Henry James, or, The Beast in the Palace of Art

Abstract

N A Small Boy and Others, the deeply revealing first of his autobiographical volumes, Henry James describes himself as person so haunted, even from an early age, with visions of life, that aridities, for him, were half a and half an impossibility... figurative language here leads directly into the heart of what I take to be the central theme of James's fiction, that of the loss of It is this terror of James's own which is the source of his great theme; and, prior to that, it is this terror, I feel, which is the dynamic of James's very creative process. Terror is a strong word, but it is appropriate to the emotions generated in stories like The Beast in the Jungle and The Jolly Corner, where those Jamesian surrogates John Marcher and Spencer Brydon are haunted by just this fear of personal failure. It is with such late works as these, and a particular pattern of imagery and event they share, that I will be especially concerned here. But from the same fear issue all those works of every period in which renunciation is at stake, or a lack of initiation into life lamented; in which young men and women discover that they have not the courage to live, and push aside wistfully or with revulsion the cup of life; or older people find that Life has somehow passed them by unawares. 'Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? .... now I'm old ... it's too late . .. it's as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there.' Thus-of course-Lambert Strether in Paris (where the young James himself saw those visions, and knew those terrors of life's aridities). It has been said to be a peculiarly American Angst. Certainly James's concern with the life lived-or lost-can be traced back from the latest fiction to the earliest childhood anxieties as described with