Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:52:32.771Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

T. S. Eliot on Henry James

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alan Holder
Alan Holder*
Affiliation:
Williams College Williamstown, Mass.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Considering how little T. S. Eliot has written about the novel, one is especially struck by the frequency with which the name of Henry James gets into his criticism. Eliot has left little doubt as to his admiration for James, having referred to him once as “the most intelligent man of his generation,” and on another occasion having placed him among “the greatest novelists.” More than one student of Eliot has shown the influence of James's works on his poetry, but virtually nothing has been said about the nature and validity of Eliot's critical remarks on a writer who has been a stock property of his mind for the last half century. It is the aim of this study to examine the responses that one of America's major novelists has called forth from the most influential critic of our time.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1964 , pp. 490 - 497
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 “On Henry James,” in The Question of Henry James, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York, 1948), p. 111, and in the introduction to G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire (Oxford, 1930), p. xii.

2 In particular, F. O. Matthiessen, both in The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (New York, 1955), passim, and in American Renaissance (New York, 1941), passim. Also, Grover Smith in T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Chicago, 1956), passim.

3 Matthiessen's books are about the only noteworthy exceptions to this. But even Matthiessen is generally content to simply quote what Eliot has said, never questioning the validity of his remarks on James. Leon Edel has discussed Eliot's dissatisfaction with James's handling of Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton, in his introduction to The American Essays of Henry James (New York, 1956), pp. viii-xi. But he confines himself solely to this aspect of Eliot's comments. Edel's remarks will be cited later in the essay.

4 T. S. Eliot, untitled review, Harvard Advocate, lxxxviii (5 Oct. 1909), 16.

5 Selected Essays 1917–1932 (New York, 1932), pp. 407–408.

6 These essays have been reprinted with no changes or additions in The Question of Henry James, pp. 108–119. Although I shall repeatedly cite them as Eliot's “Little Review” essays, I shall refer the reader to the relevant page numbers in the Dupee volume, giving those page numbers in the text of the article.

7 It is interesting to note how Eliot's conception of James as one who questioned the belief in national types is diametrically opposed to the view taken by Ezra Pound, who edited the James number in which Eliot's articles appeared and who himself contributed a long study of the novelist to that number. (See my article, “The Lesson of the Master: Ezra Pound and Henry James,” American Literature, xxxv, March 1963, 71–79.) Pound saw as one of James's chief virtues his concerning himself with the depiction of national qualities, which, Pound said, are “the permanent and fundamental hostilities and incompatibles.” See Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York, 1954), p. 301.

8 Henry James, The American Scene (New York, 1946), p. 83. While still an undergraduate, Eliot wrote a favorable review of Van Wyck Brooks's The Wine of the Puritans, a book which found that the Puritan spirit continued to survive in the United States, manifesting itself in the country's concern with keeping perpetually busy and in its suspicion of art and leisure as components of the good life. See T. S. Eliot, untitled review, Harvard Advocate, lxxxvii (7 May 1909), 80. In making his remark about James's insistence on leisure, Eliot may have been thinking not only of The American Scene but of James's autobiographical volume The Middle Years, which appeared the year before Eliot published his Little Review essays. There, James told of his excitement on finding in England, during his trip of 1869, a social order “in which everyone wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon an office or a store.” See Henry James, Autobiography, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York, 1956), p. 561.

9 I discuss this matter at length in the chapter “Past and Present” of my dissertation, “Three Voyagers in Search of Europe: A Study of Henry James, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot” (Columbia, 1962).

10 See T. S. Eliot, “American Literature,” The Athenaeum (25 April 1919), 236. The ellipses are Eliot's.

11 Hawthorne (Ithaca, N. Y., 1956), p. 51.

12 “Les Lettres Anglaises,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, xxviii (1 May 1927), 669.

13 Ibid., p. 670.

14 Abel Chevalley, The Modern English Novel (New York, 1925), p. 113.

15 Hawthorne, p. 48.

16 Ibid. James's italics.

17 Ibid., pp. 49 and 90.

18 To document this fully would require a separate study. But just to cite one notable example, The Golden Bowl seems to conceive of the maintenance of social forms by Maggie Verver and by Adam, their keeping up of pleasant appearances even while they are suffering because of the adulterous relationship of Charlotte and Amerigo, as at once beautiful and good. The outward forms of politeness, ease, and good will are seen as desirable in themselves, aesthetically pleasing; at the same time their maintenance in the given situation is a moral act, for it involves courage, self-control, and the extension of charity to Amerigo and Charlotte on the part of Maggie and Adam.

19 In another French article, which appeared in 1926, Eliot said that Dostoyevsky was “un romancier psychologique,” while James was “un romancier ‘métaphysique’.” T. S. Eliot, “Note sur Mallarmé et Poe,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, xxvii (July-Dec. 1926), 524–525.

20 “Les Lettres Anglaises,” p. 670.

21 “The Search for Moral Sanction,” The Listener, vii (30 March 1932), 445.

22 “A Commentary,” The Criterion, xii (April 1933), 469.

23 See Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, p. 176. The story is “The Jolly Corner.”

24 “Taine's English Literature,” Atlantic Monthly, xxix (April 1872), 470.

25 In a letter to Mrs. F. H. Hill, James said “Nothing is my last word about anything—I am interminably super-subtle and analytic—and with the blessing of heaven, I shall live to make all sorts of representations of all sorts of things.” The Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1955), p. 76. James's italics.

26 See the reference to Edel in n. 3.

27 Selected Essays, pp. 7–8.

28 “A Note on Ezra Pound,” Today, iv (Sept. 1918), 3.

29 See Notes on Novelists (New York, 1914), p. 366.

30 Morris Roberts, Henry James's Criticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), p. 3.

31 “Winchelsea, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval’,” Scribner's Magazine, xxix (January 1901), 45. James's italics.

32 Eliot cites this remark in his The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1933), p. 101.

33 Henry James, The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York, n.d.), p. 230. James also uses a chemical metaphor to describe the artistic process in Notes on Novelists, p. 275.

34 Selected Essays, p. 8.

35 “A Prediction in Regard to Three English Authors,” Vanity Fair, xxi (Feb. 1924), 29.

36 Ibid.

37 See, e.g., Selected Essays, p. 357, and Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth, 1955), p. 126.

38 See “London Letter,” Dial, lxxiii (Sept. 1922), 329.

39 See n. 2.

40 “A Prediction,” p. 29. Eliot's italics.

41 See “The Art of Poetry: T. S. Eliot,” (interview by Donald Hall), Paris Review, xxi (Spring-Summer 1959), 56.

42 I realize that this is an outrageously summary treatment of a large subject, but because it is a large subject, a separate essay would be required to handle it adequately. I have attempted to treat this matter in detail in my dissertation; see n. 10.

43 “A Prediction,” p. 29.