The Politics of Henry James
Each great writer acquires an image that owes its energies to certain felt airs and essences associated with his creative imagination. The cut and quality of that imagination, its character and code, its reach and ambit, finally determine its dynamics. The image is uniquely answerable to such a dialectic; it sustains itself through a certain "chemistry" of effects, and, at times, through a certain aesthetic "mysticism." In short, it attains, en route, an unmistakable ambience. Considered thus, Henry James figures to the responding imagination as a writer of such rare refinements, subtleties and felicities as to become in the end a kind of vintage wine to be taken in slow, measured draughts. To be sure, his fastidiousness has in some later tales a distressing aspect, and his "transcendence" a false ring, but where the Jamesian imagination is true to its inner energies and does not let the human situation turn cold or abstract or static, the compact between reader and writer has the quality of a shared dream. Its ceremoniousness has a purposive aspect; it becomes a kind of aesthetic tender. The "great good place" holds and compels.
The Tragic Muse
'You must paint her just like that ...as the Tragic Muse' Suggests one of James' characters to Nick Dormer, the young Englishman who, during the course of the novel, will courageously resist the glittering Parliamentary career desired for him by his family, in order to paint. His progress is counterpointed by the 'Tragic Muse' of the title, Miriam Rooth, one of James' most fierily beautiful creations, a great actress indifferent to social reputation, and triumphantly dedicated to her art. In portraying the conflict between art and 'the world' which is his novel's central idea, James engaged obliquely with current debates on the new aestheticism of Pater and Wilde and on the nature of the actor's performance. Through the living complexity of his protagonists he reveals how much, as Philip Horne puts it, 'to take art seriously as an end in itself ...is still a provocative course'.
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":