The Story in The Sacred Fount

Abstract

PUBLISHED IN 1901, Henry James's The Sacred Fount is usually described as being the first example of his ‘late’ style, and on the whole critics have tended to agree that it was not a success: that, in the words of Edmund Wilson, it was ‘mystifying, even maddening’;1 that it would drive a man mad to seek a clear answer to its puzzles and ambiguities;2 that only when ‘the riddle has been abandoned’ can the novel be enjoyed as other novels are enjoyed; and that James must have meant that no clear answer to its ‘riddle’ existed.3 This throwing up of the hands in the face of James's novel, and refusal to follow it as a story, was an odd business, and it seems to me one ought to have another look at the matter. Let me briefly recapitulate the opening of the novel. The narrator (unnamed) has arrived at Paddington station en route for a weekend at Newmarch, a grand country house in the Midlands, and on the platform he recognizes – and shies away from – a man named Gilbert Long, evidently to be one of his fellow-guests and someone he has hitherto disliked as uncivil and oafish. But to his surprise Long greets him warmly and strikes him as strangely transformed – courteous, intelligent, and easy in manner. They agree to share a compartment, and Long, who goes to find a porter to shift his luggage, returns with a lady. She is unknown to the narrator, or so he thinks, but turns out to be Grace Brissenden, whom he has met at Newmarch in previous years and who, even more than Long, appears transformed; she looks ten years younger and even beautiful – as had decidedly not been the case before. It appears that her husband Guy is to follow by a later train, escorting a certain Lady John; and while Long is buying a newspaper, Mrs Brissenden agrees with the narrator as to Long's remarkable improvement and puts it down to Lady John's influence: ‘it has positively given him a mind and a tongue’. The three travel together to Newmarch, giving the narrator much food for thought.