The Dark Sonnets of the Lady Book

CONFIDENCE in INSCRUTABILITY

This less well-known novel by Henry James is certainly worth reading. Published between The Europeans and Washington Square, the reader may think that Daisy Miller has come back to life so that she can finish it.

This is also a good novel to read for those who are scared of Henry James and his inscrutability. For the language is polished, is crafted, but it is not ambiguous. Or at least it is not overtly ambiguous even if James can play with the reader using ambiguities. Plus there is his fine irony and humor. In this book one senses that he must have enjoyed writing it.

I used to see James as an aesthetician but I am beginning to see his roots in the 19C concerns with morality. The concern he tackled in Roderick Hudson - to what extent ought one to interfere with somebody else's life reappears in these pages again. But only to then be discarded.

Or may be not entirely. The French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792-1897) is mentioned twice in the novel - one of the characters, who engages in 'casuistry', is presented reading his books. This intrigued me because Cousin is the only theoretician alluded to in the entire book and it made me think that Henry James could have been engaged with Cousin's ideas while writing his novel. Not having read Cousin's works, I just investigated in the web. From what I could gather, Cousin insisted on the strength and power of psychological observation; he also contended with the potential of the 'Self' and free volition. And may be these ideas are at the core of the somewhat enigmatic title of the book, Confidence.

To put this assuredness into action, James resorted to another of his female creations, the reborn Daisy Miller, an "Angela" who this time becomes the vehicle for shaping, in a 'Cousin-manner', an ending that, unusually in James, is enclosed, clean and somewhat comic.


And this is done with a full, but somewhat inscrutable, Confidence.