230
PARTISAN REVIEW
James, possessed of a firmer faith in the then existing structure
of society than most novelists and wholly sincere in his newly–
gained worldliness, tends to identify her moral with her material
superiority.* Yet in the long run she cannot escape the irony–
the inner ambiguity-of her status. For her wealth is at once the
primary source of her so lavishly pictured "greatness" and "lib–
erty" and the source of the evil she evokes in others. There is no
ignoring the consideration, however, that in the case of the heiress,
as in the case of most of James's rich Americans, money is in a
sense but the prerequisite of moral delicacy. What with her
'higher interests' and pieties, the rigor of her conscience and the
nicety of her illusions, what is she really if not a graduate of the
school of Boston Transcendentalism? Her author's imagination
operated according to the law of the conversion of the lower into
the higher, and by means of this ideal logic his heroine's debut
in
the "social successful worldly world" is transformed into a kind
of spiritual romance. What James knew best of all is, of course,
how to take things immensely for granted; and not to appreciate
the wonder of his beguilement is to miss the poetry, the story, the
very life of his fictions.
To grasp the national-cultural values implicit in the progress
of his heroine is to be done once and for all with the widely-held
•Some critics writing about James in the early 1930's sought to put him
in
line
with the leftist trend of the times. This sort of intention is evident
in
Robert
Cantwell's several essays of that period and to a lesser extent in Stephen Spender's
study,
The Destructive Element.
These critics overlook, it seems to me, the depth
of the conservative illusion in James, and that is why they are forced to exaggerate
the meaning of novels like
The Ivory Tower
and
The Princess Casamassinuz.
Even
though in the latter the atmosphere of class conflict is genuine enough,
its
revolu·
tionary theme cannot be taken at face value. For imbedded in this novel is the more
familiar theme of the passionate pilgrim-the pilgrim being the hero, Hyacinth
Robinson, who sees the "immeasurable misery of the people" hut who also sees,
even more clearly and passionately, "all that has been, as it were, rescued and
redeemed from it: the treasures, the felicities, the splendors, the successes of the
world"; and in the end, when the final choice is put to him, he takes his stand not
with the people but with the "world" resting upon their misery. Thus Robinson
is
enticed by the same image that draws the Jamesian Americans to Europe. The one
variation is that he constructs this image out of class rather than national or, so to
speak, hemispheric differences.
So far as the political estimate of James is concerned, one cannot but agree with
Joseph Warren Beach that he is basically a "gentleman of cultivated and conserv&·
tive, not to say, reactionary instinct, who will generally be found to favor the same
line of conduct as that favored by the ecclesiastical and civil law, as far as the
law
goes"
(The Method of Henry /ames).
So blunt a characterisation is likely to offend
the James·cultists, but I think it can stand so long as we take it in a strictly political
sense, not as a judgment of his moral realism. On that score Spender is closer
to
the truth in observing that James "saw through the life of his age" but that
he
"cherished the privilege that enabled
him
to see through it."
