MR. AGEE AND THE NEW YORKER
117
never directly commented on by the author, between good and evil: a
worldly villain jilts a girl in order to make a better marriage; a little clerk
thrashes the villain to punish this betrayal, thereby gaining the moral
courage himself to jilt a girl in order that
he
may make a better mar–
riage; the villain's breach of promise is thoroughly 'despicable and his
just undoing, the· hero's admirable and his salvation. Such opinions can–
not be put into print; the extent of the unknown makes it dangerous.
In the three or four dozen unread novels there may be one, or ten, that
make this story infantile; it may turn out that Trollope's forte was not
EnglisH life, but Irish or French. So long as there is one person who has
read every one of his novels, the professional critic is certain to have
praised the wrong one. So that in the end very little is ever said in
public; the old rule stands: a prolific writer is a bad one.
A usually unnoticed exception to the rule is our most dedicated
artist, Henry James, who achieved mass production by adopting one
of the methods of American business, dictating to a stenographer. He
escapes the consequences of his efficiency by an odd accident in his
history that has split him into two personalities, the early and the late,
with the result that the burden of his work is divided between them. The
flowing beard of the Sargent sketch of the seventies and the shaved
Roman face of the later photographs physically set off the two Jameses
as entirely different people (there may be three, if only for the sake
of Guedalla's "James the First, James the Second and the Old Pretend–
er"). The division was started-as Guedalla's witticism suggests-as a
means of disparaging his later work, and also to give point to the charge
that he had no right in later years to change his early stories. The old
debauchee, it was said, had corrupted the text of the youthful
Daisy
Miller;
some even spoke-it was
jn
the twenties-of a revised virgin. But
now the split is stressed by the Jacobites themselves to set apart his later
work from everything else, including his own past. Any Jacobite will
tell you that reading
Daisy Miller, The American,
and that sort of thing
is not reading
rea!
Henry James. The early James is at most granted the
grace of being
the
later's forerunner.
The part that accident has played in James' career may seem to be
exaggerated; it is pleasant to think that careful work must survive and
that quantity is no obstacle but merely allows for selection. Unfortunate–
ly for this notion, James' friend, Howells, was also a serious and devoted
craftsman for more than half a century; nevertheless he has disap–
peared under the weight of some seventy volumes. No more than a few
are being currently reprinted, and these are chiefly high school editions.
The principle of selection does operate, but it chooses for the most
part the already scarce. We truly like what is rare, especially if we can
avoid the act of choice ourselves. Early death is our most elegant arbiter,
but
almost any other·
mi~chance
will do. These, like the Sybil with the
Roman king, make up our minds for us.
