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impinges on this event; and everything in Mr. Howe's essay prepares
u~
for an analysis of it. But the essay closes without giving it more than
a passing glance.
It is here, I believe, that Mr. Howe's book bumps up against the
unresolved problems of critical method vis-a.-vis the novel. And since
his critical investment in the cognitive power of the novel is larger
then most critics', his failure to press on to the center of the problem
is all the more frustrating.
There is another sense, too, in which Mr. Howe's method falls
short of the goals which are implicit within his own book. In
Politics
and the Nouel
one finds an insufficient discussion of style as it relates
to the novelist's capacity to act as a critic of ideology. The most notable
exception is his essay on 1984, in which he defends stylistic qualities as
an organic embodiment of ideological vision. Orwell's book is a special
case, to be sure; but the problem of style which is pressed to an ex–
tremity in 1984 is a central one nonetheless even for novelists working
with more conventional materials; at least it is central to Mr. Howe's
book. In
The Princess Casamassima,
for example, the affective texture
of James's style is exactly suited to the progressive deterioration of
Hyacinth Robinson's commitment. From the beginning we have taken
this commitment more than a little on faith anyway, and as the novel
unfolds it seems impossible to believe that the sovereignty of
any
ide–
ological commitment could withstand the refinements of moral nuance
which the Jamesian style lavishes upon the hero. Suppose for a moment
that the unfolding drama were otherwise; that Hyacinth Robinson's
story were to
be
a representation of the progressive numbing of emo–
tion by the hardening of his commitment, by the systematic refusal to
admit moral nuances as a category of feeling in the face of the political
vocation. Such a tale would have made demands on James's style which
could be shattering; he would have had to endow the vision of Hya–
cinth's ideology with a fierceness and absoluteness beyond anything at–
tempted in the novel as it is written; even the freer-wheeling style of.
The Bostonians,
one feels, would have been inadequate to the task. This
is not, I hasten to add, a criticism of James's conception. He knew
better than most writers precisely what his style was capable of. But
that relief we feel when Hyacinth arrives in Paris for the first time,
the full release of James's energies and affinities which we sense in his
confronting a scene so congenial and intimate to his sensibility-this,
I would suggest, should warn us, more than the small inaccuracies in
his picture of the Anarchists in London, that there are dimensions of
this subject before which James falters.
I do not want to suggest that Mr. Howe neglects this side of the
