Henry McDonald
HENRY JAMES AS NIETZSCHEAN:
THE DARK SIDE OF THE AESTHETIC
Writers on Nietzsche can be divided into two groups:
the tough and the tender. "Tough" Nietzscheans see the philoso–
pher of the Will to Power as advocating the cultivation of strong
individuals in a morally unstructured environment. "Tender"
Nietzscheans admit that Nietzsche favored strong individuals but
maintain that by "strength" he did not mean military prowess or
even social and political dominance but rather the spiritual and
moral power exercised by the artist, philosopher, and saint.
Until recent decades, Anglo-American writers on Nietzsche
tended to be tough. Citing Nietzsche's adoption by the Nazis, these
writers often deprecated his works as dangerously confused.
Then, starting in the 1950s and gaining momentum in the 1960s,
there was a change in perspective. Walter Kaufmann argued that
Nietzsche was one of the more antifascistic and anti-anti-Semitic
writers of his time (an argument generally accepted today),
while Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, whose works have
greatly influenced American critics, praised Nietzsche as a
precursor of poststructuralism. Derrida went so far as to partly ex–
cuse Nietzsche's misogyny.
A look at the history of critical opinion on Henry James
shows no such striking reversal. For more than a century, James
enthusiasts have characterized his work as urbane, civilized,
graceful, and mannered. James's detractors have not quarrelled
with these adjectives; rather they have placed a "too" in front of
them and added other adjectives such as obscure, feminine, eli–
tist, and pompous. For example, during his lifetime, James was
lionized by authors like Edith Wharton, Ford Madox Ford, and
William Dean Howells, and ridiculed (on occasion) by
H.
G.
Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Mark Twain. Ignored during
the twenties and thirties, his reputation skyrocketed in the forties
and fifties with the ascendency of New Criticism. Philip Rahv,
