Henry James

PAMPHLETS ON AMERICAN WRITERS • NUMBER 4 Henry James BY LEON EDEL UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS • MINNEAPOLIS ©Copyright 1960 by Leon Edel ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Printed in the United States of America at the North Central Publishing Company, St. Paul Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-62855 fourth printing, with revisions, 1963 Distributed to high schools in the United States by McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. New York Chicago Corte Madera, Calif. Dallas PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON, BOMBAY, AND KARACHI, AND IN CANADA BY THOMAS ALLEN, LTD., TORONTO HENRY JAMES LEON EDEL, biographer and editor of Henry James, is a professor of English at New York University. He has written or edited more than twenty books, the most important being his Life of Henry James, The Modern Psychological Novel, and Literary Biography. Henry James H,.ENRY JAMES was the "largest" literary figure to come out of America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was not "large" as Melville is large; he did not have Melville's global vision, nor did he dream of epical landscapes. His largeness stemmed rather from the literary territories he annexed to the New World and the career he fashioned in two hemispheres. At a time when American literature was still young and certain of its writers were still sharpening their pens, Henry James crossed from the New World to the Old and was able to take his seat at the table of fiction beside George Eliot and Turgenev, Flaubert and Zola. He found the novel in English still the easy undisciplined and relaxed form it had been from its early days, and he refashioned it into a complex work of literary art. If he was junior to the fellow-craftsmen whom he joined in Europe, he achieved, in the fullness of time, a status equal to them, and in some instances he surpassed them. For he was not only a practitioner of fiction; he was one of its finest critics and theorists. It was he who gave us the terminology most useful in our time for the criticism of the novel. Henry James wrote for fifty years; he was a prolific writer and several times glutted his own market in the magazines. Never a "best seller," as we know best sellers today, he nevertheless earned an honorable living by his pen. He was fortunate in being born into an affluent family; but from his early twenties he began to earn his own way and wholly by literary work. He was alone among major American writers in never seeking any other employment. He was devoted to his art; and his productivity did not 5 LEON EDEL influence his meticulous style — that style by which he believed a writer gains his passport to posterity. At first his prose was fresh and clear; later it became magnificently weighted and complex in its allusiveness and imagery —and accordingly in its evocative power. His goals remained always aesthetic. He believed from the first that the artist in fiction is a historian of that part of life never found in history books: the private life that goes on behind the walls of dwellings, but which is also a part of the society in which it is lived. Literature for him was the great repository of life; and he believed that if the novel is a mirror in a roadway, it reflects not only the panorama of existence, but the countenance of the artist in the very act of experiencing the world around him. During his five decades of creation he brought into being some twenty novels and one hundred and twelve ta