Comic Pastoral: Henry James’s The Europeans
- Comic PastoralHenry James’s The Europeans
Assistant Professor of English, Victoria College, University of Toronto; editor of Henry James, French Writers and American Women: Essays (1961)
notes
1. It was first published in the North American Review, CXVIII (April, 1874), and reprinted in French Poets and Novelists (New York, 1878, and London, 1884). See A Bibliography of Henry james, edited by Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence (New York, 1957). For studies of the influence of Turgenieff on James, see Cornelia P. Kelley, The Early of Henry James (Urbana, Ill, 1930), 176–81, and Daniel Lerner, “The Influence of Turgenicff on Henry James,” Slavonic Review, 20, (1943), 28–34.
2. French Poets and Novelists (London, 1884), 230.
3. The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York, 1907), 1, x.
4. The Letters of Henry James (New York, 1920), 1, 65.
5. Henry James, The Europeans, with an introduction by Edward Sackville-West (London, 1952). vii.
6. Page numbers in parentheses refer to F. O. Matthiessen’s edition of The American Novels and Stories of Henry James (New York, 1956), which includes The Europeans, 37–161.
7. The Remains of Hesiod, tr, by C. A. Elton (London, 1815), 21.
8. Kelley, 262.
9. F. W. Dupee, Henry James (New York, 1956), 88.
10. Charles G. Hoffman, The Short Novels of Henry James (New York, 1957), 37.
11. Edward Sackville-West, viii–x.
12. Dupee, 88.
13. Henry James. Washington Square, The Europeans, with an introduction by R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1959), 7.
14. Dupee, 87.
15. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short Studies of American Authors (Boston, 1880), 56, Part of Higginson’s outraged attack on The Europeans is quoted by Dupee on page 61. Perhaps Higginson’s middle name explains the tenor of his criticism of the nouvelle.
16. The Novels and Tales of Henry James, XVIII, viii.
17. A remark in a recent article by Marvin Mudrick supports this observation on a more general level: “Narratives of short-story or novella length…are likely to approach the conditions of poetry for the reasons of length alone: the shorter the work of fiction, the more likely are its characters to be simply functions and typical manifestations of a precise and inevitable sequence of events.…” “Character and Event in Fiction,” Yale Review, L (Winter, 1961), 214–15.
18. Graham Greene, “Henry James: the Private Universe,” in The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (London, 1951), 23.
19. Since completing this essay, I have read Richard Poirier’s chapter on The Europeans in his book The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels (New York, 1960). He anticipates some of the points made in the present article, but has emphasized more the “comic” aspects of the work, whereas I have dwelt more on the “pastoral” elements. This essay is part of a larger study of Henry James’s “American” fiction and non-fiction, in process of completion.
