HENRY JAMES, JR. (1843-1916)

The inheritance and the early, as well as the later, training of Henry James and of his brother William James, the psychologist, were refining and cultural in the most exclusive sense. The father, Henry James, Senior, was a scholar, a mystic, a theorist of the Bronson Aleott type, who could live without a profession and write books for the few on such subjects as Swedenborg and The Nature of Eril. The younger Henry James was born in Albany and reared until early boyhood in New York City, a sequestered childhood with little contact with other children, with education from carefully chosen tutors, and with books as the central interest. At twelve he was sent abroad for education with the privilege of pursuing only such studies as pleased him. He learned French and French literature, estheticism,- art. Returning to America, he attended a few lectures at the Harvard law school, but with no serious intention of learning a profession, and then settled down like his father to a life of intellectual and esthetic leisure. In France he had been impressed with the new brilliant school of novelists and short story writers, and, with abundance of leisure, he tried his own hand at fiction. His first story appeared in The Atlantic in 1865, and from time to time he contributed others, all of them finished and careful bits of work, with traces of the French influence. Four years later, in 1869, he removed again to Europe, and in Europe - chiefly in England - he spent the rest of his life. He was never married, he followed no profession, he held no office, civil or political: he gave himself wholly to literary art which he studied in all its details of technique. He wrote short stories at first, varied by critical studies of literary artists, especially French litterateurs, and later he made longer ventures in fiction international novels' since they dealt with characters and scenes on both sides of the ocean, and minute studies of character and manners. From the great number of his books one may choose for mention Roderick Hudson, 1875, The American, 1877, Daisy Miller, 1878, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881, and What Maisie Knew, 1897.

James approached fiction from the standpoint of the scientist. His realism was founded on the taking of many notes, on close observation of actual characters in their social relations, on skilful ability to note little peculiarities and tell-tale trifles. He evolves his plot slowly, so slowly indeed that the reader sometimes is in doubt if there be a plot at all. Character is analyzed with scientific thoroughness. Actions and reactions are explained, and motives are dissected with minute care. The characters reveal themselves in endless conversations. In his later novels he grew more and more individual in his style and treatment until many who had enjoyed his early work ceased to read him. A lifetime of analysis, of introspection, of self-conscious concentration, of eternal contemplation of manners, led to over refinement, to mannerism, to eccentricities. One may safely say that the later James is delightful only to the few.

ALPHONSE DAUDET1

I

The novel of manners grows thick in England, and there are many reasons for it. In the first place it was born there, and a plant always flourishes in its own country.' So wrote M. Taine, the French critic, many years ago. But those were the years of Dickens and Thackeray (as 10 a prelude to the study of the latter of whom the remark was made); and the

1 Reprinted from Partial Portraits by arrangement with the Macmillan Company, holders of the copyright.

branch of literature mentioned by M. Taine has no longer, in the soil of our English-speaking genius, so strong a vitality. The French may bear the palm 5 to-day in the representation of manners by the aid of fiction. Formerly, it was possible to oppose Balzac and Madame Sand to Dickens and Thackeray; but at present we have no one, either in England or in America, to oppose to Alphonse Daudet. The appearance of a new novel by this admirable genius is to my mind the most delightful literary event that can occur just now; in other words Alphonse 15 Daudet is at the head of his profession.

20

to care much for the horrid little heroine herself, carefully as she is studied. She has been pursued, but she has not been caught, for she is not interesting (even 5 for a coquine), not even human. She is a mechanical doll, with nothing for the imagination to take hold of. She is one more proof of the fact that it is difficult to give the air of consistency to vanity and depravity, though the portraiture of the vicious side of life would seem, from the pictorial point of view, to offer such attractions. The reader's quarrel with Sidonie Chèbe is not that she is bad, but that she is not felt, as the æsthetic people say. In Jack the hollow spot, as I have called it, is the episode of Doctor Rivals and his daughter Cécile, which reminds us of the more genial parts of Dickens. It is perhaps because to us readers of English speech the figure of the young girl, in a French novel, is almost always wanting in reality seems to be thin and conventional; in any case poor Jack's love-affair, at the end of the book, does not produce the illusion of the rest of his touching history. In Le Nabab this artificial element is very considerable; it centers about the figure of Paul de Géry and embraces the whole group of M. Joyeuse and his blooming daughters, with their pretty attitudes taking in also the very shadowy André Maranne, so touchingly re-united to his mother, who had lived for ten years with an Irish doctor to whom she was not married. In Les Rois en Eril, Tom Lévis and the diabolical Séphora seem to me purely fanciful creations, without any relation to reality; they are the inferior part of the book. They are composed by a master of composition, and the comedian Tom is described with immense spirit, an art which speaks volumes as to a certain sort of Parisian initiation. But if this artistic and malignant couple are very clever water-color, they are not really humanity. Ruffians and rascals have a certain moral nature, as well as the betterbehaved; but in the case I have mentioned M. Daudet fails to put his finger upon it. The same with Madame Autheman, the evil genius of poor Eline Ebsen, in the L'Evangéliste. She is to me terribly, almost grotesquely, void. She is an elaborate portrait of a fanatic of Protestantism, a bigot to the point of monstrosity, cold-blooded, implacable, cruel. The figure is painted with Alphonse Daudet's

I say of his profession advisedly, for he
belongs to our modern class of trained
men of letters; he is not an occasional or
a desultory poet; he is a novelist to his
finger-tips -a soldier in the great army
of constant producers. But such as he is,
he is master of his art, and I may as well
say definitely that if I attempt to sketch
in a few pages his literary countenance, it
will be found that the portrait is from the 10
hand of an admirer. We most of us feel
that among the artists of our day certain
talents have more to say to us and others
less; we have our favorites, and we have
our objects of indifference. The writer 15
of these remarks has always had a sym-
pathy for the author of the Lettres de
mon Moulin; he began to read his novels
with a prejudice in their favor. This
prejudice sprang from the Letters afore- ∞
said, which do not constitute a novel, but
a volume of the lightest and briefest
tales. They had, to my mind, an extraor-
dinary charm; they put me quite on the
side of Alphonse Daudet, whatever he as
might do in the future. One of the first
things he did do was to publish the history
of Fromont Jeune et Risler Aîné. It is
true that this work did not give me the
pleasure that some of its successors have 30
done, and though it has been crowned by
the French Academy, I still think it is
weaker than Les Rois en Exil and Numa
Roumestan. But I liked it better on a
second reading than on a first; it contains 35
some delightful things. After that came
Jack and Le Nabab, and the two novels I
have just mentioned, and that curious and
interesting tale of L'Evangéliste, which
appeared a few months since, and which 40
proves that the author's genius, though on
the whole he has pressed it hard, is still
nervous, fresh, and young. Each of these
things has been better than the last, with
the exception, perhaps, of L'Evangéliste, 45
which, to my taste, is not superior to
Numa Roumestan. Numa Roumestan is
a masterpiece; it is really a perfect work;
it has no weakness, no roughness; it is a
compact and harmonious whole. Daudet's 50
other works have had their inequalities,
their infirmities, certain places where, if
you tapped them, they sounded hollow.
His danger has always been a perceptible
tendency to the factitious; sometimes he 55
has fallen into the trap laid for him by a
taste for superficial effects. In Fromont
Jeune, for instance, it seems to me difficult

inimitable art; no one that handles the pen to-day is such a pictorial artist as he. But Madame Autheman strikes me as quite automatic; psychologically she is a blank. One does not see the operation of her character. She must have had a soul, and a very curious one. It was a great opportunity for a piece of spiritual portraiture; but we know nothing about Madame Autheman's inner springs, and I think we fail to believe in her. I should go so far as to say that we get little more of an inside view, as the phrase is, of Eline Ebsen; we are not shown the spiritual steps by which she went over to the 15 enemy - vividly, admirably as the outward signs and consequences of this disaster are depicted. The logic of the matter is absent in both cases, and it takes all the magic of the author's legerdemain 20 to prevent us from missing it. These things, however, are exceptions, and the tissue of each of his novels is, for all the rest, really pure gold. No one has such grace, such lightness and brilliancy of exe- 25 cution; it is a fascination to see him at work. The beauty of Numa Roumestan is that it has no hollow places; the idea and the pictures melt everywhere into one. Emile Zola, criticizing the work in a very 30 friendly spirit, speaks of the episode of Hortense Le Quesnoy and the Provençal tambourinaire as a false note, and declares that it wounds his sense of delicacy. Valmajour is a peasant of the south of 35 France; he is young, handsome, wears a costume, and is a master of the rustic life and tambourine — instruments that are much appreciated in his part of the country. Mademoiselle Le Quesnoy, liv- 40 sense) a blot upon Numa Roumestan; ing in Paris, daughter of a distinguished member of the French judiciary — le premier magastrat de France- young, charming, imaginative, romantic, marked out for a malady of the chest, and with 45 a certain innocent perversity of mind, sees him play before an applauding crowd in the old Roman arena at Nimes, and forthwith conceives a secret, a singular but not, under the circumstances, an absolutely un- 50 gant, having at least certain appearances

assurance of her devotion; and this innocent missive, falling soon into the hands of his rapacious and exasperated sister (a wonderful figure, one of the most liv5 ing that has ever come from Daudet's pen), becomes a source of infinite alarm to the family of Mademoiselle Le Quesnoy, who see her compromised, calumniated and black-mailed, and finally of 10 complete humiliation to poor Hortense herself, now fallen into a rapid consumption, and cured of her foolish infatuation by a nearer view of the vain and ignorant Valmajour. An agent of the family recovers the photograph (with the aid of ten thousand francs), and the young girl, with the bitter taste of her disappointment still in her soul, dies in her flower.

natural passion for him. He comes up
to Paris to seek his fortune at the
' variety' theaters, where his feeble and
primitive music quite fails to excite en-
thusiasm. The young girl, reckless and 55
impulsive, and full of sympathy with his
mortification, writes him in three words
(upon one of her little photographs) an

This little story, as I say, is very shocking to M. Zola, who cites it as an example of the folly of a departure from consistent realism. What is observed, says M. Zola, on the whole very justly, is strong; what is invented is always weak, especially what is invented to please the ladies. 'See in this case,' he writes, all the misery of invented episodes. This love of Hortense, with which the author has doubtless wished to give the impression of something touching, produces a discomfort, as if it were a violation of nature. It is therefore the pages written for the ladies that are repulsive even to a man accustomed to the saddest dissections of the human corpse.' I am not of M. Zola's opinion delightful as it would be to be of that opinion when M. Zola's sense of propriety is ruffled. The incident of Hortense and Valmajour is not (to my

on the contrary, it is perfectly conceivable, and is treated with admirable delicacy. This romantic stuff,' says M. Zola, elsewhere, is as painful as a pollution. . That a young girl should lose her head over a tenor, that may be explained, for she loves the operatic personage in the interpreter. She has before her a young man sharpened and refined by life, ele

of talent and intelligence. But this tambourinist, with his drum and penny-whistle, this village dandy, a poor devil who does n't even know how to speak! No, life has not such cruelties as that, I protest, I who certainly, as a general thing, am not accustomed to give ground before human aberrations!' This objection was

5

the dignity of a critic. If we were talking French, nothing would be simpler than to say that Alphonse Daudet is adorable, and have done with it. But this resource is denied me, and I must arrive at my meaning by a series of circumlocutions. I am not able even to say that he is very 'personal'; that epithet, so valuable in the vocabulary of French literary criticism, has, when applied to the talent of an artist, a meaning different from the sense in which we use it. A novelist so personal and so penetrating,' says Emile Zola, speaking of the author of Numa Roumestan. That phrase, in English, means nothing in particular; so that I must add to it that the charm of Daudet's talent comes from its being charged to an extraordinary degree with his tempera

worth making; but I should look at the
matter in another way. It seems to me
much more natural that a girl of the tem-
per and breeding that M. Daudet has de-
scribed should take a momentary fancy to
a prepossessing young rustic, bronzed by
the sun of Provence (even if it be con-
ceded that his soul was vulgar), than that
she should fasten her affections upon a
lyric artist,' suspected of pomatum and 10
paint, and illuminated by the footlights.
These are points which it is vain to dis-
cuss, however, both because they are deli-
cate and because they are details. I have
come so far simply from a desire to jus- 15
tify my high admiration of Numa Roume-
stan. But Emile Zola, again, has ex-
pressed this feeling more felicitously than
I can hope to do. This, moreover, is a
very slight blemish in a work which I 20 ment, his feelings, his instincts, his natural

regard as one of those, of all Daudet's
productions, that is most personal to him-
self. He has put his whole nature into it,
helped by his southern temperament, hav-
ing only to make large draughts upon his 25
innermost recollections and sensations. I
do not think that he has hitherto reached
such an intensity either of irony or of
geniality.... Happy the books which ar-
rive in this way, at the hour of the com- 30
plete maturity of a talent! They are
simply the widest unfolding of an artist's
nature; they have in happy equilibrium the
qualities of observation and the qualities
of style. For Alphonse Daudet Numa 35
Roumestan will mark the interfusion of a
temperament and a subject that are made
for each other, the perfect plenitude of
a work which the writer exactly fills.'

II

qualities. This, of course, is a charm, in a style, only when nature has been generous. To Alphonse Daudet she has been exceptionally so; she has placed in his hands an instrument of many chords. A delicate, nervous organization, active and indefatigable in spite of its delicacy, and familiar with emotion of almost every kind, equally acquainted with pleasure and with pain; a light, quick, joyous, yet reflective, imagination, a faculty of seeing images, making images, at every turn, of conceiving everything in the visible form, in the plastic spirit; an extraordinary sensibility to all the impressions of life and a faculty of language which is in perfect harmony with his wonderful fineness of perception - these are some of the qualities of which he is the happy pos40 sessor, and which make his equipment for the work he has undertaken exceedingly rich. There are others besides; but enumerations are ponderous, and we should avoid that danger in speaking of a genius. whose lightness of touch never belies itself. His elder brother, who has not his talent, has written a little book about him in which the word modernité perpetually occurs. M. Ernest Daudet, in Mon Frère et Moi, insists upon his possession of the qualities expressed by this barbarous substantive, which is so indispensable to the new school. Alphonse Daudet is, in truth, very modern; he has all the newlydeveloped, the newly-invented, perceptions. Nothing speaks so much to his imagination as the latest and most composite things, the refinements of current

As I say, however, these are details, and I have touched them prematurely. Alphonse Daudet is a charmer, and the effect of his brilliant, friendly, indefinable 45 genius is to make it difficult, in speaking of him, to take things in their order or follow a plan. In writing of him some time ago, in another place, I so far lost my head as to remark, with levity, that he 50 was a great little novelist.' The diminutive epithet then, I must now say, was nothing more than a term of endearment, the result of an irresistible impulse to express a sense of personal fondness. This; kind of feeling is difficult to utter in English, and the utterance of it, so far as this is possible, is not thought consistent with

We proceed usually from the former to the latter, while the French reverse the process. Except in politics, they are uncomfortable in the presence of abstrac5 tions, and lose no time in reducing them to the concrete. But even the concrete, for them, is a field for poetry, which brings us to the fact that the delightful thing in Daudet's talent is the inveterate poetical touch. This is what mainly distinguishes him from the other lights of the realistic school modifies so completely in his case the hardness of consistent realism. There is something very hard, very dry, in Flaubert, in Edmond de Goncourt, in the robust Zola; but there is something very soft in Alphonse Daudet. 'Benevolent nature,' says Zola, has placed him at that exquisite point where poetry ends and reality begins.' That is happily said; Daudet's great characteristic is this mixture of the sense of the real with the sense of the beautiful. His imagination is constantly at play with his theme; it has a horror of the literal, the limited; it sees an object in all its intermingled relations.