[In her bibliographical note to American Humor ( 1931) Constance Rourke wrote that The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925) ‘proved highly stimulating, even though the present conclusion that the international scene is a natural and even traditional subject is at variance with that of Brooks.’ James is no less an American nor are his characters less American for living in Europe. He is ‘a man of his native soil’ as much as any other American writer, and his work reflects that with the ‘supreme excellence’, in Rourke’s estimation, perhaps as the result of the distance he obtained by living in Europe. As it turned out his apprehensions, misgivings and disillusionment landed with equal force on both continents. Has America itself ever satisfactorily settled the problem of its own deracination? Follows cut-up of Brooks’ 8th Chapter.] *
‘The old England that an American loves was rapidly passing into history. Nothing was left but little sorts of sets’ [Henry James thinks late in his life,] yet from the first there had been discordant notes in the harmony. Disconcerting had been the moment when, years before, James had encountered face to face the poet he had earliest known and best loved. Tennyson had not been Tennysonian. Fine, fine, fine he had supposed the laureate would be, fine in the sense of that quality in the texture of his verse which had appealed all along by its most inward principle to his taste. He had never dreamed of a growling Tennyson, a swarthy, scraggy berserk, with a rustic accent, whose talk ran upon port wine and tobacco . . .Tennyson had not been Tennyson . . .Had England proved to be altogether English? Had not Europe itself positively ceased to be European? . . .One couldn’t, to be sure, press the point too far. . .
In 1899, after he had retired to Rye, he wrote to a friend:’ I am only reacting, I suppose, against many, many long years of London, which have ended by giving me a deep sense of the quantity of ’cry’ in all that life compared to the almost total absence of ‘wool’. By which I mean, simply, that acquaintances and relations there have away of seeming at last to end in smoke –while having consumed a great deal of fuel and taken a great deal of time.’ But long before this he had begun to complain of his predicament: more and more frequent, in his letters and stories, had been his protests against ‘the vast English Philistine mob,’ against ‘that perfection of promptitude that makes the motions of the London mind so happy a mixture of those of the parrot and the sheep.’ In a letter to Norton in 1886 he expressed the same opinion of the English upper class as that which he had put into the mouth of the Princess Casamassima: ‘the condition of that body seems to me to be in many ways very much the same rotten and collapsible one as that of the French aristocracy before the revolution – minus cleverness and conversation; or perhaps it’s more like the heavy, congested and depraved Roman world upon which the barbarians came down.’ He had found is fellow-writers in Paris ‘ignorant, corrupt and complacent’; and now, in England, these great people –they were doing, on every hand, things that one mustn’t do if one is to remain great, if one is to retain the grand glamor of one’s greatness. ‘Gouty, apoplectic, depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and skepticism, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse’- so they were, so they seemed, at least in one’s darker moments . . . ‘That was the real tragedy of the master’s life,’ says Mr. Hueffer. ‘He had found English people who were just people singularly nasty.’
For behind this façade of an aging man of the world there was a child hidden, a Puritan child . . .
James himself tells us that the material for his portraits of misunderstood authors as was drawn from the depths of his own experience; and what a comment they are upon the unspoken bitterness of his own disenchantment! London, England, Europe, where he had supposed that the great were always great, the honorable were always honored, that the fine was always perceived and the noble invariably appreciated! Alas, for that superstitious valuation of the Old World against which he had fought a losing battle! ‘Bottomless vulgarity’! It has come to nothing less. . .He had toiled up the rocky slope of the British Olympus, and he had arrived at twilight and found the gods nodding on their dilapidated thrones. Ha, that wondrous fairy-tale of his youth- the Europe of the Americans It had flown away as a dream, as a vision of the night.
Was it possible – could he himself have survived in America? If he had stayed, if he had gone back, and if . . .What mightn’t he have done with people he would have really understood, people he could have approached en maître, whose thoughts would have been his thoughts, whose feelings would have been his feelings, whose desires would have been the desires of his own flesh and blood? If he hadn’t been on the defensive as regards his opinions and enjoyments? If he had been able to live without pomp and circumstance to back him, with mystery and ceremony to protect him? If he had been able to read the universe into his own country as Balzac had read it into France?
Well, his life had been conditioned and related and involves – it had been, so to say, fatalized . . . and yet. There was William James, perpetually urging him to come home . . . if he wanted some ‘real, roomy, rustic happiness’ . . .with a woodpile as large as an ordinary house and a hearth four feet wide and the American sun flooding the floor . . . at Tamworth Iron Works. That was just it: Tamworth Iron Works. You could feel the rust on your fingers, and the weeds and the litter and the dilapidation – and the roominess, for that matter, and the rusticity, and the bare pine boards, and that everlasting, that absolutely empty, that positively terrifying forest, and the bouncing, bustling promiscuity of the whole business. One had to face facts . . . And yet, when, one didn’t face facts, when one didn’t come up to the surface and glare about but just drifted, allowed the stream to carry one along, down there, among the seaweed, where the light was so ambiguous, one saw, felt, heard- yes, one heard something, a knock of an old vagrant question. “A man always pays, in one way or another, for expatriation, for detachment from his plain primary heritage.’
One might certainly over-estimate the intensity with which James consciously entertained any such thoughts as these. At this very moment he was remarking, in a paper on Henry Harland, that the time had come for ‘looking more closely into the old notion that, to have a quality of his own, a writer must needs draw his sap from the soil of his origin.’ But how much of the will to believe in his own destiny, how much of the unconscious pragmatism which he said he had always practiced, what an immense need of self-justification had obliterated from his sight the instinctive beliefs and desires and misgivings that carried I on their drama in the depths of his soul!. . . .
Henry James never satisfactorily settled the problem of his own deracination.
* ‘In every attempted resuscitation of an old author,’ James writes in The Works of Epictetus’, one of two things is either expressly or tacitly claimed for him. He is conceived to possess an historical or an intrinsic interest. He is introduced to us either as a phenomena, an object worthy of study in connection with a particular phase of civilization, or as a teacher, an object worthy of study in himself, independently of time or place.’ Here we study Van Wyks Brooks in connection with a phase of American history.
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