Henry James's Sacred Fount : The Theory, The Theorist, and The Lady

The single notable thing james said about The Sacred Fount (other than that he "mortally loathe[d] it"—he did not include it in the New York Edition) was that it was a joke. A joke, he said, was all that it could be, but it was "a consistent joke"; although "doubtless very disgraceful," he said, it had "its own little law of composition" which had been "applied quite rigorously and constructively" (Edel, ed. 4:186). He might have added that never before had he applied and constructed any more rigorously than in The Sacred Fount, within any more constraining a law of composition, nor ever before had application been more severe, and subtle, and deliberate and detached and deadpan—with the disheartening result, as clearly he had not anticipated, that absolutely no one seemed to have caught on, so that in one way the joke was on him.Therefore, perhaps, and reasonably, his mortal loathing of the thing.

Nor, for that matter, would the future serve him better. The Sacred Fount has lived on to be the primary case for late-James obscurity, no doubt first of all just because of the fact of that very consistency upon which James prided himself, which is to say the almost total disallowance of any of what he called "going behind," but then also because if joke it is taken to be, as usually it is not, it requires an adjusted kind of perception to see the humor of it. The novel hovers over matters which are funny only from the most austere and detached point of view, now and then dipping down to alight upon horrors.

It is told entirely in first person by an unnamed narrator who, in the way of late James, is unreliable, but who, now, is singularly persuasive, to the point of intimidation; he intimidates the reader, by the might, sheerly, of his fierce and focused intelligence, while, as eventually becomes clear, he is not merely unreliable but is almost entirely untrustworthy because almost totally self-deluding. (The "almost" of it adds to the confusion.) He is an inventor and a wielder of "theory" (the word is constantly at his lips) and is himself, like his author (but he is not the author), at once terrifically rigorous and marvelously subtle in both his constructions and his applications, and at the same time is mostly mistaken as to the facts—which would be to make him comical by way of being a fool and an object of satire, adrift in his elegant constructions, but then, as also eventually becomes clear, accumulatively and retrospectively and by way of both further complication and enrichment, the narrator is also at once a tormented person and is a nasty person whose character is at once displaced into and is serviced by his theorizing. This comes about beyond his own knowing, of course, but the reader will come to know, for the dawning joke of the matter.

Particularly, the narrator constructs a theory about love and lovers which, however, as the novel plays out, requires serial intricate adjustments and ever-renewed strenuous intellectual concentration, as new materials intervene or as the truth of things comes too close. The continuously refined theory is to reveal the truth of that which strangely obsesses him, namely, who among his fellow weekend guests at the country estate Newmarch is engaged in dalliance with whom—and in the disproportion between the tremendous effort and the small object occurs the broader part of the joke of the novel. The theory says that one party to a love affair will wax, in beauty or wit or vitality, and the other will wane. The giver gives of himself or herself as from a sacred fount. "One of the pair," says the narrator, "has to pay for the...