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The First International Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Oscar Cargill
Oscar Cargill*
Affiliation:
New York University, New York 3
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Extract

Did Henry James or someone else invent the international novel? Did it originate naturally from his vantage point in observing the behavior of his countrymen abroad or did he take an existing type of narrative and from his favorable position bring it to a perfection of which his predecessors were incapable? Although it is widely recognized that “the international theme … was … peculiarly his,” there has been only one answer suggested to these questions, despite their obviously great critical importance. “Mr. James is not quite the inventor of the international novel,” William Dean Howells observed many years ago in his introduction to Daisy Miller. He had previously ascribed the invention of this type of fiction to the Baroness Tautphoeus, “an English woman living in Bavaria,” whose first novel, The Initials, was published in 1850. “The Initials is first of all a love story,” Howells had written in his Heroines of Fiction, “and then it is an international love story, and perhaps the earliest of the modern sort, which Americans rather than the English have cultivated.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1958 , pp. 418 - 425
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

Note 1 in page 418 Richard P. Blackmur, Introd., The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James (New York, 1934), p. xix.

Note 2 in page 418 Henry James, Daisy Miller [and] An International Episode, Modern Library, No. 63 (New York, n.d.) p. iii. Le Roy Phillips, A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James (New York, 1930), p. 238, dates this edition in 1918, but the preface first appeared in a reprint edition, issued in 1916 by Harper. See Prefaces to Contemporaries by William Dean Howells, ed. G. Arms, W. M. Gibson, F. C. Marston, Jr. (Gainesville, Fla., 1957), p. xviii.

Note 3 in page 418 “The Heroine of The Initials,” Heroines of Fiction, 2 vols. (New York, 1901), u, 139.

Note 4 in page 418 Baroness [Jemima Montgomery] Tautphoeus, The Initials: A Story of Modern Life, 2 vols. (New York, n.d. [1892]). The story was originally published in London in 1850 in 3 vols. The Baroness' dates are 1807-93; she is the author of several novels (D.N.B.).

Note 5 in page 418 Small Boy and Others (New York, 1913), pp. 78-79. The material in the brackets is my condensation of an excursion by the author into the thrills given by the Boon Children. James was probably about twelve when he read The Initials. The time has to be after the publication of The Lamplighter and before he went abroad in 1855.

Note 6 in page 419 The Initials, i, 187 (italics mine). There are other sources, of course, for the title, The Wings of the Dove.

Note 7 in page 419 Heroines of Fiction, ii, 140.

Note 8 in page 419 The Art of the Novel, p. 194 (italics mine).

Note 9 in page 420 The most convenient list of James's early stories is found in Eight Uncollected Tales of Henry James, ed. Edna Kenton (New Brunswick, N. J., 1950), pp. 313-314. To Miss Kenton's first 25 stories I add “A Tragedy of Error” discovered by Leon Edel in the Continental Monthly, n (Feb. 1864), 204–216, and reprinted in the New England Quart., xxix (Sept. 1956), 291-317.

Note 10 in page 420 In “The Last of the Valerii” Martha may possibly be regarded as acting in a characteristic American way in disposing of the statue which had distracted her husband Marco Valerio, but the tale itself is but a variant of the Pygmalion and the statue legend. In “Eugene Pickering” a German bluestocking destroys the innocence of a young American who had been kept from the world by a zealous father; the emphasis in the tale, as in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), which may have suggested it, is on the youth's education rather than on his Americanism.

Note 11 in page 420 William M. Gibson and George Arms, A Bibliography of William Dean Howells (New York, 1948), p. 25; Phillips, p. 151.

Note 12 in page 420 Oscar Cargill, Introd., Washington Square and Daisy Miller (New York, 1956), pp. xii-xiii.

Note 18 in page 421 XX (7 Jan. 1875), 12-13; cxx (Jan. 1875), 207-214.

Note 14 in page 421 A Foregone Conclusion contains approximately 87,000 words while “Madame de Mauves” contains only 32,000.

Note 15 in page 421 “The American (1877) was an almost scientific study of internationalism” (Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, 10 vols. [London, 1938], ix, 248). It is important to note that Baker, by all odds the most systematic and thorough of the historians of the novel, mentions no example of the international novel prior to James's The American.

Note 16 in page 421 The Art of the Novel, pp. 21-22.

Note 17 in page 422 Daniel Lerner, “The Influence of Turgenev on Henry James,” The Slavonic and East European Rev., xx (Dec. 1941), 43-44. Cornelia Kelley, The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana, 1930), p. 241, also cites A Nest of Gentlefolk as a source, but does not develop the idea.

Note 18 in page 422 Allan Wade, The Scenic Art (New Brunswick, N. J., 1948), p. 42, says in Dec. 1875. H. J. to W. D. Howells, 3 Feb. [1876]: “Shortly after coming to Paris, finding it a matter of prime necessity to get a novel on the stocks immediately, I wrote to F. P. Church, offering him one for the Galaxy to begin in March, and was sending off my first instalment of MS. when your letter arrived” (The Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel [New York, 1955], p. 65). H. J. to William, 3 Dec. [1875]: “I shall speedily begin in the Galaxy another novel” (Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. [Boston, 1935], i, 362).

Note 19 in page 422 “I know the Théâtre Français by heart” (H. J. to William James, 29 July 1876); F. 0. Matthiessen, The James Family (New York, 1948), p. 343.

Note 20 in page 422 “Emile Augier and the Intrusion-Plot,” PMLA, lxiii (March 1948), 274-280. We know certainly that Henry James saw the following plays by Augier: Post Scriptum, L'aventurière, Paul Forestier, Lions et Renards, Gendre de M. Poirier, Les Fourchambaull, Le mariage d'Olympe, Les lionnes pauvres, and Maître Guerin (Wade, pp. 7, 81, 83, 85, 89, 116-117, 198, 204).

Note 21 in page 422 “M. Emile Augier, on bis social side, is preoccupied with the sanctity of the family, as they say in France; he ‘goes in,‘ as they say in England, for the importance of the domestic affections” (Henry James, “M. Emile Augier,” The Scenic Art, pp. 116-117). This essay appeared under “Notes” in the Nation on 27 July 1878.

Note 22 in page 422 “The slender thread of my few personal relations hangs on, without snapping, but it doesn't grow very stout” (H. J. to his father, Paris, 11 April [1876], in The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 vols. [New York, 1920], I, 45). See also n. 30 below.

Note 23 in page 422 Olympe's Marriage in Camille and Other Plays, ed. Stephen S. Stanton (New York, 1957), p. 226. James says “the modern theatre has few stronger pieces than L'Aventurière and Le Manage d'Olympe” (Wade, p. 116). There is an allusion, probably to this play, in The Siege of London: “ ? want to see what becomes of that woman', ” Mrs. Headway remarks apropos of a play she and her companions are witnessing. “ ‘Dona Clorinde? Oh, I suppose they'll shoot her; they generally shoot the women, in French plays,‘ Littlemore said” (The Great Short Novels of Henry James, ed. Philip Rahv, New York, 1944, p. 234).

Note 24 in page 422 Théâtre Complet de Emile Augier, 7 vols. (Paris, 1895).

Note 25 in page 423 See “Paris Revisited,” Wade, pp. 39-40. This was the first of James's articles to appear in the New York Tribune. It was published on 11 Dec. 1875, but dated “November 22nd, 1875.”

Note 26 in page 423 “A Source for Roderick Hudson,” MLN, LXIII (May 1948), 303-310. The source is L'affaire Clemenceau which James had reviewed in the Nation on 11 Oct. 1866.

Note 27 in page 423 Under the heading “Parisian Affairs,” this was James's 9th letter to the New York Tribune. Published on 25 March 1876, it is dated 28 Feb. 1876; hence James saw L'étrangère early in its run. Of course he may have got some details from the Figaro account, which, however, he says was lacking in particulars.

Note 28 in page 423 Quarante ans de théâtre, 8 vols. (Paris, 1901-1902), ?, 300. For a summary of the play and commentary, see Henry S. Schwarz, Alexandre Dumas, fis, dramatist (New York, 1927), pp. 71-74. Schwarz mentions, however, very few of the points which I enumerate in the next paragraph, to be got only from the play itself.

Note 29 in page 423 Portraits of Places (London, 1883), p. 75. “Occasional Paris,” in which this statement appears, was dated “1877” by James.

Note 30 in page 423 An odd conjunction of elements, quite in line with my thought, appears in a letter to William, 29 July [1876]: “My life there [Paris—he was at Etretat] makes a much more succulent figure in your letters, my mention of its thin ingredients as it comes back to me, than in my own consciousness. A good deal of Boulevard and third-rate Americanism: few retributive relations otherwise. I know the Théâtre Français by heart!'? (Letters, i, 51).

Note 31 in page 424 L'étrangère: Comédie in cinq actes (Paris, n.d. [1908?]), 148 pp.

Note 32 in page 424 H. J. to W. D. Howells, 30 March [1877], in The Selected Letters, pp. 70-71.

Note 33 in page 425 Introd., The Golden Bowl (New York, 1952), p. vi.