James and Arnold: Conscience and Consciousness in a Victorian Künstlerroman.
[In the following essay, originally published in 1968, Engelberg argues in his examination of Roderick Hudson that Henry James was the first author writing in English to utilize the künstlerroman's “artist's dilemma” as a plot device for a novel.]
In his recent study of the artist-hero in fiction, Maurice Beebe examines the scores of novels in nineteenth-century English fiction which might be considered, even in the remotest way, as dealing with the “Artist-Hero,” or simply with artist types.1 With the exception of Henry James, Beebe's list is unimpressive. Almost all the novels he cites, from Disraeli's Contarini Fleming to Thackeray's The Newcomes, remain unread today. Not until the turn of the century—and perhaps not really until Joyce's Portrait—did the English novel concern itself with the “Artist-Hero”—except, of course, for Henry James. In view of the central place which the Künstlerproblem occupied in the German Romantic tradition (Eichendorff, Novalis, Tieck, Hoffmann, not to speak of Goethe) and in mid-century France, this belated interest in the Artist as Hero in English fiction is curious; it may well be due to the traditionally low place assigned to the novel in England, even amongst its own practitioners. Before the ascendancy of Henry James, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, who in England would have argued that the novel was as worthy of our serious interest as, say, the drama, the epic, the narrative, or the lyric poem?
Beebe links the Künstlerroman to the Bildungsroman (the “Apprentice” novel) and to the “Confessional Novel,” forms in which English fiction fares much better, with books like David Copperfield as prototypes and progenitors. But I feel that there is a certain blurring in the way these links are established. The Bildungsroman, in the German tradition,2 is almost antithetical to the Künstlerroman: from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister through Keller's Grüne Heinrich to Mann's Magic Mountain, the Bildungsroman has tended to portray the education of a would-be artist, a young man who comes to his senses, ceases to dabble in areas in which he discovers he has no talent, and associates himself with some useful activity in the social community—as surgeon, civil servant, engineer, soldier. This “anti-Künstlerroman” was scorned even by some of Goethe's admirers, especially Novalis, who wrote his anti-Meister (he considered that book to be a betrayal of Art), Heinrich von Ofterdingen, in which Poetry is, as with Shelley, not merely a civilizing force but the very unifying power of the universe, the victor over all positivistic-rationalistic values in a spiritual realm beyond death. Thus, in German fiction at least, there are two opposing artist-themes: stories of young men who renounce their artistic pretensions to become useful members of society and stories of young men who pursue the Ideal of Art, renouncing the “useful” for what they often feel is the truer reality, the “visionary.”
Obviously, these distinctions are complex and one can infer endless implications from them. My aim has been merely to place James's first novel (he virtually disowned Watch and Ward) Roderick Hudson, his Künstlerroman, into a context. I feel justified in claiming that, from a modern perspective, James's novel is the first in English fiction to take the “artist's dilemma” seriously, and that in so doing, James prepared the way for a significant progeny. From The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) onwards artists have abounded in English fiction. Throughout this essay I will consider James as an English writer, and while both Poe and Hawthorne are two prominent American writers who dealt with the Artist-Problem, neither sustained a full-scale novel on the theme. Hawthorne's The Marble Faun is only incidentally about Art; nevertheless, it is true that American writers, more influenced by Germans like E. T. A. Hoffmann perhaps, took up the Artist as Hero earlier and more frequently than their English cousins.
The “artist's dilemma” in Roderick Hudson encompasses the whole debate over the artist and his function from Romanticism to Realism—and beyond. Many Romantics—Shelley, Hugo, Novalis, Wordsworth—had faith that the august Imagination could conquer Life. Such faith became transvaluated so that—as Goethe at times complained—Life was being ignored in the very process of being pursued. The Imagination became an agent not of wider perception but of narrowing containment: it often died for lack of sustenance. When “consciousness” enlarged itself by focusing on a single line of vision (love, hate, pleasure) it also, paradoxically, became exclusive, narrow, obsessive. As many Romantics discovered (and later the Symbolists and Decadents in a different era), Imagination cannot sustain itself on itself: it needs to be stimulated from without, freely and—as Nietzsche finally warned—guiltlessly.
I
Roderick Hudson begins his artistic career with vast, abstract conceptions, with the help of which he does some very fine work. But conceptions soon cease to stimulate, and Roderick turns to Life, to experience, for his “ideas.” But between Roderick and Life there appear a number of formidable obstacles and his struggles to overcome these result in the familiar curve of Romantic genius: decline, dissipation, despair, a state in which Imagination is totally disabled. It appears that Roderick's pursuit of ideals in fleshly form is the prime cause of his demise, but James, both in his Preface to the New York Edition and in his revisions, makes clear that this is too simple a view of the matter. The Romantic's urge for vague and infinite abstractions; the Realist's awareness that such a course is futile; and the artist's struggle to resolve this impasse: these are all carefully delineated in the novel. What makes Roderick Hudson a special “case” is not the treatment of a Romantic artist who fails (romantically), but the special conflict leading to that failure, both within and without the hero. Most commentators blame this collapse on the enchanting but fatal charms of Christina Light, with whom Roderick falls in love, and almost all of these—including Beebe—champion Rowland over Roderick, see Christina Light as a femme fatale, and sum up the theme of the novel as a kind of object-lesson about “a romantic artist, divided between sex and art.”3 However, in his own Introduction to the New York Edition, James cautions against such a view: “Everything occurs … too punctually and moves too fast,” and “the determinant function attributed to Christina Light, the character of well-nigh sole agent of [Roderick's] catastrophe that this unfortunate young woman has forced upon her, fails to commend itself to our sense of truth and proportion.”4 Still, Roderick Hudson is a failure: he is a man caught in the encirclement of a very un-Hegelian dialectic; thesis and antithesis produce no synthesis, only pain, suffering, and finally death.
One way to describe this dialectic is Romanticism versus Realism. Certainly the consistent change of a word like “picturesque” (in the early versions) to the word “romantic” for the 1907 New York Edition provides some evidence for James's apparent desire to underscore the novel's involvement in Romanticism, particularly as James saw the book retrospectively.5 Another possible approach to the dialectic of the novel is the strongly suggested Faustian theme: defiant action and defiant despair. A year before writing Roderick Hudson, James reviewed a French translation of Faust.6 Several indirect and direct allusions to Faust found their way into the novel: the young man who sculpts a Water-Drinker called “Thirst”—for “knowledge,” he says; the betrayal of the fiancée; the pursuit of Ideal Beauty in a woman; the Baden-Baden episode, even the final thunderstorm, a kind of Walpurgisnacht. There are references to the sculptor Gloriani as resembling Mephisto and to the black poodle in Goethe's Faust. All these allusions, however, do not add up, except in a general way. Indeed, Roderick is less a Goethean Faust and more a Byronic Manfred, whom Gérard de Nerval called the “personification of remorse.” As a variation of the Faust-Manfred theme, Roderick may be seen as suffering from an Imagination too quickly spent, for, like Coleridge's, Roderick's decline of genius is not merely a dissipation of character but a paralysis of creativity: “My mind is like a dead calm in the tropics, and my imagination as motionless as the blighted ship in the ‘Ancient Mariner!’” (231). Here in his dejection Roderick echoes Coleridge:
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination …
But there is yet another, and a far more explicit set of terms to describe Roderick's dialectic, for the terms are James's own as he undoubtedly took them from Matthew Arnold: Hebraism (conscience) versus Hellenism (consciousness). From this dialectic there can never result any synthesis, only mutual annihilation.
II
In Chapter VI of Roderick Hudson James describes an elaborate party of artists and friends who have come to be guests at Roderick's debut as a sculptor. They are rewarded with life-sized statues of Adam and Eve and with a confident and ebullient young genius. It is Roderick's high point (a figure of speech that fits in several ways). On this occasion he announces a creed which to any English reader would undoubtedly have been a topical allusion: “… I'm a Hellenist; I'm not a Hebraist!” (115). That James was here alluding to Arnold's famous distinction is almost certain, although James reinterprets Arnold's terms and applies them to serve his own purposes. Encouraged by Henry James Sr., James had from early youth been a sympathetic reader of Arnold. We also have evidence that in the year Culture and Anarchy (which contains the section on “Hebraism and Hellenism”) was published in book form, 1869, James was in London, where he probably first heard of the new book, then the talk of the hour: it was his “thrilling opportunity to sit one morning, beside Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-urn … opposite to Frederic Harrison, eminent to [him] at the moment as one of the subjects of Matthew Arnold's early fine banter. …”7 James's first review of Arnold (the Essays in Criticism, First Series) was published in the North-American Review, July, 1865. In his biography of James, Leon Edel records a meeting between James and Arnold in 1873. Though the personal confrontation was a disappointment (due apparently to the “little glass [Arnold] screws into one eye”), Edel stresses the intellectual kinship between the two men. He also records a letter from Arnold to James in 1879, congratulating James on the achievement of Roderick Hudson. Clearly, Arnold was an early, strong influence, and, I should think, a permanent one.8
For Arnold, Hebraism and Hellenism were the anti-poles of Western history: “doing” and “thinking,” “energy” and “intelligence.” “The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.” What characterizes the spirit of Hellenism is “spontaneity of consciousness”; what characterizes Hebraism is “strictness of conscience.” The ideal of Hellenism is the perception of Beauty, but its attainment is impeded by a Hebraistic sense of sin, an obstacle which Arnold noted was greatly strengthened during the Puritan reactions against the excesses and moral deficiencies of the Renaissance. Although neither Roderick Hudson nor his patron, Rowland Mallet, perfectly fits one or the other of Arnold's principles, each behaves according to certain basic patterns which a knowledge of Arnold's dualism helps to illuminate. Rowland, by and large, is a Puritan, a man long habituated to “conscience” of the kind Arnold meant by “Hebraism”; Roderick is largely a creature of consciousness, and his own aesthetic aims toward the perfection of Ideal Beauty identify him as something of an Arnoldian Hellenist. (It is true that Roderick's Hellenism is very Romantic and less “classical” than Arnold's, and that unlike Shelley, whom Trelawney took to see the dirty Grecian ships, Roderick never discovers that Hellenism can be Hell.) These distinctions are not, of course, rigid in the novel, and the complexities of character and story happily prevent one from forcing an almost allegorical interpretation on the book. Still, in that very complexity James seems to have caught the duality of the problem with a very firm grip: the century was, after all, characterized by a mixture of inclinations between Hebraism and Hellenism. Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Hopkins, Ruskin, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and, indeed, Arnold and James—were they not all (sometimes alternately) moral aesthetes or aesthetic moralists?
From the first pages of the novel, James makes us aware of Rowland Mallet's conflict between his Puritan heritage and his acquired taste for a form of irresponsible dilletantism: “[Europe is] always lotus-eating” (7). Rowland had a “lively suspicion of his [own] uselessness,” which coincides with his cousin Cecilia's suggestion that there may be some positive harm in a man who is not doing some “positive good” (2-3). This inner state of disaffection puts Rowland on the track of some “errand”—something to do: and in his “frequent fits of melancholy,” he declared that he was “neither fish nor flesh … neither an irresponsibly contemplative nature nor a sturdily practical one. …” Indeed, the two impulses divide him to make an “awkward mixture of moral and aesthetic curiosity,” and Rowland can obtain “happiness” only in one of two directions: “either in action of some thoroughly keen kind in behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts” (16). Since he confesses himself as being incapable of achieving either, being “a man of genius half-finished” with “the faculty of expression … wanting,” but “the need of expression” remaining, the reader is very early alerted to Rowland's fate, which Rowland himself predicts: to “spend [his] days groping for the latch of a closed door” [8] (like Morris Townsend in Washington Square). For all his knowledge of the arts and his immersion in the “antique” world, Rowland's conception of the artist—which is central to the shaping of Roderick's fate—is a “strong conviction that the artist is better for leading a quiet life,” a philosophy which he promises to “preach to [his] gifted pupil [Roderick Hudson]” (49). The artist, then, must do: what is to feed the imagination toward execution is a question that does not exist for Rowland; or, to put it more positively, any contact with Life as a source of stimulation will, in Rowland's view, merely contaminate the artist.
Rowland's sole prescription for artistic success is Work: “You've only to work hard,” he tells Roderick before they set sail for Europe (37); and, much later, after a stormy scene during which Roderick pleads the special case of genius, Rowland's only response is: “tumble to work somehow …” (232). Rowland even advises Roderick to continue working on commissions which now revolt the artist, for virtue lies in the act, in “the resolution not to chuck [it],” in making “the effort necessary at least for finishing [the] job,” after which one is free to destroy it, the moral fiber having been tested by chafing it against the grain (305). When Roderick's collapse is imminent and he pleads for Rowland's companionship, the latter offers to bargain his affection on familiar terms: “If I go with you, will you try to work?” To this he gets a bitter reply: “‘Try to work!’ [Roderick] cried, ‘Try—try! work—work! … Do you suppose I'm trying not to work?’” (441). James may very well have been divided on the question himself: all artists have found, sometimes to their bitter dismay, that work is an inseparable adjunct to creativity. Nor am I suggesting that, in the special case of this novel, Rowland's advice was always and altogether wrong. But James also courts sympathy for the artist's desperate need to rejuvenate himself, an activity of “play” and “purposelessness” (using Kantian terms) with which Rowland's “Work” has little in common. The somewhat sudden decline of Roderick's creative productivity, James shows very clearly, is not due to a lack of work—as Rowland repeatedly thinks.
The chronology of the story is here very important. Despite Rowland's repeated insinuations that it was Christina Light whose fatal charms paralyzed Roderick's genius, events do not bear this out. After the initial vision of Christina (“Immortal powers … what a vision!” [95]), before he even knows her name, follows a great and happy period of inspiration and a good deal to show for it, namely the Adam and Eve. The dissipation of Roderick's powers begins almost immediately after his great success and before he meets Christina Light again. The fact is that Christina, when she becomes “involved” with Roderick, acts as a potential stimulant for his imagination, not as a deterrent; and what leads Roderick to the escapade in Baden-Baden is the weight of “conscience,” the claustrophobic pressures of “creating” in a dingy Roman studio, where his imagination feels—as well it might—imprisoned. The later appearance of Christina is truly a “light” in contrast to the darkness of the studio which has made the young genius as impatient as it had Goethe's Faust in his solitary study, “unruhig auf seinem Sessel am Pulte.”
At the party where Roderick displays his life-sized Adam and Eve, proclaiming himself a “Hellenist,” there is one man who understands Roderick's plight—his aesthetic opponent, the sculptor Gloriani. These first fruits of Roderick's Hellenism are admired by the young, seasoned Italian, but he is also sardonic: is the young man to proceed “straight through the Bible” now that he has begun with the Creation? Roderick replies that he does not care for “Old Testament people,” though he concedes he may make a David, treat it “as a young Greek,” Roderick stressing that his interests lie with the “Christian, or still better the pagan, form” (a sentiment James added in the revision of 1907). From David, “a beautiful runner at the Olympic games,” Roderick intends to go forward and create a “ripping Christ,” not a Christ of tradition but “More idealistic! … The perfection of form … to symbolise the perfection of spirit.” Will there be a Judas? He is being teased. “Never! I mean never to make anything ugly, and I'm a Hellenist …” (114-115).
Such a notion of Greek sculpture had its historic anchoring, and evidently James was not unaware of it: to counter Roderick's Hellenism he creates Gloriani, strictly a Realist, both as a man and an artist. By the time James wrote Roderick Hudson, the conception of Greek sculpture was an old matter of dispute, but still a lively one. Winckelmann had established a view of Greek art that rapidly spread from the continent to England and stubbornly prevailed for better than a century. Greek art was ideal, circumventing the realistic and incidental; it was the product, not of imitation but of the artist's grand conceptualization, the contemplation of a sort of divine essence, the result of which was abstract form. No Greek could bring his noble soul to create anything ugly (though Lessing had vigorously disputed this in the Laocöon), and Beauty, based on the ethical conception of nobility, was the chief aim of the artist. This was the Romantic Hellenism which held sway through the time of Pater, who celebrated Winckelmann in his famous essay in The Renaissance. Pater undoubtedly understood Hellenism better than did Roderick Hudson, who thinks he will yet concede once more beyond the David to the Old Testament and make a Cain, though not ugly, but a “handsome fellow … lift[ing] up the murderous club with the beautiful movement of the fighters in the Greek friezes …” (115). Evidently Roderick is reluctant to surrender the Old Testament; but what is interesting is his notion that he can transform his Hebraic subjects into Hellenistic ideals: it is a conflict which appears unresolved within himself. And Adam, Eve, Cain, and David are a mixed company, topped by a Christ; as if he were intent on working his way through innocence, the fall, and ultimate redemption.9
Gloriani warns Roderick against “trying to be Greek” (115) and encourages the suggestion of a Judas, to which Roderick answers, in the revision, that such a figure might have “a great deal of character” but not of the sort he cares for: “I care only for beauty of Type” (116). Roderick complains that his contemporaries have forsaken the “beauty in the large ideal way,” and that he means to restore it, to “go in for big things; that's my notion of my art. I mean to do things that will be simple and sublime” (116), an unconscious echo perhaps of Winckelmann's famous phrase about Greek sculpture—“noble simplicity and calm grandeur.” For the 1907 revision James puts into Roderick's mouth a pure late Jamesian language to propose what the young sculptor means to do: “I want to thrill you, with my cold marble, when you look. I want to produce the sacred terror. …” This remark is uncharitably received by his guests; after all, the Greeks had their belief in the gods. But Rome today, where “we sit talking nineteenth-century English[?]” “Mr. Hudson,” ventures one guest, “may be a new Phidias, but Venus and Juno—that's you [referring to another guest] and I—arrived to-day in a very dirty cab; and were cheated by the driver too” (117).
Against the Idealistic Roderick, James marshalls all the resources of the New Realism (including cynicism), embodying them in a point of view which admires the naiveté and spontaneity of a nineteenth-century Hellenistic Imagination, while recognizing all the inherent weaknesses and dangers of an epigone. When Rowland asks Gloriani to judge a photograph of the “Water Drinker,” an early piece done in Northampton, the experienced sculptor admires but issues a warning that Roderick won't be able to keep up this sort of thing; to which Roderick replies that he won't merely keep it up but do even better. Gloriani's answer is straight to the point:
You'll do worse. You'll do it on purpose. This thing wasn't done on purpose. It couldn't have been. You'll have at any rate to take to violence, to contortions, to romanticism, in self-defence. Your beauty, as you call it, is the effort of a man to quit the earth by flapping his arms very hard. He may jump about or stand on tiptoe, but he can't do more. Here you jump about very gracefully, I admit; but you can't fly; there's no use trying.
(119)
It takes only a week for Gloriani's prophecy to come true; Roderick suddenly becomes restless and he ceases to work. Here occurs the interlude at Baden-Baden (Roderick is reluctantly released by Rowland to make the trip himself and James never reports what happens except indirectly). When he returns he seems to have forgotten all his grand abstractions—Hebrew, Christian, Pagan. Instead he sculpts “a woman leaning lazily back in her chair, with her head inclined in apparent attention, a vague smile on her lips and a pair of remarkably beautiful arms folded in her lap.” Rowland “was not sure he liked it” because it “differed singularly from anything his friend had yet done” (143). But Gloriani likes this “Lady conversing affably with a Gentleman,” admires it, is happy that Roderick is “coming round”: had he not prophesized he “couldn't keep up that flapping of his wings in the blue, and … [would have to] come down to earth” (146)? Rowland remains unconvinced; he does not like this fruit of experience at Baden-Baden. “That's because you yourself try to sit like an angel on a cloud,” replies Gloriani; “This … is full of possibilities, and he'll pull some of them off; but it isn't the sancta simplicitas of a few months ago. … I congratulate him on having found his feet …” (147). Baden-Baden, then, has not been merely an episode of debauchery, nor has it led to declining creative powers. On the contrary, experience with Life has put to rest some of Roderick's grandiose Abstractions (“I mean to do the Morning … Night … Ocean … Mountains … Moon … West Wind” [118]), and it has inspired a new inventiveness and a new Art.
It is true that Roderick himself is moodily unhappy about his work: the newly acquired art is too close to the art Gloriani has championed and Roderick had scoffed at. The “reclining lady” Roderick finds “curiously, almost interestingly bad,” “false from the first,” having “fundamental vices.” The trouble appears to be not so much the art but the manner of sustaining it. “I haven't a blamed idea. I think of subjects, but they remain idiotic names. They're mere words—they're not images” (149).
Words, not images: Roderick has not yet learned the fundamental lesson of the artist as James conceived it, that abstractions need to be embodied in concretions which are in turn rooted in reality. The Word is never equal to the Image. James by no means underestimated the value of “ideas” in Art, saying in his Notebooks that “one does nothing in art or literature unless one has some general ideas. …”10 But even the “idea”—which Roderick invokes as if it alone would have him—is insufficient. Moments after his moody disapproval of himself, his failure to make words into images, Christina Light enters his life for a second time. This time she is no vision; nor is she an idea, nor an image—she is flesh and blood, a human being.
It should be no surprise that Roderick immediately wishes to sculpt Christina Light, for her idea and image are rooted in a real person. “Didn't you hear him?” Christina asks Rowland: “Mademoiselle, you almost come up to one of my dreams. … That almost should be rewarded” (168). And that almost would have been impossible prior to Baden-Baden; that almost is testimony to a changing aesthetic, one which produces finally a bust of Christina which has neither the pure naiveté of the earlier work nor the apparent vulgarity which Roderick suspected in the too nonchalant work of the reclining lady. Christina's bust “was thoroughly a portrait,—not a vague fantasy executed on a graceful theme. … The resemblance was close and firm; inch matched with inch, item with item, grain with grain, yet all to fresh creation” (182). Like the novelist James describes in The Art of Fiction, Roderick had succeeded at the great task of art; he had “converted … ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality,” without sacrificing either conception or “exactness … truth of detail,” which James never meant, in his own words, to “minimize.”
This is the young artist's moment of crisis; the transition from abstraction to concretion marks a crucial advance in both the man and the artist. While it might be misleading to claim that Christina Light has caused this momentous change, it is quite accurate to say that she has at least served as its instrument. Beyond this point Roderick does not develop, partly because he himself resists, but mostly because Rowland, among others, prevents him. Much later, far into his decline, he speaks again in St. Peter's of “grand form,” sublimity, “magnificent forms” (337), and still later, “Before Michael Angelo's statues and pictures of the early Tuscans [he picks up] the thread of his old love of ideas” (445-446). What happens to Roderick between the momentary triumph of creating Christina Light's bust and his regression to thinking of Abstractions comprises the “reversal” of the novel, the conflict between Hebraism and Hellenism, Conscience and Consciousness.
III
Although Rowland has an “uncomfortably sensitive conscience” (1), his consciousness is another matter; we must not confound, as he does, a Hebraistic sense of sin with a Hellenistic capacity to see the object as it really is. Rowland is a connoisseur, that is all; and even in this role his Puritan taste remains an unconscious censor. He tells his cousin Cecilia that to care for something or someone is now his only aim, for as a man he is totally insufficient: his search is for love. James allows Rowland to fall in love (in the Jamesian manner) with Roderick's American fiancée at the very start of the novel, yet he proceeds to have Rowland remove not only the future bridegroom but himself. While the young James might well have been struggling with plot and structure, there is already the self-punitive economics as well as the punishment-of-others at work in his character of Rowland. Eventually it is Roderick, not Mary Garland, who becomes the object of Rowland's love (a prefiguring of a theme taken up by James in many later stories). Rowland's relationship to Roderick is essentially that of the former being nourished by the latter; as “experience” it is surrogate, or, in the phrase of Osborne Andreas (though not in relation to this novel), a form of “emotional cannibalism.” Andreas perceives that “The conclusion in James's stories of emotional cannibalism is that inevitable defeat lies in wait for him who seeks to procure from other people that strength which can only come from within”; “to make … use of other people is to consume them, and both the user and the used, the consumer and the consumed, are depleted by it.” (Andreas inexplicably ignores Roderick Hudson as a prime instance of this Jamesian theme.)11
In fairness, Rowland does not undertake his mission of “educating” Roderick lightheartedly: “when he reflected that he was really meddling … he gasped, amazed at his temerity” (67). Yet this very sense of responsibility nails down his relationship to Roderick with ambiguously gained rights. “If anything happens to you I'm accountable,” and he speaks deep from his “moral passion”; for Roderick it feels like the boot upon his chest: “That's a view … I can't accept. … I know all I owe you. … But I'm not a small boy … and whatever I do I do with my eyes open. When I do well the merit's my own; if I do ill the fault's my own” (220). Rowland is bitter at such a declaration of independence: “If I hadn't been meddlesome I should never have cared a fig for you” (220) he reasons, to which Roderick, after some pause, gives his most articulate reply:
I think when you expect a man to produce beautiful and wonderful works of art you ought to allow him a certain freedom of action … to give him a long rope … to let him follow his fancy and look for his material wherever he thinks he may find it. … An artist can't bring his visions to maturity unless he has a certain experience. You demand of us to be imaginative, and you deny us the things that feed the imagination. … When you've an artist to deal with you must take him as he is, good and bad together … ; if you want them to produce you must let them conceive. If you want a bird to sing you mustn't cover up its cage.
(224)
When it is the artist's turn to reproach his sponsor, he asks bitterly: “What am I … but a desperate experiment?” (231). The word “desperate” James added in the 1907 revision perhaps to balance the characteristic noun of the century—experiment—with an adjectival corrective from the world of feeling (Hawthorne had written a score of stories about “desperate experiments”). Roderick prepares his brief against the future with a typically Romantic weaponry: “Do I more or less idiotically succeed—do I more or less sublimely fail? I seem to myself to be the last circumstance it depends on” (231). The Romantic hero invariably feels that “circumstance” is his greatest enemy, and he himself the least effective of circumstances. Although only ten pages earlier Roderick had in effect accepted the responsibility for success or failure, he now implies that Zeitgeist will play the ultimate role in his fate.
In making of Roderick a self-conscious Romantic increasingly aware that he is an anachronism presiding over his own extinction, James has opened the question of free will, essential in the case of the artist who must decide whether he can triumph over such preying monsters as Ennui, one thoroughly catalogued and described by a variety of nineteenth century writers.12
“Live!” It was the great cry of the century; and the clutching to the bosom of Time, the Keatsian fear of the temporal, gives way—must give, way (even in Keats), for the sake of survival, to the “breathing human passion … / … heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue,” or to “The weariness, the fever, and the fret.” It gives way to the even greater fear of a paralysis of the Imagination itself. The Romantics were not always morbidly anxious to die—that has been in part the romanticizing of Romanticism; the Romantic often wished very much to live, if he could find terms adequate enough to appropriate experience as a successive number of terminations and reimmersions, not merely a long straight path toward longevity itself. “Our physical life is a perpetual motion”: and within that motion Pater sought to find the fixity of ceaselessness, the paradox of Zeno's arrow transferred from physics to metaphysics: “experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality. …” To relieve the pressure, to make the “reality” bearable, we must corner the moment—not, indeed, as Pater's young readers appeared to have thought, in order to indulge our senses for the sake of a fleeting pleasure; but, quite the opposite, the moment would be arrested and enriched to combat and outmaneuver static reality, which seemed so insistently to front itself as a finite goal toward which the earnest travel and at which the wise arrive. Zeno's arrow was the issue: “How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?” That is, how shall we survive the many deaths of aliveness we must live through? It was a paradox: “expanding [the] interval,” answers Pater, is “our one chance,” and the metaphor itself is painfully self-contradictory. If there was a false way of life for Pater it was surely the way of fleeting emotions, moments devoured for transitory pleasures; to expand the interval was merely to recognize that Time was also Space. But free will would need to assert itself if one wanted to “live.”
James did not, I think, quite realize the issue in this way, for his complaint that Roderick collapses too fast betrays a measure of naiveté about Time as it relates to the subject he treated: the life and death of an artist. Yet James sufficiently recognized the necessity to expand the interval; for James “Live!” was to mean finally the art of living not measured temporally, by duration, but spatially, by the capaciousness with which the educated sensibility could take measure of the life before it. If Roderick Hudson goes to death too rapidly, Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors comes to life even more rapidly—but there is no record of James's complaint on that score. For James “consciousness” seems almost always intended at least as the liberated state; yet in this novel, as elsewhere, it is clear that consciousness, in the end, can be a dangerous, even barren, condition. In spite of James's insistence on living to one's greatest capacity, few of his heroes, even when they achieve such desired awareness, are permitted to enjoy the fruits of their struggle. From Roderick and Rowland to Isabel Archer, from Strether to the Ververs, conscience prevents, thwarts, aborts: renunciation is James's ultimate virtue, but it is an expense of spirit, a waste, a highly questionable triumph at best.
Some critics see Roderick Hudson as a fictionalized biographical novel in which James erects a “split personality” structure. James is here regarded as questioning his own future as an artist, Roderick and Rowland representing two parts of himself: the straying artist, who becomes ensnared by vulgar Life and the Conscience which attempts to prevent this by emphasizing the dedication to Art required of the genuine Artist.13
But the renunciation of the artist in Roderick Hudson is not, as has so often been suggested, Roderick's fickleness toward the Muse and his involvement in a hopeless love affair. Like so many nineteenth-century heroes, Roderick is fatherless, and his mother, weak in character, possessive, desperate to preserve herself, joins with the now discarded fiancée and the disenchanted patron to unman the young sculptor. For James makes it rather clear that Roderick—though he may have all the predisposition for it—is, ultimately unmanned. Toward the end of the novel, in a move of questionable motives, Rowland brings mother and fiancée to “rescue” the failing son and bridegroom-to-be. In his pursuit of the beautiful Christina Light, Roderick is thwarted by the young lady's mother, the disowned father, and Rowland himself. Moody, inert, at times full of heat and passion, Roderick rather rapidly (as James noted) falls apart. When the mother and Mary Garland arrive, the young man submits, though here and there are occasional rebellions, furtive, instinctual—the instinct in the wriggling butterfly pinned live against the collector's velvet. Mrs. Hudson has always demanded that Roderick deliver to her an emotional response worth two sons—one for himself and one for the favorite, lost in the Civil War. “I have to fill a double place,” Roderick tells Rowland; “I have to be my brother as well as myself. … I must be to her everything that he would have been” (41-42). Under such a burden, Roderick buckles, and he reverts, in classic fashion, to childhood: “He said little. … [but] he clearly liked again, almost as he had liked it as a boy, in convalescence from measles, to lounge away the hours in an air so charged with feminine service” (353).
In submitting—in renouncing—Roderick is by no means unaware of the tightening cords. His mother's effect upon him is silently absorbed, and he attempts to propitiate her by “doing” her bust, as if it were an act of exorcism. But Mary's effect (and Rowland's) is felt and expressed—far more strongly in the 1907 revision, James accenting the “cannibalism” theme in human relationships which he had by 1907 so thoroughly explored: “She thinks all the world of me,” Roderick says of his American fiancée; “She likes me as if I were good to eat. She's saving me up, cannibal-fashion, as if I were a big feast” (356). The cannibalism metaphor clarifies what James must have felt, in revising, was the true meaning of the story of his Künstlerroman: prevented from using Life as experience for Art, the artist will be devoured by Life. Feelings of helplessness, excessive self-pity, regressive and petulant moods, passion and quiescence alternating—all are symptoms of Romantic Genius whose consciousness of Life has brought him not freedom but imprisonment. Certainly Roderick still belongs in the tradition of Werther: the gesture toward sublimity, the empty response, the paralysis of imagination, the tendency to self-dramatize, the fears of a devouring world, and the final plunge into the abyss (which incidentally Roderick takes during the inevitable Alpine thunderstorm, rejecting Werther's more orderly suicide by revolver). The end of the novel moves swiftly toward the dénouement.
During the last interview between Roderick and Rowland the pains of the sufferer—that final mark of the sensitized aesthete—are fully bared: Rowland confesses his love for Mary Garland, prompted by Roderick's final bitter outburst against his patron. Roderick has asked Rowland for money to follow Christina to Interlaken, but this suddenly strikes his heart with revulsion, the economic aspect of his relationship to Rowland (a theme James was to explore many times in later works) mirroring itself in the most vulgar images, translating itself from the currency of coin to the currency of emotions and spiritual loans:
… what I resent is that the range of your vision should pretend to be the limit of my action. You can't feel for me nor judge for me, and there are certain things you know nothing about. I have suffered, sir. … I've suffered damnable torments. Have I been such a placid, contented, comfortable creature these last six months that when I find a chance to forget my misery I should take such pains not to profit by it? You ask too much … for a man who himself has no occasion to play the hero. I don't say that invidiously; it's your disposition, and you can't help it. But decidedly there are certain things you know nothing about.
(504)
This attack against Rowland—and those against Mary Garland—is strengthened in the 1907 revision, where Mary herself blames Rowland for having in part destroyed her lover. When it becomes clear that Roderick will not return from the night of the storm, “Mary stood there at first without a word, only looking hard at [Rowland]” (517)—a hard look she does not give in the earlier versions. Hebraism, too, James seems to have felt, needed its atonement. And if Hellenism failed Roderick, he dies like a hero, imperfect but admirable. There is a suggestion of the Icarus myth in the circumstances and descriptions of Roderick's death, a myth so thoroughly Romantic but already foreshadowing a more famous portrait of the artist. In any case, in James's Künstlerroman the artist is a victim.
Alone amidst the stony Alps the morning after the storm, Rowland searches for his lost friend. “The silence everywhere was horrible; it mocked at his impatience, it was charged with cruelty and danger. In the midst of it … sat a hideous crétin who grinned at him over a vast goitre. …” Looking down into the “ugly chasms” below, Rowland “was to consider afterwards, uneasily, how little he had heeded his foothold.” Rowland's sense of guilt works hard upon his imagination: with a bright sun penetrating the “depths and heights” of a lonely and “stony Alpine void” Rowland feels “sick to his innermost soul” (522). Finally, in a gorge, he and a friend find “a vague white mass” but James almost ritualistically avoids gory details. This Icarus “had fallen from a great height, but he was singularly little disfigured. The rain had spent its torrents upon him, and his clothes and hair were as wet as if the billows of the ocean had flung him upon the strand” (523-524).
Though attacked by some as melodrama,14 the final pages of this novel, seen in the perspective I have tried to place them, reinforce the elegiac note of the last Romantic's death and the survivor's guilt for his victim. Again James added sentences for the 1907 edition to strengthen Rowland's guilty conscience as an instrument of Roderick's death. Alone, waiting for the stretcher-bearers to take Roderick to the village, Rowland feels at the very least an actor in a tragedy of Fate:
The great gaunt wicked cliff above them became almost company to him, as the chance-saved photograph of a murderer might become for a shipwrecked castaway a link with civilisation: it had but done its part too, and what were they both, in their stupidity, he and it, but dumb agents of fate?
(525)
Of the surrogate nature in his relationship to Roderick, Rowland is now aware, for he now “understood how up to the brim, for two years, his personal world had been filled [with Roderick].” This world now comes to a close in the appropriate metaphor of the stage (added for the 1907 edition), for the world seems to Rowland now “as void and blank and sinister as a theatre bankrupt and closed” (526).
Rowland had predicted he would spend his life “groping for the latch of a closed door,” and so he shall. His “patience” (back in America) is that of endurance and penitence, not of hope; and James could not resist sanctifying Roderick's memory by adding a final sentence in the 1907 revision: “And then [Rowland] talks to [cousin Cecilia] of Roderick, of whose history she never wearies and whom he never elsewhere names” (527). Thus Rowland continues to live a surrogate life; his fate was to have failed in sustaining himself, even through others. In spite of vast economic advantages he is driven to seek domination over another: it is a sinister parable in nineteenth-century literature, and James was not alone in being fascinated by it. When the patron becomes the conscience of his protégé's consciousness, neither can prevail.
IV
The aim of this essay has not been to explicate James's novel for its own sake, but, quite frankly, to use it illustratively as an exemplum of late Victorian ambiguity about Romanticism fictionalized in the first serious Künstlerroman in English. Part of the Victorian ambiguity about Romanticism was, of course, the ability of the Victorians to talk with two voices. Their pursuit of Beauty was fraught with a pervasive Conscience; their Palace of Art was a consciously perilous place for any prolonged sojourn. To cultivate Art with a Conscience can lead to more serious problems than to cultivate it without one. Just before embarking for Rome, Roderick, intoxicated by the thought of his liberation from New England, sings a snatch from Tennyson's The Princess:
The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story …
The snowy summits are prophetic, but James does not quote the refrain: “Blow, bugle; answer echoes, dying, dying, dying.”
Hebraism and Hellenism, Conscience and Consciousness, play a central role in the lives of countless nineteenth-century heroes and their authors. As consciousness is permitted to expand, experience often corrupts it (Rowland Mallet's fears are not entirely unfounded); then conscience, or guilt, begins to destroy from within and from without. The Romantics never fully resolved this problem—how to allow a receptive consciousness to lead to fruitful experience and free will (many of Ibsen's early plays are variations on this particular theme, especially of course Peer Gynt and Brand). Schopenhauer's blind and malign Will (though often misunderstood) was ubiquitous, haunting scores of heroes in fiction and drama and turning them into helpless victims. It was not until 1887 that Nietzsche struck out in The Genealogy of Morals, attacking the whole Judaic-Christian system of “guilt” and “conscience.” Throughout the nineteenth century the Faustian urge to “experience” seems converted (or perverted) into the compulsive urge to repent (even as Faust himself repents). Something holds back; something negates what is being affirmed: from Werther to the last of the Buddenbrooks the theme of Conscience versus Consciousness is a source of art itself.
I began this essay by drawing some distinctions between the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman, the novel in which the hero is often educated away from Art and the novel in which the hero reaches the Kingdom of Art through a renunciation of the everyday world. I have also suggested from the outset that Roderick Hudson, as a Künstlerroman, is deeply concerned with the problem of the Artist's Imagination and its susceptibility (in the Romantic tradition) to becoming sterile or crippled. This theme of the vulnerable Imagination James treated largely, I think, by adapting Arnold's distinctions between Hebraism and Hellenism, for here he seemed to have found the perfect dialectic for describing his hero's conflict. As a late Romantic, an epigone, Roderick is already overtaken by a new art and a new time, a situation that makes Roderick's struggle to reach a compromise with Reality pathetic and futile. Hebraism—work, conscience, renunciation—served James perfectly in fashioning his Puritan Hebraist, Rowland; while Hellenism, freedom, spontaneity, the free pursuit of Beauty created the perfect foil in drawing the portrait of his artist-hero.
The “situation” of the novel—something James was interested in creating with extreme care even as early as his first serious novel—was therefore well set. Roderick, the artist with talent and Imagination, would be unable to resolve what had become for a Romantic sensibility an unresolvable conflict: how to permit Consciousness to have a fruitful traffic with Life. But to make the issue less predictable, James introduced Rowland, who acts the role of censorious Conscience. Of one thing James seems certain: from the perspective of Victorian England, the Artist who is indecisively caught between Life and the Studio, between Spontaneity and Work, walks a precarious tightrope which by 1875 he can no longer hope to negotiate safely. Hence Roderick declines, not because he is ensnared by a femme fatale, not because he is corrupted by too much experience, but because he is stranded in Limbo: stimulated neither by Life nor by Imagination. Undoubtedly James envisioned the Artist as one who must be close to Life without being corrupted by its vulgarities and sufficiently dedicated to the Muse without becoming lost in the misty regions of unattainable Abstractions. In The Art of Fiction James wrote: “All life belongs to you [the novice novelist], and do not listen either to those who would shut you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine air, and turning her head from the truth of things.”
James was a Romantic Pragmatist, something which Roderick tries but fails to become. What finally frustrates Roderick is not only Rowland, the Puritan Hebraist (his alter-Conscience), but his illusory belief that the Artist's Consciousness can go slumming and then return to its rarefied Heaven. Clearly once the Artist has had true intercourse with Life he has fallen and no return to innocence is possible. To see the object as it is requires, at least for the Artist, a seeking out, a process of “doing.” Thus, whether or not he intended it, James's novel is a critique of Arnold's distinctions, for implicitly James insists that the Artist cannot survive them.
Arnold's opposition between Hebraism and Hellenism, Conscience and Consciousness, was well-intentioned; and it served for a time as a useful historical paradigm that highlighted the negative of a striving society too dedicated to the virtues of a materialistic “doing.” Yet he was perhaps too optimistic in thinking that he might divide and conquer a habit which he had recognized and berated in the Romantics even before he saw and feared the worst in the conduct of his contemporaries. For between “Knowing” and “Doing” there can never be a true choice, only a continual oscillation.15 Doing, when translated to the life of an Artist, must always precede Knowing or Being (Arnold was no Existentialist);16 and the road to Hellenism leads from the Imagination to Baden-Baden, to Christina Light, to Life and Experience. Like Emerson's, Arnold's moral vision was sometimes misleading and incomplete; in separating Hebraism from Hellenism, Doing from Knowing, Conscience from Consciousness, he perhaps ultimately rendered a disservice to the culture of his day.17 When Hamlet says that “Conscience doth make cowards of us all” he does not mean a “bad conscience” but “Consciousness.” These two words, which the nineteenth century separated, had in Shakespeare's day basically the same meaning: “Knowledge within oneself.” Such courage to behold oneself is neither Doing nor Knowing but both.18 A good deal of agony has been expended in returning to that identity of meaning, and we are not yet arrived.19
Notes
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Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to James Joyce (New York, 1964). In his section on the English “apprentice” novel (pp. 79-100), Beebe draws upon Susanne Howe's Wilhelm Meister and his English Kinsmen: Apprentices to Life (New York, 1930). Beebe's title refers to the “divided Self” of the Artist who chooses either the Sacred Fount, art as “essentially a re-creation of experience,” or the Ivory Tower, the tradition which “insists that the artist can make use of life only if he stands aloof” (p. 13). In general, this distinction applies to Roderick Hudson (though Beebe does not treat this novel from that perspective); using terms taken from James's novel (derived from Arnold), I develop a different point of view.
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Beebe's study is surprisingly scant in dealing with nineteenth-century German writers. With the exception of Werther and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the Künstlerproblem in German literature is all but ignored. E. T. A. Hoffmann's many tales about Art and Artists are not even mentioned.
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Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York, 1961), p. 29. Cargill offers the best review of opinions on Roderick Hudson, pp. 19-40. In his Introduction to the Harper Torchbook edition of Roderick Hudson (New York, 1960), Leon Edel writes that “… James [is] concerned with sex. … Roderick allows his terrible passion to destroy his art” (p. vii). However, in his biography of James (Henry James, The Conquest of London, 1870-1881 [Philadelphia and New York, 1962], pp. 175-180), Edel modifies this view, insisting that a mere art-sex conflict ignores “the complexity of the story fabric …” (p. 175).
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The New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York, 1907-1909), I, XIX-XX. All references are to this edition. Roderick Hudson was published in 1907.
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The present essay is not concerned with the textual problems of James's revisions. James first serialized the novel in The Atlantic Monthly (1875), first published it as a book in 1876, and then revised the novel for subsequent editions in 1879, 1882, and, of course, the New York Edition, 1907-1909. See Hélène Harvitt, “How Henry James Revised Roderick Hudson; A Study in Style,” PMLA, XXXIX (1924), 203-227 (a very unenlightening study); Raymond D. Havens, “The Revision of Roderick Hudson,” PMLA, XL (1924), 433-434 (a correction of some errors in the Harvitt essay). The issue has again gained currency because F. R. Leavis quoted in The Great Tradition excerpts from the New York Edition that aimed to show the young Henry James's stylistic talents. See J. C. Maxwell, Durham University Journal, XXIII (1961-1962), 79-80, and Bruce Harkness, “Bibliography and the Novelistic Fallacy,” Studies in Bibliography, XII (Charlottesville, 1959), 59-60. Harkness quotes Gordon N. Ray, who attacks Leavis, in “The Importance of Original Editions,” in Nineteenth-Century English Books (1952).
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“Dumas Fils and Goethe,” The Nation (October, 1873), reprinted in Literary Reviews and Essays, ed. Albert Mordell (New York, 1957), pp. 110-118.
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Henry James, Autobiography, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York, 1956), p. 562 and Notes, p. 609.
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“In Matthew Arnold the young Henry James had found an intellectual kinsman …,” Edel, The Conquest of London, p. 123. The entire episode of the meeting between James and Arnold is described on pp. 122-125. The reference to Arnold's letter is on p. 394.
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F. O. Matthiessen sees Roderick's productions as “an allegory of the life of an artist,” in “James and the Plastic Arts,” Kenyon Review, V (Autumn, 1943), 537.
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The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1955), p. 69.
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Osborne Andreas, Henry James and the Expanding Horizon (Seattle, 1948), p. 53; see also William H. Gass, “The High Brutality of Good Intentions,” Accent (Winger, 1958), p. 67; Cargill p. 26, Note 32; p. 37; p. 31.
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The question of “free will”—or the lack of it—is interestingly explored by Viola R. Dunbar, “The Problem in Roderick Hudson,” MLN, LXVII (February, 1952), 109-113. However, she tends to place all the blame for failure on Roderick's passivity, not taking into account Rowland's role in the novel. In his final revision, James made changes which show that he wished to distribute blame among Roderick, Rowland, and Fate as well.
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Supporters of the “split personality” approach include Cornelia P. Kelley, The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana, 1930); Stephen Spender, “The School of Experience in the Early Novels,” Hound and Horn, VII (April-June, 1934), 420 ff; Leon Edel, Introduction to Roderick Hudson (Harper Torchbooks), p. xiii, and The Conquest of London, pp. 177-178; and Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (Boston, 1963), p. 20. Undoubtedly the novel is autobiographical, but Roderick and Rowland, when put together, do not add up to Henry James.
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For Example, Cargill, p. 36.
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James was all his life writing about artists. The standard discussion of this theme is F. O. Matthiessen's Introduction to Stories of Artists and Writers, New Directions (n.d.), pp. 1-17. Lyall H. Powers has written several fine studies on the “artist-theme” in James: “Henry James and the Ethics of the Artist: ‘The Real Thing’ and ‘The Liar,’” University of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, III (Autumn, 1961), 360-368, and especially “Henry James's Antinomies,” UTQ, XXXI (January, 1962), 125-135.
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See William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York, 1958, 1962), pp. 69-71, for an interesting account of how Arnold fits into the general “Existentialist” situation of our time.
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To be fair to Arnold, he makes it clear that he conceives of Hebraism and Hellenism dialectically; that both philosophies have as their aim “man's perfection or salvation,” and that after a suitable period of Hellenism, he would fully expect Hebraism to return as the corrective swing of the pendulum. But for his time he wanted Hellenism and, in the tradition of Goethe, a Hellenism both guiltless and free, yet full of “order” and “authority.”
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In a section on Zola entitled “Conscience and Consciousness” appearing in The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York, 1963), Harry Levin points out the “interrelated meanings” in the French conscience, signifying both “moral compunction” (as in English) or simply consciousness in the broader sense. Of course, only one word in French—conscience—covers both meanings (p. 371). In Italian as well as in Spanish Conscience and Consciousness may also be used interchangeably: coscienza and conciencia respectively. (See, for example, the title of Italo Svevo's novel La Coscienza di Zeno.) In German, however, there are distinctions though the words are cognate: we have Gewissen (conscience), wissen (to know), and Bewusstsein (consciousness). Significantly, then, in later English and in German, where the language clearly provides two words, two concepts as well have been developed (illustrated best by Arnold and Nietzsche).
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On the ubiquitous New England Conscience, Austin Warren remains the expert analyst: especially relevant is his essay “The New England Conscience, Henry James, and Ambassador Strether,” Minnesota Review, II (Winter, 1962), 149-166. Seeing The Ambassadors as a Bildungsroman (p. 158), Warren feels it was James's intent to educate Strether's conscience, to make his story “the development of conscience into consciousness …” (p. 157). As I have suggested throughout, it is precisely this New England Conscience which so interestingly parallels Arnold's conception of “Hebraism.”
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