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entertain
US;
and thi!! is not to mention James's expressed dislike of
"symbols and correspondences," of "seeing a story told as if it were
another and very different story." James, of course, figures in our
minds exactly as an avowed enemy of Philistinism, yet an ideology
works in mysterious ways, no one can be sure of being immune from
all its effects, and it may be that we have to admit that James was
in accord with some of the questionable aspects of his epoch.
This unhappy possibility might be sustained by the recollection of
a certain passage from
The Ambassadors,
the famous speech that
Lambert Strether makes to Little Bilham. "Live all you can," Strether
says
to
his young friend, "it's a mistake not to.
It
doesn't so much
matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.
If
you haven't had that, what have you had? ..." When, in our 'forties,
James was in the full tide of the great revival of interest in him,
this speech was frequently quoted. Twenty years ago the little homily
seemed to touch the American consciousness in a very intimate way.
Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.
How much that seemed to say
about America---our nation gave us much, but it was ever reluctant
to grant us the right to have our lives. No one thought that the
implied doctrine was the whole of James, yet it seemed very much
at the center of his work, and its intensely asserted positivism
validated him for many readers who might otherwise have been put off
him, just as now, in a different cultural moment, it accounts, as I
think, for much of that diminution of interest in James which is to be
observed.
What did James mean by having one's life? He meant something
really quite simple and actual and tangible. He meant Paris-surely
he meant that first. He meant all that was possible to do and enjoy
in Paris and not in Woollett, Massachusetts-he meant having intense
erotic relationships; and breaking the code of respectability without
pain of conscience; and Gloriani's garden; and sunny days on the
river; and Mme. de Vionnet's beauty and charm, and her manners
and place in society. "To live" meant to know and to have the
pleasures of the world.
James gave perfect credence to the pleasures of the world. He
believed them to be real even at those moments when he was most
intensely aware that they might be involved with vulgarity and even
cruelty. He gave an equal credence to the sanctions which control
