HENRY JAMES' PURSUIT OF MORAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Abstract

The development of Henry James' style is expressed by his magnificent intelligence. In The pertrait of a lady Isebol Archer's life started and restarts from Gardencourt. And she puts on the tleck dress which seems to symbolise a certain refinement of pathes. His grasp of psycholegichl realism is remarhahie. His dramatic method remains esthetic as wellas his theme of signiflcant beauty of moral intelligence. Henry James creats a moral refinement of the best American kind, Isabel Archer, and an ideal civiliantion, a maturity of human culture. It is in this light that we must try to see Henry James--in the light of high civilization, a figure of large and noble dimensions, a man indubitably of his time and place, yet with his craft and with the problems of the one with an abiding sense of his destiny that invariable enabled him to triumph over certain of his deeply rooted inner problems.1 We have surveyed and considered Isabel's psychological precess. The value of the novel is laid in the heroine's individual moral sense. Henry James sets up moral presperity in witch th estheitic sense and intellectual power are balanced. Ianbel Archer, the beroine of The Fortrait of a Lady, accepts her destiny significantly though it is not the way she dreamed of. Her ideas and demands for life are injured, but she makes herself responsible for her unbappiness and restarts her lirs. The erisis is the moral one. It is a personal proboem rather than asocial one, But the individuel behavior from a personal moral sense entublishes an international character. It is a remarkable effort of Henry James who gives a deep and minute examination of moral relation to the erisis, Henry James' outstanding character. Isabel Areher, tries to keep a moral balance. In the novel Henry James allows a ruin of innoconce. His greater aspect is his love and high estimation of innocence. His view of merality identifies the truth of art with the truth of life. The quality of mind and intelligence makes a aubstance of beauty and truth, with which Henry James illustrates the higher eivilimation. The novel procends from a high quality of mind and intelligance. Henry James bulids the herocine's right fate-not to surrander, but to return to her faith. We cannot lock over the fact that in the higher civilimation "life is an art." But esthetics will not satisfy natural integrity of the human being. The trus valus and essence of human life point "the way toward greater understanding" of moral integrity. The moral sense, the moral intelligence, takes an important place in human life because it is a reguletor of action and a guide of human integrity. Moral intelligence, as the guide of human conduct and decision is necessary in the modern world, The Second World War has brought a tremendous change in our life. Through the war our philosophy lost its base and the notion of truth si transformed. The prevailing dubiousness drives men and women into a complete nihil or into especially irrecoverable ennul and morbidity, into the hell of immorality, Increased prosperity accompanied by mass-production, one of the characteristics of the twentleth century, has made human being the slave of machines, dapriving them of perscnality and humaness. Moreover with the collapse of the established moral order and the standard of human conduct, we have complete freodom, in other sense, anarchism in human thought and spirit. The limitless freedom may provide inflnits capacity and chance for one to work in the fields of human thought and spirit, but it rather leads one to a chaetis anarchy. The moral intelligence penstrates through an enternal and spiritual milleu of an individual and awakes respensibility for his conduct. The moral intelligence will also restore the balance and function as a lind between the highly advanced knowledge and the morbid taste of modern man. Our civilization depends much upon its constituent with the well-balanced and harmonized life by his intellectual, esthetic, moral sense.