Gazette of the Grolier Club

Home , Clifton Fadiman, Edmund Gosse, Theatricals

Volume 11, No. 7 February, 1947 GAZETTE OF THE GROLIER CLUB

CONTENTS

Address on Henry James by W. H. Auden. Address on James by Clifton Fadiman.—The Henry James Exhibition.

The first Club exhibition of the autumn of 1946 was in honor of Henry James. It included first editions, manuscripts and typescripts of his novels and other books, and also a number of portraits of the novelist and a collection of interesting letters. The exhibition was opened on the evening of October 34, 1946, with an address by the poet, Mr. W. H. Auden, who, born a British subject, is now a citizen of the United States. At the regular monthly meeting of the Club on November 21, Mr. Clifton Fadiman, 208 who has recently edited a volume of James’s short stories, made an address on James. Both meetings were attended by large and enthusiastic audiences. A check-list of the items in the exhibition follows the addresses.

ADDRESS ON HENRY JAMES W. H. Auden

Chairman Wheeler: Fellow members of The Gro- lier Club and guests; The matter of the nationality of writers is not, in my opinion, of great interest. Cer- tainly the issue has been exaggerated in regard to Henry James. Van Wyck Brooks maintains that Henry James would have been a greater man if he had remained in America, but it seems to me that he was a better writer than any of those who stayed home during that same period. Howells did stay in America, and Henry James wrote rings around him. It is touching to consider how James’s reputation entered into the vicissitudes of nations, and was affected by war and peace. As you know, he suffered the anguish of the damned during America’s long isolation and procrastination before entering the First World War. Apparently, as a personal gesture of solidarity with England, he became a British subject. 209 R. B. Cunninghame Graham told me a story, when I was a boy in England, about how Edmund Gosse was sent to confer the Order of Merit upon Henry James, upon his death-bed. According to this story, after the presentation had been made and the medal had been laid upon him, James turned to his nurse and whispered, “Put out the candle to hide my blushes.” Whether or not James’s romantic devotion to the British during their ordeal inclined them kindly toward him, he appears today a greater influence upon British writers than upon our own. Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Wolf, and E. M. Forster, among others, have all acknowledged the greatness of his example in the art of fiction; and this is certainly a more distinguished group than any of America’s Jamesians I can think of. Today, there is a James revival, almost a James boom. I think we may admit it was the English who proclaimed, promoted, and expounded him to us. Certainly, the interest of their country in reading him is great; and the recent preface to James’s American Scene by Mr. W. H. Auden is one of the finest essays ever written on the work of this man. Although The American Scene is one of James’s best books, it was never widely read. It is an account of his return after years of absence, and a re-exami- nation of his native land in his old age. 210

Wystan Auden, who has become an American citizen, writes of America with the freshest possible eye. It is the meeting of these two fine eyes gazing, as it were, across the Atlantic and meeting eye to eye, which gives this essay savor. I cannot promise you that he will speak of this book tonight, but I can recom- mend your reading his preface as a real treat. At dinner tonight, Mr. Auden told me a story which he said he was not going to include in his own re- marks, which I am going to tell you now, about James’s visit to America in 1906, when Miss Thomas of Bryn Mawr wrote and asked him to lecture there. Jamesreplied with a very, very long letter explaining that he couldn’t do it, that he only had prepared a lecture on Balzac. Finally, at the end of the letter, he said, “To be lucid, the honorarium offered is in- sufficient.” I am going to tell you another story about James, which I think is extremely touching, which was told one night here at The Grolier Club at a meeting of the Bowsers, of a letter which Edith Wharton sent to her publishers, who were also James’s publishers here, explaining that Mr. James was distressed because his books had been selling very badly in the United States, and authorizing the publishers to pay royalties received upon her. Miss Wharton’s books, to Mr. James, as if they were the royalties on his books. Mr. Auden is, if not the most famous, certainly the 211 second most famous poet writing in English today, and it is a great privilege to have him talk to us about the man whose work is the subject of the exhibition which is being opened here tonight. W. H. Auden: Gentlemen: What the economic and psychological climates of earlier ages were, whether they were more favorable to the artist than ours, we can only surmise, but it is certainly difficult for us to believe that any were less, for no artist today can observe either his colleagues or consult his own heart without admitting how multiple and how grave are the contemporary threats to his artistic integrity and his personal honor alike. In all such situations of trial and danger, pious exhortations are of little help. The aid and comfort we seek is to be found, if at all, in personal example; it is the knowledge that others before us have successfully endured similar tribulations and triumphed over similar temptations, which alone can convince us that it is possible for us, too, to endure and to triumph over our own. Among that luminous cloud of witnesses—how bless- edly great it is—who have, throughout their lives, kept unfaltering faith with their calling, few shine with more lucid felicity than he whose long life of sustained production we are gathered here this evening to honor. Much has been written, and written well, concern- 212

ing the aesthetic value of his work—many have placed his status in the literary hierarchy too low; a few, perhaps, have placed it too high—but to such criticism, even were I capable of making a significant contribution, I have no wish at this time to add. Rather, I shall confine myself to that aspect of Henry James over which there can be no controversy whatsoever, namely, the consistent integrity displayed both in the work and in the man. It must be highly embarrassing—at least I hope it is—for living American novelists to be told, as they have recently been by distinguished foreigners, that they have produced the only significant literature between the two great wars. It is worth while asking, I think, why, just at this time, Europe should have de- veloped such an intense interest in them. I wonder if most of you, who have grown up in this country, realize just how odd to a new arrival like myself, American literature appears. Coming from Europe, my first, my strongest, my most abiding impression is that no body of literature, written at any time or in any place, is so uniformly depressing. It is a source of continual astonishment to me, that the nation which has the world-wide reputation of being the most optimistic, the most gregar- ious, and the freest on earth, should see itself through the eyes of its most sensitive members as a society of helpless victims, shady characters and displaced per- 213 sons, and I cannot escape the conclusion that the sudden popularity of American literature in Europe is a function of the latter’s disintegration. “I am helpless, I am shady, I am displaced," she says, “and here is a literature which describes my condition in a way that my own authors have not.” The opening words of the greatest American novel, Call me Ishmael, would serve as a motto for the heroes of so many. The criminal characters in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe have continued to pop- ulate the stories of his successors. But it is not of homelessness or of crime that I wish to speak—in these respects, I believe American literature to have given a uniquely accurate picture—- but of the denial of free will and moral responsibility, because this is a recent feature; it is not conspicuous in the great classical American writers, but has become so in the work of the last thirty years. It is only lately that in novel after novel one encounters heroes without honor or history; heroes who succumb so monotonously to temptation that they cannot truly be said to be tempted at all; heroes who, even if they are successful in a worldly sense, remain nevertheless but the passive recipients of good fortune; heroes whose sole moral virtue is a stoic endurance of pain and disaster. That a novelist should depict human life in this way is, in the strictest sense, comic, for since writing 214 a book, like playing baseball, is a totally unnecessary act, it could not be undertaken by a man who was lacking in free will. So that a novelist who describes man as the absolute victim of circumstance and in- capable of choice, contradicts his assertion by the mere fact that he has written a novel. Since in our time this contradiction is so common and passes so unnoticed, one is forced to conclude—and the increasing multitude of young persons who aspire to become artists of one sort or another supports one’s guess—that, in the general opinion of our age, it is possible for men to make aesthetic choices—only the most fanatical surrealist would deny this—but not possible for them to make any other kind of choice. Consequently, the artist, qua artist, is the only free being. For the sake of publishers’ readers, if for no other, I believe this view should be combatted, and for such a purpose the fiction of Henry James provides some of our heaviest artillery. One of the commonest complaints about Henry Jamesis that his characters are without body, bloodless and genteel, all sensitivity and no passion; that they neither talk nor behave like the Joneses next door. While his admirers will dispute this, most of us will admit, I think, that, in comparison with the characters, say, of Stendhal, Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky, those of Henry James are lacking in pungency and 215 richness; just as, while all of us in this room can be en- tranced by the exquisite formal beauty of James’s construction, we need not forget that the price which had to be paid for this particular enchantment is high and that it wouldbe a pity if all novelists were expected to pay it. But that is not the issue here. The division which concerns us is not between the refined and the earthy, the sensitive and the passionate, the drawing room and the bar, stylized diction and the language really used by men, but between the responsible agent and the irresponsible victim, and here there can be no doubt that the great masters and Henry James are on one side, and too many contemporary writers, however “vital,” “daring,” or “honest,” in the reviewer’s sense of these words, on the other. Without exception, so far as I know, the characters in Henry James are concerned with moral choices; they may choose evil, but we are left in no doubt about the importance of their having chosen it; and it is no accident that the story of his which deals with a character who fails to choose should be the most terrifying of all his stories. The Beast in the Jungle, the ultimate annihilating horror, is no ex- ternal creature of nature or fate, no perturbation of nations or restraint of princes, but the shrinking of the subject’s sovereign will from decisive choice. We, his successors, should do well to heed this 216

warning. Fascinating copy about this or that social milieu, this or that profession, events of theatrical farce or breathtaking horror, are admirable as far as they go, and every reader will welcome them, but they can never be more than what James himself has called: “the circumstances of the interest.” The interest itself is the freedom of the individual will, not to deny the field of fated facts within which it oper- ates, but to create, with them and in spite of them, a human character. Deny this freedom altogether, openly, or indirectly by omission, and your interest vanishes. No richness of description orskill in dialogue can make up for the loss. Even passion willnot help you, for passion is only the necessary source of desires. Passion cannot conflict with itself. It is at the level of desire that conflict occurs, choices are made, and interests created. Re- main below that level and, however great your talent, your book will remain in the class to which belongs that lady novelist invented by Beachcomber, who was known as the Anatole France of Hertfordshire; it will not be about human beings, but will resemble her masterpiece: No Second Churning. A Tactfully Written Plea for old Horses. When I look at the two great classes of contemporary writing, popular and highbrow, it seems to me that each class is in possession of a half-truth. The popularity of the Westerns, the soap operas, and so 217 forth, all imply a belief that every man is either good or bad, a sheriff or an outlaw, and you can tell which he is by his actions. Highbrow literature implies a belief that all men are both good and bad, and you cannot distinguish very much between one man and another. The former, of course, are wrong in believing that once a hero, always a hero, once a villain, always a villain; but are right in believing that actions are either good or bad, and cannot be both at the same time. Vice versa, the highbrow is right of course, in believing that all men are capable of both good and evil, but wrong in supposing that you cannot tell by any action whether a man is good or bad. What both sides lack is a real conception of freedom; the popular writers make goodness and badness an inevitable fact of fortune: the highbrow writers make the mixture of goodness and badness inseparable by action. It is typical of our time that, because many of their choices are renunciations, we should think James’s characters lacking in vitality, and even suggest that such characters are lacking in will power. Only an age which was essentially deficient in both could so con- fuse passion and will. It would surely be diverting, if the consequences of the attitude which we see all around us were not so formidable, that in an age when every little Nora has learned the trick of slam- 218 ming doors, and every little Tristan has learned, with or without the aid of a good stiff potion, to cuckold his best friend, that a writer who enters a plea for closing doors gently or sleeping alone should be con- sidered stuffy and even shocking. It has become clear to many highbrows that what the art of our time needs is just such a restraining hand as is exemplified in James’s work; that you can have too much of books which sprawl like suburbs, for the final result is the accidental product of laissez- faire competition among interests, and that a well constructed book with a guiding principle of construction which eliminates as much as it includes, can be a welcome relief. But few of these I fear are willing to extend theirrecognition from the aesthetic sphere to the moral. Not to do so is to misunderstand James, for it is one measure of his greatness that he neither awards to nor demands from his characters as moral beings less freedom or less conscience than he awards to or demands from himself as an artist. This brings me to our second point, James as an example of personal integrity. Those who attempt to become creative artists and fail may be divided into three classes: Firstly, those who have no talent; secondly, those who are seduced by their natural longing for what Freud so mistak- enly believed to be the lure of all artistic creation, honor, power, and the love of women, the goods of 219 this world; and thirdly, and most tragically, those who are seduced by the devil’s subtlest temptation, the desire to do good by their art. The first class, the size of which today constitutes a serious problem, must not detain us here for it is not relevant to ourselves, and I will content myself with repeating what I have already said. The fact that relatively few young people imagine they want to become doctors or engineers without having the necessary talents, and that when one meets the young man or woman in whom one can detect no particular talent for any definite occupation, the chances are that he or she will announce an intention to write, is an indication, I think, that it is not in writing that they are really interested, but in freedom, for artistic creation is the only realm in which they believe freedom of choice to exist. About members of the second class, those seduced by this world, James has written several of his finest stories, the general moral of which is that art is a vocation for which since its values are not those of this world, a price must be paid, and the cost of keeping one’s artistic integrity is as high as the rewards which the world will offer to make one lose it. So far as I know, no other writer on this subject has faced as unflinchingly as James a very obvious but extremely unpleasant fact, that the duties towards marriage and the duties towards the artistic vocation 220 may and probably will conflict; worse still, that any romantic relation may constitute such a threat for many a man; and the more unselfish and honorable his character, the more likely he is to be one who, while he would not dream of prostituting his art for his own sake, will feel it is his duty to do so ( and who can say that he is wrong?) for the sake of those whom he loves; and that, therefore, it may well be the duty of more artists than is commonly imagined, as James felt it was his, to become and to remain—dread pros- pect-celibate. In certain respects, it is perhaps harder for an American writer than for a European to resist the temptations to cheapen his product, to make it more salable, because he suffers from a lack of popular success in a way that the latter does not. Growing up in a society where the business ethos is dominant, it is difficult for him not to believe that art is, or, if it is not, should be, a commodity like a motor car whose sales and profits are an accurate indication of value, whereas a European brought up in a culture which inherited the medieval conception of the clerk and the social value of the contemplative life is spared this doubt and is indeed more likely to be guilty of unjustified arrogance towards those in “trade.” The European, for example, has always been completely bewildered by the way in which James, being the kind of writer he was, worried so about his lack 221 of popular appeal. Since coming to this country, I have realized how American in this respect he was, for I have never encountered a writer here, however highbrow, who was not seriously concerned with reviews and sales, while, on the other hand, I have never met a serious European writer who, outside the need to pay his creditors, took the slightest interest in the opinion of any but a few friends whose criti- cal minds he admired and trusted. There are cases in this country where the concern for public opinion does not appear on the surface, but its presence reveals itself in messianic claims, and the demand for a select uncritically adoring circle. To all American writers, then, the knowledge that James suffered as they do, without succumbing either to the crowd or to the clique, should make him a tower of strength in their dark discouraged hours. Living as he fortunately did in the serene and golden light of late Victorian and Edwardian hours—- how immeasurably distant they seem now—when the grand edifice of Occidental culture stood unshaken still in all its glory—rats in the cellar there might be, defects in the plumbing, yes—and James was not un- aware of them—still no artist, Tolstoy excepted, felt serious qualms about his right to follow his calling. He might overestimate its importance—it is possible, I think, that James himself did—but to mind one’s, own business, to employ the particular talent with 222 which God entrusted one, seemed to all the natural right and duty of man. The temptations, therefore, to which the third class I have mentioned succumb, had not yet arisen. They belong to our age of disintegration, when the mansion of the West is a heap of smoking rubble, where the starving scratch miserably for food, and the bright day has turned to a thick darkness out of which come multitudinous wails of horror and de- spair. It is under such conditions that the helpless authorities turn as a last resort to the artist, and promise him all, dinners with themselves, an office with a dicta- phone, extra ration cards, free tickets to the opera, an unlimited expense account, if he will forsake the artistic life and become an official magician, who uses his talents to arouse in the inert masses the passions which the authorities consider socially desirable and necessary. Should the artist yield? Let each individual judge for himself, but let him at least be honest and admit that magic, black or white, is not art, for magic is a means of ruling children and all who cannot rule themselves, one kind of fraud and force, while art, like all kinds of truth, is one of the pleasures of free men. If it is my personal conviction that an artist should under no circumstances and in the face of no bribe or threat, have any truck with magic, whether 223 in its politer forms like diplomatic cultural missions, or in its more virulent varieties, I do not mean to suggest that art is of sacred importance. On the con- trary, I know that along with most human activities, it is, in the profoundest sense, frivolous. For one thing, and one thing only, is serious: loving one’s neighbor as one’s self. I merely mean that the artist’s motives for yielding are so mixed and the rewards in cash and prestige so great that his moral corruption will inevitably follow. There can hardly be a person of conscience today, artist or not, who, hearing the cry of the wretched for help, is not disquieted by the thought that perhaps he should drop whatever he is doing and devote the rest of his life in some humble capacity to the relief of suffering. Indeed, if he refuse, I do not want to know what justifiable answer we give other than selfishness. But magic is another matter. Luckily, we artists in America are still in the posi- tion where our chief temptations are the old ones, Hollywood, Broadway, the book clubs, and so on; to these, if we succumb, we at least know it is for the sake of cash and not to satisfy an uneasy conscience. In this, as I say, I think we are fortunate for it is morally less confusing for the poor Muse to be goosed by a traveling salesman than by a bishop. Assuming that the artist, the writer today, decides rightly or wrongly, to continue pursuing his vocation, what are his obligations? To this question, Henry 224 James offers, I believe, the correct answers. He must become international and he must stand alone. Such volumes of tedious rubbish have been written on the subject of expatriation that one is loathe to add to them. But the subject is too important for any artist to remain silent or neutral. In pre-industrial times a family could go on living for generation after generation in the same house and when the father grew old, his son succeeded him. Then circumstances changed and it became necessary for the sons, if they were to mature successfully, to leave the family hearth. We have now, I believe, readied a further stage of development in which it may well be as necessary at least for intellectuals to leave their country, as it is for children to leave their homes, not to get away from them, but to recreate them. Those who become expatriates out of hatred for their homeland are as bound to the past as those who hate their parents. No, one must love one’s country as one’s parents, and for that very reason say farewell and carry it with one in one’s heart where, God willing, it may bear new and lively fruit. As everybody knows, we live today in one world, but not everyone realizes that to live in one world is to live in a lonely world. The master’s study with its mahogany desk, and the statues of those three great Europeans, “Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper,” the brilliant salon, the defiantrevolutionary group in the 225 cheap ca£6, the costly romantic tie, all the old charms and cozinesses have vanished forever, and every attempt at their reconstruction is a fake and doomed to failure. Like the Wandering Jew, each must go his way alone, every step of it, learning for himself by painful trial and shaming error, and never resting long on any triumph, but soon proceeding to risk total defeat in some fresh and more difficult task. Of teachers he will find few and even of them he should be wary. But of examples of those who in their day have dared, like the Prince Tamino, the trials by fire and water and survived them to enter the Temple of Wisdom, he will, thank God, find a number, and among these great forerunners there are few, if he write in English, of whom he will think more often and more gratefully than of our noble, our prodigious, our—yes, let us risk an annihilating snub to our pre- sumption from his most formidable shade—our dear H. J.

ADDRESS ON HENRY JAMES Clifton Fadiman

Chairman Wheeler: Fellow members of The Gro- lier Club and guests: It is perhaps presumptuous to think it necessary to introduce to any public whatsoever the indispensable chairman of America’s favorite radio program—lnformation Please. But I would 226 like to remind you that the extraordinaryknowledge, grace, and wit which Mr. Fadiman reveals to us every Wednesday evening really constituted only half his talent. His fame as a literary critic is just as great, for as you know, he was for many years the literary editor of The New Yorker. I can think of no other person who has kept his spirits up so brilliantly and maintained such high standards in the face of so difficult a weekly assign- ment. He was always wonderfully unflagging, read- able, and unmistakable, and no one can read or re-read him without being sensible of his warmth of heart and subtlety of mind. I myself deeply regretted his resignation from his important cultural post on The New Yorker, but I am extremely happy that he has continued his valuable contribution to our literature in other ways. One ofhis most important recent activities has been the editorship of the short stories of Henry James. So when we planned this exhibition of the manuscripts and memorabilia and first editions of Henry James, it at once became our fond hope to have Mr. Fadiman talk to us about some of the impressions that came to him upon re-reading and re-considering this great American author. Mr. Fadiman most graciously accepted our invitation, and it is a very great pleasure to introduce him to you now. 227 Clifton Fadiman: Gentlemen, I am almost the only living American bookman who is not an au- thority on Henry James, although I am one of the dozen or so who has recently fattened on the ghost of Mr. James by publishing anthologies of his work. As you know—and your exhibition is a demonstration of this fact—that ghost is very much alive in our time. There must be a reason why so many people are reading him, and why in this Club you are holding 3n exhibition of first editions, memorabilia, manuscripts and the other association items that I see in the cases to my right and left. Evidently, there is something permanent in James, or, if not something permanent, at least something recurrent. He seems as near to us, at any rate, as he did to the people of his own generation. He lived to be a fairly old man, as you know, covering a period from 1843 to 1916; and 1916 is quite a long time ago. Why is he now being redis- covered? Is it a fad? Or is there something more profound in James that makes it necessary for people from time to time to rediscover him after long inter- vals of neglect? I would like this evening, very briefly and infor- mally—l have no prepared address—to try to find out with you why it is that so many people (and I should say, on the whole, the most perceptive part of the 228

American reading population) are finding more in James than they are apt to find in their own contemporaries. In order to discover what it is that people are re- finding in James, I shall have to digress for a few minutes and talk very generally about our own period. In anything that I may say this evening about the times in which we live, I beg you to believe that I am not making a moral or political judgment. I am quite certain that, on the whole, human beings get what they want. (That does not mean that they necessarily want the right things.) I believe that history is not purposeless; that history is a response to the deep desires of human beings. Sometimes history may seem ugly because human beings at that time want ugly things. At other times history may seem beautiful, dynamic, progressive, because at that time people want things which are beautiful, dynamic, or progressive. In our time, as I see it, we, too, want certain things. We want a certain kind of society and, blindly, we are achieving it. I am going to try to outline for you the kind of society that I think we want and that I think we are going to get, and then I am going to con- trast it with the kind of society you find depicted in Henry James, and with thekind of society that existed ideally in his mind. 229

When I say that we—you and I—want a particular kind of life, a particular kind of country, a particular kind of society, I do not mean that too per cent of our minds wants them. We are all divided human beings. While one part of us may want society A, another part of us, perhaps nostalgically, yearns back towards society B, or, farsightedly, looks ahead to society C. Very often we have to reconcile in ourselves these divisions of impulse and passion. I am going to try, however, to indicate in general what most of us seem to want to happen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and then try to see what James thought of the kind of society that we want, and what kind of society he himself enjoyed and understood. I should say, in general, that what we have been going through since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and more particularly since the beginning of our century, is a general levelling-out process of thought and emotion. As you travel through a representative country like our own, you find that the differences among people are becoming less and less; that we tend to cluster around a few ideas that most of us agree to; that character is becoming less sharply defined; that the same Pullman car stories are told in the same Pullman cars all along the breadth and length of the country: that habits on the whole are becoming standardized; 230 that ideas are becoming fewer and fewer and are held by more and more of the population, because those ideas are exploited very quickly and cleverly by the mass media of communication. One of the ways in which this levelling-out process shows itself is—and I speak now without any bias whatsoever; I take no point of view with respect to this—in the lessening of respect for human life. Respect for human life is a religious emotion; indeed, it seems to me the basis of the religious emotion. The two gigantic wars of the last generation; the obvious fact that we are going to have one or more even more gigantic wars within the near future; the fact that all of us have been subjected during the last twenty or thirty years to hearing about the murder of large sections of the population; all this has made us, whether we like it or not, more apathetic with respect to the value of the individual life than our great-great-grandfathers were. Whether this is a good thing or bad, I don’t say. All I know is that respect for the individual is harder to create now because it is so much easier to kill people than to honor them. The fact of destruction is far more present and alive, as it were, than the tact of preservation. With the lack of respect for life, there has come a lack of feeling for death. Our ancestors of perhaps no more than 150 years ago had a sense of death which we, who see destruction all around us, are beginning to lose. 231

With this is connected a kind of obsolescence of the individual. This indicates itself in a number of ways. It indicates itself in such large patterns, for example, as unions. The important thing about a labor union is only in part whether it wins or loses. The important thing about the labor union is that it is taking over part of the life of the individual. More and more workers live their lives in terms of their union activities, and by so much their individuality obsolesces. This is equally true of the National Association of Manufacturers or any other large group which ab- stracts a part of the individual’s life. So we are beginning, without knowing that this is happening, to accept the fractional life, as we might call it, as the proper life of man. If you go back a few hundred years, you encounter people like Leonardo da Vinci and, later on, Goethe, people to whom a human life is an almost infinitely expandable thing. No limits, they think, in theory, can be set to what a human being may experience except the limits provided by death. If you read Goethe’s life—and I say this without intending any criticism of anybody here—you will find that he lived a life perhaps 200 or 300 times as intense and spacious as the life, I imagine, that is being led by anybody in this room. Again, I am not saying that is either a bad ora good thing. I say this: That the industrial revolution, which has made The Career or The Job the Be All 232

and the End All of man, has, without our knowing that this is happening, made us accept work as the proper and true meaning of the life of man. I walk into a train, I sit down next to a man, I say, sooner or later, “What is your line? What do you do?” I never think of saying, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” He tells me that he sells plastic buttons. I ask him about the plastic button business, and he tells me. He says, "What do you do?” I say, “I am a radio entertainer.” He says, “Tell me something about the radio business.” I tell him something about the radio business. Neither he nor I thinks of asking the other, “What sort of human being are you?” We assume without question that the plastic button business or the radio entertainment business comprises virtually the whole of our lives. From the point of view of Leonardo da Vinci or Goethe, and I would say of their contemporaries in general, the button-man and myself are leading fractional lives. We have accepted fractionality as if it were normal existence. Again, I am not affirming that this is good or bad. I think merely that it is what we want. As we become more and more fractional in our experience, as this levelling-out process continues, as the individual begins to lose the angularity of his 233 profile, as he begins to be more and more like his neighbor, we begin to work out in our minds, and will eventually work out in reality, the kind of state into which that fractional individual will most easily fit. That kind of state, I think, the ideal social state toward which we are moving, might be called the state in which mechanical order is the thing, in which, to put it very simply, the main job will be to see that production is incessant and large, that con- sumption is incessant and large, and that these two processes balance each other in such a way that there will be no disharmony between producers and con- sumers, on the one hand, and we hope, eventually, no great disharmony between one social or economic class and another. In other words, we are vaguely beginning to formulate an idea of the planet as a well- functioning machine in which properly coordinated activity is the main thing, in which the inchoate soul of the individual becomes something that you don’t worry very much about. One necessary consequence of this idea of mechanical order as determining the ideal social state is the death of what used to be called culture. Traditional culture, the culture that was born roughly 3000 years ago, has, it seems to me, begun to see the end if its life, because it does not fit very well into the idea of a state as a system of mechanical order. Hence, we transmute our traditional culture into 234 mechanical forms. The simplest example is literature. Literature is becoming a kind of mechanically produced journalism. Our mass media of journalistic communication, it seems to me, are our true, crucial literary cultures. The good books that are occasionally produced in our society seem to me to be subordinate, unimportant, on the whole, as compared with our picture magazines, our newspapers, and the kind of thing you hear on the radio. That is the trans- mutation of traditional literary culture into a new mechanical form. If it weren’t what we want, we would not have it. This has been a very rough and extremelyrambling attempt to isolate some of the main characteristics of our time. I know that many of you do not agree that this is happening, and you perhaps are very angry with me for thinking as I do. That is because in each of you, and in me, there is something which revolts against this change. That part of us which is revolting against this inevitable transformation into the orderly mechanical state is the less important part. It will be overcome. Yet it does revolt. Hence all of us are split, and some of us are unhappy. What has all this to do with Henry James? This: that James is one expression of everything which is opposed to our time, as I have described it. That part of us which is in revolt against the main tendencies of 235 our time goes back to James in order to find some support for that revolt. The support must be found in art because it cannot be found in reality. James, as it seems to me, stands for certain notions, most of which have their opposites in our time. In the first place, Henry James is essentially interested in the individual. He is as much interested as any human being can be in the individual, by which I mean that when he creates a character—- any one of the five or six hundred characters that you will find in his books—he creates him with a com- pleteness, with an exhaustiveness, with a patience, with an almost agonizing stubbornness that we do not find in most current fiction. Take a novel like What Maisie Knew, which, you may remember, is the story of a couple of unhappy marriages and misalliances as seen through the eyes of a small girl. By the time you have finished What Maisie Knew, you know this little girl really better, in my opinion, than you are apt to know your own son or daughter. That is because James is more percipient than we are. His interest in the individual is an exhaustive interest. He is not satisfied until he has put down on paper everything that he could possibly imagine this individual to be. He understands the individual cen- trally. He understands the individual peripherally. 236

He understands the individual in terms of that individual’s relationships with the other people in the novel or short story, or whatever it may be. But our time, as I have said, is becoming less and less interested in the individual, and more and more interested in what man can do as part of a mass, whether the mass be a labor union, a manufacturers association, a social or economic class, whether the mass be a state or whether the mass be a continental economy, which will probably be the next step. James uses several favorite words. One of them is the very simple word “awareness.” James, I suppose, during his long life was aware of more things than perhaps all of us put together have been aware of all our lives. That is partly because he was an artist, and it is an artist’s job to be aware, but it is also because he was a particular kind of artist. He was aware of every impingement upon the sen- sibility of every single human being that he imagined or invented in any of his novels. That is very different from the kind of psychological habit in our own time. In our schools today teachers use a word about as frequently as James used the word "awareness.” It is a word which is, to my mind, almost the opposite of “awareness,” and that word is “adjustment.” You know that you are always very happy when you are toldby the master that your boy is well-adjusted; isn’t that true? If you are told 237 that your boy is ill-adjusted, you begin to worry, and you say, “Why don’t you adjust yourself? What’s wrong? Why don’t you go out for football the way other people do? Why don’t you adjust yourself to the prejudices of your teacher? Why don’t you be like everybody else?’’ The boy goes back and tries to be like everybody else, and usually succeeds. If you are continually adjusting to something outside yourself, by which I mean trying to become a part of it so that you will not seem different from it, you are negating the possibility of being aware, because awareness is a kind of antagonism to your environ- ment and not a process of merging yourself with it. As for James, he merged himself with nothing. He was detached all his life from the many things he thought, saw and felt; and it was his detachment, sometimes amounting to a kind of cool antagonism, that enabled him to put down so clearly what he felt. Our ideal—particularly our American ideal, and I think particularly the Russian ideal; in this respect the two countries are very similar—is to get the individual to adjust to something, as we say, larger than himself: the football team, the school, the fraternity, the club, the labor union, being an American, being a Russian, whatever it may be. The more he adjusts in this mechanical sense, the less aware he is apt to be. James is interested in relationships. If you are interested in relationships, in the impingement of one 238 person on another, in the subtle interplay of one idea upon another, you are not interested in what our journalists call the facts. Our major magazines and newspapers are devoted, day after day and week after week, to the giving of the facts. They have been giving these facts now, since the birth of modern journalism, for about one hundred years. Theoreti- cally, we should all be very wise. James is not interested in the discrete fact at all. The fact by itself means nothing to him, because he does not believe that a fact exists except in relation to an extremely complex web of character upon which this fact impinges or by which it is rejected. Therefore, we have James, the relationship man, versus you and me, the fact men. James is mainly interested in the creative artist, or in somebody like the creative artist, because the creative artist has a larger sense of relationships than most people happen to have. So, the creative artist, the novelist, the painter, or very often merely the observer, like Strether in The Ambassadors, who is not himself an artist, but who is an artist in observation—such a person, the man interested in relationships, the man who is aware, the man with an overweening respect for the individual or even an obsession by the individual—such a man is James’s typical hero. Who is our typical hero? The twentieth century 239 has, in the course of its forty-six years, I think, more or less begun to develop its proper heroes. It seems to me that they divide into two classes. The first class is the destroyer, by which I mean the man who kills, whether directly or indirectly. It is obvious that during the last forty-six years we have devoted most of our energy to killing. That is apparently what we want to do. If we didn’t, we would not pay out so overwhelming a percentage of the national budget for wars, past and future. If we were not genuinely interested in orderly, effective, quick destruction, it doesn’t seem to me we would engage in it. We do engage in it. That is a necessary part of the process, it seems to me, of construct- ing thekind of machine-planet that we want. The second kind of hero that has come into being during the last fifty years or so is the technician, the man who can make things work. I think if I were to ask an average audience to name the greatest Ameri- can scientist of the last fifty years, perhaps nine out of ten persons would say “Edison,” who, of course, was not a scientist at all, and never pretended to be one. Edison was a technician, a very great one. Edison was a man who could invent things that would work. We are interested in producing more men who can make things that will work and that will multiply themselves. Hence our typical heroes tend to be geniuses of the type of Henry Ford and Edison. 240 The technician and the wholesale destroyer, who may be excellent men in many ways, and are certainly very interesting men in many ways, are completely opposed, in every way, to Henry James’s hero, who is the creative artist. The creative artist, as you can tell from the adjective preceding the noun, doesn’t like destruction at all. Not only does he like the human race to be alive and increasing, but he wants to increase the human race still more by imaginary creations—the heroes and heroines in his books, the people in his paintings. Henry James once wrote a story called The Great Good Place, in which he projected an imaginary rest-home to which people went when they were tired of living their regular lives. This Great Good Place, which I shan’t describe, is I think presented very quickly by James in one simple phrase. He says, “This place was all beautiful with omissions.” It was a very bare place. Its furniture consisted of serenity, harmony, purity, cleanliness and quiet—abstractions all. In the Great Good Place, the private life—another favorite phrase of Henry James—can be lived without interruption or distortion. Our time has invented a place, too—our world, in fact—but it is not anything like the Mozartian universe that James was so fond of describing. Our world is essentially a world of gadgets. We live by 241 and for gadgets. We do all we can to increase their number, to effect their more economical distribution to larger and larger numbers of people. James didn’t like this. James called this—he said this in 1905, which was a long time ago—“the modern madness, mere maniacal motion and extension.” He lived, of course, before our time in which motion and extension are enormously magnified, but he already foresaw in 1905 that our main interest would be in the production of objects which we could move around as rapidly as possible from one place to another. Among these objects are ourselves. We invent techniques of moving ourselves very rapidly from one place to another, never asking ourselves whether what is being moved, you or me, is a valuable piece of freight or not. What interests most of us, I think, is the mere fact of quick movement. This morning, or perhaps it was yesterday, the Times devoted a large part of its front page to the fact that now you can have telephones in your car. The question was not asked, will what you hear when you pick up the telephone receiver be pleasant or use- ful or wise. It is more important, from our point of view, to be able to have your wife telephone you when you are travelling in the car than to have an interesting wife. I am so much a man of my time that I was ab- 242 sorbed by the account o£ this development. It seemed to me wonderful that now I could, travelling at fifty miles an hour, speak with anyone I wished. It didn’t occur to me until just this minute that I have nothing whatsoever to say to anyone under those conditions, but I am so much a man of my time that I think it is a miracle anyway. James would have said, “No.” He would have said, “It is quite unimportant.” Or he would have gone further. He would have said, “This is mad. This is mere maniacal motion and extension,” purposeless, from his point of view. From our point of view, it is not purposeless, because it is what we want. It satis- fies some subtle, profound, inner need of ours; otherwise, we would not invent telephones which can be used in moving cars. James was interested aesthetically in exploring con- sciousness in what may be called a vertical direction. He was interested not merely in the kind of behavior that is obvious on the face of it, but in the behavior that was not apparent, that was hidden in what we have now learned to call the unconscious. He didn’t know the word, but he knew what it meant. As opposed to this kind of deep, vertical exploration of the human being in James, we have invented a literary form which is very aptly called The Profile. The theory of The Profile is very simple. The theory of The Profile is that what is interesting about 243 a human being, is what is eccentric in him and apparent to the first glance, or what is apparent to the reporter who interviews him for a few hours. It is assumed that if a man has done something a little unusual or if he speaks a little unusually, has his own slang, his own eccentric habit?, his own modes of movement, modes of speech—these are the things which the human race wants to know about. That is the opposite of the vertical exploration that James is interested in. He is not interested whatsoever in the small eccentricities of people, whether they have large or small noses, whether they are bald or semi-bald or have lots of hair, whether something peculiar happened to them on May 15, 1907, or whether they cracked a joke at the 21 Club. James is a non-profile writer. He doesn’t care about the profiles of people at all; but our journalism is more interested in the profile of the human being than in the human being himself. Whether this is good or bad, I don’tknow. It is what we want, and we get it. Along with this goes James’s interest in what is exhaustive as against our interest in what is reportorial. We do not have time to exhaust anything. We do not have time to exhaust an idea. We do not have time to exhaust a personality, either. So we have created art forms which are peculiarly and beautifully suited to the reportorial method of 244 presenting character. The motion picture is the greatest example of this. There are no complete human beings in any Hollywood motion picture, because it does not have time to present anything like a complete human being. It must make its impression very quickly. When I sit down in Radio City Music Hall and a picture is flashed on the screen, withinfive minutes I must understand the characters presented, because if I don’t understand them I am going to be irritated. If I do understand them immediately, if I know just the kind of person that Van Johnson is representing—then I am happy, because nothing has irritated me. Nothing has puzzled me. Nothing has made me uneasy—or, as James would say, aware. So, we have invented these new art techniques: the movies, the soap opera, the profile, which present to us characters on a reportorial scale, on a non-exhaustive scale. We don’t really want to know what is inside a human being, either because it is too difficult for us to go to the troubleof understanding it, or because we are afraid that there is nothing in the contemporary human being below the surface. James put this well when he said, around 1900, “The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the general Anglo-Saxon mind,” by which he meant Englishmen and Americans generally. James is bitter about this because of all the great writers of his time, he was the one whose books de- 245 manded the most relentless, patient and painstaking attention. Already he saw in his time that journalism was, as he said, enfeebling this muscle of the mind, the faculty of attention, so that in his day he found, on the whole, rather few people who would read him constantly and with love. James was interested in the traditional, in the past, and in the cosmopolitan. He was an American by birth. He removed from this country, as you know, at a rather early age. He travelled for a short time on the Continent, but for the most part spent his life in and around London, partly in Rye. In the last years of his life he became a British subject, although I suppose as far as his personal allegiances were concerned he had been a British subject for many years. However, I am inclined to think that James, though much of him was very American and much of him very English, was basically a cosmopolitan. He was what used to be called in the late eight- eenth and nineteenthcenturies, a good European, by which is meant that he had depressed in himself some of those national allegiances and fidelities that play so large a part in the mental and emotional makeup ofmyself and yourself. He also was traditional in the sense that he had an enormous respect for the past and, more than a respect, he had a very vital sense of the past living inside him. Yesterday or last week lives pretty vitally in me. 24 6 I can remember more or less what I did yesterday and what I did last week, but the further back I go the less am I interested in what happened to me when I was young. I find myself—l am a very typical and average American—not greatly concerned with the planet’s past. I went to college and I learned some history and I know more or less what the human race has done in a large, general way, but the past is not anything that lives passionately within me. It did live passionately within James. He had a sense of tradition on a large scale, something like what those of us have who are afflicted or blessed, if you wish, with ancestor worship. Our time, on the whole, has abandoned the idea of cosmopolitanism and abandoned the respect for the past in favor of what is here and now. Most of our problems we attempt to solve on the basis of what has happened during the past forty-eight hours. That is why none of us would think for one moment of not reading our daily newspaper. I once figured out that the average, what is called the well-informed, man spends about an hour and a half to two hours a day reading newspapers, magazines and similar agencies of day to day information. That is an awfully large part of one’s life. We spend practically no time reliving the past, thinking about the past, reading about the past, feeling the past. The 247 most successful journalisticinstitutions of the country are those which exploit the present, today. Once in writing about this sort of thing, I said that we think the headline truer than the proposition. I believe that is so. Most of us are more interested in the headline and believe it to have a greater sanctity than a general proposition, the abstract idea or the thought that has its roots perhaps in something that happened 2,500 years ago. To turn now to the style and the inner nature of his books, James has a particular kind of wit. He is not a humorous writer, but he is a witty writer. James’s wit is of the sort that I would call connective. When he says a witty thing, that witty thing is part of an un- expressed moral system of other witty things which he doesn’t express. In other words, his wit is connected usually with some large aspect of human character; it is philosophical. But the wit that you and I admire is the wit which, instead of being connective, instead of opening out, as it were, into a large universe of thought and dis- course, is enclosing. It is good only for the moment. The most popular radio program on the air is Mr. Hope’s program. Mr. Hope’s wit—because he is very witty; otherwise we wouldn’t laugh at him—is what I call enclosing; that is, each line is only good in and for itself. We call it a wisecrack or a gag. 248 What we like in our wit is something that does not make us think of anything else, wit which attains its end, its point, as we say, at once. Wit which does not open out into anything, which is non-philosophic, non-reflective, which you cannot think about after you have once got the point, is the wit that you and I admire. It is not the wit that James admires. So here again we have a set of polar opposites. Finally, I would like to make a very simple dis- tinction, and that is this: James’s novels will live because of their characters, mainly, as all great novels live because of their characters. That is their blood. James’s characters are—and I use a very simple word- made; they are truly created, by which I mean that James never once asked himself, when he sat down to work out his novels, “Will this interest my public?” Nor did he ask himself, “Is this thekind of character that will be readily understood by my public?” Nor did he ever ask himself, “Is this the kind of character that has become familiar somehow in general life so that when people meet the character in a book, they will recognize him with pleasure?” He never asked himself any of these questions. He asked himself only, “Am I interested in this character? Do I understand him? How can I make him or her absolutely clear, completely created?” All he was interested in was complete projection; in other words, he was making characters almost in 249 exactly the same sense that a great sculptor, working purely from his imagination, makes a piece of sculp- ture; not asking himself whether this piece of sculp- ture will be readily and easily recognized by his audience, but asking himself only whether it corres- ponds to some idea that he has inside his own head. The modern novelist, for the most part, does not make characters in that way. Instead of making characters what he does is to sell characters almost pre- cisely as any other object is sold.The modern novelist, either consciously or unconsciously, asks himself, “What sort of people seem to be interesting folks in general now?” Then he says, “I think I will write about that sort of person.” Then he says, “What are the aspects of this kind of character that are most readily recognizable by large numbers of people?” Then he lists them, consciously or unconsciously, and these become the aspects of that character. Hence when we read his books, there is no dif- ficulty whatsoever, there is no interposition between us and the character. The characters become, as we say, alive at once. We recognize them immediately for what they are. We follow their behavior eagerly and with ease—but I think we forget themrather rapidly. I have listed a set of oppositions, as you see, about a dozen, just to indicate the enormous difference between the obsessions, if you will, of Henry James, 250 and the dominant interests of our own time. Now, I want to come back to what I started with. When I say these are dominant interests, I do not mean that they are exclusive interests. Actually, in every one of us there is a longing to get away from the idea of the mass man. There is a longing not to adjust, but a longing rather to perceive and to be aware. There is a desire to see the relationships among human beings and among ideas rather than merely to list the so-called facts. There is a desire in us to reverence the creative artist, although in actuality we do not do so. Many of us are occasionally tired of the gadget world that we have so carefully and so efficiently created, even though we keep on increasing the number of gadgets. So it goes. However, that part of us which dominates is, shall we say, the anti-Jamesian part. And that part of us which is subordinate will turn back to men like Henry James from time to time for a little spiritual support. When I say James, I mean many others, too. At the present time a good many people are reading Sten- dhal, because he too gives one a sense of the complexity of human life, that sense which is vanishing, I think, from our own time. These oppositions, the oppositions in ourselves, it seems to me, represent the basic cause of the present revival of interest in Henry James. 251 I may be wrong about this. It is very probable that I am. However, it doesn’t seem to me that the interest is merely a superficial one, sponsored and exploited by publishers. It seems to me more than a fad. It may not last very long, but I do think that for the moment many thousands of people are getting from the difficult, dense, thick works of this man, who died in 1916 and who lived a life almost entirely of reflection and observation, a sense of the adventure of living, a sense of the complexity that lies in the human mind that they do not get from reading the mass magazines that dominate and express the central current of our life.

CATALOGUE of the Henry James Exhibition October 24-December 8, 1946

BOOKS A Passionate Pilgrim, and other Tales. Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1875. (H. J.’s first published book). Une Femme philosophe, le premier Amour d’Eugfene Pickering [and stories by other writers]. Paris, Naum- bourg s/S., Chez G. Paetz, 1876. (French translation of Eugene Pickering, which appeared in A Passionate Pil- grim). 252 Transatlantic Sketches. Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1875. Roderick Hudson. Boston, James R. Osgood and Com- pany, 1876. (H. J.’s second novel and his first to be published in book form).

Same. . . . London. Macmillan and Co., 1879. 3 vols. (First English edition, revised. Inscribed by H. J. to Mrs. Singleton).

. Same. . . Boston and New York. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1902. (Revised edition. Inscribed by H. J. to Sidney Painter). The American. Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1877. (The play of the same title was published in 1891). The American, a Comedy in four Acts. London, William Heinemann, 1891. (The first of H. J.’s theatrical ventures to reach the stage. The American ran for but two months in London during 1891).

Same. . . . Copy two, with leaves printed on one side only. (H. J. used this copy for corrections and additions). Watch and Ward. Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Com- pany, 1878. French Poets and Novelists. London, Macmillan and Co, 1878. The Europeans, a Sketch. Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1879. (This first American edition was published about a month later than the English edition, which appeared in September, 1878).

Daisy Miller, a Study. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1879. (First edition of H. J.’s first popular success, later dramatized by him). 253 An International Episode. New York, Harper Sc Brothers, 1879- Daisy Miller: a Study. An International Episode. Four Meetings. London, Macmillan and Co., 1879. 2 vols. (First English edition of Daisy Miller and An Inter- national Episode. First appearance in book form of Four Meetings. Inscribed by H. J. to Mrs. Livingston). Copy two. (Inscribed by H. J. to Mrs. Smalley). Daisy Miller, a Comedy. Not Published, 1882. (The dramatization of Daisy Miller, probably printed for use as a prompt book. One of less than half a dozen known copies). Daisy Miller, a Comedy in Three Acts. Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1883. (First published edition of the play). Hawthorne. London, Macmillan and Co., 1879. (H. J.’s own copy. First edition. Three variant bindings are shown).

Same. . . . New York, Harper & Brothers, 1880. (First American edition). The Madonna of the Future and other Tales. London, Macmillan and Co., 1879. 2 vols. The Diary of a Man of Fifty and a Bundle of Letters. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1880. (Two variants of the backstrip are shown). A Bundle of Letters. Boston, Loring [lßßo]. (First separate printing of this story).

Confidence. London, Chatto & Windus, 1880. 2 vols. (First edition, actually published December, 1879). 254

Same. . . . Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1880. (Two variants of the binding are shown).

Washington Square. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1881. (First edition). Washington Square. The Pension Beaurepas. A Bundle of Letters. London, Macmillan and Co., 1881. 2 vols. (Two variants of the binding are shown).

Washington Square. New York and London, Harper & Brothers, 1901. (On the binding of this copy the name “Henry James” is stamped in blind, and over it stamped in ink is the name, “G. R. P. James”!) The Portrait of a Lady. London. Macmillan and Co., 1881. 3 vols. (First edition).

Same. . . . Boston, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1882.(First American edition). The Point of View. Not Published, 1882. (The only re- corded copy in wrappers). The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of View. Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1883. (Inscribed by H. J. to G. A. James. Two variants of the binding are shown). Portraits of Places. London, Macmillan and Co., 1883. (First edition. Inscribed by H. J. to Edmund W. Gosse).

Same. . . . Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1884. (First American edition. Three variants of the binding are shown).

Notes. . . on a Collection of Drawings by Mr. George Du Maurier exhibited at The Fine Art Society’s 148 New Bond Street [London] 1884. 255 Tales of Three Cities. Boston, James R. Osgood and Com- pany, 1884. A Little Tour in France. Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1885.

. Stories Revived. . The Author of ‘Beltraffio.’ Pandora. The Path of Duty. A Day of Days. ALight Man. London, Macmillan and Co., 1885. 3 vols. The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina’s Reasons, The Path of Duty, Four Meetings. Boston, James R. Osgood and Company, 1885. (Two variants of the binding are shown). The Bostonians, a Novel. London, Macmillan and Co., 1886. 3 vols. (H. J.’s own copy). James, “Henrietta.” Another Chapter of "The Boston- ians.” Bloomfield, N. J., S. Morris Hulin, 1887. (A parody on The Bostonians). The Princess Casamassima, a Novel. London, Macmillan and Co., and New York, 1886. 3 vols. (H. J.’s own copy. Two variants of the binding are shown). Partial Portraits. London, Macmillan and Co., 1888. (In- scribed by H. J. to Edmund Gosse). The Aspern Papers, Louisa Pallant, The Modern Warn- ing. London, Macmillan and Co., 1888. 2 vols.

The Reverberator. London, Macmillan and Co., and New York, 1888. 2 vols. (Inscribed by H. J. to William James). Copy two. (Inscribed by H. J. to Mrs. Hugh Bell). Same.... London, Macmillan and Co., and New York, 1888. (One-volume issue). 256 A London Life, The Patagonia, The Liar, Mrs. Temperly. London, Macmillan and Co., and New York, 1889. 2 vols. The Tragic Muse. London, Macmillan and Co., and New York, 1890. 3 vols. (First edition).

Same. . . . Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890. 2 vols. (First American edition, published a few weeks after the English edition. Two variant bindings are shown). Catalogue of a collection of Drawings by Alfred Parsons, R. I. with a Prefatory Note by Henry James. Exhibited at The Fine Art Society’s. 148, New Bond Street, W., London, 1891. Daudet, Alphonse. Port Tarascon, the last Adventures of the illustrious Tartarin Translated by Henry James. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1891. (First edition).

& Same. . . . London, Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle Rivington, Limited, 1891. (First English issue, printed from the American plates). The Lesson of the Master, The Marriages, The Pupil, Brooksmith, The Solution, Sir Edmund Orme. New York, Macmillan and Co., and London, 1892. (First issue).

Same. . . . London, Macmillan and Co., and New York, 1892. (Printed from the American plates). The Private Lite, Lord BeauprA The Visits. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893. (Three variant bindings are shown). The Private Life, The Wheel of Time, Lord Beaupre, The Visits, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave. London, James R. Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co., 1893. (H. J.’s own copy). 257 Same. Copy two. (Inscribed by H. J. to Evelyn Smalley). The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893. The Real Thing and other Tales. New York, Macmillan and Co., and London, 1893.

Picture and Text. New York, Harper &Brothers, 1893. (In- scribed by H. J. to Edmund Gosse. Two variants of the binding are shown). Essays in London and Elsewhere. London, James R. Os- good, Mcllvaine & Co., 1893. (First edition. Inscribed by H. J. to Edmund Gosse).

Same. . . . New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893. (First American edition, published about three months after the English). Guy Domville, Play in three Acts. London, Printed by J. Miles 8c Co., 1894. (At top of T.p.: Printed—as Manu- script-tor Private Circulation only.) Same. Copy two. (An interleaved copy containing extensive corrections in manuscript). Guy Domville. (Program of performance at St. James’s Theatre, London, January 5, 1895). Theatricals. Two Comedies: Tenants, Disengaged. Lon- don, Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co., 1894.(First edition).

& Same. . . . New York, Harper Brothers, 1894. (First American edition). Theatricals, Second Series: The Album, The Reprobate. London, Osgood, Mcllvaine & Co., 1895. (Inscribed by H. J. to Edmund Gosse). 258 Terminations: The Death of the Lion, The Coxon Fund, The Middle Years, The Altar of the Dead. London, William Heinemann, 1895. (First edition. Inscribed by H. J. to Mrs. Humphry Ward).

& -—-Same. . . . New York, Harper Brothers, 1895. (First American edition).

Embarrassments. New York, The Macmillan Company. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1896. (Two variant bindings are shown). The Other House. New York, The Macmillan Company. London, Macmillan 8c Co., Ltd. 1896.(As issued, in eight paper-covered parts).

Same. ... London, William Heinemann, 1896. 2 vols. (First English edition. Inscribed by H. J. to Mrs. Hum- phry Ward). The Spoils of Poynton. London, William Heinemann, 1897.

Same. . . . Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1897. (First American edition, which followed the English by about one week).

What Maisie Knew. Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone S<: Co., 1897. (Two variants of the binding are shown).

Same. . . . London, William Heinemann, 1897. (Re- view copy, with title-page all in black).

Same. . . . London, William Heinemann, 1898. (First English regular issue, with title-page in red and black. Inscribed by H. J. to Johnathan Sturges). 259 The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End. New York, The Macmillan Company. London, Mac- millan & Co., Ltd., 1898. (First appearance in book form of The Turn of the Screw). In the Cage. London, Duckworth and Co., 1898. (First edition).

. & & Same. . . Chicago New York, Herbert S. Stone Company, 1898. (First American edition). The Awkward Age. London, William Heinemann, 1899. (First edition. Title-page in red and black).

Same. (Colonial edition. Title-page all in black).

The Soft Side. New York, The Macmillan Company. Lon- don, Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1900. (Inscribed by H. J. to Edmund Gosse).

& Same. . . . London, Methuen Co., rgoo. (First Eng- lish edition. Inscribed by H. J. to Madam Langel). The Sacred Fount. New York, Charles, Scribner’s Sons, 1901. (Two variant bindings are shown. In the copy bound in blue cloth, there is a half-title both preceding and following the title-page).

. & Same. . . London, Methuen Co., 1901. (First Eng- lish edition. Inscribed by H. J. to Mary A. Ward). The Wings of the Dove. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902. 2 vols. Same.... Westminster, Archibald Constable and Co., Ltd., 1902. (First English edition. Inscribed by H. J. to Mary A. Ward). 260

William Wetraore Story and his Friends, from Letters, Diaries, and Recollections. Edinburgh and London, William Blackwood and Sons, 1903. 2 vols. (Inscribed by H. J. to Edmund Gosse).

The Better Sort. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903.

& Same. . . . London, Methuen Co., 1903. (First Eng- lish edition).

The Ambassadors. London, Methuen & Co., 1903.

Same. . . . New York and London, Harper & Brothers, 1903. (First American edition. In cloth jacket. Inscribed by H. J.). The Golden Bowl. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904. 2 vols. (Inscribed by H. J. to Evelyn Smalley). The Question of our Speech, The Lesson of Balzac. Two Lectures. Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905. (Three variant bindings are shown).

English Hours. London, William Heinemann, 1905. (In- scribed by H. J. to Edmund Gosse. Two variant bindings are shown).

Same. .. . Cambridge, Printed at The Riverside Press, 1905. (First American edition, which followed the Eng- lish edition by ten days. One of 400 copies on large paper).

The American Scene. New York and London, Harper & Brothers, 1907. (Two variants of the binding are shown).

Same. . . . London, Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1907. (First English edition. Inscribed by H. J. to Sir G. A. Trevelyan, Bart.) 261

Views and Reviews. Boston, The Ball Publishing Com- pany, 1908. (Two variants of the binding are shown). The Whole Family, a Novel by Twelve Authors. New York and London, Harper & Brothers, 1908. (Contains The Married Son by H. J.) Julia Bride. New York and London, Harper & Brothers, 1909. (H. J.’s own copy. Two variants of the binding are shown). Italian Hours. Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909.

Same. . . . London, William Heinemann, 1909. (First English edition).

The Finer Grain. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910.

& Same. . . . London, Methuen Co. Ltd. [l9lo]. (First English edition). In after Days, Thoughts on the Future Life. New York and London, Harper & Brothers, 1910. (Contains a chapter by H. J.; “Is there a Life after Death?”) The Outcry. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911.

Same. . . . London, Methuen & Co. Ltd. [l9ll]. (First English edition). A Small Boy and Others. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913.

Same. . . . London, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1913. (First English edition. Inscribed by H. J. to Florence Bell). Notes on Novelists with some other Notes. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914. 262

Same. . . . London, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. 1914.(First English edition).

Notes of a Son & Brother. London, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1914. (Inscribed by H. J. to Frances Colvin). Same. Copy two. (Inscribed by H. J. to Florence Bell). The American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps in France. A Letter to the Editor of an American Journal. London, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1914. The Question of the Mind. Issued by The Central Com- mittee For National Patriotic Organizations [1915]. Funeral Service for Henry James. (Folder, 1916).

The Ivory Tower. London, W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. [1917]. (This novel was unfinished at H. J.’s death).

Same. . . . New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917. (First American edition, published about a month after the English edition). The Sense of the Past. London, W. Collins Sons 8c Co. Ltd. [1917]. (This novel was unfinished at H. J.’s death).

Same. . . . New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917. (First American edition). The Middle Years. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917. (First American edition, published about a month after the English edition. This work was unfinished at H. J.’s death). Within the Rim and other Essays 1914-15. London, W. Collins Sons 8c Co. Ltd. [l9lß]. Gabriclle de Bergerac. New York, Boni and Liveright, 1918. 263

A Landscape Painter. New York, Scott and Seltzer, 1919. (One of 250 copies). Travelling Companions. New York, Boni and Liveright, 1919- Master Eustace. New York, Thomas Seltzer, 1920. The Letters of Henry James Selected and Edited by Percy Lubbock. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. 2 vols. (First American edition, published one day after the English edition). Notes and Reviews by Henry James. With a Preface by Pierre de Chaignon la Rose. Cambridge, Mass., Dun- ster House, 1921. A Letter from Henry James to Mrs. Linton. Privately Printed [at the Sign of the George, 1921.] "A most Unholy Trade” being Letters on the Drama. The Scarab Press, Privately Printed, 1923. Letters of Henry James to Walter Berry. Paris, The Black Sun Press, 1928. Henry James: Letters to A. C. Benson and Auguste Monod

. . . edited with an introduction by E. F. Benson. Lon- don: Elkin Mathews & Marrot. New York, Charles Scrib- ner’s Sons, 1930. The Mad Lovers and the Emperor’s Topaz (Adina). Girard, Kansas, Haldeman-Julius Publications, [cop. 1931]. (Lit- tle Blue Book No. 1675). Theatre and Friendship. Some Henry James Letters with a Commentary by Elizabeth Robins. London, Jonathan Cape [1932]. 264 Conrad, Joseph. The Nigger of the “Narcissus” London, William Heinemann, 1898. (Inscribed by Joseph Conrad in a letter beginning “Cher Maitre” to H. J. on the fly- leaf). Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book. London, Macmillan and Co. and New York, 1894. (“Written for Josephine Kipling,” the author’s daughter who was then a little over a year old. Inscribed on half-title: "To Henry James from Josephine Kipling.”)

MANUSCRIPTS, TYPESCRIPTS, &C.

The American. Printed pages with manuscript revisions, and typescript, to serve as copy for revised version. Confidence. Manuscript. The Portrait of a Lady. Printed pages with manuscript revisions, and typescript, to serve as copy for revised version. The Princess Casamassima. Manuscript, The Chaperon. Typed scenario and manuscript notes tor a comedy which was never completed. Guy Domville. Manuscript revision of a passage. The Quest of the Holy Grail by Edwin A. Abbey. With Explanatory Notes by H. J., 1895. Dummy. The Other House. Typescript. Dramatization of the novel of this title. The play has never been published or performed. The Ambassadors. Scenario. Typescript. The High Bid. Play, performed in 1909.Typescript. 265

The Outcry. Typescript of a play which was never produced in H. J.’s lifetime. He re-wrote it as a novel which was published in 1911. The Saloon. Typescript, with revisions, of a play, produced in 1911. Rupert Brooke. Preface to Brooke’s Letters from America, 1916. Typescript. Mrs. Max. Preliminary statement of an unfinished novel, which formed the germ of The Ivory Tower. Manu- script. The Ivory Tower. Revision of Books I, II and 111. Type- script. The Sense of the Past. Redictated version. Typescript. The Middle Years. Typescript of original dictated version.

LETTERS A.l.s. of H. J. to Edgar Van Winkle [previous to 1855], stating that he would like to belong to a theatre with which Van Winkle was concerned.

A.l.s. of Ivan Turgeniev to H. J., August 7, 1874, thanking the latter for his reviews of two of Turgeniev’s novels. A.l.s. of James Russell Lowell to H. J., August 27, 1889. A.l.s. of George Du Maurier to H. J., November 13, 1891. A.l.s. of Robert Louis Stevenson to H. J., May 26, 1892. A.l.s. of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero to H. J., December 31, 1894, regretting his inability to attend the opening of H. J.’s play, Guy Domville. A.l.s. of George Meredith to H. J.. May 11, 1895. 266

Mrs. Jasper. Program of its performance at The Empire Theatre. New York, February 13, 1902. Folder. A.l.s. of William Dean Howells to H. J., February 14, 1902, reporting concerning performance of Mrs. Jasper.

A.l.s. of H. G. Wells to H. J., March 20, 1907, after having read The American Scene. A.l.s. of Henry Adams to H. J., May 6. 1908,with which a copy of the privately printed edition of Adams’s Edu- cation was sent to H. J. A.l.s. of Joseph Conrad to H. J., December 12, 1908, thanking the latter for volumes of the definitive edition of James’s novels. A.l.s. of George Bernard Shaw to H. J., January 17, 1909, criticizing H. J.’s The Saloon. Notice to H. J. signed by the Registrar of the University of Oxford. May 14, 1912, of intention to confer degree of Doctor of Letters on H. J. Printed letter, April ig, 1913, transmitting to H. J. as a birthday present a portrait of him painted by John S. Sargent. The list of about 250 donors is printed at the end of the letter.

Printed letter of H. J., April si, 1913, thanking the donors of the Sargent portrait. (Two other printed letters connected with this gift are also shown). A.l.s. of Sir John Simon to H. J., July 19, 1915, informing H. J. of his pleasure in approving the formal certificate of H. J.’s naturalization as a British subject. A.l.s. of H. J. to Edmund Gosse, July 25, 1915, about the former’s application for naturalization as a British subject. 267 A.l.s. of Rudyard Kipling to H. J., July 28, 1915, after reading the notice of H. J.’s naturalization in The Times.

Warrant signed by King George V, January i, 1916, con- ferring the Order of Merit on H. J. L.s. of Douglas Dawson to H. J., February 4, 1916, transmitting warrant appointing H. J. a member of the Order of Merit. A.l.s. of James A. M. Whistler to H. J., n.d.

PORTRAITS Thirteen portraits of Henry James were shown, includ- ing a photograph made when James was 16 or ty years old, a reproduction of a portrait by John La Farge made when James was 21, a profile drawing by John S. Sargent, and a painting by the same made in 1913 and presented to James by about 250 friends. A portrait of James’s father was shown, as well as portraits of William James and Edward Compton (who played in The American).