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his spirit express itself on a level with his deepest intuitions, his most
nearly tragic finality. (Surely what
J.
lost in expatriation-and he lost
something; that need not and cannot be denied-found wonderful com–
pensation; perhaps he simply saved his skin as a functioning writer.)
4. Nevertheless, not at all an uncritical, blown-up over-estimate
of these novels or of J.'s work as a whole, in the ve.in that threatens to
become a fashionable orthodoxy. Recognizes the absence from even the
great novels of some qualities that would (he implies) lift
J.
to the level
of the Prometheans of modern fiction-not to plunge more deepl)'i back–
ward into the
coulisses
of literary history. The "attenuation" of Strether's
desire for experience, "its passive rather than its active scope," "the
inadequacy_of his adventures"; the femininity of all J.'s emotional sym–
bols; the sense in which Milly Theale is the sufferer rather than the actor
(and hence no
protagonistes
in the developed Greek sense of that word),
and the elegiac rather than tragic emotionality of the
Wings;
the failure,
in the
Bowl,
to find an "objective correlative" really equal to the moral
burden of the fable.
5. Necessity, surely, to push the analysis still further and more
unsparingly. J .'s great achievement of understanding and revelat,ion–
even of compositional beauty-not safe with the mere idolaters. Let us
avoid exploiting him in the interest of our own anxieties, our own revul–
sions from reality, our own inner poverty. Essential components of card–
inal literature missing in him: (a) the toughest mastery of external,
contemporary, historical and biological reality, and (b) the deepest and
clearest, most unshrinking awareness of the inner abyss-or the "inner
fountain" either-the fearful and hopeful nature of man, man the
primate and the saint. J.'s work fully understandable only after a still
more rigorous dual analysis, socio-historical at one pole, depth-psycho–
logical at the other. Importance for latter of Saul Rosenzweig's tentative
discussion. Deep and crippling injury to the sources of social capacity
and sexual realization certainly sustained by
J.
in early experience–
resulting, no doubt, as S. R. argues, in repression of both sexuality and
aggression. Highly ambiguous quality, then, of his relations with the
outer and the inner world. Vacillation between acceptance and repudia–
tion, between thirst for experience and shrinking from it, between the
active and the passive role, between the male and the female principles.
Hence the
relative
meagerness of his work as "history" (his own term) :
imagine his sharing Proust's passion for military science, or Mann's and
Joyce's for medical learn.ing, or Gide's for political exposure. Hence,
too, the
relative
attenuation of his symbols for moral evil and moral
heroism. His novels compensatory-and not in the highest sense-for
vital frustrations, vital withdrawals from experience. His sense of evil
(if
Kate Croy and Charlotte Stant are its fullest embodiments) remains
a shuddering perception rather than an unblinking gaze; his vision of
