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An Unpublished Review by Henry
James
by
James Kraft
The Clifton Waller Barrett Library at the University of Virginia contains a holograph manuscript of an unpublished review by Henry James. Written late in 1865 when he was twenty-two, this review of Two Men, a contemporary novel by Elizabeth Stoddard, seems to be the second earliest extant James manuscript.[1]
The young James is harshly critical of the novelist and poet Elizabeth Stoddard (1823-1902) — the wife of Richard Henry Stoddard — who published her first novel, The Morgesons, in 1862, and a third, Temple House, in 1867. These were considered by some critics of the time to combine the "romance" of Hawthorne's New England with the modern, scientific realism of Balzac.
James had published his first critical article in the North American Review in October 1864. The editor of the Review, with Lowell, was Charles Eliot Norton, James's earliest publishing mentor. James wrote seven reviews for him in 1865 of authors ranging from Goethe to Louisa May Alcott, from Matthew Arnold to Harriet Prescott, one review, which was not published, of Bayard Taylor's John Godfrey's Fortunes, and the one of Mrs. Stoddard's novel. Why the review of Two Men was not printed by Norton and how it came to its present location are unknown. The manuscript was obtained by Mr. Barrett from the Seven Gables Bookshop, and had been originally in the hands of the bookseller James F. Drake. Beyond this point there is no record of the manuscript.
Although its complete history is not known, one can definitely identify the article as written for the North American Review. The manuscript shows two comments in the pencil hand of its editor, Charles Eliot Norton: "Henry James Jr." is written at the top of page one (above the title written in ink by James), and two words on page eight are crossed out in pencil and the word "curiously" written in by Norton. The only other publication for which James was writing reviews at that time was E. L. Godkin's The Nation, and this journal published an unsigned review of Two Men on October 26, 1865, written by William Dean Howells.[2]
While James was not alone in his criticism of Mrs. Stoddard, he did have an opinion contrary to certain important published and private judgments. Howells, who praised Mrs. Stoddard in his review in The Nation, continued to believe her an important writer.[3] A reviewer of the Round Table, a contemporary literary journal, stated that her first novel had "as much genius as power."[4] Richard Henry Stoddard, her husband, records in his autobiography a letter of praise that Hawthorne sent Mrs. Stoddard shortly after the publication of her first novel:
It may be the harshness of James's judgments of the wife of a contemporary literary figure that stopped Norton from publishing the review. Mrs. Stoddard shows an original mind struggling to portray realistically New England people controlled by environment or forcing themselves free of the limitation of social convention. Her characters are meant to express hidden, powerful streams of abnormal emotions. The author's failure, however, is that she only states that such emotions exist in her characters. She does not embody what she states in action or dialogue, and it is this failure to find action and suitable dialogue that James forcefully attacks. What is of particular interest is the firmness with which the twenty-two-year-old James avoids being taken in by Mrs. Stoddard's oddly suggestive imagination. Howells in his review succumbs. James sees it, but goes on to criticize the straining for effect that constitutes the failure of the novel.
James maintains in his review that the successful novelist must seek "authentic information," "data," or "facts" from a close observation of nature. To give the reader "useful or profitable" facts to respond to is the story-teller's responsibility. If truth is faced, fully observed, the imagination can "rest"; it will have the material with which to work effectively. The writer's "honest competency to his task" will demand form in his work, or at least "mechanical coherency." The writer should seek a "unity of design," an argument clearly constructed, and action logically developed in narrative,
What he most strongly attacks is a writer's failure to observe. Such a failure forces the imagination to work with its back to the truth. The result is uncontrolled violence: unnatural characters; "humanity and society caricatured, coarsely misrepresented and misunderstood"; an imagination straining after nature and creating vicious, morbid, vain, crude, pathological pictures. This violence is the great failure, for once it appears in a novel, nature has been distorted in order to achieve cheap dramatic effects.
Such a failure to observe destroys style; it too becomes violent as it strains, like the imagination, for what is natural. Violence is mechanically infused into a feebly constructed plot; dialogue is incoherent and irresponsible. The author must then resort to the claim of being original, which is for James the name some writers give to "a flagrant absence of order in a work of art." All the responsibilities of the story-teller then fall on the reader's shoulders.
The review shows how awkward James finds any situation, particularly in fiction, that appears to move out of control. James is always a conservative critic, but especially in his early reviews. Writing anonymously, he might strongly attack weakness and so appear harsh or even rash, but his attack is a methodical demand for certain clearly determined and conservative principles that he consistently articulates in his early criticism. When he errs in his judgment of Trollope as he does in this and other early essays, he errs because of a too rigid application of his standards. These standards do not greatly change, but he is able in time to be certain and tolerant; later even admitting that he likes "ambiguities and detest[s] great glares; preferring thus for my critical no less than for pedestrian progress the cool and the shade to the sun and dust of the way."[6]
What the early James expects of the novelist is what he admired in Balzac and desired to be himself: the historian of society, the master of imaginative creation, the novelist of deliberate and conscious intent. It is Mrs. Stoddard's failure even to begin to be such a writer that provokes James to call her work "nonsense" and to view her novel with a detached humor.
The review is written in ink on 22 sheets numbered at the top and torn on the left side from a notebook. The first and last sheets measure 20.3 cm. x 25 cm. and are unlined; sheets 2-21 measure 19.6 cm. x 24.6 cm. and are lined in blue. The first sheet contains a two-line title, 9½ lines of text, and a line at the bottom drawn on a 165° angle from left to right. Sheets 2-21 contain 11 lines of text, with a blank line left between each line of text. Sheet 22 has 14 lines of text and an ink line across the bottom. Sheets 1 and 22 contain a watermark of a three-sided shield, surrounded on two sides by stars with the words "E Pluribus Unum" across the top. Sheets
The notes to the text include all the substantive corrections made in ink by James, but not his few slips of the pen or inconsequential false starts. Also recorded in the notes are Charles Eliot Norton's one correction on the actual manuscript and two other notations on the title page not by James. At the end of the review in its present slip case is an extra page of much heavier bond, slightly larger all around than the small sheets and larger top and bottom but not in width than the large sheets. At the top of this page is written in ink the name "L. Agassiz."; it is crossed through in pencil twice. This name refers to the Harvard zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz, whose expedition to Brazil William James was on at the time Henry James wrote this review. There is no direct relation between this name and the review; the name appears to be written in the hand of Charles Eliot Norton.
Two Men. A Novel. By Elizabeth Stoddard.[*] New-York. Bunce and Huntington. 1865 [1]
A few years ago Mrs. Stoddard published a work entitled The Morgesons, which although it failed to become widely known was generally[2] spoken of as a remarkable book by those who had the good fortune to come across it. There is no doubt, however, that equally with this epithet it deserved the obscurity to which it was speedily consigned: for it was a thoroughly bad novel. It was nevertheless not to be confounded with the common throng of ignoble failures; inasmuch as no intelligent person could have read it without a lively irritation of the critical senses. To say that it was totally destitute of form is to speak from a standpoint absurdly alien to that of its author; but we may perhaps meet her on her own ground in saying that it possessed not even the slightest mechanical coherency. It was a long tedious record of incoherent dialogue between persons irresponsible in their sayings and doings even to the verge of insanity. Of narrative, of exposition, of statement, there was not a page in the book. Here and there a vivid sketch of seaside scenery bespoke a powerful fancy: but for the most part, the story was made up of disjointed, pointless repartee between individuals concerning whom the author had not vouchsafed us the smallest authentic information. She had perhaps wished us to study them exclusively in their utterances, as we study the characters of a play: but with what patience, it may be asked, does she suppose[3] a play would[4] be listened to, in which the action was at the mercy of such a method of development as she used in The Morgesons? With what success does she conceive that the bewildered auditor could construct the argument? In spite however of the essentially abortive character of her story, it contained several elements of power. If the reader threw down the book with the sensation of having been dreaming hard for an hour, he was yet also sensible of the extraordinary
The volume before us is practically but a repetition of its predecessor; from which it differs only in degree. It is a better novel, because it possesses a comparative unity of design. But like The Morgesons, it is almost brutally[10] crude. Up to a certain point, to which the contagious ingenuity which fills the literary atmosphere of the day may easily carry a writer, the characters[11] are sufficiently natural; but beyond this point, where a writer's only resource is his science, his honest competency to his task, they are violently unnatural. It is probable that Mrs. Stoddard's first novel, with all its disorderly energy, bespoke a certain amount of originality. By this term it is, at all events, that most people account for a flagrant absense of order in a work of art. Now Two Men reads very much as if its author, while determined to do the best she could and to profit by increased experience, was yet still more determined not to omit at any hazard this same precious fact of originality, but to give her work an unmistakable flavouring of it. The result is that her book betrays[12] an almost mechanical infusion, in this interest, of a savage violence which she apparently believes to be a good imitation of the quiet seriousness of genius. Our expression is not too strong: the essential defects of Two Men are resumed in the fact that while it is feebly conceived, it is violently written. Violence is not strength: on the contrary it needs strength. In any but the strongest hands a violent style is fatal to truth. It is fatal to truth because of necessity it perverts everything it touches. Throughout the present volume, there is not a quiet page. What more forcible statement can we make of its inferiority?[13] We use the word style here more especially to designate the author's[14] manner of talking of human beings and of making them talk. In dealing with certain facts of nature she has frequently an admirable command of language. "That day a summer rain fell from morning till evening; it sheeted the windows with mist, hummed against the doors, and smote the roof with steady blows." There, in three lines, is the[15] in-door sensation of a rainy day, quietly given. But Mrs. Stoddard is violent when she speaks, without explicit demonstration, of her heroine's hungry soul.[16] She is violent when she says that the same[17] young lady has speckled eyes and feathery hair. From these data and from the condensed and mystic utterance which occasionally break the pregnant silence which seems to be her rôle in the story, as well as from the circumstance that she is declared by one of her companions to be the American Sphinx, and by another to embody the Genius
Notes
Leon Edel, "Autobiography in Fiction: An Unpublished Review by Henry James," Harvard Library Bulletin, XI (1957), 245-257. Mr. Edel publishes for the first time and discusses James's earliest holograph manuscript, a review of Bayard Taylor's John Godfrey's Fortunes. The manuscript of Two Men was probably written several months after that of John Godfrey's Fortunes.
The Nation, I, October 26, 1865, 537-538. Identification made in William M. Gibson and George Arms, A Bibliography of William Dean Howells (1948), p. 90.
Richard Henry Stoddard, Recollections: Personal and Literary (1903), p. 131. When Mrs. Stoddard's novels were reissued in three collected volumes (Revised Edition: Philadelphia, 1901), she gave a somewhat different version of this letter at the end of her introduction published with The Morgesons, p. vi: "Pray pardon my frankness, for what is the use of saying anything, unless we say what we think? . . . Otherwise it seemed to me as genuine and lifelike as anything that pen and ink can do. There are very few books of which I take the trouble to have an opinion at all, or of which I could retain any memory so long after reading them as I do of 'The Morgesons.'"
above the title appears "Henry James Jr." written in the pencil hand of Charles Eliot Norton; in upper left hand corner is a small, unidentifiable mark, most likely a bookseller's code
without . . . vanity added: period after fancies changed to comma, without squeezed onto end of line, causing . . . vanity inserted above line
almost brutally crossed out in pencil by Charles Eliot Norton and curiously written in by him; only change on manuscript in pencil and not by James
when . . . soul. inserted, when she says of her heroine without further demonstration that she has a hungry heart. deleted
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