Henry James

But it is a part of English hypocrisy, or let it be more politely said, English reserve.

that whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences we insist on making light of any great difficulties or griefs that may beset us and just there i suppose is the reason why our great novelists have shunned great books as subject-matter it is fortunate for us jarring though it is to our patriotic sense that mr henry james was not born an englishman that he was born of a race of specialists men who are impenitent specialists in whatever they take up be it sport commerce politics anything and it is fortunate for us that in paris and in the straightest literary sect there his method began to form itself and the art of prose fiction became to him a religion in that art he finds as much inspiration as swinburne found in the art of poetry just as swinburne was the most learned of our poets so is mr james the most learned of our let us say our prose writers i doubt whether the heaped total of his admirations would be found to outweigh the least one of the admirations that swinburne had but though he has been a level-headed reader of the works that are good enough for him to praise his abstract passion for the art of fiction itself has always been fierce and constant partly to the parisian partly to the american element in him we owe the stories that he and of our great writers he only has written about books and the writers of books here indeed in these incomparable stories are imaginary great books that are as real to us as real ones are sometimes as in the author of beltrafio a great book itself is the very hero of the story we are not told what exactly was the title of that second book which ambient's wife so hated that she let her child die rather than that he should grow up under the influence of its author but i have a queer conviction that it was the daisies usually in these stories it is through the medium of some ardent young disciple speaking in the first person that we become familiar with the great writer it is thus that we know hugh veriker throughout whose twenty volumes was woven that message or meaning that figure in the carpet which eluded even the elect it is thus that we know neil parade the manuscript of whose last book was mislaid and lost so tragically so comically and it is also through parade's disciple that we make incidental acquaintance with guy walsingham the young lady who wrote obsessions and with dora forbes the burly man with a red moustache who wrote the other way round these two books are the only inferior books mentioned by mr james but stay i was forgetting the top of the tree by amy evans and also those nearly forty volumes by henry st george for all the greatness of his success in life henry st george is the saddest of the authors portrayed by mr james his shadow mere was splendid and its splendour is the measure of his shame the shame he bore so bravely in the ruck of his output he is the only one of those authors who did not do his best of him alone it may not be said that he was generous and delicate and pursued the prize he is a more pathetic figure than even dencombe the author of the middle years dencombe's grievance was against fate not against himself it had taken too much of his life to produce too little of his art the art had come but it had come after everything else ah for another go ah for a better chance a second chance that's the delusion there never was to be but one we work in the dark we do what we can we give what we have our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task the rest is the madness of art the scene of dencombe's death is one of the most deeply beautiful things ever done by mr james it is so beautiful as to be hardly sad it rises and glows and gladdens it is more exquisite than anything in the middle years no i will not say that mr james's art can always carry to us the conviction that his character's books are as fine as his own i crave it may be a foolish whim but i do crave ocular evidence for my belief that those books were written and were published i want to see them all ranged along goodly shelves a few days ago i sat in one of those libraries which seemed to be doorless nowhere to the eye was broken the array of serried volumes each door was flush with the surrounding shelves Across each the edges of the shelves were mimicked, and in the spaces between these edges the backs of books were pasted congruously with the whole effect.

Some of these backs had been taken from actual books.

Others had been made specially and were stamped with facetious titles that rather depressed me.

So there's Melville.

And then Henry James said that Hawthorne was the great American novelist.

So he's kept his place in American literature for that reason.

But he's kind of hard to read.

The Scarlet Letter is, I actually think, the most advanced level of Hawthorne that you can get to and that it is a bit impenetrable because he has his own language.

It's

like starting Henry James with The Golden Bowl or Wings of the Dove.

Just go back, read Portrait of a Lady, read Washington Square.