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Henry James's "The Story in It": A Successful Aesthetic Adventure by Ellen Tremper, Brooklyn College, City University of New York Stuart Sherman in "The Aesthetic Idealism of Henry James" has complained that for "Henry James all things are ultimately beautiful or ugly. ... [He] ... receives and attempts to judge alI the kinds of his experience on the single crowded, swarming, humming level of the aesthetic consciousness; the apartments above and below are vacant."1 Yet Sherman does not sufficiently account for the operation of James's aesthetic sense. Towards the close of his essay he remarks of The Other House, What MaIsIe Knew, and The Turn of the Screw: "If the effect Is not thrilling In the first case and heartrending In the last two, It Is because Anglo-Saxons are quite unaccustomed to having their deeps of terror and pity, their moral centers, touched through the aesthetic nerves."2 Sherman, In other words. Is forced to admit that James does not make all life Into an "aesthetic flat.". Somehow, he does touch our "moral centers." For, though James resembles Walter Pater in his interest in consciousness and the subjective experience of the Individual, he Is also like Matthew Arnold in that he Insists on seeing "the object as In Itself it really is." We might, in fact, say that James is not only Interested In "impressions" of the real world, but in the quality and moral value of the objects and people he looks at. If he chooses to fasten his critical gaze on certain things, it is precisely because he knows they will touch our moral centers. James complains, exactly as Sherman does, of one of his own creations, Gilbert Osmond. Through Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady he says: "He's the incarnation of taste," Ralph went on, thinking hard how he could best express Gilbert Osmond's sinister attributes without putting himself in the wrong by seeming to describe him coarsely. He wished to describe him impersonally, scientifically. "He judges and measures, approves and condemns, altogether by that."^ Osmond's taste (in the ordinary sense of the word) is confining; his life, not the Jamesian world he inhabits, Is the aesthetic flat. Yet, as Isabel is attracted to Osmond, James is attracted to Paterlan aestheticism though he does not rest content until, also like Isabel, he has transformed It into an Arno I di an "criticism of I I fe." It would even be fair to assert, as the fol low I ng account will show, that the necessity James sees for transforming aesthetlcisjn and putting it in touch with "the hug'e, firm earth" is the characteristic note in James's relations with this approach to art.* In February, 1884, Henry James returned to Paris and was reintroduced, through his friend Theodore Child, to his former acquaintances of Flaubert's cénacle, Daudet, Concourt, Loti, and Zola. Leon Edel has found the record of the conversation that James had with these writers one evening at the home of Alphonse Daudet.5 Child apparently made notes on it for the literary column "The Contributors' Club" 1. Stuart P. Sherman, "The Aesthetic Idealism of Henry James," In The Question of Henry James, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York: Henry Holt, 1945), pp. 76-77. 2. "The Aesthetic Idealism of Henry James," p. 90. 3. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Scribner's, 1908), II, 71. 4. Miriam Rooth recites these words of Queen Constance's from King John in The Tragic Muse. 5. Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882-1895 (Philadelphia: Llppincott, 1962), pp. 97-100, hereafter cited parenthetical Iy as HJ III. THE HENRY JAMES REVIEW ΠFALL, 1981 of the May, 1884, Issue of the Atlantic Monthly. This record, while Interesting In Its own right, Is even more so when conpared with "The Author of Beltraffio," published in the June and July numbers of the English Illustrated Magazine, and with "The Art of Fiction," which appeared In Longman's Magazine In September of the same year." Edmond Gosse's anecdote about "Jlohnl Alddingtonl Slymmonds]" and h is Ca I vl nlstlc wife, which served as James's inspiration for...

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