 Henry James Licensed by Creative Commons"I meant to write to you tonight on another matter - but of what can one think, or utter or dream, save of this ghastly extinction of the beloved R.L.S? It is too miserable for cold words - it's an absolute desolation. It makes me cold and sick - and with the absolute, almost alarmed sense, of the visible, material, quenching of an indispensable light"
(Letter from Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 17 December 1894. From Letters, ed. by Leon Edel, vol iii [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974-84], p. 495)
Henry James (1843-1916) was an American novelist and close friend to RLS. Some of his most notable works are Daisy Miller (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Ambassadors (1903). He often wrote from the point of view of his characters, and his innovative style, using unreliable narrators and interior monologues, strongly influenced modernist writing. Although mostly known for his realist fiction, James also wrote literary criticism, plays, works on travel writing, biographical and autobiographical works.
James was born in New York City. He studied law at Harvard University , but like RLS, he wanted to be a writer and focused instead on his literary ambitions. Although an American, James felt that he identified more with Europe. Indeed, he was preoccupied with national identity. Much of his writing centers on what happens in the meeting between American and European cultures. In the end, James’s life seemed to suggest that national identity is a choice – he settled in England in 1876 and became a British citizen in 1915.
First Meeting
RLS first met Henry James in the summer of 1879. He had travelled to London on 30 July to ask his friends what they thought about his plan to go to the United States in pursuit of Fann Van de Grift Osbourne (they tried and failed to dissuade him).
Sometime in early August, RLS, Edmund Gosse and Andrew Lang had lunch with Henry James. Although he and Stevenson later grew close, James was not terribly impressed on this first meeting. In a letter to T.S. Perry on 14 September 1879, James wrote that RLS was “a shirt-collarless Bohemian and a great deal (in an inoffensive way) of a poseur” (From Leon Edel, Henry James Letters, vol ii [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974-84], p. 255).
On 2 July 1884, James attended the first London performance of Deacon Brodie. RLS was unfortunately too unwell to attend himself.
“The Art of Fiction” and “A Humble Remonstrance” Debate
The authors got in touch again in 1884 in a published debate about “the art of fiction”. In April 1884, Walter Besant had published a pamphlet on his lecture “The Art of Fiction”. Henry James responded in “The Art of Fiction” (Longman’s Magazine, September 1884). He was concerned with the importance of literary technique and he used Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) as an example of how different the novel could be (while still being a novel):
“I have just been reading, at the same time, the delightful story of Treasure Island, by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, and the last tale from M. Edmond de Goncourt, which is entitled Chérie. One of these works treats of murders, mysteries, islands of dreadful renown, hairbreadth escapes, miraculous coincidences and buried doubloons. The other treats of a little French girl who lived in a fine house in Paris and died of wounded sensibility because no one would marry her. I call Treasure Island delightful, because it appears to me to have succeeded wonderfully in what it attempts; and I venture to bestow no epithet upon Chérie, which strikes me as having failed in what it attempts-that is, in tracing the development of the moral consciousness of a child. But one of these productions strikes me as exactly as much of a novel as the other, and as having a 'story' quite as much. The moral consciousness of a child is as much a part of life as the islands of the Spanish Main, and the one sort of geography seems to me to have those 'surprises' of which Mr. Besant speaks quite as much as the other. For myself (since it comes back in the last resort, as I say, to the preference of the individual), the picture of the child's experience has the advantage that I can at successive steps (an immense luxury, near to the 'sensual pleasure' of which Mr. Besant's critic in the Pall Mall speaks) say Yes or No, as it may be, to what the artist puts before me. I have been a child, but I have never been on a quest for a buried treasure, and it is a simple accident that with M. de Goncourt I should have for the most part to say No. With George Eliot, when she painted that country, I always said Yes.” (Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” in The Art of Fiction by Henry James and Walter Besant [London: Cupples, Upham, 1885] pp. 79-80).
In response to James, RLS wrote “A Humble Remonstrance” (Longman’s Magazine, December 1884). RLS’s essay, with an additional paragraph, was later included in Memories and Portraits (1887). He wrote:
“[James] cannot criticize the author, as he goes, ‘because,’ says he, comparing it with another work, ‘I have been a child, but I have never been on a quest for buried treasure.’ Here is, indeed, a willful paradox; for if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure it can be demonstrated that he has never been a child. There never was a child (unless Master James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck and prison” (RLS, “A Humble Remonstrance”, Memories and Portraits [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895], p. 287).
James and RLS’s essays are both significant debates about the novel in the 1880s. After RLS’s piece was published, James wrote words “of hearty sympathy, charged with the assurance of my enjoyment of everything you write. It’s a luxury, in this immoral age, to encounter someone who does write - who is really acquainted with that lovely art” (From The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, vol v [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 42).
Stevenson replied: “I have re-read my paper, and I cannot think I have at all succeeded in being veracious or polite. I know of course, that I took your paper merely as a pin to hang my own remarks upon; but alas! what a thing is any paper! what fine remarks can you not hang on mine!” (Letter from RLS to Henry James, 8 December 1884, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol v [New Haven: Yale University Press], p. 43).
A Lifelong Friendship
It was in 1885, that James and RLS cemented their friendship. In 1885, James was visiting his invalid sister in Bournemouth. The Stevensons had just moved into Skerryvore (early April 1885). James was one of their first visitors, and over the next couple of months he spent a great deal of time there. Both Fanny and RLS enjoyed his company. He even attended a wedding anniversary dinner they had on 19 May.
RLS met James in person for the last time on 21 August 1887 at the Armfield’s Hotel, Finsbury, London. RLS was leaving for the USA, and James (along with W.E. Henley, Coggie Ferrier, Katherine de Mattos, Aunt Margaret Scott Jones Stevenson [Aunt Alan] and Cummy) had come to say goodbye. James gave Stevenson a case of champagne as a farewell gift for the journey.
From 1885 until Stevenson’s death, RLS and James exchanged warm letters. They wrote about each other’s writing, but RLS also confided his fears about his health. Later, when in Samoa, he expressed his worry that he would never be well enough to return to the UK.
A Literary Friendship
Stevenson admired James’s writing, praising Roderick Hudson (1875), The Princess Cassassmina (1886) The Tragic Muse (1890) and the short stories “The Pupil” (1891) and “The Marriages” (1892). RLS did not, however, care for Washington Square (1881). He wrote to W.E. Henley in early March 1881: “Mrs Pennyman we both adore and have always adored. And shall ever adore, world without end; which does not prevent Washington Square from being in its way, an unpleasant book, nor H. James from being a mere club fizzle [. . .] and no out-of-doors, stand-up man whatever” (The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol iii [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 159).
In turn, James praised many of RLS’s works, including Catriona (1893). He also devoted a chapter to Stevenson in Partial Portraits (1888): “Before all things he is a writer with a style – a model with a complexity of curious and picturesque garments. It is by the cut and the colour of this rich and becoming frippery – I use the term endearingly, as a painter might – that he arrests the eye and solicits the brush” (Henry James, “Robert Louis Stevenson”, Partial Portraits [London: Macmillan, 1919], pp. 139-40).
Later, in Notes on Novelists (1914) James wrote: “The case was nevertheless that the man somehow approached them [the reader], and that to read him – certainly to read him with the full sense of his charm – came to mean for many persons much the same as to ‘meet him’. It was as if he wrote himself outright and altogether, rose straight to the surface of his prose, and still more of his happiest verse; so that these things gave out, besides whatever else, his look and motions and voice, showed his life and manners, all that there was of him, his ‘tremendous secrets’ not excepted. We grew in short to possess him entire” (Henry James, “Robert Louis Stevenson”, Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914], p. 1).
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