He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it

 T.S. Eliot’s essay on Henry James for the Little Review in 1918 has some of the great qualities of Eliot as a critic as well as the baffling inconsistencies and Harvard grad tone that puts off a reader who is not eager to be inducted into some Ivy League Dining society frat. He tells us, absurdly, that Henry James was no literary critic – and thus makes us think that he never did read those prefaces to the novels and stories in the collected edition – and then tells us that he is a highly creative critic, who puts his criticism into his fiction. And then he makes his famous crack:

“James’ critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas: a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.”

The phrase has the fascinating obliqueness of a line in some modernist poem: a line that short-circuits the functionality of sense, and gives us, instead, clues. For instance, the clue given by writing idea with a capital I. In another, later essay, Eliot briefly contrasts James with Dostoevsky – the latter being, supremely, a novelist of ideas. This might be a clue to this earlier essay, and it would make things simple. The idea is that vision outside the character which the character, in some ways, creates and guides itself by. A projection of a kind.

Or (another way of going about the clue) the idea is a principle. The principle operates as a rule for the personality. In this sense, what Eliot is saying is that principles are distinctly absent from James’ fictions.

In that sense, one could say that James is applying the pragmatic notion of the test to experience. I think this is a notion that revolted Eliot, who felt that this is a test for which he was so constituted as to always fail. In a sense, Eliot’s poetry flows from the failure of any kind of test to give us a point of view from which we can judge experience.

2.

I have been thinking about Eliot’s phrase because of a book by Francois Jullien, the great French Sinologist, which is entitled: the Sage is without any Ideas. The sage, in Jullien’s account, is very much like the Master as Eliot conceives him.

“’Without ideas’ signifies that he guards himself against putting one idea before the others – to the detriment of the others. He has no idea that he put at the head of the line, posed as a principle, serving as a foundation or simply a beginning, from which he can deduce or, at least, deploy his thought. Principle, arché: at the same time what begins and what commands, that by which thought can debut. A thing which, posited, the rest follows. But, in fact, that there is the trap, the sage fears the taking of this direction and the hegemony that it will assert. … The sage fears the ordinating power of the first [idea]. Thus, with these ideas, he is on watch to keep them on the same plane – and that is his wisdom: to continue to hold them equally possible, equally accessible, without letting any of them get before the others, hide the others, cast its shadow on the other ones – in brief, without privileging any.”

Interestingly, the contrast between James and Dostoevsky, in this light, is not that Dostoevsky has a critical principle for writing fiction that differs from James – rather, it is that Dostoevsky’s pluralism does make way for a certain principled order in the world that he strongly prefers, and that he strongly makes felt is an order from which the world is deviating. Whereas James lacks that sense of the modern as a deviation, a lack, a de-racination, in his fiction. Even as he allows some Henry Adam-ish hints to inflect his book of American travels, The American Scene, the famous complexity of his periods refine and reduce that complaint to something that is not a point of view at all, but rather a discomfort, an acknowledged nostalgia. Like Dostoevsky, James suffers, in the American Scene, from the anti-semitic sentiment that beset the end of the 19th century; but for James, unlike Dostoevsky, this is not an obsession. In giving the nod to W.E.B. Dubois in that book, James even comes out as a sort of Theodore Roosevelt Republican, something at the opposite pole from Henry Adams.

The sage as fiction writer is, to my mind, a highly attractive impossibility. Just as, for T.S. Eliot, it was a highly attractive impossibility that allowed his poetry of failure, one failure after another, to flow, redeemingly, out. It was Eliot’s tragedy that while he failed as a poet, and thus became a great poet, he succeeded as a critic, and thus became a minor critic.

And that’s my wisecrack for the day.