The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The pragmatic test sounds simple and to many it is at once convincing. However, it is open to philosophical objections into which it is not our present business to go. Briefly, James argues that an ideas meaning and truth depend on its practical consequences. A problem is real if its solution makes a differ- ence in actual experience, if it performs an operation on our behavior. Thus James stresses not origins but results. In the Varieties he asserts that the religious states he is describing are, like ali states of mind, neurally conditioned. But he goes on to say that "their significance must be tested not by their origin but by the value of their fruits.^,> Thus religion, whether or not determinably "true," is valuable to the individual and therefore to the race. Its truth is not absolute but functional. Ideas are good only as instruments, and it is by their instru- mentalism that we must judge them. To sum up, "an idea is 'true' so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives." James^ moral ideais were of the highest and purest; "profitable" does not refer to the marketplace; nor is it fair to vulgarize James's pragmatism by saying that what he meant was "Anything is O.K. if it works."

There is more in James, far more, than the pragmatic idea, though it is central both to him and to our vague national phi- losophy, if we may be said to have one. One should understand it. But that is not the main reason for reading him. The main reason is the man himself. He is one of the most attractive

figures in the history of thought—vital, alert to the whole world of experience, mentally liberating, emotionally refresh- ing. In addition he is master of a style of great freshness and clarity. One may disagree with the pragmatic test (believers in fixed religious and moral values are bound to do so) and still emerge from reading James feeling more alive and hopeful than before. He is the philosopher of possibility. By his own pragmatic test, he is apt to succeed with the reader. Reading him can make a difference.

C.F.

96

HENRY JAMES

1843-1916 The Ambassadors

During his seventy-two years, nothing much happened to Henry James, brother of the great American philosopher-psy- chologist William James [95]. He never married. Indeed, so far as we know, he had few passionate relations with men or women. (He had a close, but entirely chaste, friendship with Edith Wharton [102].) The one decisive externai event of his long, industrious life was his decision in 1876 to live perma- nently in England. There, varying his desk labors with trips to his native country and the European continent, plus much din- ing out, James spent the rest of his days.

It seems a bit passive. Yet on balance James probably lived one of the most active lives of the century. Nothing happened to him except everything—everything he could observe, feel, discriminate, ponder, and finally cast into his elaborately wrought stories. He made everything pay artistic dividends. His books are his real biography.

Conrad [100] called him "the historian of fine consciences," an excellent phrase if we extend the last word so as to include the idea of consciousness. James excels in the careful tracing of

subtle relationships among subtle characters. He exhausts ali the psychological possibilities of any given situation; and the situations he chooses, at least in his major novйis, are dense with meaning. His mastery flows in part from his perfect recognition of his own immense powers. These depend on sen- sibility and high intelligence, and the ability to find and mold the exactly right form for his ideas and themes. As pure artist he is the most extraordinary figure in the history of the American novel.

James himself thought The Ambassadors his finest book. Though written in his late period it does not suffer from the overelaboration of which many readers complain. (One well- known witticism of Philip Guedallas thus describes James's three phases: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.) Ali his powers are here held in beautiful balance and suspension. He handles one of his major themes—the impact of Continental moral realism on the rigid and sometimes naive ethical outlook of Americans—on the levei of the highest com­edy. That last word should not make you think The Ambassadors is not a serious work. For ali its grace and wit, it is weighty enough, with its grave and reiterated plea for more life, for more perception, for the claims of the intelligence as an instrument for seizing and interpreting experience. "Live ali you can," cries Lambert Strether to Little Bilham, "live, live!" In Strether, who is superbly equipped to react to the new experience that comes to him, alas too late, I think James felt he had created a peculiarly American type.