288
PARTISAN REVIEW
he could be fascinated with human character in its own right and for
its own sake, even
if
he was silly enough to speak of Russian novels as
"fluid puddings"; and above all that James, ingrained nineteenth–
century American as in one part of himself he was and habitual moral–
ist as he also was, could ever be tempted by sophistication or worldliness
or malice or even, perhaps, the sinister-temptations that might lead
him, as it has led almost everyone else, to like and admire a magnificent
schemer like Kate Croy.
If
the bent of contemporary criticism is to supply
novelists with severe moral intentions, might it not also recognize how
creative and life-renewing the relaxation of moral intentions can be in a
work of art? Like so many other critics of our time, Mr. Anderson does
not really read novels; he reads through or past them, searching so
obsessively for the figure that he quite chews up the carpet.
And so it is that he summarizes the "emblematic themes":
The Ambassadors
has for its subject the failure of the law, and its
correspondent 'church' is New England's, here standing for the elder
James's 'Jewish' church.
The Wings of the Dove
treats the redemption
of an individual by an exemplary savior, Milly Theale; the correspondent
church is 'Christian.'
The Golden Bowl's
subject is the regeneration of
mankind, and its correspondent church is that of the new Jerusalem
announced by Swedenborg.
Admittedly, quoting these summary sentences without providing the
material from the elder James upon which they are based, is to make
them seem more obscure than they need be or already are.
4
But the
objection to this sort of thing isn't that one can't make sense out of
such descriptions; it is that finally they have so little to do with
literature. In Mr. Anderson's reading of the great trio of James's final
period, Prince Amerigo emerges as "the walking sum of history," Adam
Verver as "the Christ founding a new temple," Lionel Croy as "the
Devil," Colonel Assingham as also "a devil of sorts." Mme. de Vionnet
"turns out to be a lovely lie" (whereas I had taken her for an attractive
and cultivated middle-aged woman painfully discovering that the man
she loves
is
preparing to leave her). Kate Croy's sister, Mrs. Condrip,
4 Here is Mr. Anderson at his most high-powered: "James [in
The Golden
Bowl)
seems to have had a great deal of fun in detailing emblematically the
marriage of the second or universal Adam, the Grand Man or
Maximus Homo,
to the Eve, or
minimus homo
(also called
vir
by the elder James). He first
named her Charlotte, the emblematic significance being 'little man' or
minimus
homo
(Charlotte is a
diminutive
of Carl, which originally meant man, or male).
He then imagines the courtship as recapitulating the relation God had to Israel,
since Charlotte is spiritually Jewish, that is, is publicly represented by the
'church' and 'state', the Assinghams." I assure the reader that in context this
passage is comprehensible. But could anytIiing be more unfortunate?
