Scherzinger, Karen I
'He thinks he's a failure--fancy!' Henry James's 'The Lesson of the Master'
The girl asked him what mysteries he meant, and he said: "Oh, peculiarities of his work,
inequalities, superficialities. For one who looks at it from the artistic point of view it contains a
bottomless ambiguity."
"Oh, do describe that more--it's so interesting. There are no such suggestive questions. I'm so
fond of them. He thinks he's a failure--fancy!" Miss Fancourt added.
"That depends on what his ideal may have been. Ah, with his gifts it ought to have been high.
But till one knows what he really proposed to himself...." (250)
Henry James's tantalizingly equivocal story, "The Lesson of the Master," has justifiably drawn
the attention of James's critics to two important and interlinked aspects of his work: the
operations and effects of ambiguity, and the "doctrine of renunciation" (273).(n1) But James's
skilful exploration of the theme of renunciation in this story by means of ambiguous suggestions
and counter-suggestions has provoked such scholarly interest that another aspect of the story
has been relatively neglected. The shades and degrees of sincerity and perceptiveness in this
story are, indeed, employed to serve the delicate issue of renunciation and its value to the artist.
As significantly, however, they lend themselves to questions concerning what is ideal and whole
in art, or what constitutes aesthetic failure and aesthetic success. For it is not only the sincerity
of Henry St George's "lesson," the accuracy of Paul Overt's perceptions, the degree of Mrs St
George's influence, or the constitution of Marian Fancourt's innocence that intrigue the reader,
but also the fraught notion of aesthetic value. Miss Fancourt's flippant "He thinks he's a failure-fancy!" resonates ironically in the face of James's own deeply felt and complex responses to the
problem she so glibly dismisses.
Failure finds sustained and vivid expression in James's novels, tales and critical writings as a
constituent of the art work itself. James's writing is littered with the debris of spoiled, incomplete
and fragmented works of art, as well as peopled by frustrated and anxious artists and would-be
artists who seek to bring their efforts to completion. The list of artistic casualties seems endless:
Clare Vawdrey's elusive play in "The Private Life," Roderick Hudson's variously shattered,
incomplete or unrealized sculptures, Nick Dormer's disappearing portrait of Gabriel Nash and
incomplete representation of Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse, the burnt remains of the spoils
of Poynton, the never-attempted madonna of the future, the elusive figure in the carpet, the
slashed depiction of the liar, the rejected illustrations of the real thing. This catalogue of
destruction, frustration and conflagration points towards the complex and abiding nature of
James's preoccupation with aesthetic failure.
I use the term "aesthetic failure" to describe how James's work, and works of art in James's
writing, resist the ideals of perfection, unity and closure, and frustrate the redemptive value of a
life dedicated to art.(n2) James had much to say on these ideals: many of his statements to this
effect have been quoted repeatedly by his readers and critics, especially his remark to H.G.
Wells that it "is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance" (Letters 4: 770). In his
prefaces to the New York Edition this sentiment is to find dogged, almost mantra-like reiteration.
Continuity, unity, economy, organic form: aesthetic triumph is achieved through the presentation
of wholeness in subject and design, content and form, "without which showing foul failure hover
[s] and pounce[s]" (Art 88).
2
Similarly abundant evidence shows that James devoted his career to the search for such
sublime harmony and wholeness, such closure and completion. This comment makes his
intentions clear:
To keep at it--to strive toward the perfect, the ripe, the only best [emphasis added]; to go on, by
one's own clear light, with patience, courage and continuity, to live with the high vision and effort,
to justify, one's self--and oh, so greatly!--all in time: this and this alone can be my only lesson
from anything. (Notebooks 61)
"Ah, perfection, perfection--how one ought to go in for it! I wish I could" (251), Marian Fancourt
declares in "The Lesson of the Master." The facetiousness of her remark indirectly satirizes
James's own mission to "strive toward the perfect, the ripe, the only best," a task persistently
troubled by the seemingly ever-present threat of aesthetic failure. Despite the proclamations of
faith made in his letters, notebooks and prefaces, both James and his fictional artists are
repeatedly confronted, and frequently vanquished, by threats of fragmentation, incompletion and
wayward signification. With disturbing regularity, a masterpiece in James's writing vividly enacts
all of the "bottomless" ambiguities ironically associated with the term "master" in "The Lesson of
the Master."
Given the persistent subversion of the term "master" in "The Lesson of the Master," it is
supremely ironic that the term should have been applied by the author's admirers so innocently
to James himself. Fellow writers such as Edith Wharton, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson,
William Dean Howells, Edmund Gosse, Ford Madox Hueffer, Joseph Conrad, Hugh Walpole
and E. M. Forster all held James's work in high esteem (although some had their reservations).
The epithet of "Master" for James had common currency, especially towards the end of his
career. Conrad referred to him as "cher maître" and "very clear Master" (cited in Edel, Life 2:
393), as did Edith Wharton (278,345and 348). James himself encouraged Hugh Walpole to use
the same endearment.(n3) Leon Edel remarks that during the period 1900-05, James had
"become a presence, an oracle, a legend" (Life 2: 516); Kenneth Graham observes that there
was a "tendency for the external image of the Master to confirm him in some of his portentous
mannerisms and whimsicalities to the point of self-caricature" (Literary Life 140). And the title is
tenacious: when Leon Edel wrote the last volume of his biography of Henry James in 1972 he
referred to the writer throughout as "the Master" (Life 2:613 ff); in a 1993 conference address,
Edel persists, Overt-like, with the term ("Some Notes on the Master's birthdays").
But as much as James had his admirers, and in spite of the fact that he was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as awarded the British Order of Merit, James
was still haunted by criticism and failure. While it would be an oversimplification to claim that St
George is a spokesman for Henry James,(n4) there reverberates nevertheless in this confession
an echo of the despair and desire uttered by so many artists and would be artists in James's
work, from Roderick Hudson to Lambert Strether, who, collectively, can be regarded as
expressing at least some of James's special aesthetic concerns:
"I've got a loaf on the shelf; I've got everything, in fact, but the great thing--"
"The sense of having done the best--the sense, which is the real life of the artist and the
absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music
that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he
doesn't--and if he doesn't he isn't worth speaking of. And precisely those who really know don't
speak of him. He may still hear a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible
silence of Fame." (263)
3
In St George's words we might hear the sincere formulation of James's own dilemma, and
possibly the clearest indication of his purpose in "The Lesson of the Master." James's criticism is
directed principally towards the "chatter" of naive assessments and immature evaluations, but
the desire for triumph over and in the aesthetic effort remains, and the "incorruptible silence of
Fame" resounds in spite of his professed skepticism.
While a small group of cognoscenti valued his work, more widespread, public celebrity was rare.
Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady were well received generally, but James never realized
during his lifetime the seemingly effortless popularity of contemporaries such as Stevenson, du
Maurier, Walpole and (to his chagrin) Oscar Wilde. The "thrill of seeing stacks of copies of
Portrait in all the bookstore windows" (Kaplan 236) was not a sensation to which he would
become accustomed. He wrote to William Dean Howells that his books were "behind,
irremovably behind, the public, and fixed there for my lifetime at least; and as the public hasn't
eyes in the back of its head, and scarcely even in the front, no consequences can ensue"
(Letters 4: 222). In much the same spirit as Henry St George, Henry James disparages the
"great chatter" of popular if ignorant approval, but is nonetheless perturbed by its resolute
absence. Henry. St George complains that "precisely those who really know don't speak of him":
Henry James, too, must have been painfully aware that not every member of his circle of
admirers offered unequivocal adulation. Both Vernon Lee and H. G. Wells parodied James's
style (Lee in Vanitas, Wells in a chapter of Boon). E. M. Forster had his reservations,(n5) as did
Edith Wharton, who expressed impatience with James's later style and wrote to William Brownell
that James "looks, without Ns beard, like a blend of Coquelin and Lord Rosebery, but seems in
good spirits, & talks, thank heaven, more lucidly than he writes" (88). And amongst his most
acerbic critics figured his elder brother William, with whom Henry shared a lifetime of mutual
admiration combined with vigilant censure, and who, like Wharton, disliked James's later
complex and subtle style. Furthermore, any fame accorded to Henry would always, inevitably, be
measured against, and seem somehow inferior to, the reputation of his successful, philosopher
brother.(n6)
The lack of substantial financial reward for his writing served as a nagging reminder to James of
the narrow limits of his popularity. In this respect there is little similarity between himself and
Henry St George: while St George's work provides him with the "idols of the market--money and
luxury and "the world" (239) as evidenced by the hazy contentments of Summersoft, James's
own commercial success was qualified. On more than one occasion he found himself in the
demeaning position of having to winkle the most niggardly of royalties from Macmillan(n7) and,
in general, he had a rather miserable time with publishers and the vagaries of cross-Atlantic
copyright laws.(n8) Hawthorne earned more money for its publishers than it did for its writer;(n9)
The American was pirated;(n10) and he had to watch helplessly and impecuniously as The
Bostonians fell victim to publisher James Osgood's bankruptcy.(n11)
But there was surely no more keenly felt evidence of professional failure for Henry James than
that provided by the audience of his play, Guy Domville, at the St James's Theatre, London, on 5
January 1895. James's biographers have written vivid and moving accounts of how James was
called onto the stage after the performance, expecting to receive adulation, but was faced
instead with humiliating jeers and derision. Here was failure at its loudest and most tangible,
woundingly expressed in a raucous "great chatter" which could not be dismissed: for a writer
exasperated by the "incorruptible silence of Fame," the response of the audience at the St
James's Theatre must have echoed horribly.(n12)
The effect of the shadowy figure of failure in James's career is indicated most clearly by the
evidence of the New York Edition. This project typifies James's ambivalent feelings, towards the
end of his life, about his own artistic and commercial successes and failures. While he docs
express satisfaction with the achievements of, for example, The Portrait of a Lady and The
Ambassadors (Art 52 and 309), the prefaces to the New York Edition in general are troubled by
admissions and (not always convincing) denials of doubt. Texts arc omitted from this collection
of a life's achievement, and their absence creates a nagging lacuna in which suggestions of
dissatisfaction and failure find disturbing expression. Martha Banta contemplates on the causes
4
and consequences of James's decision to leave certain texts out of the New York Edition, and in
particular how this decision reveals James to be participating in the same "aesthetics of refusal"
(259) embraced by so many of his fictional characters. And the mammoth effort which James
put into collecting, rereading, revising and prefacing his earlier work failed to produce the desired
results: financially and critically the project was a great disappointment.(n13)
Given James's own difficult encounters with mastery, it is perhaps not surprising that the term in
"The Lesson of the Master" is treated with considerable complexity. At first glance at least, the
appellation of "master" would seem to indicate triumphant control over the artistic medium. But
as the quality of St George's work becomes increasingly uncertain, so the title "master" becomes
shaded with irony, and its initial implications are substantially subverted. This subversion is
instigated early on in the text. The first conversation Paul Overt enjoys on his arrival at
Summersoft is with the footman and, inauspicious as this encounter might seem initially, it is by
no means superficial or gratuitous:
"But that lady, who is she?" he said to the servant before the man went away.
"I think it's Mrs St George, sir."
"Mrs St George, the wife of the distinguished--" Then Paul Overt checked himself, doubting
whether the footman would know.
"Yes, sir--probably, sir," said the servant, who appeared to wish to intimate that a person staying
at Summersoft would naturally be, if only by alliance, distinguished. His manner, however, made
poor Overt feel for the moment as if he himself were but little so.
"And the gentlemen?" he inquired.
"Well, sir, one of them is General Fancourt."
"Ah yes, I know; thank you." General Fancourt was distinguished, there was no doubt of that, for
something he had done, or perhaps even had not done (the young man could not remember
which) some years before in India. (213-14)
The effect of the repetition of the word "distinguished" three times in this short extract serves to
fix our attention on the term and on the difficulty of establishing its precise meaning. The first
allusion refers, presumably, to Henry, St George, the eponymous "master." The distinction the
description initially bestows, however, is diminished somewhat by its second iteration, by which it
is suggested that alt the present occupants of Summersoft are "distinguished," and by which it is
ironically implied that the members of the party are indistinguishable from one another in their
distinctiveness. This playful disarmament of the term gains further effect when General Fancourt
is described as "distinguished ... for something he had done, or perhaps even had not done."
Exactly what makes a person distinguished is made impossible to establish, as the notion of
eminence is parodied to the point of meaninglessness. And this parody, in turn, provokes some
of the story's most vexing questions: what makes an artist so "distinguished" that he may be
called "master"? How can one reliably distinguish between second-rate attempts and the
products of mastery?
5
The rest of the first section of "The Lesson of the Master" enacts this difficulty of distinguishing
which is introduced in the early stages of the story. For example, Paul Overt is unable to make
much sense of the conversation between General Fancourt and his companions ("the latter
looked at him and he looked at them without knowing much who they were, while the talk went
on without enlightening him much as to what it was about" [216]); and Marian Fancourt is
introduced as an enthusiastic but indiscriminate judge of value ("She's very fond of art and
music and literature and all that kind of thing....She has gone to church--she's fond of that too"
(217)). Paul Overt is exasperated by the difficulty of distinguishing between an English artist and
an English gentleman (221-22); this comic observation, combined with a flippant piece of banter
concerning who is "good," who is "bad" and who are "angels" (219), lends an amusing
accompaniment to the general sense of bewilderment Overt--as well as the reader--experiences
in these opening encounters. Rather more seriously, however, there also emerges an intricate
relationship in these early remarks between the activity of "distinguishing between" and the
business of "being distinguished" that resonates throughout the story.
The apparently uncomplicated term "master" becomes increasingly qualified and redefined in the
tale, so much so that Henry St George (to whom the term always refers) is rarely described in
any sense that is not contradictory or ironic. Mrs St George calls him "Poor dear Henry" (257);
he is, variously, the "poor peccable great man" (229), "the great misguided novelist" (216), "the
pardonable master" (232) and "the mocking fiend" (283); he writes at a tall desk "like a clerk at a
counting-house" (258); he describes himself as a "weary, wasted, used-up animal" (237) and "a
successful charlatan" (262). Perhaps most revealingly, he is referred to by the narrator in the
space of two sentences as both "the head of the profession" and "the master of the house"
(256). The implication of this ironic juxtaposition seems to be that distinguishing between the two
positions is possibly not as simple as one might at first assume, and, therefore, that the term
"master" has a mundane, domesticated currency which irrevocably diminishes its special
application: it is no longer a term of distinction. The repeated requalification of the word "master"
forcefully implies that St George cannot, after all, be convincingly set apart from the
unremarkable General Fancourt: like the General, the writer is "distinguished ... for something
he had done, or perhaps even had not done."
The character who, possibly until the very end of the tale, most devotedly regards Henry St
George as "the master" is, of course, Paul Overt, and allusions to his adulation are made in such
a manner as to underscore significantly the irony with which mastery is treated by James in this
story. In the spirit of Marian Fancourt, who seems to regard art as a vague pseudo-religion and
who is, apparently, as "fond" of church as she is of literature, Overt's devotion is frequently and
deprecatingly described in religious terms. For example, he regards Mrs St George's references
to her husband's work, and his own allusion to "St George and the dragon," as "profane" (224
and 231). He describes himself as "prostrate" (229) before the older writer, and, when faced with
what he perceives to be St George's treachery, he "blasphemed even against all that had been
left of his faith" (279,emphasis added). The diction of the disciple is tenacious: it survives Overt's
occasional twinge of doubt and "the torment of being able neither clearly to esteem [St George]
nor distinctly to renounce him" (259). The extremes of Overt's fervor are exposed when it is
noted that St George (whose sincerity is, at the least, uncertain, at the worst, deviously
contrived) uses the same devotional terminology: he speaks of the "altar of literature" (262), of
the necessity, to "do it and make it divine" (269); he describes himself as "the depressing, the
deplorable illustration of the worship of false gods" and promises that as "an act of faith" he will
"tie [his] vanity to the stake for [Overt] and burn it to ashes" (239). The questionable veracity of
St George's remarks has the effect of exposing and satirizing, by comparison, Overt's artless
acolyteship.
Overt's naïve assumptions about what constitutes mastery and aesthetic success are satirized
to particularly striking effect when his views on what a master should look like are revealed. His
convictions are shown to be childlike and stereotyped: according to him, a master cannot have
"contradictory, conventional whiskers" (216), nor would he take "the important little woman in the
aggressively Parisian dress for [a] domestic partner" (218). Overt is comically elated when he
regards St George's coat ("it was a coat for talk and promised confidences--it must have
received so many--and had pathetic literary, elbows" [258]), and equally comically disappointed
6
that St George should, after all, be so indistinguishable from a gentleman, "in his tall black hat
and his superior frock coat" (222). It must also be noted that the extremity of Overt's reaction to
what he perceives as St George's betrayal, exacerbated as it is with frustrated sexual and
artistic jealousy, further discredits his ability to "distinguish between" and accurately to identify
the "distinguished."
A healthy antidote to Overt's prostration before St George is offered by Mrs St George. She
bestows upon her husband a regard of "unmistakable serenity" (222), and has been known to
remark that "she didn't care for perfection" (251). She is also notorious for having made her
husband "burn up a bad book" (219), to Overt's horror. Of course, just what Mrs St George's
influence has been over her husband's career is never unequivocally established; however, the
role she plays of exposing, to the reader, the speciousness of mastery is unmistakable. Her
purpose in the text is made clear in a remark which resonates with provocative ironies: "Paul
Overt suspected her of a tendency to figure great people as larger than life, until he noticed the
manner in which she handled Lady Egbert, which was so subversive that it reassured him" (21819). Obviously, it is Overt himself who is most guilty of figuring "great people" as "larger than
life." And Mrs St George's "subversive" tactics are not, it seems, directed towards Lady Egbert
alone, but also towards the unsound foundations upon which mastery is built. As much as Overt
is "reassured" by Mrs St George's shrewd treatment of Lady Egbert, the text is destabilized by
James's "subversive" portrayal of Mrs St George.
Persistent qualifications of the meaning of "perfection" in "The Lesson of the Master" also lend
support to the argument that the story, should be considered a critical appraisal of the
configurations of aesthetic failure and mastery. For example, the term "decent perfection"
(Novels 15: 75), used to describe the ideal aim of aesthetic effort, undercuts its apparent
signification: there is something distinctly qualified about a "perfection" that is "decent" (the term
implying modesty, even mediocrity, rather than sublime achievement or excellence), to the
extent that the phrase becomes a virtual contradiction in terms.(n14) Similarly, St George's
"supposition that a certain perfection is possible and even desirable" (264,emphasis added)
intimates a depleted excellence that, surely, cannot actually mean "perfection" at all. Later, in his
long conversation about success and failure with Paul Overt, St George lampoons the illogical
premise that there might be degrees of perfection:
Do you call it success to make you blush ... if some foreign critic ... were to say to you: "He's the
one, in this country, whom they consider the most perfect, isn't he?" Is it success to be the
occasion of a young Englishman's having to stammer as you would have to stammer at such a
moment for old England? No, no; success is to have made people tremble after another fashion.
(265; emphasis added)
Furthermore, the way in which "the high theme of perfection" (252) is bandied about in the
contrived sincerity of the conversation between Marian Fancourt and Overt considerably lessens
the profundity of their observations, so that "perfection," the ideal and art all fall within the story's
equivocal ambit.
A consideration of the problem of mastery in this story would be incomplete without a careful
look at just what it is that St George has achieved to deserve the title. Perhaps not surprisingly,
this is yet another ambiguous aspect of the text. Those in the story who express an opinion
about St George's writing seem to agree that his earlier work surpasses the quality of his most
recent, and it is on the basis of these early texts that his reputation is established. James's
readers appear to have unanimously shared this view.(n15) But of all the scholarly attention
given to this tale, little has been clearly directed at St George's entitlement to the name "the
master" (in spite of the unanimous view of his failure), or at the deeply ironic undercurrents that
ripple through the tale every time this term is used to describe him.(n16) And it is surely
inconsistent to take the word of St George, Overt and Marian Fancourt as accurate and
unproblematic on this issue, when their views have proven to be questionable in other respects.
7
The reader who looks for firmer evidence for St George's reputation in descriptions of the
writer's work will look in vain. Shadowmere (235), apparently one of St George's great
successes, remains undescribed beyond the rather disturbing implications of elusiveness and
insubstantiality in the "mere shadow" of its title. Another text, the inscrutable "story" told by the
"measured mask" (Novels 15: 18) of St George's face, is barely more penetrable:
That story came out as one read, in little instalments ... and the text was a style considerably
involved--a language not easy to translate at sight. There were shades of meaning in it and a
vague perspective of history which receded as you advanced. (224)
The only other work by St George that is referred to is the one that his wife caused him to burn
and which, perhaps significantly, was about himself (267). Therefore, the one text that might
have revealed something about his own attitudes towards the accolade of mastery has (like so
many of the works of art in James's stories and novels) been destroyed. The notion of mastery
is located in very, uncertain territory, indeed.
In "The Lesson of the Master," the piercing shafts of satire and irony aimed at the interrelated
problems of aesthetic success, failure and mastery, also find their mark in the reader intrigued
by James's own position on these matters. Just what failure in the aesthetic context constituted
for James changed considerably throughout his career. Whether or not it is possible to establish,
as Paul Overt requires, "what his ideal may have been," to discover "what he really proposed to
himself," is questionable. While James's comments in the prefaces to the New York Edition give
us some indication of his "ideal," it must, I think, be borne in mind that these comments can be
as enigmatic, as laced with irony and obfuscation, as "The Lesson of the Master" itself. And
perhaps inevitably, the purpose of "The Lesson of the Master" is not easy to discern. On the one
hand, James's critical portrayal of Paul Oven's and Marian Fancourt's acolyteship, and his hints
at St George's devious authority, suggest that he deliberately exposes the sophistical
constitution of mastery. On the other hand, such skepticism is never unqualified or clear-cut.
Notwithstanding the (extreme) possibility that St George's "lesson" is entirely self-serving and
mean-spirited, it is difficult to detect any malicious or cynical motive in, for example, his central
outburst about "the incorruptible silence of Fame." Furthermore, a tantalizing hint of what will
become Strether's famous, heart-rending and possibly authorial injunction to Bilham to "Live!"
(216) in The Ambassadors might be heard in this exchange from "The Lesson of the Master":
Paul held the other's hand a minute; he looked into his face. "No, I am an artist--I can't help it!"
"Ah, show it then!" St George broke out--"let me see before I die the thing I most want, the thing
I yearn for--a life in which the passion is really intense. If you can be rare, don't fail of it! Think
what it is--how it counts--how it lives!" They had moved to the door and St George had closed
both his own hands over that of his companion. Here they paused again and Paul Overt
ejaculated--"I want to live!"
"In what sense?"
"In the greatest sense."
"Well then, stick to it--see it through." (270)(n17)
8
As the two writers' hands are closed together, there glimmers-momentarily--a communion
between the putative master and the would-be master; between the desire for popular acclaim
and the desire to renounce earthly trappings for a life of untrammeled, aesthetic purity; and
between the wistful acknowledgement of failure and the tantalizing promise of triumph.
(n1) Some readers contend that the story is not ambiguous at all: see, for example, Brian Lee
(52), Granville H. Jones (145-46) and Adeline R. Tintner (145). Nevertheless, it must be said
that most of the readers of "The Lesson of the Master" acknowledge, in yawing degrees and with
different views of its purpose, some element of intriguing ambiguity in the story. These include
Maxwell Geismar (114), Manfred Mackenzie (66), Peter Barry, Edward Wagenknecht (52),
Richard Hocks (51), Sara S. Chapman (94) and Philip Horne (289-314).
(n2) Brooke K. Horvath uses the term "failure" unproblematically in his essay on the "Aesthetics
of Defeat" in James's short fiction. As his title reveals, "failure" for Horvath is simply a synonym
for "defeat." However, I would argue that Horvath's entertaining and witty article docs not
adequately address the extent and complexity of James's lifelong preoccupation with the
problematics of aesthetic failure.
(n3) See Edel (Life 2: 691). It is, however, quite possible that James's contemporaries, as well
as James himself, used the term "master" with at least an inkling of its ironic reverberations,
especially given the subversive treatment of literary. authority in "The Lesson of the Master."
Nevertheless, subsequent admirers of James's work--Edel in particular--have used the term
apparently unaware of its satirical potential.
(n4) Philip Home ponders on the viability of regarding "The Lesson of the Master" as a
"confessional" piece (294-95). Ross Posnock makes the point that while significant similarities
between St George and James exist, and while "the master's lesson is one with which James
would have great sympathy, closer scrutiny reveals that St George vulgarizes and simplifies his
creator's beliefs" (82). Posnock argues that "James's biographical relation to 'The Lesson of the
Master' is, finally, double in nature: he is St George (whose first name is after all Henry) and
Overt, master and disciple" (102). One might supplement Horne's and Posnock's convincing
arguments by suggesting that Paul Overt is modeled on the young Henry James. In Notes of a
Son and Brother, James provides this account of his first meeting with Charles Dickens:
I can imagine no actual young person of my then age, and however like myself, so ineffably
agitated, so mystically moved, in the presence of any exhibited idol of the mind who should be in
that character at all conceivably "like" the author of Pickwick and of Copperfield .... [Dickens
stood] there as in a sublimity of mastership. I saw the master--nothing could be more evident--in
the light of an intense emotion, and I trembled, I remember, in every limb, while at the same
time, by a blest fortune, emotion produced no luminous blur, but left him shining indeed, only
shining with August particulars. (Notes of a Son and Brother: 236-37)
James's vocabulary when speaking of Dickens is strikingly similar in its religious fervor to that of
Paul Overt when referring to St George. I would propose, therefore, that while a strictly
biographical reading of "The Lesson of the Master" might be limiting in certain respects, distinct
biographical suggestions in the composite construction of Overt and St George exist
nevertheless--suggestions distinct enough to take on the shape of authorial deliberations on the
temptations and trappings of mastery.
(n5) See Furbank (163).
9
(n6) In his biography of Henry James, Leon Edel investigates the relationship between Henry
and William in some detail and suggests that the rivalry between the two was the cause of a
number of Henry's physical and mental infirmities. (See, for example, Life 2: 335-43.)
(n7) See Kaplan (187 and 217-18).
(n8) See Culver (43), Anesko (81) and Kaplan (292-93).
(n9) See Kaplan (205-06).
(n10) See Edel (Life 1: 513).
(n11) See Kaplan (281-85).
(n12) See Kaplan (378), Edel (Life 2: 157), Graham ("Stress" 109) and, for a slightly different
interpretation, Ellmann (225).
(n13) See Horne (1-19), Anesko (84-85) and Margolis (91-92).
(n14) Philip Home draws attention to this revision of the early edition of the story and argues that
the "story itself can be read as an example of the kind of 'decent perfection' ... St George pleads
for." He refers to the phrase in order to dispute claims that "The Lesson of the Master" is a
"'confessional' work" (Horne 295). Ross Posnock makes the point that James "believed
perfection to be a spurious goal" (Posnock 83), a claim that has some validity, but which fails to
consider the many suggestions in James's writing to the contrary'. However, neither Horne nor
Posnock considers the troubling implications of common, shrunken value associated with
perfection in this story.
(n15) Usually in passing, St George is described as "an artist of failed promise who has not
exercised [the] requisite disciplines" (Chapman 36), "a best-selling novelist who has never really
attained perfection" (Rimmon 79-80), one who "has produced several 'great' novels, [but whose]
works have become more and more superficial through the years" (Walton 72) and whose work
"we know to be some way below the high level of perfection" (Home 291).
(n16) Ross Posnock offers some possible reasons for St George's title, but he concentrates on
the parallels between James (as disciple and master) and Robert Browning (as a master whom
James must defeat), and the consequences for lames of Browning's sexual mastery (94-104).
Posnock does not dwell on the problems surrounding St George's artistic claims to the title.
However, his conclusion that "only great artists can acknowledge the difficult and unflattering
truth that 'fallibility' and mastery are inextricable" (104) is relevant and astute.
(n17) While similarities between The Ambassadors and "The Lesson of the Master" resonate
here, there are important differences between the two as well. In The Ambassadors, Strether
seems to postulate "living" as an alternative to the renunciation of experience and passion that
has shaped his own life of "Duty and conscience" (Notebooks 141); Overt and St George, on the
other hand, are proposing the virtues of a fife dedicated solely to art.
10
WORKS CITED
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New York Edition." McWhirter 77-89.
Banta, Martha. "The Excluded Seven: Practice of Omission, Aesthetics of Refusal." McWhirter
240-60.
Barry, Peter. "In Fairness to the Master's Wife: A Re-interpretation of 'The Lesson of the
Master.'" Studies in Short Fiction 15 (1978): 385-89.
Chapman, Sara S. Henry James's Portrait of the Writer as Hero. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990.
Culver, Stuart. "Ozymandias and the Mastery of Ruins: The Design of the New York Edition."
McWhirter 39-57.
Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977. 2 vols.
-----. "Some Notes on the Master's Birthdays." The Henry James Review 14:2 (1993): 129-31.
Ellmann, Richard. "Henry James Amongst the Aesthetes." Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in
American Literature and History. Proceedings of the British Academy 69 (1983): 209-28.
Furbank, P. N. E M Forster: A Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.
Geismar, Maxwell. Henry James and the Jacobites. Boston: Houghton, 1963.
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Horvath, Brooke K. "The Life of Art, the Art of Life: The Ascetic Aesthetics of Defeat in James's
Stories of Writers and Artists." Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1982): 93-107.
11
James, Henry. The Ambassadors. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986.
-----. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James. Edited by R. P. Blackmur. New
York: Scribner's, 1934.
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12
Posnock, Ross. Henry James and the Problem of Robert Browning. Athens: U of Georgia P,
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Rimmon, Shlomith. The Concept of Ambiguity--the Example of James. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
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~~~~~~~~
By Karen I. Scherzinger
Title: 'He thinks he's a failure--fancy!' Henry James's 'The Lesson of the Master' , By:
Scherzinger, Karen I., Studies in Short Fiction, Summer99, Vol. 36, Issue 3