and success. He is a man, as Lord Morley has said, "whose zeal, whose ability, and whose single-mindedness is beyond dispute," and he had won, in a manner which did credit to them no less than to him, the confidence of the Persian Parliament. In all this long and rather sordid business there is no brighter feature than the courage and the loyalty with which the Mejliss stood by Mr. Shuster. And what, after all, were the charges against him? Lord Morley tells us that he "had shown want of tact," and that he had "ignored the position and indisputable claims of Persia's two great neighbors." Whatever may be the gravity of such charges, they are exceedingly general in scope; and it may well be asked what were the exact offences alleged against Mr. Shuster to justify the violence and the haste with which he is being expelled. Only two definite charges have yet been made: (1) That he wrote a letter to The Times defending his conduct, which The Times had attacked, and in turn attacking the Governments of Great Britain and Russia, and that he afterwards circulated this letter as a pamphlet in Persia; (2) that he appointed a British subject, Mr. Lecoffre, to a position in Northern Persia. With regard to the pamphlet he himself denies that he was in any way responsible for its circulation in Persia. With regard to the appointment of Mr. Lecoffre, it is noteworthy that Mr. Lecoffre had already for some years held office in Northern Persia. All that Mr. Shuster did was to transfer him from Teheran to Tabriz, and the appointment has since been cancelled. But, after all, the question was not whether Mr. Shuster conformed to the diplomatic standards of London or St. Petersburg, but whether, on the whole, he had served Persia well, or had committed any offences of so grave a character as to warrant his immediate ex pulsion. At present no such offences have even been alleged. To demand the instant dismissal of an official who had the full confidence of his Government on charges so trivial as those made against Mr. Shuster, was to make a vital attack on Persia's liberty. To say that no successor should be appointed without the formal consent of the two Powers was to make it practically impossible under present conditions for the sovereignty of Persia to continue. By consenting to such demands the British Government have consented to the virtual destruction of an independence which they were pledged in honor to maintain. As I write, the news comes that the Mejliss have at last given way, and accepted the three demands of the ultimatum. Deserted by their friends, denied even the right of inquiry, threatened by an immediate advance of Russian troops to overwhelm them, it may well have seemed to them that no other course was left. Mr. Shuster has been dismissed; the right of veto on future appointments is admittedthough we are told with some modifications; even the indemnity is to be paid, if not in cash, at any rate in concessions. The crisis of the second ultimatum has ended, as did the crisis of the first, in the exaction by Russia of the full measure of her demands. But still the Russian troops will remain. The disturbances that have unfortunately occurred at Tabriz and Resht have given indeed exactly the justification that was necessary. Already we learn that fresh reinforcements are being sent; while the Novoe Vremya is demanding that Russia should "take justice" at these places "into her own hands," and that "the whole population of Tabriz should be held responsible and punished." Russian honor, it would seem, is not yet satisfied. In the meanwhile what is to be the position of the Persian Government? At the end of his recent speech in the House of Commons, Sir Edward Grey gave a short but very important outline of the joint policy which he hoped that, when the crisis was over, Great Britain and Russia would pursue. A form of government was to be set up "that would not disregard the special interests of the two Powers." A successor to Mr. Shuster was to be found. A fresh loan was to be raised with a view to "a constructive policy." If Russian troops remained, it was to be only as a temporary arrangement. The Convention, in fact, was to be continued on a new basis; and so long as the present co-operation between the two Powers continues there seemed no reason why some such arrangements should not work-at any rate for a time. In spite of all that has been lost, they would preserve at least the semblance of Persian autonomy: something round which in happier days The Nineteenth Century and After. the national spirit might revive. But if the most recent developments are any indication of Russian intentions towards Persia, it becomes doubtful if even this can be still secured, or if any co-operation with regard to Persia would continue possible. A situation might then arise in which nothing would be left for this country but to consent to the political partition of Persia, with all the dangers and strategical difficulties and the immense drain on Indian resources which that would involve. If this last and crowning blunder is to be avoided, the Government will have to take a firmer attitude than they have hitherto adopted. If Russian friendship is valuable to this country, the friendship of Great Britain is also of some value, if only for financial reasons, to the Russian Government. Let it be made clear that that friendship can only be retained if the principle on which the Convention was based is faithfully and loyally observed. Philip Morrell. MR. HENRY JAMES AND HIS PREFACES. Few literary careers can compare with Mr. Henry James's in achievement. He has been publishing for almost half a century, his aims from the first have been distinctive and uninfluenced by any popular demand, he chose his own methods and brought them well-nigh to perfection. He is a theorist, and his theories have been enunciated in a long series of critical essays. But what amazes us is the consistency with which they have been illustrated in his work. It is this very coherence which makes his work in its totality so difficult to estimate. It is easy enough to point out certain of his books which we like or dislike, but the mass, the momentum almost, of the solid block he fills in our shelves is hard to appraise. We gaze at the backs of Mr. James's volumes to feel them individually perhaps less vivid and significant than those of any equally great writer, but their weight, their space, the gap they make between our days and days the other side of them, that is immense. And lately he has increased our debt to him by a generosity new in its form. The es says, one of which precedes each volume of the tales in the New York Edition, enable the reader in a unique degree to compare an author's performance with his theory. A great artist puts himself before us, not as a magician producing mysterious, spontaneous results, but as a craftsman revealing the nature of his methods and avowing his invariable habit of experimentation. It was twenty-seven years ago, when writing his Art of Fiction, in reply to Sir Walter Besant, that Mr. James first ran atilt at the novelist's ordinary conventions and formulated his creed. "A novel," he said, "is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct, impression of life"; "the characters, the situations that strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most"; "experience is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue"; "what is incident but the illustration of character? It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way." In regard to these statements, and others like them scattered throughout Mr. James's critical essays, the prefaces find little to add or to alter. But if on the level of the theorist the prefaces add very little, on a secondary plane they are altogether invaluable. They establish much that must otherwise have been only surmise; they give the conditions and places in which the novels were written, the nature and order in which themes suggested themselves. It has always been impossible to miss the fact that Mr. James's gifts had their root in "internationalism," yet only amid the circumstantial details now afforded us does the truth become fully apparent. To think of Mr. James's vision as a cosmopolitan product we do not, of course, need to be reminded of Mr. Beerbohm's delightful caricature. Mr. James exclaiming on revisiting America, "I might, in regarding and, as it somewhat were, over-seeing, à l'œil de voyageur, these dear good people find hard to swallow, or even to take by subconscious injection, the great idea that I am-oh! ever so indig enously-one of them." Paris, London, Rome, the subtlety and brilliancy of each capital, have heightened his power of refraction; but his lenses themselves remain more trans-Atlantic than many of his readers are apt to suppose. Never, perhaps, will there be a more satisfying presentation of the old country as seen through the eyes of the new, than was given in A Passionate Pilgrim. It is not the smallest of Mr. James's contributions to knowledge that he has revealed how much Europe stood in need of American eyes to intellectualize, if not actually discover, her beauties. London he has seen as no Englishman could have seen it, from the days when as a child in New York he pored over pictures in Punch, down to the time of the broad-washed, essential portrayal in which Kate Croy has her being. "There is an emotion," he tells us in writing of Hampton Court, "familiar to every intelligent traveller, in which the mind seems to swallow the sum total of its impressions at a gulp, to take in the whole place whatever it be." A Passionate Pilgrim appeared in 1871, Roderick Hudson in 1875, The American in 1877, Daisy Miller in 1878, The Portrait of a Lady in 1880, The Reverberator in 1888, and all these, with a score of shorter stories, presented American characters on a European background. So constant, in fact, up to about 1890, was Mr. James's attention to this theme that it has become customary to divide his work into two periods-the earlier portion respecting "the adventures of the rich Americans in our corrupt old Europe"; while the latter contains simply those works which have been published since 1892. To extol Mr. James's success in the earlier of these periods would be an impertinence. What he accomplished is without parallel; he invented a genre of his own. Roderick Hudsou was begun in Flor ence and finished in Boston, and "one fact about it," he tells us, "outlives all others; the fact that as the loved Italy was the scene of my fiction-so much more loved than one has been able after fifty efforts to say-and as having to leave it persisted as an inward ache, so there was soreness in still contriving, after a fashion, to hang about it, and in prolonging from month to month the illusion of the golden air." Is it not easy to see how well these conditions served for a tale in which Italy is, so to speak, the Eastern horizon, and hangs in luminous haze? And if in A Passionate Pilgrim he gives us the magic of place, scents and sounds, the feel of our hedgerows and pastures, the mild moist air and memories dense in the sod; in Daisy Miller, The Reverberator, and perhaps most of all in The American, he reveals a yet more rarefied fragrance. Francie's and Newman's spiritual clarity set against conventional "manners" is like a stream by a mirror. In the Preface which speaks of this time and these tales Mr. James tells us "the 'international' light lay thick on the general scheme of my observations, everything that possibly could managed at that time to be international for me. Therefore, I may say that if no particular element or feature of that view had struck me from far back as receiving so much of the illumination as the comparative state of innocence of my country folk by that same token everything had a price, was of immediate application and found closely interwoven, that could tend to emphasize or vivify the innocence." And, again, he writes in regard to the reprinting of Lady Barbarina (1884); The Siege of London (1882); An International Episode (1878): "The author of these volumes would seem struck with no possibility of contrast in the human lot so great as 1 Preface to "The Reverberator, The Passionate Pilgrim," &c. &c. Vol XIII. that encountered as we turn back and forth between the distinctively American and the distinctively European outlook. He might even, perhaps, on such a showing be represented as scarce aware, before the human scene, of any other sharp antithesis at all." " Later, since 1890 or thereabouts, Mr. James has abandoned this specialized interest, this particular angle, for a cosmopolitan temper. He has shared, say his exponents, in a general European tendency towards the recondite rather than the rare, the kind of obscurity offered only by over-ripe civilizations. And here in this region of non-moral, at times almost pathological, interests, his genius has found its true scope. Whether this verdict is just, time only can tell. To find any of the myriad whisperings and beckonings which solicit our hyper-sensibility tabulated for us is a boon we may over-estimate easily. However that may be, I cannot but think that in the employment of his methods upon English themes Mr. James has exposed an essentially un-English mind. "The Golden Bowl," he tells us, "is not 'international,' the subject could have been perfectly expressed had all the persons concerned been only American, or only English, or only Roman." Now even to Mr. James's most unquestioning admirers this must come as a hard saying. If Maggie Verver is not to be seen as American, some of us will not be able to see her at all. She is lovely, with a loveliness no one may gainsay; but is she not what she is beeause she belongs with Newmen and Francie? She is the rarest of the bunch, but she belongs to them, and it is that fact, surely, that gives us our grip of her. Manners and morals in her are the result of uniquely American conditions. The equivalently well-bred Englishwoman in similar circumstances would have been neither 2 Preface to Vol. XIV. so lovely nor so unintuitive. European good breeding consists of personal simplicity made possible by what has come to be effortless responsiveness to complexities. Such simplicity as Maggie Verver's differs essentially from that of, say, a bome-staying duchess. English readers are apt to lose sight of the difference, from their consciousness of the taste and wealth by which Maggie is surrounded. But, for good or for evil, these are no part of her; she is sprung neither of generations having them, nor of generations not having, and craving them. She is what she is because she has escaped the moulding of either initiation. The equivalent English-woman is, perhaps, more independent of the things themselves; but she is in no way independent of the processes they represent. Her great grandmother built certain conditions into life and her successor responds to them intuitively. Mr. James seems altogether to have missed a fact, which is really the central fact about an Englishman or Englishwoman of good breeding, that their past is actually made present, summed up, in a certain refusal to analyze. And what this failure of perception may amount to, The Sacred Fount and The Siege of London have exposed. Call us a nation of hypocrites if you like, but if you come to describe us you will be quickly aware that the whitening is part of our sepulchres. The separate constituents of The Sacred Fount may exist, but the totality of English country-house life it portrays is simply incredible. The atmosphere, the medium suggested could not exist for a day unless the house were given up to detectives. Conventions are, after all, Society's tribute to decency, and incidents such as those of The Sacred Fount, portrayed without their corresponding conventions, result merely in nightmare. The actions described may be those of Englishmen, but outside kitchens, through the length and breadth of the land, no collection of men and women would be found to share in what are represented as their actor's habitual reflections upon them. Mr. James's scientific search for phenomena has led him astray. Interested only in discovery, in tracking down, he has missed truth that should have been perceived intuitively. He has analyzed individuals and placed them together without a co-ordinating atmosphere. And in England-in Europe-their atmosphere is SO much more than themselves. This failure is most markedly present in certain scenes in The Ambassadors. Mr. James sets forth to satiety in the prefaces his theory that everything in the tale must be seen through the mind of some actor in the drama. Essentially this is, after all, Wilkie Collins's method, and, however widely different the material it is employed on, is likely to retain some of the dangers of the detective story-dangers which, where delicate themes are involved, wrest certain actors to "impossible" actions and speeches because such and such things must be brought into the story. But, however we should explain it, perhaps the most astounding example of unreality of situation, and character destroyed for want of its atmosphere, is to be found in The Ambassadors. the growing discomfort the reader may have experienced as to Madame de Vionnet's not being a consistent reallydrawn character comes to a climax in the incident of her call on Sarah Pocock. No woman of the world could have imposed that call. Considered on the lowest, the most obvious ground, it is not the way to propitiate the "Sarah Pococks" of life to cheapen oneself to them. Even if we suppose the call to be paid, Madame de Vionnet's talk is incredible. Surely it is diametrically opposed to all we have All Elaborated finally and completely in the Preface to "The Golden Bowl." |