'Transmitting Messages from Mysterious Regions'

A fine if modest volume of off-the-cuff literary criticism could be extracted from the letters of William James. The philosopher/psychologist was an ambitious reader, like his brother Henry, though unlike Henry he never advertised as a critic. Both admired the young Kipling’s work, with William declaring his “adoration of that infant phenomenon.” He loved War and Peace and described Anna Karenina as “a book almost incredible and supernatural for veracity.” He knew Mark Twain and called him “a dear little genius,” and in 1907 William famously expressed his reservations about Henry’s “third manner.”  

The Correspondence of William James in twelve volumes is published by the University of Virginia Press but shorter selections are available. I have an old copy of the Selected Letters edited by Elizabeth Hardwick and published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy in 1961. You’ll find all of the passages quoted above in Hardwick’s collection, as well as my favorite James mini-review. On June 3, 1876, William writes to Henry that he is reading George Eliot’s greatest novel, Daniel Deronda, which was published in monthly installments that year between February and September. Henry’s first reaction to Eliot’s final novel appeared in an anonymous note in The Nation late in February. In it he says:

“The ‘sense of the universal’ is constant, omnipresent. It strikes us sometimes as rather conscious and over-cultivated; but it gives us the feeling that the threads of the narrative, as we gather them into our hands, are not the usual commercial measurement, but long electric wires capable of transmitting messages from mysterious regions.”

Here is part of Williams’ ambivalent reaction to the novel, as expressed to Henry:

“You say we don’t notice ‘Daniel Deronda.’ I find it extremely interesting. Gwendolen [Harleth] and her spouse are masterpieces of conception and delineation. Her ideal figures are much vaguer and thinner. But her ‘sapience,’ as you excellently call it, passes all decent bounds. There is something essentially womanish in the irrepressible garrulity of her moral reflections. Why is it that it makes women feel so good to moralize? Man philosophizes as a matter of business, because he must,--he does it to a purpose and then lets it rest; but women don’t seem to get over being tickled at the discovery that they have the faculty; hence the tedious irritation and restlessness of George Eliot.”

  

In December 1876, Henry published his eccentric reaction to Eliot’s novel, “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” written in dialogue form among three characters who agree on almost nothing. Only because I marked it and remember it, here is a passage from Chap 33 of Daniel Deronda:

“One of the shop-windows he paused before was that of a second-hand book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, the literature of the ages was represented in judicious mixture, from the immortal verse of Homer to the mortal prose of the railway novel. That the mixture was judicious was apparent from Deronda’s finding in it something that he wanted—namely, that wonderful bit of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon; which, as he could easily slip it into his pocket, he took from its place, and entered the shop to pay for, expecting to see behind the counter a grimy personage showing that nonchalance about sales which seems to belong universally to the second-hand book-business.”