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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Criticism of Henry James's controversial novel The Sacred Fount has tended rather insistently to take one of two interpretive directions. Since Edmund Wilson's famous essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James” appeared in 1934 and made everyone more aware of the potential complexity of James's handling of the focus of narration, the perhaps more frequently encountered approach to the novel has been one which regards it, like The Turn of the Screw and In the Cage, as principally another Jamesian experiment with a narrator of doubtful omniscience. The other approach, one still found in many treatments of the novel, tends rather to accept completely the narrator's version of events at Newmarch and looks for the meaning and significance of the work in his most obvious preoccupation during the weekend in which those events occur, the vampire theme of fulfillment and depletion in intense human relationships. Both approaches are valid. Indeed, one of the impressive aspects of the serious criticism of The Sacred Fount is that nearly all of the important attempts at analysis have been and remain true to some degree. Leon Edel, following and building on the hints of Wilson, has shown that the novel clearly is about “appearance and reality,” and R. P. Blackmur has pointed out the parabolic nature of the story and called attention to The Sacred Fount as the “nightmare nexus” in the Jamesian struggle “to portray the integrity of the artist and… the integrity of the self.” Even Rebecca West, in her witty dismissal of the book some years ago, was correct—more correct than she knew perhaps since she gives James no credit for a deliberate and skillfully manipulated irony—-in recognizing and mocking the disparity between the passion, pride, and labor expended by the incredibly egocentric, narcissistic narrator and the, if not completely trivial, at least gossamer issues involved. But the irony, like the ambiguity, is both constant and conscious. Unlike the narrator, to whom James has frequently been compared, James presides confidently over his fictional world like, in Lady John's words, “a real providence,” who “knows” (p. 176).
Note 8 in page 408 So far as I know, only two of the many critics of this novel have touched even incidentally upon any of these crucial problems. R. P. Blackmur, “The Sacred Fount,” p. 352, in discussing the function of the narrator as author or as any novelist acting as the conscience of his characters, comments: “She [Mrs. Brissenden] has been hallucinated—supposing James is crazy—into accepting his vision of life against her will and without her knowledge. James had given her the butter and honey of his imagination to eat, so that, if we may borrow the language of Isaiah, she might know to refuse the evil, and choose the good. Thus we see that as a novelist James is the hidden conscience of his characters, and as conscience he is himself their sacred fount. For is not conscience indeed that imaginative resource of which, if one has it at all, one has too much for a single share and yet not enough to go round?” The other criticism is by Claire J. Raeth, in “Henry James's Rejection of The Sacred Fount,” ELH, xvi (December 1949), 308–324. She writes: “The operation of consciousness upon the narrator is different from its effect upon the principals; he is interested in the thrill and sport of intellectual exercise and resists the claims of morality which would involve him in attacking the aggressors and in aiding the victims. The narrator's probing is dependent upon the corroboration given him by others, especially by the four principals, since he himself has no relationship with them except as a prying outsider. He is primarily dependent upon Mrs. Brissenden, who has given him the clue to the theory of the sacred fount at the beginning…” (p. 310). Again, she cites as “the basic problem, that which develops out of the particular use of the narrator and of the meaning of his search and defeat in relation to the meaning of the two couples” (p. 311). Neither of these writers, however, ever urges his verbal insights to the point of discovering their real significance; they remain isolated and peripheral. Perlongo, in his recent “The Sacred Fount: Labyrinth or Parable,” p. 644, sees “the downfall of the central character as the essence of that tragedy” which he believes the novel to be, but he interprets this downfall and the entire novel in a way very different from that for which I am arguing.
Note 9 in page 409 The Crooked Corridor: A Study of Henry James (New York, 1949), p. 48.
Note 10 in page 410 “An Introductory Essay,” pp. xvi-xx.