, as certain elements in any work are of the essence,
so others are only of the form; that as this or that char-

acter, this or that disposition of material, belongs to the

 

49

subject directly, so to speak, so this or that other belongs
to it but indirectly-~belongs intimately to the treatment"

(The Art hi the Novel, p. 53). The first kind of char-

 

acter is the "true agent"; the second is the ficelle. In

the Preface to The Ambassadors James describes the ficelle

 

as "the reader's friend," "an enrolled, a direct, aid to

lucidity" (The Art hi the Novel, p. 322). Henrietta

 

Stackpole in The Portrait 2£.3 Lady is an example of a

 

ficelle in one of the early novels. In a later work Maria

Gostrey and Waymarsh perform that function in The Ambassa-

 

gghg. The critic Wayne Booth describes the ficelle as a
character "whose main reason for existence is to give the
reader in dramatic form the kind of help he needs if he
is to grasp the story."11
The ficelle is the "reader's friend" but it is
also the writer's friend because among other things it ob-
viates direct exposition and furthers the indirect approach,
especially as it aids in the revelation of the centre of
consciousness. This is especially true when a specific
variety of ficelle is employed--the confidant. The
simplest confidant in the earliest works does little more
than listen to the centre of consciousness and occasionally
provide information, almost as a messenger in the Greek

tragedies or in Shakespeare does. James describes this

function of the confidant in the Preface to The Ambassadors:

 

" . . . I had thus inevitably to set him up a confidant or

50

two, to wave away with energy the custom of the seated
mass of explanation after the fact, the inserted block of

merely referential narrative . . . ." (The Art hi the Novel,

 

p. 321). The confidant here enables James to turn what
might have required rather dull exposition at the hand of
the author-narrator into scene, to substitute the dramatic
for the narrative, to show instead of tell. It is another
step in the disappearance of the assumed author as narrator.
As James saw the value of the confidant, he ex-
panded its role. Sister M. Corona Sharp points out that
"The culmination of the development is to be found in the
stories of the later period, 'The Altar of the Dead,‘
'The Beast in the Jungle,’ and 'The Jolly Corner.‘ In
these stories the confidante not only serves the original
and fundamental, technical purpose, but is also a character
whose presence forms an integral part of the story."12
Perhaps the full value of the confidant in this kind of

situation may be most clearly seen in a comparison of

passages from Roderick Hudson (1876) and The Ambassadors

 

 

(1903). In Roderick Hudson the narrator at one point in

 

the opening chapter gives the reader nearly eight pages
of unadulterated exposition which begins: "This little
profession of ideal chivalry (which closed the conversa-
tion) was not quite so fanciful on his lips as it would
have been on those of many another man; as a rapid glance

at his antecedents may help the reader perceive." The

51

narrator then goes on to tell the reader about Rowland
Mallet's father, mother, education, youth, life up to the
present, and his personality: "Yet few young men of means
and leisure ever made less of a parade of idleness, and
indeed idleness in any degree could hardly be laid at the
door of a personage who took life in the conscious, serious,
anxious fashion of our friend." It should be recalled
that, while the narrator is directly addressing the reader,
Rowland Mallet is nominally the centre of consciousness

of this work. The narrator concludes his eight pages of
exposition: " . . . He engaged to believe that all women
were fair, all men were brave and the world a delightful
place of sojourn, until the contrary should be distinctly
proved."13 The contrast of this passage with its judg-

mental summary with one from The Ambassadors is striking.

 

 

Here James uses Maria Gostrey as a confidant and engages
her and the central consciousness, Lambert Strether, in

a dramatic scene to reveal exposition in a more indirect
way. Strether has come to Europe to persuade the son of
a friend to return home to the United States:

He looked at the hour without seeing it, and then, on
something again said by his companion, had another
pause. "You're really in terror of him."

He smiled a smile that he almost felt to be siCkly.
"Now you can see why I'm afraid of you."

"Because I've such illuminations? Why, they're all
for your help! It's what I told you," she added,
"just now. You feel as if this were wrong."

He fell back once more, settling himself against
the parapet as if to hear more about it. "Then get
me out!"

52

Her face fairly brightened for the joy of the
appeal, but, as if it were a question of immediate
action, she visibly considered. "Out of waiting for
him?--of seeing him at all?"

"Oh no--not that," said poor Strether, looking
grave. "I've got to wait for him--and I want very
much to see him. But out of the terror. You did put
your finger on it a few minutes ago. It's general,
but it avails itself of particular occasions. That's
what it's doing for me now. I'm always considering
something else; something else, I mean, than the
thing of the moment. The obsession of the other
thing is the terror. I'm considering at present for
instance something else than you."

She listened with charming earnestness. "Oh you
oughtn't to do that!"

"It's what I admit. Make it then impossible."

She continued to think. "Is it really an 'order'
from you?--that I shall take the job? Will you give
yourself up?"

Poor Strether heaved his sigh. "If I only could!
But that's the deuce of it--that I never can. No--I
can't."

She wasn't, however, discouraged. "But you want
to at least?"

"Oh unspeakably!"l4

Not only has James set forth the requisite exposition in
this scene, but even more important he has, through the
use of the confidant, allowed the centre of consciousness
to reveal certain things about himself, his own untenable
position, his yearnings, his handicaps--and all of this is
shown dramatically. Surely, it is an example of the indi-
rect approach at its finest.

Through the indirect approach Henry James made his
assays at realistic expression, sometimes tentative and
uncertain, sometimes masterly and sure, always pragmatic
with an eye toward the effect. The technique of the centre
of consciousness proved to be one of the most significant

and fruitful in these attempts. As James saw the central

I;

 

53

intelligence, its potential was unlimited. Perhaps his best
description of that potential is in the metaphor of the

house of fiction in the Preface to The Portrait 9i 3 Lady:

 

"The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a
million--a number of possible windows not to be reckoned,
rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still
pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual
vision and by the pressure of the individual will" ($22,522

_i the Novel, p. 46). That vision and that will are charac-

 

teristic not only of the artist's need to create but also
of the capability of the centre of consciousness to experi-

ence the richness of life.

NOTES TO CHAPTER II

Henry James, The Art hi the Novel: Critical Pref-

 

 

aces, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), p. 111.
Further references are to this edition and are included

parenthetically in the text.

2Theory 9i Literature, 3rd ed. (New York, 1956),

 

pp. 223-24.

3The Craft of Fiction (New York, 1957), p. 111.

 

4The Craft gfi Fiction, p. 87.

 

5The Rhetoric 9i Fiction (Chicago, 1961), p. 51.

 

6"Ivan Turgénieff," French Poets and Novelists

(New York, 1964), p. 217.

7
The Rhetoric hi Fiction, p. 346.

 

8 .
The Notebooks hi Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen

 

 

and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1961), p. 11. James used
this device twice, in "A Bundle of Letters" and in "The

Point of View."

9 .
The Craft gi_Fiction, p. 143.

 

loThe Novels 9i Hengy James (New Haven, 1918),

 

 

pp. 204-205.
54

55

11The Rhetoric 9i Fiction, p. 102.

 

12

The Confidante ih_Henry James (Notre Dame,

 

 

Indiana, 1963), p. 3.

l3Roderick Hudson (New York, 1907). PP.

 

l4The Ambassadors (New York, 1909). PP.

 

9, 15,

19-20.

16.

CHAPTER III

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE CENTRE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Henry James's house of fiction metaphor, applied
to the centre of consciousness, implies that that observer
may function as a pair of eyes for the reader, looking out
on the landscape of life and registering what he perceives.
He may even become, as indeed he does in many of James's
works, a secondary narrator. While he is performing these
technical functions, he himself is often the subject of
the fiction. James points this out quite clearly in his

Preface to Roderick Hudson: "My subject . . . had defined

 

itself--and this in spite of the title of the book--as not
directly, in the least, my young sculptor's [Roderick's]
adventure. This it had been but indirectly, being all the
while in essence, and in final effect another man's, his
friend's and patron's [Rowland Mallet's], view and experi-

"1 Thus the centre of consciousness may be on

ence of him.
the one hand a technical and structural method and on the
other a subject. It involves both form and content.

This dual nature of the centre of consciousness

submits to many finer gradations. It may perform a number

of reasonably precise, though overlapping, functions in

56

57

the work of fiction. The use of the centre of consciousness
gives to the novel:

1. Unity

2. Structure

3. Intensity

4. A view and a meaning of action and characters

5. An aid to the self-effacement of the author-

narrator

6. Greater reader involvement

7. A subject
This chapter takes up these functions individually, explain-
ing briefly what is meant by each one and illustrating its
use in the fiction of Henry James. In the succeeding chap-
ters on the three early novels the functions are considered
in more detail and in relation to one another. Also to be
considered, as it relates to several of these functions, is
a critical problem that has caused quite a misunderstanding
in the last several decades. The dual nature of the centre
of consciousness, although clearly and frequently posited
by James, seems often to have been overlooked by his many
critics, both friendly and otherwise. Most stress his doc-
trinal insistence on the disappearance of the narrator.
The results have often been unfortunate for James's repu-
tation and for the practice of fiction in the twentieth

century.

F." ——I——'
1_ ' ; L‘.

'_ .W‘i

 

VV

58

9222

A single, consistent point of view gives the value
of virtually everything as it appears and relates to one
character, the central intelligence or centre of conscious-

ness. Thus Roderick Hudson is given a oneness through

 

Mallet's consciousness, despite the title of the novel. In
this early novel, however, James fails to achieve a perfect
fusion. There are elements of the work which certainly

seem more relevant to Roderick than to Rowland. The problem
of the artist is one of these. In terms of philosOphy and
plotting this is Roderick's area; he is the artist whose
development and eventual failure is the object of the
reader's concern. Yet even here, the centre effects a
unity, for it is Roderick's development ii viewed hy Rowland

and ii ii affects the latter that must concern the reader

 

most. Furthermore, the problem of the artist is not focused
in the figure of Roderick alone; other artists in the work,
Gloriani and Singleton, present other sides of the question.
Rowland Mallet, then, as an "outsider," is perhaps better
able to perceive these differing temperaments and abilities.
So, while a misplaced centre (perhaps) may be responsible
for a lack of complete unity in this novel, it is finally
the centre in the person of Rowland who gives the work what
unity it has. It soon becomes clear that in discussing the

first of these functions of centre of consciousness, its

59

relationship with the last one, subject, may be seen. The

subject of Roderick Hudson is Rowland Mallet's consciousness.

 

Critics have from time to time found fault with
James's lack of consistency in the handling of the centre of

consciousness. The Portrait hi 2 Lady is one occasion for

 

such criticism. Oscar Cargill points out that not all of
this story is centered in Isabel's consciousness. "There
are episodes in which she is not a participant, between
Ralph and his uncle, Ralph and his aunt, Henrietta and the
Countess Gemini, Ralph and Goodwood. The final scene
between Osmond and Mme. Merle is out of her focus . . . "
Cargill views these reversions to an assumed narrator and
to scenes out of the reach of the vision and the sensibility
of the centre as weaknesses better avoided. Of the scene
between Osmond and Mme. Merle, he writes; "James yielded to
an impulse to include this for its drama, but its chief
accomplishment being the revelation of Osmond's ingratitude
toward his one-time mistress, the drama should have been
sacrificed for integrity in point of view and the substance
of the revelation brought to Isabel indirectly."2
Actually, "the substance of the revelation" ig
"brought to Isabel indirectly" two chapters later by
Countess Gemini. Artistically, the treatment works well.
The direct confrontation adds drama, as Cargill notes.

The indirect revelation by Countess Gemini comes in the

climatic chapter in which Isabel first receives word that

60

Ralph is dying, then has the final interview with Osmond,
and finally learns of the relationship between Osmond,

Mme. Merle, and Pansy. James has sacrificed the integrity
in point of view for intensity. By handling the matter as
he does, James is true to his statement in the Preface
where he stresses the value of "the scale of her [Isabel's]
relation to herself." Countess Gemini's revelation to
Isabel removes the instantaneous quality of the scene
between Mme. Merle and Osmond with the result being a sit-
uation in which Isabel can reflect, can view the information
as it relates to herself.

Thus it is true that James has made little attempt
to establish or preserve any "integrity in point of view"
in the sense of making every scene fall into the direct pur-
view of Isabel as a register or centre of consciousness.
Also there is still a very apparent narrator throughout.
But Isabel is the only significant centre of consciousness
and the sole commanding centre of the work. The value of
any of the scenes in which she is not present is their
value for her or for the reader's view of her. The value
of a scene as it affects the reader's view of a character
is highly significant in most of James's works. James's
interest in character in preference to action or what
might be called external plot has been discussed earlier.
Many of his novels are simply revelation of character,

that is, there might be little real change or development

61

in a major Character through the course of a novel. The
progress of the fiction is then located in the reader's
growing understanding of the character as little by little
the character is subjected to various events, influences,
and other characters. To a large extent this is true of

Isabel Archer in The Portrait 9£.§ Lady. The reader's

 

"bewilderment," then, is less often centered around what
will happen next (in the sense of external plot) than
around the unveiling of another facet of character. The

first chapter of The Portrait illustrates the way in which

 

a scene in which the central consciousness does not par-
ticipate still has value for the reader's view of Isabel
and thus serves the purpose of helping to unify the work.
Although it is perhaps the simplest of examples and lacks
the richness and complexities of many of the ensuing scenes,
it does illustrate the point. The setting is in the garden
of an English country house. Isabel has not been introduced
into the novel yet. Before she is even mentioned by the
characters in the scene, their focus is on the house from
which she later makes her entrance into the garden. In
their polite small talk, Ralph, Mr. Touchett, and Lord
Warburton reveal a sense of anticipation, of waiting.

Their conversation turns to talk of marriage and then of
Isabel and of Isabel's eligibility. Even when Isabel is
not physically present, she affects the scene and the

reader and serves as a unifying element.

62

In terms of "integrity in point of View" as it
functions to unify the novel, James probably reaches the

peak in The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors. In The

 

 

Sacred Fount the centre of consciousness is also the first

 

person narrator, one for whom "the vision of life is an
obsession."3 The entire story is his search for the sacred
fount, the source of the strange changes that come over

(or appear to come over) several of the characters. His
ignorance (if there is anything to be ignorant of) and his
gropings unify the work and all its parts-~the many charac-
ters and their changing groupings, his responsibility to

live up to the freedom and wit of Newmarch, the carrefour

 

device in the garden, the paintings in the gallery, the
turned backs of the guests. In fact, the integrity of the
work is so great, the fusion of subject and treatment so
complete that the problem of the meaning of it all is
raised by the reader's doubts about the reliability of
the narrator-centre. This, however, is a problem of dis-
tance, to be discussed below in the section entitled
"greater reader involvement."

Oscar Cargill, who decried James's handling of

view in The Portrait 2£.3 Lady, holds a different attitude

 

toward The Golden Bowl. Although it might seem that

 

James's use of two centres of consciousness in this novel
is potentially destructive of unity, Cargill affirms that
actually the omniscience of each principal, when the

point of view is his or hers, is peculiarly limited
by ignorance of the motives of the persons who are,

63

in turn, of chief concern. Thus the Prince knows

less than we about his wife and father-in-law in the

first book and Maggie is in ignorance of the true

feelings of her husband in the second, our view of

his mental processes being cut off just at the moment

when they would reveal too much to us.4

The use of a centre of consciousness in the novel

can provide the work with a sense of unity by means of a
consistent (or fairly consistent) point of View. Closely
related in effect to this unity is the second function of

the centre of consciousness, STRUCTURE.

 

Structure

 

Form, compositional value, structure--James employs
all of these terms to describe that quality of a work of
art that he prizes so highly. Early in his career, in an
1877 review article on George Sand, he writes: "It has
been said that what makes a book a classic is its style.

We should modify this, and instead of style say IQEER

Madame Sand's novels have plenty of style, but they have no
form. Balzac's have not a shred of style, but they have a
great deal of form."5

The shape or form of a work of fiction continued to
interest him in the years that followed. Often he would
criticize the work of a contemporary as being shapeless,
formless, diffuse. Both Thomas Hardy and Victor Hugo came
under fire on this count. R. P. Blackmur summarizes

James's attitudes toward form in art as it relates to

life: "Art was serious, he believed, and required of the

fillhi‘l‘En .

64

artist every ounce of his care. The subject of art was
life, or more particularly someone's apprehension of the
experience of it, and in striving truly to represent it
art removed the waste and muddlement and bewilderment in
which it is lived, and gave it a lucid, intelligible form"

(The Art pi the Novel, xv). To a large extent James came

 

to rely on the technique of the commanding centre and more
especially the centre of consciousness to circumscribe
that portion of "life" that he wished to illuminate in
his fictions. Many of the realists and the naturalists
of James's time wished to mask the act of artistic selec-
tion with the illusion of seeming to include all aspects of
life. This was not James's way. To make life intelligible
it was necessary somehow to refine it, to filter it through
an intelligence, and not to present it to the reader in its
original unassimilated formlessness.

The device most readily adaptable to that end,
James found, was the central intelligence. He describes

the manner in which it operates in the Preface to Roderick

 

Hudson: "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and
the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to
draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which

they shall happily appear to do so" (The Art pi the Novel,

 

p. 5). James could begin, "by a geometry of his own," by
first locating the centre of his circle. This would be in

the consciousness of a character, say Lambert Strether or

 

«nub-Ta 45-..; . Arvin»! i in»...

65

Rowland Mallet. The radius of the circle would be limited
by his relationships with other characters and by those
events which come into his perception or affect him in

one way or another. The limitations of his horizon would
become the circumference of the circle. Included within
that circle would be everything as it affects him or
affects the reader's understanding of him, not necessarily
limited only to those events of which he has a direct per-
ception and immediate knowledge. So one of the ways that
the centre of consciousness functions as an element of
form is by circumscribing the circle of relations. Again

in the Preface to Roderick Hudson, James explains: "It

 

[Roderick Hudson] remains in equilibrium by having found

 

its centre, the point of command of all the rest. From

this centre the subject has been treated, from this centre
the interest has been spread, and so, whatever else it may
not do, the thing has acknowledged a principle of composi-
tion and contrives at least to hang together" (Thg_hih_pi

the Novel, p. 15). The centre here is, of course, located

 

in Rowland Mallet's consciousness.

James is fond of architectural metaphors to describe
his theories. The house of fiction metaphor discussed ear-
lier is one example. He uses another variant to explain
the function of the centre of consciousness of Isabel

Archer in The Portrait 2£.§ Lady. The character of Isabel

 

had appeared to him as a disponible, a disembodied, unsit-

 

uated germ, long before the conception of the novel came

 

. 0.“.

-;.i K ..

66

to him. His problem became what to do with this figure.
"The point is, however, that this single small corner-stone,
the conception of a certain young woman affronting her des-
tiny, had begun with being all my outfit for the large
building of 'The Portrait of a Lady.‘ It came to be a
square and spacious house--or has at least seemed so to

me in this going over it again; but, such as it is, it had
to be put up around my young woman while she stood there

in perfect isolation" (The Art pi the Novel, p. 48).

 

Several pages later, he continues with the figure, describ-
ing how he built "brick upon brick" until he reached "fine
embossed vaults and painted arches." "Such is the aspect
that to-day 'The Portrait' wears for me: a structure

reared with an 'architectural' competence, as Turgenieff
would have said, that makes it, to the author's own sense,
the most proportioned of his productions after 'The Ambassa-

dors'"(The Art pi the Novel, p. 52).

 

Another way in which the central intelligence may
function as a compositional element is through the pattern
of his inner struggle or growing awareness. While one may
perceive several kinds of structure in a work such as ihp

Ambassadors, (temporal, spatial, dramatic, etc.), certainly

 

one of the most significant is the organic structure of
Strether's developing awareness--of a sense of loss, of
the missed opportunities, of the self-fulfillment still

possible. Blackmur points out that "The whole question is

67

bound up with James' exceeding conviction that the art of
fiction is an organic form, and that it can neither be
looked at all round nor will it be able to move on its

own account unless it has a solidly posed centre" (Thp_hii_

pi_the Novel, xxiii). It is very difficult to discuss the

 

matter of organic structure in a novel in a small space;
therefore, a thorough exposition of this kind of structure
must be postponed until the chapters following.

In his later works, especially, James employed
still a third means of imposing form on life through the
centre of consciousness. This is to limit the realm of
the work wholly, or nearly so, to that which falls within
the perceptions of the centre alone. The earlier method

was not nearly so restrictive. Even in The Portrait pi‘p

 

Lady and The Ambassadors there are scenes and pictures that

 

do not fall into the ken of Isabel and Strether. James does
not rigidly limit himself to their consciousnesses. The

Sacred Fount, however, is one work in which he does restrict

 

everything to the perceptions of a single character, the
first person narrator. The reader knows only what the
narrator perceives, sees only what the narrator sees, and
so the mystery (if, indeed, there is one) is never solved
for the narrator--centre. The difficulties involved in
using a central intelligence in this manner are many; the
fact that no one seems to agree on what the work is "about"

is ample testimony to that. A more successful use of the

68

method is to be found in The Golden Bowl. This work is

 

neatly divided into two parts. In the first, the centre
of consciousness is that of the Prince, in the second part
his wife, the Princess, takes over. As James explains:

. . . The whole thing remains subject to the register,
ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two
of the characters. The Prince, in the first half of
the book, virtually sees and knows and makes out, vir-
tually represents to himself everything that concerns
us. . . . Having a consciousness highly susceptible of
registration, he thus makes us see the things that may
most interest us reflected in it. . . . The function of
the Princess, in the remainder, matches exactly with
his; the register of hpi_consciousness is as closely
kept [as his own] . . . ; the Princess, in fine, in
addition to feeling everything she has to, and to
playing her part just in that proportion, duplicates,
as it were, her value and becomes a compositional
resource, and of the finest order, as well as a value
intrinsic. (ZRE.§£E.2£ the Novel, pp. 328-29).

 

This double vision informs the structure of the work: "It
is the Prince who opens the door to half our light upon
Maggie, just as it is she who opens it to half our light
upon himself; the rest of our impression, in either case,
coming straight from the very motion with which that act

is performed" (The Art pi the Novel, p. 330). Thus the

 

centre of consciousness may function as an element of form

in at least three ways.

Intensity

 

There are two varieties of intensity which may be
fostered by the use of the centre of consciousness. The
first of these varieties of intensity is what might be

called dramatic intensity which arises through the

69

presentation of a character's inner life. James was deeply
concerned with this quality of the heightened emotion as

the passage from the Preface to The Portrait pi_p Lady re-

 

veals: "Without her [Isabel's] sense of them [her 'mild
adventures], her sense ipi them, as one may say, they are
next to nothing at all; but isn't the beauty and difficulty
just in showing their majestic conversion by that sense,
conversion into the stuff of drama or, even more delightful
word still, of 'story'?" The process of "conversion into
the stuff of drama" is the process of intensifying the pic-
torial, the non-scenic through the medium of consciousness.
James continues, "The question here was that of producing
the maximum of intensity with the minimum of strain." He
then gives two examples of what he means. The first occurs
in chapter xviii when Isabel enters the drawing-room at
Gardencourt and encounters Madame Merle for the first time.
The young American girl sits quietly as the stranger
finishes the piece on the piano. Isabel senses "a turning
point in her life." The second is what James calls Isabel's
"extraordinary meditative vigil." "Reduced to its essence,
it is but the vigil of searching criticism; but it throws
the action further forward than twenty 'incidents' might
have done. It was designed to have all the vivacity of
incident and all the economy of picture" (IEE.§£E.2£.EEE
hpypi, pp. 56-57). Nothing "happens" in this twenty page
chapter--nothing external, that is. But, Isabel's medi-

tation in which she ponders her relationship with her

70

husband, Osmund, with Pansy, with Warburton, and considers
her future course of action, has all the intensity of the
most dramatic of scenes.

Another example of James's use of centre of con-

sciousness to build dramatic intensity occurs in The Ambass-

 

pppip. A real confrontation between Strether and Chad, the
young man he has come to Europe to "save," is postponed on
their first meeting by using the necessity of their remain-
ing quiet in the theatre while the play is in progress.
The intensity of the scene is magnified even while the mo-
ment they can talk becomes eagerly anticipated. Strether
can do nothing but meditate--about the past and the future,
about Woolett and Paris, about himself and Chad. His state
of mind is revealed and the beginning of his internal crisis
is dramatized.

The second variety of intensity that James sought is
what Wayne Booth has called "'intensity of illusion'--most
often the illusion of experiencing life as seen by a fine

6

mind subject to realistic human limitations." This was

the problem James faced in Roderick Hudson in the difficulty

 

of making Hudson's collapse seem likely and realistic des-
pite a faulty time scheme in the novel: "Since one was
dealing with an action one might borrow a scrap of the
Dramatist's all-in-all, his intensity--which the novelist
so often ruefully envies him as a fortune in itself. The

amount of illustration I could allow to the grounds of my

71

young man's disaster was unquestionably meagre, but I

might perhaps make it lively; I might produce illusion if

I should be able to achieve intensity" (IRE.§£E 2£.ERE
hpypi, p. 15). He recognizes what really "saved" him as
being produced, in part at least, by locating the centre

in Rowland Mallet's consciousness. "The centre of interest
throughout 'Roderick' is in Rowland Mallet's consciousness,
and the drama is the very drama of the consciousness--which
I had of course to make sufficiently acute in order to
enable it, like a set and lighted scene, to hold the play"

(The Art pi the Novel, p. 16). Booth observes, "There can

 

be no intensity of illusion if the author is present, con-

stantly reminding us of his unnatural wisdom. Indeed,

there can be no illusion of life where there is no bewilder-

ment, and the omniscient narrator is obviously not bewilr

dered. The process most like the process of life is that

of observing events through a convincing, human mind, not

a godlike mind unattached to the human condition."7
Thus the intensity that James so frequently strained

to achieve is of two kinds: the dramatic intensity which

holds the reader's interest by heightening emotional moments

and the intensity of illusion which adds verisimilitude to

the perceptions of the fiction. Both varieties are pursued

with the assistance of the centre of consciousness.

72

A view and a meaning of action and characters

 

At its simplest, most unsophisticated level the
centre of consciousness provides the reader with a view
and a meaning of the elements of the fiction--the action
and the other characters. He, if he is reliable as are
most of James's centres, indicates the norms of the world
of the novel. His assessments are usually those that the
reader accepts. This is not to say that everything is
given through him. Often the reader is shown something
that the centre is not privileged to know. This is irony,
and James knows how to make use of it. But in the main,
the centre represents the standards of the author and the
work.

Sometimes, even in an early work such as Roderick
Hudson the centre of consciousness seems almost to assume
the role of a secondary narrator in clarifying a situation.
Such is the case toward the end of that novel when Roderick
has degenerated a good deal: "The great and characteristic
point with him [Roderick] was the perfect separateness of
his sensibility. He never saw himself as part of a whole;
only as the clear-cut, sharp-edged, isolated individual,
rejoicing or raging, as the case might be, but needing in
any case absolutely to affirm himself. All this to Rowland
was ancient history, but his perception of it stirred within
him afresh at the sight of Roderick's sense of having been

betrayed."8

73

This method can become quite complex as the follow-
ing passage from the same scene demonstrates. Rowland
remarks to Mrs. Hudson and Roderick about Christina: "'You
took, her, I did think, too seriously at first but you take
her too harshly now. She had no idea of wronging or of so
terribly upsetting you.'" Roderick is not soothed by the
kind words for the girl who has disappointed him: "'That's
consoling for me who have lost herl'" Roderick's mother
comes to his side:

"Oh yes, Mr. Mallet show a little mercy!" said Mrs.
Hudson in a tone which for all its gentleness, made
Rowland stare. This demonstration on his part cov-
ered a great deal of concentrated wonder and appre-
hension--a presentiment of what a small, sweet,
feeble, elderly lady might be capable of in the way

of abrupt and perverse animosity. There was no

space in Mrs. Hudson's tiny maternal mind for compli-
cations of feeling, and one emotion existed only by
turning another over flat and perching on top of it.
She had evidently not penetrated at all, having no
imagination for it whatever, the strange cloud of her
son's personal situation. Sitting without, in dismay,
she only saw that all was darkness and trouble, and

as his gained position, or what she had been deeming
such, appeared quite to exceed her original measure and
lift him beyond her jurisdiction, so that he had become
a thing too precious and sacred for blame, she found
it infinitely uncomfortable to lay the burden of their
common affliction upon Rowland's broad shoulders. Had
he not promised to make them all rich and happy? And
this was the end of it! Rowland felt as if his trials
were only beginning.9

In this passage a multitude of shades of feeling is shown
through the consciousness of Rowland Mallet. In dialogue,
Rowland presents his view of Christina to Mrs. Hudson and
Roderick. But in his thoughts and observations, that is

in his consciousness, there register his impressions of

74

Roderick's and his mother's views of Christina. Also
presented is Rowland's view of Mrs. Hudson and of the
dangers she might present to him. These expressions are

clearly Rowland's and not the implied author's.

An aid to the self-effacement of the author-narrator

This is the function of the centre of consciousness
that has attracted the most attention and caused the great-
est misunderstanding about James's method in this century,
leading to this apocalyptic reaction in 1966: "We are told
that Joyce represents a dead end in the art of fiction.
Actually, the influence of James, should it prevail, would
be much more pernicious; for the Jamesian method leads in-
evitably to the death of narrative art by a kind of artis-
tic suicide. The narrator is to eliminate himself for the

good of his art."10

This warning sounded by Robert Scholes
and Robert Kellogg is perhaps a bit overexuberant. One
reason is that James never did entirely dispense with the
assumed author as narrator with the minor exceptions of

such relatively short experimental pieces as "The Turn of

the Screw" and The Sacred Fount where he uses a first-person

 

narrative style. Even The Awkward Age, which is probably

 

his most scenic and dramatic work, shows signs of a narra-
tor. Furthermore, despite an occasional overstatement by
James himself, he was not concerned only or even primarily

with the disappearance of the author-narrator. That is one

75

small result of the use of the centre of consciousness

which itself is but one means of the objective method.

His ultimate goal in his fiction was to present life as

he saw it, life in which meaning was imposed by intelligence,
in which the activities of the sensibility were the most
interesting, and in which the most exciting movements were
those guided by a moral sense. He writes in the Preface to

The Golden Bowl: "The 'taste' of the poet is, at bottom

 

and so far as the poet in him prevails over everything else,

his active sense of life . . . " (The Art gf_the Novel,

 

p. 340). The indirect approach and the centre of conscious-
ness were the methods James chose to present his "active
sense of life," not ends in themselves.

Before going any further in this discussion, it
seems advisable to consider more precisely what is meant
by the phrase, "an aid to the self-effacement of the au-
thor." It begins in impartiality, as William Dean Howells
pointed out in an 1882 review article, "Henry James, Jr.":
" . . . That artistic impartiality which puzzled so many
in the treatment of Daisy Miller is one of the qualities
most valuable in the eyes of those who care how things are
done, and I am not sure that it is not Mr. James's most
characteristic quality. As 'frost performs the effect of
fire,‘ this impartiality comes at last to the same result

as sympathy." Howells admires in James what he calls the

lack of "downright petting," which is so insistent in

76

Dickens and Thackery. "The new school derives from Hawthorne
and George Eliot rather than any others; but it studies human
nature much more in its wonted aspects, and finds its eth-
ical and dramatic examples in the operation of lighter but
not really less vital motives. . . . This school, which is
so largely of the future as well as the present, finds its
chief examplar in Mr. James; it is he who is shaping and di-
recting American fiction, at least."11
If the disappearance of the assumed author began in
impartiality, it was not long before it went further. James
writes, in 1909 toward the end of his career: "Anything,
in short, I now reflect, must always have seemed to me bet-
ter--better for the process and the effect of my represen-

tation, my irrepressible ideal--than the mere muffled ma-

jesty of irresponsible 'authorship'" (The Art of the Novel,

 

p. 328). It is valuable to note that his "irrepressible
ideal" is not to do away with the narrator, it is not even
to do away with "irresponsible 'authorship'." Doing away
with the latter is a means to his ideal: representation of
life. In the most successful of his works the procedure
involves the self-effacement of the assumed author as narra-
tor and the reliance on a character within the work to do

as much of the narration as possible. That is, to relin-
quish the author's prerogative of standing above and out-
side the world created in the fiction and commenting at
will about it or moving freely about within it, changing his

position and entering characters' minds as he wishes. As

77

Norman Friedman points out, "If artistic 'truth' is a
matter of compelling rendition, of creating the illusion
of reality, then an author speaking in his own person
about the lives and fortunes of others is placing an extra
obstacle between his illusion and the reader by virtue of
his very presence." Thus James dramatizes the narrator.
Friedman clarifies the distinction: "It might be ques-
tioned as to exactly how this mode of presentation [the
centre of consciousness as dramatized narrator], where the
author shows us internal states, differs from normal omnis-
cience, where the author peers into the minds of his char-
acters and tells us what is going on there. It is chiefly
that one renders thoughts, perceptions, and feelings as
they occur consecutively and in detail passing through the
mind (scene), while the other summarizes and explains them
after they have occurred (narrative)."12

Critic Wayne Booth refers to Strether, "through

whose vision most of The Ambassadors comes to us," as

 

one of the "great narrators." Strether, of course, is

not the narrator of the work; there is someone else telling
the story, someone who talks about Strether as "he," an
implied author. But that author-narrator is modestly re-
tiring. As Booth continues, he explains why it is that

he refers to Strether as the narrator: " . . . The effect

of The Ambassadors is much closer to that of the great

 

first person novels, since Strether in large part 'narrates'

 

..rv 3.1f'5u

78

his own story, even though he is always referred to in the
third person." Later, he adds more justification: "We
should remind ourselves that any sustained inside view,

of whatever depth, temporarily turns the character whose
mind is shown into a narrator . . . ."13 Booth's general
thesis about James is eminently sensible. James was con-
cerned first and last with the illusion of reality and to
this he sacrificed, when necessary, impersonal narration,

a consistent point of view, anything else. Many of James's
critics have failed to recognize that James voluntarily and
consciously made these sacrifices for that illusion; instead
they condemn his inconsistency.

Certainly James could be inconsistent. At times he
might better be called Thackery James for his intrusiveness,
especially early in his career. At other times he uses the
kind of centre characterized by Isabel Archer and Lambert
Strether as registers but with the author-narrator still

present on occasion. The fully dramatized narrator-centre

is used in The Sacred Fount, a first-person narrative. In

 

The Awkward Age there is little evidence of a narrator, and

 

in the plays, which he wrote mainly between 1889 and 1896
there is of course no narrator at all; everything is scene.
Not only did James vary his practice from one work to the
next (and not always in the straight-line progression sug-
gested above), but within a given work he often mixed his

approaches and thus his effects. He was highly conscious

79

of the value of the alternation of picture (summary) and
scene (presentation). And James was always an experimenter,
as he noted in a letter to his brother William, who had com-

plained about the "thinness" of The Europeans: "Being very

 

'artistic,‘ I have a constant impulse to try experiments
of form, in which I wish not to run the risk of wasting
or gratuitously using the situations. But to these I am
coming now [1878]. It is something to have learned how
to write, and when I look round me and see how few people
(doing my sort of work) know how (to my sense) I don't re-
gret my step-by-step evolution."14
As this section began with ominous words about
James's contribution to the death of narrative art, so it
will end with another observation by Messrs. Scholes and
Kellogg, who maintain that there is a sophisticated link
between cultural conditions and the shape and technique of
the narrative: "Just as psychological knowledge impinges
on the novelist's choices and the reader's expectations
with regard to characterization, epistemological knowledge
and notions about how we perceive inevitably impinge, for
writer and reader, on the question of point of view. And
the more realistic or representational a work is, the more
insistent these non-esthetic pressures will be." They argue
that in an age of relative values such as ours "the authori-
tarian monism of the fully omniscient mode of narration has

become less and less tenable ... . ." They believe that

80

James was wrong when he worked to dramatize the narrator

for dramatic reasons. "The narrator does not need to be

 

dramatized for the modern audience so much as he needs to
be relativized. A narrator who is not in some way suspect,
who is not in some way subject to ironic scrutiny is what
the modern temper finds leasts bearable."15 If Scholes
and Kellogg are correct, and it would seem that they are,
James has done the right thing (at least the modern thing
of bringing the narrator closer to the reader's scrutiny)
for the wrong reason. The ironic scrutiny of which they
speak is a necessary task of the reader of James, for as
James's narrators are dramatized they are nearly always
"relativized" as well. Although it is most clearly called

for in some of the later works such as The Sacred Fount

 

and "The Turn of the Screw" (both first-person narratives),
a position of ironic scrutiny is a wise one for the reader
to take before nearly all of his works because of the self-
effacement of the author-narrator. It was the author-nar-
rator who in times past provided the norms of a work. In
James and many of the writers who have followed him, the
norms are not so readily apparent and the reader is in-
volved in deciding what they are before he can begin to
judge them and the characters who live within that frame-

work.

81

Increased reader involvement

 

Ever so closely bound up with the question of the
self-effacing author-narrator are the problems of reader
involvement and aesthetic distance. These problems center
on the relationships between the author, the characters of
the fiction, and the reader. Each of these three elements

may be thought of as the point of a triangle:

aut or

work A reader

In the narrative in which the author-narrator assumes un-
limited omniscience and freely intrudes in direct address
to the reader, the distance between reader and author is
diminished. The narrator confides in his reader and the
two are even capable of smugly looking down on the charac-
ters of the fiction. Such a god-like posture results in

a decreased distance between author and reader but an in-

creased distance between them and the work (and its char-
author
reader

In this situation the author is like the bard who sings to

acters):

the court. A variety of this relationship is what James
deplored in Thackery and Dickens and sought to avoid in his

own work. It is typical of the middle Victorian novel.

82

A second possible relationship places the author
close to his work with an increased distance between them
and the reader. This might be illustrated thusly:

author

work

When this relationship is in effect, the work is probably

an essay, a lyric poem, or a prose fiction like Thus Spake

 

Zarathustra.

 

The third possibility sees the reader and the work
in a close relationship with the author at a remove. The
most extreme example of this kind of relationship is the
play, from which the author has retired completely (al-
though, of course, he is present in the stage directions).
In this situation the reader moves closer to the characters,
if only because he has to do some of the sorting out, some
of the work of deciding the meaning of it all--tasks that
the author-narrator might otherwise have done:

reader

work

This is the relationship that characterizes most twentieth-
century fiction. Much of Hemingway's fiction maintains
this relationship with the author-narrator doing little
more than briefly (and without comment) setting the scene

and indicating movements. James's The Awkward Age, how-

 

ever, probably marks the limits of James's experiments of

83

this sort until he turned to the theatre in an attempt
to carry this relationship to its logical fulfillment.

This attempt to systematize the relationships be-
tween author, reader, and characters is obviously an over-
simplification. While it takes into account what has been
called aesthetic distance, it leaves out emotional distance,
for example--the sympathy or antipathy an author may feel
for his characters and seek to evoke from the reader. It
also omits the kind of distance experienced by the reader
when the characters are far superior or inferior to him
in freedom of action and moral strength. It is helpful as
a tool, however, to aid in illustrating another function of
the centre of consciousness in James's fiction--that of in-
creasing reader involvement by decreasing the distance be-
tween the reader and the central intelligence. This works
in conjunction with the author-narrator's self-effacement,
that is his increasing distance from his main characters
and his reader.

Wayne Booth explains how this relationship operates
to involve the reader with James's centres of consciousness.
The writer may reduce the presence of the implied author
(or author-narrator):

. . . because his central intelligence is of the kind
that will seem most sympathetic if presented as an
isolated, unaided consciousness, without the support
that a reliable narrator or observer would lend. Such
an effect is possible, I think, only when the reflected
intelligence is so little distant, so close, in effect

to the norms of the work that no complicated decipher-
ing of unreliability is required of the reader. So

84

long as what the character thinks and feels can be

taken directly as a reliable clue about the circum-

stances he faces, the reader can experience those cir-

cumstances with him even more strongly because of his

moral isolation.
Lambert Strether and Isabel Archer are probably the two cen-
tres of consciousness that, because of their distance from
the author and their subsequent moral iSolation, invoke
most strongly such a deep reader involvement. The reader's
involvement is not limited to a feeling of sympathy for the
character. At its most complete it may result in identifi-
cation and participation with the character. This partici-
pation is made possible by James's practice of showing what
the centre is feeling as those feelings occur. "Leave the
reader to choose for himself, force him to face each deci-
sion as the hero faces it, and he will feel much more deeply
the value of the truth when it is attained, or its loss if
the hero fails," Booth adds.16

Nothing has been said here about the problems that

arise with unreliable or insensitive centres. James made
little, if any, intentional use of such centres in his early
work, always seeking during these years the sensitive, in-
telligent, articulate character who would register im-
pressions accurately. In some of his later writing he did
elect central intelligences that cause difficulties for the
reader when their suspected unreliability is coupled with

a detached author. But that is a problem for another time

and another place.

85

A subject

 

The last function of the centre of consciousness to
be discussed is one of the most important, yet it is the
one that will get the shortest shrift here because it has
been discussed in the preceding pages and will be taken up
again in the chapters that follow. Given the statements
that James made about the centre of consciousness as a
subject (many of them cited earlier) and given the novels
themselves, it should be immediately apparent to anyone
interested in James's work that he employed the centre of
consciousness not simply as a technical device which func-
tioned as a narrative frame and permitted the author-nar-
rator to retire, but that the central intelligence was an
integral part of his subject, was indeed the subject it-
self in many cases. Unfortunately, many otherwise capable
critics seem not to have noticed this truth or, noticing,

have forgotten it. The story of The Portrait 93.3 Lady,

 

for instance, is not about Isabel Archer, it i§_Isabel
Archer. It is called, after all, a portrait.

As much as James gave to future generations of
novelists in the way of technical innovations, perhaps
this was his most valuable gift--the gift of the human
sensibility. Far from bringing about the death of the

novel, Henry James liberated the form and gave it new life.

‘VI'HTA

 

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

1
Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical

 

 

Prefaces, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), p. 15.

 

Further references are to this edition and are included

parenthetically in the text.

2
The Novels of Henrnyames (New York, 1961), p. 109.

 

 

3Henry James, The Sacred Fount in_Three Novels

 

 

(New York, 1968), p. 329.

4
The Novels of Henry James, p. 423.

 

 

"George Sand," French Poets and Novelists (New

 

York, 1964), p. 180.

6
The Rhetoric of Fiction, (Chicago, 1961), p. 42.

 

7The Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 45.

 

8
Roderick Hudson (New York, 1907), pp. 429-30.

 

9Roderick Hudson, pp. 431-32.

 

10Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of

 

Narrative (Oxford, 1966), p. 270.

 

86

87

11"Henry James, Jr.," Discovery 9: g Genius:

 

William Dean Howells and Henry James, ed. Albert Mordell

 

(New York, 1961), pp. 114, 120-21.

2 . . . . .
"POint of View in Fiction: The Development of

a Critical Concept," The Theory of the Novel, ed. Philip

 

 

Stevick (New York, 1967), pp. 113, 127-28.

13The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 149-151, 164, 59.

 

l4£g££g£§ of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock

 

(New York, 1920), I, 66.

5
The Nature g£_Narrative, pp. 275-77.

 

 

16
The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 274, 293.

 

CHAPTER IV

RODERICK HUDSON

 

Henry James began to write Roderick Hudson in

 

Florence in the spring of 1874 and spent the rest of the
year working on it as he moved from there to the Black
Forest, then to Boston and on to New York. The power that
Europe (especially Italy) held over his imagination vi-
brates throughout his story of a young promising American
sculptor, brought to Rome from the Massachusetts town of
Northampton by a wealthy patron. But as James observes
in the Preface, this was to be only indirectly the story
of the sculptor, Roderick Hudson. James's intention was
that it be in reality "another man's, his friend's and
patron's view and experience of him."1 The friend and
patron is Rowland Mallet; his view and experience of Rode-
rick is meant to be the subject of the novel at the same
time that his consciousness of the experience is to be the
primary means of representation. In other words, Rowland
as centre of consciousness is both subject and treatment.
This novel is James's first extended attempt to
employ the indirect or objective method and its most use-

ful technique, the central intelligence. Critic Cornelia

88

89

Kelley characterizes her reactions to the method: "It
is as though James had written the novel using Rowland
as the [first person] narrator and then re-written it to

avoid the excessive use of the first person."2

A simple
example of the way in which Rowland's consciousness oper-
ates as a means of presentation is to be found in this
passage when Christina Light, her mother and their Cava-
liere are visiting Rowland's apartment:
The Cavalier approached Rowland to express the plea-
sure he had derived from his splendid collection.
His smile was exquisitely bland, his attitude seemed
to call attention to its exemplary correctness. But
he gave Rowland an odd sense of looking at an elabor-
ate waxen image adjusted to perform certain gestures
and emit certain sounds. It had once contained the
marvellous machinery of a spirit too, but some acci-
dent, had apparently befallen that part of the mecha-
nism, to the cost of the perfect limitation of life.
Nevertheless, Rowland reflected, there are more grace-
less things than the mere motions and passes of a very
old civilization--the civilization that had given this
personage his exhausted impetus never having struck
him as so immemorially old.3
Of course, it might be claimed that all that James does
here is to take the comments of the old-fashioned intrusive
narrator and attribute them to Rowland instead. To some
extent this is true. The description is interpretive: the
Cavaliere was not just smiling or even smiling weakly, "his
smile was exquisitely bland." This observation might have
been made by an intrusive author-narrator. Even the recog-
nition of the hollowness of the Cavaliere in the next
sentence, although attributed to Rowland's register ("he

gave Rowland . . . "), is not necessarily characteristic

90

of Rowland's intelligence. But the final sentence clearly
belongs to Rowland; it comes from his cumulative experience
of Europe. Furthermore it illustrates, even further, his
growing awareness of the qualities of life and art in the
Old World.

James seems to try to keep everything within Row-
land's purview. One result is the somewhat "staged" qual-
ity of the scene in the coliseum (pp. 257-265). Rowland is
visiting the ruin alone and has climbed to the upper tiers
when, hearing voices, he discovers Christina and Roderick
meeting secretly below him. James apparently felt that
his eavesdropping on their clandestine meeting was the only
way to present that meeting scenically and have it fall
within the province of Rowland as well. On another occa-
sion, after Roderick had lost his artistic powers, he came
upon Sam Singleton, the watercolorist, at work. Roderick
questions him about the regularity of his work habits,
clearly comparing them in his mind to his erratic inspira-
tion. "'Damnation,'" is all that Roderick can say. Rowland
is not present at this brief scene, presented by the way in
direct quotation of dialogue; "Singleton related the inci-
dent afterwards to Rowland," the narrator reveals (pp. 484-
485).

Roderick's decline presented a problem to James,
one that he never felt that he completely solved. The
beginning of the decline is not really shown through Row-

land's eyes, but through letters from Roderick at

91

Baden-Baden: "'I know I've been a great brute. . . . I've
lately learned terribly well how to do nothing.'" But
when Rowland has finished reading the letter, James lets the
reader see his reaction of surprise and doubt. Two more
letters follow, asking for money to clear up gambling debts,
before Roderick rejoins Rowland at Geneva. Then James uses
the technique of picture (summary) to allow Roderick to
reveal to Rowland in his own words his account of his ad-
ventures at Baden-Baden (pp. 134-139). James remarks in
the Preface on the difficulty of making Roderick's decline
plausible and blames his failure to achieve complete suc-
cess in this regard to a faulty time scheme: "Everything
occurs . . . too punctually and moves too fast: Roderick's
disintegration, a gradual process, and of which the exhi-
bitional interest is exactly that it is gradual and occa-
sional, and thereby traceable and watchable, swallows two
years in a mouthful . . . ."4
Perhaps the problem lies partly in his failure to
present the early stages of Roderick's decline scenically,
letting the reader see the disintegration. As it is, the
first instances of his fall come to Rowland second hand.
James, of course, was faced with the choice of the greater
vividness of scenic presentation, on the one hand, and the
greater economy of summary on the other. He leaned toward
summary in the early stages of the disintegration with the
result that the changing nature of the young sculptor is

less vivid and immediate to the reader.

92

When James revised the text of Roderick Hudson for

 

the collected edition of 1907-1909, he made many altera-
tions, some of which were designed to add depth to the
changes in Roderick. Hélene Harvitt has compared the texts
of the 1883, two-volume book edition with the Macmillan
edition (1921), which is essentially the same as the New

York edition. Because Roderick Hudson is the most heavily

 

revised of James's novels, it seems desirable to summarize
her findings. Other than the few touches that James added
to Roderick's disintegration (making him more testy toward
Rowland), the revisions have little bearing on the subject
under discussion. James did try to add interest and charm
to the character of Mary Garland, justifying the attraction
that both Rowland and Roderick feel toward this plain girl.
The remaining alterations are primarily stylistic, fre-
quently metaphoric, and often, in the judgment of Miss
Harvitt, changes for the worse in the substitution of analy-
sis and obscurity for spontaneity and clarity.5 It seems
justified then, to adhere to the standard text of the New
York edition throughout this chapter because it is so
much more readily available and because the revisions appear
to have little bearing on a discussion of point of View.

In this early attempt to dramatize the narrator
James resorts to a variety of devices, perhaps never with
the sure touch of the later novels but with amazing skill
considering that he was just beginning to develop his indi-

rect method. One of these devices is the letter, used on

93

a number of occasions, from Roderick, from Mary Garland,
and to and from his cousin Cecilia. The latter correspon-
dent serves not only to present information (as the earlier
letters from Roderick do) but to provide Rowland with a lis-
tener in whom he can confide his thoughts, especially his
doubts and fears about Roderick. Some of Rowland's obser-
vations, such as this one about Roderick appear more natu-
ral when included as part of a letter, devised in solitude
and committed to the more thoughtful and formal medium of
the written word, than when they are intended to represent
spontaneous thoughts:
. . . In the summer I began to be uneasy, though I
succeeded in keeping down alarm. When he came back
to Rome, however, I saw that the tide had turned and
that we were close upon the rocks. It's in fact
another case of Ulysses and the Sirens; only Roderick
refuses to be tied to the mast. He's the most extra-
ordinary being, the strangest mixture of the clear and
the obscure. I don't understand so much power--because
it i§_power--going with so much weakness, such a bril-
liant gift being subject to such lapses. The poor
fellow isn't made right, and its really not his fault;
nature has given him his faculty out of hand and bid-
den him be hanged with it. (p. 294)
This kind of summary of Rowland's reactions to Roderick's
behavior and these suppositions about his genius, natural
as they are in a letter, would be less so as instantaneous
reactions in a scene. Furthermore, the expanded analogy
of Ulysses and the Sirens is more realistic when presented
in this fashion.

Thus through the medium of a letter James is making

an early use of the kind of character that he was to find

94

so valuable-—the confidant. Rowland has, in addition to
Cecilia, two other confidants, the Cavaliere and Madame
Grandoni. The Cavaliere is only half a confidant, actu-
ally, and is closer to being a simple ficelle, for his main
function in this regard is to give information to the centre
of consciousness rather than provide a friendly and trusted
ear. Sometimes, particularly early in the novel, Madame
Grandoni performs only this limited function. But as Row-
land comes to know her better and trust her judgment (and,
perhaps, as James discovers the need), Madame Grandoni be-
comes a true confidant. Earlier in the novel, the narrator
even refers to her as "the confidant of his innermost
worries" (p. 365). Here she reveals to him that Christina
has, without warning and after refusing to do so, married
the Prince that morning. Madame Grandoni cannot understand.
"'Well,‘ said Rowland, 'it's all none of my business, and
perhaps I see things melodramatically. But certain suppo-
sitions have taken shape in my mind which serve as answers
to two or three riddles'" (p. 417). Rowland reveals his
suppositions: that the Cavaliere is in reality Christina's
father, that this fact had always been kept a secret from
her, and that her mother told her this secret to bring
pressure to bear on her and force her marriage to the
Prince. While this sample does not show the confidant in

its fullest development, it does indicate James's early

95

use of that device to lessen the need for unassimilated
information and, in this case, to illustrate the range of
Rowland's perceptions.

As has been pointed out earlier, James unambigu-
ously asserts in the Preface that the subject of the novel
is Rowland's "view and experience" of Roderick and that the
centre of interest is Rowland's consciousness. James's
choices of the wealthy patron as the central intelligence
is a fascinating one which raises many questions--why did
he choose Rowland instead of Roderick Hudson himself? what
are the advantages and limitations of that choice? does
the centre of consciousness serve the end of unity in this
novel?

If, as James holds, the subject is Rowland's view
of Roderick, then what is the conflict of the work? Leon
Edel claims that it is art yg. passion. But this is Rod-
erick's conflict, not Rowland's. There is a second conflict,
Edel claims--America yg. Europe.6 Although Rowland is an
American in Europe, he is able to maintain from the first
a balanced view of the two cultures and accepts from each
one what it has to offer. Roderick, on the other hand, once
exposed to the richness of Europe, is lost. He succombs to
the sensuous passion that he finds about him--in the sculp-
ture, the architecture, the scenery, and the women, esper
cially Christina. Rowland compares him to Ulysses before

the Siren. A more apt comparison might be to one of

96

Ulysses' crew members in the land of the Lotus eaters.

The point is this: that although the centre of conscious-
ness may be Rowland Mallet, the "hero," the figure who
struggles, is Roderick Hudson. Occasionally Rowland does
struggle with his conscience--did he do the wise thing in
bringing Roderick to Rome? does he have any right to think
fondly of Mary Garland? But these debates are brief, unem-
phasized, and certainly insignificant when compared to
Roderick's disintegration.

In the Preface James discusses the failure to por-
tray convincingly Roderick's downfall due to a faulty time
scheme. It seems strange that he is so concerned about
this aspect of the novel, almost as if Roderick were the
subject. He does not express the fear that Rowland's view
of the downfall had insufficient time to mature. In fact,
it would seem that James made a tactical error in working
out his novel this way. Unlike the seamless web of The

Portrait of a Lady or The Ambassadors, Roderick Hudson is

 

 

 

badly split and the seam shows. Whereas in The Portrait

 

gf‘a Lady the subject and the treatment are unified in the

consciousness of Isabel Archer, in Roderick Hudson the

 

reader's interest is divided, perhaps fatally so, between
Roderick and Rowland. The writer's effect is also divided
and weakened by the inherent interest in Roderick as active
"hero" and Rowland as a somewhat passive consciousness.
Whereas Rowland is the centre of consciousness, Roderick

would seem to be the commanding centre.

1. I: ..tlnr...

Ill-RU» a: ,.l...1-I gain

97

Oscar Cargill disagrees with this point of view,

however: "James's great triumph in Roderick Hudson was

 

to lodge his point of view in the consciousness of Rowland
Mallet, whom, at the same time, he meant principally to
portray." James, he adds, "accepted at the outset a great
handicap in making Rowland the patron of a figure essen-
tially more spectacular--the immature and romantic sculptor."
But Cargill believes that it was a happy choice in that
Rowland, as Roderick's patron, has good cause to be always
close at hand. Roderick would not have made a good central
intelligence anyway, with his thoughtless drive toward sex
and art.7 Certainly, given the choice between these two
characters, Rowland was the only possibility for James to
use as the centre of consciousness. He has all the requi-
sites of the central intelligence: he is acute, intense,
observant, articulate, intelligent. The degree to which he
embodies these qualities may be seen in his guessing at the
secret pressure that forced Christina to marry the Prince
Casamassima against her wishes. Even his vision has its
blind spot, though, as evidenced in his misunderstanding
of Christina's feelings toward him. He is surprised and
unbelieving when Roderick informs him of Christina's inter—
est.

The question of whether James misplaced the centre
in this novel is surely an important one, for upon the lo-

cation of the centre rests the integrity of the work.

98

Joseph Warren Beach probably speaks for many readers when
he complains: " . . . we naturally resent being cheated
of the experience of Roderick by having it shown through
the judicial optics of Rowland."8 A second critic takes
the opposite view. F. R. Leavis remarks on the difficulty
of attempting to treat "postulated genius," especially in
a sculptor (James being a writer) and suggests that the
book is saved on this count by James's choosing Rowland as
the centre of consciousness.9 Perhaps the balanced view
is that James made the best of a difficult task. Roderick
is inherently more interesting as a character and his strug-
gle is what moves the novel. Rowland is far better suited
as a registering intelligence.

This discussion of the duality of focus of the work
is further complicated by the suggestion that Roderick and
Rowland represent either complementary or antithetical
principles. Critics treating this problem have advanced
theories that range from the obvious to the most imagina-

tive. Gorley Putt, for example, states in Henry James: A

 

Reader's Guide that the role of the hero is divided between
10

 

Rowland and Roderick. Cornelia Kelley begins with that
observation and adds to it: "Because Roderick is seen
through Mallet, the story may almost be said to have two
heroes. Is not the real situation, however, somewhat like

that which we have often seen in James's stories, that we

have in Roderick one side and in Rowland another side of a

99

complete man, of, if you wish, James's own nature?" Miss
Kelley also feels that James overemphasized one dominant
trait of each man to make the point. She makes the same
observation about other characters, especially Mary Garland

11 There is some truth in this obser-

and Christina Light.
vation, and James's treatment of his character here some-
times resembles Hawthorne's romantic, almost allegorical,
figures. T. 8. Eliot wrote in 1918: "He [James] too much
identifies himself with Rowland, does not see through the
solemnity he has created in that character, commits the
cardinal sin of failing to 'detect' one of his own char-

12 It is interesting that whereas Eliot identifies

acters."
James with Rowland, James's biographer Leon Edel views
James as Roderick with his brother William as Rowland. He
later suggests that the two characters may represent two

13

sides of Henry James. This is the same view held by

F. O. Matthiessen: "Roderick Hudson is full of interest

 

for James' development, since the two halves of his nature,
the creator and the critic, are in a sense projected in
Roderick and Rowland."14
In this the first novel that he wishes to preserve,
James's difficulty is not limited to the treatment of Rod-
erick through Rowland's consciousness; he also struggles
with the problem of reconciling his early attempt at dra-

matizing consciousness with a somewhat intrusive author-

narrator. A good case can be made that the narrator of

100

Roderick Hudson is strictly conventional-—that he is fre-

 

quently intrusive, that he passes judgments and assess-
ments on characters and their actions, that he is con-
sciously retrospective, that he addresses the reader di-
rectly, and that he insists on his own separate existence
by numerous references to himself in the first person. All
of these accusations are true and valid.

The narrator of Roderick Hudson sometimes seems as

 

much the puppet-master as Thackery ever was. When he makes
a statement like "Nothing especially pertinent to our narr-
ative had passed between the two young men since Mrs.
Light's ball save a few words bearing on a passage of that
entertainment," the reader is not only made aware that
someone is telling the story but that that someone stands
above the world of the tale, clearly removed from it

(p. 218). This kind of intrusion is not commonplace but

it does occur at least a half dozen times. A different
kind of intrusion is that of passing judgment on the char-
acters or making assessments of them through words or tone.
In the first chapter he characterizes Rowland neatly:

" . . . He engaged to believe that all women were fair, all
men were brave and the world a delightful place of sojourn,
until the contrary should be distinctly proved" (p. 16).
The reader gets the sense from the very outset that this
story is being related in retrospect, and not through a

character as Joseph Conrad frequently did, but by the

101

author-narrator himself, who hastens to point out on the
very first page: "The truth was that, as it will be part
of the entertainment of this narrative to exhibit, Rowland
Mallet had an uncomfortably sensitive conscience . . . "
Also of interest in this short passage is the stance of
the narrator, turned toward the reader. On several occa-
sions the author-narrator, addresses the reader: "Very
odd, you may say" or "the reader will remember." This
author-narrator's presence is nearly always felt; some-
times he seems in plain View, while at others he stands

off to the side and out of the way for the moment. Several
times he even refers to himself, as when he talks about
Rowland: "That Mallet was without vanity I by no means
intend to affirm . . . ." (p. 5) Each of these intrusions
has the effect of decreasing the distance between the
author-narrator and the reader and increasing the distance
between them and the characters, as was discussed in the
last chapter. They tend to work at cross-purposes with

the use of the centre of consciousness, diminishing the
reader's involvement, the intensity, and the sense of

unity of the work. The fact that the majority of these
faults (faults in the ideal of the objective method) occur
in the early chapters of the book or at least are most
flagrant there may suggest that James grew more skillful

as the novel progressed through the months of writing for

serial publication.

102

One criticism that has been lodged against the
author's relationship to the work deals more with plotting
than with point of view. Oscar Cargill charges:

Overplotting and melodrama are the real faults of
Roderick Hudson. The complex of relationships that
results in ChriStina's vague yearning for Rowland,
who yearns for Mary, who will not have him but is
passionately devoted to Roderick, who, ultimately
bored by her, burns for a casually responsive Chris-
tina, is hardly plausible. There is a kind of man-
agement in this that makes one more aware of the
presence of the author than one is in a Turgenev
novel.15

 

The large number of implausible coincidences may be added
to this charge; Rowland's happening to be in the coliseum
to overhear Christina and Roderick is one example.

The drama of the writer struggling for mastery of
his materials and his method is at least as exciting as
the story is told. This struggle is perhaps most apparent
as James seems to gain control of the point of view, lodg-
ing it in Rowland's consciousness, and then loses his grip
on it as it slips back to the author-narrator again. One
paragraph of Chapter XXII begins: "This was an arduous
time for Rowland; he said to himself that he would see it
through but must never court again such perils"--clearly
James is using Rowland's consciousness. The paragraph con-
tinues in the same vein, concluding: "It often struck him
that he had too abjectly forfeited his freedom. Wasn't it
grotesque, at his age, to be put in a corner for punish-
ment?" Rowland asks the question of himself. The next

paragraph begins the same way, then the author-narrator

103

creeps in: "After that dreadful scene in Rome which had
hurried their departure it was of course impossible that
there should not be on the girl's part some frankness of
allusion to Roderick's so pronounced and so public per-

versity. She had been present, the reader will remember

 

[emphasis added], during only half this supreme demon-

stration of it . . . (pp. 446-48). This is a rather
bald example of the shift from the indirect method to an
intrusive narrator. More often the change is more subtle
and the narrator's observations seem almost to merge with
Rowland's. An excellent example occurs when Rowland and
Roderick are arguing about Christina:

"So you back her up, eh?" Roderick cried with a re-
newal of his passion. "Do you pretend to say she
gave me no hopes?" He had been speaking with grow-
ing bitterness, quite losing sight of his mother's
pain and bewilderment in the passionate joy of pub-
lishing his wrongs. Since he was hurt he must cry
out; since he was in pain he must scatter his pain
abroad. Of his never thinking of others save as they
figured in his own drama this extraordinary insensi-
bility to the injurious effects of his eloquence was
a capital example; the more so as the motive of his
eloquence was never an appeal for sympathy or com-
passion--things to which he seemed perfectly indiffe-
rent and of which he could make no use. The great
and characteristic point with him was the perfect
separateness of his sensibility. He never saw him-
self as part of a whole; only as the clear-cut, sharp-
edged, isolated individual, rejoicing or raging, as
the case might be, but needing in any case absolutely
to affirm himself. All this to Rowland was ancient
history, but his perception of it stirred within him
afresh at the sight of Roderick's sense of having
been betrayed. (pp. 429-30)

The beginning of the passage, after Roderick's speeches,

seems to be in the voice of the author-narrator, but

104

somewhere a transfer is made to Rowland's consciousness
and his perceptions are given. Perhaps the reason that the
narrator's observations merge so frequently with Rowland's
is that James and his central intelligence have so much in
common. Both are young Americans who have experienced the
gift of Europe. Both are observers of the scene of life
and students of the arts. This is perhaps a fruitless
comparison to push too far; suffice it to note that their
standards of conduct and morality are so similar that there
is very little distance between them.

James is not the master of point of view and of
the objective method in this novel; he is the apprentice,
skilled but still learning. Yet the work contains within
it the germs of most of the techniques that he later devel-
oped until they approached perfection. For instance, he
experiments with several ways of handling exposition. In
chapter I it is the narrator who provides Rowland's back-
ground and family history, sometimes slipping into the
first person, once or twice engaging in irony, and conclud-
ing with an assessment of Rowland's character. This expo-
sition lasts for eight pages (pp. 9-16). The Light family
background, however, is presented dramatically through the
agency of the confidant Madame Grandoni: "'I've known mama
for twenty years,'" she begins (p. 161). Occasionally
James seems to forget his decision to limit his omniscience

and enters the mind of someone other than the centre of

105

consciousness: "Mr. Striker eyed his old friend for a
moment with a look of some displeasure; he saw that this
was but a cunning female device for pretending still to
hang back and that, through some untraceable logic of
treachery, she was now taking more comfort in the opinions
of this sophistical stranger than in his own tough dogmas"
(p. 62).

Even the concluding note of the novel is sounded by
the narrator. Unlike the more ambiguous and unfinished

ending of, say, The Portrait g£_a Lady, Roderick Hudson

 

 

 

ends unequivocally, projecting Rowland's life into the
years which follow:

That cry still lives in Rowland's ears. It interposes
persistently against the consciousness that when he
sometimes--very rarely--sees her, she is inscrutably
civil to him; against the reflexion that during the
awful journey to America, made of course with his
assistance, she had used him, with the last rigour of
consistency, as a character definitely appointed to
her use. She lives with Mrs. Hudson under the New
England elms, where he also visits his cousin Cecilia
more frequently than of old. When he calls on Mary

he never sees the elder lady. Cecilia, who, having
her shrewd impression that he comes for the young
person, the still young person, of interest at the
other house as much as for any one else, fails to

show as unduly flattered, and in fact pronounces him,
at each reappearance, the most restless of mortals.
But he always says to her in answer: "No I assure you
I'm the most patient!" And then he talks to her of
Roderick, of whose history she never wearies and whom
he never elsewhere names. (pp. 526-27)

James's major strengths and weaknesses in Roderick

 

Hudson both appear to derive from his employment of the
objective method. The work is clearly marred by the divi-

sion of interest between Rowland and Roderick and by the

106

inconsistent point of view, alternately relying on the
centre of consciousness and the intrusive narrator. But
truly in this uneven novel the values of the central in-
telligence for adding felt life and a moral dimension to
the drama are experienced by the writer and the reader.

Henry James had discovered his métier.

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV

lThe Art of the Novel (New York, 1934), p. 15.

 

2The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana,

 

 

Illinois, 1965). P. 190.

3Roderick Hudson (New York, 1907), p. 120. Fur-

 

ther references are to this edition and are included par-

enthetically in the text.

4
The Art of the Novel, p. 12.

 

5"How Henry James Revised Roderick Hudson: A

 

Study in Style," PMLA, XXXIX (1924), 203-27.

6
Introduction to Roderick Hudson (New York, 1960),

 

vii-viii.

7The Novels of Henrerames (New York, 1961), p. 29.

 

 

8Cited in The Novels gf_Hen£y James, n. 26, p. 36.

 

 

9"Henry James's First Novel," Scrutiny, XIV

 

(September 1947), 296-97.

0HenryJames: A_Reader's Guide (Ithaca, New York,

 

 

1967), pp. 95-96.

107

108

11The Early Development of Henry James, p. 191.

 

 

12"Henry James," The Little Review (August 1918):

 

rpt. in The Shock of Recognition, ed. Edmund Wilson (New

 

 

York, 1955), p. 864.

3
Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870-1881

 

 

(Philadelphia, 1962), PP. 175-77.

14
Henrnyames: The Major Phase (New York, 1963),

 

 

p. 153.

15The Novels of Henrerames, p. 26.

 

 

CHAPTER V

THE AMERICAN

 

The major technical difficulties that faced James

in The American are not the same ones that he encountered

 

in Roderick Hudson. In the earlier novel the interest is

 

divided between the somewhat passive, reticent centre of
consciousness, Rowland Mallet, and the more exciting, mer-

curial artist, Roderick Hudson. In The American, the com-

 

manding centre is clearly balanced in Christopher Newman's
consciousness. For this study, the significant difficulty
that confronted James was the quantity and the quality of
the consciousness as a register.

Several critics and historians have pointed out
James's indebtedness to Turgenev for elements of this
story, as well as the "reasons" that he wrote this tale of
the wealthy American businessman, tired of scrambling for
money, who has come to the Old World for culture, enlight-
enment, and, perhaps, a wife. Oscar Cargill claims that
James is refuting a popular play of the time written by

Alexandre Dumas, fils, L'Etrangere (The Foreigner), which

 

 

satirically portrays Americans as vulgar, boorish, and

violent. In The American according to Cargill, James is

 

 

109

110

justifying American ways against a European caricature of

"1

them. Turgenev's A Nest 9f Noblemen has been cited as

 

a source for much of the plot of The American.2 Whatever

 

James's motivations and sources, it is clear that he moves
far beyond them in this characterization of an American
innocent confronting for the first time the complexities
of life in the Old World.

Christopher Newman is the American, newly arrived
in Paris on his first trip abroad. He has fought in the
Civil War and attained the rank of brigadier general. He
has devoted his life to the making of money and succeeded.
He has, in fact, succeeded in virtually everything that
he has attempted, although he modestly admits to taking
"quite a back seat on oil."3 Newman is likened to Benjamin
Franklin, the archetypal American. Like Franklin, Newman
is "a born experimentalist." The narrator describes his
metaphysic: "His most vivid conception of a supernatural
element in the world's affairs had come to him once when he
felt his head all too bullyingly pummelled; there seemed
to him something stronger in life than his personal, inti-
mate will. But the mysterious something could only be a
demon as personal as himself, and he accordingly found
himself in fine working opposition to this rival concern"
(pp. 26-27).

His name is, of course, symbolic. He explains to
his old friend Tom Tristram his decision not to take advan-

tage of a business competitor, thereby giving up a

.. . .I I .

.Iu

111

half-million dollar Opportunity. Afterward, he continues,
"'I seemed to feel a new man under my old skin; at all
events I longed for a new world'" (p. 32). The new world
that he chose was the Old WOrld, where he hoped to turn his
back on commercialism and money-getting and concentrate in-

stead on culture and beauty. He interprets his first name

 

for Noémie Nioche, a copyist at the Louvre: "'Did you
never hear of Christopher Columbus?‘ "Bien sfir! He first
showed Americans the way to Europe . . . '"is her confused

reply (p. 8). But as this second Christopher is the type
of the new wealthy American confronting the ancient Euro-
pean culture, he does show Americans the way to Europe.

Tom Tristram's wife, a perceptive American living in Paris,
sees him in just this light: "'You're the great Western
Barbarian, stepping forth in his innocence and might, gaz-
ing a while at this poor corrupt old world and then swoop-
ing down on it'" (p. 45).

An international novel has been described as "one
in which a character, usually guided in his actions by the
mores of one environment, is set down in another, where he
must employ all his individual resources to meet successive
situations, and where he must intelligently accommodate
himself to the new mores, or, in one way or another, be
destroyed."4 Although Newman does "swoop down" on Paris
for a short time, it is not long before he begins to feel

out of his element in Parisian society: "'It's as if I

112

were as simple as a little child, and as if a little child
might take me by the hand and lead me about'" (p. 28). Un-
like James's earlier American abroad, Rowland Mallet, Chris-
topher Newman is innocent, naive, provincial, and sometimes
even commercial. Concluding his description of the kind
of wife he seeks, he remarks: "'I want, in a word, the
best article in the market'" (p. 49). He is at the same
time, however, generous, open, friendly, and self-confident.
In fact the contrast of Newman's innocence in his dealings
with the Parisians he meets with what must have been his
very down-to-earth experiences in the American business
world is deeply ironic. Leon Edel notes that "Newman has
not been corrupted by his gold; he is still one of "nature's
noblemen' and he can, in the end, be as noble as the old
corrupt Europeans."s
This is the character, then, that James chose to

make the focus of his third novel. As James recounts it

in The Art 9E the Novel, the subject of The American was
"6

 

 

to be "Newman's own intimate experience. Christopher
Newman is the centre of consciousness. Reflecting in the

Preface to The American, James writes in 1907:

 

If Newman was attaching enough, I must have argued,
his tangle would be sensible enough; for the interest
of everything is all that it is Eli vision, sis_con-
ception, his interpretation: at the window of his
wide, quite-sufficiently wide, consciousness we are
seated, from that admirable position we "assist."

He therefore supremely matters; all the rest matters
only as he feels it, treats it, meets it. A beauti-
ful infatuation this, always I think, the intensity

113

of the creative effort to get into the skin of the
creature; the act of personal possession of one
being by another at its completest--and with the
high enhancement, ever, that it is, by the same
stroke, the effort of the artist to preserve for
his subject that unity, and for his use of it (in
other words for the interest he desires to excite)
that effect of a centre, which most economise its
value.7
The reader is frequently seated "at the window of his wide,
quite sufficiently wide, consciousness," and James uses a
variety of techniques to portray that consciousness.

The most typical of these techniques is the narra-
tor's description or summary in his own words of Newman's
registration. Newman's first visit through the streets of
the Faubourg Saint Germain, where Claire de Cintré lives,
is treated in this fashion. As he walks, he notes that
the houses "present to the outer world a face as impassive
and as suggestive of the concentration of privacy within
as the blank walls of Eastern seraglios. Newman thought
it a perverse, verily a 'mean' way for rich people to live;
his ideal of grandeur was a splendid facade, diffusing is
brilliancy outward too, irradiating hospitality" (p. 59).
The contrast between the windowless walls of houses turn-
ing inward and warm, hospitable facade opening outward is
highly suggestive of the differences between the tightly-
closed society of the Bellegarde family and the Bourbon
aristocracy that it is meant to represent on the one hand

and the open-handed and open-hearted style of life of

ChristOpher Newman and his American compeers. Newman's

114

responses to his position as an "intruder" into the tight
circle of the Bellegarde family are sometimes expressions
of cautious wonder. He is invited to dine: "Once seated
at table, with the various members of so rigidly closed a
circle round him, he asked himself the meaning of his po-
sition. Was the old lady responding to his advances? Did
the fact that he was the solitary guest augment his credit
or diminish it? Were they ashamed to show him to other
people or did they wish to give him a sign of sudden adop-
tion into their last reserve of favour?" (p. 218).
Sometimes James employs Newman's own words, di-
rectly quoting his thoughts to intensify the sense of
life of the work. His first meeting with Claire's mother,
the Marquise de Bellegarde, is recorded in this way: "'She's
a woman of conventions and proprieties,‘ he said to himself
as he considered her; 'her world's the world of things immu-
tably decreed. But how she's at home in it and what a par—
adise she finds'" (p. 183). Joseph Warren Beach has made
a valuable observation on James's use of language in the
depiction of his character's registration: "However much
James may limit himself to the point of view of his char-
acter, however closely he may identify himself with the
character's mentality, it is always in the language, the
syntax, of Henry James that the character's experience is
rendered . ... ."8 The truth of this assertion is illu-

strated in the passages cited above. It seems to make

115

little difference whether the narrator tells in his own
voice what Newman is thinking or whether Newman's thoughts
are directly quoted; the thoughts are couched in a some-
what formal written style. This fact seems strange con-
sidering James's ability to write lively colloquial speech,
amply illustrated in the scene in Chapter II when Newman
meets an old American acquaintance, Tom Tristram. James's
use of the central consciousness in his early novels bears
little resemblance to the stream-of-consciousness technique
as employed by such a writer as James Joyce whose charac-
ters' experiences are phrased in language that borders on
the pre-verbal and is frequently pre-conscious. It is a
mistake to fault James, however, as his concern was exclu-
sively with consciousness in its fullest and richest devel-
opment.

As he did in the earlier novel, Roderick Hudson,

 

James employs the letter not only to introduce information
of an expository nature but also to reveal the thoughts
and feelings of the centre. He also continues to make use
of the confidant. The major confidant here is Mrs. Tris-
tram, but Newman also confides in Valentin Bellegarde and
Mrs. Bread.

On several occasions during the course of his ad-
venture, Newman displays rather acute perceptions. He
describes the Marquise de Bellegarde to Mrs. Tristram:

"Well, she's a bad, bold woman. She's a wicked old
sinner."

116

"What then has been her sin?"

He thought a little. "I shouldn't wonder if she had

done someone to death--all of course from a high

sense of duty." (PP. 246-47)
This conversation transpires long before Mrs. Bread has
given him any hint of the Marquise's foul deed. Newman
perceives Urbain's true nature in the same way: "'If he
has never committed murder he has at least turned his
back and looked the other way while some one else was
committing it'" (p. 247). Newman is correct in his assess-
ment of both characters. He also perceives the role that
the Bellegarde's English cousin, Lord Deepmere, has played
in the Bellegarde's repudiation of Claire's engagement to
Newman.

Although Newman is not a terribly deep figure,
there are several signs of growth in his character, begin-
ning with his changing attitudes about money and those who
spend their lives getting it. It is toward the end of his
summer's touring the continent that "It had come back to
him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was
a very brave and bristling world, and that it had not all
been made by men 'live' in his old mean sense" (p. 102).
His unhappy experiences with the Bellegardes have taught
him something about "reading" people and their actions; when
he visits the Marquise's friend, The Duchess, with the in-
tention of revealing the deathbed letter to her and unmask-
ing the Marquise as a murderer, he is no longer the innocent

that he was at the beginning of the novel. Although the

117

Duchess receives him politely, even warmly, Newman realizes
that she deliberately avoids all mention of Claire and her
family and of Newman's broken engagement: "There was not

a symptom of apprehension he would trench on any ground

she proposed to avoid. 'Upon my word, she does it very
well,’ he tacitly commented. 'They all hold together
bravely, and, whether any one else can trust them or not,
they can certainly trust each other'" (p. 504).

Newman would have been incapable of any such obser-
vation upon his arrival in Paris. The narrator reinforces
the reader's awareness of this growth in a scene between
Newman and Tom Tristram in which the latter, in an ill-
considered attempt to console his friend, reveals his pro-
vincial prejudices and shallowness as well as his insensi-
tivity to Newman's state of mind in his condemnation of the
Bellegardes. Newman listens for a while, "gazing at Tris-
tram during this harangue with a lack-lustre eye; never
yet had he seemed to himself to have outgrown so completely
the phase of equal comradeship with Tom Tristram" (p. 511).
The reason for this state of affairs is only partly attrib-
utable to Newman's growth. Another element is his coming
to know himself better and the renewed sense of the wisdom
of following his natural convictions. His ultimate refusal
to exact revenge upon the Marquise and her sin is the prime
example. Although he has the deathbed letter accusing the

Marquise of murdering her husband, he rejects the idea of

118

exposing her to her friends. The reader who feels that
Newman has a right to his retribution and who is disap-
pointed that he does not exact it, perhaps failed to see
the refusal to take advantage of another person as a basic
part of Newman's character. The anecdote related early in
the novel about his opportunity to "get even" with a busi-
ness rival in the United States should serve to prepare
the reader for Newman's final gesture--the burning of the
death-bed letter. James, in the Preface, explains the sig-
nificance he attaches to this aspect of Newman's character:
" . . . one's last view of him would be that of a strong
man indifferent to his strength and too wrapped in fine,
too wrapped above all in QEEEE and intenser, reflexions
for the assertion of his 'rights.‘ This last point was
of the essence and constituted in fact the subject: there
would be no subject at all, obviously,--or simply the com-
monest of the common,--if my gentleman should enjoy his
advantage."9
Unfortunately, Christopher Newman's "intenser re-
flections" fail in the presentation. For despite the in-
stances cited of the operation of his consciousness he is,
on the whole, not an ideal, and many would argue not even
an adequate, register. The narrator frequently alludes to
the limitations of Newman's perceptivity: "He was not
'subjective'" (p. 42), "the states of Newman's own spirits

were but scantily chronicled" (p. 42), "I am afraid the

119

picture was lost on Newman" (p. 232). This American busi-
nessman has always been primarily a man of action, not
contemplation, as he himself is quick to point out:

"' . . . I have never had time to 'feel' things so very
beautifully. I've had to 93 them, had to make myself felt'"
(p. 43). In this regard he is unlike his predecessor, Row-
land Mallet, who was sensitive to virtually all of the nu-
ances of social living. When Newman confides in Valentin
of his love for his sister, Valentin tries to explain the
difficulties and complexities of life in his culture. New-
man's light-hearted response bears ironic overtones: "'It's
a pity,‘ said Newman, 'that I don't wholly catch on. I
shall lose some very good sport'" (p. 162). He is destined
to lose more than some "very good sport" as a result of his
failing to catch on.

Sometimes Newman's perceptual shortcomings are the
result of ignorance and they may be of little moment. The
first time that Newman really notices Mrs. Bread, the narr-
ator points out Newman's ignorance in matters of dress:

"She was tall and straight and dressed in black, and she
wore a cap which, if Newman had been initiated into such
mysteries, would have sufficiently assured him she was not

a French woman; a cap of pure British composition" (p. 251).
On other occasions, however, his limitations have more seri-
ous results, as when the Marquise tells him of her plans

for a party: "We have noted him for observant, yet on

120

this occasion he failed to catch a thin sharp eyebeam, as
cold as a flash of steel, which passed between Madame de
Bellegarde and the Marquis and which we may presume to
have been a commentary on the innocence displayed in the
latter clause of his speech" (p. 285).

Valentin de Bellegarde, who, unlike Christopher
Newman, was born into society, has the perceptive powers
that a centre of consciousness in one of James's novels
needs and James himself possessed. The contrast between
the two young friends is striking as they discuss a young
Italian woman, separated from her husband. Valentin de-
clares his interest in following her downfall: "'Yes, I
know what you're going to say; this horrible Paris hardens
one's heart. But it quickens one's wits, and it ends by
teaching one a refinement of observation. To see this
little woman's drama play itself out is now for me a plea-
sure of the mind'" (p. 146). The words might have been
spoken by such an earnest observer as James himself. New-
man, however, is not of the same mind: " . . . I don't
find it a pleasure of the mind to watch her prospective
adventures. I don't in the least want to see her going
down hill'" (p. 147).

The sad beauty of the situation is that Newman
thinks and acts in the novel exactly as such a man would
think and act. Not born into the kind of life where sen-

sitivity to social relationships comes naturally, like

121

Valentin was, nor possessing the inclination in this direc-
tion that Rowland Mallet had, Newman is just as he should
be. A self-made man with little formal education, he is
intelligent and desirous of improvement. He is of strong
moral fibre and the indications are that even when he was
engaged in money-getting he was honest. He makes a very
believable and sympathetic nineteenth-century American
abroad for the first time. He "collects" cathedrals un-
tiringly, but for him the act of collection is limited to
placing a check mark or perhaps the words "Beautiful!" or
"So true!" in the margin of the appropriate guide book

(p. 103). He is not an insensitive boor; it is simply
that his character and personality do not run to acuteness
or genuine interest in people and the arts. He is perhaps
best characterized in this regard by the reactions of two
men with whom he travelled during parts of his summer's
tour. One, a colorless Unitarian minister, found him too
passionate and unpredictable to bear. The other, a well-
travelled Englishman, pronounced him in Newman's words "a
poor creature, incapable of the joy of life" (p. 105).

A number of critics have complained about James's
handling of Newman as a centre of consciousness. One of
these is Oscar Cargill, who writes:

However satisfactory Newman may be judged as a type,
he is much less satisfactory as a "centre." It is
true that James keeps him in focus admirably, but it

is not true that he endows him with much perceptivity,
despite his final illumination. . . . James failed to

122

avail himself thoroughly of the most obvious advantage
in making Newman imperceptive, namely, of ascribing

to Newman's ignorance whatever James himself did not
know about the Bourbon faction in the old aristocracy
of France.10

Perhaps even harsher in his judgment of the novel is
Joseph Warren Beach:

A story in which the main actor is so uninitiated
can bear no very close resemblance to the story of
Isabel Archer or Fleda Vetch or Lambert Strether.
There is here no revelation of anything through
Newman's consciousness--nothing that depends upon
his understanding. There is in fact no spiritual
dilemma. That is why the book is not among the
greatest of its author's.ll

 

The irony of the technique of the novel is that had Newman
been truly perceptive and acute in the fashion of other of
James's centres, he would not have been as valuable for
reasons of plotting. James needed Newman's naiveté and his
expansiveness to move the plot along--to get him embroiled
with the Bellegardes while seeking the most admirable

woman in Europe. Rowland Mallet would have been a more
perceptive centre, but he would not have had the innocence
and then the temerity to fall into the clutches of the Bell-
egardes. The balance that James had to find in his charac-
terization of Newman was indeed a difficult one and if he
erred in making him not fine enough as a centre of con-
sciousness, it is at least an understandable mistake.
Surely the romantic and melodramatic elements of James's
plot are at least partly responsible for the necessity of

the major character's features.

123

Another factor that must have had a bearing on
James's use of Newman as hero and as centre of conscious-
ness is the way that James "arrived at" this novel. His
"germ," he explains in the Preface, was a theme or a situ-

ation, not a character as it was for The Portrait sf s

 

Lssy: "in another country and an aristocratic society,

of ssms robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, ssms
cruelly wronged, compatriot: the point being in especial
that he should suffer at the hands of persons pretending
to represent the highest possible civilization and to be
of an order in every way superior to his own" [emphasis
added].12 Starting with the idea of this romantic plot,
James ssss arrived at a character to fit. This may help
to explain the weaknesses of Newman as a centre of con-
sciousness; he was not designed with this function in mind
and when James, working in the objective method that he

began to develop in Roderick Hudson, attempted to employ

 

him as the central intelligence the character of Newman
could not satisfy the conflicting demands. James himself
admits that his hope of presenting the novel entirely as
Newman's experience might not have been fulfilled:

" . . . I was perhaps wrong in thinking that Newman by him-
self, and for any occasional extra inch or so I might
smuggle into his measurements, would see me through my
wood."13

It is perhaps as a consequence of Newman's limita-

tions as a centre of consciousness that James puts an

124

excessive load on the narrator, to the detriment of the ob-
jective method. The engagement party that the Marquise de
Bellegarde gives demonstrates admirably both Newman's per-
ceptive limitations (although these limitations are clearly
an important element in the plot here) and the narrator's
penchant for stepping in and illuminating the situation for
the reader. Urbain de Bellegarde is escorting Newman
through the rooms to introduce him to the family's aristo-
cratic friends. The differences between Newman's impres-
sions and the narrator's insights are great: "Every one
gave Newman extreme attention, every one lighted up for
him regardless, as he would have said, of expense, every
one was enchanted to make his acquaintance, every one
looked at him with that fraudulant intensity of good so-
ciety which puts out its bountiful hand but keeps its fin-
gers closed over the coin" (p. 322). Newman perceives

only the surface appearances while the narrator penetrates
those appearances to the underlying reality. Frequently
the narrator feels the need to reassure the reader about
the accuracy of Newman's observations, as on this occasion
when he visits the Duchess: "He fell at this juncture to
admiring the Duchess for her fine manners. He felt, most
accurately, that she was not a grain less urbane than she
would have been if his marriage were still in prospect.

. . . " (pp. 504-505). The narrator is just as quick, how-

ever, to correct Newman when his impressions are erroneous.

125

Toward the end of the novel Newman visits the convent and
hears the nuns chanting a dirge: "He listened for Madame
de Cintré's voice, and in the very heart of the tuneless
harmony he imagined he made it out. We are obliged to be-
lieve that he was wrong, since she had obviously not yet
had time to become a member of the invisible sisterhood

. . . (pp. 480-81).

The narrator of The American speaks in a voice not

 

surprisingly similar to James's own. When he describes
Newman's tour of Europe's cathedrals and ruins, the narrator
remarks on the American's lack of discernment as he pays
equal homage to virtually all edifices regardless of the
quality. "But there is sometimes nothing like the imagi-
nation of those people who have none ... . " he adds
ironically (p. 89). Much as James might sympathize with
Newman generally, he cannot overlook his shortcomings, and
to James artistic appreciation is a quality to be held in
high esteem. As Rowland Mallet bears striking resemblances
to his creator, Christopher Newman is better noted for his
differences.

The narrator's stance is outside and above the
world of the novel--that is, he takes no part in the story
as a character and he is clearly superior to his characters
in knowledge and in tone. He speaks any number of times in
the first person, confiding in the reader some little

perception of his about the characters. Of Newman's

126

sometime travelling companion he comments: "Mr. Babcock's
moral malaise, I am afraid, lay deeper than where any defi-
nition of mine can reach it" (p. 92). James, or the narra-
tor, is not above tenderly patronizing even the reader when
the occasion requires. Of M. Nioche's "pigeon English" he
explains: "The result, in the form in which he in all hu-
mility presented it, would be scarcely comprehensible to
the reader, so that I have ventured to attempt for it some
approximate notation" (p. 63). Furthermore, he is a con-
scious story-teller, forever referring to Newman as "our
hero," thus diminishing by that much the illusion of re-
ality that he seeks to create. Although he does stand
above his characters, his omniscience is strictly limited
as this example illustrates: "I know not whether in re-
nouncing the mysterious opportunity to which he alluded
Valentin felt himself do something very generous" (p. 160).
With one or two minor exceptions he restricts himself to
Newman's register alone. Such a narrator, although helpful
here, is a retrograde step in James's development of the
objective method.

The combination of factors detailed in this chap-
ter--a relatively imperceptive centre of consciousness, an
inappropriate, romantic plot, an intrusive narrator--all
serve to render the objective method nearly inoperative

and to lessen the sense of reality in The American. James

 

has overcome the problem of the division of interest that

127

plagued Roderick Hudson by consolidating his centre of con-

 

sciousness and his "hero" into one figure, but he has done
so at the cost of realistic rendering of interior states of

consciousness. If The American fails in the presentation,

 

it is because James attempted to use the centre of conscious-
ness technique on the wrong kind of character in the wrong

kind of story. In The Portrait 9: s Lady he finds the right

 

combination.

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

1The Novels sf Henry James (New York, 1961), p. 46.

 

2Daniel Lerner, "The Influence of Turgenev on Henry
James," The Slavonic and East European Review, XX (December,

1941), 43-44; Cornelia Kelley, The Early Development 9:

 

Henry James (Urbana, Illinois, 1965), PP. 239-41; and

Cargill, The Novels s: Henry James, p. 42.

 

 

3The American (New York, 1907), p. 44. Further

references are to this edition and are included parenthe-

tically in the text.

4Oscar Cargill, The Novels 9E HenryJames, pp.

 

 

46-47.

5Henry James: The Conquest s£_London (Philadelphia,
1962), p. 252.

6The Art of the Novel (New York, 1934), p. 34.

 

7The Art of the Novel, pp. 37-38.

 

8Introduction to The American (New York, 1949), ix.

 

9The Art 93 the Novel, p. 22.

 

128

129

10The Novels 93 Henry James, p. 49. Like several

 

other critics, Cargill believes that James did not know or
understand the French aristocracy, that he was never ad-
mitted into its circles, and that he took his view of it

from the theatre and from Turgenev.

11
The Method 9: Henrnyames (Philadelphia, 1954),

 

pp. 204-205.

12
The Art of the Novel, pp. 21-22.

 

13The Art of the Novel, p. 39.

 

CHAPTER VI

THE PORTRAIT g A LADY

 

 

In the figure of Isabel Archer, Henry James found
the combination of intriguing subject and polished reflec-
tor that was ideal for his approach to fiction. The con-
ception of this young woman, which, he says, hovered about

him as a disponible for some time, was the germ of The Por-

 

sssis 2£.E ssgy, James relates in the Preface to EEE.EQ£F
Essis his finding himself in accord with his master, Ivan
Turgenev, in beginning a work with the vision of a charac-
ter; the problem remaining was "to find for them the right
relations, those that would most bring them out . . . .”
Reaching back through the veils of memory, James recalls
the words of Turgenev, spoken decades earlier: "'To arrive
at these things is to arrive at my "story,"' he said, 'and
that's the way I look at it. The result is that I'm often
accused of not having "story" enough. I seem to have as
much as I need--to show my people, to exhibit their rela-
tions with each other; for that is all my measure.”l To
find the right character and then to work out the relations

that will present that character--that is the essence of

Henry James's method, too.

130

131

Having the germ of The Portrait, the figure of

 

Isabel Archer, in hand, James then saw that the problem
facing him was what to do with her, how to treat her, how
to make an "ado" about her. Such women, of course, had
appeared before in fiction. But "They are typical none
the less, of a class difficult, in the individual case, to
make a centre of interest . . . ." James had noted George
Eliot's failure to achieve this end in her treatment of

Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch. Furthermore, the earlier

 

females in fiction are all stoutly supported by other char-
acters (male) and strong plots. James decided to take the
more difficult way: "'Place the centre of the subject in
the young woman's own consciousness,‘ I said to myself,
'and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty
as you could wish. Stick to ssss--for the centre; put the
heaviest weight into ssss scale, which will be so largely
the scale of her relations to herself. . . . Press least
hard . . . on the consciousness of your heroine's satel-
lites, especially the male.'" And this is what he did.2
His two earlier experiments with the central in-
telligence had used male characters (Rowland Mallet and
Christopher Newman). This time he would use a young woman,
which fact in itself might raise some difficulties, for
Isabel's adventures are relatively mild: "Without her
sense of them, her sense fss them, as one may say, they are

next to nothing at all; but isn't the beauty and the diffi-

culty just in showing their mystic conversion by that

132

sense, conversion into the stuff of drama or, even more de-
lightful word still, of 'story'?"3 The interest and the
excitement was to lie in Isabel's "inward life." 322.3237
Essis s; s LEQX was to be a drama of consciousness.

James began to write The Portrait in the spring of

 

1880, just six years after he started Roderick Hudson and

 

in the same city, Florence. Like that work too, Tss Egg:
Essis commenced serial publication before James had fin-
ished writing. Perhaps this process, which enabled him to
see installments in print while he was still at work on
later sections, gave him a clearer perspective of what he
had written and enabled him to perceive whatever short-
comings were inherent in the earlier parts. At any rate,
sometime during the course of the writing and the serial
publication (the entry is undated), he reminded himself in

his Notebooks that the first half of The Portrait was some-

 

what slow: "There has been a want of action in the earlier
part and it may be made up here [the five installments
after Isabel's marriage]. . . . The weakness of the whole
story is that it is too exclusively psychological--that it
depends too little on incident; but the complete unfolding
of the situation that is established by Isabel's marriage
may nonetheless be quite sufficiently dramatic."4 Joseph
Warren Beach agrees with James about the first half of the
novel and points out the differences of treatment in Tss

Portrait and in the later novels. He maintains that

133

"Nearly the whole first volume [of the three-volume English
edition] is taken up with material which would have been ex-
cluded from the more distinctive work of the later years."
He exemplifies by noting that just as James has launched
Isabel on her adventures he halts the forward movement for
two chapters while he provides exposition of Isabel's back-
ground and girlhood and of Ralph's past. "And this is not
done, as it would have been done after 1896, by reminis-
cence and dialogue as an integral part of the narrative of
present experience."5 The second half of the novel, how-
ever, Beach calls "a masterpiece of revelation." Like so
many other critics, Beach tends to read the earlier novels
in the light of the later ones: " . . . if the details
brought out are chiefly details of 'background'--having

to do with the characters of Osmond and Madame Merle--that
is essentially the case in the later books."6 This is the
method that Beach names "revelation." " . . . In the most
distinctive works of James the sense of progress, of story,
is almost altogether lost. You have rather a sense of being
present at the gradual uncovering of a wall-painting which
had been whitewashed over and is now being restored to view.
The picture was all there from the start; there is nothing
new being produced; there is no progress in that sense."
And he adds: "The story is rather the process by which the
characters and the situation are revealed to us."7 This

method of revelation is the way all men experience life

134

most of the time. They have no god-like voice whispering
in their ears, explaining what will happen next or present-
ing an outline of a life. They learn what they learn about
other men by watching their actions, listening to their
words, hearing what others say about them, ideally always
weighing the reliability of the impression.

This is the manner in which The Portrait s£_s Lady

 

proceeds. To be sure, there is a narrator who frequently
offers summaries (pictures). That is partly because James
has not fully developed the objective method and partly
because of the economy of summary. But the narrator as-
sumes a more limited degree of omniscience and a less in-
trusive stance than in the earlier novels, revealing Isa-
bel's character more gradually and letting more of it be
shown. Christopher Newman was fairly completely character-

ized in the early chapters of The American; the rest of the

 

novel was concerned with his romantic quest. Furthermore
he was a less complex figure. Isabel's revelation is never
really complete because she is complex, because she grows,
and because her character is presented in small pieces.
What is revealed, how it is revealed, and what it signi-
fies--these are the topics to be dealt with in the rest of
this chapter.

Isabel Archer is the new American woman--indepen-
dent, romantically idealistic, determinedly unconventional.
In many respects she resembles her predecessor, Christopher

Newman. Indeed, Leon Edel claims that "The Portrait was

 

135

envisaged as a kind of feminine version of The American,

 

and James began with the thought that Isabel Archer would
be a female Christopher Newman." In fact Edel even sug-
gests that she is named after Spain's (and Columbus')
queen, further linking her to the latter-day Christopher.8
Surely they are similar, and they represent the expansive-
ness of the New World in all that is suggested thereby.
There are some significant differences, however. Newman

is a man of the world, his own world at least. Although he
may not be wise to the ways of the French aristocracy, he
is experienced in some aspects of life. He went to EurOpe
seeking culture and perhaps a wife. The first goal is
easily gained, for him at least: simply travel until you
have checked off everything in the guide books. While his
second goal, a wife, may not be easy of accomplishment in
the long run, it seemed so to him at first. A wife could
be acquired in virtually the same way that a copy of a
Reubens could--by purchase. This summary of Newman's char-
acter is, of course, an over-simplification; the point is
that his goals were fairly concrete, reasonable, and not
impossibly hard to gain. Isabel, on the other hand, was
more interested in experience when she went to Europe, the
kind of experience that would fit and reinforce her notions
of the world. Her life has been sheltered; she spent her
earlier years largely reading in her grandmother's house,

in a disused room with a disused door leading to the

136

outside: "She knew that this silent motionless portal
opened into the street.. . . .But she had no wish to look
out, for this would have interfered with her theory that
there was a strange unseen place on the other side ... . ."9
She never opened the door, preferring to retain the romance
of the unknown. In its own way her life before the advent
of Mrs. Touchett was as limited as was Roderick Hudson's
life before Rowland Mallet entered it. Newman was innocent
of the ways of the society which he tried to enter in France;
Isabel is innocent of the ways of the world. These she must
learn, and learn through suffering. Her attitude toward the
world is almost childlike as she considers accepting Mrs.
Touchett's offer to accompany her to Europe: "It appeared
to Isabel that the unpleasant had been even too absent from
her knowledge, for she had gathered from her acquaintance
with literature that it was often a source of interest and
even of instruction" (I, 42). Her reading has had a forma-
tive influence on her character, leading her to view people
and events as elements from the latest novel, and expecting
them to correspond to their fictional counterparts. She
frequently saw herself as a romantic heroine: "Sometimes
she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some
day in a difficult position, so that she should have the
pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded"

(I, 69). Of course, she finally got her wish.

137

Because of these traits and because of her native
intelligence and feminine curiosity, she performs the
function of the centre of consciousness admirably well.
Unlike Newman, her consciousness is balanced--neither too
dull nor too fine. She is perceptive enough to recognize
the responsibilities and the dangerous freedom wealth may
bring, for instance. She expresses her doubts to Ralph:
"'A large fortune means freedom, and I'm afraid of that.
It's such a fine thing and one should make such good use
of it'" (I, 320). Yet she is unable to see the inadequacy
of her view of independence and freedom. Finally it is
the wealth that she supposed would bring her freedom that
leads to her entrapment.

As the central intelligence Isabel serves to unify
the novel in its varying sub-plots and relationships and
its large cast of characters. Oscar Cargill, however,
takes issue with those who claim that all of the story is
centered in her consciousness, pointing to scenes and ep-
isodes in which she is not present. He believes that James
should have been more concerned with integrity of point
of view and less with dramatic interest.lo But James seems
always to have been concerned with dramatic interest above
all, seldom being dogmatic about integrity of point of
view. Still James does employ Isabel to preserve the in-
tegrity of the novel as a whole, if not its point of view.

The opening scene of the novel serves to illustrate this

138

point. The setting is tea-time on the lawn at Gardencourt,
the Touchetts' English home. Ralph, his father, and their
neighbor, Lord Warburton, have gathered for the pleasant
ceremony. Isabel has yet to make her first appearance in
the novel, but there is a sense of expectation, of waiting,
during this longest, most leisurely part of a summer after-
noon. The attention of the three men is focused on the
house and the expected appearance of Mrs. Touchett and her
niece, Isabel Archer. When the subject of marriage arises,
Mr. Touchett warns Warburton jokingly: "'Well, you may
fall in love with whomever you please; but you mustn't fall
in love with my niece . . . '" (I, 12). They discuss the
puzzling cable sent by Mrs. Touchett: "'Changed hotel,
very bad, impudent clerk, address here. Taken sister's
girl, died last year, go to Europe, two sisters, quite in-
dependent'" (I, 13). Their uncertainty about the precise
meaning of the wire also serves to focus attention on the
absent Isabel. The effect, then, is to make this Isabel's
"chapter" even though she has not yet been introduced into
the novel. The means vary throughout the work, but the re-
sult is always to give the value of everything for Isabel.

James employs a technique in this novel that was to
become a most valuable addition to his objective method and
an indisputable aid in his presentation of consciousness.
The technique is the interior monologue, exemplified in

Chapter XLII, the scene of Isabel's meditative vigil.

139

The chapter is so important in the structure of the novel
and the form so significant in James's development of the
objective method that it seems worthwhile to summarize the
passage. Osmond has, in the preceding chapter, instructed
Isabel to influence Warburton to marry Pansy, Osmond's
daughter. Although Isabel finds Osmond's behavior offen-
sive and his request unfair, when he tells her to think
about it, she does. Left alone before the fire in the
drawing room, with only a few candles for light, Isabel
spends the night in a chair meditating. The narrator gives
her thoughts without intrusion. She first considers War-
burton: does he still love her? is that why he is inter-
ested in marrying Pansy--to be near Isabel? Isabel rejects
this idea. She then reflects on the impression that she
gained earlier in the day that there is something, some

odd relationship, between her husband and Madame Merle.
Osmond's behavior seems to have changed since their mar-
riage; it is "as if he had had the evil eye; as if his
presence were a blight and his favour a misfortune. Was
the fault in herself, or only in the deep mistrust she had
conceived for him?" (II, 188-189). His feelings seemed to
have turned to hatred. Isabel then reflects on their court-
ship and on her highest motives of helping Osmond, of doing
something useful and good with her money, "to make it over
to the man with the best taste in the world" (II, 193).

She is struck by the irony of Mr. Touchett's bequest; wealth

140

that she once thought would bring complete independence has
instead linked her inextricably with the man who has come
to hate her. Poor Mr. Touchett has become for Isabel "the
beneficent author of infinite woe" (II, 193). Osmond she
had once thought to be enlightened, open, and honest. Now
she has come to see him symbolized by his house, "the house
of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffoca-
tion" (II, 196). She considers the contrast of their
ideals: "His ideal was a conception of high prosperity and
propriety, of the aristocratic life, which she now saw that
he had deemed himself always, in essence at least, to have
led." On the other hand, "Her notion of the aristocratic
life was simply the union of great knowledge with great
liberty; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty and
the liberty a sense of enjoyment" (II, 198). She had ex-
pected her marriage to Osmond to be such a union. But he
is concerned only with the appearance of nobility and aris-
tocracy, only with the forms of life. Isabel seeks the
reality (even in her romantic fashion) of an Open, free,
and noble existence. She is the true aristocrat; she
achieves a natural nobility. "The real offense, as she ul-
timately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all"
(II, 200). Because she could not accept his views of life,
he came to hate her with a hatred that "had become the occu-
pation and comfort of his life" (II, 201). What then of
their future? "What would he do--what ought §§E.t° do?"

(II, 202). Although she does hate him and does feel

141

largely responsible for the impasse, she recognizes the
horror of their lives together: "Nothing was a pleasure
to her now; how could anything be a pleasure to a woman
who knew that she had thrown away her life?" (II, 203).
This recognition, this admission, marks a turning point
in Isabel's life. Ralph, now near death, only "made her
feel what might have been" (II, 203). As the monologue
nears its conclusion, the fire has gone out. It is four
o'clock; she has spent "half the night, trying to per-
suade herself that there was no reason why Pansy shouldn't
be married as you would put a letter in the post-office"
(II, 205). She rises to leave the room, stops, and stands
there "gazing at a remembered vision--that of her husband
and Madame Merle unconsciously and familiarly associated"
(II, 205).

James was quite pleased with this chapter. He ex-
plains in the Preface that it is an instance of dramatizing
Isabel's "mild adventures" by showing her sense of them,
that is by presenting their impact upon her consciousness.
The key to James's technical aim is to be found in the
words: "It was designed to have all the vivacity of in-

11 Now, picture as

cident and all the economy of picture."
it includes the narrator's summary and compression of time
and space is economical but usually lacks dramatic impact.
It can, however, present the centre's thoughts directly.

Scene, as it presents characters in confrontation has the

142

potential of great intensity and is a keystone of the ob-
jective method; it is also relatively uneconomical. It

can present inner states of consciousness only as they are
mirrored in dialogue and in action. The value of an inter-
ior monologue such as Isabel's meditation is that it com-
bines most of the virtues of picture and scene without
their limitations.

The interior monologue is James's attempt to drama-
tize picture, Kristin Lauer points out in her study of the
technique in the later novels. It is a dramatic unit, like
a scene, with a start, a turn, and a finish. There is a
definite setting in which the character is usually isolated.
The major purpose, beyond giving scenic qualities to pic-
ture, is to dramatize ethical conflicts in the conscious-
ness of the register or, put another way, to externalize
the inward life. The interior monologue is invaluable in
characterization by revealing patterns of rationalization
and motivation. Mrs. Lauer also observes that in the later
novels there are fairly consistent patterns of imagery in
these monologues, usually suggestive of illumination and
12

discovery.

As early as 1880, when he was writing The Portrait,

 

James had sensed the strong need for such a device and
the chapter of Isabel's vigil has most of the qualities
of the later, more highly developed and more frequently

used monologues. If James does not achieve the mastery

143

of the form here that he eventually reaches in The Golden

 

E931! he does manage to make this chapter one of the most
vivid and significant scenes of the novel. It brings to-
gether and contrasts Isabel's earlier romantic notions
about life and about Gilbert Osmond with a growing aware-
ness of the tragedy of her situation. Her ideas of inde-
pendence and freedom are given a rude jolt as she realizes
that what she once took for glorious freedom is indeed un-
remitting bondage. The union of great knowledge with great
liberty that she had so hopefully perceived as the true
aristocratic life has turned into a mere hollow existence
full of empty forms and appearances. It is in this scene
too that Isabel first voices her suspicions of the relation-
ship of her husband and Madame Merle.

Isabel's conflict in this chapter is whether to
help force Pansy to marry as Osmond wishes. As she ap-
proaches a decision on the matter, the action is advanced
and her motivations for her later behavior are revealed.
Whether she actually reaches a decision about Warburton
and Pansy in this chapter is not clear, although two
thoughts that occur to her at the end of the vigil suggest
that she has decided not to betray Pansy. The language of
the first thought is suggestive; "She believed she was not
defiant, and what could be better proof of it than that
she should linger here half the night, trying to persuade

herself that there was no reason why Pansy shouldn't be

144

married as you would put a letter in the post-office?"
(II, 205). That she had been tsying to persuade herself
implies that she was not successful. Further, it has

long been obvious that she values Pansy more than "a let-
ter in the post-office" even if Osmond does not. The
second thought that strikes her as she rises to leave the
room is "a remembered vision--that of her husband and
Madame Merle unconsciously and familiarly associated"

(II, 205). If these thoughts do not in themselves indi-
cate Isabel's decision not to betray Pansy into a false
marriage, they, along with the rest of the monologue, do
provide the motivation for Isabel's later actions, notably
her subtle warning off of Warburton. The impressions, the
thoughts, the disappointments that are presented in this
scene are such that Isabel would never reveal to anyone,
not even a most trusted confidant. These reflections are
too bitter for Isabel to voice to anyone. The interior
monologue form, then, becomes a means of revealing the
kind of information that could probably not be presented
in any other way. As James developed and perfected it,

it was a step toward the stream-of-consciousness technique
that was to become a major instrument of modern psycholog-
ical fiction. This kind of monologue is probably as close
to that technique as James could come (or perhaps cared to
come) while still preserving one of the highest functions

of art--the imposing of order on life or the discernment of

145

meaning in its confusion. Unlike the stream-of-conscious-
ness presentation, the interior monologue has the benefits
of a literate, articulate consciousness located in a dis-
cernible structure. The narrator, although still present,
stands to one side, letting the character's thoughts speak
for themselves.
Even in this novel in which there is such a fine

register, there is still an author-narrator present, al-

though he is less intrusive than in Roderick Hudson and The

 

American. His omniscience is perhaps more limited than in
those works; even so he occasionally enters the conscious-
ness of characters other than Isabel. Sometimes, espe-
cially in the early chapters, he treats her with a gentle
irony such as when he reveals that she was spoken of as

"a prodigy of learning, a creature reported to have read
the classic authors--in translation" (I, 66). Even in the
scene of her midnight vigil, he resorts to the first-person.
But nowhere, even in the slower-moving first part of the
novel is his presence as strongly felt--manipulating, inter-
preting, judging and assessing--as it is in the earlier
works. And the reason is not simply that James wanted to
reduce the narrator's presence, to refine him out of exis-
tence. The reason is rather that he does hit upon a char-
acter who enables him to develop more fully the values of

the objective method.

146

This character's register is supplemented by what
has been called the "reflector system." Like the centre
of consciousness, the confidant, and the interior mono-
logue, the reflector system was instrumental in the success
of James's objective method. Briefly, this system consists
of the presentation of characters' views of one another
through comments and actions. Skillfully handled, these
views reflect not only one figure's attitude toward another,
but also reveal something about the first character. Now
in itself this technique is not at all new. What is new and
interesting is the way James used it consistently to reveal
subtleties of character and relationships and to reveal a
subject from several perspectives. In Chapter X of Tss
Portrait, for example, Isabel, Ralph, and the American news-
paperwoman Henrietta Stackpole reveal a good deal about them-
selves as they react to one another. The chapter opens with
Henrietta's letter to Isabel, announcing her intention of
writing newspaper sketches about England and Englishmen and
expressing a desire to see Isabel. The letter reveals Hen-
rietta's impulsiveness, humor and lack of respect for Brit-
ish institutions. When Isabel tells Mr. Touchett about
Henrietta's arrival in England, she wisely decides not to
show him the actual letter, realizing that it presents
Henrietta in an undesirable light. Ralph is put off when
Isabel tells him that Henrietta "doesn't care a straw what

men think of her" (I, 115). Isabel admires Henrietta's

147

bravery and independence despite the correspondent's like-
lihood of violating good taste and hospitality by writing
about Gardencourt and its inhabitants: "'I've not made

her my bosom-friend; but I like her in spite of her faults.'"
Ralph's rejoinder perfectly reveals the differences in out-
look between him and Isabel: "'I'm afraid I shall dislike
her in spite of her merits" (II, 116). Isabel's optimism
and idealism are neatly contrasted with Ralph's light-hearted
cynicism. Neither one is totally objective in his appraisal
of her. With Henrietta's appearance, however, the views of
both Isabel and Ralph moderate somewhat, coming closer to
the reality of the situation and moving away from attitudes
colored purely by their own characters. In Henrietta's pre-
sence Isabel finds her somewhat intrusive; Ralph, on the
other hand, begins to like her wit and intelligence. Hen-
rietta's fresh, democratic vieWpoint also adds a fresh di-
mension to Gardencourt. Ralph, in his enjoyment of culti-
vated leisure, becomes, through her eyes, a decadent young
man who should have steady employment. He is also guilty

of avoiding the "duty" of matrimony. Henrietta's egalitar-
ianism leads Isabel to describe her as "a kind of emanation
of the great democracy--of the continent, the country, the
nation" (I, 130). Isabel's emotions toward her native land
are strong and she finds Henrietta an image of America:

"'I like the great country stretching away beyond the ri-

vers and across the prairies, blooming and smiling and

148

spreading till it stops at the green Pacific! A strong,
sweet, fresh odour seems to rise from it, and Henrietta--
pardon my simile--has something of that odour in her gar-
ments'" (I, 130-31). Ralph's rejoinder not only reveals
his attitude toward his homeland but his impression of
Henrietta as well: "'I'm not sure the Pacific's so green
as that but you're a young woman of imagination. Henrietta,
however, does smell of the Future--it almost knocks one
down!'" (I, 131).

Leon Edel describes the reflector system as a
"method of using shifting angles of vision so as to make
us feel the way in which peOple see one another."13 James

uses the method throughout The Portrait, another excellent

 

example being the views of Warburton alternately presented
by the narrator, Ralph, Mr. Touchett, Isabel, and Warbur-
ton's sisters in Chapters VIII and IX, views that are at
the same time statements about themselves. The reflector

system in The Portrait is still a long way from what it was

 

to become in the later works, especially The Wings s£_the

 

sts. In that novel, as James explains in the Preface, the
reflectors are actually registers and instead of fixing the
centre in a single consciousness James alternates registers,
moving from Kate Croy to Merton Densher to Milly Theale.l4
The price that James must pay, and there is always a price,

is some loss of unity and integrity of point of view. In

The Portrait no such sacrifice is necessary because the

 

149

reflector system operates by means of speech and action and
does not depend upon the use of supplementary registers of

consciousness. Thus Isabel is preserved as the sole centre
of consciousness.

The Portrait s£_s Lady is the culmination of many

 

years of trial and error for its author. It is indeed what

J. W. Beach has called it--"the first masterpiece of Henry

"15

James. For in this novel James has solved the technical

problems that hinder Roderick Hudson and The American. He

 

 

has discovered a central intelligence neither too fine nor
too dull, and worthy of the task. He has lodged the centre
of the subject of the novel firmly in that intelligence.
And finally he has added to his objective approach the tech-
nique of the reflector system and the interior monologue,
which enable him to present the moral and ethical conflict,
the inward life of Isabel Archer, in a realistic fashion.
In Isabel Archer James found the figure that en-
abled him to perform the seamless fusion of subject and
treatment, of matter and manner. The novel is indeed the
portrait of a lady. Isabel's consciousness gives structure
to the novel as a revelation of the growth of the subject.
It also gives unity to the many otherwise disparate ele-
ments and furnishes the intensity of the inward life. Con-
ceived as an integral part of the objective method, the
centre of consciousness is part and parcel of the gradual
revelation which Joseph Warren Beach pointed out as char-

acterizing James's method. In the centre of consciousness

150

Henry James has discovered the means to penetrate beneath
the superficialities of the prevalent surface realism of
his day to a new depth of psychological realism. Tss_gs£f
Essis_of a Lady is only a first step in that direction, but

it is a giant step.

NOTES TO CHAPTER VI

The Art of the Novel (New York, 1934), p. 43.

 

2The Art of the Novel, pp. 49, 51.

 

3The Art of the Novel, p. 56.

 

The Notebooks 9: Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen

 

 

and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1961), p. 15.

S
The Method 9: Henry James (Philadelphia, 1954),

 

 

pp. 205-206. Oscar Cargill disagrees with Beach about the
first half of the novel: "Beach's comment on the structure

of The Portrait has no particular force save as it empha-

 

sizes James's change of aim in his career as a novelist."

The Novels 2: Henry James (New York, 1961), p. 94.

 

6The Method sf Hengnyames, p. 209.

 

 

7The Method s£_Hen£yJames, pp. 39, 41.

 

 

8Henry James: The Conquest 9: London (Philadelphia,

 

 

1962), p. 421.

9
The Portrait 2§.E Lady (New York, 1908), I, 30.

 

Further references are to this edition and are included

parenthetically in the text.

151

152

10The Novels sf Henry James (New York, 1961), p. 109.

 

 

11The Art 2: the Novel, p. 57.

 

121 am indebted for the definition and functions of

the interior monologue to Kristin Lauer's dissertation, "The
Interior Monologue in the Later Novels of Henry James" (in

progress--Michigan State University).

13Henry James: The Conquest sf London, pp. 428-29.

 

 

l4Iflg_§££ s: the Novel, pp. 300-301.

 

15The Method s: Hengy James, p. 205.

 

 

CONCLUSION

The centre of consciousness was simply one element,
albeit an important element, of James's objective method.
When it was employed most successfully, it operated in
close conjunction with the confidant, the reflector sys-
tem, the interior monologue, and the self-effacing narra-
tor. This observation requires emphasis because of the
stress that various critics have placed on one of these
elements or another to the almost complete exclusion of the
rest. It is important for an understanding of James's
method and his fiction not to accept the erroneous belief
that his major goal in life was the total elimination of
the narrator, for instance, or the rendering of a story
exclusively through dialogue. What James did seek and find
was a way of portraying the inner life, a means of drama-
tizing consciousness. He wrote as if consciousness were
the distinguishing characteristic of the human condition,
as if events were real and meaningful only as they were
perceived by someone. As a story-teller he was more inter-
ested in why an action was taken or a choice was made than
in what that action or that choice was.

The technique of the centre of consciousness grew
out of James's search for a theory and a means of realistic

153

154

expression that could treat the moral and ethical experi-
ences and conflicts that lie beneath the surface of man's
existence. Each writer has his own notion of what the
real is and each writer portrays that reality in his own
way. James chose to reveal the reality that he experienced
through the objective method. This approach is virtually
an epistemological system, for like such a system it pre-
sents a theory of knowledge. A man learns about his fellow
men in certain ways, none of them like the way a reader
learned about characters in the fiction of most novelists
before James's time. What James sought to achieve in his
fiction, then, was to represent the process of human per-
ception in terms that duplicated life as nearly as possible.
To the extent that he desired to reduce the intrusions of
the author-narrator, he did so in order to present the
reader with a more "natural" situation, natural in that
one's perception of life is not aided by an intrusive
author-narrator.

Nowhere in his writings did James prescribe or
proscribe for other writers. On the contrary, in the Pref-

ace to The Portrait 2E s Lady he describes the house of

 

fiction as a large edifice with "not one window, but a
million," at each of which is posted a watcher, looking
down on the human scene below. Each pair of eyes is diff-
erent so that no two watchers see exactly the same thing

although they are all watching the same scene. "The

155

spreading field, the human scene, is the 'choice of sub-
ject'; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied

or slit-like and low-browed, is the "literary form"; but
they are, singly or together, as nothing without the
posted presence of the watcher--without, in other words,
the consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist
is, and I will tell you of what he has bsss_conscious.
Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless free-

"1 The artist's freedom is

dom and his 'moral' reference.
restricted only by his own limitations.

Henry James expanded the world of fiction through
the development of new techniques and the introduction of
subjects which enabled him to treat with verisimilitude
the human scene that he perceived through the windows of
the house of fiction. Near the end of his life James
claimed: " . . . the Novel remains still, under the right
persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most pro-

«2

digious of literary forms. It was largely through his

own creative efforts that this was true.

NOTES TO CONCLUSION

1The Art sf the Novel (New York, 1934), pp. 46-47.

 

The Art 9: the Novel, p. 326.

 

156

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fl‘__

..1‘41-1.

"imam“