Chapter III: Part 3

The poem appears in Van Bever and Léautaud's anthology and there may be no reason for my not having thence received it; but there is, for all that, a certain value in finding a man among his native surroundings, and in finding Elskamp at home, among his contemporaries, I gained first the advantage of comprehension.

ALBERT MOCKEL AND "LA WALLONIE"[5]

I recently received a letter from Albert Mockel, written with a graciousness not often employed by English and American writers in communication to their juniors. Indeed, the present elder generation of American "respectable" authors having all their lives approached so nearly to death, have always been rather annoyed that American letters did not die utterly in _their_ personal desiccations. Signs of vitality; signs of interest in, or cognizance of other sections of this troubled planet have been steadily and papier-mâchéedly deprecated. The rubbish bins of _Harper's_ and the _Century_ have opened their lids not to new movements but only to the diluted imitations of new movers, etc.

_La Wallonie_, beginning as _L'Elan Littéraire_ in 1885, endured seven years. It announced for a full year on its covers that its seventh year was its last. Albert Mockel has been gracious enough to call it "Notre _Little Review_ à nous," and to commend the motto on our cover, in the letter here following:

109, _Avenue de Paris_ 8 _mai_, 1918
_La Malmaison Rueil_
_Monsieur et cher confrère,_

Merci de votre amiable envoi. La _Little Review_ m'est
sympathique à l'extrème. En la feuilletant j'ai cru voir
renaître ce temps doré de ferveur et de belle confiance où,
adolescent encore, et tâtonnant un peu dans les neuves
régions de l'Art, je fondai à Liège notre _Little Review_ à
nous, _La Wallonie_. Je retrouve justement quelques
livraisons de cette revue et je vous les envoie; elles ont
tout au moins le mérite de la rareté.

Vous mon cher confrère, déjà ne marchez plus à tâtons mais
je vous soupçonne de n'être pas aussi terriblement, aussi
criminellement jeune que je l'étais à cette époque-là. Et
puis trente ans ont passé sur la littérature, et c'est de la
folie d'hier qu'est faite la sagesse d'aujourd'hui. Alors le
Symbolisme naissait; grâce à la collaboration de mes amis,
grace à Henri de Régnier et Pierre M. Olin qui dirigèrent la
revue avec moi, _La Wallonie_ en fut l'un des premiers
foyers. Tout était remis en question. On aspirait è plus de
liberté à une forme plus intense et plus complète plus
musicale et plus souple, à une expression nouvelle de
l'éternelle beauté. On s'ingeniait on cherchait....
Tâtonnements? Certes et ils étaient inévitables. Mais vif et
ardent effort, désintéressement absolu, foi juvénile et
surtout "No compromise with the public taste".... N'y a-t-il
point la quelques traits de ressemblance avec l'œuvre que
vous tentez aujourd'hui en Amérique, et, à trente années
d'intervale, une sorte de cousinage? C'est pourquoi mon cher
confrère, j'ai lu avec tant de plaisir la _Little Review_
dont vous avez eu la gentillesse de m'adresser la
collection.

Croyez-moi sympathiquement vôtre,

ALBERT MOCKEL.

With a native mistrust of _la belle phrase_; of _"temps doré," "ferveur," "belle confiance"_, etc., and with an equally native superiority to any publication not printed LARGE, I opened _La Wallonie_. The gropings, "tâtonnements," to which M. Mockel so modestly refers, appear to have included some of the best work of Mallarmé, of Stuart Merrill, of Max Elskamp and Emile Verhaeren. Verlaine contributed to _La Wallonie_, De Régnier was one of its editors.... Men of since popular fame--Bourget, Pierre Louys, Maeterlinck--appeared with the rarer spirits.

If ever the "amateur magazine" in the sense of magazine by lovers of art and letters, for lovers of art and letters, in contempt of the commerce of letters, has vindicated itself, that vindication was _La Wallonie_. Verhaeren's "Les Pauvres" first appeared there as the second part of the series: "Chansons des Carrefours" (Jan., '92).... The Elskamp I have just quoted appeared there with other poems of Max Elskamp. Mallarmé is represented by the exquisite:

SONNET

Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx,
L'Angoisse ce minuit, soutient, lampadophore,
Maint rêve vespéral brûle par le phénix
Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore

Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx,
Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore,
(Car le maître est allé puiser des pleurs au Styx
Avec ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore.)

Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or
Agonise selon peut-être le décor
Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,

Elle, défunte nue en le miroir encor
Que, dans l'oubli fermé par le cadre, se fixe
De scintillations sitôt le septuor.

--_Mallarmé in "La Wallonie," Jan_.,1889.

An era of Franco-Anglo-American intercourse is marked by his address to:

THE WHIRLWIND

Pas les rafales à propos
De rien comme occuper la rue
Sujette au noir vol des chapeaux;
Mais une danseuse apparue

Tourbillon de mousseline ou
Fureur éparses en écumes
Que soulève par son genou
Celle même dont nous vécûmes

Pour tout, hormis lui, rebattu
Spirituelle, ivre, immobile
Foudroyer avec le tutu,
Sans se faire autrement de bile

Sinon rieur que puisse l'air
De sa jupe éventer Whistler.

--_Mallarmé in "Wallonie" Nov_., 1890.

If I owe Albert Mockel a great debt in having illuminated my eye for Elskamp I owe him no less the pleasure of one of Merrill's most delicate triumphs in the opening of

BALLET
_Pour Gustave Moreau_

En casque de cristal rose les baladines,
Dont les pas mesurés aux cordes des kinnors
Tintent sous les tissus de tulle roidis d'ors,
Exultent de leurs yeux pâles de xaladines.

Toisons fauves sur leurs lèvres incarnadines,
Bras lourds de bracelets barbares, en essors
Moelleux vers la lueur lunaire des décors,
Elles murmurent en malveillantes sourdines:

"Nous sommes, ô mortels, danseuses du Désir,
Salomés dont les corps tordus par le plaisir
Leurrent vos heurs d'amour vers nos pervers arcanes.

Prosternez-vous avec des hosannas, ces soirs!
Car, surgissant dans des aurores d'encensoirs,
Sur nos cymbales nous ferons tonner vos crânes."

--_Stuart Merrill in "La Wallonie," July_, '98.

The period was "glauque" and "nacre," it had its pet and too-petted adjectives, the handles for parody; but it had also a fine care for sound, for sound fine-wrought, not mere swish and resonant rumble, not

"Dolores, O hobble and kobble Dolores.
O perfect obstruction on track."

The particular sort of fine workmanship shown in this sonnet of Merrill's has of late been too much let go by the board. One may do worse than compare it with the Syrian syncopation of _Διώνα_ and '_Ἄδων ιν_ in Bion's Adonis.

Hanton is gently didactic:

LE BON GRAIN

"Déjà peinent maints moissonneurs dont
la mémoire est destinée à vivre."
--_Célestin Demblon_.

Amants des rythmes en des strophes cadencées,
Des rimes rares aux splendeurs évocatoires,
Laissant en eux comme un écho de leurs pensées,
Comme un parfum de leurs symboles en histoires:

Tels les poètes vont cherchant en vrais glaneurs
Les blonds épis qui formeront leur riche écrin.
Ils choisiront, comme feraient les bons vanneurs,
Parmi les blés passés au crible, le beau grain.

Et germera cette semence bien choisie,
Entre les roses et les lys, pour devenir
Riche moisson de la fertile fantaisie.

L'ardent soleil de Messidor fera jaunir
Les tiges souples d'une forte poésie
Qui dresseront leurs fiers épis vers l'avenir!

_--Edmond Hanton in "La Wallonie," July_,'88.

Delaroche is, at least in parts, utterly incomprehensible, but there is an interesting experiment in sound-sequence which begins:

SONNETS SYMPHONIQUES

En la langueur
accidentelle
de ta dentelle
où meurt mon cœur

Un profil pleure
et se voit tel
en le pastel
du divin leurre

Qu'or végétal
de lys s'enlise
au froid santal

Si n'agonise
occidental
qui s'adonise.

_--Achille Delaroche in "La Wallonie" Feb_., '89.

I do not know that we will now be carried away by Albert Saint-Paul's chinoiserie, or that she-devils are so much in fashion as when Jules Bois expended, certainly, some undeniable emotion in addressing them:

PETALES DE NACRE

En sa robe où s'immobilisent les oiseaux,
Une émerge des fleurs comme une fleur plus grande.
Comme une fleur penchée au sourire de l'eau,

Ses mains viennent tresser la traînante guirlande
Pour enchaîner le Dragon vert--et de légende!
Qui de ses griffes d'or déchire les roseaux,

Les faisceaux de roseaux: banderolles et lances.

Et quand le soir empourprera le fier silence
De la forêt enjôleuse de la Douleur,
Ses doigts, fuseaux filant au rouet des murmures
Les beaux anneaux fleuris liant les fleurs aux fleurs,

Ses doigts n'auront saigné qu'aux épines peu dures.

_--Albert Saint-Paul in "La Wallonie," Jan_.,'91.

POUR LA DEMONE

Un soir de joie, un soir d'ivresse, un soir de fête,
--Et quelle fête, et quelle ivresse, et quelle joie!--
Tu vins. L'impérial ennui sacrait ta tête;
Et tu marchais dans un bruit d'armure et de soie.

Tu dédaignas tous les bijoux et l'oripeau
De ruban, de dentelle et d'éphémère fleur....
Hermétique,[6] ta robe emprisonnait ta peau.
Oui, la fourrure seule autour de ta pâleur.

Tu parus. Sous tes yeux que le kh'ol abomine,
Le bal fut la lugubre et dérisoire histoire.
Les hommes des pantins qu'un vice mène et mine.
Les femmes, cœurs et corps fanés,--et quel déboire!

POUR LA DEMONE

V.

Elle est folle, c'est sûr, elle est folle la chère;
Elle m'aime à n'en pas douter, mais elle est folle,
Elle m'aime et, compatissez à ma misère,
Avec tous, avec toutes, elle batifole.

Un passe.... Elle s'élance à lui, cœur présumé....
Elle s'offre et le provoque, puis elle fuit
Vers ailleurs.... si fidèle encore au seul-aimé,
Mais elle est folle et je m'éplore dans la nuit.

Pour quelque amie aux délicatesses félines,
Elle glisse vers les caresses trop profondes.
... "Tu vas, folle, oublier mes rancœurs orphelines."
Mais sa lèvre pensive hésite aux toisons blondes.

_--Jules Bois in "La Wallonie," Sept., '90._

In part we must take our reading of _La Wallonie_ as a study of the state of symbolism from 1885 to '92.

Rodenbach displays the other leaf of the diptych: the genre, the homely Wallon landscape, more familiar to the outer world in Verhaeren, but not, I think, better painted.

PAYSAGES SOUFFRANTS

II.

_A Emilie Verhaeren._

Là-bas, tant de petits hameaux sous l'avalanche
De la neige qui tombe adoucissante et blanche,
Tant de villages, tant de chaumines qui sont
Pour le reste d'un soir doucement assoupies,
Car le neige s'étend en de molles charpies
Sur les blessures des vieilles briques qui n'ont
Rien senti d'une Sœur sur leur rougeur qui saigne!
Mais, ô neige, c'est toi la Sœur au halo blanc
Qui consoles les murs malades qu'on dédaigne
Et mets un peu d'ouate aux pierres s'éraflant.

Las! rien ne guérira les chaumines--aïeules
Qui meurent de l'hiver et meurent d'être seules....
Et leurs âmes bientôt, au gré des vents du nord.
Dans la fumée aux lents départs, seront parties
Cependant que la neige, à l'heure de leur mort,
Leur apporte ses refraîchissantes hosties!

_--Georges Rodenbach in "La Wallonie," Jan_.,'88.

Rodenbach is authentic.

Vielé-Griffin, who, as Stuart Merrill, has always been known in France as "an American," contributed largely to _La Wallonie_. His "Au Tombeau d'Hélène" ends:

HELENE

Me voici:
J'étais là dès hier, et dès sa veille,
Ailleurs, ici;
Toute chair, a paré, un soir, mon âme vieille
Comme l'éternité du désir que tu vêts.
La nuit est claire au firmament....
Regarde avec tes yeux levés:
Voici--comme un tissu de pâle feu fatal
Qui fait épanouir la fleur pour la flétrir--
Monvoile où transparaît tout assouvissement
Qui t'appelle à la vie et qui t'en fait mourir.
La nuit est claire au firmament vital....

Mes mythes, tu les sais:
Je suis fille du Cygne,
Je suis la lune dont s'exubèrent les mers
Qui montent, tombent, se soulèvent;
Et c'est le flot de vie exultante et prostrée,
le flot des rêves,
le flot des chairs,
le flux et le reflux de la vaste marée.

Mon doute--on dit l'Espoir--fait l'action insigne:
Je suis reine de Sparte et celle-là de Troie,
Par moi, la douloureuse existence guerroie
Je meus toute inertie aux leurres de ma joie,
Hélène, Séléné, flottant de phase en phase,
Je suis l'Inaccédée et la tierce Hypostase
Et si je rejetais, désir qui m'y convies,
Mon voile qui promet et refuse l'extase,
Ma nudité de feu résorberait les Vies....

_--Vielé-Griffin in "La Wallonie," Dec._, '91.
_(Complete number devoted to his poems.)_

Mockel is represented by several poems rather too long to quote,--"Chantefable un peu naive," "L'Antithèse," suggestive of the Gourmont litany; by prose comment, by work over various pseudonyms. "A Clair Matin" is a suitable length to quote, and it is better perhaps to represent him here by it than by fragments which I had first intended to cut from his longer poems.

A CLAIR MATIN

La nuit au loin s'est effacée
comme les lignes tremblantes d'un rêve;
la nuit s'est fondue au courant du Passé
et le jour attendu se lève.

Regardez! en les courbes molles des rideaux
une heure attendue se révèle
et ma fenêtre enfin s'éclaire,
cristalline du gîvre où se rit la lumière.

Une parure enfantine de neiges
habille là-bas d'immobiles eaux
et c'est les cortèges des fées nouvelles
à tire d'ailes, à tire d'ailes
du grand lointain qui toutes reviennent
aux flocons de ce jour en neiges qui s'épèle.

Des courbes de mes rideaux clairs
--voici! c'est un parfum de ciel!--
blanc des guirlandes de l'hiver
le jeune matin m'est apparu
avec un visage de fiancée.

Des fées
(ah je ne sais quelles mortelles fées)
jadis elles vinrent toucher la paupière
d'un être enfantin qui mourut.
Son âme, où se jouait en songes la lumière,
diaphane corolle épanouie au jour
son âme était vive de toute lumière!
Lui, comme un frère il suivait ma course
et nous allions en confiants de la montagne à la vallée
par les forêts des chênes, des hêtres
--car eux, les ancêtres, ils ont le front grave
ils virent maints rêves des autres âges
et nous parlent, très doucement, comme nos Pères.

Mais voyez! à mes rideaux pâles
le matin glisse des sourires;
car la Fiancée est venue
car la Fiancée est venue
avec un simple et très doux visage,
avec des mots qu'on n'entend pas,
en silence la Fiancée est apparue
comme une grande sœur de l'enfant qui mourut;
et les hêtres, les chênes royaux des forêts
par douce vocalise égrenant leur parure,
les voix ressuscitées en la plaine sonore
et toute la forêt d'aurore
quand elle secoue du crépuscule sa chevelure,
tout chante, bruit, pétille et rayonne
car la céleste Joie que la clarté délivre
d'un hymne répercute aux miroirs du futur
le front pâle où scintille en étoiles le givre.

_--Albert Mockel in "La Wallonie," Dernier fascicule, '92._

I have left Gide and Van Lerberghe unquoted, unmentioned, but I have, I dare say, given poems enough to indicate the quality and the scope of the poetry in _La Wallonie_.

In prose their cousinage is perhaps more quickly apparent. Almost the first sentence I come upon (I suspect it is Mockel's) runs as follows:

"_La Revue des deux Mondes_ publie un roman de Georges Ohnet ce qui ne surprendra personne."

This is the proper tone to use when dealing with elderly muttonheads; with the _Harpers_ of yester year. _La Wallonie_ found it out in the eighties. The symboliste movement flourished on it. American letters did not flourish, partly perhaps for the lack of it, and for the lack of unbridled uncompromising magazines run by young men who did not care for _reputations surfaites_, for elderly stodge and stupidity.

If we turn to Mockel's death notice for Jules Laforgue we will find _La Wallonie_ in '87 awake to the value of contemporary achievement:

JULES LAFORGUE

Nous apprenons avec une vive tristesse, la mort de Jules Laforgue, l'un des plus curieux poètes de la littérature aux visées nouvelles. Nous l'avons désigné, jà deux mois: un Tristan Corbière plus argentin, moins âpre.... Et telle est bien sa caractéristique. Sans le moindre soupçon d'imitation ou de réminiscences, Jules Laforgue a sauvegardé une originalité vivace. Seulement, cette originalité, par bien des saillies, touche à celle de Tristan Corbière. C'est une même raillerie de la Vie et du Monde; mais plus de sombre et virile amertume émouvait en l'auteur des Amours Jaunes, dont cette pièce donnera quelque idée:

LE CRAPAUD

Un chant dans une nuit sans air....
--La lune plaque en métal clair
Les découpures du vert sombre.
... Un chant; comme un écho, tout vif
Enterré, là, sous le massif....
--Ça se tait; viens, c'est là, dans l'ombre....
Un crapaud!
--Pourquoi cette peur,
Près de moi, ton soldat fidèle!
Vois-le, poète tondu, sans aile,
Rossignol de la boue....
--Horreur!--
...Il chante.--Horreur!!--Horreur pourquoi?
_Vois-tu pas son œil de lumière...._
Non, il s'en va, froid, sous sa pierre.
* * * * * *
Bonsoir--ce crapaud-là c'est moi.

Chez Laforgue, il y a plus de gai sans-souci, de coups de batte de pierrot donnés à toutes choses, plus de "vaille-que-vaille la vie," dit d'un air de moqueuse résignation. Sa rancœur n'est pas qui encombrante. Il était un peu l'enfant indiscipliné que rit à travers les gronderies, et fait la moue à sa fantaisie; mais son haussement d'épaules gamin, et ses "Après tout?" qu'il jette comme une chiquenaude au visage du Temps, cachent toujours au fond de son cœur un lac mélancolique, un lac de tristesse et d'amours flétris, où vient se refléter sa claire imagination. Témoins ces fragments pris aux _Complaintes:_ Mon cœur est une urne où j'ai mis certains défunts, Oh! chut, refrains de leurs berceaux! et vous, parfums.

* * * * * * *
Mon cœur est un Néron, enfant gâté d'Asie,
Qui d'empires de rêve en vain se rassasie.
Mon cœur est un noyé vidé d'âme et d'essors,
Qu'étreint la pieuvre Spleen en ses ventouses d'or.
C'est un feu d'artifice, hélas! qu'avant la fête,
A noyé sans retour l'averse qui s'embête.
Mon cœur est le terrestre Histoire-Corbillard
Que traînent au néant l'instinct et le hazard
Mon cœur est une horloge oubliée à demeure
Qui, me sachant défunt, s'obstine à marquer l'heure.
* * * * * * *
Et toujours mon cœur ayant ainsi déclamé,
En revient à sa complainte: Aimer, être aimé!

Et cette pièce, d'une ironie concentrée:

COMPLAINTE DES BONS MENAGES

L'Art sans poitrine m'a trop longtemps bercé dupe.
Si ses labours sont fiers, que ses bles décevants!
Tiens, laisse-moi bêler tout aux plis de ta jupe
Qui fleure le couvent.
La Génie avec moi, serf, a fait des manières;
Toi, jupe, fais frou-frou, sans t'inquièter pourquoi....
* * * * * * *
Mais l'Art, c'est l'Inconnu! qu'on y dorme et s'y vautre,
On ne peut pas l'avoir constamment sur les bras!
Et bien, ménage au vent! Soyons Lui, Elle et l'Autre.
Et puis n'insistons pas.

Et puis? et puis encore un pied de nez mélancolique à la destinée:

Qui m'aima jamais? Je m'entête
Sur ce refrain bien impuissant
Sans songer que je suis bien bête
De me faire du mauvais sang:

Jules Laforgue a publié outre les _Complaintes_, un livret de vers dégingandés, d'une raillerie splénétique, à froid, comme celle qui sied aux hommes du Nord. Mais il a su y ajouter ce sans-façon de choses dites à l'aventure, et tout un parfum de lumière argentine, comme les rayons de _Notre-Dame la Lune_ qu'il célèbre. Le manque de place nous prive d'en citer quelques pages. Nous avons lu aussi cette étrange Nuit d'Etoiles: le _Conseil Féerique_, un assez court poème édité par la "Vogue"; divers articles de revue, entre lesquels cette page ensoleillée, parue dans la Revue Indépendante: _Pan et la Syrinx_. Enfin un nouveau livre était annoncé: _de la Pitié, de la Pitié_!, déjà préparé par l'une des Invocations du volume précédent, et dont nous croyons voir l'idée en ces vers des _Complaintes_:

Vendange chez les Arts enfantins; sois en fête
D'une fugue, d'un mot, d'un ton, d'un air de tête.
* * * * * *
Vivre et peser selon le Beau, le Bien, le Vrai?
O parfums, ô regards, ô fois! soit, j'essaierai.
* * * * * *
... Va, que ta seule étude
Soit de vivre sans but, fou de mansuétude--

_--Albert Mockel in "La Wallonie"_, 1887.

I have quoted but sparingly, and I have thought quotation better than comment, but despite the double meagreness I think I have given evidence that _La Wallonie_ was worth editing.

It began as _L'Elan Littéraire_ with 16 pages, and an edition of 200 copies; it should convince any but the most stupid that size is not the criterion of permanent value, and that a small magazine may outlast much bulkier printings.

After turning the pages of _La Wallonie_, perhaps after reading even this so brief excerpt, one is ready to see some sense in even so lyric a phrase as "temps doré, de ferveur et de belle confiance."

In their seven years' run these editors, one at least beginning in his "teens," had published a good deal of the best of Verhaeren, had published work by Elskamp, Merrill, Griffin, Louys, Maeterlinck, Verlaine Van Lerberghe, Gustave Kahn, Moréas, Quillard, André Gide; had been joined in their editing board by De Régnier (remember that they edited in Liège, not in Paris; they were not at the hub of the universe, but in the heart of French Belgium); they had not made any compromise. Permanent literature, and the seeds of permanent literature, had gone through proof-sheets in their office.

There is perhaps no greater pleasure in life, and there certainly can have been no greater enthusiasm than to have been young and to have been part of such a group of writers working in fellowship at the beginning of such a course, of such a series of courses as were implicated in _La Wallonie._

If the date is insufficiently indicated by Mallarmé's allusion to Whistler, we may turn to the art notes:

"eaux-fortes de Mlle Mary Cassatt ... Lucien Pissaro, Sisley ... lithographies de Fantin-Latour ... Odillon Redon."

"J'ai été un peu à Paris, voir Burne Jones, Moreau, Delacroix ... la danse du ventre, et les adorables Javanaises. C'est mon meilleur souvenir, ces filles "très parées" dans l'étrange demi-jour de leur case et qui tournent lentement dans la stridente musique avec de si énigmatique inflexions de mains et de si souriantes poursuites les yeux dans les yeux."

Prose poetry, that doubtful connection, appears at times even to advantage:

"Séléné, toi l'essence et le regard des infinis, ton mal nous serait la félicité suprême. O viens à nous; Tanit, Vierge Tanit, fleur métallique épanouie aux plaines célestes!"--_Mockel._

[1] _The Little Review_, February, 1918.

[2] A testimony to the effect of anthologies, and to the prestige of Van Bever and Léautaud in forming French taste, and at the same time the most amazing response to my French number of the _Little Review_, was contained in a letter from one of the very poets I had chosen to praise:

"Je vous remercie de m'avoir révélé Laforgue que je connaissais seulement par les extraits publiés dans la première Anthologie en I volume par Van Bever et Léautaud."

This is also a reply to those who solemnly assured me that any foreigner attempting to criticize French poetry would meet nothing but ridicule from French authors.

I am free to say that Van B. and L.'s selections would have led me neither to Laforgue nor to Rimbaud. They were, however, my approach to many of the other poets, and their two volume anthology is invaluable.

[3] Statement dated Feb., 1918.

[4] _"Max Elskamp"; essai par Jean De Bosschère. Bibliothèque de l'Occident, 17 rue Eblé, Paris, fr_. 3.50.

[5] _Little Review_, Oct., 1918.

[6] _Laforgue!_

II

HENRY JAMES

This essay on James is a dull grind of an affair, a Baedecker to a continent.

I set out to explain, not why Henry James is less read than formerly--I do not know that he is. I tried to set down a few reasons why he ought to be, or at least might be, more read.

Some may say that his work was over, well over, finely completed; there is mass of that work, heavy for one man's shoulders to have borne up, labor enough for two life-times; still we would have had a few more years of his writing. Perhaps the grasp was relaxing, perhaps we should have had no strongly-planned book; but we should have had paragraphs here and there, and we should have had, at least, conversation, wonderful conversation; even if we did not hear it ourselves, we should have known that it was going on somewhere. The massive head, the slow uplift of the hand, _gli occhi onesti e tardi_, the long sentences piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with its "wu-a-wait a little, wait a little, something will come;" blague and benignity and the weight of so many years' careful, incessant labor of minute observation always there to enrich the talk. I had heard it but seldom, yet it was all unforgettable.

The man had this curious power of founding-affection in those who had scarcely seen him and even in many who had not, who but knew him at second hand.

No man who has not lived on both sides of the Atlantic can well appraise Henry James; his death marks the end of a period. The _Times_ says: "The Americans will understand his changing his nationality," or something of that sort. The "Americans" will understand nothing whatsoever about it. They have understood nothing about it. They do not even know what they lost. They have not stopped for eight minutes to consider the meaning of his last public act. After a year of ceaseless labor, of letter writing, of argument, of striving in every way to bring in America on the side of civilization, he died of apoplexy. On the side of civilization--civilization against barbarism, civilization, not Utopia, not a country or countries where the right always prevails in six weeks! After a life-time spent in trying to make two continents understand each other, in trying, and only his thoughtful readers can have any conception of how he had tried, to make three nations intelligible one to another. I am tired of hearing pettiness talked about Henry James's style. The subject has been discussed enough in all conscience, along with the minor James. Yet I have heard no word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life; not worked out in the diagrams of Greek tragedy, not labeled "epos" or "Aeschylus." The outbursts in _The Tragic Muse_, the whole of _The Turn of the Screw,_ human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage![1] The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, didn't "feel." I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom idiots didn't raise this cry.

And the great labor, this labor of translation, of making America intelligible, of making it possible for individuals to meet across national borders. I think half the American idiom is recorded in Henry James's writing, and whole decades of American life that otherwise would have been utterly lost, wasted, rotting in the unhermetic jars of bad writing, of inaccurate writing. No English reader will ever know how good are his New York and his New England; no one who does not see his grandmother's friends in the pages of the American books. The whole great assaying and weighing, the research for the significance of nationality, French, English, American.

"An extraordinary old woman, one of the few people who is really doing anything good." There were the cobwebs about connoisseurship, etc., but what do they matter? Some yokel writes in the village paper, as Henley had written before, "James's stuff was not worth doing." Henley has gone pretty completely. America has not yet realized that never in history had one of her great men abandoned his citizenship out of shame. It was the last act--the last thing left. He had worked all his life for the nation and for a year he had labored for the national honor. No other American was of sufficient importance for his change of allegiance to have constituted an international act; no other American would have been welcome in the same public manner. America passes over these things, but the thoughtful cannot pass over them.

Armageddon, the conflict? I turn to James's _A Bundle of Letters_; a letter from "Dr. Rudolph Staub" in Paris, ending:

"You will, I think, hold me warranted in believing that between precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the English-speaking family is destined to consume itself and that with its decline the prospect of general pervasiveness to which I alluded above, will brighten for the deep-lunged children of the fatherland!"

We have heard a great deal of this sort of thing since; it sounds very natural. My edition of the volume containing these letters was printed in '83, and the imaginary letters were written somewhat before that. I do not know that this calls for comment. Henry James's perception came thirty years before Armageddon. That is all I wish to point out. Flaubert said of the War of 1870: "If they had read my _Education Sentimentale,_ this sort of thing wouldn't have happened." Artists are the antennæ of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists. If it is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself; here the thing was done, the pages of diagnosis. The multitude of wearisome fools will not learn their right hand from their left or seek out a meaning.

It is always easy for people to object to what they have not tried to understand.

I am not here to write a full volume of detailed criticism, but two things I do claim which I have not seen in reviewers' essays. First, that there was emotional greatness in Henry James's hatred of tyranny; secondly, that there was titanic volume, weight, in the masses he sets in opposition within his work. He uses forces no whit less specifically powerful than the proverbial "doom of the house,"--Destiny, _Deus ex machina_,--of great traditional art. His art was great art as opposed to over-elaborate or over-refined art by virtue of the major conflicts which he portrays. In his books he showed race against race, immutable; the essential Americanness, or Englishness or Frenchness--in _The American_, the difference between one nation and another; not flag-waving and treaties, not the machinery of government, but "why" there is always misunderstanding, why men of different race are not the same.

We have ceased to believe that we conquer anything by having Alexander the Great make a gigantic "joy-ride" through India. We know that conquests are made in the laboratory, that Curie with his minute fragments of things seen clearly in test tubes in curious apparatus, makes conquests. So, too, in these novels, the essential qualities which make up the national qualities, are found and set working, the fundamental oppositions made clear. This is no contemptible labor. No other writer had so essayed three great nations or even thought of attempting it.

Peace comes of communication. No man of our time has so labored to create means of communication as did the late Henry James. The whole of great art is a struggle for communication. All things that oppose this are evil, whether they be silly scoffing or obstructive tariffs.

And this communication is not a leveling, it is not an elimination of differences. It is a recognition of differences, of the right of differences to exist, of interest in finding things different. Kultur is an abomination; philology is an abomination, all repressive uniforming education is an evil.

A SHAKE DOWN

I have forgotten the moment of lunar imbecility in which I conceived the idea of a "Henry James" number.[2] The pile of typescript on my floor can but annoyingly and too palpably testify that the madness has raged for some weeks.

Henry James was aware of the spherical form of the planet, and susceptible to a given situation, and to the tone and tonality of persons as perhaps no other author in all literature. The victim and the votary of the "scene," he had no very great narrative sense, or at the least, he attained the narrative faculty but _per aspera,_ through very great striving.

It is impossible to speak accurately of "his style," for he passed through several styles which differ greatly one from another; but in his last, his most complicated and elaborate, he is capable of great concision; and if, in it, the single sentence is apt to turn and perform evolutions for almost pages at a time, he nevertheless manages to say on one page more than many a more "direct" author would convey only in the course of a chapter.

His plots and incidents are often but adumbrations or symbols of the quality of his "people," illustrations invented, contrived, often factitiously and almost transparently, to show what acts, what situations, what contingencies would befit or display certain characters. We are hardly asked to accept them as happening.

He did not begin his career with any theory of art for art's sake, and a lack of this theory may have damaged his earlier work.

If we take "French Poets and Novelists" as indication of his then (1878) opinions, and novels of the nineties showing a later bias, we might contend that our subject began his career with a desire to square all things to the ethical standards of a Salem mid-week Unitarian prayer meeting, and that to almost the end of his course he greatly desired to fit the world into the social exigencies of Mrs. Humphry Ward's characters.

Out of the unfortunate cobwebs he emerged into his greatness, I think, by two causes: first by reason of his hatred of personal intimate tyrannies working at close range; and secondly, in later life, because the actual mechanism of his scriptorial processes became so bulky, became so huge a contrivance for record and depiction, that the old man simply couldn't remember or keep his mind on or animadvert on anything but the authenticity of his impression.

I take it as the supreme reward for an artist; the supreme return that his artistic conscience can make him after years spent in its service, that the momentum of his art, the sheer bulk of his processes, the (_si licet_) size of his fly-wheel, should heave him out of himself, out of his personal limitations, out of the tangles of heredity and of environment, out of the bias of early training, of early predilections, whether of Florence, A.D. 1300, or of Back Bay of 1872, and leave him simply the great true recorder.

And this reward came to Henry James in the ripeness of his talents; even further perhaps it entered his life and his conversation. The stages of his emergence are marked quite clearly in his work. He displays himself in _French Poets and Novelists_, constantly balancing over the question of whether or no the characters presented in their works are, or are not, fit persons to be received in the James family back-parlor.

In _The Tragic Muse_ he is still didactic quite openly. The things he believes still leap out nakedly among the people and things he is portraying; the parable is not yet wholly incarnate in the narrative.

To lay all his faults on the table, we may begin with his self-confessed limitation, that "he never went down town." He displayed in fact a passion for high life comparable only to that supposed to inhere in the readers of a magazine called _Forget-me-not._

Hardy, with his eye on the Greek tragedians, has produced an epic tonality, and _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ is perhaps more easily comparable to the Grettir Saga than to the novels of Mr. Hardy's contemporaries. Hardy is, on his other side, a contemporary of Sir Walter Scott.

Balzac gains what force his crude writing permits him by representing his people under the _ἀνάγκη_ of modernity, cash necessity; James, by leaving cash necessity nearly always out of the story, sacrifices, or rather fails to attain, certain intensities.

He never manages the classic, I mean as Flaubert gives us in each main character: _Everyman_. One may conceivably be bored by certain pages in Flaubert, but one takes from him a solid and concrete memory, a property. Emma Bovary and Frederic and M. Arnoux are respectively every woman and every man of their period. Maupassant's _Bel Ami_ is not. Neither are Henry James's people. They are always, or nearly always, the bibelots.

But he does, nevertheless, treat of major forces, even of epic forces, and in a way all his own. If Balzac tried to give a whole civilization, a whole humanity, James was not content with a rough sketch of one country.

As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national qualities are the great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals; trying to determine from the given microscopic slide the nature of the Frenchness, Englishness, Germanness, Americanness, which chemicals too little regarded, have in our time exploded for want of watching. They are the permanent and fundamental hostilities and incompatibles. We may rest our claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his protagonists, in the magnitude of the forces he analyzed and portrayed. This is not the bare matter of a number of titled people, a few duchesses and a few butlers.

Whatever Flaubert may have said about his _Education Sentimentale_ as a potential preventive of the débâcle of 1870, _if people had_ read _it_, and whatever Gautier's friend may have said about _Emaux et Camées_ as the last resistance to the Prussians, from Dr. Rudolph Staub's paragraph in _The Bundle of Letters_ to the last and almost only public act of his life, James displayed a steady perception and a steady consideration of the qualities of different western races, whose consequences none of us can escape.

And these forces, in precisely that they are not political and executive and therefore transient, factitious, but in precisely that they are the forces of race temperaments, are major forces and are indeed as great protagonists as any author could have chosen. They are firmer ground than Flaubert's when he chooses public events as in the opening of the third part of _Education Sentimentale_.

The portrayal of these forces, to seize a term from philology, may be said to constitute "original research"--to be Henry James's own addendum; not that this greatly matters. He saw, analyzed, and presented them. He had most assuredly a greater awareness than was granted to Balzac or to Mr. Charles Dickens or to M. Victor Hugo who composed the _Légende des Siècles._

His statement that he never went down town has been urged greatly against him. A butler is a servant, tempered with upper-class contacts. Mr. Newman, the American, has emerged from the making of wash-tubs; the family in _The Pupil_ can scarcely be termed upper-class, however, and the factor of money, Balzac's, _ἀνάγκη_, scarcely enters his stories.

We may leave Hardy writing Sagas. We may admit that there is a greater _robustezza_ in Balzac's messiness, simply because he is perpetually concerned, inaccurately, with the factor of money, of earning one's exiguous living.

We may admit the shadowy nature of some of James's writing, and agree whimsically with R.H.C. (in the _New Age_) that James will be quite comfortable after death, as he had been dealing with ghosts all his life.

James's third donation is perhaps a less sweeping affair and of more concern to his compatriots than to any one who might conceivably translate him into an alien tongue, or even to those who publish his writings in England.

He has written history of a personal sort, social history well documented and incomplete, and he has put America on the map both in memoir and fiction, giving to her a reality such as is attained only by scenes recorded in the arts and in the writing of masters. Mr. Eliot has written, and I daresay most other American admirers have written or will write, that, whatever any one else thinks of Henry James, no one but an American can ever know, really know, how good he is at the bottom, how good his "America" is.

No Englishman can, and in less degree can any continental, or in fact any one whose family was not living on, say, West 23rd Street in the old set-back, two-story-porched red brick vine-covered houses, etc., when Henry James was being a small boy on East 23rd Street; no one whose ancestors had not been presidents or professors or founders of Ha'avwd College or something of that sort, or had not heard of a time when people lived on 14th Street, or had known of some one living in Lexington or Newton "Old Place" or somewhere of that sort in New England, or had heard of the New York that produced "Fanny," New York the jocular and uncritical, or of people who danced with General Grant or something of that sort, would quite know _Washington Square_ or _The Europeans_ to be so autochthonous, so authentic to the conditions. They might believe the things to be "real," but they would not know how closely they corresponded to an external reality.

Perhaps only an exile from these things will get the range of the other half of James's presentations! Europe to the Transpontine, New York of brown stone that he detested, the old and the new New York in _Crapey Cornelia_ and in _The American Scene_, which more than any other volumes give us our peculiar heritage, an America with an interest, with a tone of time not overstrained, not jejunely over-sentimentalized, which is not a redoing of school histories or the laying out of a fabulous period; and which is in relief, if you like, from Dickens or from Mark Twain's _Mississippi._ He was not without sympathy for his compatriots as is amply attested by Mr. and Mrs. B.D. Hayes of New York (vide _The Birthplace_) with whom he succeeds, I think, rather better than with most of his princely continentals. They are, at any rate, his bow to the Happy Genius of his country--as distinct from the gentleman who displayed the "back of a banker and a patriot," or the person whose aggregate features could be designated only as a "mug."

In his presentation of America he is greatly attentive, and, save for the people in _Cœur Simple_, I doubt if any writer has done more of "this sort of thing" for his country, this portrayal of the typical thing in timbre and quality--balanced, of course, by the array of spittoons in the Capitol ("The Point of View").

Still if one is seeking a Spiritual Fatherland, if one feels the exposure of what he would not have scrupled to call, two clauses later, such a wind-shield, "The American Scene" greatly provides it. It has a mermaid note, almost to outvie the warning, the sort of nickelplate warning which is hurled at one in the saloon of any great transatlantic boat; the awfulness that engulfs one when one comes, for the first time unexpectedly on a pile of all the _Murkhn_ Magazines laid, shingle-wise on a brass-studded, screwed-into-place, baize-covered steamer table. The first glitter of the national weapons for driving off quiet and all closer signs of intelligence.[3]

Attempting to view the jungle of the work as a whole, one notes that, despite whatever cosmopolitan upbringing Henry James may have had, as witness "A Small Boy's Memoirs" and "Notes of Son and Brother," he nevertheless began in "French Poets and Novelists" with a provincial attitude that it took him a long time to work free of. Secondly we see various phases of the "style" of his presentation or circumambiance.

There is a small amount of prentice work. Let us say "Roderick Hudson," "Casamassima." There are lucky first steps in "The American" and "Europeans," a precocity of result, for certainly some of his early work is as permanent as some of the ripest, and more so than a deal of the intervening. We find (for in the case before us criticism must be in large part a weeding-out) that his first subject matter provides him with a number of good books and stories: "The American," "The Europeans," "Eugene Pickering," "Daisy Miller," "The Pupil," "Brooksmith," "A Bundle of Letters," "Washington Square," "The Portrait of a Lady," before 1880, and rather later, "Pandora," "The Four Meetings," perhaps "Louisa Pallant." He ran out of his first material.

We next note a contact with the "Yellow Book," a dip into "cleverness," into the epigrammatic genre, the bare epigrammatic style. It was no better than other writers, not so successful as Wilde. We observe him to be not so hard and fine a satirist as is George S. Street.

We come then to the period of allegories ("The Real Thing," "Dominick Ferrand," "The Liar"). There ensues a growing discontent with the short sentence, epigram, etc., in which he does not at this time attain distinction; the clarity is not satisfactory, was not satisfactory to the author, his _donné_ being radically different from that of his contemporaries. The "story" not being really what he is after, he starts to build up his medium; a thickening, a chiaroscuro is needed, the long sentence; he wanders, seeks to add a needed opacity, he overdoes it, produces the cobwebby novel, emerges or justifies himself in "Maisie" and manages his long-sought form in "The Awkward Age." He comes out the triumphant stylist in the "American Scene" and in all the items of "The Finer Grain" collection and in the posthumous "Middle Years."

This is not to damn incontinent all that intervenes, but I think the chief question addressed to me by people of good-will who do not, but are yet ready and willing to, read James, is: Where the deuce shall I begin? One cannot take even the twenty-four volumes, more or less selected volumes of the Macmillan edition all at once, and it is, alas, but too easy to get so started and entoiled as never to finish this author or even come to the best of him.

The laziness of an uncritical period can be nowhere more blatant than in the inherited habit of talking about authors as a whole. It is perhaps the sediment from an age daft over great figures or a way of displaying social gush, the desire for a celebrity at all costs, rather than a care of letters.

To talk in any other way demands an acquaintance with the work of an author, a price few conversationalists care to pay, _ma che_! It is the man with inherited opinions who talks about "Shelley," making no distinction between the author of the Fifth Act of "The Cenci" and of the "Sensitive Plant." Not but what there may be a personal _virtu_ in an author--appraised, however, from the best of his work when, that is, it is correctly appraised. People ask me what James to read. He is a very uneven author; not all of his collected edition has marks of permanence.

One can but make one's own suggestion:--

"The American," "French Poets and Novelists," "The Europeans," "Daisy Miller," "Eugene Pickering," "Washington Square," "A Bundle of Letters," "Portrait of a Lady," "Pandora," "The Pupil," "Brooksmith," "What Maisie Knew," and "The Awkward Age" (if one is "doing it all"), "Europe," "Four Meetings," "The Ambassadors," "The American Scene," "The Finer Grain" (all the volume, i.e., "The Velvet Glove," "Mona Montravers," "Round of Visits," "Crapey Cornelia," "Bench of Desolation"), "The Middle Years" (posthumous) and "The Ivory Tower" (notes first).

I "go easy" on the more cobwebby volumes; the most Jamesian are indubitably "The Wings of a Dove" and "The Golden Bowl"; upon them devotees will fasten, but the potential devotee may as well find his aptitude in the stories of "The Finer Grain" volume where certain exquisite titillations will come to him as readily as anywhere else. If he is to bask in Jamesian tickle, nothing will restrain him and no other author will to any such extent afford him equal gratifications.

If, however, the reader does not find delectation in the list given above, I think it fairly useless for him to embark on the rest.

Part of James is a caviare, part I must reject according to my lights as bad writing; another part is a spécialité, a pleasure for certain temperaments only; the part I have set together above seems to me maintainable as literature. One can definitely say: "this is good"; hold the argumentative field, suffer comparison with other writers; with, say, the De Goncourt, or De Maupassant. I am not impertinently throwing books on the scrap-heap; there are certain valid objections to James; there are certain standards which one may believe in, and having stated them, one is free to state that any author does not comply with them; granting always that there may be other standards with which he complies, or over which he charmingly or brilliantly triumphs.

James does not "feel" as solid as Flaubert; he does not give us "Everyman," but on the other hand, he was aware of things which Flaubert was not aware of, and in certain things supersedes the author of "Madame Bovary."

He appears at times to write around and around a thing and not always to emerge from the "amorous plan" of what he wanted to present, into definite presentation.

He does not seem to me at all times evenly skillful in catching the intonations of speech. He recalls the New England "a" in the "Lady's" small brothers "Ha-ard" (Haahr-d) but only if one is familiar with the phonetics described; but (vide the beginning of "The Birthplace") one is not convinced that he really knows (by any sure instinct) how people's voices would sound. Some remarks are in key, some obviously factitious.

He gives us more of his characters by description than he can by any attribution of conversation, save perhaps by the isolated and discreet remarks of Brooksmith.

His emotional centre is in being sensitive to the feel of the place or to the tonality of the person.

It is with his own so beautiful talk, his ability to hear his own voice in the rounded paragraph, that he is aptest to charm one. I find it often though not universally hard to "hear" his characters speaking. I have noted various places where the character notably stops speaking and the author interpolates words of his own; sentences that no one but Henry James could in any circumstances have made use of. Beyond which statements I see no great concision or any clarity to be gained by rearranging my perhaps too elliptical comments on individual books.

Honest criticism, as I conceive it, cannot get much further than saying to one's reader exactly what one would say to the friend who approaches one's bookshelf asking: "What the deuce shall I read?" Beyond this there is the "parlor game," the polite essay, and there is the official pronouncement, with neither of which we are concerned.

Of all exquisite writers James is the most colloquial, yet in the first edition of his "French Poets and Novelists," his style, save for a few scattered phrases, is so little unusual that most of the book seems, superficially, as if it might have been written by almost any one. It contains some surprising lapses ... as bad as any in Mr. Hueffer or even in Mr. Mencken. It is interesting largely in that it shows us what our subject had to escape from.

Let us grant at once that his novels show him, all through his life, possessed of the worst possible taste in pictures, of an almost unpunctured ignorance of painting, of almost as great a lack of taste as that which he attributes to the hack-work and newspaper critiques of Théophile Gautier. Let us admit that "painting" to Henry James probably meant, to the end of his life, the worst possible late Renaissance conglomerations.

Let us admit that in 1876, or whenever it was, his taste in poetry inclined to the swish of De Musset, that it very likely never got any further. By "poetry" he very possibly meant the "high-falutin" and he eschewed it in certain forms; himself taking still higher falutes in a to-be-developed mode of his own.

I doubt if he ever wholly outgrew that conception of the (by him so often invoked) Daughters of Memory. He arrived truly at a point from which he could look back upon people who "besought the deep blue sea to roll." Poetry to him began, perhaps, fullfledged, springing Minerva-like from the forehead of George Gordon, Lord Byron, and went pretty much to the bad in Charles Baudelaire; it did not require much divination by 1914 ("The Middle Years") to note that he had found Tennyson rather vacuous and that there "was something in" Browning.

James was so thoroughly a recorder of people, of their atmospheres, society, personality, setting; so wholly the artist of this particular genre, that it was impossible for him ever to hold a critical opinion of art out of key with the opinion about him--except possibly in so far as he might have ambitions for the novel, for his own particular métier. His critical opinions were simply an extension of his being in key with the nice people who "impressed" themselves on his gelatine "plate." (This is a theoretical generalization and must be taken _cum grano._)