Does the Broken Estate Have a Heart?

[Campbel Morgan]

from Joseph Conrad's _Notes on Life and Letters_ (J. M. Dent edition, 1921):
HENRY JAMES--AN APPRECIATION--1905

The critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry
James's work. His books stand on my shelves in a place whose
accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion. But not all
his books. There is no collected edition to date, such as some of "our
masters" have been provided with; no neat rows of volumes in buckram
or half calf, putting forth a hasty claim to completeness, and
conveying to my mind a hint of finality, of a surrender to fate of
that field in which all these victories have been won. Nothing of the
sort has been done for Mr. Henry James's victories in England.

In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one
would not exhaust oneself in barren marvelling over mere bindings, had
not the fact, or rather the absence of the material fact, prominent in
the case of other men whose writing counts, (for good or evil)--had it
not been, I say, expressive of a direct truth spiritual and
intellectual; an accident of--I suppose--the publishing business
acquiring a symbolic meaning from its negative nature. Because,
emphatically, in the body of Mr. Henry James's work there is no
suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender, or even of
probability of surrender, to his own victorious achievement in that
field where he is a master. Happily, he will never be able to claim
completeness; and, were he to confess to it in a moment of
self-ignorance, he would not be believed by the very minds for whom
such a confession naturally would be meant. It is impossible to think
of Mr. Henry James becoming "complete" otherwise than by the brutality
of our common fate whose finality is meaningless--in the sense of its
logic being of a material order, the logic of a falling stone.

I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen;
indeed, I heard that of late he had been dictating; but I know that
his mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of
intellectual youth. The thing--a privilege--a miracle--what you
will--is not quite hidden from the meanest of us who run as we read.
To those who have the grace to stay their feet it is manifest. After
some twenty years of attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's
work, it grows into absolute conviction which, all personal feeling
apart, brings a sense of happiness into one's artistic existence. If
gratitude, as someone defined it, is a lively sense of favours to
come, it becomes very easy to be grateful to the author of The
Ambassadors--to name the latest of his works. The favours are sure to
come; the spring of that benevolence will never run dry. The stream of
inspiration flows brimful in a predetermined direction, unaffected by
the periods of drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms of
the land of letters, without languor or violence in its force, never
running back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of its
course through that richly inhabited country its fertility has created
for our delectation, for our judgment, for our exploring. It is, in
fact, a magic spring.

With this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the
inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as applied to Mr. Henry
James's inspiration, may be dropped. In its volume and force the body
of his work may be compared rather to a majestic river. All creative
art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive,
enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind,
pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest
consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality.

Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be
compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of
wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this
snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words,
out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms
may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of
permanence in this world of relative values--the permanence of memory.
And the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of the
individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, "Take me out of
myself!" meaning really, out of my perishable activity into the light
of imperishable consciousness. But everything is relative, and the
light of consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of
the things of this earth, imperishable only as against the short-lived
work of our industrious hands.

When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship
fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying
earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and
pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble
glow of the sun. The artistic faculty, of which each of us has a
minute grain, may find its voice in some individual of that last
group, gifted with a power of expression and courageous enough to
interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms of his
temperament, in terms of art. I do not mean to say that he would
attempt to beguile the last moments of humanity by an ingenious tale.
It would be too much to expect--from humanity. I doubt the heroism of
the hearers. As to the heroism of the artist, no doubt is necessary.
There would be on his part no heroism. The artist in his calling of
interpreter creates (the clearest form of demonstration) because he
must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death;
and the postulate was, that there is a group alive, clustered on his
threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to hear
the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth. It is safe
to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who would
be moved to speak on the eve of that day without to-morrow--whether in
austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess?

For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I
am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange
as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For
mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable
tenacity. It will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the
manner of an army having won a barren victory. It will not know when
it is beaten. And perhaps it is right in that quality. The victories
are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a purely
strategical, utilitarian point of view. Mr. Henry James seems to hold
that belief. Nobody has rendered better, perhaps, the tenacity of
temper, or known how to drape the robe of spiritual honour about the
drooping form of a victor in a barren strife. And the honour is always
well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry James chronicles with such
subtle and direct insight are, though only personal contests,
desperate in their silence, none the less heroic (in the modern sense)
for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of arms and sound of
trumpets. Those are adventures in which only choice souls are ever
involved. And Mr. Henry James records them with a fearless and
insistent fidelity to the PERIPETIES of the contest, and the feelings
of the combatants.

The fiercest excitements of a romance DE CAPE ET D'EPEE, the romance
of yard-arm and boarding pike so dear to youth, whose knowledge of
action (as of other things) is imperfect and limited, are matched, for
the quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by the
difficulties presented, to the sense of truth, of necessity--before
all, of conduct--of Mr. Henry James's men and women. His mankind is
delightful. It is delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own itself
beaten; it will sleep on the battlefield. These warlike images come by
themselves under the pen; since from the duality of man's nature and
the competition of individuals, the life-history of the earth must in
the last instance be a history of a really very relentless warfare.
Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man
alone. In virtue of these allies and enemies, he holds his precarious
dominion, he possesses his fleeting significance; and it is this
relation in all its manifestations, great and little, superficial or
profound, and this relation alone, that is commented upon,
interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist in the only
possible way in which the task can be performed: by the independent
creation of circumstance and character, achieved against all the
difficulties of expression, in an imaginative effort finding its
inspiration from the reality of forms and sensations. That a sacrifice
must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved
in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification
by the masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind the
curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the
supreme energy of an act of renunciation. It is the uttermost limit of
our power; it is the most potent and effective force at our disposal
on which rest the labours of a solitary man in his study, the rock on
which have been built commonwealths whose might casts a dwarfing
shadow upon two oceans. Like a natural force which is obscured as much
as illuminated by the multiplicity of phenomena, the power of
renunciation is obscured by the mass of weaknesses, vacillations,
secondary motives and false steps and compromises which make up the
sum of our activity. But no man or woman worthy of the name can
pretend to anything more, to anything greater. And Mr. Henry James's
men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits his art, so
clear, so sure of itself, has drawn round their activities. He would
be the last to claim for them Titanic proportions. The earth itself
has grown smaller in the course of ages. But in every sphere of human
perplexities and emotions, there are more greatnesses than one--not
counting here the greatness of the artist himself. Wherever he stands,
at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods
to his passions, or his passions to his gods. That is the problem,
great enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity
and knowledge.

In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr.
Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as
the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. I think
that the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is
unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But
it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on
the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas
history is based on documents, and the reading of print and
handwriting--on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth.
But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is
a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human
experience. As is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr.
Henry James is the historian of fine consciences.

Of course, this is a general statement; but I don't think its truth
will be, or can be questioned. Its fault is that it leaves so much
out; and, besides, Mr. Henry James is much too considerable to be put
into the nutshell of a phrase. The fact remains that he has made his
choice, and that his choice is justified up to the hilt by the success
of his art. He has taken for himself the greater part. The range of a
fine conscience covers more good and evil than the range of conscience
which may be called, roughly, not fine; a conscience, less troubled by
the nice discrimination of shades of conduct. A fine conscience is
more concerned with essentials; its triumphs are more perfect, if less
profitable, in a worldly sense. There is, in short, more truth in its
working for a historian to detect and to show. It is a thing of
infinite complication and suggestion. None of these escapes the art of
Mr. Henry James. He has mastered the country, his domain, not wild
indeed, but full of romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and sunny
places. There are no secrets left within his range. He has disclosed
them as they should be disclosed--that is, beautifully. And, indeed,
ugliness has but little place in this world of his creation. Yet, it
is always felt in the truthfulness of his art; it is there, it
surrounds the scene, it presses close upon it. It is made visible,
tangible, in the struggles, in the contacts of the fine consciences,
in their perplexities, in the sophism of their mistakes. For a fine
conscience is naturally a virtuous one. What is natural about it is
just its fineness, an abiding sense of the intangible, ever-present,
right. It is most visible in their ultimate triumph, in their
emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of renunciation.
Energetic, not violent: the distinction is wide, enormous, like that
between substance and shadow.

Through it all Mr. Henry James keeps a firm hold of the substance, of
what is worth having, of what is worth holding. The contrary opinion
has been, if not absolutely affirmed, then at least implied, with some
frequency. To most of us, living willingly in a sort of intellectual
moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of truth, the shadows so
firmly renounced by Mr. Henry James's men and women, stand out endowed
with extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary that their
rejection offends, by its uncalled-for scrupulousness, those
business-like instincts which a careful Providence has implanted in
our breasts. And, apart from that just cause of discontent, it is
obvious that a solution by rejection must always present a certain
lack of finality, especially startling when contrasted with the usual
methods of solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by
fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden death. Why the reading public
which, as a body, has never laid upon a story-teller the command to be
an artist, should demand from him this sham of Divine Omnipotence, is
utterly incomprehensible. But so it is; and these solutions are
legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which
our hearts yearn with a longing greater than the longing for the
loaves and fishes of this earth. Perhaps the only true desire of
mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be set at
rest. One is never set at rest by Mr. Henry James's novels. His books
end as an episode in life ends. You remain with the sense of the life
still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is felt in
that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word
has been read. It is eminently satisfying, but it is not final. Mr.
Henry James, great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the
impossible.


On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Robin
Landseadel<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Jul 23, 2009, at 10:50 AM, Campbel Morgan wrote:
>
>> . . . maybe it's not in there and Pynchon is not interesting
>> now, James, Henry and Wood, are.
>
> Feels like you're applying a tea & crumpets aesthetic to a 420 festival.
>
> I felt something when I read "Against the Day." of course, a lot of what I
> felt was humor, found plenty of the book laugh-out-loud funny. And obviously
> some folks won't. Right -wingers sure won't. Crypto-Fascists probably won't
> like it either. It's not that I'm engaging in flame-throwing here, it's just
> that a lot of the novel's vivid satirical portraiture is applied to
> Republicans, Christians, Plutocrats—the whole sick crew that mans the helm.
> Far-left folks and fans of Steampunk and Science-Fiction most certainly will
> get a kick out of it. As with all of Pynchon's books, I felt a whole lot
> more emotional impact once I started re-reading it. A lot of the book is
> visionary in a good-old-fashioned religious "awe" sort of way, and some
> folks don't take a hankerin'' to that, neither.
>
> Somehow, applying the literary aesthetic of the early 20th century to THE
> author who defines literary Postmodernism seems like comparing angel food
> cake to tarantulas.
>