The importance of James lies not so much in his achievements as in the queerness of them. He did not broaden a way for his successors but closed nearly every exit as with hermetic sealing tape. It is undeniable that this American author, almost single-handed, invented a peculiar new kind of fiction, more refined, more stately, than anything known before, purged, to the limit of possibility, of the gross traditional elements of suspense, physical action, inventory, description of places and persons, apostrophe, moral teaching. When you think of James in the light of his predecessors, you are suddenly conscious of what is not there: battles, riots, tempests, sunrises, the sewers of Paris, crime, hunger, the plague, the scaffold, the clergy, but also minute particulars such as you find in Jane Austen—poor Miss Bates’s twice-baked apples, Mr. Collins’ “Collins,” the comedy of the infinitely small. It cannot have been simply a class limitation or a limitation of experience that intimidated his pen. It was a resolve, very American, to scrape his sacred texts clean of the material factor. And it was no small task he laid on himself, since his novels, even more than most maybe, dealt with material concerns—property and money—and unrolled almost exclusively in the realm of the social, mundane by definition. Nevertheless, he succeeded, this American prodigy. He etherealized the novel beyond its wildest dreams and perhaps etherized it as well.
To take a pleasant example, he managed in The Spoils of Poynton to relate a story of a contest for possession of some furniture in immense detail without ever indicating except in the vaguest way what the desirable stuff was. We gather that quite a lot is French—Louis Quinze and Louis Seize are mentioned once each (“the sweetest Louis Seize”)—but we also hear of Venetian velvet and of “a great Italian cabinet” in the red room, though with no specifics of place, period, inlays, embossment, and of a little Spanish ivory crucifix. When you think of what Balzac would have made of the opportunity...! Actually The Spoils of Poynton is a Balzacian drama done with the merest hints of props and stage setting. James’s strategy was to abstract the general noun, furniture, from the particulars of the individual pieces, also referred to as “things.” He gives us a universal which we can upholster according to our own taste and antiquarian knowledge. In short, he gives us an Idea. The Spoils of Poynton is not a novel about material tables and chairs; it is a novel about the possession and enjoyment of an immaterial Idea, which could be any old furniture, all old furniture, beautiful, ugly, or neither—it makes no difference, except that if it is ugly the struggle over it will be more ironic. James, however, is not an ironist; no Puritan can be. And the fact that with this novel we can supply “real” tables and chairs from our own imagination makes The Spoils of Poynton, to my mind, more true to our common experience, hence more classic, than most of his fictions.
But that, for the moment, is beside the point. What I should like to bring out now is another peculiarity: that though James’s people endlessly discuss and analyze, they never discuss the subjects that people in society usually do. Above all, politics. It is not true that well-bred people avoid talk of politics. They cannot stay away from it. Outrage over public events that menace, or threaten to menace, their property and privilege has devolved on them by birthright (though it can also be acquired), and they cannot help sharing it when more than two meet, even in the presence of outsiders, which in fact seems to act as a stimulant. This has surely been so from earliest times, and James’s time was no exception, as we know from other sources. But from his fictions (forgetting The Princess Casamassima, where he mildly ventured into the arena), you could never guess that whispers—or shouts—ever burst out over the tea table regarding the need for a firm hand, for making an example of the ringleaders, what are things coming to, and so on. Dickens’ Mr. Bounderby, although no gentleman, put the position in a nutshell with “The turtle soup and the gold spoon,” his own blunt résumé of the trade unionist’s unmistakable goals. As James’s people are constantly telling each other how intelligent they are, more subtlety than this might be expected of them, but we can only hope it. What were Adam Verver’s views on the great Free Trade debate, on woman suffrage, on child labor? We do not know. It is almost as if James wanted to protect his cherished creations from our knowledge of the banalities they would utter if he once let us overhear them speak freely.
Or let us try art. These people are traveled and worldly and often in a state of rapture over the museums and galleries they visit, the noble fa?ades of mansions and dear quaint crockets of cathedrals. Yet they rarely come away from a morning of sightseeing with as much as a half-formed thought. They never dispute about what they have looked at, prefer one artist to another, hazard generalizations. In real life, they would certainly have had their ideas about the revolutions that were occurring in painting and sculpture. In Paris, if only out of curiosity, they would have rushed to see the Salon des Indépendants. Wild horses could not have kept them away. A bold pair, armed with a letter from Lady Sackville or Isabella Stewart Gardner, might have penetrated Rodin’s studio. His bronze statue of Balzac in a dressing-gown, shown at the Salon des Beaux Arts, would already have led the travelers to take sides, some finding it disgusting and incomprehensible while others were calling it a “break-through.” What would they have made of the nude Victor Hugo in plaster in the Luxembourg Garden? Or “The Kiss” (“Rather too suggestive”?) in marble? Unfailingly one would have heard judgments as to what was permissible and impermissible in art.