Henry James and George Eliot: The Price of Mastery

Henry James and George Eliot: The Price of Mastery by Sarah B. Daugherty, Wichita State University In The Middle Years, Henry James recalls his experience of reading and reviewing George Eliot's Felix Holt: I had rejoiced without reserve in Felix Holt—the illusion of reading which, outstretched on my then too frequently inevitable bed at Swampscott during a couple of very hot days of the summer of 1866, comes back to me, followed by that in sooth of sitting up again, at no great ease, to indite with all promptness a review of the delightful thing, the place of appearance of which nothing could now induce me to name, shameless about the general fact as I may have been at the hour itself: over such a feast of fine rich natural tone did I feel myself earnestly bend. . . . The book was not, if I rightly remember, altogether genially greeted, but I was to hold fast to the charm I had thankfully suffered it, I had been conscious of absolutely needing it, to work. (MY 62-63) This is the voice of James the master, who claims to have "shaken off the anxieties of circumspection and comparison" and to regard his memory of Eliot as "an attachment pure and simple" (My 61). But upon reading the original review— which, like most of James's early critical pieces, appeared in the Nation—one encounters a different persona. Here is the male judicial critic, wise beyond his years, putting the female novelist in her place: In our opinion .... neither "Felix Holt," nor "Adam Bede," nor "Romola ," is a master-piece. . . . They belong to a kind of writing in which the English tongue has the good fortune to abound— that clever, voluble, bright-colored novel of manners which began with the present century under the auspices of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen. George Eliot is stronger in degree than either of these writers, but she is not different in kind. She brings to her task a richer mind, but she uses it in very much the same way. With a certain masculine comprehensiveness which they lack, she is eventually a feminine—a delightfully feminine—writer. She has the microscopic observation , not a myriad of whose keen notations are worth a single one of those great synthetic guesses with which a real master attacks the truth, and which, by their occasional occurrence in the stories of Mr. Charles Reade ..., make him, to our mind, the most readable of living English novelists, and prove him a distant kinsman of Shakespeare. George Eliot has the exquisitely good taste on a small scale, the absence of taste on a large . . . , the unbroken current of feeling and ... of expression, which distinguish the feminine mind. That she should be offered a higher place than she has earned, is easily explained by the charm which such gifts as hers in such abundance are sure to exercise. (FH 128) 154 The Henry James Review The later James was probably embarrassed by his youthful sexism as well as by his taste for Reade's overwritten melodramas; hence his coyness about a review whose location he knew only too well. Yet the language of The Middle Years reveals James's effort to maintain his dominance, no longer as critic—a role he gratefully abandons—but as master novelist who can look back, without anxiety, on an author whose works he has appropriated. I find it idle even to wonder what "place" the author of Silas Marner and Middlemarch may be conceived to have in the pride of our literature___We simply sit with our enjoyed gain, our residual rounded possession in our lap; a safe old treasure, which has ceased to shrink, if indeed also perhaps greatly to swell___ (MY 60-61) Through the metaphor of the treasure, James acknowledges his debt to Eliot while reducing her novels to possessions he has secured for himself. The rhetoric of the old novelist is more subtle than that of the young critic; but in both cases it serves to distinguish the male author from his female rival, whose "charm" is at once a limitation and a threat to be "suffered" and overcome. The extent of the...