The Literary Children of James and Clemens

Abstract

IN HIS controversial book The American Adam, R. B. Lewis makes a major distinction between the innocence celebrated by Whitman and the knowledge of evil evinced by Hawthorne and Melville. There is perhaps as great a difference again between these latter and Clemens and James. It is a subtler one-one that can perhaps best be designated as a change in tone. The religious and metaphysical significances in Hawthorne and Melville dominate their work: one feels that the discerned interplay of significant forces of good and evil is not only more important but, imaginatively, more visible than the romance or parable in which they are immanent. Characters are lurid with large meanings. In James and Clemens this atmosphere has disappeared. There is a density of specification which, whether it is scenic or psychological, firmly anchors their work in the palpable human environment. Images of evil no longer have the largeness and luminous identity of the white whale and the house with seven gables. The complexities of good and evil have become far harder to recognize and discriminate among: there is no longer such certainty about the abstract, capitalized entities, and the firm blacks and whites of Melville, Poe, and Hawthorne give way to the chromatic subtleties of James. Hawthorne and Melville treat of a generalized cosmic evil; Clemens and James, in many wvays an incongruous coupling, do have this in common-an eye and an ear for the subtle particulars of much human malignity. Melville and Hawthorne are always between the reader and the story to discuss and point the moral; the philosophizing author is nearly always present. There is no such moral cicerone in the confusing worlds of Huckleberry Finn and What Maisie Knew: the author has retired behind the story. Now