The Sacred Fount and Modernist Baroque

The Sacred Fount was published in 1901. Contemporary reviews struck the note of bemusement which has persisted in criticism of the novel. Adverse reaction has extended to summary dismissal by Rebecca West, customarily an astute reader. She remarked with evident frustration how “a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason, in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows” (qtd. in Edel vii).

While reviewers referred relentlessly to the novel’s obscurity, some sought to salvage James’s reputation by praising his descriptive powers, occasionally to be glimpsed through the murk of his dialogues. One passage in particular was cited by the Indianapolis News and was quoted by the London Daily News (Hayes 355, 341–42):

There was a general shade in all the lower reaches—a fine clear dusk in garden and grove, a thin suffusion of twilight out of which the greater things, the high tree-tops and pinnacles, the long crests of motionless wood and chimnied roof, rose into golden air. The last call of birds sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed, serious splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again.

(SF 128)

This schematized topography, gloomy below and radiant above, is reproduced in the interior of Newmarch, with its “great dim chambers” (92) set in dramatic contrast to the modern electric lighting that blazes so ironically over the obscurities of the culminating dialogue.

The country house is composed in “velvet and marble,” and is characterized by “glooms and glimmers and echoes” (225), but in its great saloon we find a “high frescoed ceiling arched over a floor so highly polished that it seemed to reflect the faded pastels set, in rococo borders, in the walls and constituting the distinction of the place” (50). “The painted dome” above these “pictures of a later date” is “a triumph of the florid decoration of two centuries ago,” and constitutes an earlier mode of illumination. From it “a kind of profane piety” descends on May Server, “drizzling down, in the cold light, in silver, in crystal, in faint, mixed delicacies of colour, almost as on a pilgrim at a shrine” (51).

Newmarch conforms, interior and exterior, to a Baroque pattern of upper glory and lower gloom. In chapter 8, we find the two realms conflated in artificiality, as the narrator observes May Server out-of-doors: “She looked about and above, down each of our dusky avenues and up at our gilded tree-tops, and our painted sky, where, at the moment, the passage of a flight of rooks made a clamour” (133). Locating The Sacred Fount within the framework of Baroque philosophical ideas can elucidate some of its mysteries.

In The Fold, Gilles Deleuze traces continuities from G. W. Leibniz to Modernist thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Alfred North Whitehead. Of particular relevance to the case being made in this essay is their common understanding that “a subject will be what comes to the point of view, or rather what remains in the point of view” (19). For “subject,” Whitehead substituted “superject,” in order more accurately to render the correlative transformation that accompanies any change in the status of the object. James’s narrator observes apparent distortions of the world that is familiar to him and seeks that point of view which will resolve abnormality into coherence and regularity. James makes this quest the matter of The Sacred Fount, and in doing so he highlights the Baroque core to the novel’s Modernist artifice. The strangeness of the text is largely due to its refusal to endorse a more straightforward, and banal, relativism in which truth varies according to subject. In The Sacred Fount, point of view corresponds to the definition given by Deleuze: “the condition in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamorphosis), or: something = x (anamorphosis)” (20).

The Fold offers more general grounds for recognizing the peculiar relevance of Baroque to incipient Modernism: “the Baroque is a...