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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
From what Henry James writes in the well-known passage on the novelist's ‘need of the individual vision’ (Preface to The Portrait of a Lady), one is surprised to find him attributing absolute objectivity to the central character in another of his novels. A valid subject, he had said, is the result of some direct impression or perception of life; it springs out of the soil of the artist's prime sensibility. To represent adequately what he felt mattered about Isabel Archer, James had decided to place ‘the centre of the subject in the young woman's own consciousness’. He had rejected the easy evasive trick of giving only the general sense of her effect upon the characters surrounding her. To make theirs the predominant point of view would have been an escape from any close account of the subject. What then induced James on a later occasion to reverse this procedure without scruple? One can look first at James's account of the effect which this novel was to produce.
page 73 note 1 James, Henry, The Art of the Novel (1934), intro. by R. P. Blackmur, pp. 45–52.Google Scholar
page 73 note 2 Ibid. p. 79.
page 73 note 3 Ibid. p. 85.
page 73 note 4 Ibid. pp. 90–1.
page 74 note 1 Ibid. p. 82.
page 74 note 2 Quoted by Edel, L. in Henry James: The Middle Years (1963), p. 294Google Scholar. Lyall H. Powers's perceptive suggestion that the Nick–Miriam situation is ‘James's projection of his problem of turning to the theater—there was both an artistic and a mercenary impetus involved, perhaps an insoluble paradox’ is relevant here. See his ‘James's The Tragic Muse—Ave atque Vale’, in PMLA, 73 (06, 1958), 272Google Scholar. Cargill, Oscar, however, in ‘Gabriel Nash—Somewhat less than Angel?’ in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 14 (No. 3; 12 1959), 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar, believes that James had no twinge of conscience in writing for the theatre.
page 74 note 3 Cargill, O., The Novels of Henry James (1961), p. 189.Google Scholar
page 75 note 1 The Art of the Novel, pp. 89–91.
page 75 note 2 Ibid. p. 95.
page 75 note 3 See The Art of the Novel, p. 322.
page 75 note 4 William F. Hall's argument that the centre of the novel shifts from Miriam to Nash ‘under the weight of meaning that James tries to impose on it’ seems to me to depend too much on an allegorical interpretation of Nash as ‘ideal consciousness’. See ‘Gabriel Nash: “Famous Centre” of The Tragic Muse’, in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21 (No. 2; 09, 1966), 168–72.Google Scholar
page 76 note 1 ‘The London Theatres’, 1879; in The Scenic Art (ed. Wade, A., 1949), pp. 119–23.Google Scholar The theatre was the fashion among the bored, leisured class of England, James notes, in a world which was ‘being steadily democratized and vulgarized…’
page 76 note 2 Cf. ‘The London Theatres’, 1877 (ibid., pp. 93–4). ‘The English stage of today…certainly holds the mirror as little as possible up to nature—to any nature, at least, usually recognized in the British islands…barbarism, chaos and crudity hold undisputed sway.’
page 76 note 3 The Art of the Novel, p. 94. Arnold had argued that the French example should be followed in England; see his ‘The French Play in London’, 1879, reprinted in Irish Essays and Others (1882).
page 76 note 4 Cf. ‘The Parisian Stage’, January 1876; in The Scenic Art, p. 45, where he asks if the golden days of the French stage are over.
page 77 note 1 Ibid. p. 129.
page 77 note 2 ‘The French Play in London’, in The Nineteenth Century (1879), 230. In 1863 Arnold had written three sonnets on Rachel as a culture-heroine; ‘The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours.’ The Poems of Matthew Arnold (ed. Allott, K., 1965), pp. 482–5Google Scholar. James's idea that great actresses were not necessarily intellectually deep informs his criticism of George Eliot's handling of Daniel Deronda's mother. In James's dialogue, Pulcheria asks, ‘Why should an actress and prima-donna care so much about religious matters?’ In answer to the point that the mother hated Jewish manners, Pulcheria goes on to say that she understands that, ‘but I am not a Jewish actress of genius; I am not what Rachel was. If I were I should have other things to think about.’ See ‘Daniel Deronda: A Conversation’ (1876), in James's, Selected Literary Criticism (ed. Shapira, M., 1963), p. 43.Google Scholar
page 77 note 3 The Notebooks of Henry James (ed. Matthiessen, F. O. and Murdock, K. B., 1947), p. 64.Google Scholar
page 77 note 4 Madame Carré refers to Rachel's talent as one ‘essentially formed by work’ (Ch. 7).
page 77 note 5 ‘Frances Anne Kemble’, in Essays in London (1893), p. 108. In fact while James knew her she confined her professional activity to recitals on tour.
page 78 note 1 In the light of Fanny Kemble's lack of technical curiosity, Leon Edel is surely wrong in remarking that Madame Carré ‘might have been drawn out of Fanny Kemble’. His reference to Miriam as ‘a fictional English counterpart to Rachel or Sarah Bernhardt’ also blurs a distinction: see his ‘Henry James: The Dramatic Years’, prefaced to his edition of Guy Domville (1960), pp. 47–8.
page 79 note 1 Notebooks, p. 92; 2 February 1889. Julia Bartet was a well-known comédienne.
page 81 note 1 See The Art of the Novel, pp. 94–5.
page 81 note 2 As W. D. Howells noted, Miriam is ‘most herself when her whole nature is straining toward the realization of some one else’, in ‘Editor's Study’, Harper's New Monthly Magazine 81, (09, 1890), 640Google Scholar; quoted by Stone, E. in The Battle and the Books (1964), p. 107.Google Scholar
page 82 note 1 Wilson, Edmund in The Triple Thinkers (1952), p. 110Google Scholar, comments, ‘Precisely one trouble with The Tragic Muse is that James does not get inside Miriam Rooth; and if he fails even to try to do so, it is because, in his experience of the world and his insight into human beings, he is inferior to a man like Tolstoy.’ Oscar Cargill rejoins flatly, ‘He knew her as he knew an artist, as he knew himself, in The Novels of Henry James (1961), p. 200, n. 31.
page 82 note 2 Anderson, Q., The American Henry James (1958), p. 103.Google Scholar
page 83 note 1 Lyall H. Powers's view that this marriage ‘merely symbolises her being wed to her art’ misses its social and moral implications. Powers, however, realises that ‘Miriam Rooth is, in James's terms, a Jewish muse—at once mercenary and aesthetic’. See his ‘James's The Tragic Muse—Ave atque Vale’, in PMLA, 73 (06 1958) 272–3.Google Scholar
page 83 note 2 The Art of the Novel, p. 300.
page 83 note 3 Ibid. p. 51.
page 83 note 4 Ibid. p. 96.
page 84 note 1 The Art of the Novel, p. 167.
page 84 note 2 Sherringham's vision of a National Theatre surely can be used to qualify W. W. Robson's account of his ‘profound conventionality’, in Critical Essays (1966), p. 236.
page 85 note 1 The Art of the Novel, pp. 90–1.
page 85 note 2 The 1908 version reads, ‘the words “revelation”, “incarnation”, “acclamation”, “demonstration”, “ovation”—to name only a few, and all accompanied by the word “extraordinary”—acquired a new force’. The expansion guys newspaper style more than it praises Miriam.
page 86 note 1 See ‘London Plays’, in The Scenic Art, p. 164. ‘I have never thought of Romeo and Juliet as a dull drama; but Mr Irving has succeeded in making it so.’
page 88 note 1 Dorothea Krook, for instance, writes that Sherringham's ‘poor divided passion is exposed in all its final shabbiness against Miriam's splendid integrity’, in her The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (1962), p. 98.
page 89 note 1 Cf. A Small Boy and Others (1913), p. 109. ‘Rather dismal, everywhere, I admit, the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off—the fatigued and disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling some closed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blighted for want of custom.’