286
PARTISAN REVIEW
most previous criticism obsolete, you can hardly dismiss so casually
this dazzling list of masterpieces: it is as if one discovered the "key"
to Dostoevsky but had to grant that the doors remained locked to
Crime and Punishment
and
The Possessed.
As
it happens, three of these novels are set in America (which
comes to three more than any among those Mr. Anderson does discuss),
and one wonders how it is that precisely the novels with an American
setting fail to be relevant to "the American James." More important,
Mr. Anderson, in the course of dividing the novels into "emblematic"
sheep and "non-emblematic" goats, fails to ask himself some essential
questions:
If
The Bostonians, Washington Square,
etc. fail to conform
to what is supposed to be the central principle of James's vision, what
other principle do they conform to? And if there is at work in these
novels another, let us call it "alien" principle, what is its relation to
the "emblematic" one that controls such books as
The Wings of the
Dove
and
The Golden Bowl?
And finally, if such an "alien" principle
is to be found in some of James's novels,2 might it not be supposed that
it also operates, however fitfully, in those novels Mr. Anderson has
chosen to consider? For unless we assume James to have been hopelessly
schizoid, it hardly seems plausible that he could have spent a lifetime
writing from two utterly disconnected and opposing principles of
composition that would each have no effect upon the work dominated
by the other. Mr. Anderson is to be criticized not for failing to
answer such questions, but for failing to raise them.
The image of James that emerges from Mr. Anderson's book is that
of a painfully high-minded, idealistic, humorless and unworldly Profes–
sor of Moral Philosophy. James, we are told, celebrated "a vision of the
moral life founded on personal freedom and unsupported by institutional
props...." His world "is one in which dramatic situations are always
prior to fated conditions. . . ." "A conception of the world in which
consciousness made all the differences exempted him from the tyranny
of conditions, external compulsions and from the unblinking pressure
2 Novels which, in passing, he violently mishandles, as if they were some–
how culpable for being "non-emblematic." Thus, his extraordinary statement
that
The Bostonians
is not written from James's usual assumption of "our ac–
countability for our experience." Or his even more extraordinary statement that
The Awkward Age-a
brilliant but very difficult novel-depends on "a spectrum
of moral judgments and presumptions about the social scene which the reader
possesses before he begins to read." I should think myself that the problem in
regard to
The Awkward Age
is to be able to possess its "moral judgments and
presumptions about the social scene"
after
one has read it.
