Complete Works

earth must in the last instance be a history of a really very relentless warfare.  Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone.  In virtue of these allies and enemies, he holds his precarious dominion, he possesses his fleeting significance; and it is this relation in all its manifestations, great and little, superficial or profound, and this relation alone, that is commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist in the only possible way in which the task can be performed: by the independent creation of circumstance and character, achieved against all the difficulties of expression, in an imaginative effort finding its inspiration from the reality of forms and sensations.  That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction.  There is no other secret behind the curtain.  All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation.  It is the uttermost limit of our power; it is the most potent and effective force at our disposal on which rest the labours of a solitary man in his study, the rock on which have been built commonwealths whose might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans.  Like a natural force which is obscured as much as illuminated by the multiplicity of phenomena, the power of renunciation is obscured by the mass of weaknesses, vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and compromises which make up the sum of our activity.  But no man or woman worthy of the name can pretend to anything more, to anything greater.  And Mr. Henry James’s men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits his art, so clear, so sure of itself, has drawn round their activities.  He would be the last to claim for them Titanic proportions.  The earth itself has grown smaller in the course of ages.  But in every sphere of human perplexities and emotions, there are more greatnesses than one — not counting here the greatness of the artist himself.  Wherever he stands, at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions, or his passions to his gods.  That is the problem, great enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and knowledge.
    In one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, Mr. Henry James claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience.  I think that the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable.  Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.  But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting — on second-hand impression.  Thus fiction is nearer truth.  But let that pass.  A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.  As is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine consciences.
    Of course, this is a general statement; but I don’t think its truth will be, or can be questioned.  Its fault is that it leaves so much out; and, besides, Mr. Henry James is much too considerable to be put into the nutshell of a phrase.  The fact remains that he has made his choice, and that his choice is justified up to the hilt by the success of his art.  He has taken for himself the greater part.  The range of a fine conscience covers more good and evil than the range of conscience which may be called, roughly, not fine; a conscience, less troubled by the nice discrimination of shades of conduct.  A fine conscience is more concerned with essentials; its triumphs are more perfect, if less profitable, in a worldly sense.  There is, in short, more truth in its working for a historian to detect and to show.  It is a thing of infinite complication and suggestion.  None of these escapes the art of Mr. Henry James.  He has mastered the country, his domain, not wild indeed, but full of romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and sunny places.  There are no secrets left within his range.  He has disclosed them as they should be disclosed — that is, beautifully.  And, indeed, ugliness has but little place in this world of his