The Portable Henry James by Henry James Read Free Book Online Page A

the less a private occasion, a concert of one, both performer and auditor, who plays for his own ear, his own hand, his own innermost sense, and for the bliss and capacity of his instrument.
    Style is different from the sacred rage of perfect art. It is more easy, self-indulgent, general, more generally happy and more promiscuous, and finally it is inescapable. For James it was the essential process by which the individual engages the universe—the very membrane of individual consciousness. It defines and “inevitably provides for Character”—“Every inch of it is personal tone, or in other words brooding expression raised to the highest energy.” Shakespeare’s powers of expression—“the greatest ever laid upon man”—could meet any part of that universe and work any subject, flicker, or donnée. Whatever Shakespeare touched with “the lucid stillness of his style,” he changed and made it his, as his style achieved “some copious equivalent of thought for every grain of the grossness of reality.” Here unconcerned with the question of any significant “truth,” the modernist Henry James has no complaint that “the subjects of the Comedies are, without exception, old wives’ tales,” and that the “subjects of the Histories are no subjects at all.” It is sufficient that “each is but a row of pegs for the hanging of the cloth of gold that is to muffle them.”
    When James affirmed the “absolute value of Style,” he recognized that no matter what it addresses or describes, brilliant language can be irresistible. And his contemplation also suggests what Shakespeare surely knew, that poetic language is sly, and that it rides a conundrum. An agonized king stares into the void and comprehends that life is a petty, dusty, miserable tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And yet it is an undeniable fact that as unknown generations chant his searing empty lines until the end of time, they will do so, always, with helpless happy smiles upon their lips.
    One admits a similar puzzle concerning the idiosyncratic language of Henry James, and that his language gives great pleasure, and that such pleasure is important—even in the postmodern world. Although as a young man James had produced confident works of art, over time his language evolved more than the language of most writers. He got, as Huck Finn might put it, more and more style. Colette spoke of the plays of Shakespeare as those before—and after—he knew he was Shakespeare, and that happened to Henry James. In 1873 a regular guy—“Harry,” his family called him in their letters—rode a horse through the Italian campagna. When he spotted a tavern, he decided to “rein up and demand a bottle of their best.” In 1907—and by then ferociously Jamesian—the Master records that while traveling at dusk through the same Italian countryside, he and his friends had “wished, stomachically, we had rather addressed ourselves of a tea basket.” Hardly anything has changed—except the words. We smile at the inimitable locution and we shake our heads with fond delight. But although James is talking about nothing important, the change is monumental. For as he finally rides on into the night, he is moving about on a different planet.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
    xi “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus”: Leon Edel and Gordon Ray, eds., Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of Their Friendship, Their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and Their Quarrel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959), 248.
    xi “the exquisite deformities”: E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1927), 161.
    xi “imagine with pain”: Roger Gard, ed., Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 268.
    xi “I am tired of hearing pettiness”: Ezra Pound, “Henry James,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 296.
    xii “For to be as subtle as