SOURCE: "The Most Valuable Thing: James on Death," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 22, No. 4, Winter, 1976, pp. 507-24.

Everyone has recognized that for Henry James the living of the fully conscious life is a supreme value. Critics speak of his "ordeal of consciousness," his "religion of consciousness," his "idea of consciousness.'" James himself had asked, " . . . what is morality but high intelligence?"² and he had shown characters, like Lambert Strether or Maggie Verver, achieving creative awareness and others, like John Marcher or Merton Densher, achieving it too late. But, despite the general recognition of this theme in the fiction, there is still a profound disagreement about what it means in terms of a philosophic stance. No one expects a novelist to be a philosopher; and in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James had disposed of the claims of the moralist and the propagandist when he said that the only moral requirement of the work of fiction is that it should manifest "the amount of felt life concerned in producing it."³ But in no sense does his statement nullify the fact that a novelist's presuppositions about life and death will affect his way of conveying that "felt life."

There are those who claim that Henry James had no particular philosophic bent. Martha Banta dubs him a supreme eclectic and says that he would use any idea which would work for him.⁴ Ralph Barton Perry, biographer of William James, concludes that Henry was philosophically naïve.⁵ Other critics still follow the interpretation of Quentin Anderson, who sees James as the heir to his father's thought: as a kind of Swedenborgian idealist or modified transcendentalist in whom "the impulse of Emerson's generation to practice a Carthusian individualism came to artistic fulfillment."⁶ Generally echoing Anderson's views, John Goode has recently said that James affirms "a level of reality beyond the phenomenal."⁷

Robert Reilly, though he directs attention to the novelist's ethical kinship to William James, describes the "typical Jamesian protagonist" as "an Emersonian individual who exists in an unintellectualized faith-state that will lead him to unique moral action." This protagonist, Reilly continues, "is not in touch with law but with the divine."⁸ For Yvor Winters, James is in the thought-tradition of the "long discipline of the Roman, Anglo-Catholic, and Calvinist churches"; but his moral sense, Winters concludes, was "finally destroyed by Emerson's 'antimoral' philosophy."⁹ For Philip Rahv, James "approaches the world with certain presumptions of piety that clearly derive from the semireligious idealism of his family background . . . and from the early traditions and faith of the American community." This faith, Rahv believes, was converted to secular ends, but "one might venture the speculation that his wordly-aesthetic idea of an élite is in some way associated . . . with the ancestral and puritan idea of the elect. . . . "¹⁰ Ross Labrie agrees."¹¹

For Edward Rich Levy, Henry James was a Pragmatist: "The pragmatic theory of inquiry . . . was to become the keynote for his approach to characterization; tychism as the principle of consciousness was to form the theme of his novels, in their assertion of the possibility of growth in conscious awareness and of the supreme value of that consciousness of life as a possibility."¹²

Clearly Henry James cannot have embraced all of these philosophic positions simultaneously, and no one has adduced any evidence of a progression or change from one to another. If, then, there are ways of adjudicating among them, they must be further explored. At the heart of every philosophy is the philosopher's solution to the most stubborn of the ineluctable human problems—death. To understand how James looked at death and how it is used in his fiction may, therefore, invalidate some of the above views and may provide evidence for a tenable, if partial, interpretation of his Weltanschauung.

The statements and comments of James on death are generally known from his letters, his notebooks, and his prose essays; but they need to be examined for pattern and consistency.

The letters reveal persistent shock at human "terminations" and a firm refusal to engage in what Wallace Stevens called "sleek ensolacings."¹³ Even absolutists, of course, feel and express grief—and idealists and those supported by theological conviction as well. But the language of James suggests more than personal sorrow. "Extinction" is the word most often used to describe the fate of the loved dead. After the death of William in 1910, Henry wrote to Edith Wharton that he sat "stricken in darkness" over his "beloved brother's irredeemable absence." He adds that his relation to William and his affection for him "and the different aspect his extinction has given for me to my life are unutterable matters. . . . "¹⁴ In a letter to Edward Marsh, he spoke of the death of Rupert Brooke: "This is too horrible and heart-breaking. If there was a stupid and hideous disfigurement of life and outrage to beauty left for our awful conditions [the War] to perpetuate, those things have been now supremely achieved, and no other brutal blow in the private sphere can better them for making one stare through one's tears." He saw Brooke's death as a "stupid extinction of so exquisite an instrument and so exquisite a being" (II, 472). To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan, whose husband was killed in World War I, James wrote that he could offer her no consolation except the happiness of her having been associated with him in marriage (II, 499). In another troubled letter about the death of Brooke, he insists that death must be confronted without evasion. He advises: " . . . all my impulse is to tell you [Edward Marsh] to entertain the pang and taste the bitterness for all they are 'worth—to know to the fullest extent what has happened to you and not miss one of the hard ways in which it will come home" (II, 469).

The death of James's mother in 1882 was a profoundly disturbing experience for him. It elicited one of the rare statements he ever made that might suggest some hope of an afterlife:

her death has given me a passionate belief in certain transcendent things—the immanence of being as nobly created as hers—the immortality of such virtue as that—the reunion of spirits in better conditions than these. She is no more an angel today than she had always been; but I can't believe that by the accident of her death all her unspeakable tenderness is lost to the beings she so dearly loved. She is with us, she is of us—the eternal stillness is but a form of her love.¹⁵

Even here, however, the "transcendence" seems chiefly a perpetuation of her memory in the living. And in the same letter he uses the term extinction. After the father's death, Henry told William: "As I stood there and looked at this last expression of so many years of mortal union, it was difficult to believe that they [the parents] were not united again in some consciousness of my belief."¹⁶ The negative phrasing, though, more than hints that Henry shared William's uncertainty on the point. Late in life, when Henry visited the family graves in Mt. Auburn cemetery, there is no word of ultimate union in a "beyond" with those loved and lost: only a determination to know and to savor once again what these dead have meant to him. He feels "how not to have come would have been miserably, horribly to miss it. . . . Everything was there, everything came; the recognition, stillness, the strangeness, the pity and the sanctity and the terror, the breathcatching passion and the divine relief of tears." He stood there facing "the pity and tragedy" of all the past.¹⁷

If no evidence existed beyond the passages already cited, a wide gap between Henry James and Emerson or Whitman or other romantics is clearly visible. One cannot imagine James concluding a threnody on the death of a small son with the comforting thought that he is "Lost in God, in Godhead found."¹⁸ Nor can one imagine his finding anything but nonsense in Whitman's certainty:

Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.¹⁹

James did not know it. For him death was the Beast in the Jungle, and he is closer to our own day than he is to the romantic idealist tradition.

More direct evidence is available from other letters and from the late essay on immortality contributed to Howells' volume In After Days, Thoughts on the Future Life. In a letter to William following the latter's publication of the literary remains of Henry James, Sr., Henry separates himself from any kind of transcendental absolutism:

It comes over me as I read them [his father's writings] how intensely original and personal his whole system was, and how indispensable it is that those who go in for religion should take some heed of it. I can't enter into it (much) myself. I can't be so theological nor grant his extraordinary premises, nor throw myself into conceptions of heavens and hells, nor be sure that the keynote of nature is humanity (I, 111-112)

To be taken with equal seriousness is his letter to Mrs. William James to thank his brother for a copy of "his 'Immortality' lecture . . . which I have read with great appreciation of the art and interest in it. I am afraid I don't very consciously come in to either of the classes it is designed to pacify—either that of the yearners, I mean, or that of the objectors. It isn't the difficulties that keep me from the yearning—it is somehow the lack of the principle of the same" (I, 305).

The essay for Howells, "Is There a Life After Death?," gives the fullest explicit statement on death and its aftermath.²⁰ The major thrust is an affirmation of life and an impatience with all who are "dead" before they die. To be indifferent to the question of immortality, James says, is "below the human privilege"; and of those who do not consider it, it may be asked "whether they are distinguishable as 'living' either before or after" (p. 602). Ross Labrie says that James means that "each man must earn an afterlife through raising his level of awareness in this life." An "immortal élite" thus inheriting life-after-death would be, he continues, "analogous to the religious ideas of American Puritans like Jonathan Edwards."²¹ One can only insist that James implies nothing of the kind. He simply seizes the occasion to rebuke those who, in their worry over survival, fail to live the life they have. After this rebuke, James develops, through the central part of the essay, the evidence that death is indeed a termination:

he sees "nothing so much written over the personalities of the world as that they are finite and precarious and insusceptible. All the ugliness, the grossness, the stupidity, the cruelty, the vast extent to which the score in question is a record of brutality and vulgarity, the so-easy non-existence of consciousness . . . these things fairly rub it into us that to have a personality need create no presumption beyond what this remarkably mixed world is by itself amply sufficient to meet." (p. 605)

Wholly repudiating the claims of the spiritualism flourishing at the time as "absolutely not established," James laments:

. . . we begin by pitying the remembered dead, even for the danger of our indifference to them, and we end by pitying ourselves for the final demonstration of their indifference to us. "They must be dead, indeed," we say; "they must be dead as 'science' affirms. . . . " (p. 607)

To this point, there is no hint of faith, either in a Christian deity or in any concept of spiritual oneness in the universe which might make death something other than a brutal ending. A "tough-minded" man is simply brooding over the nothingness that may yawn at life's end. But James continues:

Living or feeling one's exquisite curiosity about the universe fed and fed, rewarded and rewarded—though I don't say definitely answered and answered—becomes the highest good I can conceive of, a million times better than not living. . . . (p. 610)

Recognizing a growth and change in consciousness, he must then concede that there may be realizations "I am condemned as yet but to dream of," On the continuation of consciousness after death he will at least keep an open mind. His concluding statement could have been written by his brother William—it is so essentially the pragmatist's position:

I "like" to think . . . that this, that and the other appearances are favorable to the idea of the independence . . . of my individual soul; 1 "like" to think even at the risk of lumping myself with those shallow minds who are happily and foolishly able to believe what they would prefer. It isn't really a question of belief . . . it is on the other hand a question of desire, but of desire so confirmed, so thoroughly established and nourished, as to leave belief a comparatively irrelevant affair. . . . If one acts from desire quite as one would from belief, it signifies little what name one gives to one's motive. (p. 614)

The prevailing tone of the essay is tentative. It reflects a pained admission that rational evidence indicates that death is an end, but it refuses to close the door on the possibility that future explorations of consciousness might alter the weight of the evidence. The essay is a rejection of absolutism and a hesitant commitment to openness and futurity. It is pragmatic in the sense of William James's Will to Believe.

Henry's comments on his brother's thought are, of course, well known. In 1907 he wrote to William: " . . . I was lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life I have . . . unconsciously pragmatised." And later he wrote of The Pluralistic Universe: "As an artist and a 'creator' I can catch on, hold on, to pragmatism and can work in the light of it and apply it. . . . "²² Ralph Barton Perry has called these statements mere fraternal compliments from a novelist wholly naïve in philosophy. But the evidence of the immortality essay, not to speak of the very substantial arguments of Edward Rich Levy based upon consideration of certain novels, prefaces, and reviews, forces a skeptical view of Perry's conclusion.²³ Quite evidently Henry James had thought about his brother's views, particularly his views of religious experience, and perhaps had reached similar positions independently.

Nevertheless, the letters and the fiction suggest that, though Henry James chose, on the level of intellect, an open-ended pragmatism regarding death, he more often, on the deeper levels of feeling, holds to the dominant tone of the essay on immortality: "What it comes to is that our faith or our hope may to some degree resist the fact. .. of watched and deplored death, but that they may well break down before the avidity and consistency with which everything insufferably continues to die" (p. 608). It is hard to see what Quentin Anderson could have meant when he said that the taste of Henry James, Sr., for "the unconditioned, which led to an explicit denial of the reality of sexuality and death, is present in the novelist."²⁴ To the contrary, death is a grim fact in many of the stories and some of the novels, and an examination of how the death-theme is used in the fiction confirms the most persistent value in the work of James: the value of life itself. He states it explicitly in his often-quoted letter to Grace Norton: "I don't know why we live—the gift of life comes to us from I don't know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that . . . life is the most valuable thing we know anything about, and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup." He advises her: "Don't melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can, and those of us who love and know, live so most" (I, 101).

Generally in the stories and novels, death is used in one of three interrelated ways: 1) to show that life must be lived in a present not unduly burdened by the weight of the past; 2) to awaken those living-dead whose consciousness is hardly more active than if they were already in the grave; 3) to rebuke, with artistic obliquity, those whose conventionality or fear of life would fatally repress fulfillment of the individual.

James was always sensitive to the claims of the dead upon the living; he had profound feeling for the "visitable past." George Stransom, in "The Altar of the Dead," defends his ritual observances for the dead: "This was no dim theological rescue, no boon of a contingent world; they [the dead] were saved better than faith or works could save them, saved for the warm world they had shrunk from dying to; for actuality, for continuity, for the certainty of human remembrance."²⁵ But the point of the story, finally, is that, while our bonds with the past and with the dead are ineradicable and enrich our lives, death cannot be allowed to keep men from loving and living. Stransom's hurt that a friend has dishonored a dead wife by remarrying is the obverse of his later discovery that his own love for his altar-companion actually honors the dead more by honoring life more. The same theme is at the heart of The Aspern Papers: a story which lovingly and appreciatively creates the ambience of the past but focuses upon old Juliana's willingness to surrender her cherished mementoes of the dead poet to ensure the happiness of the living Tina. Though James did, indeed, hate invasions of privacy, the story is not primarily about that hatred. The papers are Juliana's only counter with which to bargain for poor Tina's one chance at life; and they are a small price to pay. Tragedy, here, lies in the fate of Tina and the thoughtless manipulations of her "suitor."

Juliana knows that death-in-life from lack of love is a far greater cause for concern than the preservation of tokens from the dead past.

Any discussion of James's views on death must take account of his stories of the occult—the so-called "ghost" stories. In a preface to a collection of eighteen such tales, called Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural, Leon Edel describes these stories as concerned with "the mysterious world of daylight ghosts"; James, he says, "knew uncannily—how to make us walk in his company, in the broad daylight of our own lives—with our own ghosts."²⁶ Martha Banta, too, in Henry James and the Occult rightly agrees that the "ghosts" are the vocabulary, the metaphor for something strictly human: they are the "catalysts to self-knowledge." They never, she observes, speak in a literal sense "of belief in other beings, other worlds, or other lives than those discernible by the human eye and the human heart in this world and this time."²⁷ These stories, however, are interestingly apposite to James's several ways of using death in his fiction.

Two early stories, "DeGrey: A Romance" (1868) and "The Last of the Valerii" (1874), deal with the curse of the past when it impinges unduly upon the present. In the first, all of the DeGrey brides, over a number of generations, have died unexpected deaths. Margaret, fully aware of the family curse, marries Paul DeGrey with the passionate conviction that she can and will live life fully in the face of it: "Then raising her head, with her deep-blue eyes shining with the cold light of an immense resolve—a prodigious act of volition—'Father Herbert,' she said, in low, solemn accents, 'I revoke the curse. I undo it. I curse it!'"²⁸ Thereafter, she is blooming and happy and fulfilled while Paul weakens and sickens and finally dies. Both Edel and Banta believe that this is an instance, not uncommon in James, of psychic vampirism—of a wife's draining the vigor from a husband. Professor Banta extends the theme far beyond this story: "Is not vampirism," she asks, "the blood-brand that ought to be stamped upon what is most unhealthy in James' fiction? Are not Alice Staverton, May Bartram, Milly Theale, Maggie Verver, Miriam Booth [sic], Isabel Archer, and others soul-suckers of the men whose wills come under their spell?"²⁹ Though disproof does not fall within the context of this paper, I should say that the answer is a resounding "No!" And the story of DeGrey would appear to have a quite other theme. Margaret lives because she sturdily repudiates the Hawthorne-like "curse"; Paul dies because he permits himself to be a psychic victim of the dead past. Another near-victim is the Count Valerio in "The Last of the Valerii." When the archeological interests of his wife lead to excavations of relics from the ancient past of his family, the Count falls in love with that past. His withdrawal from the present and from his wife culminates in an actual return to the worship of Juno and to other ancient rites. Edel says that the story makes the reader "aware that the past harbors within it unspeakable evil—haunting evil." Though I agree with him that the theme is the danger of living in the dead past, I think that the charm of the story is in the seductive evocation of that past through its descriptive details. Good or evil, the past is not viable: it leads to a death-in-life. The story's ending is amateurishly incredible, but the theme is sufficiently established.

Perhaps the most poignant of the tales dealing with the past and the dead is "Maud-Evelyn," written in 1899. A middle-aged couple, unable to accept the death of their young daughter, forge the future for her that she never had. A young man who meets them by chance is chosen as the suitor and husband of the long-dead Maud-Evelyn. With motives perhaps mixed at the outset, the young man gradually comes to believe in the fiction in which he and the parents and the dead child, now a fictive woman, are living. The living girl whom he was to have married sums up the strange obsession: "It's the gradual effect of brooding over the past; the past that way grows and grows. They make it and make it. They've persuaded each other—the parents—of so many things that they've at last also persuaded him. It has been contagious."³⁰ This is a cult of the dead more extravagant than the ritual observances of George Stransom. The living woman, however, brings Stransom back to life and acceptance; the living girl in "Maud-Evelyn" can only share blighted final hours with a man utterly committed to the dead and to death. The story displays a psychological realism familiar enough—and a pathos that comes from the goodness and sensitivity of the people really destroyed by their own fantasies. Ghosts and fantasy-figures are natural symbols of those unreal, real haunting presences which signify unhealthy relationship to the past.

Another death attributable to the destructiveness of a senseless tradition is that of young Valentin de Bellegarde in The American. Dying of a pointless duel fought for the "honor" of Noemie, Valentin is attended by Christopher Newman. Newman feels anger at the meaningless dying: "You might have done something better than this. It's about the meanest winding up of a man's affairs that I can imagine!" Valentin answers: "It is mean—decidedly mean. For you see at the bottom—down at the bottom, in a little place as small as the end of a wine-funnel—I agree with you."³¹ The youth dies apologizing—apologizing for the hollow values of the ancient house of Bellegarde. But neither he nor his sister has been able to summon the courage to defy the horrendous pressures of enslavement to the accumulated traditions that kill the possibilities of life in the present. Whether such pressures be a commitment to the dead or to the dead past, whether they be commitment to conventional values in the present—James knew that they were the stuff of a tragic denial of life, and they provide the theme of much of his fiction. The pride of French aristocracy and the Puritan ethos of Woollett, Massachusetts, can come to the same deprivation.

The several deaths by suicide in the fiction of James throw further light upon the novelist's passion for that "most valuable thing"—life. The fatal fall of Roderick Hudson may or may not have been suicide. Rowland, lashing himself for having driven Roderick into despair, convinces himself that the tormented young man had made a false step in the mountain-top storm. But the matter is left in doubt. The fact of importance is that, in effect, Roderick was dead before he died. There was nothing left in the cup for him. Caught up in a hopeless passion for Christina Light, Roderick had abandoned his art, the people who loved him, and his own Self. Rowland had forced him to contemplate his tragedy: to see himself as a man self-destroyed, because he could not make the saving choices. And, however he may have died on the cliff, his life was already expended. In a much better novel, The Princess Casamassima, Hyacinth Robinson, too, lacks the courage and vigor to make the hard choice. Committed to the anarchists who champion the poor, Hyacinth feels increasingly drawn to the arts and way of life to which the Princess has introduced him. He decides that violent revolution is incompatible with the preservation of high culture—and he most choose between them: "To desert one of these presences [the social need and the cultured values] for the other—that idea was the source of shame, as an act of treachery would have been. . . . "³² But, as I have said elsewhere: ". . . the supreme act of treachery is to desert both with a bullet through the heart." James means for us to see ". . . that Hyacinth sees too little and loves life too little, for all his awakening awarenesses."³³ Both Roderick and Hyacinth are artists manqué, one a selfish man, the other a sensitively good man—but both unable to see, as James did, that it is a mistake to surrender life "while there is any yet left in the cup" (Letters, I, 101).

A hero who may belong to the same category is the young pacifist Owen Wingrave. Included in Henry-James: Stories of the Supernatural, "Owen Wingrave" cannot really be called a "ghost story." Leon Edel rightly points out that the only ghost is the pressure of the past and of family. But the question remains: how shall we interpret the death of Owen? He is found dead on the floor of the "haunted" room where his ancestor had mysteriously died: "He was all the young soldiers on the gained field."³⁴ Edel cites Bernard Shaw's objection to the story on the ground that Owen, in his pacifism, had viable choices other than death. To this cavil, James replied: "You simplify too much."³⁵ And, though the story is troubling, perhaps Shaw did. James would appear to be saying that, given Owen's strong sense of family (like Valentin's), he could not repudiate family—hence chose to die himself rather than to inflict death upon others. If this is indeed the meaning, then Owen's death would have a more positive significance than that of Hyacinth or Roderick.

Two of the best tales, "The Author of Beltraffio" and "The Turn of the Screw," seem closely related in a common theme: the death which is always implied in a denial of life. According to the admiring disciple who recounts the story of the author of Beltraffio, Mark Ambient is a very great novelist whose wife fears and despises his art and desperately tries to shield their child from the influence of his father. To the younger writer, the troubled father confesses the deep chasm between his own and his wife's view of the world:

It's the difference between making the most of life and making the least, so that you'll get a better one in some other time and place. Will it be a sin to make the most of that one too, I wonder; and shall we have to be bribed off in the future state as well as in the present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty—I don't know, I doubt if a poor devil can; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it. My wife holds that we shouldn't cultivate or enjoy it without extraordinary precautions and reasons. She's always afraid of it, always on her guard.

Ambient worriedly concludes:

I don't know what the end will be. Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that's the way I try to show them in any professed picture. But you mustn't talk to Mrs. Ambient about things as they are. She has a mortal dread of things as they are.³⁶

The end is that the mother, in effect, chooses to let the child die sooner than expose him to the dangerous, open world of a father who prefers to see things as they are. She withholds medicine from Dolcino, desperately ill with diphtheria, and turns the doctor away. The story clearly expresses, through Ambient, many of James's own feelings and convictions about his art. Mrs. Ambient, indeed, seems almost a fictionalized, feminized version of the critic [Besant] to whom James had addressed The Art of Fiction. But beyond his view of the novelist's art, Ambient expresses a view of life: it should be totally exposed, honestly encountered, and fully lived. His wife's Puritan view logically culminates in a death-choice. As an ironical twist at the end, Mrs. Ambient for the first time reads her husband's "black" novels.

Everyone, now, who writes about "The Turn of the Screw" feels tempted to apologize for adding to the bulky bibliography. The debate, of course, has centered about the question of the ghosts: are they real or are they the sick creations of an hysteric spinster-governess? The question should be phrased differently: what is the meaning of these very real "ghosts"? For all of Henry James's ghosts are "real" in the sense that they have psychological meaning; never, in the sense that they are emanations from a world beyond death. All of the James ghost stories can be read on more than one level: first, simply as oldfashioned tales of terror but finally as portrayals of an inner reality. What, then, could the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel mean. Edmund Wilson, who advanced the so-called Freudian view of the governess, and Robert Heilman, who argued for the story as religious allegory, have set, perhaps, the dominant patterns of interpretation.³⁷ Certainly, the artistry of the tale lies, as James said in his Preface that it did, in the carefully preserved ambiguity which allows many possible meanings. Nevertheless, the Wilson and Heilman views strain credulity—Heilman's because it is utterly unlike James to frame a religious allegory and Wilson's because it takes no account of the narrator's introduction and because it denies the felt realness of the "ghosts," a feeling that Quint and Jessel are a force that has some meaning beyond the question of the governess' interpretation of them.

On balance, the essay of Joseph J. Firebaugh seems to me to come closer to intelligent explication and to some sensible accounting for the death of Miles. He recognizes, as one has to, the hint of "boyish homosexuality" in Miles: "If that is the nameless crime, it is still knowledge. . . . He gives this knowledge to his schoolmates, those he 'liked' moreover, in love rather than malice." Firebaugh assumes, without much evidence, that Quint had had a "corrupt purpose"; but, more convincingly, he says that the governess "destroys the children by imposing on them images of evil formed in her conviction of the essential sinfulness of mankind."³⁸ It is more than possible to see the governess as the "good" woman the narrator feels her to be and at the same time to argue that she belongs in that large company of the good who go into panic when they confront forms of experience unknown and, therefore, frightening to them. Homosexuality as a carefully covert theme is suggested, not only by the reasons for Miles's expulsion, but also by the pairing of Miles and Quint and of Flora and Miss Jessel. James's interest in that theme is present, of course, elsewhere and is a matter for discussion in the last two volumes of Edel's biography. I would hazard a guess that "The Turn of the Screw" could be the story Edel says James never wrote because he had for many years lived it. Edel notes that three years after the death of his sister Alice (1892), James "thought of a story he might write about 'the existence of a peculiar intense and interesting affection between a brother and sister.' As he recorded this in his notebook, he spoke of 'two lives, two beings, and one experience.'"³⁹ There can be no question about the nature of the relationship of Alice with Katherine Loring, as that is made clear both by Edel and by certain letters of James.⁴⁰ And from both the Edel biography and from the literary expressions of the theme of homosexuality, it may be inferred that James had good reasons for his deep understanding of his sister's problems. If, indeed, "The Turn of the Screw," written in 1897-98, may covertly reflect that "one experience" of brother and sister, then the fate of Miles and the illness of Flora would symbolize, as usual in James, the belief that whatever interferes with the fullness of life for the individual is veritable death.

Two other short stories have particular relevance to the theme of death in the work of James, "The Middle Years" and "The Beast in the Jungle." What death means to the artist is the concern of "The Middle Years." Martin Dencombe, his latest novel in his hands, his illness and his years upon him, senses "the completion of a sinister process; feels the chill of this dark void." His last chance is ebbing away: "He had done all he should ever do, and yet hadn't done what he wanted." There is no speculation about some expansion of his artist's consciousness after death: "A second chance—that's the delusion. There never was to be but one."⁴¹ For James, death is the Beast in the Jungle, for it terminates the chance to know and to feel and to create. The beast that leaps out at John Marcher is death—his tragic perception at the grave of May Bartram not only that life has a term but also that life itself can be a death-in-life when consciousness fails: "Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted."⁴² Death is not felt as a tragedy for May Bartram: she has "had her man," has known love in full consciousness. It is Marcher, "powerless to penetrate the darkness of death," who throws himself upon her tomb in an agony of recognition too late. Death is as shocking to James as it was to the existentialist writers of recent time. For him, the brutality of death can give a sharper poignancy to the living of life and can be the spur that awakens the unawakened.

When Isabel Archer, at the death-bed of Ralph Touchett, cries out that she would sooner die than lose him, Ralph assures her: "you won't lose me—you'll keep me. Keep me in your heart; I shall be nearer to you than I've ever been. Dear Isabel, life is better; for in life there's love. Death is good—but there's no love."⁴³ And Isabel turns back to life and to responsibility.

Milly Theale, too, believes that life is better. The Wings of the Dove, the most tragic of James's novels, is, in one sense, focused upon the death of its heroine. The emphasis upon Minnie Temple as model for Milly has perhaps influenced some readers to suppose that the tragedy is Milly's. But no matter how filled with pathos her situation is and no matter how cruel the deception practiced, Milly's death cannot be called tragedy. Hers is death from a natural cause and is the donnée of the novel: nothing could have forestalled her fate—no choice of hers, no choice of Densher's or Kate's. F. W. Dupee, mis-reading the role of Sir Luke Strett, says that Milly's "physician hopes that she may recover if she falls in love."⁴⁴ But this is not at all what the physician means. Strett is, in effect, the voice of Henry James. After questioning Milly and learning of her circumstances and after sensing her courage and capacity for life, Sir Luke expresses to her the characteristic philosophy of James: live as fully as you can in whatever time you have. "You've the right to be happy," he tells her. "You must make up your mind to it. You must accept any form in which happiness may come. . . . It's a great, rare chance."⁴⁵ Milly grasps his meaning perfectly. At the end of the second visit, she asks: "Shall I . . . suffer?" (XIX, 246). Strett replies that she will not. "And yet then live?" she persists. "My dear young lady," he answers, " . . . isn't to 'live' exactly what I'm trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?" (XIX, 246). In the chapter following that conversation, Milly understands what Sir Luke has done for her. He has not lied to her; he has not offered her pity; he refuses to conjure up visions of sick-rooms and medicines and suffering. She knows she will die, but she feels how wonderful it is, the "strange mixture that tasted at one and the same time of what she had lost and what had been given her" (XIX, 248). The bloom was gone "from the small old sense of safety. . . . But the . . . idea of a great adventure, a big dim experiment or struggle in which she might, more responsibly than ever before, take a hand, had been offered her instead" (XIX, 248). She must pluck the nettle danger from the flower safety; she must take up "some queer defensive weapon, a musket, a spear, a battle-axe" and assume a military posture (XIX, 248). She reflects: "It was wonderful to her . . . she had been treated—hadn't she?—as if it were in her power to live, and yet one wasn't so . . . unless it came up quite as much, that one might die" (XIX, 248). She knows; Sir Luke knows; Susan Stringham soon finds out; Kate Croy is sure—that Milly, in fact, will soon die. But Sir Luke commands Milly to lay claim to those kingdoms of the earth which she had earlier viewed from her mountain-top: he frees her to live with a valiant intensity while she can.

Sir Luke reenters the situation at a crucial later time in Venice after Lord Mark's revelation to Milly of the Densher-Croy plot and after she has "turned her face to the wall." Oscar Cargill says that Kate and Densher commit psychological murder of Milly.⁴⁶ This view is a sentimentalizing of a doom that was inevitable anyway. But more than that, it overlooks the final role of Sir Luke Strett. After he spends a day with Densher, never mentioning Milly at all, he evidently concludes that there is in Densher a genuine concern and caring for Milly. Later, he gives Densher the word that Milly will receive him. In effect, his good offices turn Milly's face away from the wall and back toward life. The greatness of Milly Theale is not that she "forgives": it is that she is capable of opting for life when she is in the very embrace of death. Those who speak of Milly's getting some sort of "revenge" surely miss the point. But those go equally astray who see Milly as somehow transcendent in death—a sort of abstract symbol of the holy spirit. John P. O'Neill feels that, as Milly looks at the Bronzino portrait, she "arrives at a kind of joy, partly aesthetic, partly mystical, over a fact of experience [death] which . . . is most feared. She sees the fusion of life and death poetically. . . . "⁴⁷ The details do not support O'Neill. Milly sees death with an absolute horror and is in protest against it to the end. She is a loving woman, however, who decides that, though she cannot live, she can give the gift of life to Merton Densher. We never see the letter which she writes to Densher. Its importance lies in how the receipt of it affects him. The tragedy of the novel is the tragedy of Densher and Kate Croy. His obsessive guilt turns him away from the gift of life offered by Milly and toward a cruel testing of Kate. It is the goodness in him which creates his shame, but he is not, finally, good enough. He cannot summon the strength to read the letter; he can only put the burden upon Kate in an accusatory way. The beauty of Milly's nature has so moved him that we feel in him, at the end, the devotion of the "mari" in "Maud-Evelyn": he will live henceforth with a ghost. Kate, understanding how Milly has changed them both, nevertheless still loves Densher. For him she had propagated a cruel deception and ventured a stupendous risk for herself in her willingness that Densher should marry the dying Milly. She does care for Milly, and her motives had been not wholly evil—more imprescient than designedly evil. She had been wrong. But she is still capable of life and of facing guilt. The tragedy, then, is a tragedy of waste and a surrender to guilt, an outcome that Milly could not have willed. Like James her creator, Milly speaks for life. She fears and hates death and draws all her weapons against it. It is a bitter irony that her last defiance of death—an act of life—should destroy where she had hoped it would save. But, as always in James, memory of the dead is destructive when it turns the living away from pursuit of their lives.

Letters, essays, novels, stories show Henry James to be consistent in his view of death. Death is a termination. If, like his brother William, he was intellectually open to the idea that the future might bring new insights to bear upon the problem, emotionally he is sure that death is the enemy, the Beast in the Jungle. To confront it honestly may catapult the living into a fuller consciousness; to make a cult of it—whether of the loved dead or the dead past or a dead set of values—is to impede the embrace of life.

Leon Edel, in his last volume of the biography, describes the pathetic clutching at consciousness and the reaching, still, for his craft as James neared his end.⁴⁸ That life for him was indeed the "most valuable thing" is manifest in a letter written, just two years before he died, to the despairing Henry Adams:

Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss—if the abyss has any bottom . . . I still find my consciousness interesting—under cultivation of that interest. Cultivate it with me, dear Henry. . . . (II, 361)

The views James had of death and of life place him very far from the position of any of the familiar varieties of philosophic idealism. Without metaphysical supports, he was closer to the questioning and often doubting twentieth century. But his faith in the interest of life did not wane.

¹ Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge at the University Press, 1962); Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972); Ross Labrie, "Henry James's Idea of Consciousness," American Literature, 39 (January, 1968), 516-529. Many others, of course, have explored the role of consciousness in James.

²The Golden Bowl (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), I, 90.

³ Leon Edel, ed., Henry James, The Future of the Novel (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 49.

⁴ Banta, p. 53.

⁵ Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1935), I, 429.

⁶ Quentin Anderson, The American Henry James (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957), pp. 352-353.

⁷ John Goode, "The Pervasive Mystery of Style: The Wings of the Dove," in John Goode, ed., The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James (London: Methuen & Co., 1972), p. 245.

⁸ Robert J. Reilly, "Henry James and the Morality of Fiction," American Literature, 39 (March, 1967), 25.

⁹ Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (Denver, CO: University of Denver Press, 1947), p. 306.

¹⁰ Philip Rahv, Literature and the Sixth Sense (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969), p. 123.

¹¹ Labrie.

¹² Edward Rich Levy, Henry James and the Pragmatic Assumption (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1964), p. 87.

¹³ Wallace Stevens, "Esthetique du Mal," Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), p. 322.

¹⁴ Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), II, 168, All references will be to this edition.

¹⁵ F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock, eds., The Notebooks of Henry James (New York: Oxford University Press, A Galaxy Book, 1961), p. 41.

¹⁶ A letter to William cited by Leon Edel, Henry James, The Middle Years (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1962), p. 62.

¹⁷The Notebooks of Henry James, pp. 320-321.

¹⁸ Brooks Atkinson, ed., The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), pp. 775-783.

¹⁹ Gay Wilson Allen and Charles T. Davis, eds., Walt Whitman's Poems (New York: New York University Press, 1955), p. 75.

²⁰ F. O. Matthiessen, ed., "Is There a Life After Death?" The James Family (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961). The essay first appeared in a collection edited by Howells, entitled In After Days, Thoughts on the Future Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910). References will be to this edition.

²¹ Labrie, pp. 528-529. F. O. Matthiessen says that James argues for survival in a "loosely neo-Platonic way," Henry James, The Major Phase (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 147. Neo-Platonism, however, is based upon belief in the upward journey of the soul toward God or the One. This ultimate goal finds no expression in James. Frederic Harold Young, in an analysis of the thought of Henry James, Sr., points out that the elder James never developed any specific doctrine of immortality. In Chapter IX of Part Two, Young explains the role of consciousness in the father's philosophy but makes clear that it did stem from theological assumptions never made by the younger Henry. The Philosophy of Henry James, Sr. (New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1951), pp. 164-225.

²² Perry, I. 428. See Richard A. Hocks, Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974) for a recent analysis of James's pragmatism.

²³ Levy's unpublished doctoral dissertation, previously cited, makes a convincing demonstration of elements of pragmatism in the work of Henry James, He deals with Roderick Hudson, The Sacred Fount, The Ambassadors, and certain reviews and essays.

²⁴ Anderson, pp. 352-353.

²⁵ Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Short Stories of Henry James (New York: The Modern Library, 1945), p. 353. William Troy has pointed out the contemporary relevance of this story and shown it to be wholly without theological implications. "The Altar of Henry James" in F. W. Dupee, ed., The Question of Henry James (New York: Henry Holt, 1945).

²⁶ Leon Edel, ed., Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural (New York: Taplinger, 1970), p. xiv.

²⁷ Banta, p. 3.

²⁸Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural, p. 56.

²⁹ Banta, p. 85.

³⁰Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural, p. 617.

³¹The American, The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), II, 394.

³²The Princess Casamassima, The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908), VI, 264.

³³ Mildred E. Hartsock, "The Princess Casamassima: The Politics of Power," Studies in the Novel, I (Fall 1969), p. 305.

³⁴Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural, p. 352.

³⁵ Edel, Preface to "Owen Wingrave," Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural, p. 314.

³⁶ "The Author of Beltraffio," The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), XVI, 45-46.

³⁷ Edmund Wilson, "The Ambiguity of Henry James," The Triple Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). Robert Heilman, "The Turn of the Screw as Poem," The University of Kansas City Review, 14 (Summer 1948), 277-289.

³⁸ Joseph J. Firebaugh, "Inadequacy in Eden: Knowledge and The Turn of the Screw," Modern Fiction Studies, 3 (Spring 1957), 57-63.

³⁹ Leon Edel, Henry James, The Middle Years, p. 306.

⁴⁰ See Edel, Henry James, The Middle Years, pp. 67-68; 126-129; 134-136; 299-304.

⁴¹ Fadiman, p. 315.

⁴² Fadiman, p. 575.

⁴³The Portrait of a Lady, The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908), IV, 413-414.

⁴⁴ F. W. Dupee, Henry James (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1965), p. 217.

⁴⁵The Wings of the Dove, The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), XIX, 245. Other references will be to this edition.

⁴⁶ Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1961), p. 340.

⁴⁷ John P. O'Neill, Workable Design (Port Washington, NY.: Kennikat Press, 1973), p. 111.

⁴⁸ Leon Edel, Henry James, The Master (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1972), pp. 542-554.