In Defense of James's The Tragic Muse

In Defense of James's The Tragic Muse by W. R. Macnaughton, University of Waterloo The longest novel by Henry James—The Tragic Muse, first published in 1890—is in all probability also the novel by him least often read and least highly regarded, despite the occasionally valiant and sometimes brilliant scholarly attempts to create an audience for the work. ' Many critics have expressed significant dissatisfaction with it and would undoubtedly agree with Joseph Warren Beach's delicately supercilious pronouncement that the novel's best chance for appreciative readership would be with those "who are not overly fond of James" (218). Critical hostility has focused on the second half. An early critic writes, for example, that The Tragic Muse is "spun out too long and beaten too thin" (Edgar 295); Edmund Wilson, in an extremely influential comment, asserts, "After the arrival of Miriam in London, The Tragic Muse is almost a blank. The only decisions looming are negative ones, and the author himself seems to lose interest" (189); Donald Stone argues that, after the first half of the novel, "the subject is resolved, the choices are made, and the triumph is inevitable ... the novel is swamped by James's self-indulgent appeals for artistic freedom, and advertisements for the glories of art" (328). Most recently, Alwyn Berland writes of the diplomat Peter Sherringham (whose vacillations about whether or not to give up his career so as to marry the actress Miriam Rooth are central to the last part of the novel) that "his choice proves to be mainly a diversion rather than a significant contrast; ... it is damaging to the form as well as the idea, since his choices seem finally unimportant, and all too predictable even from the beginning" (174).2 In contrast to those readers of The Tragic Muse who have shown strong dislike for sections of it, James himself was relatively happy with the novel, both immediately after writing it and after refurbishing it approximately twenty years later for the New York Edition of his works.3 Just after completing his revisions for the Macmillan book edition , he referred to it in a letter to Robert Louis Stevenson as "a very highly-finished novel" (HJL 279), despite his embarrassment about its length (originally, he had hoped it would be only one-half as long as The Princess Casamassima ); in a letter thanking Grace Norton for her compliments , he wrote, "for I tried so hard to make it one [a success] that if it hadn't been it would have been a failure indeed' ' (HJL 296); and to his brother (who very much liked The Tragic Muse), he wrote, "it [William's praise] has plunged me into a glow of satisfaction which is far, as yet, from having faded" (HJL 300). In his Preface to the New York Edition, James points to certain elements in the novel with which he is dissatisfied—his treatment of Nick Dormer (whom he had hoped would be the best thing in the book) and the overly lengthy first half (a common problem in his long fiction). On the whole, however, he is proud of the novel—because of his success in unifying it through his treatment of the "Tragic Muse," Miriam Rooth, for example . Most important—in view of the many objections to the last half of the novel—is James's feeling that this section is an example of successful foreshortening. He grants that the possibilities for drama were minimized because of his decision to portray Nick not as a hero (and thus an "interesting and appealing and comparatively flounderingperion" [TM I, xxi]), but instead as an artist at work—"testing himself and feeling his reality" (TM I, xviii). Nonetheless, for James, the section—which he associated ' 'with the effort to weight my dramatic values as heavily as might be, since they had to be so few"—clearly possessed "a compactness into which the imagination may cut thick" (TM I, xiii). About the novel in general he concludes that because of "that wrought appearance of animation and harmony, that effect of free movement and yet of recurrent and consistent reference, 'The Tragic Muse' has struck me again as conscious of a...