HENRY JAMES
83
our want of a nursing air, of a kindly soil, of opportunity, of the things
that help. The only thing that helps is to do something fine. There's
v'
no law in our glorious Constitution against that. Invent, create,
achieve."
The intensity with which Americans like James and Poe and _,
Eliot have cared about art has been almost a compulsive reac · n
against its neglect in their surroundings. It is significant, as Harry
Levin has said, that whereas Balzac's story emphasizes the
ess~ntial
vitalit ' of life upon which art must be based, Hawthorne's
The Artist
of the Beautiful
is concerned with the spiritual ideals which sustain
the artist, and James insists that such ideals may themselves be a delu–
sion and that the only health for the artist is in the constant practice
of
his
craft. For James, at the outset of his career, there was an even
deeper dread than that voiced by the old painter. He had seen in his
father's generation, which was Emerson's generation, so many artists
whose master canvases remained blanks, so many transcendental
v
geniuses without the concentration of talent. His own father was a
haunting case, possessing an amazing flair for style in individual
sentences but absolutely no organizing form, without which his books .....
remained unreadable. There was a further personal pressure behind
this story: here was James himself, already at the verge of thirty, and
with hardly a start in fiction. Was he to be yet another of Emerson's
promising young men, afraid to take the plunge? Still, as he contem–
plated the old painter's fatal mistake in so idealizing art that he never
brought it to earth, James could envisage an even worse fate in the
opposite extreme, that of cynical talent without an ideal. His particu–
lar American heritage spoke through him as he created the Italian
contriver of obscene animal figurines. To this heritage James was to
owe his deepest tones, the blackest threads in his design, the rare abil-
ity to suggest the horror of spiritual death. Such horror comes out in
this early story with the intei_lSity of the narrator's revulsion from
thi~
sculptor's declaration: "Cats and monkeys-monkeys and cats-
all human life is there!"
The rival claims of the real and the ideal in art, and the dread
that he might never find his own way of reconciling talent and genius,
had long since been resolved by James when an anecdote dropped by
his
friend Du Maurier stimulated him to one of the lightest and yet .,..
most searching affirmations of
hi~
aesthetic theory. He produced ex–
actly what he hoped for in his notebook recording that
The Real
