Vision and Revision: The Perceptual Modes of Henry Ja1nes by Kevin R. Allen

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 1992 Vision and Revision: The Perceptual Modes of Henry James

by

Kevin R. Allen

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Howard Pearce, Department of English and Comparative Literature. It was submitted to the faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Arts.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

Thesis Advisor

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Chairpe on, Department of English and Comparative Literature ~~\(~ Dean, The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities

1= /)JU..~ I 11 1L Dean of Graduate Studies Date

11 ABSTRACT

Author: Kevin R. Allen

Title: Vision and Revision: The Perceptual Modes of Henry James

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Howard Pearce

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 1992

For Henry James, artistic vision is essentially revision. It is a process of transfom1ation: of literal experience to "felt life," of pictorial presentation to dramatic representation, of the past to the present. This process is a central element of James's fiction. The "meaning" of stories such as "The Real Thing" and "TI1e Middle Years" and novels such as The Ambassadors depends on a growth of vision. Their protagonists must be able to overcome the limits of their imaginations. They must be reflective, both intellectually and mimetically. In demanding a finer kind of artistic perception, James pointed the way for a younger generation of writers and critics. James's vision was broad enough to encompass classic critical ideals and artistic goals that would be achieved years after he struggled with them.

111 Table of Contents

I. Introduction ...... 1 II. The Synthesis of Perception in James's Fiction ...... 6 III. The Limits of Realism in James's Dynamics of Perception .... 25 IV. TI1e Critical Context for James's Perceptual Modes ...... 39 V. Conclusion ...... 44 Notes ...... 46 Works Cited ...... 48

lV I. Introduction

TI1e magical, elusive process of art, said Henry James, lies in the artist's ability to "guess the unseen from the seen" (Partial Portraits 389). This simple expression of James's artistic intentions in no way can sum up the volume of James's work, the depth of his prose, and most significantly, his own constant re-evaluation and revision in both his fiction and commentary. In a useful way, however, this phrase serves as a kind of formula for James's process of artistic perception. For James, perception is a two-part process consisting of the actual physical world the artist has seen and the unseen world of imagination. Art is the guesswork, the synthesis of these two modes of perception into a heightened form of experience. The crucible of this mysterious process is reflection. Art is both a mirror-like reflection of the physical world and the artist's cognitive reflections on that world. James's vision then is essentially revision, in the sense both of re-visiting past experience and re-creating that perception through imagination. Supporting this view is James's most direct statement of his artistic philosophy, "The Art of Fiction," in which he compares the creative writer with the historian: To represent and illustrate the past, the actions of men, is the task of either writer [of fiction or history], and the only difference that I can see is, in proportion as he succeeds, to the honour of the novelist, consisting as it does in his having more difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far from being purely literary. It seems to me to give him a great character, the fact that he has at once 1 so much in common with the philosopher and the painter; this double analogy is a magnificent heritage.

(Partial Portraits 347). This dual character of fiction, the combination of characteristics of visual art and philosophy, run throughout James's theories of literature and is expressed in a variety of paired terms: the scenic and the pictorial, imitation and imagination, perception and feeling. The duality is central to James's ideas about literary technique, particularly in regards to point of view, narrative voice, authorial intrusion, and dramatic representation. "Re-vision" is also the core of his aesthetic theories. For James, fiction is like visual art because both the writer and the painter must choose details to create "a direct impression of life," the value of which lies in its degree of intensity. There is no intensity "unless there is freedom to feel and say" (Partial Portraits 384). James's requirement of intensity asks for much more of the pictorial nature of literature than a mimetic reflection of reality. The writer of fiction must also be a philosopher because he must develop "precepts" with which he can interpret the past through his cognitive powers. Reality and imagination merge in this process to form experience. "Experience is never limited and never complete," James says in "The Art of Fiction." "It is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airbome particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind. It takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations" (Partial Portraits 388). Thus experience, the never-complete

2 synthesis of the pictorial and the imaginative, is for James the motive of art. Joseph Conrad, also recognizing the risk of over-generalizing James, wrote in "Henry James, An Appreciation," that "Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine consciences" (Conrad 17). "In the body of [his] work there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender, or even probability of surrender, to his own victorious achievement in that field where he is a master" (Conrad 11 ). James's compulsion to revisit the past is demonstrated nowhere more clearly than in his 1909 New York Edition, in which he painstakingly revised about half his body of fiction and supplied prefaces detailing the events that originally inspired many of his stories and novels. Christof Wegelin points out that while James frequently revised his stories for incorporation into books after they had originally appeared in magazines, the changes were minor compared to those he made for the New York Edition (Tales 435). Wegelin cites "TI1e Madonna of the Future" as a typical example. For its inclusion in a collection of stories in 1875, James made just five minor changes in the first eight paragraphs of the text that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly two years before. But for the New York Edition thirty years later he made fifty-one changes, many of much greater significance (Tales 435). According to Wegelin, James intended the New York Edition to represent his life's work and he included only what he could still approve or make acceptable. "Revising now meant not just mending and polishing but re-imagining, re-seeing his material" (Tales 435). 1bis re-vision naturally focused on James's earlier work, because, as James points out in his preface to The Golden Bowl, his perceptions had changed (Art of the Novel 344-45). Thus, says Wegelin, "Revising his early work, therefore, became a process of reassessing the old 'matter' and 3 of registering the result of these 'renewals of vision'" (Tales 436). Beginning most notably with F. 0. Matthiessen's 1944 examination of the revisions in The Portrait of a Lady, much of the criticism of James's fiction in the last fifty years has examined the changes in the New York Edition. In his introduction to James's Prefaces, R. P. Blackmur observes that James revised "as a rule, only in the sense that he re-envisaged the substance more accurately and more representatively. Revision was responsible re-seeing" (Art of the Novel xxvi). But as Philip Home points out, revision in James's work goes far beyond merely editorial fine-tuning. In Home's broader definition, revision for James involves two "visions" of the same object or situation, one in the past and one in the present. These visions may involve two texts, but they may also involve James reconsidering his past work or that of another writer. In some cases the revision may be performed by characters in a story. Often, Home says, both the character and the author are engaged in the act of revision (358). How these various acts of revision create the synthesis of pictorial and imaginative perception will be the focus of the remainder of this examination. Chapter II will look at how this dynamic is constantly at work in James's fiction. First, it wiJl discuss James's revision of "The Real Thing." Most significantly, it will argue that a recurring change of the verb "to perceive" to "to feel" is a systematic change that mirrors both the action and structure of the story. The second part of the chapter will look at "The Middle Years," which depicts a dying author's revision of his last work, the intervention of a young admirer with a fresh vision of the author's work, and the resulting changes in the author's perceptions on life as well as art. Finally, the chapter will review James's narrative technique in The 4 Ambassadors showing how James attempted to dramatize the synthesis of vision in what he considered his finest novel. Chapter III will examine how James's ideas about artistic perception influenced his judgment of his contemporaries. The first section of the chapter will show how James's insistence on the synthesis of pictorial perception and imagination led to his rejection of the Victorian realism of such popular figures as Trollope, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. 'The second section will look at James's relationship with a younger generation of novelists, including H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and D. H. Lawrence, whom he also ultimately dismissed for their lack of imagination. Chapter IV will place James's ideas about artistic vision in a historical context. The first section will observe that the idea that art demands the intervention of imagination to reshape observation, which is the essence of James's process of perception, echoes classical literary criticism. The second section will show how James's aesthetic theories anticipated issues confronted by modem critics ranging from T. S. Eliot to Sigmund Freud.

5 II. The Synthesis of Perception in James's Fiction

James's dual modes of perception and the role of art to synthesize them are central both thematically and dramatically in many of his novels and stories. This process accounts for much of the meticulous structuring and complex ironies that characterize James's style. The process, necessarily a reflective one, is achieved most successfully through the activity of revision and often is evident in the comparison of James's original and revised texts. 1 To fully appreciate this nature of James's work, however, revision must be seen in the broader context Philip Horne describes as "a re-reading or reinterpretation of the past" (359). In "The Real Thing," James not only dramatizes the act of reinterpreting artistic perception, he also demonstrates the process himself through his textual revisions. The eighty word changes, additions, or deletions in the New York Edition of James's "The Real Thing" from the original text sharpen images, clarify themes, and refine characters. The revisions occur uniformly throughout the four sections of the story at a rate of about one per one-hundred-twenty-five words, and can be grouped into three categories: minor changes of style or syntax which tighten but do not substantively alter the text; simple revisions, mostly one-word substitutions; and compositional changes in which James recast entire phrases and sentences. TI1e least of the categories in both number and significance is a

6 group of sixteen minor revisions involving word order, pronouns, and speech attributions. The result in most cases is a smoother flow or more economic use of language but little substantive change in meamng. More significant is a group of twenty-two revised phrases and entire sentences, mostly aimed at strengthening the description of various characters. For instance, in describing Miss Chunn, an unsophisticated model, originally James wrote: "She was not a person to conceal her skepticism if she had had a chance to show it" (Tales 251). He changed that to: "She wasn't a person to conceal the limits of her faith if she had had a chance to show them" (Novels and Tales 329). Similarly, the character of Mrs. Monarch is revised throughout. For example, in the original text James wrote, "her tinted oval mask showed friction as an exposed surface shows it" (Tales 240). The revision is "Her tinted oval mask showed waste as an exposed surface shows friction" (Novels and Tales 308). These are clear examples of James's re-vision at work. He is essentially re­ imagining and re-interpreting. The remainder of the story's forty-two changes are seemingly simple word substitutions, deletions or additions, many involving a single word. Most of these changes seem merely to reflect a personal preference. Among these seemingly simple changes, however, are the most substantial of James's revisions. Because they occur in a distinctive pattern, one set of alte1native verbs in particular reflects James's new vision of the characters and themes of "The Real Thing." This act of textual revision itself reflects the process of artistic re-vision dramatized so masterfully in the story. In his introduction to James's Stories of Writers and Artists, F. 0. Matthiessen calls "The Real Thing" "one of the lightest and yet most searching affirmations of [James's] aesthetic theory" (13). The story 7 is about an artist's experience with two sets of models. One is an aristocratic couple, the Monarchs, who have fallen on hard times and come to the artist seeking jobs posing as models for illustrations the artist is doing for a novel about high-society characters. The other set is the Monarchs' antithesis, a cockney girl and an Italian fruit peddler already employed to pose, quite successfully, for virtually any illustration the artist can imagine. The Monarchs claim that as possessors of "the real thing"--upper­ class manners and appearances--they are perfect for the job, and somewhat reluctantly the artist agrees to let them pose. The result is a disaster. The artist's repeated attempts to draw them result in misshapen, distorted images. He must return to the working-class models who, on the other hand, prove perfectly mimetic in their ability to represent any figure. Ultimately, the artist rejects the Monarchs, ordering them out of his studio despite the couple's pathetic pleas to allow them to stay on even as servants. Allnost from its first appearance in 1892, "The Real Thing" has been seen as itself an illustration of the differences between real life and art. Just four years later the story was cited as a reminder of "an interesting truth in art, that the actual is not by any means the real" (Scudder 265). For Matthiessen the story is James's "wholehearted repudiation of realism as mere literal reporting" and thus demonstrates to critics that a preference for the represented subject over the real one does not imply that James's art is a hollow evasion of reality (Writers and Artists 14 ). As critics have pointed out for the last forty years, however, there is more to "The Real Thing" than James's simple rejection of rigid realism. Earle Labor saw in the short story three levels of meaning: the social, the ethical and the moral (377). Walter Wright described the Monarchs as "completed literary portraits" depicting the best part 8 of life (90). Robert Berkelman saw two meanings in the title: "the ingenious make-believe" of att and in life "a quiet heroism, a tough grace under pressure" (94). Even more recently "The Real Thing" has been examined as a dramatization of perception. For Martha Banta, the "pressure" of the story lies in the artist's choice between the two pairs of models. The artist--and reader, too--must assess the models in terms of the kinds of identity they can provide and not by "narrow notions of what is authentic" (1 0). Banta is correct in pointing out that by focusing too narrowly on the story's title in search of a theme many critics have failed to appreciate the process of perception that "The Real Thing" explores. The Monarchs are the real thing in the same way that realistic fiction is the real thing. Both are, in Ronald Lycette's phrase, presentational rather than representational (57). The fact that they already are precisely what the artist-narrator wishes to envision--the real thing--allows no opportunity for the artist to engage in re­ vision. Mrs. Monarch is the perfect subject for a photograph, the artist/narrator observes. Yet that ability makes her unsuitable as a model for an illustration. She is stiff, has no sense of variety, and the artist's drawings of her all "looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph" (Novels and Tales 326). In other words, she is so much of one single thing she ends up emphasizing all the things she is not. She cannot be re-imagined. Banta observes: "Since hers is a concentration of being Mrs. Monarch, she is a simile, not a metaphor; not a person able to act out 'Mrs. Monarch,' in approximation" ( 11). The working-class models, on the other hand, can imitate any character. Miss Chunn, whose name James creates by revising the word charm (Kehler 79), "was only a freckled cockney, but she could represent everything, from a fine lady to a shepherdess; she 9 had the faculty" (Novels and Tales 321). Because she and the orange peddler Oronte are, in terms of social standing, so insignificant, they emphasize only the infinite possibility for revision. The artist­ narrator observes that the "value of such a model as Miss Chunn resided precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp" (Novels and Tales 327-28). "Miss Chunn, says Banta, "is metaphor to Mrs. Monarch's simile; she is 'like' whatever is the thing that pays" (11). In the dramatic structure of the story, the Monarchs are the real thing, unrevised perception, and when represented as art their images become distorted. Because they are so perfect as presentations they preclude imagination, and thus under James's definition of experience they resist representation of "felt life." lne working-class models, on the other hand, are only impressions. ll1ey force the artist to exercise his imagination, to realize his "power to guess the unseen from the seen." There is yet another level of perception in the story involving how each of the characters views himself or herself and how they come to revise those images. The Monarchs' failure as models is not only the fault of the artist's perceptions of them. It is also due to their own failure to revise their perceptions of themselves as anything but members of the upper class, even in the face of the obvious evidence of the poverty that has led them to the artist in the first place. "The Monarchs are self-prisoners," Lavonne Mueller observes. "They are always the same--true to their phenomenal selves. When they fail as models, they can, of course, be comforted by the fact that they are genteel--not meant to be common sitters" (48). In contrast, the professional models, Miss Chunn and Oronte, have no delusions about themselves, says M. D. Uroff. They are seen clearly by the artist because they see only what is expected of them (43). Lacking the Monarchs' strong vision of their 10 significance, the working-class models are perfect objects for artistic re-VISIOn. The artist, too, suffers from faulty self-perception. In the opening scene of the story, in which he imagines himself really a sensitive portrait painter rather than a second-rate book illustrator, he immediately upon first seeing the Monarchs sizes them up as perfect subjects for a portrait. Uroff observes that at this point the artist's powers of perception are great, not only in the pictorial sense but also in the imaginative sense (45). The artist imagines that he can guess everything about the couple down to the kind of luggage they own. The artist's trouble begins when he is forced to revise his perception after realizing that the Monarchs see themselves as models for the artist's illustrations rather than as portrait subjects. At this level, Mueller says, the story is "a perceptual tug-of-war" (50). The artist would like to see the Monarchs as they see themselves, but he cannot; The Monarchs would like to see themselves as the artist sees them, but they also fail. Mueller concludes that James's point in the story is that an individual's perceptual field is the only reality one knows (50). But this conclusion discounts the process of revision, which transforms uninterpreted perception into "felt life." In revising "The Real Thing" James systematically changed the verb "to perceive" to "to feel." The significance of this apparently simple substitution is clearer when it is seen as an alternating unit, one in which the original meaning is retained, if only subconsciously, in the act of revision. The alternation occurs three times, each in relation to the artist-narrator's perceptions/feelings toward his two groups of models. This theme forms the story's underlying crisis, the resolution of which is revealed through the merging of the objective perceptions and subjective feelings. 11 The first revision involves the artist's first meeting with the Monarchs. "I perceived they would have been willing" (Tales 241) is changed to "I felt them willing" (Novels and Tales 311). l11e revision marks the beginning of the artistic process through which perception, through imagination, becomes "felt life." The artist sizes the Monarchs up in a glance as "types" whose "advantages" strike him as "preponderantly social." They would make a drawing room look well, he says (Novels and Tales 311). It is, of course, their perfection that will ultimately make them unsuitable as models. As Lycette observed, James's language emphasizes the superficial, two­ dimensional quality of the Monarchs' appearance. They lack the ability to "express, to suggest or to symbolize a subject's, and an artist's, inner source of form and meaning" (57). Miss Churm, conversely, is a perfect model because she lacks completely both self-perception and status. This revelation strikes the artist during the second occurrence of the perception/feeling alternation. After a dozen failed drawings of Mrs. Monarch, the artist realizes the value of Miss Chunn as a model. "I perceived more clearly than before that the value of such a model resided precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp" (Tales 250) is changed to "I felt surer even than before" (Novels and Tales 327). J.rplicit in the revision is the contrast between the artist's perceptions of the Monarchs and Miss Churm, but also present is a stronger emphasis on feelings over perceptions. This time the revision involves the artist's choice of Miss Churm as a model over Mrs. Monarch, marking his growing understanding of the Monarchs as he continues to revise his initial perceptions. The third instance refers to the artist's first meeting Oronte, an unsophisticated peddler who also comes to the artist seeking work as a model. He is "a young man whom I easily perceived to be a 12 foreigner" (Tales 252) is changed to, "whom I at once saw to be a foreigner" (Novels and Tales 331). Though James did not use the word "felt" in this last revision, it fits the pattern because the verb "saw" de-emphasizes the objectivity of an object being "perceived," connoting not only perception but also understanding and feeling. "Perceive" is ordinarily restricted in meaning to the denotation "sense perception," while "see" is ordinarily expanded metaphorically to mean "understand" or "grasp instinctively." This is further dramatized by the fact that unlike the case with the Monarchs, the artist's initial perceptions/feelings regarding Oronte prove to be accurate. The young Italian becomes not only the artist's best model but also his servant, supplanting in the process both of the Monarchs and prompting the artist to again revise his perception/feelings of the Monarchs. It is this double vision of the actual and the real in terms of artistic perception that interests James, who judged the value of art by whether it is "the result of some direct impression or perception of life." The "moral sense" of a work of art, he wrote, depends on "the amount of felt life concerned in producing it." (Art of the Novel 45). This standard extends as well to the characters within a work, who "are interesting only in proportion as they feel their respective situations." (Art of the Novel 62). As "The Reall11ing" reveals, it is how perceptions become "felt life" that is interesting, that is indeed art. Lycette described this process as "the transformation of consciousness" (58). The artist sees beyond his limited perceptions of the real thing to real life and art only when he feels the Monarch's shame. Tellingly, the final scene of the story dramatizes the transformation through a series of events in which actual physical touching (literal felt life) produces changes in perception. Having 13 failed as models and having abandoned any pretense of status, the Monarchs attempt to reverse roles with Miss Churm and Oronte as the artist's servants. Trying to be useful, Mrs. Monarch moves to adjust Miss Churm's hair as the latter is posing. "Do you mind me just touching it?" she asks (Novels and Tales 344 ). When the artist tries to stop her, Mrs. Monarch responds with a glance that moves the artist beyond his imaginative power to depict the impression. He confesses, "I should like to have been able to paint that" (Novels and Tales 344). When Mrs. Monarch then stoops to pick up a dirty rag, it is in poignant contrast to the woman who earlier in the story cringed at the thought of wearing costumes that "had served their time, a hundred years ago, on living world-stained men and women" (Novels and Tales 319). The Monarchs' humility affects the artist to the point of tears and literally changes his perception. "When it came over me, the latent eloquence of what they were doing, I confess that my drawing was blurred for a moment--the picture swam" (Novels and Tales 344). After a week of watching the Monarchs debase themselves, though, the artist can stand it no longer and pays them to go away. Though the experience may have gotten the artist into "false ways" (perhaps challenging his old ways of perceiving/feeling the world), he is · willing to have paid the price--"for the memory." Certainly, the artist-narrator has sacrificed, but just what he has given up and for what gain has been widely discussed. Lyall H. Powers says that James uses the final scene's humbling images of the Monarchs to evoke sympathy for the couple in contrast to the artist's harshness in sending them away. In doing so, James is dramatizing the idea that the artist's first and overwhelming duty is to his art, according to Powers. All else must be sacrificed to its demands. This, he says, explains the artist's selfishness (362). Judith Ryan 14 reads the story as James exploring how "an alternating vision of the real and the unreal can directly affect the person experiencing it." The artist is willing to pay the price of being second rate for the memory of his relationship with the Monarchs because he has learned the value of "the invisible bridge" between the actual and the possible. "His disappointment with the 'real thing' has helped him, in effect, to validate the unreal" (308). What the artist--like the Monarchs--has sacrificed mostly, though, is self-perception. What he has gained is the memory of the Monarchs through which, finally, he has achieved the synthesis of perception. It is, after all, James reminds us, only in reflection that one can arrive at the goal of "felt life." For the Monarchs it comes only after they feel the desperation of their circumstances. For the artist the synthesis comes only after he stops "perceiving" the Monarchs as types and "feels" in a real way their shame. The failure of his art is not the fault of the models, but the failure of the artist to synthesize his visual and imaginative perceptions. By the time he sees beyond the Monarchs as "real things"--when Mrs. Monarch touches Miss Churm's hair--the artist is unable to depict the feeling Mrs. Monarch conveys in a simple glance. Yet another form of what Home calls the "idea or figure" of revision (358) is present in "The Real Thing." The story's pattern, like most of James's fiction, is one of reversal. What begins one way turns out to be something precisely the opposite. The Monarchs are originally seen as ideal models--the real thing. But by the end of the story they literally have changed places with Miss Churm and Oronte. In the process, the artist's vision also has undergone a reversal. Honre describes this as the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, the mirror-pattern "abba" (359). It occurs throughout James's stories 15 and novels. E. M. Forster describes a similar symmetry in The Ambassadors as"the shape of an hour-glass" (218). He goes on to decry the lack of vitality and variety in James's fiction in general. James's characters are "gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in other books, and ourselves." This " [castrating] is for the sake of a particular aesthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price" (233). Forster's criticism--that James is willing to sacrifice all else to the triumph of pattern--is too harsh. Unity and structure are important in James's fiction, but they remain tools for the process of re-vision. James does not seek to "equate" the sides of the hour-glass figure for a static balance, Home points out, rather the alternates "are being seen in terms of similarities, contrasts, ironies of circumstance and intention and outcome, so that complex meanings are being generated and controlled rather than simplified and denied" (319). This way, James is able to dramatize in a quiet, careful way how the artist in "The Real Thing" stmggles to overcome the limits of his vision. It is the same process through which James's "The Middle Years" examines the other variable in the formula of artistic perception, the limits of imagination. 1l1ough told in the third person, "The Middle Years" is also presented from the narrative point of view of an artist, this time a dying author named Dencombe who has come to the seaside resort of Boumemouth to recuperate. As the story opens he has just received a copy of his latest novel entitled The Middle Years and, having forgotten its composition, admires in a detached way the artistic achievement of what he is almost certain will be his final work. He sees again how, confident in his talent, he had allowed his art to surmount the "difficulties" the work had entailed. "The result produced in his little book was somehow a result beyond his 16 his method, and they had grown up and flowered with this sweetness" (Tales 262). He had achieved the synthesis of imagination and perception, yet the novel is an ironic triumph. It occurs to Dencombe that just when he was arriving at last to the height of his imaginative powers there probably would be no more opportunities to bring that power to bear on the "material" it had taken him a lifetime to gather. He turns the pages of his book and mutters to himself, "Ah for another go!-­ ah for a better chance" (Tales 263). Dencombe's despair over the price he has paid for his artistic vision is the impetus for the story, which centers on the author's meeting and relationship with a young doctor who turns out to be Dencombe's most ardent admirer. But just as the artist and the Monarchs begin their relationship with mistaken perceptions of one another, so the young Doctor Hugh and Dencombe at first are misled by their imagination. Dencombe, watching the young man and two women on the beach, believes he can "instantly characterize the performers." A "clever theory," he calls the process. "What, moreover, was the use of being an approved novelist if one couldn't establish a relation between such figures" (Tales 261). His clever theory, however, tums out to be all wrong. Doctor Hugh is not the frivolous young man he first imagined, but an intelligent young doctor employed by the wealthy old Countess as a personal physician and traveling with a young female attendant, Miss Vernham, whose main concem seems to be securing an inheritance from the ailing widow. When Doctor Hugh and Dencombe meet, the young man is also reading The Middle Years, and Dencombe imagines, incorrectly, that the young man is a book reviewer. Doctor Hugh lavishly praises Dencombe's novel and his art in general, confessing that his books 17 are the only ones he ever re-reads. The young doctor never guesses Dencombe's identity, though he appears suspicious at times. He is visibly shocked when he accidentally picks up Dencombe's copy of the novel and finds that his new acquaintance has been "altering the text" (Tales 267). Dencombe, it turns out, is like James, an inveterate revisionist, "a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style; the last thing he ever arrived at was a form final for himself' (Tales 267). Just as the admiration of the "gushing modern youth" (Tales 267) begins to make Dencombe feel some optimism for his second chance, however, he falls ill again and faints. He awakes to find that everything has changed. Doctor Hugh has discovered his identity and, though risking his lucrative position with the countess, has devoted himself to the ailing writer. Dencombe is flattered by Doctor Hugh's attention, but he thinks the doctor is too young to understand his disgust of having "wasted inestimable years." Only in his decline, when it is too late, has the novelist finally "begun to see." "He had ripened too late and was so clumsily constituted that he had had to teach himself by mistakes." When Doctor Hugh answers that "it's for your mistakes that I admire you," Dencombe dismisses him: "You're happy--you don't know" (Tales 270). Dencombe realizes how wrong he is when Doctor Hugh sacrifices his chance for a substantial inheritance from the Countess in order to stay nearby when the novelist becomes bedridden. It is then that Dencombe realizes that he has accomplished more with his art than merely to "cast our little spell." He has captured enough of life so that his art has engaged another's imagination. It is a double lesson: he learns that life is not merely "material" and that art is not detachment but a re-vision of life. "A second chance--that's the

18 delusion," he says. "TI1ere never was to be but one. We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art" (Tales 276). Again in "The Middle Years" a role reversal leads to the synthesis of vision. In the begim1ing of the story, Doctor Hugh looks upon Dencombe as a master. And Dencombe sees himself as having sacrificed everything for his art. By the end of the story, however, it is Dencombe who has come to a clearer vision through his association with his young admirer who has indeed sacrificed if not his life, then his fortune for Dencombe's art. Of James's stories of artists, "TI1e Middle Years," says Wegelin, most closely approaches "that complex process in the 'crucible of imagination,' as James says in the Preface to "The Lesson of the Master," by which the artist turns experience into art" (Wegelin 644). Art and life converge throughout the story, Wegelin notes: in Dencombe's struggle between financial reward and literary passion; in his desire for a second chance to fully exercise his talent; in Doctor Hugh's choice between Dencombe and the Countess (Wegelin 642-43). The theme is dramatized early in the story, when Dencombe begins to re-read his novel and realizes that he has achieved more than his "conscious intention." He is "drawn down, as by a siren's hand, to where, in the dim underworld of fiction, the great glazed tank of art, strange silent subjects float" (Tales 262). For Wegelin, this image leads to the story's famous climactic declaration about the madness of art. Together, he says, the two images frame the story's major theme: that the real power of art lies not in conscious design but in an artist's "surrender to his insights" (Wegelin 643-44 ). While the story is undeniably concerned with the artistic process, 19 Wegelin's conclusion seems to contradict the idea that there has been a renewal of vision. First, it suggests that the artist's perception is the same at the end of the story as it had been in the begim1ing. Second, it ignores how Dencombe's role-reversal with Doctor Hugh changes his vision. In fact, James presents this change in roles with an image that reverses the initial one of the author sinking into the "great glazed tank of art." When Doctor Hugh returns and tells the dying author he has given up his fortune by choosing Dencombe over the Countess, Dencombe views the act as a supreme compliment to his power as an artist. The thought produces in Dencombe "a strange commotion [that] slowly altered and transfigured his despair. The sense of cold submersion left him--he seemed to float without an effort" (Tales 274). Lifted from the "delusion" that his art has been detached from any life but his own, the author has his final insight. "A second chance--that's the delusion," he says (Tales 276). Regardless of the passion driving it or the doubt limiting it, art, like life, is imperfect and imperfectable, the author realizes. "The Middle Years" suggests that only art can transform life through a constant renewal and revision. One cannot go back in time and change things, Philip Home reminds us. A written text, on the other hand, may come from the past, but it is experienced in the present (373). Thus, all writing is a kind of historical record of the author's perceptions and imagination. It is essentially a re-vision.2 James's fiction is not content, however, with merely recording the past; rather it attempts to capture the activity of recalling the past through what has been described here as the synthesis of perception. James's fiction continually dramatizes what he called in his

20 Preface to The Ambassadors the "march of action" through a "process of vision" (Art of the Novel 308). Indeed, says Leon Edel, "It is seeing that is the subject of the novel, perception at the pitch of awareness" (Ambassadors Edel xv). The process is yet another of James's figures of revision, one achieved primarily through technique, but also drawing on the forms of revision present in "The Real TI1ing" and "The Middle Years." In The Ambassadors, role-reversals abound: Strether Lambert and Chad; Mrs. Newsome and Madame de Vionnet; Mamie and Jeanne de Vionnet; Paris and Woollett, Mass. All ultimately serve to dramatize Strether's growth of perception and renewal of vision. Also present in the novel is the sense of re-visiting a place from the past. When Strether is dispatched by the Newsomes to Paris to retrieve Chad Newsome from the corruption of Europe in general and from the clutches of Madame de Vionnet in particular it is for him a return trip to the city he first encountered, like Chad, as a young man. The renewed charm the city reveals to him is an important part of the process through which he learns to see in a new way. Perhaps most significantly, The Ambassadors dramatizes the activity of re-assessment, which ultimately leads to the major conflict in the novel, Strether's having to decide between his comfortable life back in New England with the Newsomes or Chad's Paris. The choice is complicated by Strether's complex web of relationships and the responsibilities he must consider: his duty to the Newsomes, his feelings for Chad, his enchantment with the de Vionnets, and his attaclunent to Paris. This moral struggle is the stage for James's "drama of consciousness" which ends with Strether's renewed vision of everything--the Newsomes, Chad, the de Vionnets, Woollett, and Paris. Instead of bringing Chad home, Strether becomes convinced that 21 the young man's place is in Paris. As Percy Lubbock, the "official" interpreter of James's early work (Wagenknecht 187), explains, Strether's opinion of the life of freedom changes because it is so different from his prevision of it. "He no longer sees a misguided young man to be saved from disaster, he sees an exquisite, bountiful world laid at a young man's feet" (Lubbock 158). The question then is whether Chad can choose between "commonplace" Woollett and "bountiful" Paris. It turns out he chooses to return to America, completing his role-reversal with Strether. With his new powers of perception, however, Strether sees clearly his situation. "The world of the commonplace is no longer his world, and he is too late to seize the other; he is old, he has missed the opportunity of youth" (Lubbock 159). In his Preface to the novel, James said he attempted to manage the technical task of dramatizing Strether's internal struggle by "employing but one centre" and by keeping it all "within my hero's compass" (Art of the Novel 317). Lubbock points out that all of the people, places, and pictures in the book are Strether's visions. "Nothing in the scene has any importance, any value in itself; what Strether sees in it--that is the whole of its meaning" (161). Other critics, beginning with John E. Tilford, have noted that James technique in The Ambassadors is inconsistent. Tilford cites numerous examples of shifting points of view, changes in narrative voice, and direct authorial intrusion. The art in many cases, he says, "is often remarkably subtle, but occasionally it comes close to being essentially a dazzling technical trick that does not quite come off' (164). But, as Wagenknecht says, there is no harm done, particularly if we remember it is sleight of hand. James accomplishes his goal (186). By presenting the story through Strether's central consciousness 22 but in the third person, says Elsa Nettles, James sought to assume the identity of his character while at the same time maintaining a necessary detachment (54). The pressure of the novel then is applied to the growth and expansion of Strether's understanding. Attention is focused on how Strether synthesizes the things he perceives objectively and the subjectivity of his imagination. Nettles explains that James "makes objective the mind of the character, presenting it as a picture or a stage, to be watched as a spectator watches a performance in a theater" (54). This is a complex process, Nettles observes, through which observation and imagination "act in conjunction with the logical faculties of the mind to lead the protagonist from ignorance to the understanding of his situation" (55). The growth of understanding and vision is accomplished through a succession of scenes, each designed to carry the action to certain point (Nettles 57). The result, says Morris Roberts, is that "the imagination is always at work, the moment is always present and full, the story completely 'told'" (208). James's imagery, he says, is carefully considered and concentrated. It often serves to foreshorten the action of days or months. Through elaborate use of metaphors and similes, says Roberts, James creates a synthesis of reality and imagination, "the essential meaning of an event embodied in an unforgettable image" (208). This quality of The Ambassadors, however, points to a difficulty in James's attempt to synthesize pictorial and imaginative perception, a difficulty not present (or at least not as prominent) in "The Real Thing" and "The Middle Years." Great eff01t is required by both the author and the reader to trace the fine sensibilities and subtle moral considerations that lead to Strether's new vision. In the stories the moral considerations are fewer, even singular, producing a clearer, 23 and thus more powerful vision. This is F. R. Leavis's point when he asks whether "the energy demanded for the reading" of The Ambassadors is "disproportionate to the issues--to any issues that are concretely held and presented" (161). In James's defense, Leon Edel argues that difficulty is not a proper critical measure of any novel. James wrote The Ambassadors for a reader capable of "seeing" with him, Edel says. This reader must accept James's complicated artistic technique and his "need to render this in a highly colored and elaborate style, so as to capture the nuances of his perceptions" (Ambassadors, Edel xvi). Finally, then, the reader, too, must be capable of the synthesis of perceptions. One must be able to perceive not only James's "picture" but also his imagination.

24 III. The Limits of Realism in James's Dynamics of Perception

James's notion of the synthetic nature of artistic perception, central in his idea of realism, is especially evident in his commentary on the English novel and its development from the Victorians of the mid-nineteenth century to the early modem writers emerging during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The development of his aesthetic theories moved James away from the Victorian realism of Dickens and the determinism of Hardy and pointed him toward the modern emphasis on imagination and psychology. How James himself synthesized these two modes of perception--the pictorial and imaginative--in his own art and criticism helps account for his often harsh, sometimes seemingly contradictory, but usually keen-sighted judgments of his contemporaries. From his first published review in 1864, James was, in the words of Laurence Barrett, "a most assured young critic" (386). His opinions must have been a powerful influence on public taste, Barrett says, because the editors of many of the most respected and widely read periodicals--the North American Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Nation--assigned him the most important reviews of the time, the ones their readers would turn to first. James reviewed "fresh from the presses" the most recent novels of George Eliot, Hardy, Trollope, Kingsley, and Dickens; the poetry of William Morris, Browning, and Tennyson; and the criticism of Matthew Arnold and Swinburne (386). 25 James was so self-assured and self-conscious that early in his career he was inspired to rewrite in his story "Guest's Confession" Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice--despite what he considered the play's "witless plot" --because he wanted to "measure his mind" against a literary classic (Tintner 19). This is characteristic of James's supreme confidence in his own abilities as well as yet another example of the act of revision. Edel notes that James "was stating the truth when he wrote to his parents that he could see all round Flaubett 'intellectually'" (Future of the Novel xii). But his desire to match his ideas and abilities against the recognized masters also indicates James's dedication to what he considered artistic truth. Despite his self-confidence--perhaps because of it--he was also flexible, and as his aesthetic theories evolved James often revised over time his critical judgments both positively, as in the case of Anthony Trollope, and negatively, as with H. G. Wells, even when the consequence of his harsher views jeopardized personal relationships, as it certainly did with Wells. As change in perception leads to revision in James's fiction, so it does in his criticism as well. James's early reviews are centered on a moralistic conception of art by which he judged the validity of all literary work, his own as well as that of others. Morris Roberts sums up this early vision: "In a word, the critic's function is to expound the philosophy of art, to guide public taste, and to enlighten the erring author" (James's Criticism 14). James's persistent revision of his fiction points to a search for some ideal vision, and he sought no less as a critic. His early criticism measures quality on the scales of James's own precepts and standards. He demanded nothing less from other writers than the same lofty moral standards he strove for in his own creative work if they were to be worthy of the true role of the artist or critic. To illustrate James's insistence on the 26 idealistic Roberts cites James's essay on Swinburne, whom James admires as a stylist but dismisses as an "accidental" critic (James's Criticism 10-11). James writes:

To note, however, the points at which Mr. Swinburne's judgment hits the mark, or the points at which it misses it, is compar­ atively superfluous, inasmuch as both of these cases seem to us essentially accident- al. His book is not at all a book of judgment; it is a book of pure imagination. His genius is for style simply, and not in the least for thought nor for real analysis; he goes through the motions of criticism, and makes a considerable show of logic and philosophy, but with deep appreciation his writing seems to us to have very little to do.

(Views and Reviews 55) In his early reviews and essays James begins from an ideal, a conviction not in doctrines or dogma but a commitment he shared with Edmund Scherer to a "certain irrepressible moral substance" (Notes and Reviews 100). A critic, James says, is neither a philosopher, who processes ideas through a preconceived theory, nor a historian, who processes facts according to a preconceived plan. The critic's frame of reference is the work itself and its own "concrete standard of truth" (Notes and Reviews 104). Like a landscape painter, the critic focuses on a "small, square field under his eye." He exhausts it, "then he shifts his window-frame, as we may call it, and begins again" (Notes and Reviews 104-05). For this opinion James, says Vivien Jones, found a kindred spirit in Matthew Arnold (8). James sums up Arnold's view of the duty of criticism: "Its function is simply to get at the best thought which is

27 current--to see things in themselves as they are--to be disinterested" (Views and Reviews 90). Arnold's essays, Jones says, endorse James's own sense that "one of the chief duties of criticism is to exalt the importance of the ideal" (Views and Reviews 89). The ideal for both James and Arnold, according to Barrett, is "to perceive the truth" (389). But where does one find this ideal? James is not emphatic on this point: "It is hard to say whether the critic is more called upon to understand or to feel" (Views and Reviews 87). Barrett argues that James's admission that feeling might challenge intellect as the critic's primary faculty is merely a matter of rhetoric. James presents both possibilities to more strongly endorse the importance of understanding, Barrett says (389). Indeed, as Barrett points out, James clearly dismisses mere feeling elsewhere in his criticism. In his last major essay, James observes that in an entire generation of 19th-century novelists "the sentimental habit and the spirit of romance stood out to sea as far as possible the moment the shore [of the real] appeared to offer the least difficulty of hugging, and the Victorian age bristled with perfect occasions for our catching them in the act of showy retreat" (Future of the Novel 265). Instead, Jones suggests, James endorses Arnold's critical aim of educating the reader "by making his mind dwell on what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things." Applied to the novel, these principles reflect "a conservative, neo-classical view of mimesis: art justified by its apprehension and representation of the spiritual and universal" (Jones 9). This is to say that art must be more than a mirror of observable life; it must also reflect inner life, thought, emotion, and imagination. This was the theme, in its early form, that would infuse all of James's criticism. When James first brought this critical standard to bear on the

28 Victorian novelists, a few emerged for him as literary models. In an 1865 review of Miss Mackenzie, he makes novelist Anthony Trollope's work representative of a trend in English fiction that particularly troubled James, that of being too true to common life and thereby reducing art to the vulgar. "Mr. Trollope's devotion to little things, inveterate, self-sufficient as it is, begets upon the reader the very disagreeable impression that not only no imagination was required for the work before him, but that a man of imagination could not possibly have written it" (Notes and Reviews 72). James does not suggest that Trollope is not a gifted writer capable of rendering a scene in careful detail. This is, in fact, his objection. "Nothing, we say, is omitted; but, alas! nothing is infused. The scene possesses no interest but such as resides in the crude facts: and as this is null, the picture is clever, it is faithful, it is even horrible, but it is not interesting" (Notes and Reviews 73). Trollope, James writes, lacks not only seriousness but also a sense of humor because his work is unreflective. In an 1865 review of Can You Forgive Her? James writes, "In Mr. Trollope we perpetually miss that sustained action of the imagination, that creative movement which in those in whom this faculty is not supreme may, if you will give it time, bear out the natural or critical one, which would intensify and animate his first conception. We are forever wishing that he would go a little further, a little deeper" (Notes and Reviews 88). A year later, reviewing Trollope's The Belton Estate, James appears to have given up any hope that Trollope will heed his wishes. James concludes that "Mr. Trollope is simply unable to depict a mind in any liberal sense of the word" (Notes and Reviews 127). He calls the book ''a work prepared for minds unable to think" and "a stupid book." It fails in the primary function of a book, "to suggest thought" (Notes and Reviews 130). 29 Like Trollope, the novel exhibits what for James is a "damning" fault: it reflects life pictorially but not imaginatively. "Mr. Trollope is a good observer," James writes, "but he is literally nothing else. He is apparently as incapable of disengaging an idea as of drawing an inference. All his incidents are, if we may so express it, empirical" (Notes and Reviews 130-31). James registers the same complaint, with some qualification, against Charles Dickens, whom he calls "the greatest of superficial novelists" (Views and Reviews 159). In an 1865 review of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, James criticizes the book--and Dickens in general--for characters who are either exaggerated eccentrics or vulgar. Dickens, James says, "is master of but two alternatives: he reconciles us to what is commonplace, and he reconciles us to what is odd. The value of the former service is questionable; and the manner in which Mr. Dickens performs it sometimes conveys a certain impression of charlatanism. The value of the latter service is incontestable, and here Mr. Dickens is an honest, an admirable artist" (Views and Reviews 159-60). But this is not enough fbr James. For a great novelist, he says, there are no oddities, nothing outside humanity. There are only true and false, right and wrong. "Mr. Dickens is a great observer and a great humourist," James says, "but he is nothing of a philosopher." A great novelist "must know man as well as men, and to know man is to be a philosopher" (Views and Reviews 160). In his rejection of the realism of Trollope and Dickens, James applies the critical principles he found in Arnold. He is the idealist, seeking what for him was the ultimate aim of a novel "namely--to suggest thought" (Notes and Reviews 130). But, as Roberts notes, in emphasizing the negative qualities of the two novelists, James overlooked many positive aspects of their work. "Of literature and 30 criticism [James] demands general ideas and great truths. Graces of form, humor, observation, eloquence, are not enough" (James's Criticism 17). In the novels of George Eliot James finds a kind of realism more in tune with his evolving notion of imaginative perception. Though her work in general lacks what for James are the all-important qualities of composition and form through which art transforms the real to the ideal, Eliot's novels are superior to those of Trollope or Dickens because they are more thoughtful. James observes: "The constant play of lively and vigorous thought about the objects furnished by her observation animates these latter with a surprising richness of colour and a truly human interest" (Views and Reviews 25). But Eliot's work still falls short of the ideal. Her pictorial perception is finer because it is more than a reflection of life; it is reflective in the intellectual sense. But it is still essentially mimetic. It is not in her conceptions nor her composition that George Eliot is strongest: it is in her touches. In these she is quite original. She is a good deal of a humourist, and something of a satirist; but she is neither Dickens nor Thackeray. She has over them the great advantage that she is also a good deal of a philosopher; and it is to this union of the keenest observation with the ripest reflection, that her style owes its essential force. She is a thinker,--not, perhaps, a passionate thinker, but at least a serious one; and the term can be applied with neither adjective to either Dickens or Thackeray.

(Views and Reviews 25)

31 He praises Adam Bede for its unity but faults its lack of character development. It is a picture rather than a series of pictures, James says. "The author succeeds better in drawing attitudes of feeling than in drawing movements of feeling" (Views and Reviews 24 ). Romola, in James's view, perhaps Eliot's most important work, is obviously excellent in execution and spirit, but its characters are essentially prosaic and "make no demand on the imagination of the reader" (Views and Reviews 35). Compared with writers such as Trollope, Eliot is richly endowed with imagination, James says. But he judges Adam Bede merely "admirable prose" compared to the "very good poetry" of Jane Eyre. "Compared with writers whom we are tempted to call decidedly imaginative, she must, in my opinion, content herself with the very solid distinction of being exclusively an observer" (Views and Reviews 36). As an observer, however, Eliot is masterful if not a master. "If she is not a great dramatist," James says, "she is at least an exquisite describer" (Views and Reviews 22). He ranks Silas Marner as the most nearly a masterpiece of all Eliot's work for its evocative impression of "agricultural England in the last days of the old regime" (Views and Reviews 8). Similarly, James admired Eliot's Felix Holt for its picture of the English country life in the early nineteenth century. Eliot writes, James says, "with a wealth of fancy, of suggestion, of illustration, at the command of no other English writer" (Notes and Reviews 204-05). And yet James finds in Felix Holt an example of the "sagacious tendency to compromise which pervades the author's spirit" and creates in her novels "a disproportion between the meagre effect of the whole and and the vigorous character of tl1e parts, which stamp them as the works of a secondary thinker and an incomplete artist" (Notes and Reviews 200). 32 Critics have long pointed to these early reviews and essays as forerunners of James's more mature and complete views on artistic perception. The process is the same renewal of vision that James dramatized time and again in his fiction. Jones sees in James's objection to Eliot's lack of internal consistency--her touches as opposed to the meager effect of the whole--a growing emphasis on the crucial role of imagination (47). James himself writes of Eliot: "She has the microscopic observation, not a myriad of whose keen notations are worth a single one of those great sympathetic guesses with which a real master attacks the truth" (Notes and Reviews 207). Roberts notes that James's criticism of Eliot's weak composition and lax form foreshadowed James's later conviction that the goal of art is to transform life, not merely to pile up details and local color. According to Roberts, James believed that "every word in a story which is not in effect narrative, which does not advance the story, is simply irrelevant" (James's Criticism 20). Barrett notes an obvious shift in emphasis beginning in James's reviews of the mid-1870's in which questions of execution begin to replace those of morality (396- 400). James's insistence on form over matter led him to reject outright the work of Thomas Hardy, whom he dismisses in a review of Far Fmm the Madding Crowd as a second-rate imitator of Eliot. Hardy is clever: "He has caught very happily [Eliot's] trick of seeming to humor benignantly her queer people and look down at them from the heights of analytic omniscience" (Literary Reviews and Essays 293). But Hardy's talent is only cleverness. His oddly-named characters are comical and speak quaintly. His novel "produces a vast deal of sound and commotion" and "has a rather promising air of life and warn1th" (Literary Reviews and Essays 293). But it has a "fatal lack of magic," and James finds it too 33 long, diffuse, and inartistic (Literary Reviews and Essays 294 ). James's review is unrelenting. "Mr. Hardy describes nature with a great deal of felicity," James says, "and is evidently very much at home among rural phenomena. The most genuine thing in his book, to our sense, is a certain aroma of the meadows and lanes--a natural relish for harvesting and sheep-washings" (Literary Reviews and Essays 296). Privately, James was even harsher, referring to Hardy in a letter to Robert Louis Stevenson as "The good little Thomas Hardy," whose Tess of the d'Urbervilles is "chock-full of faults and falsity and yet has a singular beauty and charm" (Letters of Henry James 1: 194). In another letter to Stevenson James called Hardy's novel vile. "The pretense of 'sexuality' is only equaled by the absence of it, and the abomination of the language by the author's reputation for style" (Letters 3: 406-07). More and more in his reviews and essays James put pressure not on observation but the quality of observation and consequently the quality of the observer's perceptions. This conviction is repeated and refined throughout his career. In his Preface to The Princess Casamassima, James writes that careful observation "positively provokes, all round, a mystic solicitation, the urgent appeal, on the part of everything, to be interpreted and, so far as may be, reproduced" (Art of the Novel 59). Notetaking for James was "as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognize, to remember" (Notebooks x). And in "The Art of Fiction" James says that for a novelist, notetaking from observation "is the business of his life" (Partial Portraits 391). Observation alone is not sufficient for art, he says in the essay. As readers and critics, we must grant the writer only his starting place, his subject, although the reader ultimately has the right to reject the subject on the grounds that it is simply not interesting. The 34 "treatment" of the subject is a matter of selection of details, the activity of revising past events. It is the product of perception in all its modes. James says: "Selection will be sure to take care of itself, for it has a constant motive behind it. That motive is simply experience. As people feel life, so will they feel the art that is most closely related to it." This relationship, of course, is not merely a mimesis that reduces art to "the eternal repetition of a few familiar cliches." Fiction rings false when we can sense the author has simply rearranged a few details, James says. It is not sufficient to simply recall the past; art approaches truth only when the synthesis of observat!on and imagination transforms the selected details so seamlessly that the rearrangement is not visible. "Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet" (Partial Portraits 397 -98). James's commitment to perceptual revision is consistent with his critical insistence on the absolute necessity of art to distill, abstract, and "feel" life. This issue was central in James's decade-long correspondence with H. G. Wells in which first James lectured the younger novelist and ultimately antagonized him over the issue of imaginative perception. E. K. Brown summarizes James's objections: "Wells does not objectify and does not shape; his personages are less alive than the personality of the author which suffuses them all and, indeed, the whole novel; the material is flung together helter-skelter, the parts being far more interesting, far more fully done, than the whole" (9). As Leon Edel remarks in his introduction to Henry James and H. G. Wel!s, the two writers' differences centered on their opposing views of reality. James could "refashion the world into art," while for Wells reality was something to be "manipulated with all the 35 resources of human intelligence" (James and Wells 19). Two years after they met, James addressed Wells in almost mentor-like terms. Praising Wells's Love and Mr. Lewisham, James politely criticized the book for falling short of true imaginative perception. In a letter to Wells, James wrote: "I have found in it a great charm and a great deal of the real thing--that is of the note of life, if not all of it" (James and Wells 61). Two years later, in a letter discussing Wells's Anticipations, James asks: "Where is life in all this, life as I feel it and know it?" (James and Wells 16). As their relationship matured James's criticism became more pointed. In 1911, he criticized The New Machiavelli for failing sufficiently to transform reality. Art cannot be authentic, interesting, or beautiful "unless the great stewpot or crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part" (James and Wells 128).3 Finally, in his last major essay on artistic theory, "The Younger Generation" published in 1914, James makes Wells one of the representatives of the young generation of writers, including Arnold Bennett and D. H. Lawrence, which substitutes for form and character an inartistic "saturation" of details. "The act of squeezing out to the utmost the plump and more or less juicy orange of a particular acquainted state and letting this affirmation of energy, however directed or undirected, constitute for them the 'treatment' of a theme" (Future of the Novel 166-67). This kind of pictorial perception, the mimetic representation of details, says James, possesses the virtues of photographs, which lack the supreme virtue of character. "It is the detail alone that distinguishes one photograph from another" (Notes and Reviews 74). A photograph may produce a more true-to-life record than a

36 painting or a work of fiction but it is not true-to-art, because art demands both perception and imagination. James retained this view more than forty years after his review of Miss Mackenzie. He wrote in the Preface to The Spoils of Poynton that life is "all inclusion and confusion" and art is "all discrimination and selection" (Art of the Novel120). Thus the value of fiction lies in the writer's ability to transform literal observation through reflection and revision into a fully developed reality that approaches "felt life." This idea of imaginative perception is expressed most succinctly in the Preface to The Princess Casamassima: "The figures in any picture, the agents in any drama, are interesting only in proportion as they feel their respective situations" (Art of the Novel 62). An artist's source of strength, therefore, is his ability to abstract reality, to select details carefully, and, through a highly-tuned imagination, to invest feeling into these impressions, in James's words "to guess the unseen from the seen, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience" (Partial Portraits 389). In the same essay in which James criticizes Wells for his practice of saturation, he places Joseph Conrad "absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing" (Future of the Novel 279), that is creating a unified, organic novel of form and substance. The essay, says Edel, "was, to a degree, a case of the Master looking at his own image in a disciple's mirror" (Future of the Novel xv). But Nettels argues that James's approval is qualified: James implies that Conrad's reflective nanators compromise precious objectivity and suggests that Conrad is

37 preoccupied with technique for its own sake (17).4 James's objection seems to center on his idea of artistic perception. He remarks on the difficulty of bridging the "gap" between the multiple "reciters" and the "situation or subject" (Future of the Novel 281). "It is easy to see how heroic the undertaking of an effective fusion becomes on these terms," he says, "fusion between what we are to know and that prodigy of our knowing which is ever half the very beauty of the atmosphere of authenticity" (Future of the Novel 281). Despite the difficulty, however, James praises Conrad's ability to carry out this fusion between perception and the imagination. He calls this "the fine process by which our impatient material, at a given moment, shakes off the humiliation of the handled, the fumbled state, puts its head in the air and, to its own beautiful illusory consciousness at least, simply runs its race" (Future of the Novel 283). As his discussion of Conrad illustrates, James retained a strong sense of realism always. Darshan Singh Maini observes that James constantly emphasizes the "value of the directness of impressions and the holiness of experience" (203). Implicit in James's artistic goal of "felt life," in which the observable is transformed and made universal, is the possibility of elevated experience that transcends the common and vulgar. He states his commitment to the process nowhere more eloquently than in his response to the vicious portrait of James in Well's novel Boon. James writes: "It is att that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process" (James and Wells 267).

38 IV. The Critical Context for James's Perceptual Modes

At the beginning of the twentieth century, James was at a fortuitous position to become a pivotal figure in the transition to modem literature. His deep respect for form and structure and his never­ ending search for the petfected vision sprang from ancient traditions, while his exploration of imagination, subject-object relationships, psychological motivation, and internal drama anticipates a great many of the issues central in modem art. James is more than a transitional figure, however. Though he was fully aware of tradition and acutely conscious of his artistic legacy, his work stands apart on its own feet, which are, of course, his complex, highly-developed aesthetic theories. James's ideas about revision, modes of perception, and artistic experience exemplify the broad, sometimes paradoxical range of his aesthetic sensibilities. His distinction between the chaos of life and the order of art reflects the ancient ideal of unity while also suggesting some aspects of modem existential thought. James's artistic goal of "felt life" carries with it the possibilities of elevated experie.nce while also exploring the necessity of art to reach down to darker human impulses. Finally, James's synthesis of pictorial and imaginative perception suggests that while the artist is more than a mirror of society his true value is the power of his imagination. James's distinction between life as "inclusion and confusion" and art as "discrimination and selection" suggests a kind of Platonic unity. The remark indicates James's idealism and an impulse to the 39 Platonic ideal of The One. ll1is must be qualified, however. There is in both James's critical and creative work a motivation to arrive at a final truth. But this truth is never noble nor located among Plato's true forms. Truth for James is more humanistic. His unity has more in common with Aristotle in that it is the result of a process. For Aristotle, artistic imitation should inspire "fear and pity," through a process of cause and effect. The probable leads to the wonderful. Art is an imitation of reality but also of life itself because it is a process. For James, the process is that of observation and selection, which, he says, will take care of itself because its constant motive is experience. For Aristotle, the goal is "tragic wonder." For James it is "felt life." The chaos of life and the order of art, however, also is a distinction of modern concern. Though his stories often are "about" manners or social relationships, James's aesthetic sensibilities move him away from moralism in the sense of ideal conduct. According to James, there is a "prefect dependence of the 'moral' sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it" (Art of the Novel 44). The equation of morality with the integrity of the work itself would become a central issue in the New Criticism, which insists on the wholeness of the work of art. As Cleanth Brooks wrote in The Well Wrought Urn, "Unless one asserts the primacy of the pattern, a poem becomes merely a bouquet of intrinsically beautiful items" (Brooks 1033). James's "felt life" also anticipates some of the fundamentals of phenomenology and existentialism. James's search for the essence of reality as opposed to mere surface appearance and his insistence that that essence be located in life itself finds full expression in Heidegger's Being and Time, and his term "dasein," which views being as inseparable from the world (Solomon 94 ). To the extent 40 that James's idea of experience relies on the subjectivity of imagination and the synthesis of observation and imagination, his view of reality is reflected in Sartre's existentialism. In rejecting the dualism of "experience" and "essence" in Being and Nothingness Sartre says: "The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence" (4 ). This is not to suggest that James is either a phenomenologist or existentialist, however. He does not reject objectivity. In fact, his aesthetics start with observation, and the idea of human nature is implicit in his goal of "felt life." Sartre, by contrast, says in Existentialism is a Humanism that the first principle of existentialism is that "man is nothing else but that which he makes himself' (Solomon 198). James's idea that art must transform literal perception into experience that transcends the commonplace follows the tradition of the sublimity of art implicit in Aristotle's idea of the wonderful rising from the probable and in Longinus's On the Sublime, in which art transcends rhetoric and elevates it to the sublime. James's ideas about perception and revision could have come directly from I · I, Pope's An Essay on Criticism: "True wit is nature to advantage dressed. What oft' was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" (Pope 281). Despite their lofty aspirations, James's aesthetics do not proscribe lower human drives as the basis of art. This is conceded somewhat grudgingly in his preface to The Ambassadors: "I think, verily, there are degrees of merit in subjects" (Art of the Novel 309). James objected only when writers failed to treat such subjects seriously. Ultimately, his gauge of the moral quality of fiction was its degree of felt life. This transformation of observation into art finds parallels in Freud's "Creative Writers and Daydreaming." Fantasies and dreams, according to Freud, are the mental fulfillment of some 41 suppressed wish aroused by a current impression (Freud 751). The creative writer is the "dreamer in broad daylight." Experiences awaken in him memories of earlier experiences, provoking a wish that is fulfilled in the work of art (Freud 752). James expresses something similar when he speaks of guessing the unseen from the seen. Long before Freud, James was dramatizing this "madness of art." Despite his obvious distaste for the vulgar and his lofty expectations of fiction, James's idea of the role of the artist never extends to that of shaping society. This is seen in his idea of the synthesis of pictorial and imaginative perception in that the artist's task begins with a detached observation and ends with a renewed vision of reality. The artist is never a Platonic mirror, nor is he an agent of the Republic, for good or evil. His primary task is to represent life fully and faithfully. The issue is the fundamental difference between James and the more pragmatic Wells, who is willing to sacrifice art for a greater good. James thinks of art as its own end. The artist's true powers are of observation and imagination. And an interdependence of the two is essential in James's aesthetic theories, despite the idealism that pervades his work. This insistence on process leads James to reject the realism of Dickens, Trollope, and later Wells, but it also places him at odds with the romantic tradition. There is no Wordsworthian spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings in James, nor does "feeling shape the action or situation" (Wordsworth 435). Quite the contrary. For James, the cognitive power of the artist is cmcial. "The quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer," James writes in the "Art of Fiction." "In proportion as that intelligence is fine will the novel, the picture, the statue partake of the substance of beauty and tmth" (Partial Portraits 406). James's 42 synthesis of observation, imagination, and cognition, then, leans fairly far toward the modem art of Stevens. Experience for both includes the imagination. Both consider the task of the artist an extremely serious one, requiring a fine appreciation of the infinite possibilities of art to transform perception. Both enlarge the power of the artist by reducing his moral, social, and political roles thereby freeing him to explore his imagination. And ultimately, both search for order. Stevens's search--in the metaphor, in the "sound of words," for "sound free of motion"--is never fulfilled, but it is never limited. For James, too, art is an unending re-vision. However, the goal is always in sight: "It is art that makes life."

43 V. Conclusion

For James, artistic vision is essentially revision. It is a process of transfmmation: of literal experience to "felt life," of pictorial presentation to dramatic representation, of the past to the present. This process is a central element of James's fiction. The "meaning" of stories such as "lbe Real Thing" and "The Middle Years" and novels such as The Ambassadors depends on a growth of vision. Their protagonists must be able to overcome their perceptual shortcomings and the limits of their imagination. They must be reflective, both intellectually and mimetically. James's central characters must carefully consider fine moral questions. 'These characteristics of James's vision, however, are precisely what leads to the "difficulty" of his fiction. What he asks of his characters he also demands of his readers. James does not sacrifice everything else to technique and structure. What he does give up is the objective, pictorial realism of his contemporaries. By consistently choosing to dramatize rather than to describe, James seeks to show the human heart and mind in motion rather than to record the images passing before the human eye. Thus, James the critic had little patience for those writers who preferred the pictorial. The harshness of his judgments reflects his dedication to the standards he set for his own fiction. In demanding a finer kind of artistic perception, James pointed the way for a younger generation of writers including Conrad and Joyce. He also led critics to develop more objective standards for judging art. 44 James's vision was broad enough to encompass classic critical ideals and artistic goals that would only fully be realized and appreciated years after he struggled with them. For an artist whose work was never finished, for whom nothing was the last word, whose life was dedicated to a constant renewal of vision, this synthesis of past and future is a fitting legacy.

45 Notes

1 The revisions discussed here are from the 1909 Scribner's New York Edition Novels and Tales as compared to the original text first published in 1892 and reprinted in Tales of Henry James edited by Christof Wegelin.

2 This admittedly traditional perspective perhaps would be contradicted by other approaches. Reader-response critic Stanley Fish argues that the "meaning" of a text lies not in the perceptions of the author but in those of the reader (Fish 22-66). For Murray Krieger, the idea of vision involves a work's totality. "I must see the work not as a projection of a preexisting vision, formed in the self behind it, but as a dialogistic entity that comes into being out of the dramatic conflict of forces and of language which constitutes its finished form. I prefer to use 'vision' for what comes out rather than for what goes in" (Krieger 1240).

3 The once amiable and polite relationship between James and Wells gradually deteriorated and ultimately ended on bad tem1s shortly before James's death. The break was precipitated by essays by both novelists in which they publicly criticized the other. James used Wells as an example of unrefined and unrestrained art in "The Younger Generation." In his autobiography, Wells answered James's lifelong criticism and admitted "I never got 'all life within the scope of the novel.' (What a phrase! Who could?)" (James and Wells 223). Finally, in his novel Boon, Wells is vicious in his criticism. "The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity and an entirely superficial curiosity," Wells wrote. "The L~ i ng his novel is about is always there. It is like a church lit but withuut a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed,

46 intensely there, is a kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string" (James and Wells 248).

4 Nettels notes that while Conrad did not respond to James's remarks as bitterly as Wells, he was stung by the criticism of the man he addressed as cher maitre. In a letter written after James's death, Conrad remembered that "this was the only time a criticism affected me painfully" (Nettles 18). For his part, Conrad retained the admiration of James's work he expressed in a 1905 essay, "Henry James: An Appreciation." "TI1e critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry James's work," he writes. "His books stand on my shelves in a place whose accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion" (Conrad 11).

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51