Henry James, the English Spirit of Robert Browning, and the American Century

James’s work at the turn of the century took form amid a ferment of revisionist and millennial energies in fin-de-siècle Europe without directly reflecting any of them. Yet a profound, if not surface, register of the urgency of historical, political, and cultural change drove James’s career through the personal upheavals of the 1890s into the magisterial assurance of the late novels, and in important ways this impetus is traceable to a seminal and—for James—definitive Victorian figure, Robert Browning. The great work of Browning’s improbable romantic marriage, Men and Women (1855), effectively fed on the Jamesian gap between life and art to produce self-portraiture and subtle explorations of human history and psychology in memorable poetry. Subsequently, Browning’s career in his late widowed years rebounded anew in the monumental, genre-bending epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868–69). The canon-maker of the nineteenth century’s poetic legacy to the twentieth was an alter ego at once compelling, intimidating, and necessary to James at the coincident turn of the century and of his career.

Companion essays by James, “Browning in Westminster Abbey” (1890) and “The Novel in ‘The Ring and the Book’” (1912), indicate Browning’s liminal space on James’s cultural, temporal, and aesthetic map and the implicit model that James constructs in Browning. In the first essay, recognizing the occasion of Browning’s burial in the Abbey, James represents Browning as subversive amid the august, traditional, English company. Even as he joins them, James says, Browning breaks through the “rigid pale” of canonical presences in the Abbey, that “Valhalla by the Thames,” by the individualistic modernness of his poetry (EL 788, 789). In the more extended 1912 essay, Browning’s great poem The Ring and the Book has itself become the cathedral into which the irreverent and profane presence of Henry James intrudes, usurping, redefining, and assimilating Browning’s literary monument, “so vast and so essentially gothic a structure, spreading and soaring and branching at such a rate,” into James’s own American spirit and century (791). In both pieces James stages a liminal scene between modern and traditional, English and American, sacred and secular, poetry and prose, and steps purposefully toward claiming that space as his own. James rescues “The Novel in ‘The Ring and the Book’”; it is the undertaking of this study to rescue the poem in The Golden Bowl.

The American Browning is not a difficult construction on the face of it: the Victorian poet whose dramatic monologues gave generic form to an ideology of individualism, whose extended career and body of work kept faith and optimism available to an increasingly skeptical century and culture, whose doctrine of Incompletion was a philosophic and aesthetic program vitally linked to realism—this poet had almost as devoted and wide a following in the New World as in the Old. But for James, finally, the American Browning was the poet of “the great constringent relation between man and woman at once at its maximum and as the relation most worth while in life for either party” (EL 809), the poet whose gallery of historical voices, criminal and grotesque eccentrics, aesthetic archetypes, idealized heroes and heroines, kept before his readers a multiplicity of models of uncertain and unsatisfied desire, pragmatic questers all for “the very ideal of the real,” in James’s phrase (799). For James the challenge of The Ring and the Book was to convert the binary polarities of constraining (“constringent”) necessity and idealization dramatized in the poem to an American pragmatics of desire mediated by necessity, to “the very ideal of the real,” in The Golden Bowl. James decentered the force of transcendence in the poem, revised and recentered the poem’s focus on marriage, and projected these revisions as early as the initial notebook entries on the genesis of the novel.

In his 1912 essay James recounts first the story of The Ring and the Book, then the reader’s experience of the story, and presents them as two separate and different narratives. One is the “bundle...