The Condition of Light: Henry James’s The Sacred Fount
- The Condition of LightHenry James’s The Sacred Fount
Associate Professor of English, Middlesex College, University of Western Ontario; author of The Red Heart (1949), A Suit of Nettles (1958), and the forthcoming The Killdeer and other plays
notes
1. Edward Sackville-West, “The Sacred Fount: a Book Considered Unreadable,” New Statesman and Nation, XXXIV (1947), 273.
2. R. P. Blackmur, “The Sacred Fount.” Kenyan Review, IV (1942), 349.
3. Leon Edel, “An Introductory Essay.” in Henry James, The Sacred Fount (New York: Grove Press, 1953), xvi. All the subsequent page references are to this edition.
4. Arnold P. Hinchliffe, “Henry James’s The Sacred Fount,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, II (1960), 89.
5. “Introductory Essay,” xvi.
6. Ralph Ranald, “The Sacred Fount: James’s Portrait of the Artist Manquè,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XV (1960), 241.
7. Robert A. Perlongo, “The Sacred Fount: Labyrinth or Parable?” Kenyan Review, XXII (1960), 635–47.
8. “And I could only say to myself that this was the price—the price of the secret success, the lonely liberty and the intellectual joy. There were things that for so private and splendid a revel—that of the exclusive king with his Wagner opera—I could only let go, and the special torment of my case was that the condition of light, of the satisfaction of curiosity and the attestation of triumph, was in this direct way the sacrifice of feeling.” (p. 296) The observer sacrifices his own dignity and any help he might give to the victims for a reward: the condition of light. But it— the condition of light—provides him with dignity and helps the victims!
9. See page 133. On page 195 we have “Mrs. Server’s unquenchable little smile” and on page 197 “the deadly little ache of her heroic grin.” The rigid smile and the “lovely grimace” are the same.
10. “Introductory Essay,” xxx–xxxi.
