The Europeans, and Other Novels

To read Mr. Henry James, Jr., is to experience a light but continuous gratification of mind. It is to be intellectually tickled, provided one is capable of such an exercise. It is to take a pleasure so simple and facile that it seems only one step removed from physical content in the lavish cleverness of an almost incessantly witty writer, — a pleasure enhanced, no doubt, by a lurking sense that one must be a little clever one’s self in order to keep pace with such dazzling mental agility. To people who have read a good deal of French, and read it because they liked it, — and why else should an Englishman or an American ever advance in that literature beyond the absurd Racine of his schooldays?— the writing of Mr. James has the additional interest of offering the best of proof that the English language approaches the French much more nearly than is usually supposed, in its capacity for what may be called current epigram. Occasionally, also, Mr. James comes strikingly near to showing that our “ sober speech ” might, under proper cultivation, blossom as richly as that of the lively Gaul, into what Mr. Mallock calls “ that perfect flower of modern civilization, the innuendo.” But to do our countryman justice, he is too truly refined to indulge more than sparingly in this exotic species of literary ornament. The clean turns and crisp graces of his style are such as peculiarly befit an essayist, and some of his critical sketches are extremely admirable ; but he is too freaky and irresponsible to be always a safe guide, even in matters of bookish opinion, and it is as a novelist only that we propose to consider him.

Within the last three years, Mr. James has written two noteworthy stories, both of which appeared first in these pages. One and the same purpose animates them, and that is to illustrate the different types of character and manners produced by European and American civilization ; or, more strictly speaking, by European civilization and American semi-barbarism. On this one point our author keeps all his bright faculties intently focused, and studies the human specimens, which he has first carefully selected, with the methodical minuteness and ecstatic patience of a microseopist.

In The American, as the readers of The Atlantic undoubtedly remember, the hero, Christopher Newman, a self-made Yankee who has gathered a great fortune before the age of thirty-five, and gone to Paris to spend it, naïvely resolves to take him a wife out of the Faubourg St. Germain, gets the entrée in a sufficiently unlikely manner of that difficult stronghold and very nearly succeeds in carrying out his project. His wife is in fact promised him by her high-bred and fastidious family. But when these potentates see an unexpected chance of marrying her to an imbecile Irish lord they break their pledge. The passive bride, whose heart had really been won, has just spirit enough to baffle them by going into a Carmelite convent, and the American, after one rueful promenade round the walls of his lady’s sepulchre, takes the self which he had made away to parts unknown.

In The Europeans,¹ which came as a kind of per contra to The American, we have a brother and sister of mixed Swiss and American parentage, who have passed all their lives (they are both in the neighborhood of thirty) on the continent of Europe. The sister, Eugenia, has made a morganatic marriage with a German prince, which, for state reasons, the reigning family desire to annul; and the brother, Felix, though a pleasant fellow and a clever artist, is virtually a penniless adventurer; so the two come to seek their fortune among their American cousins. These prove to be people of wealth and the highest respectability, living puritanically and yet with dignified abundance at a fine old country-seat, seven miles and a half from Boston, —say in Watertown; and the equable currents of suburban life are of course terribly disturbed by this unlooked-for foreign irruption. In the ende Felix wins and carries away to the Parisian heaven the younger and more enterprising of his pretty cousins; while Eugenia, after a course of the most finished coquetry with a gentleman retired from the India trade, returns as she came. But whether it was because she could not, at the last, quite bring her own mind to the flavorless conditions of a virtuous New England lift, or because Mr. Acton could not reconcile himself to her constitutional duplicity, we are left, after three steadfast perusals of this part of the narrative, absolutely in doubt.

It will be perceived at a glance that all these plans —they cannot be called plots — afford abundant opportunities for humor of situation, every one of which, it need hardly be said, Mr. James brilliantly improves. Newman, before the old Marquise de Bellegarde, replying to her slow and pompous explanations of the uncompromising pride of the race he dared seek to come among by the cheerful assurance that he wasn’t proud, and did n’t mind them; Felix expatiating to his blameless uncle, sitting reluctantly for his portrait, on the ravishing novelty of “ calling on twenty young ladies and going out to walk with them,” sitting in the evening on the piazza and listening to the crickets, and going to bed at ten o’clock; Mr. Brand making a pale, intrepid confession of Unitarianism to the heathen strangers who had never heard of that form of faith; and the Rev. Benjamin Babcock taking a small bag of hominy with him to all the principal Continental hotels, and passing sleepless nights because he cannot make Newman feel, as he does, the overwhelming “ seriousness of art and life,” — all these are spectacles that minister a malign delight. It is in single scenes, detached portraits, and episodes like those of Valentin’s duel and Newman’s summer tour with Mr. Babcock, that Mr. James is at his very best. The habit of his mind is so irresistibly analytic that he must needs concentrate himself in succession upon each separate det ail of his subject. His romance is a series of situations imperfectly vivified by action. There is a scene in The American,— a stormy night in the Rue de l’Université, when Madame de Cintré goes to the piano and plays, — and there are a dozen idle scenes in the more languid Europeans, which have absolutely no connection with the thread of the story. In like manner his portraits are a succession of uncolored features, and his philosophy is a succession of admirably quotable aphorisms. Here probably we have the reason suggested why we can hear Mr. James’s characters so much better than we can see them. In the nature of things only one word can be spoken at a time, and Mr. James is an acute listener and an alert reporter; so that his conversations, except when he endeavors to put into the mouths of his creatures some of his own over-subtle considerations, are exquisitely real and just. But over and above all the items of aspect, whether in places or people, there is a physiognomy, a look, and this is what Mr. James never imparts. He tells us clearly, and with an almost anxious emphasis, that Claire de Cintré had a “long, fair face;” that Gertrude Wentworth had “ sweet, dull eyes; ” that his delightful and deplorable Valentin de Bellegarde had “ a round head high above the ears,” and “ a crop of short silky hair;” and that the Wentworth mansion in Watertown had white wooden pilasters in front, supporting a pediment with one large central window and two small ones. And we listen as if we were blindfolded, and credit our informant certainly, but do not see at all.

It, is a question whether Mr. James himself sees. He is so spirituel, and his conceptions are so subtle, that he has not sense enough (the term is used metaphysically and with entire respect) to give them form, still less flesh. And so, although a most entertaining chronicler, he escapes being an artist, for an artist must portray.

The American is perhaps the finest fragment in modern fiction, but it is only a fragment. The Europeans is much less fine, but equally unfinished. His narratives are so fine-spun and so deficient in incident, so unpicturesque as a whole and weak in the way of sensuous imagery, that they are specially ill fitted for serial publication. His flavor is too delicate to be suspended and superseded for a month. But he never wrote anything which was not well worth a connected reperusal, and nothing strikes one with more surprise in re-reading him than the unremembered, one might almost say unintentional, goodness—pure and simple— of some of his characters. Christopher Newman is as noble a fellow, in essentials, as ever breathed. Ife is the soul of honor as distinguished from its code, which is gracefully personified in Valentin de Bellegarde. He is generous, gentle, and gloriously frank; he is delicate-minded and true. He has wrath and scorn only for what is vile, and in his forgiveness of the base injury done him by the elder Bellegardes, and the relinquishment of his vengeance, there is the essence of a Christianity usually considered as much too fine for every-day use as unalloyed gold would be. Yet all this sterling worth seems to be held not merely lightly, but cheaply, by Newman’s biographer. Our final impression of this simple hero is of a man disconcerted and disheartened, and who more than half deserved his bitter discomfiture for the undeniable social enormities of having telegraphed his engagement to America, and shaken hands on his introduction to a duke with the affable remark that he was happy to make his acquaintance.

Again, in The Europeans Felix beguiles Gertrude away from a home, austere indeed, but singularly safe, dignified, and refined, into the dark ways of European Bohemianism; and Eugenia seems to have missed the affluent settlement which she had exiled herself to secure, because she disgusted a high-minded suitor by lavish and inappropriate lying; yet we cannot help feeling — and who but Mr. James makes us feel? — that Felix won a victory and Eugenia made an escape.

In general, one cannot help wishing that our native authors would have done with this incessant drawing of comparisons between ourselves and the folk in Europe, and our respective wavs of living, thinking, and talking. Publicly to compare one’s self with another is always ungraceful and undignified. It always proclaims self-consciousness, usually self-uneasiness. Tt was very well for Count, de Gasparin, once upon a time, to write of America Injure Europe, hut for America herself to be passing between two mirrors looks rather silly. We have our own life to live, our own resources to unfold, our own crude and complex conditions finally to compel into some sort of symmetry, our own youth to train. If we do not evolve some new forms adapted to our new environment, it will show pretty conclusively that there is small health in us. At all events, let us concentrate our wits on our affairs for a time, and not worry about our looks.

Mr. James has made his favorite theme piquant by the overflow of his own dainty drollery, but if we want to see how it appears when vulgarly and yet vigorously treated, let us read a recent novelette by M. L. Scudder, Jr., entitled Almost an Englishman.² Therein a Cayuga County lawyer and a Suffolk County gentleman, who have been college classmates, cross the Atlantic in company with a father and daughter returning to England, and a husband and wife from Chicago. The lawyer, Ketchum, is a rabid American. The Bostonian, Hill, is an abject English admirer and copyist. Ketehum’s character is drawn sympathetically, Hill’s theoretically, but there is a certain brute ability in the way they are developed and discriminated. Ketchum has a “ long nose and a keen, cold eye,” and he announces to Mr. Hill his intention of making friends among their fellow-passengers in these terms: —

“ I guess it will be money in our pockets to make our friends among these people right away. We’ve got to know ’em, or some of ’em, and if we push right in we can take our choice before the sets are formed.”

Lawrence Hill was shocked. He never " pushed in ” anywhere.

Again, when Hill apprises Ketchum that the English maiden has promised to marry him, the lawyer thus felicitates him: —

“ ‘ Great Cæsar’s ghost! Jerusalem crickets,’ pulling his chin-beard in undisguised astonishment. ' You don’t say so! I knew you were struck, but not that bad. Can’t you — can’t you get a new trial, or a change of venue, or an appeal, or something? ’ ”

Nevertheless, Ketchum is the deus ex machina who by his energy and shrewdness unravels all the plots, detects the criminals, and prepares the way for the reward of virtue. At the last, Lawrence Hill receives his English bride from the hands of relatives, whose hearts thrill with joyful relief when they find that the Bostonian does not expectorate upon their drawing-room carpets, while Ketchum appropriately marries the widow of the Chicago defaulter, Ogle, to whom he had prudently proposed before her husband’s release from the body. Mr. Scudder makes a rather good point when he represents the English bride as reproving her husband for despising his own country, and bracing him up to patriotism; but his prevailing purpose seems to have been to make both his Britons and his Yankees as unpleasant as possible.

What it might profit us to study — let it be said again as it has here been said several times already— is the vast superiority in method and workmanship of the average English novel to our own. Now here are two cases in point: a tale of English origin, though reprinted here without ceremony, and one of Harper’s new library. A tolerably foolish pair of books may be surmised from the titles, Blush Roses³ and Molly Bawn.⁴ But as George Eliot once said that the ignorance of a man is of a better quality than the ignorance of a woman, so the folly of Molly Bawn is bewitching and brilliant compared with that of her American cousin. Both books are conspicuously immature, slight in characterization, and threadbare in plot, and there is not much reason in art or morals why either should be. Both affect unflagging sprightliness: in Blush Roses the claim is rested on the incessant employment by the English and American pupils in a French pension of the phraseology of Dickens, and in Molly Bawn, on an extremely copious vocabulary of what is claimed as fashionable slang. Of the two tales, Blush Roses is undeniably the more innocent and refined, and so, alas, it consists well enough with the perversity of human nature that one should drop it with an impatient sigh, wondering how long, in the mystery of providence, such futilities will continue to be written and read; while in the case of its ne’er-do-weel rival, we are for a time propitiated (it would be in the author’s style to say mollified) by the saucy graces of the Irish heroine, and the genuine ardor of feeling which she appears to kindle in her numerous admirers. And since, if man, woman, or book cannot be useful, it is doubly incumbent upon them to be agreeable, it may be worth while to inquire a little more carefully what it is which makes this frivolous Molly Bawn so uncommonly — again we adopt the author’s own choice language — " fetching.”

It is partly, perhaps, the entire and audacious naturalness of most of the conversation. Here is a random specimen or two. Molly, whose real name, by the way, is Eleanor, has privately and provisionally engaged herself to Tedcastle George Luttrell, who is visiting in her brother’s house, and it is thus that they discuss, one ardent summer morning, the practical aspect of the situation: —

“ ' Are you poor, Teddy t ’

“ ' Very. Will that make you like me less? ’

“ ' Probably it will make me like you more,’ she replies, with a bewitching smile, stroking down the hand that supports the obnoxious umbrella [the other is supporting herself] almost tenderly. ' It is only the very nicest men that have n’t a farthing in the world. I have no money, either, and if I had, I could n’t keep it; so we are well met.’

“ ' But think what a bad match you are making,’ says he, regarding her curiously. ' Did you never ask yourself whether I was well off, or otherwise? ’

“ ‘ Never! ’ with a gay laugh. ' If I were going to marry you next week or so, it might occur to me to ask the question; but everything is so far away, what does it signify ? . . . The reason I like you [reverting to something which has gone before, and tilting back her hat so that all her pretty face is laid bare, etc.], the reason I like you— No! stay where you are! [seeing a tendency on his part to creep nearer] I only said I liked you. If I had mentioned the word love, indeed, —but the weather is far too warm to admit of endearments! ’

“ ' You are right, as you always are,’ says Luttrell, with superficial amiability, being piqued.

“ ' Ted,’ says the girl, a little later on, ' it puzzles me why you should think so highly of my personal charms.’ And leaning forward to look into her lover’s eyes, ' Tell me this: have you been much away — abroad, I mean — on the Continent, and that? ’

“ ' Well, yes, pretty much so.’

“ ' Have you been to Paris? ’

“ ' Oh, yes, several times.’

“ ' Vienna? ’

“ ' No. I wait to go there with you,’ “ ' Rome?’

“ ' Yes, twice. The governor was fond of sending us away between seventeen and twenty-five, — to enlarge our minds he said, to get rid of ns he meant.’

“ ' Are there many of you? ’

“ ' An awful lot. I would be ashamed to say how many. Ours was indeed a numerous father.’

“ ' He is n’t dead? ’ asked Molly, in the low tone befitting the occasion if he should be.

“ ' Oh, no. He’s alive and kicking,’ replies Mr. Luttrell, with more force than elegance. ' And I hope he ’ll keep on so for many years to come. He’s about the best friend I have.’

“ ' I hope he won’t keep on the kicking part of it,’ says Molly, with a delicious laugh which ripples through the air and shows her utter enjoyment of her own wit.”

Not to laugh when Molly laughs is impossible; so Luttrell joins her, and they make merry over his vulgarity.

It may gratify the apprehensive reader to know that though these lovers are but at the beginning of a very fluctuating experience, this formidable father is never mentioned again; but there is no denying that it requires a species of art to be as artless as all this, and the insignificant portion of the book which is not slang is in very nice, plain, few-syllabled English. There is also a good and quite fresh situation among the minor characters, where the parties to a marriage of the coolest convenience known in the highest circles, who had agreed to separate directly after the wedding ceremony, meet accidentally, and fall honestly in love with each other. The episode is not well worked out, however, the characters of this pair being mere reflections of the principal ones,—the man more or less of a Luttrell, the woman wearifully of a piece with Molly. And in general we must restrict our indulgence to the earlier and less edifying portions of the story. There is no real continuity between the irresponsible flirt of the chief part of the book and the austere artist of the last thirty pages; and by the time that Molly has achieved an instantaneous success as a concert singer, supported a beggared family for three months, and then opportunely fallen heir to a genteel sufficiency of twenty thousand pounds a year, we begin to fancy that we have heard this tale before, and to suspect that after all we have thrown our precious charity away. To Blush Roses belongs at least the merit of not having deluded us for an instant.

There are possibilities in the Old Slip Warehouse⁵ of a rather uncommon order, but it is greatly to be feared that they are past possibilities. The author has evidently had long practice in poor writing, and hardly suspects herself that she wastes her material wantonly. Dark deeds are done in her pages, and incontinently forgotten; secrets are vaguely hinted, but never divulged; characters are sketched in with spirit, and calmly belied; and what might have been a very fair melodramatic plot is offered to the public in a shapeless jumble, with four successive beginnings and no end at all. The conception of the old city warehouse itself, with the decayed dignity of its architecture, the thunder of trade before and the wash of the tide behind it, and of the two miserly old-maiden owners, living in thrifty comfort in low rooms on the seventh floor, and collecting their rents with anile enthusiasm, is worthy of Dickens in his best days, and if patiently elaborated might have been made extremely effective, even without the somewhat pointless crime which is committed within its walls. But we are vouchsafed only a passing glimpse of that which gives the tale its title, — a picture too disjointed even to be called a dissolving view. The same lack of vital connection with the story belongs to all the other promising and dramatic points,—the father’s curse, the hero’s birth-mark, and the discovery of the marriage certificate, whose existence nobody, by the way, seems ever to have questioned. Mrs. Denison could never, it may be, have created character, although the late apparition of Miss Crippen in the present story appears to show that she might, even now, draw caricatures cleverly; but the power, only less desirable by a novelist, of being able to concoct a multitude of strange and romantic incidents is undoubtedly hers. It is a pity that she, and the whole host of her careless confrères, should not learn, by carefull study of that excellent second and third class work which literary craftsmen in England, France, and even Germany continually turn out, how to make a proper use of her own order of ability.

Sibyl Spencer ⁶ is a strictly and somewhat sternly American romance, the scene of which is laid —of all unromantic places and periods! — in Connecticut, during the war of 1812. The discouraging nature of his material considered, the author must, we think, he held to have managed it well. He appears thoroughly to have studied the fierce but heartless polities of that day, and the varying shades of opinion and degrees of passionate prejudice exemplified by the stately senator, the scholarly divine, the canny deacon, and the young volunteer soldiers, of different social grades, are graphically and even dramatically described. So much of the solid talk in these pages is put into the mouths of Deacon Knapp aforesaid, and of a certain shrewd and intrepid “hired help” brought up in the clergyman’s family, that we feel like thanking the author for having been so merciful to us in the matter of dialect. In fact he manages the rustic speech of old New England, if not with the supreme good taste of Miss Jewett in her Deephaven sketches, at least modestly and like an artist; not as a prig, anxious above everything to show his exaggerated horror of all which falls below the high-school standard. The talk of Mr. Kent’s more literate characters appears to us unnatural and stilted, but probably he meant to make it so; for it is matter of history and tradition that well-bred people did express themselves in those earlier days of the republic with very considerable pomposity.

While, however, commending Mr. Kent’s politics and his historical portraits, we cannot speak so well of his dramatic power or his delineation of sentiment. In the not unfamiliar motto chosen for the title-page of Sibyl Spencer we are reminded that it is " Amour, Amour, Amour,” which lies at the heart of everything, but the sort of “ Amour” which Mr. Kent depicts seems fully as problematical a motive power as Miss Hosmer’s permanent magnet. It is probably a desperate sense of having failed to make the emotional part of his novel very thrilling which leads the author to take our breath away by a general massacre of his chief personages, in the last three pages. The device is barbarous, and worse yet it is futile. True tragedy is never unforeshadowed in art, seldom in life. There is a dead set of circumstances, a call of character, a consecration of spirit, which announces it. There is a pause before and after it, like that which precedes and follows the bursting of fatal storm. It will not be used as a mere dernier ressort, and avenges itself on the bungling workman who seeks so to employ it by utterly destroying the symmetry of that which he has made.