James's The Sacred Fount: The Phantasmagorical Made Evidential

James's The Sacred Fount: The Phantasmagorical Made Evidential by James W. Gargano, Washington and Jefferson College The easiest way to account for the difficulties of Henry James's The Sacred Fount is to pronounce the narrator a near madman who converts the flux and heterogeneity of life into a world ruled by a simplistic psychological formula. Indeed, Jean F. Blackall has devoted a book to an expose of the narrator's inconsistencies and self-indulgent, witless flights into airy theorizing. Two very recent essays make almost the same point: William F. Hall ends by tracing the "craziness" of James's observer to the "crucial error of confusing what he has made with the reality, the true experience, out of which he has made it"; Patricia Merivale accuses the narrator of turning his friends and acquaintances "into the characters of his own fiction." Such views reiterate, with emphasis, those of F. 0. Matthlessen, who declares that The Sacred Fount betrays James's consciousness "of how preoccupation with nothing but personal relations might pass into insanity," Two of the most perceptive students of James's fiction find less madness and more ambiguity in the portrait of the restless, endlessly probing center of consciousness. In a fine introduction to the novel, Leon Edel sees the narrator's problem as stemming from the inevitable limits to human inquiry encountered by even the most clairvoyant analyst: "The Sacred Fount, in its rather madly obsessed way, states the dilemma of the extra-sensitive observer who can never be sure that he is fathoming the mystery whole." In a brilliant essay, Tony Tanner explores the manner In which James directs the reader to an "ambivalent assessment of the narrator." He concludes, however, by conceding that the artistic mind, as analyzed in The Sacred Fount, may well be distinguished by a touch of madness: "It is James's peculiarly modern insight—think of Mann's Dr. Faustus—to allow the suggestion that the activities of the artist might be allied to insanity."2 Probably the most cogent defense of The Sacred Fount as altogether sane and lucid is conducted by Alan W. Bellringer, who attributes to the narrator a "sense of honour" and a high degree of intelligence.3 I agree with Bellringer that James's observer arrives at "truth" rather than delusion and that decency and the special nature of his knowledge keep him from making embarrassing disclosures. Edel, Tanner, and Bellringer have effectively challenged the widespread critical notion that the narrator's fantasticalities are destroyed by the hard "facts" produced by Mrs. Briss at the end of the novel. Is ¡t not time to lay to rest at last the reputation of The Sacred Fount as an irresponsible, if not crazy, web of psychological absurdities? The web is indeed subtle and intricate, but it does make sense to the careful and sympathetic reader. 1. Jean Frantz Blackall, Jamesian Ambiguity and The Sacred Fount (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1965); WI I I ¡am F. Hal I , "The Mean ¡ng of The Sacred Fount: 'Its own little law of compos i t i on , '" Modern Language Quarterly, 37 (1976), 178; Patricia Merivale, "The Esthetics of Perversion: Gothic Artifice in Henry James and Witold Gombrowicz," PMLA, 93 (1978), 994; F. 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), p. 365. 2. Leon Edel, Introduction to The Sacred Fount (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959), pp. 13-14; Tony Tanner, "Henry James's Subjective Adventurer: 'The Sacred Fount,'" in Henry James's Major Novels: Essays in Criticism (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1973), p. 240. 3. Alan W. Bellringer, "The Sacred Fount: The Scientific Method," Essays in Cr i t i c i sm, 22 (1972), 244-64. 49 A short summary of the narrative action shows its impressive economy, its more than Wi Idean wit, and its mixture of the phantasmagorical and the real. On his way to a weekend sojourn at Newmarch, the narrator encounters Mrs. Brissenden, a friend who, instead of having aged since their last meeting, has become mysteriously youthful and radiant. The simple cause of this arresting phenomenon turns out to be her...