Page images
PDF
EPUB

Maruehl, and from the German minnesinger, Walther von der Vogelweide. There is nothing, however, to show that the Welsh bard had any direct knowledge of the works of either the troubadours or the minnesingers; and, alike in his independence of native bardic convention, and in the freshness and the freedom of his outlook upon life, he is one of the most original singers of the Middle Ages. Dafydd ap Gwilym, though he had his share of learning, and was brought up to the bardic craft under courtly auspices, instinctively rebelled against the traditional culture of the cloister and the schools. He dared, open-eyed, to 'gaze on nature's naked loveli ness,' and he found it good. He is, above everything, the poet of the joy of life; to him 'sunshine and health, and-as he frankly adds-' woman are the cardinal essentials of earthly happiness. To this creed of sensuous enjoyment he held manfully through a life-time's war fare against sour priests and envious friars.

'Black sinner though I be' (he protests in one of his odes), 'yet have I art enough to get me a grave under the green leaves; there shall the letters of my name be duly cut, and memorials of Summer be laid over my head, and on the tombstone an image of my mistress, to stir my love e'en though I

lie so low!'

In his revolt against the corrupt religion of his time, and in his passionate delight in all the wonder and the wealth of the visible world, Dafydd ap Gwilym antici pates the intrepid spirits of the later Renaissance. But we have to come down much nearer to our own time to find a poet who lived in such close intimacy with Nature as he, and whose songs so quiver and throb with the joyous impulse of Nature's own music. His songs are the spontaneous outpourings of a heart that was as blithe as a bird's, responding instinctively to the seasons' influences, and knowing, away from the haunts of man, no enemy but winter and rough weather. It was with him at the close of the fourteenth century, and not with the crowd of bards who, some three or four generations earlier, thronged the courts of the Princes, that the Welsh Muse came to her own, and fulfilled the promise of her obscure and stormy prime.

W. LEWIS JONES.

[ocr errors]

Art. 4.-THE ART OF HENRY JAMES.

The Novels and Tales of Henry James. New York edition. In twenty-four volumes. London: Macmillan, 19071909.

THE recent appearance of a definitive edition of Mr James's novels offers to his readers what he himself would call a beautiful incentive' to take a general view of his work.

Mr James's literary activity has extended over more than twenty years, and during that time not only his language and manner, but the fundamental theory of his art, has been modified in a way so curious and interesting as to provoke continual discussion, and divide his readers somewhat sharply into the champions of his earlier and his later styles. The publication of his 'complete works' seems the opportune moment for summing up the arguments on both sides, and trying to reach a general conclusion which shall more clearly interpret the importance of his work; yet the reperusal of these volumes checks the very zeal it excites by making the reader pause and ask himself, 'What need has Henry James of champions or interpreters?' Why, indeed, in such a case, 'jostle the elbow of slow-fingering Time'? Mr James has no need of such aid. He is bound to enter into his own; his final form is indestructible. But if words in recognition of his eminence can serve no end for him, they constitute an act which may have its uses for his public. They have the purifying grace of a confession. We know where he stands. We do ourselves a service in noting where we stand as well.

The opportunity of applying this test is abundantly aided by the prefaces to the new edition. In these prefaces Mr James has shed a vivid light on the theory of his own work, and incidentally on the art of fiction in general. They represent, in fact, the first serious attempt ever made in English to call upon that bewildered art to pause and give a conscious account of itself; to present its credentials and justify its existence. In these remarkable pages Mr James has again and again illustrated his general theory by taking to pieces before the reader the

1

complex machinery of his own fiction, and showing, with a beguiling candour, how and to what end its intricate parts were combined. The lesson is deeply instructive, though it may be questioned if it makes the process completely intelligible. The conjuror who shows his audience how a trick is done cannot impart the suppleness needed to execute it; he can display the successive gestures, not their moment of fusion. But Mr James's confidences have at least the inestimable value of showing how he can do the work, and why he does it.

[ocr errors]

The early James, the painter of the single consciousness, with its more or less loosely grouped surrounding incidents, won a large measure of popular success by the distinction of his intelligence, the precision of his vision, the admirable freshness and flexibility of his style. But he was a James who, save in the very early tales (so personal in their romance), was still evidently under the influence of French comedy, French art, and Russian art, of Flaubert, Maupassant, and Turgénieff. The James of the second period-extending, one might roughly say, from The Portrait of a Lady' to the great work of transition, What Maisie Knew,' and including such memorable volumes as 'The Princess Casamassima' and The Tragic Muse-the artist of this period was simply disengaging and developing to the utmost the possibilities of expression latent in his first form of presentation. Taking up the hardly conscious theory of fiction where it had been left by Balzac-'the master of us all-he had turned and twisted it about, and had shed on it at every angle the searching light of human experience. In the course of these experiments he had evolved, by a series of syntheses now clearly traceable in the collected edition, several principles tending to modify the whole theory of his art, and at last to break it down as the oak-roots, in Goethe's magnificent metaphor, burst the vase in which the acorn has been planted.

[ocr errors]

The most fruitful of these innovations was the principle that the action of each narrative should be recorded in the consciousness of one or more of the actors rather than in the vague impersonal register of an ex machind story-teller. Mr James had learned, in other words, that the only way of acquiring the objectivity necessary to artistic representation was to assume successively, and at

[ocr errors]

the exact psychological moment,' the states of mind of the actors through whom his story became a story. This method had been rigorously practised by the early French psychological novelists, the authors of such masterpieces as 'La Princesse de Clèves,'' Adolphe,' or the 'Liaisons Dangereuses,' where the drama had been either confined to one consciousness, or else-as in the novel of Choderlos de Laclos-presented, by means of letters, in different sharply divided layers. The same necessity had been intermittently recognised by Balzac and Stendhal, though the enlargement of their field, and the introduction of a human background, an ambiance,' for their principal figures, had greatly complicated and often obscured the problem. It was left to Mr James to restate it in this infinitely more difficult form, to face the need of a definitive solution, and lastly to find that solution in the art of passing, at the inevitable moment, from the consciousness of one character to that of another. The increased sureness and dexterity of these transitions constitute the other notable characteristic of what has here been called his second manner, and point the way to the fundamental change distinguishing the novels of his latest period.

The James of the second manner (when he was producing things in their kind the peer of the most excellent of their kind), before he had come to himself, saw himself coming. It needed not the prefaces to tell us this; but they bring beautiful corroboration of his early sense of the possibilities within him. It was perhaps this sense of what his art still concealed from him, of the amazing answer he was yet to wring from it, that kept him so single-mindedly to his path. There is no nobler example of intellectual probity in the world of letters; and the rarity of such phenomena is not difficult to account for. The great danger that besets the artist is the peril of popularity, and the all-too seductive appeal to outdo himself, to abound still more in the same sense. It is at his risk that he leaves his admirers in the lurch. What? just as they have begun to understand and 'interpret him he dares to perform a volte-face and show an aspect unknown to them? The secret of continued success is not to disturb the spectator's association of ideas. That is the lesson of any show-case of Tanagras. It is the

1

principle so delightfully, if deliberately, exploited by Renan in the last fifteen years of his life. It explains the abundance of the Henners, the Harpignies, even the Reynoldses, that stock the collections of our Adam Ververs. It requires courage to ignore this instant value of the trade-mark; for not only gratified vanity but uneasy self-criticism urges that the public may be right. Henry James had this high courage; and to it we owe the fact that he has become, throughout the Englishspeaking world of letters, one of those 'premiers parmi les plus grands' with whom Hugo classed Balzac.

It is first of all on the ground of form that this may be affirmed of him; yet he himself has shown, in divers passages of self-analysis, how 'form' is in the last resort the outcome of the subject, as the subject is the outcome of the author's temperament. The arbitrary distinction between the two ought by this time to be classed among such metaphysical abstractions as the separateness of body and soul; and perhaps Mr James's statement of the indivisibility of form and content may help to kill a

mischievous literary superstition.

No one has spoken more authoritatively on the vexed point of morality' of theme, on what Mr James calls 'the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question' (he goes on in the same passage) 'comes back thus obviously to the kind and degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which the subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its ability to "grow" with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected "morality. saying that, as there is no colour without vision, there is One might sum up the subject by no 'subject,' good or bad, without contact with a given consciousness. In the domain of serious literature-the only one to be contemplated in such discussions-the socalled 'badness' of a subject lies in reality in the inadequacy of the mind transmitting it. The dull or discoloured mirror dims or disturbs the image it reflects.

[ocr errors]

The James of the third manner has surprised his most confident admirers by an evolution which even such a dispenser of aesthetic emotions as the creator of 'Daisy Miller' and 'Roderick Hudson,' of 'The Portrait of a

« PreviousContinue »