HENRY JAMES AT THE SACRED FOUNTnby Thomas P. McDonnellnIt has* long been self-evident that Henry James wasnthoroughly apolitical in any practical sense of the term.nHe did not involve himself in public affairs as such andnhardly took more than passing notice of the Civil War, evennthough his two younger brothers, Wilkinson and RobertsonnJames, served with distinguished records in the UnionnArmy. Roughly a half century later, as if in mitigation of hisnprevious indifference, Henry suffered most bitterly theneffects of the First World War. He was active in BelgiannRelief services and in other phases of the Allied Cause. Innthe year of his last illness, 1915, after some 40 years innEngland, he became a British subject.nEurope itself had long since become the locus not only ofnJames’s consciousness, as realized in the remarkable art ofnhis fiction, but also as formed in his finely tuned consciencenas well. And yet, for James, the war was not so much anpolitical as a socially calamitous event. But in the anguishnof this event, he sought no political answers as far as thenuncertain future was concerned. He never felt compelled tonask the necessary questions of his age; and though a man ofnno political party (Tory, of course, would have been thenmost appropriate party label), he was nevertheless a mannwho, more than anything else, espoused a classic stability ofnthe social order.nIn this cultural sense, Henry James was one of the mostnformidable conservatives of the age. He was, in the waningnof one century, the prototypical social conservative andnpossibly the last of such before the general breakdown, atnthe beginning of the new century, would manifest itself innthe seeming chaos of postwar arts and letters. As a writernwhose primary gift was a prodigious amassing of wellorderednwords, James’s genius projected itself into a merendecade and a half of the new century in such a way as tonforce us to think of him as a modern novelist.nA sense of human complexity and the superlative style ofnhis middle period were the means by which James wouldnachieve this level of our awareness, especially insofar as angreat style always contributes to preserving the integrity ofnsocial communication. At his best, he was never merelynexperimental for its own sake or given to an obsession withnspecial or sometimes bizarre effects. The dominant qualitynclearly recognized in James by the late Flannery O’Connornwas, in sum, his overriding “devotion to form”; and in thisnregard he was duly acknowledged as the Master by thenbest—or at least by the most nearly approachable—of hisnpeers.nStill, with all this to the good, there remains an unsatisfiednyearning to discover in what other ways James was—ornwas not—the complete conservative. In short, what was thennature of his conservatism? It seems unlikely that such anhighly organized and complex English style, as Jamesncertainly had, could have evolved from solely reductivenprinciples. If James had a passion for anything, it was—innThomas McDonnell is a free-lance writer living nearnBoston.nhis later years especially—for (1) a contrapuntal constructnof language and (2) an almost salvific need for manners as anguarantee of privacy against the encroachments of annincreasingly restive world. But, as Marion Montgomerynpoints out in his excellent study Why Hawthorne WasnMelancholy (Sherwood Sugden, 1984), “One does not findnJames concerned with the mystery upon which MissnO’Connor found manners to depend.” This is nothing lessnthan that sacred mystery from which all modes of humannbehavior, whether as gestures of the moral impulse or asngiven maxims of conduct, are ultimately derived.nThe point of inquiry, quite bluntly, is whether HenrynJames had an essentially religious nature; and if so, did it tonany appreciable extent influence his wrihngs? To whatnextent, moreover, did James manage to shed the Swedenborgianninfluences of Henry James Sr.? In fact, there are allnkinds of critical testimonies which would deny him anynreligious orientation. P.O. Mathiessen contrasted Jamesnwith Hawthorne, whose “general vision of evil came to himndirectly from theological tradition.” James, on the othernhand, was very early on liberated from orthodoxy by hisnfather’s insistence on educating his elder sons to “have theirnethics cleared from any restrictions of dogma.”nWhatever his sympathies, James would never subscribento a creed. It was T.S. Eliot who said, in one of thosenutterances which seem to suggest more than they actuallynsay, that James “had a mind so fine that no idea couldnviolate it.” This is not conservatism, however. It is angelism.nIt is Emersonian, and James himself knew better thannto subscribe to any such notion. For instance, of the threengreat Concord worthies—Emerson, Thoreau, andnHawthorne—it was, of course, with Hawthorne thatnJames, creatively speaking, had formed a striking andnabiding aiEnity. He acquired from Hawthorne a highlyndeveloped moral sense, but still recognized no authoritativennnDECEMBER was 125n