Sepiemoer zo, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
15 
Life and Letters 
Henrv 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 arc 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 the 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 coursi>," he admits to his 
amanuensis " I am afraid of twists, 1 mean of their multiply- 
ing on my hands to tlic efi'ect of too much lengthening and en- 
larginp 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 bc-commaed sentences. These, it is quite 
, notorious, got more and more extraordinary as he got older. 
There are many in tiie two books now published which will 
entertain those who g..»t an easy pleasure out of James's 
serpentine phaseology, with tiie conclusion : " Do you expect 
us to read a man who writes like that ? " Here is one from the 
new and variegated collection of syntactical blooms : 
She was happy — this our young woman perfectly, iTerccived, to 
her own very great increa.se of interest ; .so happy that, as had 
been re|Teatedly noticeable before, she multipHed herself 
through the very agitation of it, appearing to be, for particular 
things they had to say to her, particular conversational 
grabs and .snatches, all of the most violent, they kept attcmpt- 
nig an<1 mostly 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 arc some such, I candidly confess, of which I have 
got the general sense, but no more. But one must not mind 
that occasionally. And one must give him his idiom. When 
he makes a dying American millionaire .say, " You 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 forttmc was tliat his little turns 
of speech were more unusual than most. And tlie wrongness is 
only siiperticial. 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 concerned only with a restricted and very exacting 
field of observation. He avoids strong passions, strong 
affections, melodramatic situations. His peqplc do not 
stamp or scowl or li(- awake : discomfort, in these books, does 
not approach agony nor; pleasure delight. His business i^ 
with the fine features of character, the little unspoken thoughts 
tiiat underlie (and usually greatly differ from) the thing? 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 b..'ings and seeing many things about them 
more clearly than ever before ; but they arc seen as it 
were through tinted plate glass which shuts out sound ; 
they have something of the near and clear yet remote and 
phantasmal apix-arance of creatures in an aquarium. The 
sea breezes here do not ruffle the hair; the s^insHine, though 
bright, is scarcely warm. It is easy, 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 concrivcd 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 inventing 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 The 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 
i()io, but keeping the fact dark. By this, shall one say im- 
probable, transference he docs 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 Raljih 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 fragments 
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, wc see his forehead knitting while 
his invention, his always fertile invention, produces the 
necessary cncoimter, past episode, new subsidiary character, 
or what not. Sometimes he dismisses the difficulty 
with " That will be ea.sy when wo come to it " ; some- 
times he postpones it with the reflection that a notion 
will come some time if he tliinks about it long enough. 
He refers now and then to a past work. The delicate 
grucsomeness 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 enlhusiasm over the " magnificent," 
the " tremehdous " possibilities oiiencd up by something, 
some" admirable twist," which h»s just f)ccurred to 'him. 
He exhorts himself repeatedly to fare his problem, to "get 
it right " ; and in one place he openly strikes a develop- 
ment which is too coin|ilicated to handle. It is in 'The Sense 
of the I'ast. The man of i()io has changed places with the 
man of 1820. He is describing the man of iqio 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 that he would not attempt. As it was he 
was jxirhaps attempting too much : and I should certainly 
recommend all but the hardened to take The Ivory Towff 
before the other book. 
