Culture and Conduct in the Novels of Henry James by Alwyn Berland (review)

432 LETTERS IN CANADA 1981 readings of words and lines - is cumulatively dispiriting. Bridges, Williams, and Gardner, his editorial precedessors, gave us poetic texts, but they were not sufficiently candid about the extraordinary demands made on a would-be editor. (See pp I-liii of Poems, and try to make sense of Bridges and Gardner on 'As Kingfishers' in Poems, pp 280-1, and Guide, p 148.) The difficulty of producing a text of Hopkins may be inferred from pages xiii-xvii, xli-Ix and 231-6 of Poems. Such difficulty (compounded by shifts in publisher's policies) has kept MacKenzie's OETS Hopkins, a 'variorumedition' as Gardner foresaw in 1966, still tantalizing. This book is as clear a sign as anything can be that works on Hopkins will never be tidy. The intermittent frustrations that it will generate in its most attentive readers as to the absolute difficulty of interpreting the poems relying only on the printed texts are inherent in the subject, Hopkins. This book shows the state of the art, and it is accordingly a necessary tool and companion. (JOAQUIN KUHN) Alwyn Berland. Culture and Conduct in the Novels of Henry James Cambridge University Press. xi, 23'. $39.95 Alwyn Berland has written a book which, while it does not bring any strikingly new perspective to James's work in the way that, for example, Ruth Yeazell's book on the late style did a few years ago, is nevertheless highly intelligent, readable, and likely to be of use to both more and less experienced readers of James. The study ranges widely and knowledgeably through the canon, and if the judgments arrived at are orthodox- The Portrait ofaLady and The Ambassadors are the great works - they are arrived at by a perspective which has needed the attention Berland gives it. He acknowledges James's place in the American moral tradition, but turns his attention to an aspect of James that many readers will probably have noticed but never really considered: his debt to the English intellectual-moral-aesthetic tradition embodied in Ruskin, Pater, and, above all, Matiliew Arnold. Berland takes 'civilization-as-culture' to be central to James's concerns from the beginning of his career and announces in his opening chapter: 'What needs to be demonstrated is the relevance of James's commitment to civilization to almost every aspect of his fiction.' The demonstration is worth doing and, by and large, successful. Berland is particularly adept at relating his primary perspective to standardJamesian themes. The international becomes the pilgrim searching for a fusion of Arnoldian Hebraism and Hellenism; the thirst for knowledge incorporated in Jamesian innocents is primarily a yearning after high civilization with its attendant betrayals; the uninvolved HUMANITIES 433 Jamesian spectator is viewed as a 'sensibility so finely charged that all involvement turns finally inward'; the difficulty of understanding and sympathizing with Jamesian renunciations is partly attributable to the absence of public sanctions within the works themselves. Commenton the specific novels is mainstream but frequently illuminating . Berland shows George Eliot's influence on Roderick Hudson to be greater than usually supposed; Isabel Archer's final rejection of Caspar Goodwood and return to her marriage to be a function of her high ideal of civilization; the gradual decline manifested in the three novels between The Portrait and James's dramatic period to be related toJames's unwitting divorce of culture and art from the wider context of life. Berland classifies The Golden Bowl and The Ivory Tower as failures because in themJames tries again to reconcile the acquisitive genius with the life of culture as he had done years before in The American, and The Ambassadors as a success because it is built on the dichotomy between the two. The analysis of Strether - James's 'Whole Man' - is carried out according to the perspectives developed throughout the book and consequently validates the claim that the novel is James's 'persuasive tribute' to the ideal of civilization. Clarity in planning and execution, the ability to sum up discussion with witty concentration - these also help make Culture and Conduct in the Novels of Henry James a welcome addition to Jamesian criticism. (J. PETER DYSON) Frederick J. Marker...