University of Virginia Library

An Unpublished Review by Henry James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The Clifton Waller Barrett Library at the University of Virginia contains a holograph manuscript of an unpublished review by Henry James.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,

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