BOOKS
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For long stretches of his book Mr. Anderson "translates" the action
of James's later novels-with much wrenching and twisting, which I
shall specify later-into the vocabulary of the elder James. That such
a shift from the son's marvelously complex and subtle vision to the ec–
centric husks of the father's doctrine must sadly impoverish and narrow
some very great works of art is finally the crux of the matter; but at
the moment I prefer to stress that this process of "translation," even if
one could find it convincing and useful, does not necessarily tell us
very much about the intellectual relationship presumed to have been
present between father and son.
In Mr. Anderson's presentation the philosophy of James Sr., despite
some frightful language, turns out to be as simple as most systems of
nineteenth-century American romantic moralists: it is an account of
the struggle between Love and Self, between morality as a spontaneous,
unfettered, personally forged and endlessly renewed "style," on the
one hand, and moralism as the institutional hardening and corruption
of Selfhood, on the other. It would therefore almost be possible to
"translate"-though for no good reason whatever-a number of other
nineteenth-century American novels into the vocabulary of the elder
James, since his ideas had much in common with the whole transcen–
dentalist impulse of mid-nineteenth-century America. The generation
of writers of that time, Mr. Anderson himself declares, "tried to main–
tain . . . the moral and religious sanctions which, for their fathers
and grandfathers, had been institutionalized. They tried to stuff into
the self what the society had ceased adequately to represent." Good
enough ; but in this remark there is neither novelty-the point having
been made most notably by Yvor Winters
in
his fine essay on James,
which Mr. Anderson does not mention-nor warrant for reading
The
Golden Bowl
as an allegory to which only the system of James Sr.
provides the key. All that can reasonably be said, and many critics
have said it, is that James absorbed a good deal of the moral idealism
floating about in New England at the time and absorbed some of it,
no doubt, from his father.
At some points, however, Mr. Anderson bids higher. "The younger
son," he writes, "is, to my knowledge, the only man who has ever
used
the elder James's beliefs" (emphasis in original) . What is more, Mr.
Anderson can speak of "the teasing way in which, throughout the pre–
faces, James refers to his emblems without ever announcing or
classifying them." Not only, then, was James consciously working with
his father's "emblems," but he was engaged
in
a "teasing" effort to
obscure their presence and their meaning. Here Mr. Anderson approach-
