524
RICHARD POIRIER
the dishes, and so even an adjustment of everything to its own
place, and to the hand that needs it, as to shed an almost epic
dignity upon the repast, and convert one's habitual "grace before
meat" into a spontaneous tribute, instinct with a divine recognition.
The charm in this case is not that the dinner is all before
me, where the man is bound by his wages to place it. This every
waiter I have had has done just as punctually as this man, which
attests that in doing it, he is not thinking either of earning his
wages, or doing his duty toward me, but only of satisfying his own
conception of beauty with the resources before him. The conse–
quence is that the pecuniary relation between us emerges in a higher
one. He is no longer the menial, but my equal or superior, so that
I have felt, when entertaining doctors of divinity and law, and
discoursing about divine mysteries, that a living epistle was cir–
culating behind our backs, and quietly ministering to our wants,
far more apocalyptic to an enlightened eye than any yet contained
in books.
The ease with which the elder James finds the artist in occupa–
tions as mundane as waiting on table is one indication that an essen–
tially Emersonian concept of style involves much more than a stand–
ard merely of literary performance. Emerson himself remarks that
"poets are thus liberating gods." Believing with James that poets
"more than any other men, have thrown off the tyranny of nature,"
Emerson also used the title
Poet
to designate anyone of any occupa–
tion who in the exercise of it fully realizes the self or the selves that
are in him. Emerson and Henry James, Sr. affirm what could in any
case be inferred from the great American books: an identification of
the writer, idealized as a liberator of consciousness, with the heroes of
a more practical, worldly and physical achievement. These heroes
may be men of "whatsoever function," but in a significant number of
cases they too are "liberators." Deerslayer shows his daring mostly in
freeing his friends and himself from captivity, so does Huck Finn and
so too does Faulkner's Charles Mallison of
Intruder in the Dust.
The
stories of Poe and of Melville are
full
of imprisonments and efforts at
liberation, while James, like Hawthorne, evolved a style meant to
liberate his heroes from those, like the governess in
The Turn of the
Screw,
who would "fix," imprison or "know" others.
[Continued on Page 631]
