The Moral Vision of Henry James

...The European symbolizes the other self, and Europe the material goods, the temptations to which we must subject ourselves if we are to be more than half-born innocents, but which we must take and use properly if we are to be, as it were, reborn...

...It is a book with a single thesis and has the strengths and weaknesses of such a book: It is dense, limited, vulnerable...

...there are many keys to many doors to the many rooms of James's great house...

...they may modify or amplify his thesis...

...Or he may make the other choice...

...The American—usually the American girl— symbolizes the possibilities of the spontaneous, loving, selfless acceptance of the goods of the world...

...This view of James's writing leads us to a new interpretation of his "international theme...

...When the switch is snapped on, the three rooms of his last "major" novels are flooded with a brilliant light that gives them an almost totally new appearance...

...Happily, instead of being confined to this wing, the illumination is diffused unevenly through the rest of the house...

...these are the ways of the Law, the Church, the institutions of society, all of which are based on the peacock desire to appear good and to attain glory in the eyes of one's fellows...

...Instead of being at heart a conflict of manners, or even of civilizations, the international situation is, to use Anderson's words, "an invocation of the depths within us or an account of the inward conflict in which nationality has an emblematic function...

...As the junior Henry grew to maturity and independence, he felt a passionate need to break his identification with the senior, and he explicitly disavowed his father's way of thinking...

...Though he cannot avoid his Eve, he can come to recognize as he faces this other self that it is, after all, his false self and that the appropriation of appearances merely increases his isolation and his ultimate misery...

...I doubt that they can reject it completely, and they certainly cannot ignore it...

...At this point, as the elder James put it, man will attain his "divine-natural-humanity" and society will become "the redeemed form of man...

...This may seem little more than a new twist on an old truism or, alternatively, as another of the madcap ideas that flourished in the millenarian days of the come-outers and the Brook Farms, Oneida Communities and Fruitlands...

...This self-hood by its very nature, and through the additional beguilements of society, will inevitably seek to use other people for its own purposes and to appropriate, for its own aggrandizement, the things, the manners, the appearances of the world...

...The significant thing is that it casts a new light on much of James's writing...

...How all this applies to James's particular writings we cannot begin to explain here...

...Hobart and William Smith Colleges My guess is that this will prove to be the most significant book yet written on Henry James...

...Thus, after facing and facing down his false self, he can become the "second Adam," as did Jesus, who rejected the blandishments of his tempter, despised worldly appearances, refused to appropriate, and thereby was the first to show us how we could each find our true selves...

...The alternative is for his true, selfless self to fill the vessel in quite another way, by actions based on spontaneous goodness, an unselfish spirit, and a recognition of God's love and presence in all men alike...

...The first Adam is a vessel (form, bowl) into which the individual can pour these worldly appearances if he so chooses...

...My first inclination was to say that in this book Anderson was, finally, providing us with the key to Henry James...

...Paradoxically, our better understanding of these books does not make us appreciate them any better—and Anderson is careful not to claim that it does...

...We create our own values from moment to moment in our actions, our reactions to these things...

...Life is not an automatic process or progress...

...This was the peculiarly American vision of the time of Emerson, Thoreau and the elder James, which Mr...

...Maybe we could better say that the book leads us to a hitherto neglected light-switch...

...It is no good to try to escape our Europe (no Typees, not even any Waldens), and it would be the most naive folly not to look upon it with fear and dread...

...In brief, the process consists of a struggle between man's true and false selves...

...Subsequent critics may find that Anderson has claimed too much...

...they are whatever we make them...

...In some rooms it makes a wonderful improvement as it lights up obscure corners and removes troublesome shadows, while leaving our old impression of the rooms essentially unchanged...

...The novelist "was engaged in celebrating a triumph, the triumph of the vision of the moral life founded on personal freedom and unsupported by institutional props...

...Henry Senior elaborates his version of the way to Utopia through a rich and complex set of symbols...

...Eliot remains right: James's mind w as not violated by ideas...

...In filling these finely wrought bowls so full of emblematic significance, with such meticulous artistry, James has left little room for the felt life, the density of actual experience that we find in the best of his earlier work...

...it is a struggle—a struggle between the spontaneous spirit as represented by America and institutionalized manners and things as represented by Europe...

...This experience comes to him first in the form of his selfish "self-hood," his Eve, his tempter...

...From now on, no one can pretend to understand James without having grasped, if only to drop or throw away, Anderson's interpretation...

...The essence of it is the belief that, without any divine intervention and without the help of institutions such as church or state, the individual can lift himself out of his primal loneliness into moral community with his fellow men...

...Much of what previously seemed paradoxical, ambivalent or simply confusing in James now comes clear...

...And when in the last three novels that moral vision engulfed the observed world, it amounted to a violation...

...Suffice it to say that Anderson demonstrates at length and in detail that The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl can (and must...

...While the younger Henry rejected the metaphysics, the mythological decor and the eschatology of his father, he retained his view of human nature and the one road to the good life...

...Through the full development of his consciousness, the individual can achieve the spiritual insight and the practical ability to bring about an ideal natural order...

...If we adopt the selfish way, we accept conventional forms and appearances...

...Anderson calls the "bootstrap myth...

...But Mr...

...The children could not escape these ideas, for they were deeply felt and lived and endlessly talked by the father...

...We can "take" life — experience and the things of the world—in either of two ways...

...Anderson demonstrates convincingly that the father's ideas provided the moral framework for the son's way of viewing the world, and further that they provided him with the symbols, or, more precisely, "emblems," that pervade his writings...

...The person who is not afraid of himself is scarcely a person and certainly not of interest to James...

...It has none of the richness of F. W. Dupee's short biographical study or of the first volume of Leon Edel's projected three-volume biography...

...be read as emblematic novels symbolizing the ascending ways of taking the world...

...This new illumination comes from what the James family called "father's ideas...

...But the ideas had sunk too deep into his consciousness to be expunged, and they formed the basis for his view of morality and life, and underlay all of his fiction...

...6.50...

...it does not pretend to...

...Experience, culture, the beautiful forms of European art are not simultaneously good and bad...

...The moral drama begins when one is aware of the beast that stalks out there and in here, looking always for new victims to appropriate to its own, our own, uses...

...By contrast, Anderson's exposition of James's moral vision enriches both our understanding and our appreciation of many of the novellas and of novels like The Portrait of a Lady and The Princess Casamassima, in which James presents us with a world to which we can respond more easily and more directly...

...That is not to gay that it is the best or the most useful, and certainly it is not the most interesting...

...The familiar objects may not look much different, but the relations between them are now clear (all too clear, some will feel) and indeed the three rooms are seen to belong to one magnificently structured wing...

...But that would have been absurd...

...The two ways which this other self has of "taking" experience are greed and self-righteousness...

...It is in terms of this view that we must interpret the peculiar characteristics of James's stories: the renunciations, the "other selves," the Old World spoils, the New World heiresses, the unremitting emphasis on consciousness and awareness and discrimination, the artist creating his world, the continuous struggle to find the proper form of life and of love...

...If we choose the loving way, we will make our own forms and arrive at a "style" which will be a worthy container of all in this world that is precious and noble...

...These comprised a total vision of life, at once simple in its outlines and intricate in its details...

...The child is the "first Adam," innocent, an empty container, a being to be molded or filled in the way he will himself determine when he faces the world of experience...

...But we can no longer accept his famed dictum as we did before: James's mind was permeated by a single, clear, all-embracing moral vision...