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PARTISAN REVIEW
years after the rest of the group, projected the situation of two wri–
ters, a man and a woman, who each had enjoyed a following
in
society, only to have it fall away, and to come to the realization that
nothing was to be gained by an author in the country-house world,
a world which simply took all one's cleverness and had no imagination
to give. James said in his preface that he failed "to disinter again
the buried germ" of this story, but went on to ask, "When had I
been, as a fellow scribbler, closed to the general admonition of such
adventures?" And thinking perhaps also of his own moment of
popularity after
Daisy Miller,
he declared that "to dissimulate the
grim realities of shrunken 'custom,' the felt chill of a lower profession
temperature-any old notebook would show
that
laid away as a
tragic 'value'."
Where James draws most deeply on his own accumulate
thoughts for these stories is in
The Middle rears)
in which the author
narrator is of the novelist's own age. Dencombe has been very sick,
and picking up,
in
his convalescence, his book of the year before,
he has a fresh impression of his work. Like James he is "a passionate
corrector" of his text, and thinking how much of his life it had taken
to produce so little art, what he longs for most is "Ah for another go,
ah for a better chance!" It is not necessary to force a too close parallel
with James' life, since his own health, very precarious earlier, had
developed by middle age considerable powers of endurance. Yet his
sister's death in England in 1892, the year before this story, had
heightened his feeling of isolation; and it is out of isolation that
Dencombe cries:' "I've outlived, I've lost by the way." Dencombe
comes through to a renewed faith in creative possibilities, to the reas–
surance that there never is exhaustion in the abundance of material,
but only "in the miserable artist." But he is not to have another
chance. He recognizes that he is dying, and says with the eloquence
of James' own urgency: "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 very conception of
The Figure in the Carpet
(
1896) sprang
from suGh passion. This was the story which James himself called
"a significant fable"; and he said that what had stimulated him to
write it was his acute impression of the Anglo-American's "so marked
collective mistrust of anything like close or analytic appreciation."
This story was designed as a plea for such mature criticism, as the
