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The Sacred Fount as a Comedy of the Limited Observer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The present reading of The Sacred Fount differs notably from existing interpretations of the novel. Yet it clearly places this book with others of James's experimental period, suggesting that it differs not in kind but in degree. The Sacred Fount is an intellectual detective story, as has often been observed, and part of its interest does consist in the investigation of a hypothetical problem: If it is true, as the narrator speculates, that a vampirish relationship exists between one couple, may an analogous relationship exist between another couple, and who is the second member of that second pair? But The Sacred Fount is not primarily a treatment of the vampire theme, as has frequently been claimed, nor is James concerned with picturing an intellectual Peeping Tom. Nor, I believe, is he primarily concerned with making a profound artistic, moral, or epistemological statement, though there are serious implications to be drawn from the narrator's behavior. Rather, the interest of the novel depends primarily on ironic effect, just as the interest of What Maisie Knew (1897) or In the Cage (1898), and again James's focus is on the observer rather than on the external scene he witnesses. The irony is again that arising from a discrepancy between the insight or knowledge of an intelligent but not infallible observer and the things he contemplates. Maisie has limited understanding because she is a child; the telegraphist is similarly restricted by poverty and her social class; and the narrator of The-Sacred Fount (1901), having both maturity and opportunity to his credit, is handicapped by certain qualities in his character. Perceptive but blinded by pride in his own ingenuity, he is too subtle to interpret accurately the social scene which he witnesses and too proud to admit his perplexities. Once the reader realizes the narrator's limitations, he is sustained by a constant sequence of ironies in a story which, like Maisie, is prevalently humorous in tone.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963
References
1 Henry James, The Sacred Fount (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901). All subsequent parenthetic page references are to this edition, the text of which is reproduced in The Sacred Fount, intro. Leon Edel (New York: Grove Press, 1953). Initial and terminal ellipses are omitted in quotations.
For a brief discussion of particular critical commentaries on the novel, see pp. v–viii of Mr. Edel's “Introductory Essay.” A more exhaustive survey of criticism with very helpful evaluative commentary appears in Oscar Cargill's The Novels of Henry James (New York, 1961), pp. 280–299. Other notable articles which have appeared very recently are: Robert J. Andreach, “Henry James's The Sacred Fount: The Existential Predicament,” NCF, xvii (December 1962), 197–216; Landon C. Burns, Jr., “Henry James's Mysterious Fount,” TSLL, ii (Winter 1961), 520–528; Sidney Finkelstein, “The ‘Mystery’ of Henry James's The Sacred Fount,” Mass. Rev., iii (Summer 1962), 753–776; James K. Folsom, “Archimago's Well: An Interpretation of The Sacred Fount,” MFS, vii (Summer 1961), 136–144; Dorothea Krook, “The Sacred Fount,” The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge, England, 1962), pp. 167–194; Norma Phillips, “The Sacred Fount: The Narrator and the Vampires,” PMLA, lxxvi (September 1961), 407–412; Ralph A. Ranald, “The Sacred Fount: James's Portrait of the Artist Manqué,” NCF, xv (December 1960), 239–248; and James Reaney, “The Condition of Light: Henry James's The Sacred Fount,” UTQ, xxxi (January 1962), 136–151. See also J. A. Ward, The Imagination of Disaster: Evil in the Fiction of Henry James (Lincoln, Neb., 1961), passim, and Mr. Cargill's own interpretation of The Sacred Fount, in The Novels of Henry James, pp. 289–296.
2 One may object that this whole method of reading is too formalized and analytic, that James could not have demanded any such participation from his reader. But the excessive intellectualizing in The Sacred Fount arises from the character James has created: “he is addicted … to the intellectualizing of every human situation; he seems to be prey to anxieties unless he can achieve a kind of intellectual superiority and omniscience over those around him. It is this which makes him feel secure” (Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel, New York, c. 1955, p. 71). To understand the narrator, therefore, one must doggedly meet him on his own ground. James, of course, created a whole group of similar anatomizing types in the “votaries … of analysis” who constitute Mrs. Brookenham's circle in The Awkward Age.
3 Cf. Leon Edel, “An Introductory Essay,” pp. xxiv–xxv.
4 James's statement appears in an unpublished letter quoted by Mr. Edel in his “Introduction” to the Rupert Hart-Davis reprint of The Sacred Fount (London, 1959), p. 9.
I am indebted in developing my own argument against Mrs. Brissenden to Mr. Cargill's essay on The Sacred Fount in his Novels of Henry James. See pp. 293–294 of his essay for further support of the conclusion that she is having an affair with Gilbert Long.
5 The parallel classification of the men in the narrator's view is: Guy Brissenden (whom he pities), Ford Obert (whose views he respects), and Gilbert Long (who does not rise to the narrator's particular brand of wit and whom he therefore dislikes).
6 Obert's remark, together with the fact that she is alone at the house party and has apparently come to other New-march parties alone (p. 14), is the reader's ground for assuming that Mrs. Server is a widow, or perhaps divorced.
7 The narrator frequently employs this technique in his memoir, that of raising the point that a detached critic of his own interpretations might in a given instance raise against him. The effect of his habit is to give him the appearance of being reasonable, but as a consequence he is later able to palm off his own view on the unwary. Though in the present instance, for example, “pity” does not seem to the narrator to be an adequate expression of his feeling, it is precisely the concept he will reintroduce at the time of the climactic interview (pp. 107, 136, 153).
8 These passages, except the first, are from an unpublished letter to Mrs. Ward cited by Leon Edel in his “Introductory Essay” to the Grove Press edition of The Sacred Fount (p. xxx), from which I quote. “Profitless labyrinth,” quoted from the same source (loc. cit.), occurs in an unpublished letter to the Duchess of Sutherland.
9 The humorous implications of the novel and the vulnerability of the narrator are further supported in the text by a topical allusion. For a consideration of this allusion and its bearing on the interpretation of The Sacred Fount, see my forthcoming article, “Henry James and the Exclusive Wag-nerite.” I will take up the problem of the symbolic (and serious) implications of the novel in the longer study from which this article is excerpted.