248

The Henry James Review

James’s Sick Souls By Pericles Lewis, Yale University

Near the beginning of The Golden Bowl (1904), Prince Amerigo distinguishes the Italian from the Anglo-American “moral sense” for his friend Fanny Assingham; he claims to have what, in Rome, “sufficiently passes for” the moral sense. “But,” he explains, it’s no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase—half-ruined into the bargain!—in some castle of our quattrocento is like the “lightning elevator” in one of Mr. Verver’s fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam—it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that—well, that it’s as short in almost any case to turn around and come down again. (1: 31) If the Italians remain stuck in the fifteenth century, Mr. Verver’s fifteen-storey buildings belong all to the twentieth. James prepares us to view Amerigo’s ethical perspective with skepticism. The image of the winding staircase seems to associate Amerigo, whose family has produced an “infamous Pope” and at least one Cardinal, with the casuistry of the Catholic Church (1: 10). The theme of the difference between Protestant and Catholic cultures underlies much of James’s writing, which often shows how right-thinking Protestants, especially Americans like Christopher Newman or Isabel Archer, learn to see their own apparently straightforward ethical beliefs as failing to account for the great complexities encountered on the tortuous staircases of Catholic Europe. Like many of James’s earlier novels, the rest of The Golden Bowl demonstrates that the direct, rocketlike route does not always take the American hero or heroine to a morally satisfying conclusion. Amerigo’s definition of these two moral senses hints at some fundamental concerns of James’s fiction, concerns which shaped both the themes and the formal techniques of his entire body of work. Religious categories here seem to have been replaced by broader ethnic or cultural identities, theological concerns The Henry James Review 22 (2001): 248–258. © 2001, The Johns Hopkins University Press

James’s Sick Souls

249

by those we might label aesthetic. Articulated religious belief makes little impact on the characters in James’s novels. Indeed, the characters often seem to inhabit a moral world in which absolute measures of value such as those associated with God are no longer available (Pippin). Yet James presents a world that remains haunted by some of the ethical beliefs and prejudices associated with the religions from which his characters seem so emancipated. James wrote his late novels at a time when many philosophers and social scientists were trying to explain the phenomena associated with the “sacred” in non-theological terms. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), for example, seeks to account for people’s experiences of the “reality of the unseen” without either affirming the existence of supernatural forces or reducing religious experiences to mere products of mental illness, sexual repression, or other organic causes (53– 77). The problem confronting William James, and other thinkers like Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and even Sigmund Freud, was how to explain religious experience without explaining it away. In order to account for the persistence of the sacred in the modern world, each of these thinkers had to reinvent his discipline and turn away from the prevailing positivism of the nineteenth century (Hughes). Henry James, in his experiments with the form of the novel, attempts a similar rethinking of the tradition of realism. Where the social scientists seek new methodologies, Henry James seeks new forms and narrative techniques that can allow him to account for the kinds of experience generally associated with faith while avoiding a judgment as to the truth-content of those experiences. How this works in a story like “The Turn of the Screw” has been the subject of much debate. In this essay, I will suggest that similar problems are at the heart of James’s late novels as well. James poses the types of problems that religious belief had traditionally sought to anwer but displays an acute sense of the absence of supernatural solutions to them. Understanding this absence can help us to see the modernity of James’s work. The contrast drawn by Prince Amerigo resembles some of the polar distinctions offered by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. James categorizes Catholicism as “healthy-minded” and Lutheran and Calvinist theology as faiths that appeal to “sick souls.” The healthy-minded individual tends toward pluralism and the view of evil as “a waste element [. . .] so much ‘dirt,’ as it were,” not central to human experience (133). By contrast, the sick soul understands the problem of evil as the essential fact of this world, surmountable only by appeal to supernatural forces. For the sick soul, “evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy” (134). William’s attitude to the healthy-minded sometimes seems condescending, as he clearly identifies more with the sick soul. Yet he finds aspects of both attitudes worthy of respect and argues that each has something to teach us about the problem of evil. Like his brother, William associates these theological differences with broader cultural ones:

250

The Henry James Review On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former [healthy-minded] way of looking upon evil, as made up of ills and sins in the plural, removable in detail; while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations. (134)

Here, ethnic, cultural, or racial identity mingles with religious tradition. Prince Amerigo’s many slow, steep steps resemble the multiple ills and sins to which, according to William James, the Catholic reconciles himself through the “practice of confession and absolution,” thus “[squaring] his accounts with evil” (128). The priest, as intermediary, and the workings of ritual allow the healthy-minded Catholic to draw on the credit of the supernatural in balancing his spiritual books. For the Protestant, no such compromise is possible. Adam Verver’s elevator shares the sick soul’s tendency to draw a sharp distinction between evil and good or between the natural world (the bottom floor) and the supernatural (the top). William James further contrasts naturalistic, “once-born” religions with the “twice-born” religions in which “the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life” (165). As James writes, “the healthy-minded [. . .] need to be born only once, [but] the sick souls [. . .] must be born twice in order to be happy” (166). William James uses an image similar to Amerigo’s when he explains this contrast: In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear or onestoried affair, whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the value which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being [. . .]. Renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of truth. (166) The twice-born religion promotes the recognition of a radical difference between this world and the next and an accompanying sense of division within the sick soul between noble aspirations and base desires.1 The once-born, in general, lack the sense of this radical distinction. They measure the world in terms of cash value and do not understand the sick soul’s sense of the incommensurability of this world’s values with those of the next, the profane with the sacred. In The Golden Bowl, Amerigo clearly belongs among the healthy-minded, yet he is at least conscious of higher stories in the castle, even if he prefers to stay on the ground floor. His account of the Anglo-American moral sense shows a clear understanding of the “double-storied” character of the sick soul’s moral life.

James’s Sick Souls

251

The difference between the Anglo-American and the Italian “moral sense” appears more clearly as a difference between Protestants and Catholics in an early novel like The American (1877). Yet even the titles of the late novels The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl refer to scriptural texts in which the speaker, like a sick soul, complains of the corruption of this world and begs for supernatural intervention to save him from it.2 James’s “ghost” stories are full of sick souls like Spencer Brydon in “The Jolly Corner,” John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle,” or the governess in “The Turn of the Screw.” These characters envision a world of supernatural horrors to which they have no direct access and continually doubt the reality of the world they actually inhabit. Though occasionally seeming to endorse a somewhat puritanical attitude to the pleasures of this world, James specializes mainly in presenting conflicts of value systems without telling the reader which system to approve.3 Submerged religious views often color the inherited ethical beliefs that result in these conflicts of value systems. One does not choose one’s own relation to the sacred. The value systems with which his Protestant characters are endowed frequently seem to prevent them from developing a healthy relationship to the pleasures of this world, whether sensual or aesthetic. For James’s late novels, the persistence of the sacred implies the incapacity of the various mutilated selves he describes to arrive at a state of equilibrium in the absence of supernatural intervention, which, of course, is never quite forthcoming. According to William James, twice-born religious beliefs sustain the “congenital” attitudes of the sick souls and confirm their sense of having a “divided self” (134, 167). He quotes Tolstoy, Bunyan, and several unnamed melancholiacs (one of whom is the author himself) to illustrate the sick soul’s sense that the self is a battleground. In a footnote, he also cites Henry James Sr.’s description of his “vastation” in Society the Redeemed Form of Man. William James summarizes the sick soul’s experience with a quotation from St. Paul: “What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I” (171). Precisely this type of divided self, as William James later argues, is most susceptible to conversion. The sense of helplessness and lack of willpower allow the sick soul to submit to a higher power capable of transforming it. James relates conversion to processes of “unconscious cerebration” and suggests that converts tend to have “a large subliminal region” (207, 251). The remarkable fact about the experience of conversion is that it seems more an event that happens to someone and at which the convert is essentially a spectator than a conscious choice made by the convert: “Throughout the height of it he undoubtedly seems to himself a passive spectator or undergoer of an astounding process performed upon him from above” (226). After conversion, many sick souls become “saints,” possessed of a “feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish interests” (272). Many of William James’s divided selves, including Tolstoy, Bunyan, and Henry James Sr., manage to heal themselves through a process of conversion; such is not always the fate of Henry James’s sick souls. Although Verena Tarrant and Hyacinth Robinson briefly seem to attain saintliness (Verena without even having to go through a conversion), most of Henry James’s characters remain sadly confined to this world.

252

The Henry James Review

Until they find conversion, William James’s divided selves are virtually incapable of action. The melancholy associated with the divided self results in a sense of being outside oneself. Metaphors drawn from the theater often express this sense of self-alienation. William James quotes an unnamed asylum patient: “There is no longer any past for me; people appear so strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a theatre; as if people were actors and everything were scenery.” He also cites the recollection of Alphonse Daudet: Homo duplex, homo duplex! The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, “He is dead, he is dead!” While my first self wept, my second self thought, “How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.” I was then fourteen years old. (qtd. in James 167) The division in Daudet’s self is marked by his ability to see himself primarily as a spectator (or director) at the drama in which he also participates (or acts). The “second self” takes responsibility for aesthetic judgments, which seem totally out of place in the world of the “first self.” This capacity to sit in aesthetic judgment even on the most emotional episodes of one’s own life marks a profound alienation. The story of Daudet’s sense of doubleness at the death of his brother Henri resonates with the tendency of characters in the novels of William James’s brother Henry to imagine their own lives in terms borrowed from the theater. One manifestation of Lambert Strether’s “double consciousness” is his tendency to think about his own life as if it were a play. James’s emphasis on Strether’s spectatorship manifests itself both thematically and formally. In the opening chapters of The Ambassadors, Strether attends a play in London, where he compares his own situation to that of characters on the stage: “in the drama precisely there was a bad woman in a yellow frock who made a pleasant weak good-looking young man in perpetual evening dress do the most dreadful things [. . .]. Would Chad also be in perpetual evening dress? He somehow rather hoped it” (1: 53–54). Chad does make a most theatrical arrival (presumably in evening dress) just as the curtain rises at another theater where Strether has taken a box. The arrival could serve as a supreme example of the technique of “delayed decoding” described by Ian Watt, as it allows the reader to experience Strether’s long moment of uncertainty as to the identity of the gentleman who has just entered. Even the experience of decoding Chad’s name is described: “The gentleman indeed, though sounding for Strether a very short name, did practically as much to explain. Strether gasped the name back—then only had he seen. Miss Gostrey had said more than she knew. They were in presence of Chad himself” (1: 135). The past perfect tense—“then only had he seen”—reminds the reader of the retrospective attitude with which the entire scene has been described; it suddenly jolts the reader out of the straightforward narrative past into the moment of recognition experienced by Strether, and indeed into the many later moments at which he must have contemplated this belated recognition. The reader shares in the experience of spectatorship which defines Strether’s existential situation.

James’s Sick Souls

253

For several pages after recognizing Chad, James describes Strether’s thoughts as he watches the play, forced to maintain the position of spectator: They couldn’t talk without disturbing the spectators in the part of the balcony just below them; and it, for that matter, came to Strether— being a thing of the sort that did come to him—that these were the accidents of a high civilisation; the imposed tribute to propriety, the frequent exposure to conditions, usually brilliant, in which relief has to await its time. Relief was never quite near at hand for kings, queens, comedians and other such people, and though you might be yourself not exactly one of these, you could yet, in leading the life of high pressure, guess a little how they sometimes felt. (1: 136) Not for the last time, Strether must take on the role of impotent spectator, but even in doing so he feels that his position of enforced stillness, if not quite resembling the plight of kings and queens, or even that of actors who sometimes play kings and queens, can at least help him guess how they feel. The irony of this passage lies in the fact that Strether has at last become an actor in a sort of drama, as he imagined at the first play of the novel that he might, but that his “acting” consists precisely in the forced immobility of the spectator, an immobility that he will in a sense maintain throughout the remainder of the novel. These brief examples of Strether’s experience of being a spectator at his own life, and of conceiving his life as a play in which he is more of an attendant lord than a king or queen, help to illustrate what James describes as Strether’s “double consciousness”: “There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference” (1: 5). When Strether tries to act, he always maintains something of the attitude of the bemused spectator. This doubleness he shares with William James’s “divided selves.” The narrative technique of The Ambassadors, which makes the reader into a spectator of Strether’s evolving consciousness, seems to embody this double consciousness. The sense of a divided self who has little hope of reunification is typical of the Jamesian hero and is inherited by the heroes of modernism, through James’s influence on Conrad, Pound, and Eliot. Henry James’s novels and stories are full of experiences of division or duality. To a certain extent, the novelist, like the philosopher, relates such psychological attitudes to a particular theological background, but just as frequently the association is more broadly cultural. In the novels, the sense of a divided self seems most pronounced in American heroes or heroines. The crises of Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer, Lambert Strether, Milly Theale, or Maggie Verver are less extreme than those of the ghost stories, but the characters’ tendency to view the world in sharply dualistic terms, their frequent oscillations between the two poles of experience they define for themselves, and their anxiety about the temptations of worldliness all point to the attitudes of the divided self. This bipolar quality adds to the melodramatic flavor of so many of James’s novels (Brooks). His protagonists, like his brother’s sick souls, are highly conscious of their position in two worlds. The two worlds of Protestant theology are heaven and earth, of course, but those of Henry James’s novels are just as often the new

254

The Henry James Review

world and the old. James continually rewrites the myth of the fall. If Woollett, Massachusetts, is far from Strether’s idea of paradise, most of its residents nonetheless still share their Puritan ancestors’ conception of New England as the New Jerusalem (Bercovitch). James’s technique in The Ambassadors, as elsewhere, is first to draw sharp distinctions that seem to condemn the old world, then to show up the falsity of the new world’s claim to innocence, and finally (in Strether’s return home) to have his characters return to a chastened allegiance to new-world values. Strether’s famous justification for leaving Maria Gostrey behind in Paris shows some of the sick soul’s sense that duty must always conflict with inclination: “That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself” (2: 326). In order for an action to be moral, Strether suggests, it must not make the actor happy. In his stark opposition of duty and inclination, Strether shares the tragic conception of life of a divided self.4 Strether’s disavowal of new world values upon his arrival in Europe resembles a conversion away from the faith of Woollett. As William James writes, “the new birth may be away from religion into incredulity [. . .] or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual’s life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion” (176). Strether’s “new birth” in Paris is relatively gradual, unlike most conversions, but his partial reversion to his older principles upon encountering Mme de Vionnet and Chad on their escapade seems a more sudden and typical conversion. In The Wings of the Dove, Merton Densher shares some of Strether’s outlook. Strether is far more conscientious in following the demands of duty, and Densher seems more evidently guilty of bad faith. Nonetheless, Densher has his own conception of duty, which consists of “stillness” or inaction. His fear of actively telling a lie allows him to live a double life. He can participate in the charade that deceives Milly so long as he does not “lie with his lips” (2: 242). Although he promises to do so, he ultimately balks at the required moment. Densher undergoes a fairly classic conversion—marked by a visit to the Catholic Brompton Oratory—as he transfers his love from Kate to Milly (or rather, the memory of Milly)(2: 361). Of course, Densher’s conversion has a self-serving property as it allows him to escape from his contract with Kate. Virtually all of William James’s sick souls are male, but he does describe a few female converts and saints without discussing their earlier division or sickness. In Henry James’s novels, the ever-anxious Olive Chancellor perhaps fits best the type of the sick soul. Kate Croy and Charlotte Stant, despite their intense knowledge of the seamy side of life, seem fundamentally healthy-minded. They know how to manage evil. With their skill at weighing possibilities, theirs is a largely utilitarian ethics. Milly Theale’s sickness, of course, is literal. At moments like her opening appearance perched on a promontory in the Alps, her encounter with the Bronzino portrait, or her outing into the “grey immensity of London” (1: 247) after her talk with Sir Luke Strett, Milly seems, too, to manifest a strong sense of the power of another world, though no supernatural force in fact arrives to “hasten [her] escape from the windy storm and tempest” (Psalm 55: 8). Milly, then, seems another type of the sick soul, and while she may long for conversion or salvation, her fate is only to offer the possibly tainted opportunity for a redemption to Merton Densher, in the form of her bequest.

James’s Sick Souls

255

The Golden Bowl seems both to intensify and to complicate the problem of contrasting types of “moral sense” and their relationship to the question of the sacred. Maggie’s response to the revelation of Charlotte and Amerigo’s earlier relationship (and her deduction of their adultery) complicates the categories outlined by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience and by Amerigo at the beginning of the novel. Throughout the first book of The Golden Bowl, Maggie appears as innocence itself. If she has a moral sense that works, as Amerigo would say, like an elevator, she remains untroubled by any apparent suspicion of real evil. She simply lives on the top floor. Fanny Assingham comments that Maggie “wasn’t born to know evil. She must never know it” (1: 78). With its many references to the fall, the novel prepares the reader for the possibility that upon learning of evil, Maggie will be stricken (like Milly Theale) and will become another sick soul. Indeed, a further Biblical allusion likens Maggie to “the scapegoat of old, of whom she had once seen a terrible picture, [who] had been charged with the sins of the people and had gone forth into the desert to sink under his burden and die” (2: 234). If Maggie were to accept this role of scapegoat, she would indeed fulfill a function like Milly’s. Yet Maggie manages to take the sins of her circle upon herself and to rearrange the circle in such a way that the sins can be contained without Maggie sinking under their burden or dying. Despite her profound awareness of evil and sin, Maggie proves as adept as any healthy-minded heroine at cleaning up. William James compared evil in the healthy-minded worldview to “dirt,” and Henry James presents Maggie, preparing for the confrontation with Fanny over the golden bowl, as carrying with her a suggestion of the swept and garnished, in her whole splendid yet thereby more or less encumbered and embroidered setting, that reflected her small still passion for order and symmetry, for objects with their backs to the walls, and spoke even of some probable reference, in her American blood, to dusting and polishing New England grandmothers. (2: 152–53) If Maggie’s passion for order seems still to align her with the dualistic moral sense of the Puritan New Jerusalem, James immediately undoes the Protestant associations: If her apartment was “princely,” in the clearness of the lingering day, she looked as if she had been carried there prepared, all attired and decorated, like some holy image in a procession, and left precisely to show what wonder she would work under pressure. Her friend [Fanny] felt—how could she not?—as the truly pious priest might feel when confronted, behind the altar, before the festa, with his miraculous Madonna. (2: 153) Maggie is both the descendant of domestic New England grandmothers and a mysterious Catholic Madonna. She is capable of a healthy-minded management of evil as a type of dirt and of a radical sense of evil as a supernatural force threatening her whole being. Although she may seem to have the instincts for

256

The Henry James Review

moral judgment that Amerigo compares to an elevator in one of her father’s skyscrapers, Maggie finds herself able to navigate the tortuous stone staircase created for her by Charlotte and the Prince quite successfully. Unlike most of James’s American heroines, Maggie is a Catholic. James introduces this information, which seems oddly to conflict with one’s expectations of the daughter of a great industrialist of the gilded age, almost in passing. While the guests at Fawns all go off to the local Anglican chapel, Maggie takes her husband to the nearest altar, modest though it happened to be, of the faith—her own as it had been her mother’s, and as Mr Verver himself had been loosely willing, always, to let it be taken for his—without the solid ease of which, making the stage firm and smooth, the drama of her marriage might not have been acted out. (1: 152) That Maggie and, perhaps, her father should be Catholic seems surprising, since most of James’s American heroes and heroines are Protestant, and Adam seems another embodiment of the Protestant ethic. Yet, perhaps this surprising biographical fact partially explains Maggie’s tendency to confound Amerigo’s expectations. He imagines the Ververs to be straightforward, two-storied Protestants, incapable of compromises with evil and unskilled at moral arithmetic. In fact, Maggie proves herself as capable as any European of making the compromises necessary to ensure her victory over Charlotte Stant. As Ruth Bernard Yeazell has written, “the opposition between Maggie and Charlotte increasingly looks like an identity—which is to say that when the Princess begins to lie and manipulate, James begins to reject the split heroine of his predecessors” (278). The Golden Bowl also offers an opportunity to consider how the problem of the sacred can help us to understand Henry James’s narrative technique in the late period; this question connects the thematic concern over the moral sense with the epistemological concerns of William James’s pragmatism, which have been the focus of most comparisons between William and Henry James. In Varieties, William James summarizes the attitudes of Immanuel Kant to the “supersensible” realm, the realm of ideas like God, freedom, and immortality. Kant’s philosophy in many respects offers a systematic defense of the worldview of the sick soul. Kant’s emphasis on the radical distinction between the noumenal realm of the thing in itself and the phenomenal realm of appearances reworks in epistemological terms the Protestant doctrine of the two worlds. His ethics, which emphasize the sharp contrast between duty and inclination, the right and the good, seem designed to appeal to the sick soul, just as utilitarianism, with its greatest happiness principle, seems decidedly healthy-minded. Of Kant’s transcendental ideas, James writes: These things [. . .] are properly not objects of knowledge at all [. . .]. Yet strangely enough they have a definite meaning for our practice. We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be

James’s Sick Souls

257

immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life. (55) William’s pragmatist interpretation of the transcendental ideas, which he calls a “particularly uncouth part of [Kant’s] philosophy,” underlies his defense of the “reality of the unseen.” Although we can have no knowledge of what Kant called the “supersensible” realm, we can (must in Kant’s formulation) live as if such a realm, the realm of things in themselves, exists. Kant’s philosophy gives an epistemological defense of the sick soul’s sense that the world is “double-storied.” One story consists of all that we encounter in this world, and the other story, to which we can never have any direct access, can be hypothesized to consist of the transcendental ideas. To guide our action in this realm, however, we must believe in the existence of that other realm. Without, of course, offering a disquisition on epistemology, The Golden Bowl confronts this problem of the supersensible realm, and it does so using the very phrase “as if” that William James employed for paraphrasing Kant and that Hans Vaihinger later described as central to Kant’s philosophy. When Charlotte asks the antiquarian what is the matter with the golden bowl, he replies: “But if it’s something you can’t find out, is n’t that as good as if it were nothing?” (1: 114). The phrase returns continually throughout the book, and it stands for the possibility of an illusion accepted, by both parties to the illusion, in “good faith” (115). James’s fiction frequently suggests that people have a responsibility to take into consideration the “as ifs”—the necessary fictions, of their fellow beings. The dénouements of the three last great novels all turn (like the final scene of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) on the question of whether a protagonist will tell a necessary lie to maintain an illusion in which a web of people might prefer to live. With their characteristic quasi-Kantian aversion to lying, Lambert Strether and Merton Densher fail the test. Strether is not so much called upon to lie as to accept a lie, but he realizes at the end of the novel that “there had been simply a lie in the charming affair,” and he finds himself incapable of continuing to accept that lie now that he has recognized it (2: 262). Merton Densher more explicitly fails to “lie with his lips” at precisely the moment when it might save Milly (WD 2: 242, 326– 27). Maggie’s solution to the problem of the two marriages at the end of The Golden Bowl, on the other hand, depends precisely on her successfully lying to Charlotte Stant: she denies, on her honor, that she has any reason to be angry with Charlotte. James describes the mutual misinformation as “their conscious perjury” (2: 251). Later, Maggie tells Amerigo, “I’ve chosen to deceive her and to lie to her,” and she prevents him from revealing the truth (2: 348). Faith, for Henry James, seems to mean something less than it did for Kant or for William James. Whereas belief in the power of the “as if” allows Kant to affirm the existence of a supersensible realm and permits William James to proclaim the practical reality of the unseen without ever really affirming its existence, the “as if” for Henry James seems to become simply an acceptable social lie. His sick-souled Americans and healthy-minded Europeans may have inherited a “moral sense” from their Protestant and Catholic forebears, but they live now in a world where the absolute is absent. To live with the “as if” in this world means

258

The Henry James Review

to accept the fictions of the others with whom one is thrown. James’s late novels seem to describe, through their continual representation of the analysis by one character of the possible fictions on which other characters are shaping their lives, the necessity of shared illusion as the only faith on which an action can be based. What lies beyond the experience of this world is not so much an actual higher realm of supernatural forces as an inaccessible realm of individual motives, the motives of one’s fellow-beings. James even suggests the moral responsibility of lying, when the lie is “in good faith.” Such, at any rate, is the most effective response to the problem of evil. James’s golden bowl is something like the noumenal realm on the upper stories that the sick soul needs to believe in even, perhaps, after it is broken. This is a picture of the world from the point of view of a sick soul, one who knows that the golden bowl is broken but who doubts that the wings of the dove will ever carry him away. James’s novels continually describe the need to make sense of others’ motives within the context of what Kant called the phenomenal realm, even though those motives lie in the inaccessible realm of the noumenal, the thing in itself. One never sees the thing in itself in James, but one must always act as if one did. NOTES I would like to thank my students in “Henry James and the Ethics of Storytelling” for discussing with me some of the issues raised here and my colleagues Elizabeth Dillon, Amy Hungerford, and Catherine Labio for their helpful responses to an earlier draft. 1 Catholicism is, of course, a branch of a twice-born religion, but according to William James it gives a healthy-minded “mild” interpretation of the Christian repentance of sins as “getting away from the sin, not groaning and writhing over its commission” (128). The distinction between the healthy-minded and the sick souls concerns individual attitudes; it overlaps with but does not precisely correspond to the theological distinction between the once-born and twice-born religions. 2 In Psalm 55: 6, the psalmist prays, “Oh that I had wings like a dove! For then would I fly away and be at rest.” Compare the quotations from Bunyan and Alline in Varieties (James 159). In Ecclesiastes 12:6–7, the preacher says, “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return to God who gave it.” 3 For the Puritan strain, see Updike. 4 If Strether’s moral maxim seems vaguely Kantian, Amerigo’s seems vaguely utilitarian: “it’s always a question of doing the best for oneself one can—without injury to others” (GB 1: 44). WORKS BY HENRY JAMES The Ambassadors. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. Vols. 21 and 22 of The Novels and Tales of Henry James. GB—The Golden Bowl. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. Vols. 23 and 24 of The Novels and Tales of Henry James. WD—The Wings of the Dove. 2 vols. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. Vols. 19 and 20 of The Novels and Tales of Henry James. OTHER WORKS CITED Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976. Hughes, H. Stuart. Consciousness and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Random, 1977. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Pippin, Robert. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Updike, John. “On ‘The Portrait of a Lady.’” New York Review of Books 2 Dec. 1999: 20–22. Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of “As If.” Trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge, 1924. Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. “Teaching The Golden Bowl as the Last Victorian Novel.” Henry James Review 17 (1996): 275–80.