THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE:

'Tis better to have loved and lost'

When I first read Henry James' 'The Beast in the Jungle' over forty years ago on MI Kuruvilla's recommendation, I thought it the greatest short story I had ever read. On re-reading I find myself of the same opinion, though I realise that its more accurate description is as a nouvelle since it is nearly thirty pages long and is divided into chapters.

James was particularly attached to this form, calling it "the dear, the blessed nouvelle." He evidently appreciated its conduciveness to the development of a single theme with minimal plot, interplay of characters and social context; in short, its facilitating a more poetical treatment of a subject. "The Beast in the Jungle' might well be called a prose poem. Yet, it is poetry such as could only have been achieved through the medium of prose.

John Marcher, in his mid or later thirties and visiting a country house with friends, comes across a woman a few years his junior, who seems to be a dependant of the chatelaine and whom he believes he has met before. May Bartram confirms their having met ten years earlier in Europe and reminds him that he had confided in her his belief that something momentous was going to happen to him. He confesses that it has not yet happened and is grateful to her for her assurance that she will watch with him for whatever is meant to happen to him.

The death of her patroness enables Miss Bartram to move into a modest apartment in London, where they continue to meet. Realising that she has given him a new sense of purpose, he wonders whether marrying her would be appropriate, but puts it out of his mind as something that would hinder his quest. "Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and turns of the months and years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle...The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson of that was that a man of feeling didn't cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt."

Thus, they grow older together, visiting places of interest and dining together. He continues to draw her out on his prospects, but she says he must find out for himself. When she suddenly suffers a decline in health, he is seized with a sense of dread that the "thing" which is to happen to him is round the corner. He presses her to disclose his fate but she declines on the grounds that it is too bad to communicate. Soon she is too ill to leave home, even her chair. He becomes aware that he himself is aging and that time may be running out for him too. When the end seems nigh he renews his efforts to get his secret out of her. After letting him know that what is to happen to him is the worst that could happen, she struggles to her feet and approaches him with all the strength she has left:

'The door isn't shut. The door's open,' said May Bartram. 'Then something's to come?' She waited once again, always with her cold sweet eyes on him. 'It's never too late.' She had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken. Her movement might have been for some finer emphasis of what she was at once hesitating and deciding to say...Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes. She gave way at the same instant to a slow fine shudder, and though he remained staring - though he stared in fact but the harder - turned off and regained her chair. It was the end of what she had been intending....He showed once more his mystification. 'What then has happened?' She was once more, with her companion's (maid's) help, on her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hat and gloves and reached the door. Yet he waited for her answer. 'What WAS to', she said."

When she sees is able to receive him for the last time she repeats that what was to happen to him has happened; and that, as it is now behind him, it is best that he remain ignorant of it since the suffering caused by such knowledge would be too great.

At her funeral he realises that, since he has established no more than an informal relationship with her, he cannot even enjoy the status of the bereaved.

Following the funeral he senses that not only has the beast disappeared from his life but so has the jungle. He travels abroad to regain a meaning to his life, but fails to find any and is drawn back irresistibly to her grave.

"That had become for him, and more intensely with time and distance, his one witness of a past glory....What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most live...Thus in short he settled to live - feeding all on the sense that he once HAD lived, and dependent on it not alone for a support but for an identity."

This could be seen as a satisfactory ending to the tale. And here a lesser author may well have concluded. But the final chapter continues, and after a year of haunting her grave Marcher observes one of the regular mourners at a nearby grave. "This face, one grey afternoon, when the leaves were thick in the alleys, looked into Marcher's own, at the cemetery, with an expression like the cut of a blade....Marcher knew him at once for one of the deeply stricken....The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder..What has the man HAD, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live? Something that HE, John Marcher, hadn't; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher's arid end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant...He had seen OUTSIDE of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself.....The name on the table smote him, as the passage of his neighbor had done, and what it said to him, full in the face, was that she was what he had missed....Everything fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed; leaving him most of all stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The fate he had been marked for had met him with a vengeance. He had been the man of his time, THE man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.

"The escape would have been to love her, THEN he would have lived. SHE had lived - who could now say with what passion - since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use...He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened-it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb."

I have summarised and excerpted the story at some length to convey something of the dramatic intensity and mounting suspense with which James develops it despite the lack of any significant action or dialogue. Also to provide an example of James' style. It is that of his late period, highly wrought and convoluted, and of his own favourite novel of the same year (1903), 'The Ambassadors'. In the latter this style has failed to impress most critics including Leavis and Kuruvilla. But here it is the ideal medium for the psychological thriller and the poetic drama that this nouvelle proves to be. There is no more terrifying and tragic artistic demonstration of the Tennysonian axiom: "'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all."