Van Wyck Brooks

“ To the end of his life, then, and however disenchanting his experience of Europe may have been, America, to James, signified failure and destruction. It was the dark country, the sinister country, where the earth was a quicksand, where amiable uncles ended in disaster, where men were turned into machines, where genius was subject to all sorts of inscrutable catastrophes. ”

“ The American artist in the American air was a doomed man: pitfalls surrounded him on every side. Was not even Hawthorne a case in point, Hawthorne who had himself attributed the paucity of his productions to a "total lack of sympathy at the age when his mind would naturally have been most effervescent"? What might not Hawthorne have become if he had sprung from another soil! . . . Thus Henry James read his own fears into the world that surrounded him. Was there any occasion for these fears, any justification in the facts of the case itself? ”

“ One thing may be said of him: if he has been estranged from life, his lot has been cast amid conditions that are the least calculated to win him back again. . . . "The generation between 1865 and 1894," as Henry Adams remarks, "was already mortgaged, and no one knew it better than the generation itself." . . . Henry James knows it, knows it in advance: has he failed to catch the signs of the times, to foresee the chaos of the new age, the decline of the social life of his countrymen, the drop of the American barometer? Far from reassuring is the spectacle that lies before him. ”

“ IN the last story that he published, The Jolly Corner, James presents an expatriate like himself, Spencer Brydon, who, returning to New York after an absence of a quarter of a century, finds himself obsessed with thoughts of what his destiny might have been if he had remained in America. He still owns the old house on lower Fifth Avenue, the "jolly corner" in which he had passed his childhood: it is empty and deserted and full of dusty memories, and Brydon falls into the habit of passing his nights there, roaming through the great blank chambers and evoking the past. ”

“ The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. ”

“ And thereupon he becomes convinced that the old house is still haunted by the self who stayed at home. Who is he, what is he, what has he become, that abandoned, that American self? Brydon, invaded by the illusion, stalks the ghost; and at last, one night, in the first glimmering of the dawn, he becomes aware that it has actually taken form. Prowling about the house, he has himself opened a certain door; he returns to the room and finds it closed. Shall he open it? It comes over him that the other Brydon does not wish to be seen. He hesitates; he masters his curiosity; he turns away ”

“ And in any case—granting that one didn't, for one's life, for the very life of one's imagination, dare to penetrate too far beyond one’s own circle—how could one ever create a comédie humaine out of the world at one's disposal? ”

“ We remember the moral that James tells us he had drawn from Hawthorne's case before his first naïve opinion of Hawthorne had been subjected to the test of his friend H. B. Brewster's "cosmopolitan culture," the moral "that an American could be an artist, one of the finest, without 'going outside' about it." Clearly, Hawthorne to James' mind was the exception that proved the rule, the rule that, without "going outside," an American could not be an artist at all, and even Hawthorne ceased to be an entirely convincing exception. ”

“ Or is there some truth in the theory that a given society must have arrived at a certain equilibrium and crystallized in certain more or less permanent forms before the novelist can effectively handle it? "Looking about for myself," James wrote in 1871, "I conclude that the face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But," he adds, "it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. . . . To write well and worthily of American things one needs even more than elsewhere to be a master." ”

“ Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things of American life—especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably, as a general thing, be appalling. The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say. ”

“ It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle—it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist. ”

“ We remember how the narrator in The Aspern Papers marvels that Jeffrey Aspern, that American Shelley of the previous age, had "found means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand and express everything." ”

“ We have it all, or much of it, in The Bostonians, that admirable novel which deserves its generic title; we have there a most memorable image of the aftermath of the heroic age, the ebb-tide of all those humanitarian impulses which, at an exceptional hour and at the hands of exceptional men, had assumed such elevated if rather fantastic forms, and had now lost themselves in fatuity and petrifaction. ”

“ He is determined to vindicate his existence, to write as man has never written before: had he not convinced himself, in the face of Mr Lincoln's call for volunteers, that this might be "at least a negative of combat, an organized, not a loose and empty one, something definitely and firmly parallel to action in the tented field"? He is infinitely curious about life; his sensibilities are clear and fresh. For the rest, he is circumspect and somewhat prim. Should an artist have passions? ”

“ Like Longueville, in Confidence, he is annoyed when he discovers that he has obeyed a force which he was unable to measure at the time; he has little taste for giving himself up and never does so without very soon wishing to take himself back. ”

“ No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins ”