JAMESIANA 29

In a letter to a Texan admirer, Henry James classified his novels as 'beef and potatoes', while his shorter tales were 'little tarts'. However, in the eyes of most contemporary critics, it is James's 'little tarts' that contain most substance and that display the full range of his aesthetic gifts. Although his novels have their admirers (particularly Portrait of A Lady), it is his novellas and contes that provoke most debate and interest. The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw are perhaps the most well-known, but the short novels Daisy Miller, Washington Square, What Maisie Knew and The Spoils of Poynton are justly acclaimed, as are his short stories, 'The Lesson of the Master', 'The Real Thing', 'The Figure in the Carpet' and 'The Beast in the Jungle'. In these works, James manages to synthesise all of the great psychological achievements of the nineteenth-century novel, while also paving the way for more daring twentieth-century innovations.
James has many great themes in his novels, in particular the contrast between the old world (Europe) and the new (America), the position of women in society, and the quality and nature of art. However, his greatest subject is human consciousness. James is often seen as a 'backward move' in the evolution of the modern novel, because after the generous and expansive imaginative visions of Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot and Thackeray, in which all classes and types were included and embraced, James once more seems to shrink the scope of the novel to upper-middle-class drawing rooms and society gatherings. It is a return to the aesthetic principles of Jane Austen. However, this is to overlook James's revolutionary handling of his characters' inner lives. James was the first novelist to realise that many of the most significant human dramas take place internally. In this way, what is not said, what is not done, can be as potentially dramatic as a Dickensian 'unmasking' scene. Moreover, James's characters try to read each other's minds, try and decipher each other's real feelings and opinions. James always shows how interpreting other people is a flawed, fractious business. His characters misread each other, and themselves. A single perspective can only reveal a limited part of the truth.
For some critics, James's focus on psychological realism is a weakness. He is unable to show people acting, only people musing, meditating, hesitating and prevaricating. Certainly it is true to say that he is obsessed with the figure of the outsider, the spectator who thinks and witnesses, rather than the 'man of action' who wins wars and conquers women. However, this is hardly a shortcoming. Rather he makes the figure of the reflective visitor an emblem of the human condition. It is easy to identify with his protagonists as they postpone big decisions, shy away from confrontation, then regret their weakness and passivity. Like James Duffy in Joyce's 'A Painful Case', they are 'outcasts from life's feast'. In 'The Figure in the Carpet' and The Aspern Papers, the narrators are excluded from mysteries and secrets. James's protagonists always tremble on the verge, hover on the margins, pull back from the brink. It is as if James associated decision-making with death. When Isobel Archer chooses a mate in Portrait of A Lady, she suffers a kind of death. At the beginning of the novel, she is alone, and inundated with offers and possibilities. By the end of the novel, she is spoilt and contaminated by her contact with others. James's squeamishness and prissiness are not to everyone's taste. Certainly at his worst, he makes the reader yearn for the candour, crudity and passion of a D.H. Lawrence. However, at his best, he makes the reader empathise with the wilful self-sufficiency of his protagonists. To paraphrase Samuel Butler, life is chiefly a business of getting spoilt, and James shows how 'knowing oneself' is a lifelong task, constantly threatened by outsiders, prone to error, destined to failure.
James's style suits his subject-matter perfectly. Just as he wrote about hesitant outsiders, so his prose questions, prevaricates and postpones. It is brilliantly crafted, perfectly imitating the ebb and flow of consciousness. In his later novels, like The Golden Bowl, James can be frustrating to read, because he is so devoted to psychological realism, that he loses himself in sub-clauses, asides, qualifications and provisos. However, in his best work, his patient, roundabout style ideally suits his civilised, observant narrators.
Moreover, James was always happy to comment on his writing style and why he shaped his novels as he did. Indeed, he is widely praised for his literary criticism. In his Preface to the New York edition of Portrait of A Lady, he declared: 'The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million', emphasising the huge scope of literary prose. In 'The Art of Fiction' (1884), he included his famous advice: 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.' In his book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, he wrote: 'the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, [. . .] it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.'

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