The Other Lambert Strether: Henry James's The Ambassadors, Balzac's Louis Lambert, and J.H. Lambert

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 230-258

  Hutchison, Hazel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949865324     PISSN: 08919356     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2003.58.2.230     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. T. S. Eliot, "In Memory of Henry James," Egoist, 5 (1918), 1-2
2. rpt. in Critical Thought Series 5: Critical Essays on Henry James, ed. Peter Rawlings (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), p. 150
3. See Leon Edel and Adeline R. Tintner, eds., "The Library of Henry James, from Inventory, Catalogues, and Library Lists," Henry James Review, 4 (1983), 158-90
4. Henry James, rev. of Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens, rpt. in Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), p. 857
5. Henry James, "The Art of Fiction" (1884), in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, p. 53
6. Bellringer, The Ambassadors (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), p. 21
7. The question of James's philosophical sources has long been a vexed one. In The American Henry James (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1957) Quentin Anderson's attempt to prove that James's novels were the dramatization of his father's Swedenborgianism sparked a critical backlash insisting on the novelist's intellectual freedom. Dorothea Krook denies that James's view of reality had any definite source: "he did not take it from anywhere, or anybody, in particular: neither from Hegel, nor F. H. Bradley, nor from his brother William's Pragmatism, nor (least of all) from his father's Swedenborgian system. I have supposed he took it from the ambient air of nineteenth-century speculation, whose main current was the preoccupation with the phenomenon of self-consciousness" (The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962], pp. 410-11)
8. Even Richard A. Hocks, in his illuminating study, goes out of his way to stress that the novelist "unconsciously pragmatised" (see Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought: A Study in the Relationship between the Philosophy of William James and the Literary Art of Henry James [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1974], p. 5)
9. But Ross Posnock challenges this tendency, stating in the opening line of his study his "modest intention of taking Henry James seriously as an intellectual" (The Trial of Curiosity [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991], p. vii). This work remains the most comprehensive treatment of James's connections to the philosophical thought of his age
10. Over the last decade several important critical works have focused on the presence of phenomenological ideas in James's work. Alongside Posnock's The Trial of Curiosity, see Paul B. Armstrong, The Phenomenology of Henry James (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1983)
11. Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel: Being and Seeing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993)
12. Julie Rivkin, False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James's Fiction (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996)
13. and Collin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). These critics have all explored the importance of experience and perception in James's fiction as vehicles of knowledge. Of these writers only Posnock sees James as consciously rooted in the philosophical tradition, while the others see him as working parallel to the rising ideas of phenomenology and anticipating elements of post-structural linguistic and critical theory
14. Henry James, The Ambassadors (London: Methuen and Co., 1903), p. 11. Unless otherwise noted, further references to The Ambassadors are to this edition and are included in the text
15. See Henry James, "Preface to The Ambassadors" (1909), in his Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), p. 1,309
16. Henry James, "Honoré de Balzac, 1902," in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces, p. 97
17. See Greene, "Henry James," in The English Novelists: A Survey of the Novel by Twenty Contemporary Novelists, ed. Derek Verschoyle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1936), p. 215
18. Greene is quoting Henry James from The Ivory Tower (first published 1917)
19. See Cornelia Pulsifer Kelley, The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1930)
20. and F. O. Matthiessen, introduction to The American Novels and Stories of Henry James, ed. Matthiessen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), pp. vii-xxvii
21. See Tintner, The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987)
22. See also Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976)
23. and William W. Stowe, Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983)
24. James W. Gargano, "The Ambassadors and Louis Lambert," Modern Language Notes, 75 (1960), 213
25. Bettina L. Knapp, "Louis Lambert: The Legend of the Thinking Man," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 6 (1977-78), 35
26. Honoré de Balzac, "Les Martyrs Ignorés" (1837, 1843)
27. quoted and trans, in André Maurois, Prometheus: The Life of Balzac, trans. Norman Denny (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 104
28. Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert (1883)
29. rpt. in Seraphita, A Daughter of Eve, and Other Stories, trans. Clara Bell and R. S. Scott (Philadelphia: Gebbie Publishing, 1899), p. 205
30. Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (1914); rpt. in his Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (London: W. H. Allen, 1956), pp. 339-40
31. See Charles R. Anderson, Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James's Novels (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1977)
32. Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913), rpt. in Autobiography, p. 123
33. Henry James, "Preface to The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, The Liar, The Two Faces" (1908), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces, p. 1,185
34. Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), p. 402
35. See Marie-Luis Waldeck, "Johann Heinrich Lambert, 1728-1777: A Bicentenary Tribute," Publications of the English Goethe Society, 48 (1978), 104-27
36. Immanuel Kant, letter to J. H. Lambert, 31 December 1765, in Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, 1759-99, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 47
37. See Harold Griffing, "J. H. Lambert: A Study in the Development of the Critical Philosophy," Philosophical Review, 2 (1893), 54-62
38. Adolf Reinach, letter to Theodor Conrad, September 1910; quoted in Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith, "Adolf Reinach: An Intellectual Biography," in Speech Act and Sachverhalt: Reinach and the Foundations of Realist Phenomenology, ed. Kevin Mulligan (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 18
39. Peirce, Elements of Logic, in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1931-66), II, 197
40. See Johann Heinrich Lambert, Neues Organon, Oder Gedanken über die Erforschung und Bezeichnung des Wahren und dessen Unterscheidung vom Irrthum und Schein (1764), 2 vols., vols. 1-2 of his Philosophische Schriften, ed. Hans Werner Arndt (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965)
41. Henry James, The Ambassadors, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), II, 266
42. See F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family, Including Selections from the Writings of Henry James, Senior, William, Henry, and Alice James (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 143
43. J. H. Lambert, Cosmological Letters on the Arrangement of the World-Edifice (1761), trans. Stanley L. Jaki (New York: Science History Publications, 1976), p. 175
44. See J. H. Lambert, Anlage zur Architectonic, oder Theorie des Einfachen und des Ersten in der Philosophischen und Mathematischen Erkenntniss (1771), 2 vols., vols. 3-4 of Philosophische Schriften
45. See Henry James, "Is There a Life After Death?" in W. D. Howells, et al., In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910), pp. 199-233
46. William James, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" (1904), in his Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), p. 14
47. See also William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902)
48. See Norman Kretzmann, "Semantics, History of," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, et al., 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan Co. and The Free Press, 1967), VII, 386
49. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1974), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. 49
50. Paul G. Beidler, Frames in James: "The Tragic Muse," "The Turn of the Screw," "What Maisie Knew," and "The Ambassadors" (Victoria, B.C.: Univ. of Victoria, 1993), p. 83
51. See Tintner, Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 87-91
52. and Hervey, Holbein's "Ambassadors": The Picture and the Men: An Historical Study (London: Bell and Son, 1900)
53. See Roger Jaquel, "Le Problème nuancé de la 'nationalité' du 'Leibniz alsacien' Jean Henri Lambert (1728-1777)," Studies on Voltaire, 88 (1972), 789-807
54. See Waldeck, 'Johann Heinrich Lambert," p. 109
55. Nicola Bradbury, Henry James: The Later Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 38
56. See John North, The Ambassadors' Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance (London: Hambledon and London, 2002)