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Henry James: The Poetics of Empiricism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John Henry Raleigh
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Extract

Criticism of Henry James in our time is verging into metaphysics. The late works have recently been analyzed in terms of “dialectic” and “myth”,1 as products of Swedenborgianism,2 and as an artistic objectification of William James' philosophical pragmatism.3 Despite great individual differences these three approaches hold in common the basic assumption that James' inner and final meaning has not yet been as-certained and the corollary assumption that this final meaning is perhaps expressed symbolically, by technique, rather than overtly by subject matter.4 In this climate of opinion James is conceived of as a kind of nineteenth-century Dante, the architect of a secular Divine Comedy for some later-day equivalent of scholasticism, and the legendary “late manner”, once considered merely idiosyncratic, is thought to be an elaborate structure which metaphorically expresses a coherent system of values. The critical problems are, first, to find James' Aquinas, or the rationale for the body of ideas on which the late works constitute a metaphor, and, second, to define the relationship between this logical statement and James' symbolic one.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 2 , March 1951 , pp. 107 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

1 Austin Warren, Rage for Order (Chicago, 1948), pp. 146–161. Warren speaks of the basic ingredients of the late works, dramatic dialogue and highly metaphorical descriptions of states of consciousness, as “dialectic” and “myth”, respectively.

2 Quentin Anderson, “Henry James and the New Jerusalem”, Kenyon Rev., viii (1946), 515–566. There is neither space nor occasion for a summary of this complex essay. For the miniscule sketch of recent James criticism being given here two quotations will suffice: “Since the elder James was a theologian and a moralist, it is conceivable that he stood in the same relation to the novelist as Aquinas does to Dante or Kierkegaard to Kafka” (p. 515); “In the end James is not a tragic poet but the poet of his father's theodicy” (p. 565). Anderson's theories are further elaborated in “The Two Henry Jamses”, Scrutiny, xiv (1947), 242–251, and “Henry James, His Symbolism and His Critics”, Scrutiny, xv (1947), 12–19.

3 Henry Bamford Parkes, “The James Brothers”, Sewanee Rev., lvi (1948), 323–328. Parkes says, e.g., that the use by Henry James of a scrupulously observed “point of view” rather than the customary novelistic convention of authorical omniscience was the artistic counterpart of the pragmatist theory that no truth has absolute validity and, hence, everything is relative to the observer.

4 “The meaning of his [James] works has been obscured by its subject matter … the deeper significance of his work is to be found not in its subiect matter but in its mode of construction” (ibid, p. 326).

5 “The Great Mr. Locke: America's Philosopher, 1783–1861”, Huntington Lib. Bull., No. 11 (April 1937), pp. 107–151.

6 “The Social Significance of Our Institutions”, American Philosophic Addresses, ed. Joseph T. Blair (New York, 1946), p. 248.

7 The exposition of the ultimate implications of Locke's doctrines is based generally upon A. N. Whitehead's familiar thesis that Locke effected a “bifurcation of nature”, which broke up any organic relationship between man and nature and man and man, and made each individual an isolated mental substance. I am indebted especially to the detailed working out of this thesis by F. S. C. Northrup, The Meeting of East and West (New York, 1947), pp. 80–111.

8 The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York, 1907), ii, 3–4. Hereafter all references to James will be given in this edition.

9 “ Henry James”, Yale Rev., xix (Spring 1930), 641.

10 The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1913), p. 549.

11 The Wound and the Bow (New York, 1947), p. 99.

12 Henry James at Work (London, 1924), p. 33.

13 Philosophy in a New Key (New York, 1948), pp. 1–2.