`A Plan of Numerous Concentric Circles'

As we outgrow certain writers, so do we grow into others. Henry James is the foremost example of the latter. Who is equipped at 20 to navigate the Jamesian sentence, trace the Jamesian thread of thought? I read him with pleasure and bafflement, sensing he was worth the effort, but knowing that numberless strata of meaning eluded me. I hadn’t lived enough. Even then I knew this. I first read The Wings of the Dove at 17, in the two-volume New York Edition, in the least likely of settings – in the clubhouse of the miniature golf course I managed the summer between high school and college. Still, without effort I projected segments of myself into the central triad -- Kate Croy, Merton Densher, Milly Theale – and sensed what James had in mind in his preface to the novel:

“What one had discerned, at all events, from an early stage, was that a young person so devoted and exposed, a creature with her security hanging so by a hair, couldn't but fall somehow into some abysmal trap--this being, dramatically speaking, what such a situation most naturally implied and imposed.”

But my reading was shallow, as it couldn’t have otherwise been, and I sense that only in my third or fourth reading of the novel, well into my forties, had I begun not to understand James’ exquisite patterning, because his method was apparent to me from the start, but to dwell in the treacherous emotional and moral world he devised. My consciousness – the cultivation of which is James’ focus – had seasoned into readiness for James. T.S. Eliot confirms my experience in his 1931 essay “The Pensées of Pascal”:

“…Pascal is one of those writers who will be and who must be studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towards it. The history of human opinions of Pascal and of men of his stature is a part of the history of humanity. That indicates his permanent importance.”

Eliot addresses the evolving understanding of Pascal by readers across centuries, but in literature unlike biology, phylogeny sometimes recapitulates ontogeny. We track our maturity not only by the writers we shed but by our deepening love for the writers to whom we have remained loyal. In his essay, Eliot cites another writer to whom I felt an early attraction that has ripened incrementally into trust and sustaining kinship:

“Now the great adversary against whom Pascal set himself, from the time of his first conversations with M. de Saci at Port-Royal, was Montaigne. One cannot destroy Pascal, certainly; but of all authors Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences; or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument.”

Despite himself, despite his reasoned respect for the austere reasoning of Pascal, Eliot cannot help but be seduced by Montaigne, a seduction many of us have experienced. He writes later in the same paragraph: “Indeed, by the time a man knew Montaigne well enough to attack him, he would already be thoroughly infected by him.” Here we see a rare instance of a first-rate critic writing very personally, in a nakedly self-revealing manner, while maintaining a show of cool intellect – something Eliot often does in poetry and prose. Detractors say otherwise, but Eliot is among the emotionally red-hot writers who feel no compulsion to shout. To shout is to betray the intensity of the emotions. Here is more Eliot on Montaigne:

“He exists, so to speak, on a plan of numerous concentric circles, the most apparent of which is the small inmost circle, a personal puckish scepticism which can be easily aped if not imitated. But what makes Montaigne a very great figure is that he succeeded, God knows how – for Montaigne very likely did not know that he had done it – it is not the sort of thing that men can observe about themselves, for it is essentially bigger than the individual’s consciousness – he succeeded in giving expression to the scepticism of every human being. For every man who thinks and lives by thought must have his own scepticism, that which stops at the question, that which ends in denial, or that which leads to faith and which is somehow integrated into the faith which transcends it.”