September 20, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
15 
Life and Letters 
Henry James's Last Works 
By J. G. Squire 
WHATEVER may be said about the later develop- 
ments of his artistic habits, the powers of Henry 
James's mind were unimpaired when, over 
seventy, he died. His posthumous works there- 
fore — there are two novels and a new volume of his re- 
miniscences — unlike most things of the sort. They are 
not rejected scraps, and they are not the diversions of an old 
hand who has left the time of great effort behind him but 
who cannot keep away from the pen. The two novels, The 
Ivory Tower and The Sense of ihi Past have now been published 
by Messrs. Collins (6s. net each), and no one who is addicted 
to James can afford to neglect them. They are not, and one at 
least of them could not have been, among his masterpieces ; 
but they are the real thing and not a senile reflection of it. 
And if they are unfinished, the deficiency is more than com- 
pensated for by the inclusion, in each volume, of the very 
elaborate dictated notes with which it was his habit to assist 
himself when writing a novel. 
All James's later works were dictated. He dictated not 
merely his notes, but successive drafts of the books themselves, 
each draft being an amplification spoken from the typescript 
of the preceding one. This practice was bound to affect the 
method of his presentation. It accentuated his natural 
tendencies of discursiveness. " Of course," he admits to his 
amanuensis " I am afraid of twists, 1 mean of their multiply- 
ing on my hands to the effect of too much lengthening and en- 
larging'and sprawling. ' ' But the twist at the moment occurring 
to him was surely, he thought, essential. It assisted, perhaps, 
his drift away from the careful description of appearances, 
of physical gestures and of scenes, of which the earlier James 
was so great a master. And, no doubt, it also made more 
voluminous the folds of his " sprawling," parenthetical, 
profusely be-commaed sentences. These, it is quite 
notorious, got more and more extraordinary as he got older. 
There are many in the two books now published which will 
entertain those who g?t an easy pleasure out of James's 
serpentine phaseology, with the conclusion : " Do you exj)ect 
us to read a man who writes like that ? " Here is one from the 
new and variegated collection of syntactical blooms : 
She wasliappy — this our young woman perfectly perceived, to 
her own ver v great increase of interest ; so happy that, as had 
been repeatedly noticeable before, she multiplied herself 
through the very agitation of it. appearing to be, for particular 
things they 'lad to .say to her, particular conversational 
grabs and snatihe.*!, all of the most violent, they kept attempt- 
ing and mo.stly achieving, at the service of everyone at once, 
and thereby as obliging, as humane a beauty, after the fashion 
ol the old term, as could have charmed the sight. 
There are some such, I candidly confess, of which I have 
got the general sense, but no more. But one mast not mind 
that occasionally. And one must give him his idiom. When 
he makes a dying American millionaire say, " Vou utterly 
loathe and abhor the bustle ! That's what I blissfully want 
of you," he fails in superficial verisimilitude. But, after all, 
dialogue in novels always bears marks of the novelist's 
style ; James's misfortune or fortune was that his little turns 
of speech were more unusual than most. And the wrongness is 
only superficial. The sentiments underlying the words 
are the principal thing ; and it was in discovering them that 
he was a true, a great, realist. 
« * • • • 
His realism, in his later books, and conspicuously in these 
two, is cohcerned only with a restricted and very exacting 
field of observation. He avoids strong passions, strong 
affections, melodramatic situations. His people do not 
stamp or scowl or lie awake : discomfort, in these books, does 
not approach agony nor pleasure delight. His business is 
with the fine features of character, the little unspoken thoughts 
that underlie (and u.sually greatly differ from) the things'we say, 
and the precise nature of the relations of people with each other 
and with, their social surroundings. Concentrated on sub- 
tleties of perception and attitude he certainly became one- 
sided. In, these two books one is certainly looking 
at human bt-ings and seeing many things about them 
more clearly than ever before ; but they are seen as it 
were through tinted plate glass which shuts out sound ; 
they have something of the near and clear yet remote ami 
phantasmal appearance of creatures in an aquarium. The 
sea breezes here do not ruffle the hair; the sunshirre, thoueh 
bright, is scarcely warm. It is ea,sy, however, to say what 
he did not do ; the important thing is what he did do, and 
what he did with tremendous pains and tremendous success. 
The pains were certainly well conceived in Mr. Wells's 
reference to him as resembling a hippopotamus picking 
up a pea. But he wasn't a hippopotamus and it wasn't 
a pea. It was a very large section of the ordinary — not 
the extraordinary — mental life of men and women. His 
resourcefulness in in\'enting situations which should display 
their reactions upon each other and to circumstance, the 
way in which their conduct is affected by temperament, 
by taste, by convenience, by ideals, by tradition, was 
unique. In these two novels — which cannot be, properly 
speaking, reviewed in this space — it is twice more illus- 
trated. In 'J'hc Ivory Tower he returns to America and 
England, the difference in outlook, manners, customs, often 
so intangible and impalpable, that nevertheless make his 
hero, arriving in America, say " no thing of one's former 
experience serves, and one doesn't know anything about any- 
thing." This novel, if finished, would have been a fine one ; 
every. page is intensely interesting, and a large number of. 
characters very clearly seen and exhibited. In The Sense of 
the Past — which I do not think could have been a success, 
though it has beautiful passages — he throws his hero back, 
and makes us almost believe in the journey, into the life 
of his ancestors of 1820, still aware that he is really a man of 
1910, but keeping the fact dark. By this, shall one say im- 
probable, transference he does what he wants to do : exhibits 
just those differences, crude, subtle, or very subtle, between 
our modern conventions and ways of thought and those of 
our grandparents which engaged his curiosity. The in- 
creasing " malaise," both of Ralph Pendril and of those among 
whom he is thrown, is marvellously conceived. He is, one 
feels, telling the exact truth all the time. He had, as an 
observer, the real scientific spirit ; though not, thank God, 
as an expositor the scientific method. But unlike some 
scientific observers he did not regard all his moral and 
psychological " tacts " as of equal value. His standards of 
honourable living are always in the background : his implied 
judgments never in doubt. 
The notes, consecutive, and filling many pages given at the 
end of these two novels, are such autobiographical fragnients 
as We would give anything for from many great writers. 
They are virtually gramophone records of a great artist's 
talk about the work he had in hand : but they were not 
spoken, self-consciously and with an assumption of the oracle, 
or at least the public figure, into the gramophone. He has 
conceived his principal characters and set them on a stage. 
He talks and talks about them and their relations with each 
other. Each time as he wishes to illuminate some trait or 
give the story some twist, we see his forehead knitting while 
his invention, his always fertile invention, produces the 
necessary encounter, past episode, new subsidiary character, 
or what not. Sometimes he dismisses the difficulty 
with '! That will be easy when we come to it " ; some- 
times he postpones it with the reflection that a notion 
will come some time if he thinks about it long enough. 
He refers now and then to a past work. The delicate 
gruesomeness of The Sense of the Past is to resemble in 
its growth that of The Turn of the Screw. And sometimes, 
he breaks into delight and enthusiasm over the " magnificent," 
the " tremendous " possibilities opened up by something, 
some " admirable twist," which has just occurred to him. 
He exhorts himself repeatedly to face his problem, to "get 
it right " ; and in one place he openly strikes a develop- 
ment which is too complicated to handle. It is in The Sense 
of the Past. The man of 1910 has changed places with the 
man of 1820. He is describing the man of 1910 living in the 
Past : shall he also, he asks (" will he also, " the reader in- 
evitably asks) concurrently describe the life that the pro- 
jected man of 1820 leads in the modern surroundings from 
which Ralph Pendrel has escaped ? No : the complication 
would be " an impossible one, an unspeakable tangle." It 
is consoling to find that there were some things that baffled 
even his curiosity and ingenuity : things not merely that he 
could not do, but tlftit he would not attempt. As it was he 
was perhaps attempting too much : and I should certainly 
recommend all but the hardened to take The Ivory Tower 
before the other book. 
