An Unpublished Review by Henry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contains a holograph manuscript of an unpublished review by Henry James.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:
Pray pardon me the frankness of my crude criticism, for what is the
use of saying anything unless we say what we think? There are very few
books of which I take the trouble to have any opinion at all, or of which I
could retain any memory so long after reading them as I do of 'The
Morgesons.' I hope you will not trouble yourself too much about the morals
of your next book; they may be safely left to take care of themselves.
[5]
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,
exposition, and dialogue that suits the context. James suggests that an
impression quietly given in a novel is most effectively given.
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
2-21 have an embossed shield in the top left corner surrounded by stars and
banners with the words "Congress" at the top and "Carson's" below, both
in banners.
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
vividness of the different episodes of his dream. He arose with his head full
of impressions as lively as they were disagreeable. He had
[5] seen humanity and society
caricatured,
coarsely misrepresented and misunderstood; but he had seen all this done
with great
[6] energy, with an
undoubted sincerity, although with amazing ignorance; with
shrewdness
[7] and with imagination.
He felt that he had read a book worthless as a performance — or
perhaps
worse than worthless; but valuable for what it contingently promised; a
book which its author had no excuse for repeating, inasmuch as it embraced
the widest limits in which a
[8] mind
may void itself of its vicious and morbid fancies, without causing suspicion
of its vanity.
[9]
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
of the Republic, we are expected to deduce the heroine's
[18] character. Perhaps we are very
stupid, but
we utterly fail to do so. For us, too, she remains the American Sphinx. Nor
have we much better luck with her companions. It is Mrs. Stoddard's
practice to shift all her responsibilities as story-teller upon the reader's
shoulders, and to give herself up at the critical moment to the delight of
manufacturing incoherent dialogue or of uttering grim impertinences
[19] about her characters. This is
doubtless
very good fun for Mrs. Stoddard; but it is poor fun for us.
[20]
Take her
[21] treatment of her hero. What useful
or
profitable fact has she told us about him? We do not of course speak of
facts which we may apply to our moral edification; but of facts which may
help us to read the story. Is he a man?
[22] Is
[23]
he a
[24] character, a mind, a heart, a
soul? You wouldn't suppose it from anything Mrs. Stoddard has said, or
has made him say. What is his formula? Is it that like Carlyle's Mirabeau
he has swallowed all formulas? A silence like the
[25] stage imitation of
[26] thunder interrupted by remarks
like the
stage imitation of flashes of lightning; such to our perceptions are the chief
attributes of Jason Auster. And yet he figures as a hero; he sustains a
tragedy, he is the subject of a passion. Like Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens's
Hard Times, what the novel-reader craves above all things is
facts. No matter how fictitious they may be, so long as they
are
facts. A hungry soul
[27] is no fact at
all, without a context, which Mrs. Stoddard has not given. Speckled eyes
and feathery hair are worthless facts. Death-beds, as a general rule, are
worthless facts, and there are
no less than four of them in Mrs. Stoddard's short story. Nothing is so
common as to see a second-rate actor "die" with effect. The secret of
the
[28] short breath, the groans, the
contortions is easily mastered. Just so, nothing leads us more to suspect the
strength of a novelist's talent than the recurrence in his pages of these
pathological phenomena. They are essentially cheap tragedy. It is evidently
Mrs. Stoddard's theory that plenty of natural conversation makes a novel
highly dramatic. Such also
[29] is Mr.
Trollope's theory. Now there is no doubt but what Mrs. Stoddard has
enough imagination to equip twenty Mr. Trollopes. But in the case of both
writers the practice of this theory makes the cheap dramatic.
[30] Both writers make their characters
talk
about nothing; but those of Mrs. Stoddard do it so
[31] much the more ingeniously and
picturesquely, thatit
[32] seems at first
[33] as if they were really saying
something.
[34] Yet this intense
and
[35] distorted common-place is
worse than Mr. Trollope's flagrant common-place.
[36] As we skim its
[37] shallow depths, one reflection
perpetually
recurs. What a strain after nature, we exclaim at every turn, and yet what
poverty! That Mrs. Stoddard strains after
[38] nature shows that she admires and
loves
it, and for this the critic commends her: but that she utterly fails to grasp
it shows that she has not seriously observed
[39] it; and for this the critic censures
her. We
have spoken of her imagination. She has exercised it with her back turned
upon the truth. Let her face the truth and she may let her imagination rest:
as it is, it only brings her intotrouble.
[40] A middle-aged
[41] man who loves a young girl for
years in
silence, knowing that she loves his own son: who quietly and heroically
awaits his
wife's death, knowing that she hates the young girl; and who at last when
his wife is dead and
[42] his son has
gone forth from home, casts out his heart at the young girl's feet: all this
makes a story quite after the actual taste. But like all stories that are worth
the telling, it has this peculiarity, that it gives every one concerned in it a
great deal to do and
[43] especially the
author. But Mrs. Stoddard's notion is to get all the work done by the reader
while she amuses herself in talking what we feel bound to call
nonsense.
Notes