The war allowed Whitman to put into practice all his young manhood's dream of saviorship. It turned him from a preacher into a prophet and a man of action, one who took his earlier message and illustrated it at every point with works. It awakened within him a new ideal of life. He had been dealing heretofore with words:
No longer does he exult in his mere physical body. Lines like these he now edits from his early editions:
Also lines like these:
He omits everywhere freely now from the early editions, not from the "Children of Adam," however, though Emerson advised it with earnestness. The Whitmans were an obstinate race. "As obstinate as a Whitman," had been a degree of comparison; and here was one of them who had taken a position before the world and had maintained it in the face of persecution. Retreat would be impossible; but it is noteworthy that he wrote no more poems of sex and that he put forth no more of his tall talk and braggadocio. Swiftly he had become the poet of the larger life: the immaterial in man, the soul.
Drum-Taps, 1866, gives us the first glimpse of this new Whitman. The tremendous poem, "Rise, O Days, from Your Fathomless Deeps," marks the transition. In it he declares that he had, with hunger of soul, devoured only what earth had given him, that he had sought to content himself simply with nature and the material world.
He does not condemn this earlier phase of his development:
Now for the first time he realizes the meaning of Democracy, the deep inner meaning of Man and America.
It is the same thrill that had aroused Stedman, and made him proud for the first time of his country. Henceforth the poet will sing of Men—men not as magnificent bodies, but as triumphant souls. Drum-Taps fairly quivers and sobs and shouts with a new life. America has risen at last—one feels it in every line. The book gives more of the actual soul of the great conflict and of the new spirit that arose from it than any other book ever written. "Come up from the Fields, Father," tells with simple pathos that chief tragedy of the war, the death message brought to parents; "The Wound-Dresser" pictures with a realism almost terrifying the horrors of the hospitals after a battle; "Beat! Beat! Drums!" arouses like a bugle call; such sketches as "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," "Bivouac on a Mountain Side," and "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown," are full of the thrill and the excitement of war; and finally the poems in "Memories of President Lincoln": among them "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "O Captain! My Captain!" and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-day," come near to the highest places yet won by elegaic verse in English.
In June, 1865, after he had served for a short time as a clerk in the Interior Department at Washington, Whitman had been discharged on the ground that he kept in his desk an indecent book of which he was the author. As a result of the episode, W. D. O'Connor, an impetuous young journalist, published in September the same year a pamphlet entitled The Good Gray Poet, defending Whitman as a man incapable of grossness and hailing him as a new force in American literature. Despite its extravagance and its manifest special pleading, the little book is a notable one, a document indeed in the history of the new literary period. It recognized that a new era was opening, one that was to be original and intensely American.
It [Leaves of Grass] is, in the first place, a work purely and entirely American, autochthonic, sprung from our own soil; no savor of Europe nor of the past, nor of any other literature in it; a vast carol of our own land, and of its Present and Future; the strong and haughty psalm of the Republic. There is not one other book, I care not whose, of which this can be said. I weigh my words and have considered well. Every other book by an American author implies, both in form and substance, I cannot even say the European, but the British mind. The shadow of Temple Bar and Arthur's Seat lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually, we are still a dependency of Great Britain, and one word—colonial—comprehends and stamps our literature.... At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in Leaves of Grass the immense and absolute sunrise! It is all our own! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctly and utterly American. Without model, without imitation, without reminiscence, it is evolved entirely from our own polity and popular life.
The defense fell for the most part on deaf ears. It had been Whitman's dream that the great poet of democracy was to be the idol of the common people, the poet loved and read even by the illiterate.
But the common people heard him not gladly: they preferred Longfellow. The American average man—"en masse"—sees no poetry in him. Moreover, he has been rejected very largely by the more educated. It has been his curious experience to be repudiated by democratic America and to be accepted and hailed as a prophet by the aristocratic intellectual classes of England and of Europe generally. Swinburne, W. M. Rossetti, Symonds, Dowden, Saintsbury, Tennyson, and very many others accepted him early and at full value, as did also Freiligrath, Schmidt, and Björnson. A cult early sprang up about him, one composed largely of mystics, and revolutionists, and reformers in all fields.
In 1871, Whitman issued what unquestionably is his most notable prose work, Democratic Vistas. It is pitched in major key: it swells O'Connor's piping note into a trumpet blast. Boldly and radically it called for a new school of literature. The old is outgrown, it cried; the new is upon us; make ready for the great tide of Democratic poetry and prose that even now is sweeping away the old landmarks.
To the new era it was what Emerson's American Scholar was to the period that had opened in the thirties. It was our last great declaration of literary independence. Emerson, the Harvard scholar, last of a long line of intellectual clergymen, had pleaded for the aristocracy of literature, the American scholar, the man thinking his own thoughts, alone, the set-apart man of his generation; Whitman pleaded for the democracy of literature, for an American literature that was the product of the mass, a literature of the people, for the people, and by the people. Emerson had spoken as an oracle: "What crowded and breathless aisles! What windows clustering with eager heads!" Whitman was as one crying in the wilderness, uncouth, unheeded save by the few. Emerson was the clarion voice of Harvard; Whitman was the voice of the great movement that so soon was to take away the scepter from Harvard and transfer it upon the strong new learning of the West. His message was clear and it came with Carlyle-like directness:
Literature, strictly considered, has never recognized the People, and, whatever may be said, does not to-day.
Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literati, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life.
He has this to say of the poets who thus far had voiced America:
Touch'd by the national test, or tried by the standards of democratic personality, they wither to ashes. I say I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or what-not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and active, pervading, underlying will and typic aspiration of the land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call these genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountaintop afar in the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States.
America has not been free. She has echoed books; she has looked too earnestly to the East.
America has yet morally and artistically originated nothing. She seems singularly unaware that the models of persons, books, manners, &c., appropriate for former conditions and for European lands, are but exiles and exotics here.
Our literature must be American in spirit and in background, and only American.
What is the reason our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local courage, sanity, of our own—the Mississippi, stalwart Western men, real mental and physical facts, Southerners, &c., in the body of our literature? especially the poetic part of it. But always instead, a parcel of dandies and ennuyés, dapper little gentlemen from abroad, who flood us with their thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-songs, tinkling rimes, the five-hundredth importation—or whimpering and crying about something, chasing one aborted conceit after another, and forever occupied in dyspeptic amours with dyspeptic women. While, current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions, and stormiest passions of history, are crossing to-day with unparallel'd rapidity and magnificence over the stages of our own and all the continents, offering new materials, opening new vistas, with largest needs, inviting the daring launching forth of conceptions in literature, inspired by them, soaring in highest regions, serving art in its highest.
America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past. Like America, it must extricate itself from even the greatest models of the past, and, while courteous to them, must have entire faith in itself, and the products of its own democratic spirit only.
Faith, very old, now scared away by science, must be restored, brought back by the same power that caused her departure—restored with new sway, deeper, wider, higher than ever. Surely, this universal ennui, this coward fear, this shuddering at death, these low, degrading views, are not always to rule the spirit pervading future society, as it has in the past, and does the present.
The book came winged with a double message: it was a defense and an explanation of Walt Whitman, the poet of democracy, and it was the call for a new era in American literature. In both aspects it was notable, notable as Wordsworth's early prefaces were notable. It was both an effect and a cause. The same impulse that launched it launched also Thoreau and the nature school, Bret Harte and the Pike County balladists, Mark Twain and the vulgarians, Howells and realism, and all the great wave of literature of locality. Its effect and the effect of Leaves of Grass that went with it has been a marked one. After these two books there could be no more dilettanteism in art, no more art for mere art's sake, no more imitation and subservience to foreign masters; the time had come for a literature that was genuine and compelling, one that was American both in message and in spirit.
1871 was the culminating year of Whitman's literary life. He was at the fullness of his powers. His final attack of paralysis was as yet a year away. For the exhibition of the American Institute he put the message of Democratic Vistas into poetic form—"After All, not to Create Only"—a glorious invitation to the muses to migrate to America:
a perfect hexameter line it will be noted, as also this:
And the same year he put forth an enlarged and enriched Leaves of Grass, including in it the splendid "Passage to India," celebrating the opening of the Suez Canal, a poem that is larger than the mere geographic bounds of its subject, world-wide as they were, for it is a poem universe-wide, celebrating the triumphs of the human soul.
The poems grouped around this splendid outburst, as indeed all the rest of his poems until illness and age began to dim his powers, are pitched in this major key. No poet in any time ever maintained himself longer at such high levels. His poems which he entitled "Whispers of Heavenly Death," are all of the upper air and the glory of the released soul of man. Not even Shelley has more of lyric abandon and pure joy than Whitman in such songs as "Darest Thou Now, O Soul":
And what deeps and abysses in a lyric like this:
And then at last, paralyzed and helpless, his work done, the body he had gloried in slipping away from him, there came that magnificent outburst of faith and optimism that throws a glory over the whole of American poetry, the "Prayer of Columbus":
Sometime the poems of Whitman will be arranged in the order in which he wrote them, and then it will be seen that the poems by which he is chiefly judged—the chants of the body, the long catalogues of things (reduced greatly by the poet in his later editings), the barbaric yawp and the egotism—belong to only one brief period in his literary development; that in his later work he was the poet of the larger life of man, the most positive singer of the human soul in the whole range of English literature. If the earlier Whitman is the singer of a type of democracy that does not exist in America except as an abstract theory, the later Whitman is the singer of the universal heart of man. The Whitman that will endure emerged from the furnace of the Civil War. In his own words:
Without those three or four years and the experiences they gave, Leaves of Grass would not now be existing.[89]
And again,
I know very well that my "Leaves" could not possibly have emerged or been fashion'd or completed, from any other era than the latter half of the nineteenth century, nor any other land than democratic America, and from the absolute triumph of the national Union arms.[90]
He is not always easy reading; he is not always consecutive and logical. He said himself that the key to his style was suggestiveness.
I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight.
He is oracular; he talks darkly, like the priestess in the temple, in snatches and Orphic ejaculations, and we listen with eagerness. Had he been as clear and as consecutive as Longfellow he would not have had at all the vogue that has been his. Somehow he gives the impression constantly to his reader, as he gave it in earlier years to Thoreau, that there is something superhuman about him. He is a misty landscape illuminated by lightning flashes. We feel that we are near lofty mountains; now and then we catch glimpses of a snowy peak, but only for a moment. The fitful roll of the thunder excites us and the flashes sometimes terrify, and the whole effect of the experience is on the side of the feelings. There is little clear vision. Or, perhaps, a better figure: taking his entire work we have the great refuse heap of the universe. He shows it to us with eagerness; nothing disgusts him, nothing disconcerts him. Now he pulls forth a diamond, now a potsherd, and he insists that both are equally valuable. He is joyous at every return of the grappling hook. Are not all together in the heap; shall the diamond say to the potsherd, I am better than thou?
He was early touched by the nature movement of the mid century. With half a dozen poems he has made himself the leading American poet of the sea. In all of his earlier work there breathes the spirit of the living out-of-doors until he may be ranked with Thoreau and Muir and Burroughs. It was the opinion of Burroughs that "No American poet has studied American nature more closely than Whitman, or is more cautious in his uses of it." He is not the poet of the drawing-room—he is the poet of the vast sweep of the square miles, of the open sky, of the cosmos. "Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air," he contended; "is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature—just as much as art is." And it was his mission, as he conceived it, "to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete."
He is not a scientist with Nature; he does not know enough to be a scientist, and his methods and cast of mind are hopelessly unscientific. He is simply a man who feels.
You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness—perhaps ignorance, credulity—helps your enjoyment of these things, and of the sentiment of feather'd, wooded, river, or marine nature generally. I repeat it—don't want to know too exactly, or the reasons why.
Such a paragraph is worth a chapter of analysis, and so also is a poem like this:
His intellect is not so developed as his emotions. He cannot think; he can feel. And after all is not the essence of all poetry, of all the meanings of life, of the soul, of Nature in its message to man, a thing not of the intellect but of the sensitive spirit of man?
Of Whitman's poetic form there is still much to learn. In its earlier phases there was a sprawliness about it that at times was almost fatal to poetic effects, but he grew more metric with every edition and more and more pruned out the worst of his lines, such for instance as this:
His lines are not prose, even the worst of them. There is a roll about them, a falling of the voice at stressed intervals, an alternate time-beat, crude at times, violated often, yet nevertheless an obedience to law.
It is impossible for any poet, however lawless and apathetic to rules, to compose year after year without at last falling into a stereotyped habit of manner, and evolving a metric roll that is second nature. That Whitman was not conscious of any metric law within himself goes without saying. He believed that he was as free as the tides of the ocean and the waves that rolled among the rocks—lawless, unconfined.
I have not only not bother'd much about style, form, art, etc., but I confess to more or less apathy (I believe I have sometimes caught myself in decided aversion) toward them throughout, asking nothing of them but negative advantages—that they should never impede me, and never under any circumstances, or for their own purposes only, assume any mastery over me.[91]
But a study of Whitman reveals the fact that certain laws did more and more assume mastery over him. With every year the time-beat of his poems grew increasingly hexametric. One may go through his later poems and find on the average a full hexameter line on every page. I quote at random:
His ear unconsciously seemed to demand the roll of the dactyl, then a cesura after from five to seven beats, then a closing roll longer or shorter as his mood struck him. The greater number of his later lines open as if the line was to be a hexameter: "Over the breast of the spring," "Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat," "Passing the apple tree blows," "Coffin that passes through lakes," and so on and on.
But one can make a broader statement. The total effect of the poems after 1870, like the "Song of the Redwood," for instance, is hexametric, though few of the lines may be hexameters as they stand. One might arrange this song like this:
Crude hexameters these undoubtedly, requiring much wrenching and eliding at times, yet for all that as one reads them aloud one cannot escape the impression that the total effect is hexametric. May it not be that the primal time beat for poetry is the hexameter, and that the prehistoric poets evolved it spontaneously even as the creator of Leaves of Grass evolved it?
To insist that Whitman has had small influence on later poetry because none of the later poets has made use of his chant is feeble criticism. No poet even can make use of his verse form without plagiarism, for his loose-fingered chords and his peculiar time-beat, his line-lengths, his wrenched hexameters—all this was Whitman himself. In all other ways he enormously influenced his age. His realism, his concrete pictures, his swing and freedom, his Americanism, his insistence upon message, ethic purpose, absolute fidelity to the here and now rather than to books of the past—all have been enormously influential. He is the central figure of the later period, the voice in the wilderness that hailed its dim morning and the strong singer of its high noon.
Walt Whitman. (1819–1892.) During the lifetime of the poet there were issued ten editions of Leaves of Grass, with the following dates: 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1876, 1881, 1888, 1889, 1891.
Among his other publications were the following: 1866. Drum-Taps; 1870. Passage to India; 1871. Democratic Vistas; 1875. Memoranda During the War; 1876. Specimen Days and Collect; 1876. Two Rivulets; 1888. November Boughs; 1891. Good Bye My Fancy.
Among the works published after his death the most important are: 1897. Calamus: a Series of Letters Written During the Years 1868–1880 to a Young Friend. Edited by R. M. Bucke; 1898. The Wound Dresser: Letters Written from the Hospitals in Washington During the War of the Rebellion. Edited by R. M. Bucke; 1904. Diary in Canada. Edited by W. S. Kennedy; 1910. Complete Prose Works, 10 vols. with biographical matter by O. L. Triggs, 1902; Poems, with biographical introduction by John Burroughs, 1902.
Among the great mass of biographies and studies may be mentioned the following: The Good Gray Poet, W. D. O'Connor, 1865; Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, John Burroughs, 1867; Whitman: a Study, John Burroughs, 1893; In Re Walt Whitman, R. M. Bucke, H. Traubel, and T. B. Harned, 1893; Walt Whitman, the Man, T. Donaldson, 1896; Walt Whitman: a Study, J. Addington Symonds, 1897; Walt Whitman (the Camden Sage) as Religious and Moral Teacher: a Study, W. Norman Guthrie, 1897; Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, E. P. Gould, 1900; Walt Whitman's Poetry, E. G. Holmes, 1901; Walt Whitman the Poet of the Wider Selfhood, M. T. Maynard, 1903; Walt Whitman, J. Platt, 1904; A Life of Walt Whitman, Henry B. Binns, 1905; A Vagabond in Literature, A. Rickett, 1906; Walt Whitman; His Life and Works, Bliss Perry, 1906; Days with Walt Whitman. With Some Notes on His Life and Work, Edward Carpenter, 1906; With Walt Whitman in Camden (March 28-July 14, 1880), Horace Traubel, 1906; Walt Whitman. English Men of Letters Series. George Rice Carpenter, 1909; Approach to Walt Whitman, C. E. Noyes, 1910; Democracy and Poetry, F. B. Gummere, 1911; Walt Whitman, Basil de Selincourt, 1914. A bibliography of Whitman's writings is appended to O. L. Triggs's Selections, 1898.
The nineteenth century both in Europe and America was a period of revolt, of breakings away from tradition, of voices in the wilderness. It was the age of Byron and Shelley, of Carlyle and Tolstoy, of Heine and Hugo. Literature came everywhere as the voice of revolution. It rang with protest—Dickens and George Eliot, Kingsley, Whittier, and Mrs. Stowe; it dreamed of a new social era—Fourier and the sons of Rousseau in France, the Transcendentalists in America; it let itself go in romantic abandon and brought back in a flood feeling and sentiment—the spätromantiker and Bulwer-Lytton and Longfellow. Everywhere conviction, intensity, travail of soul.
The school died in the last quarter of the century consumed of its own impetuous spirit, and it left no heirs. A feminine age had come, an age of convention and of retrospect. The romantic gave way to the inevitable classic; the hot passion of revolt to the cool fit of deliberate art. In America, the New England school that had ruled the mid years of the century became reminiscent, fastidious, self-contained, to awake in sudden realization that it no longer was a power, that its own second generation were women led by Aldrich, James, Howells, immigrants from New York and the West. The early leaders, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, all intensity and conviction, had been replaced by the school of deliberate workmen who had no message for their times, only technique and brilliancy.
This reaction from the New England school can be studied nowhere more convincingly than in the personalities and work of Henry James, father and son. The elder James, companion of Carlyle and Emerson and Alcott, disciple and interpreter of Swedenborg and Sandeman, was a typical product of the mid-century school—mystical, intense, concerned with the inner rather than the other aspects of man. "Henry James was true comfort," Emerson wrote in his diary in 1850; "wise, gentle, polished, with heroic manners and a serenity like the sun." He pursued no profession, but like Alcott devoted his life to philosophy and to literature. He wrote for the few a small handful of books, mostly forgotten now, though he who would read them will find them clothed in a richness of style and a felicity of expression that reminds one of the prose of the greater periods of English literature.[92]
The son of this mid-century genius, Henry James, Jr., cultured, cold, scientific, disciple of Turgenieff, of Flaubert and Daudet, Maupassant and Zola—"grandsons of Balzac"—stands as the type of the "later manner," the new school that wrote without message, that studied with intensity the older models, that talked evermore of its "art."
"We know very little about a talent," this younger James has written in his essay on Stevenson, "till we know where it grew up." The James family, we know, grew up outside the New England environment, in the State of New York—first at Albany, where the future novelist was born in 1843, then until he was twelve in New York City. But this in reality tells us nothing. The boy grew up in London rather than New York. The father had inherited means that permitted a retired and scholarly life. Following the birth of Henry, his second son, he had taken his family for a year and a half to England, and he had come back, both he and his wife, to quote his son's words, "completely Europeanized." "Had all their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happy time?—did it deal only with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park?... I saw my parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancient order."[93] He grew up in the presence of imported books and papers, the smell of whose ink fresh from London and the Strand fed his imagination.
Even his playmates transported him into the old world. It was one Louis De Coppet, a small boy, "straight from the Lake of Geneva," that first really aroused in him "the sense of Europe ... that pointed prefigurement of the manners of 'Europe,' which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my young allegiance was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. His the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail. It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, however scant, of another world."[94] While other lads were reading their juveniles, the young James was poring over Punch. "From about 1850 to 1855," he writes in his essay on Du Maurier, speaking of himself in the third person, "he lived, in imagination, no small part of the time, in the world represented by the pencil of Leech.... These things were the features of a world which he longed so to behold that the familiar woodcuts grew at last as real to him as the furniture of his home."
Such was the early environment of Henry James. Refinement and rare culture breathed upon his cradle and surrounded his whole boyhood like an atmosphere. He was kept sheltered from the world without, as from something coarse and degrading. He was not allowed to attend the public schools. "Considering with much pity our four stout boys," the father wrote to Emerson in 1849, "who have no playroom within doors and import shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely ponder whether it wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with them, allowing them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous education as they cannot get here."[95]
The plan did not mature until 1855 when the boy was twelve. In the interim tutors were employed for his education who instructed him with desultory, changing methods, allowing him always to take apparently the paths of his preference. In these same paths he seems to have continued during the four years of his residence abroad with his parents in London, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Paris. All harshness he avoided, all sharpness of discipline—mathematics, examinations. He would sit, boy as he was, only in the places of beauty and refinement. "The whole perfect Parisianism I seemed to myself always to have possessed mentally—even if I had but just turned twelve."[96]
One does not understand Henry James who neglects this formative period of his life. He returned to America an esthete, a dreamer, with his heart in the lands of culture, dissatisfied with the rush and rudeness that were preparing a new world for its future. He was too frail in health to enter the armies which soon were recruiting about him for the great war; he had no inclination, because of his father's prejudice, to undertake a college course; he shrank from the usual professions open to young men of his class. He did for a year attend lectures at the Harvard Law School, but it was with no thought of preparing for a legal career. He dreamed of literature as a profession. He would woo the muse, but the muse he would woo "was of course the muse of prose fiction—never for the briefest hour in my case the presumable, not to say the presuming, the much-taking-for-granted muse of rime, with whom I had never had, even in thought, the faintest flirtation." For this profession he trained himself as deliberately and as laboriously as if it were the violin that he was to master, or the great organ. He read industriously, especially in the French; he resided now in Boston, where his father at last had settled, now in France, now in Italy. Like Story, the sculptor, whom in so many ways he resembled, he would live at the richest centers of his art. Finally, in the late seventies, he took up his residence permanently abroad to return only as a rare visitant.
Henry James more than any other American author stands for specialization, for a limited field cultivated intensively and exclusively. Poetry, as he has explained, was no part of his endowment; he never attempted it even at the age when all men are poets; romance never attracted him. He approached his chosen field of prose fiction deliberately as a scientist, and prepared himself for it as a man studies medicine. He began as he ended—more crude in his art to be sure, more conventional, more youthful in thought and diction, yet not fundamentally different from his final manner.
His first published work, The Story of a Year, which appeared in the March, 1865, number of the Atlantic, at first reading seems little different from the hundreds of tales of the Civil War that were appearing everywhere during the period. It is full of a young man's smartness and literary affectations: "In early May, two years ago, a young couple I wot of," etc. "Good reader, this narrative is averse to retrospect," etc. And yet the story, despite its youthfulness, contains all the elements that we now associate with the fiction of Henry James. It is first of all a slight story—not so slight as some of the later work, but nevertheless a mere episode expanded into a novelette; furthermore, it was written not so much for the displaying of movement of incident as for the analysis of movements of feeling and the growth of elements of character: "I have to chronicle," he says at one point, "another silent transition." Then too its ending suggests the French school:
"No, no, no," she almost shrieked, turning about in the path. "I forbid you to follow me."
But for all that he went in.
We stand uncertain, startled, piqued—then the suggestion comes surging over us: Perhaps the author means that she married him after all! Could she do it? Did she do it? And then we find with a thrill of surprise that he has given us the full answer in his previous analysis of her character. It is finesse, it is the careful adjustment of parts, it is deliberate art.
There are other characteristics in the story that were to mark all the work of James. The tale, for instance, leaves us unmoved. We admire its brilliancy, but at no point does it grip us with its tragedy or its comedy. The faithlessness of the heroine and the death of the hero alike leave us cold. We do not care. Sympathy, the sympathy of comprehension, that sympathy that enters into the little world the author has created and for a time loses itself as if it were actually native there—of this there is nothing. It is all objective, external phenomena observed and recorded on a pad—a thing alone of the intellect.
That James should have followed this story with an essay on "The Novels of George Eliot" is no mere coincidence. How completely he had saturated himself with all the work of the great English sibyl, appears on every page. Her faithfulness to her material, her vivid photographs, her devotion to science which little by little crushed out her woman's heart, her conception of the novel as the record of a dissection—the reactions of human souls under the scalpel and the microscope, her materialism that refused all testimony save that of the test-tube and the known reagents, that reduced man to a problem in psychology—all this made its reflex upon the young student. He too became a scientist, taking nothing for granted, stripping himself of all illusions, relegating the ideal, the intuitive, the spiritual to the realm of the outgrown; he too became a taker of notes—"The new school of fiction in France is based very much on the taking of notes," he remarks in his essay on Daudet. "The library of the great Flaubert, of the brothers Goncourt, of Emile Zola, and of the writer of whom I speak, must have been in a large measure a library of memorandum-books."[97] In his earlier work at least, he was George Eliot with the skill and finesse of Maupassant, and he may be summed up with his whole school in the words he has put into the mouth of his own Anastasia Blumenthal: "It was meager," he makes her say of the singing of Adelina Patti, "it was trivial, it lacked soul. You can't be a great artist without a great passion."
During the first period of his literary life, the period that ended somewhere in the early nineties, James took as the subject of his study that vagrom area that lies on the borderland between the old culture of Europe and the new rawness of America. Howells has made much of the longings of certain classes in the older parts of his native land to visit the European cities, and he has pictured more than once their idealizations of foreign things, their retrospections and dreamings. James showed these Americans actually in Europe, their manners as seen against the older background, their crudeness and strength; and in doing so he produced what was widely hailed as the new international novel. There was nothing really new about it. James wrote of Americans in Europe just as Mark Twain wrote of Americans on the Mississippi or in California. As a scientist he must deal only with facts which had passed under his own observation—that was his much-discussed "realism"—and the life that he was most familiar with was the life of the pensions and grand hotels of Rome and Switzerland and Paris and London.
His world in reality was small. He had been reared in a cloister-like atmosphere where he had dreamed of "life" rather than lived it. It is almost pathetic to think of him going up to the Harvard Law School because in a vague way it stood for something which he had missed and longed to feel. "I thought of it under the head of 'life,'" he says. He had played in his childhood with books rather than boys; he had been kept away from his natural playmates because of their "shocking bad manners"; he had never mingled with men in a business or a professional way; he had never married; he stood aloof from life and observed it without being a part of it. Americans he knew chiefly from the specimens he had found in Europe during his long residences; European society he knew as a visitor from without. With nothing was he in sympathy in the full meaning of the word, that sympathy which includes its own self in the group under observation.
For ten years he wrote studies, essays on his masters, George Eliot, Balzac, Daudet, and stories that were not greatly different from these essays—analyses of types, and social conditions, and of the reactions that follow when a unit of one social system is thrust into another. In 1875 he enlarged his area with Roderick Hudson, a novel of length, and he followed it with The American, The Europeans, Daisy Miller, and others, all of them international in setting. In his later period, the period, say, after 1890, he confined himself to the depicting of society in London, the rapid change toward unconventionality in manners that marked the end of the century. He was so far now from contact with his native land that of necessity he must cease to use it as his source of literary material.
The earlier group of stories center about a comparatively few types. First, there are the young men of the Roland Mallet, Ralph Touchett order, "highly civilized young Americans," he calls them in Confidence, "born to an easy fortune and a tranquil destiny"; "men who conceive of life as a fine art." His novels are full of them, creatures of whim who know nothing of the bitterness of struggle, who drift from capital to capital of Europe mindful only of their own comfort, highly sensitive organisms withal, subject to evanescent emotions which they analyze with minuteness, and brilliant at every point when their intellectual powers are called into play. They talk in witty flashes for hours on end and deliver finished lectures at the call of an epigram. They cannot talk without philosophizing or hear a maiden laugh without analysis. They are brilliant all the time. The conversation of Gilbert Osmond and Mrs. Merle fills Isabel with amazement: "They talked extremely well; it struck her almost as a dramatic entertainment, rehearsed in advance." Page after page they talk in a staccato, breathless profusion of wit, epigram, repartee, verbal jewels worthy of Alexander Pope flying at every opening of the lips—is even French culture as brilliant as this? Mr. Brand in The Europeans listening to the Baroness Münster, bursts out rapturously at last, "Now I suppose that is what is called conversation, real conversation. It is quite the style we have heard about—the style of Madame de Staël, of Madame Récamier."
Within this narrow circle of Europe-visiting, highly civilized, occupationless men and women, James is at his best. Had he not been reared by Henry James, Senior? Had he not lived his whole life in the charmed circle of the highly civilized? But once outside of this small area he ceases to be convincing. Of the great mass of the American people he knows but little. He has seen them only at a distance.