Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters between Wiliam and Henry James

Chapter 4

25 of France, and where, on the other, the figures and the portraits . . . take up position and expression as he desired. .4. A chair in Stevenson’s house became known as the “Henry James chair” in honor of H’ry’s frequent visits —which maybe explains why Stevenson escaped criticism in “The Lesson of Balzac.” Or perhaps there was genuine admiration. In 1888, H’ry claimed that whatwasmostdelightfulaboutStevenson,likeBalzac, was his “constant variety of experiment.” H’ry never responded to Wm ’s commentary on “The Lantern Bearers,” but he would have agreed with Stevenson’s claim that the very best storytelling attempted to do what poetry had always done: sink down into “the mysterious inwards of psychology” so as to arrive at the “true realism.” H’ry likened both Balzac and Stevenson to painters —which is telling, in light of the fact that Wm actually was a painter. Wm , too, counted writing and painting in the same breath, but he did so in reverse order. “Your article on Historical novels was very good,” 26 Wm wrote on September 26, 1867, in the same letter in which he attested to his French debauch. He was twenty-five years old, bored in Berlin. He was eating out a lot (he complained that waiters “dressed in cast off wedding suits” were the plague of his life), and he begged H’ry to list his recent reading and to explain a stray comment he’d made about having found no good books of late. H’ry’s short piece in the Nation had surveyed the territory between history and literature , and discussed works that fell in between. He argued that artistically poor books can nevertheless have instructive historical value and that, by contrast, good books can prove themselves worthless by failing to comport with recognizable truth. The latter was more lamentable. “It is, of course, not well for people of imagination to have the divine faculty constantly snubbed and cross-questioned and held to account ... but it is very well that it should hold itself responsible to certain uncompromising realities.” What realities? Wm may have had an idea, as scarcely a month later it struck him that he might try his hand at reviewing Herman Grimm’s latest novel. He had nothing else to do—why not try? He related to H’ry how the work went—“sweatingfearfullyfor threedays,erasing,tear- 27 ing my hair, copying, recopying &c, &c. . . . Style is not my forte”—and he enclosed the finished product such that H’ry might correct it and see it through to publication (which he did). Wm ’s letter was harder on Grimmthanthereviewhadbeen:“[Hehas]anextreme belief in the existence and worth of truth . . . [but] a want of careless animal spirits—wh. by the bye seem toberathercharacteristicsof therisinggeneration.”In other words, Grimm and many others sacrificed vivid depictions of their passionate minds, so like sanctuaries or museums, so as to aspire to the salts and acids, to a rigid objectivity that was both unattainable and unrealistic. For Wm , the problem harked back to a drama that had played out in art hundreds of years earlier. Six months later—in a letter from Dresden reflecting on Italian painting, a missive at one moment interrupted by a dinner of Kalbsbraten, a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and a bowl of chocolate —he began to rethink his French debauch. He’d seen quite a bit of art in the meantime, and he was now weighing the damage that tended to result from battling artistic schools. Old masters like José Ribera and Guido Reni surely had talent, he claimed, but to 28 anyone standing “outside of the race course of schoolcompetition ” they appeared cold and heartless. Literature had a similar problem. “I’ve no doubt that the present school of novel-writing, I mean the french realistic school,” he wrote H’ry, “will strike people hereafter just as the later Roman & Bolognese pictures strike us.” Though earnest, both painters and novelists missed “the one thing needful.” They strove after “mere fact, truth of detail,” and thereby passed over the “higher and more intellectual harmony” that was evident in the work of the schools’ founders, if not their students. Wm would later import this basic dynamic to religion—something essential was lost in the attempt to transmit the experience of religious mystics to their followers—but for now he ended his treatisewitharequestthathebeexcusedforhis“vague tirade of unripe . . . impressions.” If Wm...