<SPAN name="2_The_Artist_at_Work"></SPAN>
<h3><b>2. The Artist at Work.</b></h3>
<br/>
<p>Henry James's amanuensis, Miss Theodora Bosanquet, wrote an article
a
year or two ago in the <i>Fortnightly Review</i>, describing how the
great
man wrote his novels. Since 1895 or 1896 he dictated them, and they
were
taken down, not in shorthand, but directly on the typewriter. He was
particular even about the sort of typewriter. It must be a Remington.
"Other kinds sounded different notes, and it was almost impossibly
disconcerting for him to dictate to something that made no responsive
sound at all." He did not, however, pour himself out to his amanuensis
without having made a preliminary survey of the ground. "He liked to
'break ground' by talking to himself day by day about the characters
and
the construction until the whole thing was clearly before his mind's
eye. This preliminary talking out the scheme was, of course, duly
recorded by the typewriter. "It is not that he made rough drafts of his
novels-sketches to be afterwards amplified. "His method might better be
compared with Zola's habit of writing long letters to himself about
characters in his next book until they became alive enough for him to
begin a novel about them." Henry James has himself, as Miss Bosanquet
points out, described his method of work in <i>The Death of a Lion</i>,
in
which it is attributed to his hero, Neil Paraday. "Loose, liberal,
confident," he declares of Faraday's "scenario," as one might call it,
"it might be passed for a great, gossiping, eloquent letter—the
overflow into talk of an artist's amorous plan."</p>
<p>Almost the chief interest of Henry James's two posthumous novels is
the
fact that we are given not only the novels themselves—or, rather, the
fragments of them that the author had written—but the "great,
gossiping, eloquent letters" in which he soliloquized about them. As a
rule, these preliminary soliloquies ran to about thirty thousand words,
and were destroyed as soon as the novel in hand was finished. So
delightful are they—such thrilling revelations of the workings of an
artist's mind—that one does not quite know whether or not to
congratulate oneself on the fact that the last books have been left
mere
torsos. Which would one rather have—a complete novel or the torso of a
novel with the artist's dream of how to make it perfect? It is not easy
to decide. What makes it all the more difficult to decide in the
present
instance is one's feeling that <i>The Sense of the Past</i>, had it
been
completed, would have been very nearly a masterpiece. In it Henry James
hoped to get what he called a "kind of quasi-turn-of-screw effect."
Here, as in <i>The Turn of the Screw</i>, he was dealing with a sort
of
ghosts—whether subjective or objective in their reality does not
matter. His hero is a young American who had never been to Europe till
he was about thirty, and yet was possessed by that almost sensual sense
of the past which made Henry James, as a small boy, put his nose into
English books and try to sniff in and smell from their pages the older
world from which they came. The inheritance of an old house in a London
square—a house in which the clocks had stopped, as it were, in
1820—brings the young man over to England, though the lady with whom he
is in love seeks to keep him in America and watch him developing as a
new species—a rich, sensitive, and civilized American, untouched and
unsubdued by Europe. This young man's emotions in London, amid old
things in an atmosphere that also somehow seemed mellow and old, may, I
fancy, be taken as a record of the author's own spiritual experiences
as
he drew in long breaths of appreciation during his almost lifelong
wanderings in this hemisphere. For it is important to remember that
Henry James never ceased to be a foreigner. He was enchanted by England
as by a strange land. He saw it always, like the hero of <i>The Sense
of
the Past</i>, under the charm ... of the queer, incomparable London
light—unless one frankly loved it rather as London shade—which he had
repeatedly noted as so strange as to be at its finest sinister."</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>However else this air might have been described it was signally not
the light of freshness, and suggested as little as possible the element
in which the first children of nature might have begun to take notice.
Ages, generations, inventions, corruptions, had produced it, and it
seemed, wherever it rested, to be filtered through the bed of history.
It made the objects about show for the time as in something "turned
on"—something highly successful that he might have seen at the theatre.</p>
</div>
<p>Henry James saw old-world objects in exactly that sort of light. He
knew
in his own nerves how Ralph Pendrel felt on going over his London
house.
"There wasn't," he says, "... an old hinge or an old brass lock that he
couldn't work with love of the act." He could observe the inanimate
things of the Old World almost as if they were living things. No
naturalist spying for patient hours upon birds in the hope of
discovering their secrets could have had a more curious, more hopeful,
and more loitering eye. He found even fairly common things in Europe,
as
Pendrel found the things in the house he inherited, "all smoothed with
service and charged with accumulated messages."</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>He was like the worshipper in a Spanish church, who watches for the
tear on the cheek or the blood-drop from the wound of some
wonder-working effigy of Mother and Son.</p>
</div>
<p>In <i>The Sense of the Past</i>, Henry James conceived a fantastic
romance,
in which his hero steps not only into the inheritance of an old house,
but into 1820, exchanging personalities with a young man in one of the
family portraits, and even wooing the young man's betrothed. It is a
story of "queer" happenings, like the story of a dream or a delusion in
which the ruling passion has reached the point of mania. It is the kind
of story that has often been written in a gross, mechanical way. Here
it
is all delicate—a study of nuances and subtle relationships. For Ralph,
though perfect in the 1820 manner, has something of the changeling
about him—something that gradually makes people think him "queer," and
in the end arouses in him the dim beginnings of nostalgia for his own
time. It is a fascinating theme as Henry James works it out—doubly
fascinating as he talks about it to himself in the "scenario" that is
published along with the story. In the latter we see the author groping
for his story, almost like a medium in a trance. Like a medium, he one
moment hesitates and is vague, and the next, as he himself would say,
fairly pounces on a certainty. No artist ever cried with louder joy at
the sight of things coming absolutely right under his hand. Thus, at
one
moment, the author announces:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>The more I get into my drama the more magnificent upon my word I
seem to see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of possibilities
in it that I positively quake in dread of the muchness with which they
threaten me.</p>
</div>
<p>At a moment of less illumination he writes:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>There glimmers and then floats shyly back to me from afar, the sense
of something like <i>this</i>, a bit difficult to put, though entirely
expressible with patience, and as I catch hold of the tip of the tail
of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but another admirable
twist.</p>
</div>
<p>He continually sees himself catching by the tip of the tail the
things
that solve his difficulties. And what tiny little animals he sometimes
manages to catch by the tip of the tail in some of his trances of
inspiration! Thus, at one point, he breaks off excitedly about his hero
with:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>As to which, however, on consideration don't I see myself catch a
bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?... No,
no—no latch-key—but a rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big brass
knocker.</p>
</div>
<p>As the writer searches for the critical action or gesture which is
to
betray the "abnormalism" of his hero to the 1820 world in which he
moves, he cries to himself:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>Find it, find it; get it right, and it will be the making of the
story.</p>
</div>
<p>At another stage in the story, he comments:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>All that is feasible and convincing; rather beautiful to do being
what I mean.</p>
</div>
<p>At yet another stage:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>I pull up, too, here, in the midst of my elation—though after a
little I shall straighten everything out.</p>
</div>
<p>He discusses with himself the question whether Ralph Pendrel, in the
1820 world, is to repeat exactly the experience of the young man in the
portrait, and confides to himself:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>Just now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of mind, I let
myself be scared, by a momentarily-confused appearance, an assumption,
that he doesn't repeat it. I see, on recovery of my wits, not to say of
my wit, that he very exactly does.</p>
</div>
<p>Nowhere in the "scenario" is the artist's pleasure in his work
expressed
more finely than in the passage in which Henry James describes his hero
at the crisis of his experience, when the latter begins to feel that he
is under the observation of his <i>alter ego</i>, and is being vaguely
threatened. "There must," the author tells himself—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>There must be sequences here of the strongest, I make out—the
successive driving in of the successive silver-headed nails at the very
points and under the very tops that I reserve for them. That's it, the
silver nail, the recurrence of it in the right place, the perfection of
the salience of each, and the trick is played.</p>
</div>
<p>"Trick," he says, but Henry James resorted little to tricks, in the
ordinary meaning of the word. He scorns the easy and the obvious, as in
preparing for the return of the young hero to the modern world—a
return made possible by a noble act of self-sacrifice on the part of a
second 1820 girl who sends him from her, yet "without an excess of the
kind of romanticism I don't want." There is another woman—the modern
woman whom Ralph had loved in America—who might help the machinery of
the story (as the author thinks) if he brought her on the scene at a
certain stage. But he thinks of the device only to exclaim against it:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>Can't possibly do anything so artistically base.</p>
</div>
<p>The notes for <i>The Ivory Tower</i> are equally alluring, though <i>The
Ivory
Tower</i> is not itself so good as <i>The Sense of the Past</i>. It is
a story
of contemporary American life, and we are told that the author laid it
aside at the beginning of the war, feeling that "he could no longer
work
upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life."
Especially interesting is the "scenario," because of the way in which
we
find Henry James trying—poor man, he was always an amateur at
names!—to get the right names for his characters. He ponders, for
instance, on the name of his heroine:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>I want her name ... her Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have
some bright combination with that; the essence of which is a surname of
two syllables and ending in a consonant—also beginning with one. I am
thinking of Moyra Grabham, the latter excellent thing was in <i>The
Times</i> of two or three days ago; the only fault is a little too much
meaning.</p>
</div>
<p>Consciousness in artistry can seldom have descended to minuter
details
with a larger gesture. One would not have missed these games of genius
with syllables and consonants for worlds. Is it all an exquisite farce
or is it splendidly heroic? Are we here spectators of the incongruous
heroism of an artist who puts a hero's earnestness into getting the
last
perfection of shine on to a boot or the last fine shade of meaning into
the manner in which he says, "No, thank you, no sugar"? No, it is
something more than that. It is the heroism of a man who lived at every
turn and trifle for his craft—who seems to have had almost no life
outside it. In the temple of his art, he found the very dust of the
sanctuary holy. He had the perfect piety of the artist in the least as
well as in the greatest things.</p>
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