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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Henry James tells us in his preface to the revised edition of his novels, with what interest and emotion he renewed acquaintance with his book, Roderick Hudson, after a quarter of a century had elapsed since its first appearance, in 1875. He takes up its failings and its defects, of which he is fully conscious and which he sees with very keen perspicacity. He writes:
I have felt myself then, on looking over past productions, the painter making use again and again of the tentative wet sponge. The sunk surface has here and there, beyond doubt, refused to respond: the buried secrets, the intentions, are buried too deep to rise again, and were indeed, it would appear, not much worth the burying. Not so, however, when the moistened canvas does obscurely flush and when resort to the varnish-bottle is thereby immediately indicated. The simplest figure for my revision of this present array of earlier, later, larger, smaller, canvases, is to say that I have achieved it by the very aid of the varnish-bottle. It is true of them throughout that, in words I have had occasion to use in another connexion (where too I had revised with a view to “possible amendment of form and enhancement of meaning”) I have nowhere scrupled to re-write a sentence or a passage on judging it susceptible of a better turn.
I have felt myself then, on looking over past productions, the painter making use again and again of the tentative wet sponge. The sunk surface has here and there, beyond doubt, refused to respond: the buried secrets, the intentions, are buried too deep to rise again, and were indeed, it would appear, not much worth the burying. Not so, however, when the moistened canvas does obscurely flush and when resort to the varnish-bottle is thereby immediately indicated. The simplest figure for my revision of this present array of earlier, later, larger, smaller, canvases, is to say that I have achieved it by the very aid of the varnish-bottle. It is true of them throughout that, in words I have had occasion to use in another connexion (where too I had revised with a view to “possible amendment of form and enhancement of meaning”) I have nowhere scrupled to re-write a sentence or a passage on judging it susceptible of a better turn.
1 This study is the result of investigations in connection with a course given by the author as “Lectrice” at the Sorbonne (1920-21). All quatotions from the revised version of Roderick Hudson refer to the Macmillan edition of 1921, those from the first edition, to that of 1883 (2 vols).
