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Henry James at the Grecian Urn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Daniel Lerner  and
Oscar Cargill
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Extract

The myth of the cultural “limitations” of Henry James appears to have been the creation of two British journalists, Ford Madox Hueffer and Rebecca West, who, while they rendered to James the service of publicity, were not sufficiently read in either James or the classics to generalize as freely as they did on both his riches and his deficiencies. Hueffer led off in 1913 in this fashion:

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 4 , June 1951 , pp. 316 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

Note 1 in page 316 Henry James: A Critical Study (London, 1913), p. 101.

Note 2 in page 316 Henry James (London, 1916), pp. 27, 60–62, 65.

Note 3 in page 316 Percy Lubbock, ed. Letters of Henry James (New York, 1920), I, 8.

Note 4 in page 317 For example, in a letter to Jusserand, the French Ambassador: “Dear Athenian, For once in my life I am more Attic than Alcibiades! I am living on the honey of Hymettus while you eat Spartan broth in Pall Mall.” Quoted in Marie Gamier, Henry James et la France (Paris, 1927); see “Une lettre inédite.”

Note 6 in page 317 For example, his discussions of Epictetus and of William Morris' “Earthly Paradise” and “Life and Death of Jason,” in Notes & Reviews and Views & Reviews.

Note 6 in page 317 The Bostonians (London & New York, 1886), pp. 6, 47, 91, 101, 138, 141, 162, 173, 236, 257, 429.

Note 7 in page 318 F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, eds. The Notebooks qf Henry James (New York, 1947), pp. 46, 47, 67, 48. “Alphonse Daudet” appeared in Century Magazine, August 1883. See Le Roy Phillips, A Bibliography of the Writings of Henry James (New York, 1930), p. 192.

Note 8 in page 318 Partial Portraits (New York, 1911), pp. 237, 199.

Note 9 in page 319 The Bostonians (Boston, 1921), i, 167. All further quotations from this work are followed by parenthetical page citation.

Note 10 in page 320 W. N. Bates, Sophocles (Philadelphia, 1940), p. 133.

Note 11 in page 320 “Ambiguity of Henry James,” Hound & Horn (April 1934), 391.

Note 12 in page 321 This view is roughly stated in De Quincey's observation that Greek characterization has “nothing of that complexity and interweaving of qualities, that interaction of moral and intellectual powers, which we moderns understand by character. The rude outlines of character on the Greek stage were mere inheritances from tradition, and generally mere determinations from the situation: and in no instance did the qualities of a man's will, heart, or constitutional temperament, manifest themselves by and through a collision and strife amongst each other; which is our test of dramatic character.” Letters to a Young Man, and Other Essays (Boston, 1854), p. 114.

Note 13 in page 321 Robert Whitelaw's translation, nearest in time to the publication of The Bostoniens. Subsequent parenthetical page references are to Gilbert Murray's Ten Greek Plays (New York, 1929).

Note 14 in page 323 J. J. Chapman, tr. Antigone (New York, 1930), pp. 68, 69.

Note 15 in page 325 Chandler, “ Sophocles, Analyzed According to Freudian Method,” Monisl, xxiii (1913), 77; Webster, An Introduction to Sophocles (New York, 1936), p. 60; Prye, “Theory of Greek Tragedy,” Nebraska Univ. Shidics (Oct. 1913), xiii, 37.

Note 16 in page 325 Circumventing the policeman, whose presence may have been suggested by that of the guard at the tomb in Antigone.

Note 17 in page 328 The Other House (Norfolk, Conn., 1948), pp. xiv-xviii.

Note 18 in page 329 The Plays of Euripides, Everyman (New York, 1908), II, 114 (Woodhull's translation).

Note 19 in page 329 Notebooks, pp. 140–141.

Note 20 in page 330 The Other House, p. xiii.

Note 21 in page 330 Notebooks, p. 140.

Note 22 in page 330 The Complete Plays of Henry James (Philadelphia, 1949), p. 679. The reader will be interested in the suggestion made us by Mr. Edel that the motivation of Rose is sh'ghtly influenced by that of the mother in “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884) who allows the child to die under the guise of “protecting” the child from the father.