What’s implicit in Henry James’ works is his familiarity with matters Catholic. What’s implicit is also subtle, so that Protestant and Catholic readers alike might enjoy reading about such matters.
What I understand by manners . . . is culture’s hum and buzz of implication . . . . They are hinted at by small actions . . . by the arts of dress or decoration . . . by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm . . . by the words that are used with special frequency or a special meaning. —Lionel Trilling, Manners, Morals, and the Novel
I. The Bench Of Desolation
Henry James’ commentary on his late-period short story “The Bench of Desolation” led him not to include the story among those collected in his New York Edition. It’s clearly uneven and thus less masterful than “The Beast in the Jungle” or “The Jolly Corner.” Herbert Dodd is the principle character whose life has become a somber affair if not a blighted misery. He owns a shop selling old books in a seaside town, becomes engaged, changes his mind, and finds himself with a breach of promise lawsuit. If one were to philosophize, his life has been reduced to a spiritual void.
Seated on a a seaside bench, staring at the “grey-green sea,” James writes that Dodd may “have been counting again and still recounting the beads, almost all worn smooth, of his rosary of pain—which had for the fingers of memory and the recurrences of wonder the same felt break of the smaller ones by the larger that would have aided a pious mumble in some dusky altar-chapel.”[i]
It’s neither a short story of Catholic conversion nor does Herbert Dodd set out on the road to Rome. What’s implicit is Henry James’ familiarity with matters Catholic in literary ways neither lurid nor admonitory. What’s implicit is also subtle, so that Protestant and Catholic readers alike might enjoy reading about such matters and suggesting—as this essay hopes to make clear—a sort of Catholic side to Henry James.
II. The “Art” Of The Novel
The United States Postal Services issued the 31st stamp in the “Literary Arts Series” back in July 2016. The stamp features Henry James in profile, his left hand on his chin while he reflects on a young couple off to the right. They’re in a small boat and the scene is a vignette drawn from his 1903 novel, The Ambassadors. The rendering of James is based upon a 1906 photogravure by Alvin Langdon Coburn and roughly three years before James edited and published the 24 volumes of the New York Edition which contains the remarkable critical prefaces later collected by R. P. Blackmur and titled The Art of the Novel.
As for the vignette, one might think James is a voyeur but it’s more likely his appreciation of a virtuous attachment the young couple own for each other. It’s an abundant message for the novelist whose wish is that the young couple live as fine as they can.
It was not, however, an argument for the “art” of the novel with which H. G. Wells would agree and which fomented one of the great literary feuds of all times, Wells writing that a Henry James novel is much like a “church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string . . . . And all for tales of nothingness . . . . It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.” [ii]
Wells’ mirthful criticism is not without point but James’ admirers understand that his later technique represented the utmost ingenuity. The exact picking and placing of fictional elements upon the “high altar” was neither an eccentric singleness of mind nor a “retrieving of pebbles.” James’ sense for the pressure of life and his advancing technical skill gradually compressed and solidified in his later fiction which owns—as Matthew Arnold might have said of James— “a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere . . .a certain order of ideas” and a “dealing divinely with those ideas.” [iii]
The James/Wells controversy is an irreconcilable contrast of sensibilities but a well-disposed reader with more of an open mind than Mr. Wells, might note that on numerous occasions in James’ fiction a cultivated “spiritual atmosphere” appears and what Edwin Sill Fussell calls “the aesthetics of religion” and “various conspicuous aspects of James’ literary Catholicizing.” [iv]
With that in mind and apart from the ambivalent attitudes of earlier American writers toward Catholic sensibilities, a close reading of James’ later novel The Ambassadors offers good illustration of Henry James’ “allure” with Catholic themes.
III. Henry James’ Religious Background
Henry James’ father was a close student of Swedenborg and his brother, William James, the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience which appeared in 1902.
Of his own religious seriousness, James nowhere records an argument for an institutionalized religion.
One qualifying parenthesis is revealed in his autobiography,
Notes of a Son and Brother, where James remarks his thankfulness “for a state of faith, a conviction of the Divine, [and] an interpretation of the universe.” [v] The argument is that he was neither irreligious nor indifferent but that “consciousness” owns an immortality. Equally important in that autobiography is James’ suggestion that one’s purpose in life is to practice “spiritual discipline” which he defines as the “purification and preparation of earth for heaven,” and if such is accomplished, he does not preclude “orthodox theology” as the means; rather, his narrative use of religion appears significantly in the form of imagery, symbolism, and character depiction, the aesthetic “allure” of Roman Catholicism. What James means by “spiritual discipline” and “purification and preparation” is suggestive of atonement, reparation, expiation, and, of course, confession while seated, perhaps, on that a bench of desolation.
James’ biographer, Leon Edel, further discusses in good detail a friendship wth Catholic John La Farge which dates to James’ early years and includes an 1862 portrait of the young James and one of only four portraits of James who was fiercely protective of his privacy. It’s a side view of James who appears in a suggestive manner, a young almost priestly Jesuit or even a side view of an equally young St John Henry Newman. Apart from the fact that Catholics were a minority during James’ growing up years, La Farge was an American Catholic artist who likely brought into stark relief for James any anti-Catholic sentiments while introducing James to a variety of French writers for whom Romanticism and Catholicism would have been interchangeable.
James was of course vague about religious details, but there’s enough suggestive nuance that his early friendship with La Farge would have made him familiar with, say, the religious pluralism to be found at William and Mary, hardly papist, but surely Anglican Catholic, and La Farge’s college. It’s thus likely that James learned early a more liberal attitude toward Catholicity. More so, La Farge is noted for his magnificent mural paintings and stained glass window for the Church of the Ascension in New York as well as work by La Farge for Trinity Church in Boston and especially his portrayal of Christ in Majesty, all in the grand manner depicting grand theological events and again part of James’ biography and friendship with a Catholic aesthete. And we know that James visited these sites not long after La Farge’s death.
Edel, in fact, writes that friendships “formed in young manhood sometimes are beacon lights for the future” and La Farge nourished [James’] mind and spirit at a crucial time.”[vi] Likewise the experiences James gathered from La Farge would be carried over into his fiction wielding his pen as a painter wields his palette, life as it were on a pedestal and a pose.
IV. The Ambassadors: Lewis Lambert Stretcher’s Double Consciousness And Sacred Rage
The plot of James; 1903 novel, The Ambassadors, is straight-forward: middle-aged Lewis Lambert Strether, editor of a green covered magazine intended as a refined door opening to the temple of taste (87), has been dispatched by his fiancée and financial patron, the widowed Mrs. Newsome of Woollett, Massachusetts, to retrieve her son, Chad Newsome, who is in Paris for a youthful adventure before, everyone assumes, he returns to “take over” the family’s very profitable manufacturing business about which there is some mystery, Strether suggesting that it’s vulgar.
The more complicated issue is the Woollett, Massachusetts Puritan/Protestant religious notion that time spent in Paris is equal to a loss of moral probity. More so, in Chad’s case the family believes he is indulging in an affair with Madame de Vionnet who is presumed to be vile by whatever biases owned by Woollett New Englanders. Whether Strether will or will not fulfill the terms of his ambassadorial directions is the “germ” of the novel’s action.
Apart from that “germ,” however, is a Catholic-Protestant dichotomy to the novel which is in keeping with other Henry James’ novels and occasional short stories but in the case of The Ambassadors the question that emerges is whether Strether will keep Woollett’s “belief” that Catholicism is a “mass” of calumny or will he offer a softened view of Catholic matters—without making Henry James into either a secret Catholic or merely more well-disposed to its “allure” which is a word one might use to describe Strether’s aesthetic admiration of Catholic settings which he offers up without prejudice.
The “allure,” then, is to think of Catholic settings as an aesthetic impressionist emblem of culture but also an emblem of religion. And with that in mind it’s for sure that Madame de Vionnet is Catholic, serious and refined. By comparison, there’s another influential satellite character: Maria Gostrey who owns generalities about the bountiful wonderfulness of things Catholic, whereas Strether’s old friend, Waymarsh sees it all with hostile distaste.
Whether Chad Newsmen will be “retrieved” remains ambiguous until late in the novel. But to widen the perspective, at least for thematic purposes, is to suggest that for a novel to own some Catholic topics does not mean that it has to be written by a Catholic but can provide the reader with literary space for that “allure,” a kind mixed romantic adulation for things “Romish.“
In the first book of The Ambassadors, the narrator, as much a character in the novel as the actual characters themselves, notes that Lewis Lambert Strether “was burdened . . . with the oddity of a double consciousness.” [vii] For James, “consciousness” meant a primary character from whose centering perspective the reader will “experience” the events of the narrative. Additionally, for James, the choice of a narrator also assumes a role in the novel as an observer who dramatizes rather than moralizes.
There is, however, this subtle point to be made: James’ narrator is far more concerned with the way his characters’ minds respond to events than with the events themselves which requires the reader to pay close scrutiny to those characters and their social freedom which is ambiguous and complex as are most psychological interpretations of reality. This figural narrator, furthermore, is often present in the authorial “forefront,” which James defines as “foreshortening” the passage of time but who then withdraws, as it were, to offer the reader extended scenic moments of dramatic objectivity.
Consciousness is a term that occurs in philosophy and psychology but with a variety of different meanings. Locke, we know, wrote with some enlightened understanding that consciousness is what passes in a person’s own mind, e.g., an internal sense. There are, however, some reformulations in the Nineteenth Century when the term “introspection” begins to appear. G. F. Stout, among others, suggests that consciousness is an attendance on the workings of one’s own mind. But of the various questions that emerge, one that seems vital is whether introspection can yield erroneous beliefs especially when one series of experiences from an earlier moment of time is brought into awareness with another series of experiences from a more present moment in time. William James, again the brother of our novelist, advocates a kind of relational analysis into which portions of experience enter but become complicated when those portions appear to oppose one another. Older views, for example, which contribute to prior behavioral attitudes and intentions, may find themselves in contradiction to newer views which might also lead to newer behavioral attitudes and intentions: the oddity of a double consciousness.
Thus, when reading the novel, we note that this is Lewis Lambert Strether’s second visit to Europe, the first having occurred some twenty-five years earlier. Much has changed in his life which includes the loss of his wife and the loss of a child. The reader learns this in the long second chapter in the novel’s second book and in which the narrator offers the reader a survey of Strether’s states of consciousness. Here it’s important to note that James’s narrator is “foreshortening,” which indicates his “thinking” about his principle character which also suggests that Strether, also in a manner of thinking, exists for the duration of this portion of the narrative in the narrator’s imagination rather than as a dramatic actor as if on stage.
For James, more so, foreshortening is his technical method—drawn from the painterly arts: dramatically reducing his narrative in time and scale but also adding exposition.[viii] In this case, the narrator offers glimpses into Strether’s present state of consciousness. In the Luxembourg Gardens, for example, Strether seats himself in a “penny chair” from which he can pass an hour “in which the cup of his impressions seem truly to overflow” (80).
Strether believes it his duty to think out his current state and then approve whatever presents itself. But also in this lengthy moment of quiet introspection, as he carries on what James calls “his present arithmetic,” an analogy for spiritual book-keeping and an old Puritan habit; the narrator notes that likely the slate upon which the arithmetic has been written argues for the fact that in life, so far, Stretcher has failed “in half a dozen trades” with “so much achievement missed.” In the back of him, then, is the “pale figure of his real youth” which again also includes a young wife he had early lost and a young son he had stupidly sacrificed: “Old ghosts of experience came back to him, old drudgeries and delusions, and disgusts, old recoveries with their relapses, old fevers with their chills, broken moments of good faith” (85).
Such is consciousness but such also is conscience and in that manner of thinking Strether’s conscience is not only burdened but is delicate if not scrupulous and shares a kinship with the previous mentioned character Henry Dodd seated on his bench of desolation.
Strether is not for these foreshortened moments in this chapter “counting his beads” but in the hushed silence of the gardens he is searching for some kind of reconciliation if not atonement, or expiation, for his behavior, for what he calls at other moments in the novel his “sins” and his moral wound. There’s a pair of words James’ narrator uses to define such a state of consciousness, or state of conscience, which adds to the “doubleness,” as it were: “sacred rage,” which the reader might best understand as awareness of that “double life,” one in which there’s an emotional intimacy and a life fully lived and one in which such has been deprived leading to a loneliness so deep and never to be quite dissipated, and for James as well as Strether, the latter is symbolic of New England’s Woollett (46).
One might call “sacred rage” a sort of cultural epiphany on Strether’s part. There is on one hand the perceived decadence of Parisian life which compares to the isolationist pride if not elitist stance of the New England “genteel” tradition. Strether’s epiphany is his later awareness that his original complacency was more likely a relentless moral narrowness fomented by liberal Protestantism, a sort of ideological tyranny directed against Roman Catholicism. In years past, in other words, Strether was characteristically inhospitable to Roman Catholic high culture which later becomes a changed attitude, a sort of uneasiness with his own New England culture and perhaps the recognition of his own earlier cultural boorishness.
There are two thematic points to be made here:
One is that Strether’s home is again Woollett, Massachusetts, which one surmises easily is emblematic of Puritan New England and thus a sort of religious cloud Strether carries along behind him and equally the home of his fiancé , Mrs. Newsome whom Stretcher describes as “just a moral swell” (65 ). She again presides over a manufacturing concern which offers for sale some object of common domestic use which Stretcher remarks is practical but not a work of art.
She never appears in person but is well-defined by Strether usually in his conversations with Maria Gostrey. If the “sacred rage” represents also an opposition to emotional intimacy and a life fully lived, Mrs. Newsome is the ghost hanging over Strether’s conscience, a sort of Puritan god-like presence angrily glaring over the ocean while manipulating with shame and fear and writing numerous lengthy letters.
The second thematic point which becomes evident in the novel is again Catholic Europe which should be anathema to Strether but appears as an “allure” in the novel. It’s an ambiguity in James but salve for Strether’s spiritual desires and antidote to that “sacred rage,” emotional intimacy and a life fully lived. We do not learn precisely Mrs. Newsome’s attitude toward Roman Catholics but Strether’s friend, the impulsive and curmudgeonly Waymarsh who finds nothing in Europe to his liking, especially Roman Catholicism. The fact that James’ narrator records Waymarsh’s comments in unsavory language speaks volumes: “The Catholic Church, for Waymarsh—that was to say the enemy, the monster of bulging eyes and far-reaching quivering groping tentacles—was exactly society, exactly the multiplication of shibboleths, exactly the discrimination of types and tones, exactly the wicked old Rows of Chester, rank with feudalism; exactly in short, Europe” (41).
He’s allied, of course, with the entirely joyless Woollett cause and there’s some suggestion he’s in communication with Mrs. Newsome. The narrator’s point, however, is the comparison between Waymarsh and Strether.
Early in the narrative Strether meets a young woman who asks if he knows her name. It’s an odd introduction but she explains that as a sort of expatriate American she has taken it upon herself to guide other Americans around Europe. Strether displays mild embarrassment when speaking of his New England home town but when the two tour Chester and the medieval wall surrounding the city his double-consciousness emerges when he remembers that he had been to Chester a quarter century past during his first trip and he also explains that what has become his weakness is his inability to focus on the present. Her name is Maria Gostrey and calls such his failure to enjoy life. He asks her to help him recover and when walking for a period of time, Strether reflects on his past attitudes and then remarks that he hopes that in Europe he will be more able to experience the “sweetness” possible only in Roman Catholic Europe. Waymarsh reappears and the moment allows Miss Gostrey to compare the two men. Strether is superior but when she suggests such Strether protests noting that Waymarsh is more successful financially. And it’s here that Strether calls his comment a “sacred rage,” that complication which James’ narrator also defines as Strether’s nationalism, his narrower localism, the “huge load of our national consciousness” (18).
But the double consciousness of which James speaks is the consequence of an “effect and allure” which comes about from that dreadful old tradition, one of the platitudes of the human comedy, that people’s moral scheme does break down in Paris and which if redefined could be a “good” thing. What if, then, after twenty-five years, Strether’s new adventure brings about a new light, the old intentions failing to bloom and flower, the dark abyss of romance transposed by other complex forces, distillers of an essence awaiting Lewis Lambert Strether? And what if that distillation is not only aesthetic but Catholic and iconographically represented by cathedrals?
He gives himself over to Maria by placing himself in her hands. One can gloss the moment, of course, or suggest a different kind of “allure” but he analogizes her with a “candour of fancy” that “Miss Gostrey looked perhaps like Mary Stuart” (52).
During an afternoon stroll in the sunshine with Maria and in their stroll came, as our narrator notes, “a sharper sense of what they saw.” Strether leaning back, “with his face to the tower of the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their station, the high red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketed, retouched and restored, but charming to his long-sealed eyes and with the first swallows of the year weaving their flight around it” and with Maria Gostrey watching Strether with “all her kindness” (17).
Maria, gift of God, and of course emblematic of Mary, mother of Jesus and understood as our sole mediator, a physical and moral gift and what transpires between Strether and Maria is a genuine communion. She’s a spiritual friend albeit unobtrusive, available and compassionate and a woman with a vocation and in defiance as to Strether’s idea of Waymarsh’s superiority.
If, however, the thematic purpose of the cathedral scene with its carefully selected “pebbles” is as impressionistic as those painters by the same name, the scene offers a brief vibrant moment meant to convey an “allure,” fleeting but also a change in perception. Something aesthetically fine is going on, and the world Strether is now experiencing is charged with a certain grandeur if not religious milieu, and with the experience the good possibility that Strether is becoming more “refined.”
There are, however, framework principles at work here, which own brief mention, and from which one might draw an analogy with the visual arts: Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, a painting from 1894 which captures the essence of the cathedral’s ever-changing nature. We know the technique as impressionism which James references elsewhere as the “art of figuring synthetically”[ix] and which involves a technique by which the eye unites shades and hues but only by the disciplined manner of the painter himself. Thus we have a slice of life but when along with the perception of color and light the execution conveys the mystery, the ambience added to the sense of realism. We know Monet was a French Catholic about whom there is scholarly agreement that he became more religious in the course of his life.
If it were Waymarsh, however, the moment would be an abusive sort of judgment peculiar to the faults of that New England character. He would be repulsed. For Strether, on the other hand, the scene illuminates something akin to devotion, some higher measure of perception far different than the walk he had made years ago. But the double consciousness, rather than souring the moment, the past compared to the present, was “enriched . . . for present feeling and marked this renewal as something that was his due” (16). Miss Gostrey asks him whether he was then doing something not quire right to which Strether responds, “Am I enjoying it as much as that?” Pointedly she says, “You’re not enjoying it, I think, as much as you ought.” He thoughtfully agrees saying “That is my privilege.”
Woollett, which seems again to be the double consciousness point, would be sure that Stretcher not enjoy the moment but for the moment Woollett has become a pathetic thing. But Strether has Maria and in whom he has again begun to place himself so utterly in her hands.
V. Notre Dame As Sanctuary
Volume Two of The Ambassadors begins with the narrator’s comment that “It wasn’t the first time Strether had sat alone in the great dim church—still less was it the first of his giving himself up, so far as conditions permitted, to the beneficent action on his nerves” (3).
It’s again a challenge to interpretation, this opening scene in Book Seven and the half-way point to the novel, which seems to suggest with its subtlety of language some suspicions of aestheticism on the part of James’ narrator who writes that Strether had found Notre Dame a “refuge from the obsessions of his problem that, with renewed pressures from the source, he had not unnaturally recurred to a remedy meeting the case, for the moment, so indirectly, no doubt but so relievingly” (3).
Of interest is the notion that it wasn’t Strether’s first time but also the notion that in the foreshortened “scene” Stretcher is giving himself over which even in the least speculative manner is suggestive of a stirring conversion which remains, however, without unction. The problem is whether the literary representation is a Catholicity that is only aesthetically pleasing, romantic, impressionist, picturesque, a sort of spice to a life not deeply lived and an antidote to that “sacred rage.” More so is the American Strether’s increasing awareness, his consciousness, of his European friend’s faith, especially the expatriate Maria Gostrey and now also Madame de Vionnet who in paradoxical way will be revealed as the antithetical bookend to the widow Newsome, that “moral swell.”
The scene inside Notre Dame features on the part of James and his narrator an easygoing, tolerant, non-doctrinal and surely noncommittal approach, minimalist though it may be. If there’s an irony present, it’s likely Strether’s wish for a more direct access to God, his penitence and procreation apart from the idea of “Romanism.” Thus the “allure” is present but more as a secular sanctuary, a “good” aesthetic to experience for “he could feel there what he couldn’t elsewhere” (5). And for the moment, the refuge in the cathedral allowed him “to drop his problem at the door very much as if it had been a copper piece that he deposited, on the threshold, in the receptacle of the inveterate blind beggar” (5).
James’ narrator continues with this poignant moment by noting that “the mighty monument laid upon [Strether] its spell,” and how quite sufficiently he could come to understand how “within the precinct . . . the things of the world could fall into abeyance.”
His great friend, Maria, is absent in this interlude and thus at the beginning his struggle is mitigated by his conscious notion that Notre Dame was offering him “a sense of safety, of simplification” and to which previous visits was “soothing even to sanctity.” And so alone Strether walks “the long dim nave, [sits] in the splendid choir, [passes] before the clustered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument [lays] upon him its spell” (5). The cathedral has become for him a place where “the things of the world could fall into abeyance.”
Noting for the moment again that this dramatic moment occupies the center of The Ambassadors, the narration shifts from foreshortening by the narrator to James’ usual dramatic method. Strether pauses and observes in the shade of one of the chapels the focused devotion of a conspicuously dressed woman whom he has also seen praying at others times he has made his visits. The woman is Madame de Vionnet in “splendidly-protected meditation” and who carries herself “in the sacred shade …a discernible faith in herself.” ( 7)
This timely moment in Notre Dame continues for Strether and to his surprise is suggestive of a “still deeper awakening.” His “reading” of the matter is couched in his wondering if Madame de Vionnet’s attitude “was some congruous fruit of absolution, of ‘indulgence.’ He knew what indulgence in such a place might mean; yet he had, as with a soft sweep, a vision of what it might indeed add to the zest of active rites.” For the moment, Stretcher was “sufficiently rapt in reverence.”
Far different then from the widow Newsome, Strether consciously notes Madame de Vionnet’s attitude before the glimmering altar in front of which she had placed herself. But why did she haunt the church which he thought was less to flaunt an insolence to guilt but more “for strength, for peace—sublime support from day to day” (7). More so, from his distant observation, Strether remarks “some note of [her] behavior, of penitence, of prostration, of the absolved relieved state” and all in front of the “shrine” wherein she seemed to have “lost herself” in her “splendidly-protected meditation.” Madame de Vionnet had come to pray with a certain zest for “active rites” and “for continued help, for strength, for peace—sublime support which . . . she found [need] from day to day” (10).
Such is more than a simple Protestant/Catholic dichotomy, Mrs. Newsome/Madame de Vionnet. Strether’s repeated moments in Notre Dame are narrated without prejudice but are rather steeped in repose and physical comfort, reduced from the turbid stream of life and placed in an environment far removed from Woollett which by comparison offers nothing but a sort of mindlessness. Strether is a middle-aged man orthodox needy.
A perceptive reader, Catholic or not, must conclude not only James’ preferences for scenes and characters whose religious affiliations are not marginal. Neither does James in The Ambassadors and elsewhere pen novels only to gratify coarse Woollett expectations, a place “browsing in its pride” (160). On the other hand, there are no scenes in The Ambassadors where Lambert Strether attends a religious service per se. Whatever “allure” Catholic sensibilities hold for Strether tend toward the impressionistic which still suggest Romish leanings and which when combined, novel after novel suggest examples of a Catholic “allure,” or for want of another word, “unction” and something good.
VI. In Place Of A Conclusion: Guy Domville
In 1990, Leon Edel published The Complete Plays of Henry James, an oddity of sorts for an author known mostly for his novels and short stories. Guy Domville was staged in 1895, lasting one night with James being jeered when he took the stage at the end of the play. James’ failure is covered in good detail in Edel’s biography of James.[x]
One might suspect the failure, however, to be less that of Henry James and more that of the audience whose theatrical expectations were that of emotional comedy. But given James’ penchant for a Catholic “allure,” Guy Domville should not be forgotten. It’s more likely than not Henry James most Catholic work more so since all the characters in the play are Catholic but about which some qualifications need to be made.
But timing is all….
In the masterful first act, Guy Domville is happily taking up his intention to enter the priesthood all within the time space of the forthcoming 24 hours. The complication occurs when news arrives that the young Domville has become the last of his aristocratic race which would require him to marry and carry on the family line.
Presented with an unforeseen choice, he must either abandon his plan to become a Catholic pries, his vocation, and marry the “worldly” Mary Brasier—whose love is for the naval officer George Round and to whom she had been once engaged—or, as Lord Devenesh says, become one with the “cruel profession” and “stifle” himself “in a cassock.”
In Act II, Domville abandons his vocation after facing the argument that becoming a priest is unimaginable in comparison to assuming the “duty” to perpetuate the Domville aristocratic “race.” It’s a dubious bargain more so since the choice to preserve the past involves a sacrifice to the present and Domville’s decision to understand to what or whom he beautifully belongs.
When Domville learns however, that Mary’s love is for the naval officer, he delights in arranging that marriage and in Act III and at the play’s conclusion happily takes up his vocation. Gathering himself from all the stupefied commotion around him, he leaves his parting words, “The Church takes me!”
The issue underwritten in the play is the view held even by the crowded menage of Catholics in the play that to become a priest is the worst thing imaginable.
On the other hand, perhaps it’s a jewel of some kind, albeit ascetic and celibate. To argue such is not to condemn worldliness but to see in Henry James something more than an intermittent interest in the Catholic “allure” and surely something more than the “dead kitten” or “an egg-shell,” or that “bit of string” on the high altar.
Sadly, for the audience on that fateful first night premiere, the play had no life on stage. Equally sad is the notion that the audience’ response was likely more toward the characters’ religion. One is left to wonder what the response would have been like if more Americans from Woollett had been in attendance.
Endnotes:
[i] Public Library On-Line Books, p. 7.
[ii] See H. G. Wells, Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, New York: George H. Doran Company, 1915, pp. 109-110.
[iii] For this citation, consult Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Arnold begins this citation by suggesting that the “grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition not of analysis and discovery.”
[iv] See Edwin Sill Fussell, The Catholic Side of Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. x.
[v] Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brothers, New York, Charles Scribners, 1914, p. 55.
[vi] Leon Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years: 1843-1870, J. P. Lippincott Company, New York, 1953, Volume One, p. 142. Edel further notes the influence of La Fare on Henry Adams and his Mont San Michel and Chartres and the “Virgin and the Dynamo in The Education of HenryAdams. James also further discusses the influence of La Farge in Notes . . . where he writes that La Farge was an aesthete with a “constant tradition of talk” and in which James “fairly lost himself.” p. 97.
[vii] Henry James, The Ambassadors, Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1909, New York Edition, Volume 21, p.5. All subsequent citations are parenthetic and by page number.
[viii] James’ preface to The Tragic Muse is noteworthy here although he notes that he was unable to “recover [his] precious first moment of consciousness of the idea to which [the novel] was to give form” (v). What he does make out on his “stretched canvas,” however, was by analogy the occasion in which he had seen a “certain sublime Tintoretto in Venice, a measureless Crucifixion in especial, which showed without loss of authority half a dozen actions separately taking place . . . . a mighty pictorial fusion.” The Tintoretto to which he refers has a “structural center” but arranged around are various other scenes or what James calls the “multiplication of aspects.” The canvas is crowded but foreshortening allows the observer’s eye to cover the distance from scene to scene without any loss of consistency in time or scale or discontinuity from the painting’s whole body of experience. For James, then, what might be called dramatized scenes can be followed by the narrator’s presence during which those dramatized scenes are bridged by the alternation of foreshortened narration.
[ix] See the “Preface” to The Tragic Muse where James describes in good detail his experimental “art of figuring synthetically” which owes something of its history to Gauguin and his circle who struck new impressionist paths about 189o when the term “synthése” appears. James sense of the idea was to see the novel in a new way, not as a jumbled and pedestrian assemblage of analytical data but as a spontaneous totality, an immediate temporal apprehension of form and space.
[x] Edel is prescient in describing James’ theatrical attempts as good background from the last of the middle years to the later experimental years and the masterful novels The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. After James’ to conquer the theater, Edel notes James took up his old pens with a belief that he could now do the work of his life.
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The featured image is a photograph of Henry James (1905), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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