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Henry James's Pastoral Fallacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Howard Pearce
Howard Pearce*
Affiliation:
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
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Abstract

In his early fiction, Henry James’s characters tend to see reality in terms of an idealized pastoral image. This “fallacy” is paradoxical, being both a romantic falsification and an imaginative creation of values. The pastoral complex associates images of frail, vulnerable, but perfect and innocent figures; bright, tranquil, but diminutive fragile scenes; an intruding horror; and a resultant redoubling of efforts to transform the ideal into a perfect harmony. The Europeans and “An International Episode” exploit this Arcadian motif, and in “Brooksmith” the mode is thoroughly explored, even to the elegiac apotheosis of the dead “shepherd.” In the highly ambiguous late novels, The Turn of the Screw and The Golden Bowl, the residual power of the pastoral impulse remains ironically operative. For James the process of life is not to be denied, but the stasis of art and the need to create it are requisite for meaning, richness, and worth in the “felt” life.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 5 , October 1975 , pp. 834 - 847
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

Notes

1 The Novels and Tales of Henry James, New York Ed., 26 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1907–17), xxiii, 27. Throughout I quote James's fiction from this edition, with exceptions as indicated.

2 Joel Porte, The Romance in America (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 215–19, discusses this “adventure” motif in The Golden Bowl.

3 Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (1906; rpt. New York: Russell, 1959), p. 2.

4 See also John Frank Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry from the Beginnings to Marvell (1952; rpt. Freeport, N. Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), p. 14.

5 “The Integrity of Pastoral: A Basis for Definition,” Genre, 5 (1972), 10–11.

6 Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 5; Poggioli, “The Oaten Flute,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 11 (1957), 149.

7 Greg observes the artificiality of pastoral, p. 1 ; Harold E. Toliver, Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), p. 4, points up the ceremonial and formal quality of nature in pastoral; Poggioli, “Naboth's Vineyard or the Pastoral View of Social Order,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 24 (1963), 4, finds Virgil's dialectic to be one of disorder opposed to order and observes, in “The Oaten Flute,” p. 174, that “the function of pastoral poetry is to translate to the plane of imagination man's sentimental reaction against compulsory labor, social obligations, and ethical bonds; yet, while doing so, it acts as the catharsis of its own inner pathos, and sublimates the instinctual impulses to which it gives outlet”; Mary Lascelles reminds us that the pastoral world signifies, not “wish-fulfillment,” but “a country of the mind, to be attained only by force of the imagination”—“Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy,” in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garret (Freeport, N. Y. : Books for Libraries Press, 1959), rpt. in Pastoral and Romance: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Eleanor Terry Lincoln (Englewood Cliff's: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 125.

8 “The Tragic Fallacy,” from The Modern Temper (New York: Harcourt, 1929), rpt. in Five Approaches to Literary Criticism, ed. Wilbur S. Scott (New York: Collier, 1962), pp. 129–45.

9 Marx discusses similar views of the railroad in other American writers, among them Thoreau (pp. 249–62) and Henry Adams (pp. 345–50).

10 Peter Buitenhuis, The Grasping Imagination (Toronto : Univ. of Toronto Press, 1970), considers this novel as “comic pastoral.” He finds the pastoral functioning “not for pathetic but for purely comic purposes” (p. 91). He finds, too, that this experiment in the pastoral mode was not pursued after The Europeans (p. 102). My argument is that the pastoral image, though often submerged, is one of the steady concerns in James's fiction.

11 The Europeans, in The American Novels and Stories of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York: Knopf, 1964), p. 51. All citations of this novel come from this edition.

12 Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955), p. 307.

13 “The Pastoral Elegy and Milton's Lycidas,” PMLA, 25 (1910), 404.

14 Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1935), pp. 37–38.

15 Poems, ed. A. S. F. Gow (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952), i,15.

16 The Pastoral Elegy: An Anthology (1939; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1968), p. 4.

17 This statement comes from the Cornhill Magazine text (No. 38, Dec. 1878, pp. 687–713; No. 39, Jan. 1879, pp. 61–90), rpt. in The Great Short Novels of Henry James, ed. Philip Rahv (New York: Dial, 1944), p. 220. The story is elsewhere quoted from the New York Ed.

18 Charles W. Haney, “The Garden and the Child: A Study of Pastoral Transformation,” Diss. Yale 1965, Introd., observes that in 19th-century versions of pastoral the garden image gives way to the image of the child.

19 As noted subsequently, I have compared the New York Ed. with the original periodical text in Harper's Weekly, 2 May 1891, pp. 321–23.

20 Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (New York: Scribners, 1934), pp. 282–83.

21 The Shepheards Calender, in The Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and Ernest De Selincourt (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912).

22 John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957).

23 The “hallucination” versus “apparition” theories demonstrate these apparently contradictory interpretations. Both views, as well as attempts at synthesis, are represented in critical editions of the novel: the Norton, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1966), pp. 211–34; the Crowell, ed. Gerald Willen (New York: Crowell, 1969), pp. 189–272.

24 For a comparison of texts see Kimbrough, pp. 91–94.

25 Letter to Paul Bourget, in Kimbrough, p. 109.

26 Walter F. Wright, The Madness of Art (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1962), rejects the restricted interpretations of this novel which see Maggie as either “saint” or “witch” (pp. 242–43). Sallie Sears, The Negative Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), finds James's ambiguity in this novel reaching -toward the “absurd,” where the terms “good” and “evil” lose meaning (p. 222). Given Maggie's duplicity, Sears finds her transforming “negative imaginings into the positive triumph of art,” an activity in which the novelist fancifully participates.

27 Joseph A. Ward, The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1967), finds the balanced Fawns sections indicating a “pastoral harmony in the middle of each volume,” and he finds the Ververs' innocent “pastoral” assumptions to be a cause of the evil that erupts (pp. 205–06).

28 Sears, pp. 56–57, finds in James's “‘play’ with form, his delight in the perverse,” a “consolation” which makes “any order—even an order of pain” preferable to negation and despair. That consolation in his characters, I have suggested, is transformation into ideality and art. Sears rightfully observes James's ironic attitude toward himself and his characters insofar as “the ‘consolations’ of form become a moot point.” This view of James would seem to find him in agreement with Yeats that there is no “singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence” ; even anticipating Frost's assertion that poetry is a “momentary stay against confusion.”