James the Melodramatist

In a foolish essay entitled “Books and You,” Mr. Somerset Maugham, while scorning James’s work as trivial and superficial, is nevertheless forced to admit that it somehow “keeps the reader going from page to page.” The opinion that James’s novels deal only with the amenities of high life is of course not confined to those who agree with Mr. Maugham and who would be content, like a famous American critic, to dismiss James as a “social twitterer.” For certain of James’s admirers, the pleasure he affords is in direct proportion to the elegance of his atmosphere and the rarefaction of his meaning. These readers are never so sure of his artistry as when he entrusts to a lordling some stammering speech, heavy with adverbs and precious with colloquialisms, which together suggest one of Ollendorf’s conversation manuals. Whether scornful or admiring, this attitude toward James only proves how often critical generalities are based not on what is plainly there to be generalized about, but solely on what is strange or striking. For the high life, the fine-spun surface, the Old Pretender style, would not of themselves account for the truth which Mr. Maugham grants but does not explain: we still ask what it is that keeps the reader going.

The first step towards a right answer is to recognize that James does not deal with etiquette detached from deep feeling; that his characters are not exclusively, or even mainly, drawn from a class which is beyond the reach of gross circumstance or vulgar appetites. On the contrary, most of his novels and tales deal with middling people pursuing the two simplest objects of human concern—love and money. When I say “simplest,” I mean of course that abstractly considered they are elemental and have kept their primacy in life and literature ever since the war that was fought for “Helen and all her wealth.” It is true that James’s mind is engrossed by the complexities and refinements to which passion and greed give rise in a world of elaborate laws and subtle modes of communication. But even in the course of inventing and unmasking the numberless disguises which these basic passions can assume, James holds to a simple view of their meaning: in acting out their feelings, people turn out either good or evil—a moral attitude which, taken with James’s addiction to violent plots, leads me to say that he is a writer of melodrama.