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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/37300-8.txt b/37300-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e07e46a --- /dev/null +++ b/37300-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2695 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry James, by Rebecca West + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Henry James + +Author: Rebecca West + +Release Date: September 3, 2011 [EBook #37300] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY JAMES *** + + + + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + + + + + + +HENRY JAMES + +[Illustration: Photo portrait of Henry James] + + + + +HENRY JAMES + +By + +REBECCA WEST + +KENNIKAT PRESS, INC. / PORT WASHINGTON, N. Y. + + + + +HENRY JAMES + +First Published in 1916 +Reissued in 1968 by Kennikat Press + +Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 67-27663 + +Manufactured in the United States of America + + + + +AUTHOR'S NOTE + + +_I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness for help in compiling the +bibliography to Mr James B. Pinker, Miss Wilma Meikle, and Messrs +Constable; and to Messrs Macmillan for the loan of the New York Edition +of the Novels and Tales of Henry James._ + +R. W. + + + + +CONTENTS + + + PAGE + + I. THE SOURCES 9 + + II. THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION 24 + +III. TRANSITION 55 + + IV. THE CRYSTAL BOWL 86 + + V. THE GOLDEN BOWL 105 + + BIBLIOGRAPHY 119 + + AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY 124 + + INDEX 127 + + + + +I + +THE SOURCES + + +At various times during the latter half of the eighteenth century there +crossed the Atlantic two Protestant Irishmen, a Lowland Scotsman, and an +Englishman, and thereby they fixed the character of Mr Henry James' +genius. For the essential thing about Mr James was that he was an +American; and that meant, for his type and generation, that he could +never feel at home until he was in exile. He came of a stock that was +the product of culture and needed it as part of its environment. But at +the time of his childhood and youth--he was born in 1843--culture was a +thing that was but budding here and there in America, in such corners as +were not being used in the business of establishing the material +civilisation of the new country. The social life of old New York and +Boston had its delicacy, its homespun honesty of texture, its austerer +sort of beauty; but plainly the American people were too preoccupied by +their businesses and professions to devote their money to the +embellishment of _salons_ or their intelligence to the development of +manners. Hawthorne and Emerson and Margaret Fuller and their friends +were trying to make a culture against time; but any record of their +lives which gives a candid account of how desperately these people had +to struggle to make the meanest living shows that the poor American ants +were then utterly unable to form the leisured community which is the +necessary environment for grasshoppers. "The impression of Emerson's +personal history is condensed into the single word Concord," wrote Mr +James later, "and all the condensation in the world will not make it +rich." There was no blinking the fact that in attempting to set up in +this unfinished country Art was like a delicate lady who moves into a +house before the plaster is dried on the walls; she was bound to lead an +invalid existence. + +This incapacity of America to supply the colour of life became obvious +to Henry and William James, the two charming little boys in tight +trousers and brass-buttoned jackets, one of whom grew up to write +fiction as though it were philosophy and the other to write philosophy +as though it were fiction, at a very early age. It did not escape their +infant observation that the ladies and gentlemen who fascinated them by +dancing on the tight-rope at Barnum's Museum always bore exotic names, +and when they grew older and developed the youthful taste for anecdotic +art they found it could be gratified only by such European importations +as Thorwaldsen's _Christ and His Disciples_, the great white images of +which were ranged round the maroon walls of the New York Crystal Palace, +or Benjamin's Haydon's pictures in the Düsseldorf collection in +Broadway. And when they grew older still and began to show a fine talent +for painting and drawing their unfolding artistic sense found more and +more intimations of the wonder of Europe. _A View of Tuscany_ that hung +in the Jameses' home was pronounced by a friend who had lived much in +Italy not to be of Tuscany at all. Colours in Tuscany were softer; but +such brightness might be found in other parts of Italy. So Europe was as +various as that--a place of innumerable changing glories like a sunrise, +but better than a sunrise, inasmuch as every glory was encrusted with +the richness of legend. + +But most powerful of all influences that made the Jameses rebel against +the narrowness of Broadway and the provincial spareness of the old New +York, which must have been something like a neat virgin Bloomsbury, was +their father. The Reverend Henry James was wasted on young America; it +had developed neither the creative stream that would have inspired him +nor the intellectual follies that he could slay with that beautiful wit +which made him one of the great letter-writers of the world. "Carlyle is +the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease, only +infinitely _more_ unreconciled to the blest Providence which guides +human affairs. He names God frequently and alludes to the highest things +as if they were realities, but all only as for a picturesque effect, so +completely does he seem to regard them as habitually circumvented and +set at naught by the politicians." The man who could write that should +have been a strong and salutary influence on English culture, and he +knew it. It is probable that when he and his wife paid what Mr James +tells us was their "first (that is our mother's first) visit to Europe, +which had quite immediately followed my birth, which appears to have +lasted some year and a half"--the last clause of this sentence is +unfortunate for a novelist famous for his deliberation--he brought his +babies with him with a solemnity of intention, as if to dip them in a +holy well. Thus it was that the little Jameses not only bore themselves +proudly through their childhood as became those who had lived as babies +in Piccadilly, and read _Punch_ with a proprietary instinct, but were +also possessed in spirit by something that was more than the discontent +with the flatness of daily life and the desire for a brighter scene that +comes to the ordinary child. From their father's preoccupation they +gained a rationalised consciousness that America was an incomplete +environment, that in Europe there were many mines of treasure which they +must find and rifle if they hoped for the health of their minds and the +salvation of their souls. + +In 1855, when Henry James was twelve, the family yielded to its passion +and crossed the Atlantic. The following four years were of immense +importance to Mr James, and consequently to ourselves, for he had been +born with a mind that received impressions as if they had been embraces +and remembered them with as fierce a leaping of the blood; just as his +brother William's mind acquired and created systems of thought as +joyously as other men like meeting friends and establishing a family. He +found London in the main jolly, rather ugly, but comfortable and full of +character, just as he had seen it in _Punch_, but here and there +detected--notably on a drive from London Bridge--black outcrops of +Hogarth's London. "It was a soft June evening, with a lingering light +and swarming crowds, as they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me +of George Cruikshank's Artful Dodger and his Bill Sykes and his Nancy, +only with the bigger brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the +Early Victorian four-wheeler, as we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped +up in more and more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, +somewhere far to the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab +window, of a woman reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground +with a blow in the face." He knew Paris, then being formed by the free +flourish of Baron Haussmann into its present splendours of wide +regularity, yet still homely with remnants of the dusty ruralism of its +pre-Napoleonic state; he saw all the pretty show of the Second Empire, +he stood in the Champs-Elysées and watched the baby Prince Imperial roll +by to St. Cloud with his escort of blue and silver _cent-gardes_; and +the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, its floors gleaming with polished +wood, its walls glowing with masterpieces, and its proportions awesomely +interminable and soaring, was the scene of his young imaginative life. +Those were the great places; but there were also Geneva and Boulogne and +Zurich and Bonn, the differences of which he savoured, and above all the +richness of desultory contact with arts and persons of the various +countries. He gaped at the exquisiteness of ugly Rose Chéri at the +Gymnase, copied Delacroix, read _Evan Harrington_ as it came out in +_Once a Week_; was at school with a straight-nosed boy called Henry +Houssaye and a snub-nosed boy called Coquelin; was tutored by Robert +Thompson, the famous Edinburgh teacher who was afterwards to instruct +Robert Louis Stevenson and many other eminent Scots in Jacobite +sympathies as well as the more usual subjects, and by M. Lerambert whose +verse had been praised by Sainte-Beuve in his _Causeries_. +"Impressions," writes Mr James of this period, "were not merely all +right but were the dearest things in the world." + +And one must remember that not only were impressions much to young Henry +James, they were all he had. His mental life consisted of nothing else. +His natural inaptitude for acquiring systematised knowledge was probably +intensified by the study of foreign languages entailed by this travel; +for if a child spends its time learning several systems of naming things +it plainly has less energy to spare for learning systems of arranging +things. At any rate his inability to grasp the elements of arithmetic +and mathematics led to his removal from the Polytechnic School at +Zurich, and was the cause of despair in all his tutors. But most minds, +however incapable they may be of following the exact sciences or +speculative thought, have some sort of idea of the system of the +universe inserted into them by early instruction in one or other of the +religious faiths. This unifying influence was refused to Henry James by +the circumstance that his father had found certain religious doubts +that had almost driven him from the ministry solved in the works of +Swedenborg, which he found not at all incredible but--as he once said in +a phrase that showed him his son's own father--fairly "insipid with +veracity." On this foundation of Swedenborgianism he had built up for +himself a religion which was "nothing if not a philosophy, +extraordinarily complex and worked out and original, intensely personal +as an exposition, yet not only susceptible of application, but clamorous +for it, to the whole field of consciousness, nature and society, +history, knowledge, all human relations and questions, every pulse of +the process of our destiny." This was no playground for the young +intelligence, so young Henry James was told to prepare himself by +drinking from such springs as seemed to him refreshing. When he was +asked to what church he went he was bidden by his father to reply that +"we could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom, +and that there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that +of the Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we need find +ourselves excluded." He certainly liked to exercise this privilege, but +he admits that "my grounds may have been but the love of the +_exhibition_ in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture, +sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed +most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot +of the mind." Which was to be expected; as also was the fact that he +never broke his childish habit of regarding his father's religion as a +closed temple standing in the centre of his family life, the general +holiness of which he took for granted so thoroughly that it never +occurred to him to investigate its particulars. + +This European visit came to an end in 1859, and William and Henry James +spent the next year or so at Newport studying art under the direction of +their friend John La Farge, with the result that William painted +extremely well in the style of Manet, and Henry showed as little ability +in this direction as he had shown in any other. In 1861 the Civil War +broke out; and had it not been for an accident the whole character of +Mr James' genius would have been altered. If he had seen America by the +light of bursting shells and flaming forest he might never have taken +his eyes off her again, he might have watched her fascinated through all +the changes of tone and organisation which began at the close of the +war, he might have been the Great American Novelist in subject as well +as origin. But it happened, in that soft spring when he and every other +young man of the North realised that there was a crisis at hand in which +their honour was concerned and they must answer Lincoln's appeal for +recruits, that he was one day called to help in putting out a fire. In +working the fire-engine he sustained an injury so serious that he could +never hope to share the Northern glory, that there were before him years +of continuous pain and weakness, that ultimately he formed a curious and +on the whole mischievous conception of himself. For his humiliating +position as a delicate and unpromising student at Harvard Law School +while his younger brothers, Wilky and Robertson, were officers in the +Northern Army and William was pursuing a brilliant academic career or +naturalising with Agassiz in South America, seemed a confirmation of his +tutors' opinion that he was an inarticulate mediocrity who would never +be able to take a hand in the business of life. And so he worked out a +scheme of existence, which he accepted finally in an hour of glowing +resignation when he was returning by steamer to Newport from a visit to +a camp of wounded soldiers at Portsmouth Grove, in which the one who +stood aside and felt rather than acted acquired thereby a mystic value, +a spiritual supremacy, which--but this was perhaps a later development +of the theory--would be rubbed off by participation in action. + +It was, therefore, with defiant industry, with the intention of proving +that such as he was he had his peculiar worth, that he set to work to +become a writer. His first story was published in _The Atlantic Monthly_ +when he was twenty-one, and it was followed by a number of stories, +travel sketches, and critical essays, some of which have been +reprinted, and a few farces which have not. He also went through a +necessary preface of the literary life by reading the proofs of George +Eliot's novels before they appeared in the _Atlantic_ and reviewing; the +profession of literature differs from that of the stage in that the +stars begin instead of ending as dressers. In 1869 he went to Europe +and, gaining certain impressions that had been inaccessible to him as a +child, finally fixed the dye in which his talent was to be immersed for +the rest of his life. He stepped for the first time into "a private park +of great oaks ... where I knew my first sense of a matter afterwards, +through fortunate years, to be more fully disclosed: the springtime in +such places, the adored footpath, the first primroses, the stir and +scent of renascence in the watered sunshine and under spreading boughs +that were somehow before aught else the still reach of the remembered +lines of Tennyson...." He was admitted to the homes of Ruskin, Rossetti, +Morris, Darwin, and George Eliot, and allowed to see the wheels go +round. But the real significance of this journey to Mr James' genius is +the part it played in the last days of his beautiful cousin, Mary +Temple. She should have had before her a long career of nobility, for +"she was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with +enough sincerity and enough wonder." She pretended not to know that she +had been cheated out of this, but as she lay on the death-bed that she +would not admit to be even a sick-bed, her eyes were fixed intensely on +the progress of her cousin through all the experiences that should have +been hers. There came a day when all illusion failed, and she died +dreadfully, clinging to consciousness. Her death was felt by Henry and +William James as the end of their youth. + + * * * * * + +That, as Mr James would have said, is the _donnée_. The must was trodden +out, it had only to ferment, to be bottled, to be mellowed by time into +the perfect wine. There is nothing in all the innumerable volumes that +Mr James was to pour out in the next forty-five years of which the +intimation is not present in these first adventures. + + + + +II + +THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION + + +It is no use turning up those first stories that appeared in _The +Atlantic Monthly_ and _The Galaxy_ unless one has formed an affection +for the literary personality of Mr James. The image they provoke of the +literary prentice bending over his task with the tip of his tongue +reflectively protruding like a small boy drawing on his slate, is +amusing enough; but they themselves are such pale dreams as might visit +a New England spinster looking out from her snuff-coloured parlour on a +grey drizzling day. Where there is any richness of effect, as in _The +Romance of Certain Old Clothes_, it comes from the influence of +Nathaniel Hawthorne. That story, which tells how a girl loved her +sister's husband, waited eagerly for her death that she might marry him, +and later wheedled from him the key of the chest in which the dead wife +had left her finery to await her baby daughter's maturity, is +seven-eighths prelude, and the catastrophe, which is the finding of the +girl kneeling dead beside the chest with the mark of phantom fingers on +her throat, comes with too short and small a report. But in spite of its +pitiful construction it is the only one of the dozen stories which Mr +James published before his visit to Europe in 1869 that shows any of the +imaginative exuberance which one accepts as an earnest of coming genius. + +Hawthorne was not altogether a happy influence--it is due to him that Mr +James' characters have "almost wailed" their way from _The Passionate +Pilgrim_ to _The Golden Bowl_--but he certainly shepherded Mr James into +the European environment and lent him a framework on which to drape his +emotions until he had discovered his own power to build up an +imaginative structure. The plot of _The Passionate Pilgrim_, with its +American who comes to England to claim a cousin's estate, falls in love +with the usurper's sister, is driven from the door, and dies just after +the usurper's death has delivered to him all he wants, is very clumsy +Hawthorne, but in those days Mr James could not draw normal events and +he had to have some medium for expressing his wealth of feeling about +England. It is amazing to see how rich that wealth already was, how much +deeper than mere pleasure in travel was his delight in the parks and +private grandeurs of England; and how, too, a fundamental fallacy was +already perverting it to an almost Calvinist distrust of the activities +of the present. + + "I entered upon life a perfect gentleman," says the American as he + sits in Hampton Court. "I had the love of old forms and pleasant + rites, and I found them nowhere--found a world all hard lines and + harsh lights, without lines, without composition, as they say of + pictures, without the lovely mystery of colour.... Sitting here, in + this old park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the + misty verge of what might have been! I should have been born here, + not there; here my makeshift distinctions would have found things + they'd have been true of.... This is a world I could have got on + with beautifully." + +There you have the first statement of the persistent illusion, to which +he was helped by his odd lack of the historic sense and which confused +his estimate of modern life, that the past would have been a happier +home for those who like himself loved fastidious living. He had a +tremendous sense of the thing that is and none at all of the thing that +has been, and thus he was always being misled by such lovely shells of +the past as Hampton Court into the belief that the past which inhabited +them was as lovely. The calm of Canterbury Close appeared to him as a +remnant of a time when all England, bowed before the Church, was as +calm; whereas the calm is really a modern condition brought about when +the Church ceased to have anything to do with England. He never +perceived that life is always a little painful at the moment, not only +at this moment but at all moments; that the wine of experience always +makes a raw draught when it has just been trodden out from bruised +grapes by the pitiless feet of men, that it must be subject to time +before it acquires suavity. The lack of this perception matters little +in his early work but it is vastly important in shaping his later +phases. + +There are no such personal revelations in _The Madonna of the Future_, +nor anything, indeed, at all characteristic of Mr James. There is beauty +in the tale of the American painter who dreams over a model for twenty +years, while he and she grow old, and leaves at his death nothing more +to show for his dreams than a cracked blank canvas; and the Florentine +background is worked on diligently and affectionately. But it is +admirable in quite an uncharacteristic way, like a figure picture +painted with the utmost brilliance of technique and from perfect models +by a painter whose real passion was for landscape. Yet it was only a +year later, in _Madame de Mauves_, that Mr James found himself, both his +manner and the core of the matter which was to occupy him for the +happiest part of his literary life. Euphemia de Mauves, the prim young +American who moves languidly through the turfy avenues of the French +forest, her faith in decency of living perpetually outraged by her +husband's infidelities and his odd demand that she should make him a +cuckold so that at least he should not have the discomfort of looking up +at her, is the first of the many exquisite women whom Mr James brought +into being by his capacity to imagine characters solidly and completely, +his perception of the subtle tones of life, and his extreme verbal +delicacy. And she is given a still greater importance by the queer twist +at the end of the story by which M. de Mauves blows his brains out for +no reason at all but that he is hopelessly, helplessly, romantically in +love with this cold wife who will be so unreasonable about trifles. Mr +James writes her story not only as though he stood upon the Atlantic +shores looking eastward at the plight of a compatriot domiciled with +lewd men and light women, but also as though he sat in the company of +certain gracious men and women of the world who could not get under way +with their accomplishment of charm because the grim alien in the corner +will keep prodding them with a disapproval as out of place in this salon +as a deal plank. Madame de Mauves, in fine, is the first figure invented +by Mr James to throw light upon what he called "the international +situation." + +It took all Mr James' cosmopolitan training to see that there existed an +international situation, that the fact that Americans visited Europe +constituted a drama. An Englishman who visited Italy did no more than +take a look at a more richly coloured order of life that braced him up, +as any gay spectacle might have done, to return to his own; his travel +was a pleasure, or, at most, if he happened to be a Landor or a +Browning, an inspiration. It might reasonably be supposed that the visit +to Europe of an American was no greater matter. But Mr James knew that +the wealthy American was in the position of a man who has built a +comfortable house and has plenty of money over, yet cannot furnish it +because furniture is neither made nor sold in his country; until he has +crossed the sea to the land where they do make furniture he must sleep +and eat on the floor. + + "One might enumerate," he writes in those early days, "the items of + high civilisation as it exists in other countries, which are absent + from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder + what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and + indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no + personal loyalty, no aristocracy...." + +There follows a long list, so long as to provoke the "natural remark ... +that if these things are left out everything is left out." And, Mr James +goes on to complain, "it takes so many things--such an accumulation of +history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a +fund of suggestion for a novelist." He wrote novelist because at the +moment he was criticising Hawthorne, but he would certainly have applied +his phrase to anyone who desired his life to be not a corduroy track +but a marble terrace with palaces on the one hand and fair gardens on +the other. + +Since the pilgrimage for these items of high civilisation appeared to +Europeans--as innumerable contemporary allusions show it did--as mere +globe-trottings, the pilgrims themselves were likely to be as +misunderstood. For one thing, although they were unorganised so far as +culture went, they formed at home a very cohesive moral community. The +American women who came to Europe took for granted that however people +might be habited--people, that is, whose manners showed them "nice"--and +in whatever frivolous array they might be flounced and ribboned, they +were certain to wear next their skin the hair-shirt of Puritan +rectitude. The innocent freedoms which they permitted themselves because +they held this supposition, and the terrifying surmises to which these +gave rise in the mind of the Old World, unaware of the innocence of the +New, made much material for drama. And more dramatic still was the +moment, which came to so many of the travellers who formed close +personal relationships with Europeans, when they realised that the moral +standards to which they had nationally pledged themselves, and which +they individually obeyed with extraordinary fidelity, were here regarded +as simply dowdy. "Compromise!" was the cry of Latin and even English +society. "Compromise on every and any of the Commandments you like! Do +anything you can, in fact, to rub down those rude angles you present to +human intercourse!" And yet it was not to be deduced that Europe was +lax. One had only to look behind the superficial show to see that it had +its own religion, perhaps a more terrible religion than any New England +ever knew, and that what seemed its laziest pleasures were sometimes its +most dreadful rites. + +This last conception of Europe is the subject of _Roderick Hudson_ +(1875). _Roderick Hudson_ is not a good book. It throws a light upon the +lack of attention given at that period to the art of writing that within +a few years of each other two men of great genius--Thomas Hardy and +Henry James--wrote in their thirties first novels spoilt by technical +blemishes of a sort that the most giftless modern miss with a +subscription to Mudie's would never commit in her first literary +experiment. _Roderick Hudson_ is wooden, it is crammed with local colour +like a schoolmistress's bedroom full of photographs of Rome, it has a +plain boiled suet heroine called Mary. But its idea is magnificent. An +American of fortune takes Hudson, who has already shown talent as a +sculptor, from his stool in a lawyer's office in Northampton, +Massachusetts, and sets him up in a studio in Rome. It is the fear of +old Mrs Hudson and of Mary, his fiancée, that European life will be too +soft for him. But the very opposite occurs; it is he who is too soft for +European life. The business of art means not only lounging under the +pines of the Villa Ludovisi and chiselling the noble substance of +Carrara marble; it means also the painful toil of creation, which +demands from the artist an austerer renunciation of every grossness than +was ever expected of any law-abiding citizen of Northampton, which +sends a man naked and alone to awful moments which, if he be strong, +give him spiritual strength, but if he be weak heap on him the black +weakness of neurasthenia. And when that has turned him into a raw, hurt, +raging creature he is further snared by the loveliness of Christina +Light, who is characteristically European in that her circumstances have +not the same clear beauty as her face. She is being hawked over the +Continent to find a rich husband by her mother and a Cavaliere who is +really her father, and this ugly girlhood has so corrupted her vigorous +spirit that the young American's courtship provokes from her nothing but +eccentric favours or perverse insults. After the collapse of his art and +his love Roderick falls over a precipice in a too minutely described +Switzerland, hurled by a _dénouement_ which has inspired Mr James to one +of his broadest jokes. In the first edition Roderick, on hearing that, +while he has been vexing his benefactor with his moods, that gentleman +has been manfully repressing a passion for Mary, exclaims, "It's like +something in a novel!" which Mr James in the definitive edition has +altered to, "It's like something in a bad novel!" + +This conception of Europe as a complex organism which would have no use, +or only a cruel use, for those bred by the simple organism of America, +animates _Four Meetings_ (1877), that exquisite short story which came +first of all of the many masterpieces that Mr James was to produce. It +is the tale of a little schoolmistress who, having long nourished a +passion for Europe upon such slender intimations as photographs of the +Castle of Chillon, at last collects a sum for the trip, is met at Havre +by a cousin, one of those Americans on whom Continental life has acted +as a solvent of all decent moral tissues, and is tricked out of her +money by his story of a runaway marriage with a Countess; returns to New +England hoping to "see something of this dear old Europe yet," and has +that hope ironically fulfilled by the descent upon her for life of the +said Countess, who is so distinctly "something of this dear old Europe" +that the very sight of her transports the travelled recounter of the +story to "some dusky landing before a shabby Parisian _quatrième_--to an +open door revealing a greasy ante-chamber, and to Madame, leaning over +the banisters, while she holds a faded dressing-gown together and bawls +down to the portress to bring up her coffee." It is one of the saddest +stories in the world, and one of the cleverest. There is not one of its +simple phrases but has its beautiful bearing on the subject, and in the +treatment of emotional values one sees that the essays on _French Poets +and Novelists_ (1878), which for some years he had been sending to +America with the excited air of a missionary, were the notes of an +attentive pupil. "Detachment" was the lesson that that period preached +in its reaction against the George Sand method, whereby the author +rolled through his pages locked in an embrace with his subject. We have +forgotten its real significance, so frequently has it been used as an +excuse for the treatment of emotional situations with encyclopædic +detail of circumstance and not a grain of emotional realisation, but +here we can recover it. The author's pity for the schoolmistress is +never allowed to make his Countess sinister instead of gross, and his +sense of the comic in the Countess is never allowed to make the +schoolmistress's woe more dreary; the situation stands as solid and has +as many aspects as it would have in life. + +_The American_ (1877) still holds this view of Europe. Its theme, to +quote Mr James in the preface of the definitive edition, is "the +situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some +robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged +compatriot; the point being in especial that he should suffer at the +hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible +civilisation and to be of an order far superior to his own." Christopher +Newman, the robust compatriot, is such a large, simple, lovable person +that the rest of the story leads one to suspect that one may say of Mr +James, as he said of Balzac, that "his figures, as a general thing, are +better than the use he makes of them." He walks through Europe examining +its culture with such an effect on the natives as an amiable buffalo +traversing the Galerie d'Apollon might produce upon the copyists of the +Louvre, and finally presents himself at the house where he is least +welcome in the world, the home of the de Bellegardes, a proud and +ancient Royalist family. Thereafter, the novel is an exposition of the +way things do not happen. Claire de Cintré, the widowed daughter whom +Newman desires to marry, is represented as having above all things +beauty of character; but when her family snatches her from him in a +frenzy of pride she allows herself to be bundled into a convent with a +weakness that would convict of imbecility any woman of twenty-eight. And +since her mother and brother had murdered her father by refusing him +medicine at a physical crisis, and sustained themselves in the act by +the reflection that after all they were only keeping up the good old +family tone, one wonders where she got this beauty of character. The +child of this damned house might have flamed with a strange fire, but +she could not have diffused a rectory lamp-light. But the series of +inconsistencies of which this is only one leads, like a jolting +motor-bus that puts one down at Hampton Court, to an exquisite +situation. Newman discovers the secret of the Marquis' murder and +intends to publish it as a punishment for the cruel wrong the de +Bellegardes have done him, but sacrifices this satisfaction simply +because there can be no link--not even the link of revenge--between such +as they and such as he. In all literature there is no passage so full of +the very passion of moral exaltation as the description of how Newman +stands before the Carmelite house in the Rue d'Enfer and looks up at the +blank, discoloured wall, behind which his lost lady is immured, then +walks back to Notre Dame and there, "the far-away bells chiming off into +space, at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word," decides +that such things as revenge "were really not his game." So it is with +Mr James to the end. The foreground is as often as not red with the +blood of slaughtered probabilities; a gentleman at a dinner-party tells +the lady on his left (a perfect stranger who never appears again in the +story) that some years ago he proposed to the lady in white sitting +opposite to them; a curio dealer calls on a lady in Portland Place just +to wind up the plot. But the great glow at the back, the emotional +conflagration, is always right. + +_The Europeans_ (1878) marks the first time when Mr James took the +international situation as a joke, and he could joke very happily in +those days when his sentence was a straight young thing that could run +where it liked, instead of a delicate creature swathed in relative +clauses as an invalid in shawls. There is no other book by Mr James +which has quite the clear, sunlit charm of this description of the visit +of Eugenia, the morganatically married Baroness, and her brother Felix, +the Bohemian painter, to their cousins' New England farm. There is +nothing at all to their discredit in the past of these two graceful +young people, but they resemble Harlequin and Columbine in the +instability of their existence and the sharp line they draw between +their privacy and their publicity. It appears to them natural that the +private life should be spent largely in wondering how the last public +appearance went off and planning effects for the next, a point of view +which arouses the worst suspicions in their cousins, who are accustomed +to live as though the sky were indeed a broad open eye. So Felix has the +greatest difficulty in persuading his uncle, who takes thirty-two bites +to a moral decision, just as Mr Gladstone took thirty-two bites to a +mouthful, that he is a suitable husband for his cousin Gertrude; and +poor Eugenia fails altogether in an environment where a lie from her +lips is not treated as _un petit péché d'une petite femme_, but remains +simply a lie. The frame of mind this state of affairs produces in the +poor lady is exquisitely described in a passage which shows her going +wistfully through the house of the man who did not propose to her +because he detected her lie, after a visit to his dying mother. + + "Mrs Acton had told Eugenia that her waiting-woman would be in the + hall to show her downstairs; but the large landing outside her door + was empty, and Eugenia stood there looking about.... She passed + slowly downstairs, still looking about. The broad staircase made a + great bend, and in the angle was a high window, looking westward, + with a deep bench, covered with a row of flowering plants in + curious old pots of blue China-ware. The yellow afternoon light + came in through the flowers and flickered a little on the white + wainscots. Eugenia paused a moment; the house was perfectly still, + save for the ticking, somewhere, of a great clock. The lower hall + stretched away at the foot of the stairs, half covered over with a + large Oriental rug. Eugenia lingered a little, noticing a great + many things. '_Comme c'est bien!_' she said to herself; such a + large, solid, irreproachable basis of existence the place seemed to + her to indicate. And then she reflected that Mrs Acton was soon to + withdraw from it. The reflection accompanied her the rest of the + way downstairs, where she paused again, making more observations. + The hall was extremely broad, and on either side of the front door + was a wide, deeply-set window, which threw the shadows of + everything back into the house. There were high-backed chairs along + the wall and big Eastern vases upon tables, and, on either side, a + large cabinet with a glass front and little curiosities within, + dimly gleaming. The doors were open--into the darkened parlour, the + library, the dining-room. All these rooms seemed empty. Eugenia + passed along and stopped a moment on the threshold of each. '_Comme + c'est bien!_' she murmured again; she had thought of just such a + house as this when she decided to come to America. She opened the + front door for herself--her light tread had summoned none of the + servants--and on the threshold she gave a last look...." + +That is the pure note of the early James, like a pipe played carefully +by a boy. It sounds as beautifully in _Daisy Miller_, that short novel +which, though it deals with conditions peculiar to a small section of +continental life forty years ago, will strike each new generation afresh +as sad and lovely. Daisy, who is like one of those girls who smile upon +us from the covers of American magazines, glaringly beautiful and +healthy but without the "tone" given by diligent study of the grace of +conduct, comes to Europe and plays in its sunshine like a happy child. +She wants to go to the Castle of Chillon, so she accepts the escort for +the afternoon of a young American who is staying at the same hotel; she +likes to walk in the Pincian, so she takes a stroll there one afternoon +with a certain liquid-eyed Roman. The woman who does a thing for the +sake of the thing in itself is always suspected by society, and the +American colony, which professes the mellow conventions of Europe with +all its own national crudity, accuses her of vulgarity and even +lightness. They talk so bitterly that when the young American, who is +half in love with Daisy, finds her viewing the Colosseum by moonlight +with the Roman, he leaps to the conclusion that she is a disreputable +woman. Why he does so is not quite clear, since surely it is the +essential thing about a disreputable woman that her evenings are not +free for visits to the Colosseum. Poor Daisy takes in part of his +meaning and, saying in a little strange voice, "I don't care whether I +get Roman fever or not!" goes back to her hotel and dies of malaria. And +the young American, "staring at the raw protuberance among the April +daisies" in the Protestant cemetery, learns from the Roman's lips that +Daisy was "most innocent." + +It is a lyric whose beauty may be measured by the attention which, in +spite of its tragedy, it everywhere provoked. It was interesting to note +how often in the obituary notices of Mr James it was said that he had +never attained popularity, for it shows how soon London forgets its +gifts of fame. From 1875 to 1885 (to put it roughly) all England and +America were as captivated by the clear beauty of Mr James' work as in +the nineties they were hypnotised by the bright-coloured beauty of Mr +Kipling's art. On London staircases everyone turned to look at the +American with the long, silky, black beard which, I am told by one who +met him then, gave him the appearance of "an Elizabethan sea captain." +But for all the exquisiteness of _Daisy Miller_ there were discernible +in it certain black lines which, like the dark veining in a crocus that +foretells its decay, showed that this was a loveliness which was in the +very act of passing. The young American might have been so worked upon +by his friends that he could readily believe his Daisy a light woman, +but he need not have manifested his acceptance of this belief by being +grossly rude to her and by reflecting that if "after Daisy's return +there had been an exchange of jokes between the porter and the +cab-driver ... it had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him +that the little American flirt should be 'talked about' by low-minded +menials." When one remembers the grave courtesy with which Christopher +Newman treated Mlle Noémie Nioche, the little French drab who called +herself _un esprit libre_, it is plain that we are no longer dealing +with the same Mr James. The Mr James we are to deal with henceforth had +ceased to be an American and had lost his native reactions to emotional +stimuli. He was becoming a European and for several years to come was to +spend his time slowly mastering its conventions; which means that he was +learning a new emotional language. + +The first works he produced when he was at once a finished writer and +only the cocoon of a European, present the paradoxical appearance of +being perfect in phrase and incredibly naive in their estimates of +persons and situations. _The Pension Beaurepas_ (1879), that melancholy +tale of the ailing old American whose wife and daughter have dragged him +off on an expensive trip to Europe, while ruin falls on his untended +business in New York, has its tone of pathos spoiled by extraordinarily +cold-blooded and, to women of to-day, extremely unsavoury discussions of +how a girl ought to behave if she wants to be married. _The Siege of +London_ (1883), which is the story of a Texan adventuress of many +divorces who marries into an English county family, fails to produce the +designed effect of outrage, because the adventuress is the only person +who shows any signs of human worth, and the life which she is supposed +to have violated by her marriage is suggested simply by statements that +the people concerned had titles and lived in large houses. In _Pandora_ +(1884), which describes a German diplomat's amazement that an unmarried +girl can be a social success in America, we feel as bored as we would if +we were forced to listen to the exclamations of a dog-fancier on finding +that a Pekingese with regular features had got a prize at a dog show. In +_Lady Barbarina_ (1884), which tells how a peer's daughter who marries +an American millionaire refuses to live in America, the American picture +is painted with the flatness of a flagging interest, and we suspect Mr +James of taking English architecture as an index of English character; +he had still to grasp the paradox that the people who live in the +solidities of Grosvenor Square are the best colonising and seafaring +stock in the world. In _The Reverberator_ (1888), wherein an American +girl guilelessly prattles to a newspaper correspondent about the affairs +of her French fiancé's family and is cast out by them when he publishes +her prattlings in the States, we seem to see the international situation +slowly fading from Mr James' immediate consciousness. In turning over +its pages we see the author sitting down before a pile of white paper +and finely inscribing it with memories of past contacts with Americans; +we do not see him entering his study with traces still on his lips of a +smile provoked in the street outside by the loveliness and innocent +barbarism of his compatriots. In those days he had lost America and had +not yet found Europe, but he was to find it very soon. In _A London +Life_ (1889), the tale of an innocent American girl who comes over to +live with her sister and her aristocratic English husband, and stands +appalled at their debts, their debaucheries, their infidelities, he has +rendered beautifully the feeling caused by ill lives when led in old +homes of elmy parks and honourable histories. It is a sense of disgust +such as comes to the early-rising guest who goes into a drawing-room in +the morning and finds last night's coffee-cups and decanters and +cigarette ends looking dreadful in the sunlight. The house is being +badly managed; it will go to rack and ruin. That is an aspect of +England; but the American onlooker is just a clean-minded little thing +that might have bloomed anywhere, and all references to her Americanness +are dragged in with an effort. It is plain that he had lost all his love +for the international situation. + +That Mr James continued to write about Americans in Europe long after +their common motive and their individual adventures had ceased to excite +his wonder or his sympathy, was the manifestation of a certain delusion +about his art which was ultimately to do him a mischief. He believed +that if one _knew_ a subject one could write about it; and since there +was no aspect of the international situation with which he was not +familiar, he could not see why the description of these aspects should +not easily make art. The profound truth that an artist should feel +passion for his subject was naturally distasteful to one who wanted to +live wholly without violence even of the emotions; a preference for +passionless detachment was at that date the mode in French literature, +which was the only literature that he studied with any attention. The de +Goncourts, Zola, and even de Maupassant thought that an artist ought to +be able to lift any subject into art by his treatment, just as an +advertising agent ought to be able to "float" any article into +popularity by his posters. But human experience, which includes a +realisation of the deadness of most of the de Goncourts' and Zola's +productions, proves the contrary. Unless a subject is congenial to the +character of the artist the subconscious self will not wake up and +reward the busy conscious mind by distributions of its hoarded riches in +the form of the right word, the magic phrase, the clarifying incident. +Why are books about ideas so commonly bad, since the genius of M. +Anatole France and Mr Wells have proved that they need not be so, if it +be not that the majority of people reserve passion for their personal +relationships and therefore never "feel" an idea with the sensitive +finger-tips of affection? + +The absence of this necessary attitude to his subject explains in part +the tenuity of Mr James' later novels on the international situation; +but there is also another element that irritates present-day readers and +makes the texture of the life represented seem poor. That element, which +is not peculiar to Mr James, but is a part of the social atmosphere of +his time, is the persistent presentation of woman not as a human, but as +a sexual being. One can learn nothing of the heroine's beliefs and +character for the hullabaloo that has been set up because she has come +in too late or gone out too early or omitted to provide herself with +that figure of questionable use--for the dove-like manners of the young +men forbid the thought that she was there to protect the girl from +assault, and the mild tongues of the young ladies make it unlikely that +the duel of the sexes was then so bitter that they required an +umpire--the chaperon. It appears that the young woman of that period +could get through the world only by perpetually jumping through hoops +held up to her by society, a method of progression which was more suited +to circus girls than to persons of dignity, and which sometimes caused +nasty falls. There is nothing more humiliating to women in all fiction +than the end of _A London Life_, where the heroine, appalled at having +been left in an opera box alone with a young man, turns to him and begs +him, although she knows well that he does not love her, to marry her and +save her good name. Purity and innocence are excellent things, but a +world in which they have to be guarded by such cramping contrivances of +conduct is as ridiculous as a heaven where the saints all go about with +their haloes protected by mackintosh covers. + + + + +III + +TRANSITION + + +_Washington Square_ (1881), Mr James' first important work that does not +deal with the international situation, is a work of great genius. Into +the small mould of the story of how a plain and stupid girl was jilted +by a fortune-hunter when he discovered that she would be disinherited by +her contemptuous father on her marriage, Mr James concentrated all the +sense which he had absorbed throughout his childhood of the simple, +provincial life which went on behind the brown stone of old New York. It +has in it a wealth of feeling that does not seem to have originated with +Mr James, just as an old wives' tale told over and over again by the +fireside becomes charged with a synthetic emotion derived from the +comments and expressions of innumerable auditors; and one may surmise +that Catherine's tragedy was first presented to him as an item of local +gossip, sympathetically discussed by his charming New York cousins and +friends. Certainly the tale of this dull girl, who was "twenty years old +before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown +trimmed with gold fringe," and progressed by such clumsinesses through a +career of which the only remarkable facts were that "Morris Townsend had +trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring," +is consecrated by an element of pity which was afterwards signally to +disappear from Mr James' work. + +The book so beautifully expresses the woe of all those people to whom +nothing ever happens, who are aware of the gay challenge of life but are +prevented by something leaden in their substance from responding, that +one is not surprised to find that like most good stories about +inarticulate people--like _Une Vie_ and _Un Coeur Simple_--it is +written with the most deliberate cunning. The story is evoked according +to Turgeniev's method of calling his novels out of the inchoate real +world; and what that is had better, since Mr James had been using it +with increasing power since _Roderick Hudson_, be stated in his own +words. + + "I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years + ago from the lips of Ivan Turgeniev in regard to his own experience + of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost + always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered + before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, + interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what + they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as _disponibles_, saw them + subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw + them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, + those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and + select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable + to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they + would be most likely to produce and to feel. + + "'To arrive at these things is to arrive at my "story,"' he said, + 'and that's the way I look for it. The result is that I'm often + accused of not having "story" enough. I seem to myself to have as + much as I need--to show my people, to exhibit their relations with + each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough + I see them come together, I see them _placed_, I see them engaged + in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look + and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found + for them, is my account of them--of which I dare say, alas, _que + cela manque souvent d'architecture_....'" + +And as regards the statement in prose of the conception thus formed it +is plain that, although Mr James had formed his irrational dislike of +Flaubert many years before, it was that great master who had taught him +his art of rubbing down the too brilliant phrase to tone with the quiet +harmony of the whole, of obliterating the exotic effect that would +compromise the lorn simplicity of the subject. This masterly use of +technical resource to unfold an idea whose beauty would to a lesser +artist have seemed hopelessly sheathed in obscurity, makes _Washington +Square_ the perfect termination to Mr James' first period of genius. + +It was unfortunately quite definitely a termination; for until ten years +had passed Mr James was doomed to produce no work which was not to have +the solidity of its characters and the beauty of its prose rendered +slightly ridiculous by its lack of purpose and unity. In those days, +when the international theme was slipping from Mr James' grasp and he +was looking round for another, one could no more expect him to produce +work completely and serenely formed by the imagination than one could +ask an author to continue his industry on a journey from Paris to +Madrid, with the jolting of the train destroying his physical calm and +the new land crying for his attention at the carriage window. For Mr +James was literally travelling all through the eighties; he was touring +either the countries of Europe with his body or the art of Europe with +his mind. It was his intention to find that intellectual basis without +which, his blood and upbringing assured him, he would be unable to use +his genius with noble or permanent results. + +How difficult this search was to be, and yet how ultimately fruitful, +can be judged from _A Little Tour in France_ (1884). That is one of the +happiest and sunniest travel books in all literature. _Coelum non +animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_; but Mr James did, and it is as +pleasant to see his intelligence sunning itself on the hot Latin soil, +fresh and cool as though he had not years of the creative struggle +behind him and years more to come, as it is to see a lizard crawl from +the crevice of a Provençal rock and play among the tufts of rosemary. +Yet whenever Mr James has to note some detail in his description of +French towns which refers to the life which has formed them, the +reader's fury mounts. It is horrible that his references to the +Franco-Prussian War should be faintly jocular, and one burns with shame +for them until one comes to an amazing sentence about the French +Revolution, in which it is plainly implied that the rightness and +necessity of that declaration of the principle of freedom are still +debatable questions. One perceives with relief that he said these things +because, as one guessed in _The Passionate Pilgrim_, his strong sight of +the thing that is was accompanied by blindness to the thing that has +been. He did not know whether the Franco-Prussian War was horrible or +not, because he had been out of Europe when it raged; and because he had +not been born at the time he could no more speak well of the French +Revolution than he could propose for his club a person whom he had never +met. And for the same reason he failed to envisage the Roman Empire save +as a source of agreeable ruins which, since he did not understand the +spirit that built them, he imagined might have been made still more +agreeable. Their vastness did not impress him as the merging-point of +the geological record and history, but stirred in him that benevolence +which is often aroused by clumsy largeness. He patted the Roman Theatre +at Arles as though it were Jumbo at the Zoo, and remarked, quite in the +manner of Horace Walpole, that the pavement of coloured marble "gives an +idea of the _elegance_ of the interior"; but the arena at Nîmes and that +vast, high, yellow aqueduct, whose three tiers appal the valley of the +Gardon, were too much for him, and he pronounced them "not at all +_exquisite_." The man who could write those phrases was incapable of +forming a philosophy, for no man can fully understand his kind unless he +have a revelation of old Rome and perceive in its works a record of the +pride men felt in serviceable labour for the State. And yet what, in +this particular case, did all that matter? What need was there for Mr +James to know anything but that ink makes black, expressive marks on +paper, when he could tell so exquisitely how the Château de Chenonceaux +sends out its white galleries across the clear water of the Cher, how +the crenellated ramparts of the Château d'Amboise look down over hanging +gardens to the far-shining Loire, and with what peculiar wonder +Carcassonne, Aigues-Mortes and all the other towns with lovely names, +glow in the clear bright light of France? It was enough that there was +no beauty on earth that could daunt his power of description. + +The record of his mental wanderings is not quite so happy. Mr James has +an immense prestige as critic, but a certain sentence that occurred more +than once in his obituary notices made it doubtful whether this does not +merely mean that people have run their eyes over the titles of Mr James' +essays and have accepted the fact that he dealt with authors rarely read +by the British as a guarantee of their rareness of merit. That it should +be reverently remarked on that most solemn occasion that Flaubert was Mr +James' adored master, when he had written more than one exquisitely +feline essay to delicately convey what a fluke it was that this fellow +who panted under his phrase like a bricklayer under his hod should have +produced _Madame Bovary_, is just such an ironic happening as he would +have liked to be introduced into one of his humorous studies of the +literary life. Such intimations make one guess that the homage which +England loves to pay to the unread is responsible for half Mr James' +reputation as a critic; and probably he owed the other half to the +gratitude of his readers for a pleasure which is undoubtedly given by +his critical writings, but which nevertheless does not prove them great +criticism. It is true that _French Poets and Novelists_ are the best +reviews ever written, and that it is good to listen to the old author +gossiping in _Notes on Novelists_ (1914) about the authors he had known +long ago and to watch him tracing, with all his supreme genius for +detecting personality, the imprint of dead masters on the fading surface +of old work. But he is always entirely lacking in that necessary element +of great criticism, the capacity for universal reference. The eye that +judges a work of art should have surveyed the whole human field, so that +it can tell from what clay this precious thing was made, in what +craftsman's cot that trick of fashioning was learned, what natural +beauty suggested to the creative impulse this appropriate form, what +human institution helped or hindered its making. Of that general culture +Mr James was so deficient that he was capable of inserting in quite an +intelligent essay on Théophile Gautier this amazing sentence: "Even his +æsthetic principles are held with a good-humoured laxity that allows +him, for instance, to say in a hundred places the most delightfully +sympathetic and pictorial things about the romantic or Shakespearean +drama, and yet to describe a pedantically classical revival of the +_Antigone_ at Münich with the most ungrudging relish." And while this +ignorance was perpetually blinding him to the purpose of many fair +artistic structures his literary power was perpetually betraying him +into the graceful and forceful publication of his blindness. Long after +one has forgotten all the deliverances of critics with greater wisdom +but less craft of phrase, one remembers his extraordinary opinion that +Flaubert's _La Tentation de Saint Antoine_, that book which will appeal +in every generation to those who have been visited by the angel of +speculative thought, which is not only itself a beautiful growth but has +borne beautiful fruit in _Thaïs_, is merely "strange" and has no more +reference to life than the gimcrack Eastern Pavilion at an Exposition. +And he lacked, moreover, that necessary attribute of the good critic, +the power to bid bad authors to go to the devil. There are certain +Victorian works of art which, however much esteemed by the many, are no +more matter for criticism than a pair of elastic-sided boots; yet there +is a paper in _Essays in London_ (1893) in which Mr James talks of "the +numbers of sorts of distinction, the educated insight, the comprehensive +ardour of Mrs Humphry Ward...." It recalls that the art which he +privately cultivated was courtesy, but it suggests that his criticism +was bound to consist for the most part of just such pleasant footnotes +to the obvious as _Partial Portraits_ (1888) which, with the exception +of some interesting personal recollections of Turgeniev, tell us +nothing more startling than that de Maupassant wrote a hard prose and +that Daudet was a Provençal. + +How greatly he needed the intellectual basis which he found in none of +these researches becomes increasingly plain in each novel that he +published during this period. _The Portrait of a Lady_ (1881) is given a +superficial unity by the beauty of its heroine; on the first reading one +cannot take one's eyes off the clear gaze that Isabel Archer levels at +life. As she moves forward to meet the world, holding her fortune in +hand without avarice yet very carefully, lest she should buy anything +gross with it, one thinks that there never was a heroine who deserved +better of life. "She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, and +bravery, and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the +world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible +action; she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She +had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong." One is +glad to see that the girl has the most wonderful friend, a woman who is +at once the most flexible _femme du monde_ and the freshest and most +candid soul; and among the kindnesses this friend does her is her +introduction to a certain Tuscan villa that looks down on the valley of +the Arno, where on a mossy stone bench tangled with wild roses there +sits Gilbert Osmond, a gentleman of great dignity who has been too fine +to partake in the common struggle and so lives in honest poverty, with +his daughter Pansy, a little girl from whose character conventual +training has removed every attribute save whiteness and sweetness, so +that she lies under life like a fine cloth on a sunny bleaching-green. +Here, of all places in the world, she is least likely to meet the +jealousy and falseness and cruelty which were the only things she +feared, and so she marries Osmond in the happy faith that henceforth +nothing will be admitted to her life save nobility. But all her marriage +brings the girl is evidence of increasing painfulness that her friend +is a squalid adventuress who has preserved her appearance of freshness +as carefully as a strolling musician his fiddle, in order that she might +charm such honest fools as Isabel; that Osmond has withdrawn from the +world, not because he is too fine for it, but because he is a hating +creature, and hates the world as he now hates his wife; that Pansy is +the illegitimate child of these two, and her need of a dowry the chief +reason why Osmond has married Isabel. It is a tale which would draw +tears from a reviewer, and yet the conduct invented for Isabel is so +inconsistent and so suggestive of the nincompoop, and so clearly +proceeding from a brain whose ethical world was but a chaos, that it is +a mistake to subject the book to the white light of a second reading. +When we are told that Isabel married Osmond because "there had been +nothing very delicate in inheriting seventy thousand pounds, and she +hoped he might use her fortune in a way that might make her think better +of it and would rub off a certain grossness attaching to the good luck +of an unexpected inheritance," we feel that this is mere simpering; for +there could be nothing less delicate than to marry a person for any +reason but the consciousness of passion. And the grand climax of her +conduct, her return to Osmond after the full revelation of his guilt has +come to augment her anguish at his unkindness, proves her not the very +paragon of ladies but merely very ladylike. If their marriage was to be +a reality it was to be a degradation of the will whose integrity the +whole book is an invitation to admire; if it was to be a sham it was +still a larger concession to society than should have been made by an +honest woman. Yet for all the poor quality of the motives which furnish +Isabel's moral stuffing, _The Portrait of a Lady_ is entirely n +successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too +radiantly good for this world. + +While that novel reminds one, in the way it "comes off," of a sum in +which the right answer is got by wrong working, _The Bostonians_ (1886) +reminds one of a foolish song set to a good tune in the way it fails to +"come off." The beauty of the writing is so great that there are +descriptions of the shabby petticoats of a pioneer, or the vestibule in +a mean block of flats, that one would like to learn by heart, so that +one might turn the phrases over in the mind when one wants to hear the +clinking of pure gold. And the theme, the aptness of young persons +possessed of that capacity for contagious enthusiasm which makes the +good propagandist to be exploited by the mercenary and to deteriorate +under the strain of public life, is specially interesting to our +generation. Few of us there are who have not seen with our own eyes +elderly egoists building up profitable autocracies out of the ardour of +young girls, or fierce advocates of the brotherhood of man mellowing +into contemplative emptiers of pint-pots. But, just as the most +intellectual conversation may be broken up by the continued squeal of a +loose chimney-cowl, so this musical disclosure of fine material is +interrupted past any reader's patience by a nagging hostility to +political effort. This is not so disgraceful to Mr James as it might +seem, for it is simply the survival of an affectation which was forced +upon the cultured American of his youth. The pioneers who wanted to +raise the small silvery song of art had to tempt their audiences somehow +from the big brass band of America's political movements; and so +straining was this task that even Emerson, who vibrated to the chord of +reform as to no other, was sometimes vexed into such foolish inquiries +as "Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day in his own +garden than he who goes to the abolition meetings and makes a speech?" +It was just one of the results of Mr James' condition at this period +that he presented to the world so deliberately and so vividly, and with +such an air of feeling, what was no more than the misty reflection of +some dead men's transitory irritations. + +Politics play a very great part, and in the same sense, in _The +Princess Casamassima_ (1886), but it is the peculiar magic of that +strange book which is at once able and distraught, wild and meticulous, +that in it all perversities are somehow transmuted into loveliness. It +is one of the big jokes in literature that it was the writer who among +all his contemporaries held the most sophisticated view of his art, who +prided himself that on him there gleamed no drop of the dew of naïvetê, +that brought back to fiction the last delicious breath of the time when +even the best books ran on like this: "It happened that one dark and +stormy night in March I, Sebastian Melmoth, was traversing the plain of +La Mancha.... 'Have at you!' cried the guard.... 'Seat yourself,' said +the stranger, signing to his Hindu attendant that the bodies should be +removed, and commencing to cleanse the blood from his sword with a +richly embroidered handkerchief, 'and I will tell you the story of my +life.'" There is always something doing in _The Princess Casamassima_, +and it is usually something great, and as a rule it is doing it quite +on its own. As a portal to the disordered tale there stands one of the +finest short stories in the world; how Miss Pynsent, the shabby little +dressmaker who has brought up Hyacinth, the bastard child of a French +work-girl now in Millbank for the murder of the peer who betrayed her, +is suddenly bidden to bring the boy to his mother's prison deathbed, and +how the poor woman drags him up to the brown, windowless walls, the vast +blank gate, the looming corridors infused with sallow light, is such a +study of the way the institutions devised by man in the interests of +justice and order make a child's soul scream, that the reader will for +ever after think a great deal less of Pip's adventures on the marshes in +_Great Expectations_. Dickens could never have suffused his story with +so exquisite and so relevant an emotional effect as the aching of poor +Miss Pynsent's heart over this rough introduction of her cherished lamb +to the horrible; nor could he have invented that wonderful moment when +the child turns from the ravenous embrace of the wasted and disfigured +stranger with, "I won't kiss her; Pinnie says she stole a watch!" at +which the murderess screams, "_Ah! quelle infamie!_ I never stole +anything!" and the wardress says with dignity: "I'm sure you needn't put +more on her than she has by rights," to which the poor virgin, quite +unable to understand the peculiar cachet attaching to a _crime +passionel_, cries contritely, "Mercy, more! I thought it so much less!" + +And from this portal the book goes on to incidents and persons not less +exquisite but still disconcertingly mere portals. It is as though in a +mad dream one found oneself passing through the arch in the mellow +redness of Hampton Court and straightway emerged on the colonnade of St +Paul's, through whose little swing-doors one surprisingly stepped to the +prim front of Kensington Palace. There is M. Poupin, the exiled +Communist who cannot communicate with the world, or the moustached +female companion with whom he dwells in a scrupulously unmarried state, +save by platitudes concerning the social organisation: "I'm suffering +extremely, but we must all suffer so long as the social question is so +abominably, so iniquitously neglected," is his way of intimating a sore +throat. There is poor Lady Aurora Langrish, the aristocratic precursor +of the sad Miss Huxtables in _The Madras House_: "My father isn't rich, +and there's only one of us, Eva, married, and we're not at all +handsome.... They go into the country all the autumn, all the winter, +when there's no one here (except three or four millions) and the rain +drips, drips, drips from the trees in the big dull park where my people +live, and nothing to do but to go out with three or four others in +mackintoshes...." There is dry old Mr Vetch who plays the fiddle in the +orchestra at night and fills all the rest of the empty day with love for +Hyacinth; and there is Captain Sholto, the Piccadilly swell; and Miss +Hennings, the sales-lady, and half-a-dozen admirable others casually +affixed by the stretched string of circumstance or the glue of +coincidence. And quite the preciousest "piece" in the collection is the +account of how the Princess Casamassima, who is Christina Light of +_Roderick Hudson_, grown to perilous maturity of beauty and perversity, +calls young Hyacinth to her country house, and there in the beechy park +and flowery lanes makes him talk of the plots against the rich which +later are to cause his death, and brings him nearer to it by lifting a +face wonderfully pale and pure with enthusiasm. It is so like that +Titian in the Prado which shows, against a window looking on a park +where lovers walk in golden air under silver poplars, Venus lying on a +satin couch while a young man makes music for her at an organ; her eyes +are softly intent, and the youth thinks she is suspended over the world +in his music, but really she is brooding on the whiteness of his skin +beneath his black beard. That likeness suggests that _The Princess +Casamassima_ should be taken, not as a novel, but as the small, fine +picture gallery that Mr James thought fit to add to his mental palace, +already so rich in mere sane living rooms. + +It is unpleasant to travel in a runaway motor-car, even if it ultimately +spills one into a rose-garden, and when Mr James produced a picture +gallery when he had intended a grave study of social differences, he was +in much that case. But already in _The Author of Beltraffio_ (1884) he +had shown his awareness of a movement which had started with the +intention of destroying both Christian morality and rationalism, and +otherwise making us fearfully gay, and which actually achieved the +slight mitigation of the offensiveness of plumbers' shop windows and the +recovery by Mr Henry James of control over his machine. That story is +not one of Mr James' best; the author makes his readers regard his scene +through so small a peephole that even the characters who are to be +conceived as above all retiring have to come grossly near if their +audience is to make anything of the drama at all. The theme is that an +author's wife who considers her husband's books objectionable lets her +child die rather than that he should grow up in the companionship of one +so utterly without reserve; yet, since the tale is told by a total +stranger who is visiting them for the week-end, she has necessarily to +behave with a lack of reserve that makes her imputed motive incredible. +The special value of the story lies in the moments when the author of +_Beltraffio_, whose affectation of a velveteen coat and a remote foreign +air makes us desire to scream out to the weekend visitor that he is +being fooled, and this is no writer but an artistic photographer, +remarks with some complacency that to the conventional he appears "no +better than an ancient Greek" and professes a thirst for "the +cultivation of beauty without reserve or precautions." Our happy +generation cannot understand these phrases which doubtless had their +salutary meaning for that distant day when England fed herself on so low +a diet that _Jude the Obscure_ seemed to her a maddening draught. But +they interest us by showing that even Mr James, who ordinarily turned +aside with so chill a wince from the ridiculous, had exposed his +consciousness to the æsthetic movement which had been remotely +engendered by Leigh Hunt's Cockney crow of joy at Italy and afterwards +fostered by Ruskin as one of his wild repartees to the railway train, +and which was then being given the middle-class touch by Oscar Wilde. + +We feel surprised at Mr James' cognisance of anything so second-rate as +this Decadent Movement of the late eighties and early nineties, because +most of us basely judge it by its lack of worldly success instead of by +its moral mission. The elect of the movement, if one delves in the +memory of older Londoners, were certainly silly young men who were +careful about the laundering of their evening shirts and who tried to +introduce the tone of public-school life into ordinary society. And it +is true that for all their talk of art they produced nothing but one +good farce and a cartload of such weak, sweet verse as schoolgirls copy +into exercise-books, and that from this small effort they sank +exhausted down to prison, drink, madness, suicide; and struck whatever +other notes there be in the descending scale of personal disgrace. And +yet, for all its fruitlessness, that prattle about art gave them a valid +claim on our respect. Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was +poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were +confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who +wrote as though he were the offspring of two _Times_ leaders; among +novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too +prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach; +and in criticism Andrew Lang, who had admired Scott and Dickens in his +schooldays and was not going to let himself down by admiring anybody +nearer his own generation, greeted every exponent of the real with a +high piercing northern sneer. It was of inestimable value that it should +be cried, no matter in how pert a voice, that words are jewels which, +wisely set, make by their shining mental light. That the cry could not +save the young men who raised it, bore out their contention of the +time's need for it; if they, seeking new beauty, could but celebrate the +old dingy sins of towns, it showed in what a base age they had been +bred. And if they could not save themselves they saved others. Arnold +Bennett and H. G. Wells set off in the nineties in a world encouragingly +full of talk about good writing. Conrad, mouthing his difficult strange +tales about the sea, found an audience that would sit hushed. And in the +brain of one who, being then between forty and fifty years of age, might +have been thought inaccessible to new conceptions of the art that had +for so long preoccupied him, there passed important thoughts. + +"That idea I picked up when I corrected George Eliot's proofs, oh! so +long ago!" one can imagine Mr James saying, "that idea that art must be +ballasted by didacticism can't be true for me. I've fined it down, in my +reading of the French, to an opinion that the artist should use his +fancy work to decorate useful articles; but still it isn't true for me. +For I must, before I can decorate them, make the useful articles of +thought my own, and they are just the one thing that for all my mental +wealth I can't acquire. I see them often enough in the shop-windows--the +moral and political and philosophical problems so prodigiously produced +by my age--and many times have tried the door, but to my touch it never +opens, so I have to describe them as I see them through the glass, +without having felt or known them with the intimacy of possession! It's +true I did once deal with a situation in the history of two peoples, but +I see now that in its international character there was an intimation +that it was the last with which I should ever effectively concern +myself. For I'm destructively not national; my mind is engraved with the +sights and social customs of half-a-dozen countries, and with the deep +traditions of not one, and how can I deal deeply with the conduct of a +people when I haven't a notion of the quality or quantity of the +traditions which are, after all, its mainspring? It seems to me that +the cry of "Art for Art's sake," which is being raised by those young +men, and which certainly isn't true for _them_, may be true for _me_. +What if henceforth I release the winged steed of my recording art from +the obligation of dragging up the steep hill of my inaptitude the dray +filled with the heavy goods which I have amassed in my perhaps so +mistaken desire for a respectably weighty subject, and let the poor +thing just beautifully soar?" + +One perceives how far this mood had gone with Mr James when the hero of +_The Tragic Muse_ (1890) refuses a seat in Parliament and the hand of a +wealthy widow in order that he might go on painting. From Mr James, to +whom marrying a widow appeared as much superior to marrying a spinster +as privately acquiring a "piece" from the dispersed collection of a +deceased connoisseur of repute is to buying old furniture with no +guarantee but one's own approval, this was a portentous incident. And +there is vast significance in his sympathetic representation of Miriam +Rooth, the young actress to whom the title refers, for before this +period he would never have accepted the genius of the black-browed, +untidy girl as an excuse for her lack of money and social position and +manners. It had hitherto been his grimly expressed opinion that "the +life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations," and he +had refused to dramatise in his imagination anything concerning women +save their failures and successes as sexual beings; which is like +judging a cutlet not by its flavour, but by the condition of its +pink-paper frill. That time had gone. He had abandoned all his +prejudices in despair, and for many years to come was to show a divine +charity, freely permitting every encountered thing to impress its +essence on the receptive wax of his consciousness. For the next twelve +years "impressions," as in his happy foreign childhood, "were not merely +all right, but were the dearest things in the world." + + + + +IV + +THE CRYSTAL BOWL + + +In that octagonal room at the Prado, where each wall is an altar raised +to beauty, because it is hung with pictures by Velasquez, in all the +lesser works one finds some intimation of the grave, fine personality +who produced all this wonder. At the sacred picture that was his first +one says, "He was a pupil, and very proud of painting the old things +better than the old men could, even though they meant nothing to him"; +at the squat, black dwarfs, "He was so sure that the truth about the +world was kind that he could look upon horror without fear"; and at the +sketches of the Villa Medici Gardens, "After hot, bleak Spain he loved +Italy as one who has known passion loves a passionless girl." And the +recreated personality, tangible enough to be liked, passes with one +about the gallery until suddenly, before the masterpieces, it vanishes. +With those it had nothing to do; the thing that was his character, +shaped out of the innate traits of his dark stock by the raw beauty of +the land and the stiff rich life of the court, brought him to the +conception of these works but lay sleeping through their execution. When +he was painting _Las Hilanderas_ he knew nothing save that the weavers' +flesh glowed golden in the dusty sunlight of the factory; for the state +of genius consists of an utter surrender of the mind to the subject. The +artist at the moment of creation must be like a saint awaiting the +embrace of God, scourging appetite out of him, shrinking from sensation +as though it were a sin, deleting self, lifting his consciousness like +an empty cup to receive the heavenly draught. + +And so, with the beginning of his second period of genius, the reading +of Mr James ceased to give us the companionship of the gentle, very +pleasant American who seemed homeless but quite serene, as though he +were tired of living in his boxes, but on the other hand was very fond +of travelling, that we had grown to like in his books of the eighties. +He went away and sent no letter; but instead, with a lavishness one +would never have suspected from his uneasy bearing, sent a succession of +jewels, great globed jewels of experience, from which marvellously +conceived characters gave out their milky gleams or fiery rays. The +first tentative try at the mere impression, _The Aspern Papers_ (1888), +gave an earnest of his generosity. There one passes into the golden glow +of Venice, "where the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of +the palaces all shimmer and melt together.... The gondola stopped, the +old palace was there.... How charming! it's grey and pink!" And under +the painted ceiling of the old palace sits bleached and shrivelled +Juliana Bordereau, the memory of her love affair with the great poet +Aspern hanging in the air like incense and filling the mind with tears +that such splendid lovers buy no immortality, but grow old like the +rest. Above its mere amusing story the tale breathes an elegy on the +many good things that are slain by age before death comes and decently +inters the body. For one watches, with a kind of comic horror that such +grimaces should touch the face that Jeffery Aspern kissed, the grin of +senile irony with which she meets the young American who comes to +wheedle her lover's letters out of her, with which she wheedles money +out of him that she may provide for the future of the poor spinster +niece who moves tremulously about her chair like a silly baaing sheep; +with which, one thinks, she possibly anticipates the dreadful moment +after her death when the spinster dodderingly informs the American that +she could give him her aunt's papers only "if you were a relation ... if +you weren't a stranger...." Every drop of beauty is squeezed out of the +material by a pressure so cool and controlled that, remembering how +Benvenuto Cellini "fell in his clothes and slept" after he had taken +similar small masterpieces from the furnace, one waits for his +exhaustion. But it was given to Mr James, perhaps because he was an +American and so of a stock oxygenated by contact with the free airs of +the new free lands, to swim longer in the sea of perfection than any +other writer. It was not until fifteen years later, when he was old and +the disciples of the movement which had stimulated him all shabbily +dead, and talk about art locked away in a dusty cupboard with the +Japanese fans and the blue china pots, that he turned tired and came to +shore. + +He was sustained in this long swim by two beloved subjects, one bitter +and one sweet. The literary life was written about in those days almost +as much as it was talked about, and it was continually being used by the +young decadents as the occasion for predictions of their own later +squalor in which morphia and dark ladies, moulded in the likeness of +beautiful young Mrs Patrick Campbell, played parts which in the +subsequent realisation were taken by plain beer and plainer barmaids. Mr +James took up the poor, scribbled-about thing and turned it over very +reverently, none knowing better than he that the artist was the _sacer +vates_ of his time, and very sadly, because he had now close on thirty +years of intimacy with artists behind him. He had known Turgeniev, the +most "beautiful genius" of his age, and had found him rather lonely and +pre-eminently not eminent in the eyes of the world; he had seen the dark +days of Rossetti; he had trod so close on the heels of Alfred de Musset +as to know that _il s'absente trop de l'Académie parcequ'il s'absinthe +trop_; he had seen poor, fat little Zola, who thought that though one +could not build Rome in a day one could describe it in less, plodding +and sweating up the wrong road to art. And so, in a mood of clear +melancholy, with an occasional flash of irony which was doubtless the +sole comment wrung from his urbanity by the fact that that age, when the +change of the novel's price from thirty-one and sixpence to six +shillings had enormously increased the reading public, had brought no +enlargement of his circle of readers, he wrote that wonderful series of +stories which began with _The Lesson of the Master_ (1888) and included +_The Middle Years_ (1893), _The Next Time_ (1895), and _The Death of the +Lion_ (1894). Save for that roaring joke, _The Coxon Fund_ (1894), where +one sees Frank Saltram, a "free rearrangement of Coleridge," charming +and sponging on the rich, bringing into their drawing-rooms a swaying +body that should be taken home at once in a cab and a mind "like a +crystal suspended in the moral world--swinging and shining and flashing +there," these are all sad stories. The master is bullied out of being a +master by the financial importunities of a smart wife and comely +children; the author of _The Middle Years_ dies with none but an +acquaintance picked up at the seaside to hold his hand; Ralph Limbert is +killed by worry because he could not stop producing masterpieces when it +was the damned marketable asset that was required to pay the wages of +his wife's maid; the lion dies in a cold country house, with no fire in +his bedroom, while his hostess gets paragraphed for her charity to the +wild literary, and his last manuscript goes astray downstairs somewhere +between Lord Dorimont's man and Lady Augusta's maid. One knows next to +nothing at all about the faith consciously rejected or adopted by Henry +James, and whether the atmosphere of speculative theology in which he +was bred had made him think religion as far beyond his mental range as +mathematics, or whether Christianity seemed to him just the excuse of +the Latin races for building high cool places, very grateful in the +heat, and filling them with incense and images of kind, interceding +people. But in this melancholy series, and indeed in all his later +works--for right on to _The Golden Bowl_ (1905) he presents his +characters as being worthy of treatment just because they are in some +way or other struggling to preserve some decency from engulfment in the +common lot of nastiness--one perceives that he had been born with the +grim New England faith like a cold drop in his blood. The earth was a +vale of tears, and all one could do was to go on, uninfluenced by +weeping or the fear of weeping, to some high goal. This sad belief, +accompanied by so intense a consciousness that his particular goal, the +art of great writing, was reached by a stonier and longer path than any, +might have been expected to provoke him rather to the fury of Landor or +the gloomy pomposity of Wordsworth than to the unhurried, unimpassioned +production of these wonderful stories, these exquisite vessels that +swaggeringly hold and clearly show the contained draught of truth, like +tall-stemmed goblets of Venetian glass. But glass is the wrong image; +for no hand could ever break these, no critical eye detect a crack. They +are so truthfully conceived that one could compare them only to some +nobly infrangible substance, so realistic and yet so charged with +significance by their fashioning that their likeness must be something +which is transparent and yet gives the light a white fire as it passed +through. It is of crystal they are made, hard, luminous crystal. + +Mr James' second subject, which began to show its white flowers in _The +Other House_ (1896) and went on blossoming long after winter had fallen +on his genius in _The Golden Bowl_, also showed him a son of New +England. For it consists of nothing else than the demonstration, in +varying and exquisitely selected circumstances, that blessed are the +pure in heart; and that was certainly the beatitude that New England, +with its fear of passion and publicity and its respect for spinsters and +pastors of bleached lives, most regarded. Mr James demonstrated it in no +spirit of moral propaganda, but for the technical reason that a +situation is greatly elucidated if one of the persons engaged presents a +consciousness like a polished silver surface, unobscured by any tracery +of selfish preoccupations, which clearly mirrors the other participients +and their movements. Perhaps he thereby discovered the real meaning of +the beatitude, which may be no more than an expression of the obvious +truth that he who receives the fullest impression of the world is likely +to react most valuably to it. Certainly he invented a technical trick +which in its way was as important as the discovery which Ibsen was +making about the same time and which he himself used later in his last +masterpiece, that if one had a really "great" scene one ought to leave +it out and describe it simply by the full relation of its consequences. +He showed that all sorts of things that are amusing enough to write +about and are yet too ignoble for dignified art are lent the required +nobility by being witnessed by grave candour; and that characters whose +special claim is that they are "strange," but whose strangeness cannot +be laboured by direct description lest they become crude, can have the +gaps in their representation filled out by their effect on the simple. +Rose Armiger, in _The Other House_, is made much more horrible because +she exposes her dreadful passion before the simplicity of Tony Bream, +just as a striped poisonous snake would seem more striped and poisonous +if it flickered its black fang from an English rose-bush. The awfulness +of Ida Farange, whose handsome appearance constituted "an abuse of +visibility," of Beale Farange, whose vast scented beard was, since odd +ladies liked to play with it, ultimately his chief source of income, +would never have been important enough to be recorded if they had not +formed a part of _What Maisie Knew_ (1897); and the ensnarement of Sir +Claude, her first step-parent, who was such a good fellow to talk to +when his gaze didn't wander to the dark young woman in red who was +sweeping into dinner or to the shining limbs of a Dieppe fishwife, by +the beautiful, genteel young trollop who was her second step-parent, +would have been a matter too _louche_ for representation if Maisie had +not so beautifully cared for him. The battle over _The Spoils of +Poynton_ (1897), where the greedy mother tries to defend the fine +"things" of her dead husband's house from her imbecile son's vulgar +bride, would be too unrelievedly a history of greed to be borne were not +exquisite Fleda Vetch in the foreground, being fond of the mother, +loving the son. The best ghost story in the world, _The Turn of the +Screw_ (1898), is the more ghostly because the apparitions of the valet +and the governess, appearing at the dangerous place, the top of the +tower on the other side of the lake, that they may tempt the children +they corrupted in their lives to join them in their eternal torment, are +seen by the clear eyes of the honourable and fearless lady who tells the +tale. And _In the Cage_ (1898) has no subject but the purity of the +romantic little telegraphist who sits behind the wire netting at the +grocer's. Her heart is like a well of clear water, through which, when +the handsome Guardsman comes in to send a telegram to his mistress, love +strikes down like a shaft of light. + +One pauses, horrified to find oneself ticking off these masterpieces on +one's fingers, as though they were so many books by Mrs Humphry Ward or +buns by Lyons. And yet what can one do? Criticism must break down when +it comes to masterpieces. For if one is creative one wants to go away +and spend oneself utterly on this sacred business of creation, wring out +of oneself every drop of this inestimable thing art; and if one is not +creative one can only put out a tremulous finger to touch the marvellous +shining crystal, and be silent with wonder. Deep wonder, since these are +not, as fools have pretended, merely rich treatments of the trivial. For +although he could not grasp a complicated abstraction, was teased by the +implications of a great cause, and angered by an idea that could be +understood only by the synthesis of many references, he could dive down +serenely, like a practised diver going under the sea for pearls, into +the twilit depths of the heart to seize his secrets. There is in +humanity an instinct for ritual, there lies in all of us a desire to +commemorate our deep emotions, that would otherwise glow in our bosoms +and die down for ever, by some form that adds to the beauty of the +world; but there is only one expression of it in literature that is not +poisonously silly. Newman and the Tractarians and Monsignor Benson make +the ritualist seem as big a fool as the old woman who carries a potato +in her pocket to ward off rheumatism. Sabatier makes him seem the kind +of person who takes sugar in his tea, paints in water-colour and likes +_The Roadmender_. But there is a story by Henry James called _The Altar +of the Dead_, rejected again and again by the caste of cretins who edit +the magazines and reviews of this unhappy country, although of so +perfect a beauty that one can read every separate paragraph every day of +one's life for the music of the sentences and the loveliness of the +presented images, which takes ritual from the trembling hands of the +coped old men and exhibits it as something that those who love the +natural frame of things and hate superstition need not fear to accept. +It tells how an ageing man acquires an altar in a Roman Catholic church +and burns at it candles to his many dead, and by worshipping there keeps +so close company with their charity and sweetness that, at his end, the +blaze of white lights inspires him to a last supreme act of forgiveness +to an enemy; and the beautiful recital makes one's mind no longer fear +to admit that the splendour of a Cathedral Mass may, although one's +unbelief fly like an arrow through the show and transfix even the Cross +itself, fulfil a noble need. Once at least Henry James poured into his +crystal goblet the red wine that nourishes the soul. + +And it held, too, a liberal draught of the least trivial distillation of +man's mind, which is tragedy, in _The Wings of the Dove_ (1902). That +story is the perfect example of what he had declared in _The Tragic +Muse_ the artistic performance should always be: "the application, clear +and calculated, crystal-firm, as it were, of the idea conceived in the +glow of experience, of suffering, of joy." For Milly Theale, the +American heiress, "who had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great +account could have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived +with them; such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet +making it light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it +clear as noon; of being unmistakably sad and yet making it soft as +dusk," whose hopeful progress through Europe stops suddenly at the dark +portal in Harley Street, is but the ghost of Mary Temple, whose death +thirty years before had been felt by Henry and William James as the end +of their youth. All those years he had held in his heart the memory of +that poor girl, "conscious of a great capacity for life, but early +stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite while also +enamoured of the world; aware, moreover, of the condemnation and +passionately desiring to 'put in' before extinction as many of the finer +vibrations as possible and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the +sense of having lived"; but with the prescience of the artist he had +delayed until he had perfected his art to undertake the heavy task of +presenting her tragedy without mitigation and yet making it bearable and +beautiful. Then he lavished his technical resources on her history as he +might have laid flowers on her grave. There is nothing more miraculous +in all his works than the way he contrives that, when her agony becomes +too great to be directly represented and has to be suggested by its +effect upon others, he yet breaks no link of the intimacy between the +reader and his heroine, but provides that her increasing physical +absence shall be so compensated for by her spiritual presence that her +rare appearances are like long-expected visits from a distant friend. +One's knowledge of her glows into love when one sees her holding a +reception in the faded golden splendours of the Venetian palace to which +she has dragged herself to die, smiling bravely at her guests, bidding +musicians strike up to keep them gay, playing, to preserve her hands +from any gesture of anguish or appearance of lassitude, with the rope of +pearls that seems to weigh down her wasted body. Yet one gets one's +vision through the hard, envious eyes of Kate Croy, who is the hawk +circling over the poor dying dove, and the appalled gaze of Merton +Densher, Kate's secret lover, whom she has trapped into a profession of +love for Milly so that the deluded girl will leave him her fortune. And +one sees her most radiantly of all in the interview which she grants to +Densher when she has discovered the cruel fraud practised on her and is +dying of the knowledge, although one is told no more than that "she +received me just as usual, in that glorious great _salone_, in the dress +she always wears, from her inveterate corner of her sofa." From the love +it lit in his heart, a love so great that for very shame Kate cannot +marry him even when her machinations have achieved complete success at +Milly's death, one perceives that this was the dying girl's assumption, +that her sweetness and strength must at that hour have flowered so +divinely that the skies opened and they were no longer matter for a +human history. But about this masterpiece, too, there can be nothing +said. One just sits and looks up, while the Master lifts his old grief, +changed by his craftsmanship into eternal beauty as the wafer is changed +to the Host by the priest's liturgy, enclosed from decay, prisoned in +perfection, in the great shining crystal bowl of his art. + + + + +V + +THE GOLDEN BOWL + + +The signs of age appeared in Mr James' work like white streaks in a +black beard; between two vital and vigorous books there would appear one +that in its garrulity and complacent surrender to mannerism predicted +decay. It became clear, first of all, that he was no longer able to bear +up with serenity under his deep sense that life was a vale of tears. How +much he wished it would all stop is manifest in that strangest of all +visions of Paradise, _The Great Good Place_ (1900). We all have our +hopes of what gifts the hereafter may bring us, and in most cases we +desire some compensation for the limitations of our human knowledge; we +promise ourselves that when we lean over the gold bar of heaven a +competent angel will bustle up, clasping innumerable divinely clear +text-books under its wings, to tell us absolutely everything about +physics, with special reference to the movements of the heavenly bodies +spinning below. But it is the essence of Mr James' Paradise that there +is nothing there at all but a climate, a sweet soft climate in which the +most that happens is one of those summer sprinkles that brings out +smells. This fatigue of life, this hunger for the peace of nothingness, +showed itself in his increasing preference for laying the scene of his +novels in the great good places of this earth, where there is nothing +more dangerous in the parks and on the terraces than deer and peacocks, +and nothing more disturbing to the soul in the high rooms and +interminable galleries than well-bred women. It was not a gain to his +art; under its influence he committed the twittering over teacups which +compose the collection of short stories called _The Better Sort_ (1903), +and the incidentally beautiful but devastatingly artificial _The Awkward +Age_ (1899), in which the reader is perpetually confused because Nanda +Brookenham, one of the most charming of Mr James' "pure in heart," is +wept over as though she had been violated body and soul, when all that +has happened is that she has been brought up in a faster set than the +world thinks desirable for a young unmarried girl. And it was peculiarly +unfortunate that, while his subjects grew flimsier and his settings more +impressive, his style became more and more elaborate. With sentences +vast as the granite blocks of the Pyramids and a scene that would have +made a site for a capital he set about constructing a story the size of +a hen-house. The type of these unhappier efforts of Mr James' genius is +_The Sacred Fount_ (1901), where, with a respect for the mere gross +largeness and expensiveness of the country house which almost makes one +write the author Mr Jeames, he records how a week-end visitor spends +more intellectual force than Kant can have used on _The Critique of Pure +Reason_ in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists +between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more +interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows. The +finely wrought descriptions of the leisured life make one feel as though +one sat in a beautiful old castle, granting its beauty but not pleased, +because one is a prisoner, while the small, mean story worries one like +a rat nibbling at the wainscot. One takes it as significant that the +unnamed host and hostess of the party never appear save to "give +signals." The tiny, desperate figures this phrase shows to the mind's +eye, semaphoring to each other across incredibly extended polished +vistas to keep up their courage under these looming, soaring vaults, may +be taken as symbols of the heart and intellect which Mr James had now +forgotten in his elaboration of their social envelope. + +But with this method, as in every form of literary activity save only +playwriting, in which he was rather worse than Sidney Grundy in much the +same way, Mr James gained his radiant triumphs. There could be nothing +more trivial than the _donnée_ of _The Ambassadors_ (1903); there is no +dignity or significance in the situation of Lambert Strether, an +American who is engaged, in that odd way common to Mr James' characters, +to a woman whom he certainly does not love and hardly seems to like, and +goes at her bidding to Paris to cut her cubbish son clear from an +entanglement with a Frenchwoman. And yet so artfully is the tale +displayed in the setting of lovely, clean, white Paris and green France, +lifting her poplars into the serene strong light of the French sky, that +the reader holds his breath over the story of how Strether "had come +with a view that might have been figured by a clear, green liquid, say, +in a neat glass phial; and the liquid, once poured into the open cup of +_application_, once exposed to the action of another air, had begun to +turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on +its way to purple, to black, to yellow"; how, in fact, the old +"international situation" acted on the new generation of Americans. But +that book is not typical of this period, for it is singularly free from +those great sentences which sprawl over the pages of _The Golden Bowl_ +with such an effect of rank vegetable growth that one feels that if one +took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden. And it is +those sentences which absorb, at the last, the whole of Mr James' +attention. + +For he ceased, as time went on, to pay any attention to the emotional +values of his stories; it is one of the strangest things about _The +Golden Bowl_ that the frame on which there hangs the most elaborate +integument of suggestion and exposition ever woven by the mind of man is +an ugly and incompletely invented story about some people who are +sexually mad. Adam Verver, an American millionaire, buys an Italian +prince for his daughter Maggie, and in her turn she arranges a marriage +between her father and Charlotte, her school friend, because she thinks +he may be lonely without her. And although it is plain that people who +buy "made-up" marriages are more awful than the admittedly awful people +who buy "made-up" ties, they are presented to one as vibrating +exquisitely to every fine chord of life, as thinking about each other +with the anxious subtlety of lovers, as so steeped in a sense of one +another that they invent a sea of poetic phrases, beautiful images, +discerning metaphors that break on the reader's mind like the unceasing +surf. And when one tries to discover from the recorded speeches of these +people whether there was no palliation of their ugly circumstances one +finds that the dialogue, usually so compact a raft for the conveyance of +the meaning of Mr James' novels, has been smashed up on this sea of +phrases and drifts in, a plank at a time, on the copious flood: + + "Maggie happened to learn, by some other man's greeting of him, in + the bright Roman way, from a street corner as we passed, that one + of the Prince's baptismal names, the one always used for him among + his relations, was Amerigo; which--as you probably don't know, + however, even after a lifetime of _me_--was the name, four hundred + years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the + sea, in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had + failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new + continent; so the thought of any connection with him can even now + thrill our artless breasts." + +And as if it was not enough that these people should say literally +unspeakable sentences like that, and do incredible things, the phrases +make them do things which they never did. For the metaphors are so +beautifully and completely presented to the mind that it retains them as +having as real and physical an existence as the facts. When we learn +that the relationship between Charlotte and the Prince had reared itself +in Maggie's life like "some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, +a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and +adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled ever +so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs," and the simile is cunningly +developed for seven or eight hundred words, one is left with a confused +impression that a pagoda formed part of the furniture at Portland Place +and that Maggie oddly elected to keep her husband inside it. And to cap +it all these people are not even human, for their thoughts concerning +their relationships are so impassioned and so elaborate that they can +never have had either energy or time for the consideration of anything +else in the world. A race of creatures so inveterately specialist as +Maggie Verver could never have attained man's mastery over environment, +but would still be specialising on the cocoa-nut or some such simple +form of diet. + +Decidedly _The Golden Bowl_ is not good as a novel; but what it is +supremely good as can be discovered when one learns how, in these later +days, Mr James used to compose his novels. He began by dictating a short +draft which, even in the case of such a cartload of apes and ivory as +_The Golden Bowl_, might be no longer than thirty thousand words. Then +he would take this draft in his hand and would dictate it all over again +with what he intended to be enlightening additions, but which, since +the mere act of talking set all his family on to something quite +different from the art of letters, made it less and less of a novel. For +the James family had, as was shown by their father's many reported +phrases, by William James' charm as a lecturer, and by the social +greatness of Robertson James, a genius for conversation. For long years +it had remained latent in Henry James, who had in youth suffered much +from that stockishness which often comes to those who are burning all +their energy for creative purposes and have none left for personal +display; but latterly it had been liberated by the consciousness of +maturity and fame. At last it became a passion with him, and he decided +to converse, not only with his friends, but with his public. This was +bad for his novels, so long as one considered them as such, since a +novel should be the presentation and explanation of a subject while a +conversation is a fantasia of entertaining phrases on themes the +essentials of which are to some extent already in the possession of the +interlocutors. But once one considers them as a flow of bright things +said about people Mr James knows and that one rather thinks one has met, +but is not quite sure, one perceives that the crystal bowl of Mr James' +art was not, as one had feared, broken. He had but gilded its clear +sides with the gold of his genius for phrase-making, and now, instead of +lifting it with a priest-like gesture to exhibit a noble subject, held +it on his knees as a treasured piece of bric-à-brac and tossed into it, +with an increasing carelessness, any sort of subject--a jewel, a rose, a +bit of string, a visiting-card--confident that the surrounding golden +glow would lend it beauty. Indiscriminately he dropped into it his +precious visions of his revisited motherland, in _The American Scene_ +(1907); the dry little anecdotes of _The Finer Grain_ (1910); the +tittering triviality of _The Outcry_ (1911); and his judgment of his own +works in the prefaces to the New York edition of the _Novels and Tales +of Henry James_ (1908-1909). + +Always it was good, rambling talk, although fissured now and then with +an old man's lapses into tiresomeness, when he split hairs until there +were no longer any hairs to split and his mental gesture became merely +the making of agitated passes over a complete baldness. + +And here and there the prose achieves a beauty of its own; but it is no +longer the beauty of a living thing, but rather the "made" beauty which +bases its claims to admiration chiefly on its ingenuity, like those +crystal clocks with jewelled works and figures moving as the hours +chimed, which were the glory of mediæval palaces. + + * * * * * + +William James died in 1910, and Henry James, who had already begun to +savour the bitterness of outliving brothers and friends and pets, whiled +away the next few years of separation from his adored brother in the +composition of two beautiful books about their childhood and youth, _A +Small Boy_ (1913), and _Notes of a Son and Brother_ (1914), and a third +autobiographical volume which is not yet published. Then came the +European War, in which he enlisted as a spiritual soldier. By +innumerable beautiful acts, by kindly visits to French and Belgian +refugees and wounded soldiers, by gifts of money and writings to war +charities, he raised an altar to the dead who had died for the countries +which he had always loved at the hands of the country which, ever since +he was a student at Bonn, he had always loathed. In July, 1915, he took +the great step, fraught for him with the deepest emotions, of renouncing +his American citizenship and becoming a naturalised British subject; and +in January, 1916, he did England the further honour of accepting the +Order of Merit. And on 28th February, 1916, he died, leaving the white +light of his genius to shine out for the eternal comfort of the mind of +man. + + + + +A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MR HENRY JAMES' PRINCIPAL WORKS + +[A complete bibliography of the works of Mr James would form a much +thicker volume than this book. A useful bibliography up to 1906, +compiled by Mr. Frederick Allen King, is included as an appendix in Miss +Elisabeth Luther Cary's _The Novels of Henry James_ (Putnam); and a +complete bibliography covering the same period, which gives an +interesting list of his early unsigned contributions to periodicals, has +been compiled by Mr Leroy Phillips and published by Messrs Constable. +The following bibliography records only the first editions of +publications in book form.] + +The American (_Ward, Lock_). 1877. + +French Poets and Novelists (_Macmillan_). 1878. + +The Europeans (_Macmillan_). 1878. + +Roderick Hudson (_Macmillan_). 1879. + +Daisy Miller. An International Episode. Four Meetings (_Macmillan_). +1879. + +The Madonna of the Future. Longstaff's Marriage. Madame de Mauves. +Eugene Pickering. The Diary of a Man of Fifty. Benvolio (_Macmillan_). +1879. + +Hawthorne (_Macmillan_). Included in English Men of Letters Series, +edited by John Morley. 1879. + +Confidence (_Chatto & Windus_). 1880. + +Washington Square. The Pension Beaurepas. A Bundle of Letters +(_Macmillan_). 1881. + +The Portrait of a Lady (_Macmillan_). 1881. + +Portraits of Places (_Macmillan_). 1883. + +Tales of Three Cities: The Impressions of a Cousin. Lady Barbarina. A +New England Winter (_Macmillan_). 1884. + +Stories Revived: Vol. I. The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. The Path of +Duty. A Day of Days. A Light Man. Vol. II. Georgina's Reasons. A +Passionate Pilgrim. A Landscape Painter. Rose-Agathe. Vol. III. Poor +Richard. The Last of the Valerii. Master Eustace. The Romance of Certain +Old Clothes. A Most Extraordinary Case (_Macmillan_). 1885. + +The Bostonians (_Macmillan_). 1886. + +The Princess Casamassima (_Macmillan_). 1886. + +The Reverberator (_Macmillan_). 1888. + +The Aspern Papers. Louisa Pallant. The Modern Warning (_Macmillan_). +1888. + +Partial Portraits (Macmillan). 1888. + +A London Life. The Patagonia. The Liar. Mrs Temperley (_Macmillan_). +1889. + +The Tragic Muse (_Macmillan_). 1890. + +The Lesson of the Master. The Marriages. The Pupil. Brooksmith. The +Solution. Sir Edmund Orme (_Macmillan_). 1892. + +The Real Thing. Sir Dominick Ferrand. Nona Vincent. The Chaperon. +Greville Fane (_Macmillan_). 1893. + +The Private Life. The Wheel of Time. Lord Beaupré. The Visits. +Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1893. + +Essays in London (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1893. + +Theatricals: Two Comedies. Tenants. Disengaged (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). +1894. + +Theatricals: Second Series. The Album. The Reprobate (_Osgood, +McIlvaine_). 1895. + +Terminations: The Death of the Lion. The Coxon Fund. The Middle Years. +The Altar of the Dead (_Heinemann_). 1895. + +Embarrassments: The Figure in the Carpet. Glasses. The Next Time. The +Way it Came (_Heinemann_) 1896. + +The Other House (_Heinemann_). 1896. + +The Spoils of Poynton (_Heinemann_). 1897. + +What Maisie Knew (_Heinemann_). 1897. + +In the Cage (_Duckworth_). 1898. + +The Two Magics. The Turn of the Screw. Covering End (_Macmillan_). 1898. + +The Awkward Age (_Heinemann_). 1899. + +The Soft Side: The Great Good Place. "Europe." Paste. The Real Right +Thing. The Great Condition. The Tree of Knowledge. The Abasement of the +Northmores. The Given Case. John Delavoy. The Third Person. Maud-Evelyn. +Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie (_Methuen_). 1900. + +The Sacred Fount (_Methuen_). 1901. + +The Wings of the Dove (_Constable_). 1902. + +The Better Sort: Broken Wings. The Beldonald Holbein. The Two Faces. The +Tone of Time. The Special Type. Mrs Medwin. Flickerbridge. The Story in +It. The Beast in the Jungle. The Birthplace. The Papers (_Methuen_). +1903. + +The Ambassadors (_Methuen_). 1903. + +William Wetmore Story and his Friends (_Blackwood_). 1903. + +The Golden Bowl (_Methuen_). 1905. + +English Hours (_Heinemann_). 1905. + +The American Scene (_Chapman & Hall_). 1907. + +Italian Hours (_Heinemann_). 1909. + +The Finer Grain: The Velvet Glove. Mora Montravers. A Round of Visits. +Crapy Cornelia. The Bench of Desolation (_Methuen_). 1910. + +The Outcry (_Methuen_). 1911. + +A Small Boy (_Macmillan_). 1913. + +Notes of a Son and Brother (_Macmillan_). 1914. + +Notes on Novelists (_Dent_). 1914. + +A Collection of Novels and Tales by Henry James was published by Messrs +Macmillan in 1883. This consisted of reprints of The Portrait of a Lady, +Roderick Hudson, The American, Washington Square, The Europeans, +Confidence, Madame de Mauves, An International Episode, The Pension +Beaurepas, Daisy Miller, Four Meetings, Longstaff's Marriage, Benvolio, +The Madonna of the Future, A Bundle of Letters, The Diary of a Man of +Fifty, and Eugene Pickering; and two stories, The Siege of London and +The Point of View, which had not before been published in England. + +The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was +published by Messrs Macmillan during 1908-1909. Each novel and each +volume of short stories has a critical preface by the author, and each +volume has a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn as frontispiece. The +following is the order:-- + +1. Roderick Hudson. 2. The American. 3, 4. The Portrait of a Lady. 5, 6. +The Princess Casamassima. 7, 8. The Tragic Muse. 9. The Awkward Age. 10. +The Spoils of Poynton; A London Life; The Chaperon. 11. What Maisie +Knew; In the Cage; The Pupil. 12. The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the +Screw; The Liar; The Two Faces. 13. The Reverberator; Madame de Mauves; +A Passionate Pilgrim; The Madonna of the Future; Louisa Pallant. 14. +Lady Barbarina; The Siege of London; An International Episode; The +Pension Beaurepas; A Bundle of Letters; The Point of View. 15. The +Lesson of the Master; The Death of the Lion; The Next Time; The Figure +in the Carpet; The Coxon Fund. 16. The Author of Beltraffio; The Middle +Years; Greville Fane; Broken Wings; The Tree of Knowledge; The Abasement +of the Northmores; The Great Good Place; Four Meetings; Paste; Europe; +Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie; Fordham Castle. 17. The Altar of the Dead; +The Beast in the Jungle; The Birthplace; The Private Life; Owen +Wingrave; The Friends of the Friends; Sir Edmund Orme; The Real Right +Thing; The Jolly Corner; Julia Bride. 18. Daisy Miller; Pandora; The +Patagonia; The Marriages; The Real Thing; Brooksmith; The Beldonald +Holbein; The Story in It; Flickerbridge; Mrs Medwin. 19, 20. The +Ambassadors. 21, 22. The Wings of the Dove. 23, 24. The Golden Bowl. + +Fordham Castle, The Jolly Corner and Julia Bride had not previously been +published. All the early works have been subjected to a revision which +in several cases, notably Daisy Miller and Four Meetings, amounts to +their ruin. + + +AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY + +[When the contents of collections of short stories have been given in +full in the English bibliography they are entered here by their title +only.] + +A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales: The Last of the Valerii. Eugene +Pickering. The Madonna of the Future. The Romance of Certain Old +Clothes. Madame de Mauves (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, +_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1875. + +Transatlantic Sketches: Articles reprinted from _The Nation_, _The +Atlantic Monthly_, and _The Galaxy_ (_James R. Osgood_; present +publishers, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1875. + +Roderick Hudson (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1876. + +The American (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1877. + +Watch and Ward (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1878. + +The Europeans (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1878. + +Daisy Miller (_Harper_). 1878. + +An International Episode (_Harper_). 1878. + +Hawthorne (_Harper_). 1880. + +The Diary of a Man of Fifty and A Bundle of Letters (_Harper_). 1880. + +Confidence (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton Mifflin_). +1880. + +Washington Square. Illustrated by George du Maurier (_Harper_). 1881. + +The Portrait of a Lady (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1881. + +Daisy Miller: A Comedy. Privately printed. 1882. + +The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of View +(_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1883. + +Portraits of Places (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1883. + +Tales of Three Cities (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1884. + +A Little Tour in France (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, +_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1884. + +The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. Georgina's Reasons. The Path of Duty. +Four Meetings (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1885. + +The Bostonians (_Macmillan_). 1886. + +The Princess Casamassima (_Macmillan_). 1886. + +The Reverberator (_Macmillan_). 1888. + +The Aspern Papers (_Macmillan_). 1888. + +Partial Portraits (_Macmillan_). 1888. + +A London Life (_Macmillan_). 1889. + +The Tragic Muse (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1890. + +The Lesson of the Master (_Macmillan_). 1892. + +The Real Thing (_Macmillan_). 1893. + +The Private Life. Lord Beaupré. The Visits (_Harper_). 1893. + +The Wheel of Time. Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (_Harper_). 1893. + +Picture and Text. Essays on Art (_Harper_). 1893. + +Essays in London (_Harper_). 1893. + +Theatricals (_Harper_). 1894. + +Theatricals: Second Series (_Harper_). 1895. + +Terminations (_Harper_). 1895. + +Embarrassments (_Macmillan_). 1896. + +The Other House (_Macmillan_). 1896. + +The Spoils of Poynton (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1897. + +What Maisie Knew (_Herbert S. Stone_). 1897. + +In the Cage (_Herbert S. Stone_). 1898. + +The Two Magics (_Macmillan_). 1898. + +The Awkward Age (_Harper_). 1899. + +The Soft Side (_Macmillan_). 1900. + +The Sacred Fount (_Scribner's_). 1901. + +The Wings of the Dove (_Scribner's_). 1902. + +The Better Sort (_Scribner's_). 1903. + +The Ambassadors (_Harper_). 1903. + +William Wetmore Story (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1903. + +The Golden Bowl (_Scribner's_). 1904. + +English Hours (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1905. + +The Question of our Speech. The Lesson of Balzac (_Houghton, Mifflin_). +1905. + +The American Scene (_Harper_). 1907. + +Italian Hours (Houghton. Mifflin). 1909. + +The Finer Grain (_Scribner's_). 1910. + +The Outcry (_Scribner's_). 1911. + +A Small Boy (_Scribner's_). 1913. + +Notes of a Son and Brother (_Scribner's_). 1914. + +Notes on Novelists (_Scribner's_). 1914. + +The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was +published in America by Messrs Scribner's Sons. + + + + +INDEX + + +_Altar of the Dead, The_, 100 + +_Ambassadors, The_, 108-110 + +_American Scene, The_, 115 + +_American, The_, 38-40 + +_Aspern Papers, The_, 88-89 + +_Atlantic Monthly, The_, 21, 24 + +_Author of Beltraffio, The_, 78-80 + +_Awkward Age, The_, 106-107 + + +_Better Sort, The_, 106 + +_Bostonians, The_, 71-72 + + +Civil War, 19, 21 + +_Coxon Fund, The_, 92 + +Criticism, 63-71 + + +_Daisy Miller_, 44-48 + +_Death of the Lion, The_, 92-93 + +Decadent Movement, 79-84, 90 + + +Eliot, George, 22, 82 + +Emerson, 10, 72 + +_Essays in London_, 66 + +European War, 117 + +_Europeans, The_, 41-44 + + +_Finer Grain, The_, 115 + +Flaubert, 58, 63, 65-66 + +French literature, 38, 52, 58, 91 + +_French Poets and Novelists_, 37, 64 + + +_Galaxy, The_, 24 + +_Golden Bowl, The_, 25, 93, 95, 110-113 + +_Great Good Place, The_, 105 + + +Hawthorne, 10, 24, 31 + +Historic sense, 60-63 + + +International situation, 30-33, 109 + +_In the Cage_, 98 + + +James, Rev. Henry, 12-13, 17-19, 114 + + +_Lady Barbarina_, 49 + +_Lesson of the Master, The_, 92 + +_Little Tour in France, A_, 60-61 + +_London Life, A_, 50, 54 + + +_Madame de Mauves_, 28-30 + +_Madonna of the Future, The_, 28 + +_Middle Years, The_, 92 + + +Naturalisation, 117 + +_Next Time, The_, 92 + +New York Edition of, _Novels and Tales, The_, 115 + +_Notes of a Son and Brother_, 116 + +_Notes on Novelists_, 64 + + +_Other House, The_, 96 + +_Outcry, The_, 115 + + +_Pandora_, 49 + +_Partial Portraits_, 67 + +_Passionate Pilgrim, The_, 25-27, 61 + +_Pension Beaurepas, The_, 48 + +Playwriting, 108 + +_Portrait of a Lady, The_, 67-70 + +_Princess Casamassima, The_, 73-78 + + +_Religion_, 17-19, 93, 99-101, 105-106 + +_Reverberator, The_, 50 + +_Roderick Hudson_, 33-36 + +_Romance of Certain Old Clothes_, 24 + + +_Sacred Fount, The_, 107 + +_Siege of London, The_, 48 + +_Small Boy, A_, 116 + +_Spoils of Poynton, The_, 97 + + +Temple, Mary, 23, 102 + +_Tragic Muse, The_, 84, 101 + +Turgeniev, 56-59, 91 + +_Turn of the Screw, The_, 97 + + +Velasquez, 86 + + +Ward, Mrs Humphry, 66 + +_Washington Square_, 55-59 + +_What Maisie Knew_, 97 + +_Wings of the Dove_, 101, 104 + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry James, by Rebecca West + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY JAMES *** + +***** This file should be named 37300-8.txt or 37300-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/7/3/0/37300/ + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Henry James + +Author: Rebecca West + +Release Date: September 3, 2011 [EBook #37300] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY JAMES *** + + + + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + + +</pre> + +<hr class="full" /> + +<p class="figcenter"> +<a href="images/cover_lg.jpg"> +<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="376" height="550" alt="image of the book's cover" title="image of the book's cover" /></a> +</p> + +<p> +<br /> +<br /> +</p> + +<p class="cb">HENRY JAMES</p> + +<p> +<br /> +<br /> +</p> + +<p><a name="page_001" id="page_001"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_002" id="page_002"></a></p> + +<p class="figcenter"> +<a href="images/henry_james.jpg"> +<img src="images/henry_james_sml.jpg" width="391" height="550" alt="Photo portrait of Henry James" title="Photo portrait of Henry James" /></a> +<br /> +<span class="caption">HENRY JAMES</span> +</p> + +<p><a name="page_003" id="page_003"></a></p> + +<h1>HENRY JAMES</h1> + +<p class="cb">By<br /> +<br /> +REBECCA WEST</p> + +<p> +<br /> +<br /> +<br /> +<br /> +</p> + +<p class="cb">KENNIKAT PRESS, INC. / PORT WASHINGTON, N. Y.</p> + +<p><a name="page_004" id="page_004"></a></p> + +<p> +<br /> +<br /> +</p> + +<p class="nind"><small>HENRY JAMES<br /> +<br /> +First Published in 1916<br /> +Reissued in 1968 by Kennikat Press<br /> +<br /> +Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 67-27663<br /> +<br /> +Manufactured in the United States of America</small></p> + +<p><a name="page_005" id="page_005"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="AUTHORS_NOTE" id="AUTHORS_NOTE"></a>AUTHOR'S NOTE</h3> + +<p><i>I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness for help in compiling the +bibliography to Mr James B. Pinker, Miss Wilma Meikle, and Messrs +Constable; and to Messrs Macmillan for the loan of the New York Edition +of the Novels and Tales of Henry James.</i></p> + +<p class="r">R. W.</p> + +<p><a name="page_006" id="page_006"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_007" id="page_007"></a></p> + +<p> +<br /> +<br /> +<br /> +</p> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary=""> + +<tr><th colspan="3" align="center"><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a><big>CONTENTS</big></th></tr> +<tr><td colspan="3" align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr> +<tr><td align="right"><a href="#I">I.</a> </td><td>THE SOURCES </td><td align="right"><a href="#page_009">9</a></td></tr> +<tr><td align="right"><a href="#II">II.</a> </td><td>THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION</td><td align="right"><a href="#page_024">24</a></td></tr> +<tr><td align="right"><a href="#III">III.</a> </td><td>TRANSITION</td><td align="right"><a href="#page_055">55</a></td></tr> +<tr><td align="right"><a href="#IV">IV.</a> </td><td>THE CRYSTAL BOWL</td><td align="right"><a href="#page_086">86</a></td></tr> +<tr><td align="right"><a href="#V">V.</a> </td><td>THE GOLDEN BOWL</td><td align="right"><a href="#page_105">105</a></td></tr> +<tr><td> </td><td><a href="#BIBLIOGRAPHY">BIBLIOGRAPHY</a></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_119">119</a></td></tr> +<tr><td> </td><td><a href="#AMERICAN_BIBLIOGRAPHY">AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY</a></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_124">124</a></td></tr> +<tr><td> </td><td><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></td><td align="right"><a href="#page_127">127</a></td></tr> +</table> + +<p><a name="page_008" id="page_008"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_009" id="page_009"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="I" id="I"></a>I<br /><br /> +THE SOURCES</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">A</span><b>T</b> various times during the latter half of the eighteenth century there +crossed the Atlantic two Protestant Irishmen, a Lowland Scotsman, and an +Englishman, and thereby they fixed the character of Mr Henry James' +genius. For the essential thing about Mr James was that he was an +American; and that meant, for his type and generation, that he could +never feel at home until he was in exile. He came of a stock that was +the product of culture and needed it as part of its environment. But at +the time of his childhood and youth—he was born in 1843—culture was a +thing that was but budding here and there in America, in such corners as +were not being used in the business of establishing the material +civilisation of the new country. The social life of old New York and +Boston had its delicacy,<a name="page_010" id="page_010"></a> its homespun honesty of texture, its austerer +sort of beauty; but plainly the American people were too preoccupied by +their businesses and professions to devote their money to the +embellishment of <i>salons</i> or their intelligence to the development of +manners. Hawthorne and Emerson and Margaret Fuller and their friends +were trying to make a culture against time; but any record of their +lives which gives a candid account of how desperately these people had +to struggle to make the meanest living shows that the poor American ants +were then utterly unable to form the leisured community which is the +necessary environment for grasshoppers. "The impression of Emerson's +personal history is condensed into the single word Concord," wrote Mr +James later, "and all the condensation in the world will not make it +rich." There was no blinking the fact that in attempting to set up in +this unfinished country Art was like a delicate lady who moves into a +house before the plaster is dried on the walls; she was bound to lead an +invalid existence.<a name="page_011" id="page_011"></a></p> + +<p>This incapacity of America to supply the colour of life became obvious +to Henry and William James, the two charming little boys in tight +trousers and brass-buttoned jackets, one of whom grew up to write +fiction as though it were philosophy and the other to write philosophy +as though it were fiction, at a very early age. It did not escape their +infant observation that the ladies and gentlemen who fascinated them by +dancing on the tight-rope at Barnum's Museum always bore exotic names, +and when they grew older and developed the youthful taste for anecdotic +art they found it could be gratified only by such European importations +as Thorwaldsen's <i>Christ and His Disciples</i>, the great white images of +which were ranged round the maroon walls of the New York Crystal Palace, +or Benjamin's Haydon's pictures in the Düsseldorf collection in +Broadway. And when they grew older still and began to show a fine talent +for painting and drawing their unfolding artistic sense found more and +more intimations of the wonder of Europe. <i>A View of Tuscany</i><a name="page_012" id="page_012"></a> that hung +in the Jameses' home was pronounced by a friend who had lived much in +Italy not to be of Tuscany at all. Colours in Tuscany were softer; but +such brightness might be found in other parts of Italy. So Europe was as +various as that—a place of innumerable changing glories like a sunrise, +but better than a sunrise, inasmuch as every glory was encrusted with +the richness of legend.</p> + +<p>But most powerful of all influences that made the Jameses rebel against +the narrowness of Broadway and the provincial spareness of the old New +York, which must have been something like a neat virgin Bloomsbury, was +their father. The Reverend Henry James was wasted on young America; it +had developed neither the creative stream that would have inspired him +nor the intellectual follies that he could slay with that beautiful wit +which made him one of the great letter-writers of the world. "Carlyle is +the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease, only +infinitely <i>more</i> unreconciled to the blest Providence which<a name="page_013" id="page_013"></a> guides +human affairs. He names God frequently and alludes to the highest things +as if they were realities, but all only as for a picturesque effect, so +completely does he seem to regard them as habitually circumvented and +set at naught by the politicians." The man who could write that should +have been a strong and salutary influence on English culture, and he +knew it. It is probable that when he and his wife paid what Mr James +tells us was their "first (that is our mother's first) visit to Europe, +which had quite immediately followed my birth, which appears to have +lasted some year and a half"—the last clause of this sentence is +unfortunate for a novelist famous for his deliberation—he brought his +babies with him with a solemnity of intention, as if to dip them in a +holy well. Thus it was that the little Jameses not only bore themselves +proudly through their childhood as became those who had lived as babies +in Piccadilly, and read <i>Punch</i> with a proprietary instinct, but were +also possessed in spirit by something that was more than the discontent<a name="page_014" id="page_014"></a> +with the flatness of daily life and the desire for a brighter scene that +comes to the ordinary child. From their father's preoccupation they +gained a rationalised consciousness that America was an incomplete +environment, that in Europe there were many mines of treasure which they +must find and rifle if they hoped for the health of their minds and the +salvation of their souls.</p> + +<p>In 1855, when Henry James was twelve, the family yielded to its passion +and crossed the Atlantic. The following four years were of immense +importance to Mr James, and consequently to ourselves, for he had been +born with a mind that received impressions as if they had been embraces +and remembered them with as fierce a leaping of the blood; just as his +brother William's mind acquired and created systems of thought as +joyously as other men like meeting friends and establishing a family. He +found London in the main jolly, rather ugly, but comfortable and full of +character, just as he had seen it in <i>Punch</i>, but here and there +detected—<a name="page_015" id="page_015"></a>notably on a drive from London Bridge—black outcrops of +Hogarth's London. "It was a soft June evening, with a lingering light +and swarming crowds, as they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me +of George Cruikshank's Artful Dodger and his Bill Sykes and his Nancy, +only with the bigger brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the +Early Victorian four-wheeler, as we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped +up in more and more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, +somewhere far to the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab +window, of a woman reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground +with a blow in the face." He knew Paris, then being formed by the free +flourish of Baron Haussmann into its present splendours of wide +regularity, yet still homely with remnants of the dusty ruralism of its +pre-Napoleonic state; he saw all the pretty show of the Second Empire, +he stood in the Champs-Elysées and watched the baby Prince Imperial roll +by to St. Cloud with his escort of blue and silver <i>cent-gardes</i>; and +the<a name="page_016" id="page_016"></a> Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, its floors gleaming with polished +wood, its walls glowing with masterpieces, and its proportions awesomely +interminable and soaring, was the scene of his young imaginative life. +Those were the great places; but there were also Geneva and Boulogne and +Zurich and Bonn, the differences of which he savoured, and above all the +richness of desultory contact with arts and persons of the various +countries. He gaped at the exquisiteness of ugly Rose Chéri at the +Gymnase, copied Delacroix, read <i>Evan Harrington</i> as it came out in +<i>Once a Week</i>; was at school with a straight-nosed boy called Henry +Houssaye and a snub-nosed boy called Coquelin; was tutored by Robert +Thompson, the famous Edinburgh teacher who was afterwards to instruct +Robert Louis Stevenson and many other eminent Scots in Jacobite +sympathies as well as the more usual subjects, and by M. Lerambert whose +verse had been praised by Sainte-Beuve in his <i>Causeries</i>. +"Impressions," writes Mr James of this period,<a name="page_017" id="page_017"></a> "were not merely all +right but were the dearest things in the world."</p> + +<p>And one must remember that not only were impressions much to young Henry +James, they were all he had. His mental life consisted of nothing else. +His natural inaptitude for acquiring systematised knowledge was probably +intensified by the study of foreign languages entailed by this travel; +for if a child spends its time learning several systems of naming things +it plainly has less energy to spare for learning systems of arranging +things. At any rate his inability to grasp the elements of arithmetic +and mathematics led to his removal from the Polytechnic School at +Zurich, and was the cause of despair in all his tutors. But most minds, +however incapable they may be of following the exact sciences or +speculative thought, have some sort of idea of the system of the +universe inserted into them by early instruction in one or other of the +religious faiths. This unifying influence was refused to Henry James by +the circumstance that his father had found certain religious doubts<a name="page_018" id="page_018"></a> +that had almost driven him from the ministry solved in the works of +Swedenborg, which he found not at all incredible but—as he once said in +a phrase that showed him his son's own father—fairly "insipid with +veracity." On this foundation of Swedenborgianism he had built up for +himself a religion which was "nothing if not a philosophy, +extraordinarily complex and worked out and original, intensely personal +as an exposition, yet not only susceptible of application, but clamorous +for it, to the whole field of consciousness, nature and society, +history, knowledge, all human relations and questions, every pulse of +the process of our destiny." This was no playground for the young +intelligence, so young Henry James was told to prepare himself by +drinking from such springs as seemed to him refreshing. When he was +asked to what church he went he was bidden by his father to reply that +"we could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom, +and that there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that +of the Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians,<a name="page_019" id="page_019"></a> from which we need find +ourselves excluded." He certainly liked to exercise this privilege, but +he admits that "my grounds may have been but the love of the +<i>exhibition</i> in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture, +sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed +most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot +of the mind." Which was to be expected; as also was the fact that he +never broke his childish habit of regarding his father's religion as a +closed temple standing in the centre of his family life, the general +holiness of which he took for granted so thoroughly that it never +occurred to him to investigate its particulars.</p> + +<p>This European visit came to an end in 1859, and William and Henry James +spent the next year or so at Newport studying art under the direction of +their friend John La Farge, with the result that William painted +extremely well in the style of Manet, and Henry showed as little ability +in this direction as he had shown in any other. In 1861 the Civil War +broke out; and had it not<a name="page_020" id="page_020"></a> been for an accident the whole character of +Mr James' genius would have been altered. If he had seen America by the +light of bursting shells and flaming forest he might never have taken +his eyes off her again, he might have watched her fascinated through all +the changes of tone and organisation which began at the close of the +war, he might have been the Great American Novelist in subject as well +as origin. But it happened, in that soft spring when he and every other +young man of the North realised that there was a crisis at hand in which +their honour was concerned and they must answer Lincoln's appeal for +recruits, that he was one day called to help in putting out a fire. In +working the fire-engine he sustained an injury so serious that he could +never hope to share the Northern glory, that there were before him years +of continuous pain and weakness, that ultimately he formed a curious and +on the whole mischievous conception of himself. For his humiliating +position as a delicate and unpromising student at Harvard Law School +while his younger brothers, Wilky and<a name="page_021" id="page_021"></a> Robertson, were officers in the +Northern Army and William was pursuing a brilliant academic career or +naturalising with Agassiz in South America, seemed a confirmation of his +tutors' opinion that he was an inarticulate mediocrity who would never +be able to take a hand in the business of life. And so he worked out a +scheme of existence, which he accepted finally in an hour of glowing +resignation when he was returning by steamer to Newport from a visit to +a camp of wounded soldiers at Portsmouth Grove, in which the one who +stood aside and felt rather than acted acquired thereby a mystic value, +a spiritual supremacy, which—but this was perhaps a later development +of the theory—would be rubbed off by participation in action.</p> + +<p>It was, therefore, with defiant industry, with the intention of proving +that such as he was he had his peculiar worth, that he set to work to +become a writer. His first story was published in <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i> +when he was twenty-one, and it was followed by a number of stories, +travel sketches, and critical essays, some of which have been<a name="page_022" id="page_022"></a> +reprinted, and a few farces which have not. He also went through a +necessary preface of the literary life by reading the proofs of George +Eliot's novels before they appeared in the <i>Atlantic</i> and reviewing; the +profession of literature differs from that of the stage in that the +stars begin instead of ending as dressers. In 1869 he went to Europe +and, gaining certain impressions that had been inaccessible to him as a +child, finally fixed the dye in which his talent was to be immersed for +the rest of his life. He stepped for the first time into "a private park +of great oaks ... where I knew my first sense of a matter afterwards, +through fortunate years, to be more fully disclosed: the springtime in +such places, the adored footpath, the first primroses, the stir and +scent of renascence in the watered sunshine and under spreading boughs +that were somehow before aught else the still reach of the remembered +lines of Tennyson...." He was admitted to the homes of Ruskin, Rossetti, +Morris, Darwin, and George Eliot, and allowed to see the wheels go +round. But the real significance<a name="page_023" id="page_023"></a> of this journey to Mr James' genius is +the part it played in the last days of his beautiful cousin, Mary +Temple. She should have had before her a long career of nobility, for +"she was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with +enough sincerity and enough wonder." She pretended not to know that she +had been cheated out of this, but as she lay on the death-bed that she +would not admit to be even a sick-bed, her eyes were fixed intensely on +the progress of her cousin through all the experiences that should have +been hers. There came a day when all illusion failed, and she died +dreadfully, clinging to consciousness. Her death was felt by Henry and +William James as the end of their youth.</p> + +<p> +<br /> +</p> + +<p>That, as Mr James would have said, is the <i>donnée</i>. The must was trodden +out, it had only to ferment, to be bottled, to be mellowed by time into +the perfect wine. There is nothing in all the innumerable volumes that +Mr James was to pour out in the next forty-five years of which the +intimation is not present in these first adventures.<a name="page_024" id="page_024"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="II" id="II"></a>II<br /><br /> +THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span><b>T</b> is no use turning up those first stories that appeared in <i>The +Atlantic Monthly</i> and <i>The Galaxy</i> unless one has formed an affection +for the literary personality of Mr James. The image they provoke of the +literary prentice bending over his task with the tip of his tongue +reflectively protruding like a small boy drawing on his slate, is +amusing enough; but they themselves are such pale dreams as might visit +a New England spinster looking out from her snuff-coloured parlour on a +grey drizzling day. Where there is any richness of effect, as in <i>The +Romance of Certain Old Clothes</i>, it comes from the influence of +Nathaniel Hawthorne. That story, which tells how a girl loved her +sister's husband, waited eagerly for her death that she might marry him, +and later wheedled from him the key of the chest<a name="page_025" id="page_025"></a> in which the dead wife +had left her finery to await her baby daughter's maturity, is +seven-eighths prelude, and the catastrophe, which is the finding of the +girl kneeling dead beside the chest with the mark of phantom fingers on +her throat, comes with too short and small a report. But in spite of its +pitiful construction it is the only one of the dozen stories which Mr +James published before his visit to Europe in 1869 that shows any of the +imaginative exuberance which one accepts as an earnest of coming genius.</p> + +<p>Hawthorne was not altogether a happy influence—it is due to him that Mr +James' characters have "almost wailed" their way from <i>The Passionate +Pilgrim</i> to <i>The Golden Bowl</i>—but he certainly shepherded Mr James into +the European environment and lent him a framework on which to drape his +emotions until he had discovered his own power to build up an +imaginative structure. The plot of <i>The Passionate Pilgrim</i>, with its +American who comes to England to claim a cousin's estate, falls in love +with the usurper's sister, is driven from the door, and dies just<a name="page_026" id="page_026"></a> after +the usurper's death has delivered to him all he wants, is very clumsy +Hawthorne, but in those days Mr James could not draw normal events and +he had to have some medium for expressing his wealth of feeling about +England. It is amazing to see how rich that wealth already was, how much +deeper than mere pleasure in travel was his delight in the parks and +private grandeurs of England; and how, too, a fundamental fallacy was +already perverting it to an almost Calvinist distrust of the activities +of the present.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>"I entered upon life a perfect gentleman," says the American as he +sits in Hampton Court. "I had the love of old forms and pleasant +rites, and I found them nowhere—found a world all hard lines and +harsh lights, without lines, without composition, as they say of +pictures, without the lovely mystery of colour.... Sitting here, in +this old park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the +misty verge of what might have been! I should have been born here, +not there; here my makeshift distinctions would have found things +they'd have been true of....<a name="page_027" id="page_027"></a> This is a world I could have got on +with beautifully."</p></div> + +<p>There you have the first statement of the persistent illusion, to which +he was helped by his odd lack of the historic sense and which confused +his estimate of modern life, that the past would have been a happier +home for those who like himself loved fastidious living. He had a +tremendous sense of the thing that is and none at all of the thing that +has been, and thus he was always being misled by such lovely shells of +the past as Hampton Court into the belief that the past which inhabited +them was as lovely. The calm of Canterbury Close appeared to him as a +remnant of a time when all England, bowed before the Church, was as +calm; whereas the calm is really a modern condition brought about when +the Church ceased to have anything to do with England. He never +perceived that life is always a little painful at the moment, not only +at this moment but at all moments; that the wine of experience always +makes a raw draught when it has just been<a name="page_028" id="page_028"></a> trodden out from bruised +grapes by the pitiless feet of men, that it must be subject to time +before it acquires suavity. The lack of this perception matters little +in his early work but it is vastly important in shaping his later +phases.</p> + +<p>There are no such personal revelations in <i>The Madonna of the Future</i>, +nor anything, indeed, at all characteristic of Mr James. There is beauty +in the tale of the American painter who dreams over a model for twenty +years, while he and she grow old, and leaves at his death nothing more +to show for his dreams than a cracked blank canvas; and the Florentine +background is worked on diligently and affectionately. But it is +admirable in quite an uncharacteristic way, like a figure picture +painted with the utmost brilliance of technique and from perfect models +by a painter whose real passion was for landscape. Yet it was only a +year later, in <i>Madame de Mauves</i>, that Mr James found himself, both his +manner and the core of the matter which was to occupy him for the +happiest part of his literary life. Euphemia<a name="page_029" id="page_029"></a> de Mauves, the prim young +American who moves languidly through the turfy avenues of the French +forest, her faith in decency of living perpetually outraged by her +husband's infidelities and his odd demand that she should make him a +cuckold so that at least he should not have the discomfort of looking up +at her, is the first of the many exquisite women whom Mr James brought +into being by his capacity to imagine characters solidly and completely, +his perception of the subtle tones of life, and his extreme verbal +delicacy. And she is given a still greater importance by the queer twist +at the end of the story by which M. de Mauves blows his brains out for +no reason at all but that he is hopelessly, helplessly, romantically in +love with this cold wife who will be so unreasonable about trifles. Mr +James writes her story not only as though he stood upon the Atlantic +shores looking eastward at the plight of a compatriot domiciled with +lewd men and light women, but also as though he sat in the company of +certain gracious men and women of the world who could not get under way<a name="page_030" id="page_030"></a> +with their accomplishment of charm because the grim alien in the corner +will keep prodding them with a disapproval as out of place in this salon +as a deal plank. Madame de Mauves, in fine, is the first figure invented +by Mr James to throw light upon what he called "the international +situation."</p> + +<p>It took all Mr James' cosmopolitan training to see that there existed an +international situation, that the fact that Americans visited Europe +constituted a drama. An Englishman who visited Italy did no more than +take a look at a more richly coloured order of life that braced him up, +as any gay spectacle might have done, to return to his own; his travel +was a pleasure, or, at most, if he happened to be a Landor or a +Browning, an inspiration. It might reasonably be supposed that the visit +to Europe of an American was no greater matter. But Mr James knew that +the wealthy American was in the position of a man who has built a +comfortable house and has plenty of money over, yet cannot furnish it +because furniture is neither made nor sold in his country; until<a name="page_031" id="page_031"></a> he has +crossed the sea to the land where they do make furniture he must sleep +and eat on the floor.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>"One might enumerate," he writes in those early days, "the items of +high civilisation as it exists in other countries, which are absent +from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder +what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and +indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no +personal loyalty, no aristocracy...."</p></div> + +<p>There follows a long list, so long as to provoke the "natural remark ... +that if these things are left out everything is left out." And, Mr James +goes on to complain, "it takes so many things—such an accumulation of +history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a +fund of suggestion for a novelist." He wrote novelist because at the +moment he was criticising Hawthorne, but he would certainly have applied +his phrase to anyone who desired his life to be not a corduroy track<a name="page_032" id="page_032"></a> +but a marble terrace with palaces on the one hand and fair gardens on +the other.</p> + +<p>Since the pilgrimage for these items of high civilisation appeared to +Europeans—as innumerable contemporary allusions show it did—as mere +globe-trottings, the pilgrims themselves were likely to be as +misunderstood. For one thing, although they were unorganised so far as +culture went, they formed at home a very cohesive moral community. The +American women who came to Europe took for granted that however people +might be habited—people, that is, whose manners showed them "nice"—and +in whatever frivolous array they might be flounced and ribboned, they +were certain to wear next their skin the hair-shirt of Puritan +rectitude. The innocent freedoms which they permitted themselves because +they held this supposition, and the terrifying surmises to which these +gave rise in the mind of the Old World, unaware of the innocence of the +New, made much material for drama. And more dramatic still was the +moment, which came to so many of the travellers who<a name="page_033" id="page_033"></a> formed close +personal relationships with Europeans, when they realised that the moral +standards to which they had nationally pledged themselves, and which +they individually obeyed with extraordinary fidelity, were here regarded +as simply dowdy. "Compromise!" was the cry of Latin and even English +society. "Compromise on every and any of the Commandments you like! Do +anything you can, in fact, to rub down those rude angles you present to +human intercourse!" And yet it was not to be deduced that Europe was +lax. One had only to look behind the superficial show to see that it had +its own religion, perhaps a more terrible religion than any New England +ever knew, and that what seemed its laziest pleasures were sometimes its +most dreadful rites.</p> + +<p>This last conception of Europe is the subject of <i>Roderick Hudson</i> +(1875). <i>Roderick Hudson</i> is not a good book. It throws a light upon the +lack of attention given at that period to the art of writing that within +a few years of each other two men of great<a name="page_034" id="page_034"></a> genius—Thomas Hardy and +Henry James—wrote in their thirties first novels spoilt by technical +blemishes of a sort that the most giftless modern miss with a +subscription to Mudie's would never commit in her first literary +experiment. <i>Roderick Hudson</i> is wooden, it is crammed with local colour +like a schoolmistress's bedroom full of photographs of Rome, it has a +plain boiled suet heroine called Mary. But its idea is magnificent. An +American of fortune takes Hudson, who has already shown talent as a +sculptor, from his stool in a lawyer's office in Northampton, +Massachusetts, and sets him up in a studio in Rome. It is the fear of +old Mrs Hudson and of Mary, his fiancée, that European life will be too +soft for him. But the very opposite occurs; it is he who is too soft for +European life. The business of art means not only lounging under the +pines of the Villa Ludovisi and chiselling the noble substance of +Carrara marble; it means also the painful toil of creation, which +demands from the artist an austerer renunciation of every grossness than +was ever<a name="page_035" id="page_035"></a> expected of any law-abiding citizen of Northampton, which +sends a man naked and alone to awful moments which, if he be strong, +give him spiritual strength, but if he be weak heap on him the black +weakness of neurasthenia. And when that has turned him into a raw, hurt, +raging creature he is further snared by the loveliness of Christina +Light, who is characteristically European in that her circumstances have +not the same clear beauty as her face. She is being hawked over the +Continent to find a rich husband by her mother and a Cavaliere who is +really her father, and this ugly girlhood has so corrupted her vigorous +spirit that the young American's courtship provokes from her nothing but +eccentric favours or perverse insults. After the collapse of his art and +his love Roderick falls over a precipice in a too minutely described +Switzerland, hurled by a <i>dénouement</i> which has inspired Mr James to one +of his broadest jokes. In the first edition Roderick, on hearing that, +while he has been vexing his benefactor with his moods, that<a name="page_036" id="page_036"></a> gentleman +has been manfully repressing a passion for Mary, exclaims, "It's like +something in a novel!" which Mr James in the definitive edition has +altered to, "It's like something in a bad novel!"</p> + +<p>This conception of Europe as a complex organism which would have no use, +or only a cruel use, for those bred by the simple organism of America, +animates <i>Four Meetings</i> (1877), that exquisite short story which came +first of all of the many masterpieces that Mr James was to produce. It +is the tale of a little schoolmistress who, having long nourished a +passion for Europe upon such slender intimations as photographs of the +Castle of Chillon, at last collects a sum for the trip, is met at Havre +by a cousin, one of those Americans on whom Continental life has acted +as a solvent of all decent moral tissues, and is tricked out of her +money by his story of a runaway marriage with a Countess; returns to New +England hoping to "see something of this dear old Europe yet," and has +that hope ironically fulfilled by the descent upon her for life of the +said<a name="page_037" id="page_037"></a> Countess, who is so distinctly "something of this dear old Europe" +that the very sight of her transports the travelled recounter of the +story to "some dusky landing before a shabby Parisian <i>quatrième</i>—to an +open door revealing a greasy ante-chamber, and to Madame, leaning over +the banisters, while she holds a faded dressing-gown together and bawls +down to the portress to bring up her coffee." It is one of the saddest +stories in the world, and one of the cleverest. There is not one of its +simple phrases but has its beautiful bearing on the subject, and in the +treatment of emotional values one sees that the essays on <i>French Poets +and Novelists</i> (1878), which for some years he had been sending to +America with the excited air of a missionary, were the notes of an +attentive pupil. "Detachment" was the lesson that that period preached +in its reaction against the George Sand method, whereby the author +rolled through his pages locked in an embrace with his subject. We have +forgotten its real significance, so frequently has it been used as an +excuse for<a name="page_038" id="page_038"></a> the treatment of emotional situations with encyclopædic +detail of circumstance and not a grain of emotional realisation, but +here we can recover it. The author's pity for the schoolmistress is +never allowed to make his Countess sinister instead of gross, and his +sense of the comic in the Countess is never allowed to make the +schoolmistress's woe more dreary; the situation stands as solid and has +as many aspects as it would have in life.</p> + +<p><i>The American</i> (1877) still holds this view of Europe. Its theme, to +quote Mr James in the preface of the definitive edition, is "the +situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some +robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged +compatriot; the point being in especial that he should suffer at the +hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible +civilisation and to be of an order far superior to his own." Christopher +Newman, the robust compatriot, is such a large, simple, lovable person +that the rest of the story leads one to suspect that one may say of Mr +James,<a name="page_039" id="page_039"></a> as he said of Balzac, that "his figures, as a general thing, are +better than the use he makes of them." He walks through Europe examining +its culture with such an effect on the natives as an amiable buffalo +traversing the Galerie d'Apollon might produce upon the copyists of the +Louvre, and finally presents himself at the house where he is least +welcome in the world, the home of the de Bellegardes, a proud and +ancient Royalist family. Thereafter, the novel is an exposition of the +way things do not happen. Claire de Cintré, the widowed daughter whom +Newman desires to marry, is represented as having above all things +beauty of character; but when her family snatches her from him in a +frenzy of pride she allows herself to be bundled into a convent with a +weakness that would convict of imbecility any woman of twenty-eight. And +since her mother and brother had murdered her father by refusing him +medicine at a physical crisis, and sustained themselves in the act by +the reflection that after all they were only keeping up the good old +family tone, one<a name="page_040" id="page_040"></a> wonders where she got this beauty of character. The +child of this damned house might have flamed with a strange fire, but +she could not have diffused a rectory lamp-light. But the series of +inconsistencies of which this is only one leads, like a jolting +motor-bus that puts one down at Hampton Court, to an exquisite +situation. Newman discovers the secret of the Marquis' murder and +intends to publish it as a punishment for the cruel wrong the de +Bellegardes have done him, but sacrifices this satisfaction simply +because there can be no link—not even the link of revenge—between such +as they and such as he. In all literature there is no passage so full of +the very passion of moral exaltation as the description of how Newman +stands before the Carmelite house in the Rue d'Enfer and looks up at the +blank, discoloured wall, behind which his lost lady is immured, then +walks back to Notre Dame and there, "the far-away bells chiming off into +space, at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word," decides +that such things as revenge "were really not his<a name="page_041" id="page_041"></a> game." So it is with +Mr James to the end. The foreground is as often as not red with the +blood of slaughtered probabilities; a gentleman at a dinner-party tells +the lady on his left (a perfect stranger who never appears again in the +story) that some years ago he proposed to the lady in white sitting +opposite to them; a curio dealer calls on a lady in Portland Place just +to wind up the plot. But the great glow at the back, the emotional +conflagration, is always right.</p> + +<p><i>The Europeans</i> (1878) marks the first time when Mr James took the +international situation as a joke, and he could joke very happily in +those days when his sentence was a straight young thing that could run +where it liked, instead of a delicate creature swathed in relative +clauses as an invalid in shawls. There is no other book by Mr James +which has quite the clear, sunlit charm of this description of the visit +of Eugenia, the morganatically married Baroness, and her brother Felix, +the Bohemian painter, to their cousins' New England farm. There is +nothing at all to<a name="page_042" id="page_042"></a> their discredit in the past of these two graceful +young people, but they resemble Harlequin and Columbine in the +instability of their existence and the sharp line they draw between +their privacy and their publicity. It appears to them natural that the +private life should be spent largely in wondering how the last public +appearance went off and planning effects for the next, a point of view +which arouses the worst suspicions in their cousins, who are accustomed +to live as though the sky were indeed a broad open eye. So Felix has the +greatest difficulty in persuading his uncle, who takes thirty-two bites +to a moral decision, just as Mr Gladstone took thirty-two bites to a +mouthful, that he is a suitable husband for his cousin Gertrude; and +poor Eugenia fails altogether in an environment where a lie from her +lips is not treated as <i>un petit péché d'une petite femme</i>, but remains +simply a lie. The frame of mind this state of affairs produces in the +poor lady is exquisitely described in a passage which shows her going +wistfully through the house of the man who<a name="page_043" id="page_043"></a> did not propose to her +because he detected her lie, after a visit to his dying mother.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>"Mrs Acton had told Eugenia that her waiting-woman would be in the +hall to show her downstairs; but the large landing outside her door +was empty, and Eugenia stood there looking about.... She passed +slowly downstairs, still looking about. The broad staircase made a +great bend, and in the angle was a high window, looking westward, +with a deep bench, covered with a row of flowering plants in +curious old pots of blue China-ware. The yellow afternoon light +came in through the flowers and flickered a little on the white +wainscots. Eugenia paused a moment; the house was perfectly still, +save for the ticking, somewhere, of a great clock. The lower hall +stretched away at the foot of the stairs, half covered over with a +large Oriental rug. Eugenia lingered a little, noticing a great +many things. '<i>Comme c'est bien!</i>' she said to herself; such a +large, solid, irreproachable basis of existence the place seemed to +her to indicate. And then she reflected that Mrs Acton was soon to +withdraw from it. The reflection accompanied her the rest of the<a name="page_044" id="page_044"></a> +way downstairs, where she paused again, making more observations. +The hall was extremely broad, and on either side of the front door +was a wide, deeply-set window, which threw the shadows of +everything back into the house. There were high-backed chairs along +the wall and big Eastern vases upon tables, and, on either side, a +large cabinet with a glass front and little curiosities within, +dimly gleaming. The doors were open—into the darkened parlour, the +library, the dining-room. All these rooms seemed empty. Eugenia +passed along and stopped a moment on the threshold of each. '<i>Comme +c'est bien!</i>' she murmured again; she had thought of just such a +house as this when she decided to come to America. She opened the +front door for herself—her light tread had summoned none of the +servants—and on the threshold she gave a last look...."</p></div> + +<p>That is the pure note of the early James, like a pipe played carefully +by a boy. It sounds as beautifully in <i>Daisy Miller</i>, that short novel +which, though it deals with conditions peculiar to a small section of<a name="page_045" id="page_045"></a> +continental life forty years ago, will strike each new generation afresh +as sad and lovely. Daisy, who is like one of those girls who smile upon +us from the covers of American magazines, glaringly beautiful and +healthy but without the "tone" given by diligent study of the grace of +conduct, comes to Europe and plays in its sunshine like a happy child. +She wants to go to the Castle of Chillon, so she accepts the escort for +the afternoon of a young American who is staying at the same hotel; she +likes to walk in the Pincian, so she takes a stroll there one afternoon +with a certain liquid-eyed Roman. The woman who does a thing for the +sake of the thing in itself is always suspected by society, and the +American colony, which professes the mellow conventions of Europe with +all its own national crudity, accuses her of vulgarity and even +lightness. They talk so bitterly that when the young American, who is +half in love with Daisy, finds her viewing the Colosseum by moonlight +with the Roman, he leaps to the conclusion that she is a disreputable +woman.<a name="page_046" id="page_046"></a> Why he does so is not quite clear, since surely it is the +essential thing about a disreputable woman that her evenings are not +free for visits to the Colosseum. Poor Daisy takes in part of his +meaning and, saying in a little strange voice, "I don't care whether I +get Roman fever or not!" goes back to her hotel and dies of malaria. And +the young American, "staring at the raw protuberance among the April +daisies" in the Protestant cemetery, learns from the Roman's lips that +Daisy was "most innocent."</p> + +<p>It is a lyric whose beauty may be measured by the attention which, in +spite of its tragedy, it everywhere provoked. It was interesting to note +how often in the obituary notices of Mr James it was said that he had +never attained popularity, for it shows how soon London forgets its +gifts of fame. From 1875 to 1885 (to put it roughly) all England and +America were as captivated by the clear beauty of Mr James' work as in +the nineties they were hypnotised by the bright-coloured beauty of Mr +Kipling's art. On London staircases<a name="page_047" id="page_047"></a> everyone turned to look at the +American with the long, silky, black beard which, I am told by one who +met him then, gave him the appearance of "an Elizabethan sea captain." +But for all the exquisiteness of <i>Daisy Miller</i> there were discernible +in it certain black lines which, like the dark veining in a crocus that +foretells its decay, showed that this was a loveliness which was in the +very act of passing. The young American might have been so worked upon +by his friends that he could readily believe his Daisy a light woman, +but he need not have manifested his acceptance of this belief by being +grossly rude to her and by reflecting that if "after Daisy's return +there had been an exchange of jokes between the porter and the +cab-driver ... it had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him +that the little American flirt should be 'talked about' by low-minded +menials." When one remembers the grave courtesy with which Christopher +Newman treated Mlle Noémie Nioche, the little French drab who called +herself <i>un esprit libre</i>, it is<a name="page_048" id="page_048"></a> plain that we are no longer dealing +with the same Mr James. The Mr James we are to deal with henceforth had +ceased to be an American and had lost his native reactions to emotional +stimuli. He was becoming a European and for several years to come was to +spend his time slowly mastering its conventions; which means that he was +learning a new emotional language.</p> + +<p>The first works he produced when he was at once a finished writer and +only the cocoon of a European, present the paradoxical appearance of +being perfect in phrase and incredibly naive in their estimates of +persons and situations. <i>The Pension Beaurepas</i> (1879), that melancholy +tale of the ailing old American whose wife and daughter have dragged him +off on an expensive trip to Europe, while ruin falls on his untended +business in New York, has its tone of pathos spoiled by extraordinarily +cold-blooded and, to women of to-day, extremely unsavoury discussions of +how a girl ought to behave if she wants to be married. <i>The Siege of +London</i> (1883), which<a name="page_049" id="page_049"></a> is the story of a Texan adventuress of many +divorces who marries into an English county family, fails to produce the +designed effect of outrage, because the adventuress is the only person +who shows any signs of human worth, and the life which she is supposed +to have violated by her marriage is suggested simply by statements that +the people concerned had titles and lived in large houses. In <i>Pandora</i> +(1884), which describes a German diplomat's amazement that an unmarried +girl can be a social success in America, we feel as bored as we would if +we were forced to listen to the exclamations of a dog-fancier on finding +that a Pekingese with regular features had got a prize at a dog show. In +<i>Lady Barbarina</i> (1884), which tells how a peer's daughter who marries +an American millionaire refuses to live in America, the American picture +is painted with the flatness of a flagging interest, and we suspect Mr +James of taking English architecture as an index of English character; +he had still to grasp the paradox that the people who live in the +solidities<a name="page_050" id="page_050"></a> of Grosvenor Square are the best colonising and seafaring +stock in the world. In <i>The Reverberator</i> (1888), wherein an American +girl guilelessly prattles to a newspaper correspondent about the affairs +of her French fiancé's family and is cast out by them when he publishes +her prattlings in the States, we seem to see the international situation +slowly fading from Mr James' immediate consciousness. In turning over +its pages we see the author sitting down before a pile of white paper +and finely inscribing it with memories of past contacts with Americans; +we do not see him entering his study with traces still on his lips of a +smile provoked in the street outside by the loveliness and innocent +barbarism of his compatriots. In those days he had lost America and had +not yet found Europe, but he was to find it very soon. In <i>A London +Life</i> (1889), the tale of an innocent American girl who comes over to +live with her sister and her aristocratic English husband, and stands +appalled at their debts, their debaucheries, their infidelities, he has +rendered<a name="page_051" id="page_051"></a> beautifully the feeling caused by ill lives when led in old +homes of elmy parks and honourable histories. It is a sense of disgust +such as comes to the early-rising guest who goes into a drawing-room in +the morning and finds last night's coffee-cups and decanters and +cigarette ends looking dreadful in the sunlight. The house is being +badly managed; it will go to rack and ruin. That is an aspect of +England; but the American onlooker is just a clean-minded little thing +that might have bloomed anywhere, and all references to her Americanness +are dragged in with an effort. It is plain that he had lost all his love +for the international situation.</p> + +<p>That Mr James continued to write about Americans in Europe long after +their common motive and their individual adventures had ceased to excite +his wonder or his sympathy, was the manifestation of a certain delusion +about his art which was ultimately to do him a mischief. He believed +that if one <i>knew</i> a subject one could write about it; and since there +was no<a name="page_052" id="page_052"></a> aspect of the international situation with which he was not +familiar, he could not see why the description of these aspects should +not easily make art. The profound truth that an artist should feel +passion for his subject was naturally distasteful to one who wanted to +live wholly without violence even of the emotions; a preference for +passionless detachment was at that date the mode in French literature, +which was the only literature that he studied with any attention. The de +Goncourts, Zola, and even de Maupassant thought that an artist ought to +be able to lift any subject into art by his treatment, just as an +advertising agent ought to be able to "float" any article into +popularity by his posters. But human experience, which includes a +realisation of the deadness of most of the de Goncourts' and Zola's +productions, proves the contrary. Unless a subject is congenial to the +character of the artist the subconscious self will not wake up and +reward the busy conscious mind by distributions of its hoarded riches in +the form of the right word,<a name="page_053" id="page_053"></a> the magic phrase, the clarifying incident. +Why are books about ideas so commonly bad, since the genius of M. +Anatole France and Mr Wells have proved that they need not be so, if it +be not that the majority of people reserve passion for their personal +relationships and therefore never "feel" an idea with the sensitive +finger-tips of affection?</p> + +<p>The absence of this necessary attitude to his subject explains in part +the tenuity of Mr James' later novels on the international situation; +but there is also another element that irritates present-day readers and +makes the texture of the life represented seem poor. That element, which +is not peculiar to Mr James, but is a part of the social atmosphere of +his time, is the persistent presentation of woman not as a human, but as +a sexual being. One can learn nothing of the heroine's beliefs and +character for the hullabaloo that has been set up because she has come +in too late or gone out too early or omitted to provide herself with +that figure of questionable use—for the dove-like manners of the young +men forbid the<a name="page_054" id="page_054"></a> thought that she was there to protect the girl from +assault, and the mild tongues of the young ladies make it unlikely that +the duel of the sexes was then so bitter that they required an +umpire—the chaperon. It appears that the young woman of that period +could get through the world only by perpetually jumping through hoops +held up to her by society, a method of progression which was more suited +to circus girls than to persons of dignity, and which sometimes caused +nasty falls. There is nothing more humiliating to women in all fiction +than the end of <i>A London Life</i>, where the heroine, appalled at having +been left in an opera box alone with a young man, turns to him and begs +him, although she knows well that he does not love her, to marry her and +save her good name. Purity and innocence are excellent things, but a +world in which they have to be guarded by such cramping contrivances of +conduct is as ridiculous as a heaven where the saints all go about with +their haloes protected by mackintosh covers.<a name="page_055" id="page_055"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="III" id="III"></a>III<br /><br /> +TRANSITION</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra"><i>W</i></span><b><i>ASHINGTON +SQUARE</i></b> (1881), Mr James' first important work that does not +deal with the international situation, is a work of great genius. Into +the small mould of the story of how a plain and stupid girl was jilted +by a fortune-hunter when he discovered that she would be disinherited by +her contemptuous father on her marriage, Mr James concentrated all the +sense which he had absorbed throughout his childhood of the simple, +provincial life which went on behind the brown stone of old New York. It +has in it a wealth of feeling that does not seem to have originated with +Mr James, just as an old wives' tale told over and over again by the +fireside becomes charged with a synthetic emotion derived from the +comments and expressions of innumerable auditors; and one may<a name="page_056" id="page_056"></a> surmise +that Catherine's tragedy was first presented to him as an item of local +gossip, sympathetically discussed by his charming New York cousins and +friends. Certainly the tale of this dull girl, who was "twenty years old +before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown +trimmed with gold fringe," and progressed by such clumsinesses through a +career of which the only remarkable facts were that "Morris Townsend had +trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring," +is consecrated by an element of pity which was afterwards signally to +disappear from Mr James' work.</p> + +<p>The book so beautifully expresses the woe of all those people to whom +nothing ever happens, who are aware of the gay challenge of life but are +prevented by something leaden in their substance from responding, that +one is not surprised to find that like most good stories about +inarticulate people—like <i>Une Vie</i> and <i>Un Cœur Simple</i>—it is +written with the most deliberate cunning. The story is evoked according +to Turgeniev's<a name="page_057" id="page_057"></a> method of calling his novels out of the inchoate real +world; and what that is had better, since Mr James had been using it +with increasing power since <i>Roderick Hudson</i>, be stated in his own +words.</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>"I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years +ago from the lips of Ivan Turgeniev in regard to his own experience +of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost +always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered +before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, +interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what +they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as <i>disponibles</i>, saw them +subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw +them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, +those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and +select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable +to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they +would be most likely to produce and to feel.</p> + +<p>"'To arrive at these things is to arrive<a name="page_058" id="page_058"></a> at my "story,"' he said, +'and that's the way I look for it. The result is that I'm often +accused of not having "story" enough. I seem to myself to have as +much as I need—to show my people, to exhibit their relations with +each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough +I see them come together, I see them <i>placed</i>, I see them engaged +in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look +and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found +for them, is my account of them—of which I dare say, alas, <i>que +cela manque souvent d'architecture</i>....'"</p></div> + +<p>And as regards the statement in prose of the conception thus formed it +is plain that, although Mr James had formed his irrational dislike of +Flaubert many years before, it was that great master who had taught him +his art of rubbing down the too brilliant phrase to tone with the quiet +harmony of the whole, of obliterating the exotic effect that would +compromise the lorn simplicity of the subject. This masterly use of +technical resource to unfold an idea whose beauty<a name="page_059" id="page_059"></a> would to a lesser +artist have seemed hopelessly sheathed in obscurity, makes <i>Washington +Square</i> the perfect termination to Mr James' first period of genius.</p> + +<p>It was unfortunately quite definitely a termination; for until ten years +had passed Mr James was doomed to produce no work which was not to have +the solidity of its characters and the beauty of its prose rendered +slightly ridiculous by its lack of purpose and unity. In those days, +when the international theme was slipping from Mr James' grasp and he +was looking round for another, one could no more expect him to produce +work completely and serenely formed by the imagination than one could +ask an author to continue his industry on a journey from Paris to +Madrid, with the jolting of the train destroying his physical calm and +the new land crying for his attention at the carriage window. For Mr +James was literally travelling all through the eighties; he was touring +either the countries of Europe with his body or the art of Europe with +his mind. It was his intention to find that<a name="page_060" id="page_060"></a> intellectual basis without +which, his blood and upbringing assured him, he would be unable to use +his genius with noble or permanent results.</p> + +<p>How difficult this search was to be, and yet how ultimately fruitful, +can be judged from <i>A Little Tour in France</i> (1884). That is one of the +happiest and sunniest travel books in all literature. <i>Cœlum non +animum mutant qui trans mare currunt</i>; but Mr James did, and it is as +pleasant to see his intelligence sunning itself on the hot Latin soil, +fresh and cool as though he had not years of the creative struggle +behind him and years more to come, as it is to see a lizard crawl from +the crevice of a Provençal rock and play among the tufts of rosemary. +Yet whenever Mr James has to note some detail in his description of +French towns which refers to the life which has formed them, the +reader's fury mounts. It is horrible that his references to the +Franco-Prussian War should be faintly jocular, and one burns with shame +for them until one comes to an amazing sentence about the French +Revolution,<a name="page_061" id="page_061"></a> in which it is plainly implied that the rightness and +necessity of that declaration of the principle of freedom are still +debatable questions. One perceives with relief that he said these things +because, as one guessed in <i>The Passionate Pilgrim</i>, his strong sight of +the thing that is was accompanied by blindness to the thing that has +been. He did not know whether the Franco-Prussian War was horrible or +not, because he had been out of Europe when it raged; and because he had +not been born at the time he could no more speak well of the French +Revolution than he could propose for his club a person whom he had never +met. And for the same reason he failed to envisage the Roman Empire save +as a source of agreeable ruins which, since he did not understand the +spirit that built them, he imagined might have been made still more +agreeable. Their vastness did not impress him as the merging-point of +the geological record and history, but stirred in him that benevolence +which is often aroused by clumsy largeness. He patted the Roman<a name="page_062" id="page_062"></a> Theatre +at Arles as though it were Jumbo at the Zoo, and remarked, quite in the +manner of Horace Walpole, that the pavement of coloured marble "gives an +idea of the <i>elegance</i> of the interior"; but the arena at Nîmes and that +vast, high, yellow aqueduct, whose three tiers appal the valley of the +Gardon, were too much for him, and he pronounced them "not at all +<i>exquisite</i>." The man who could write those phrases was incapable of +forming a philosophy, for no man can fully understand his kind unless he +have a revelation of old Rome and perceive in its works a record of the +pride men felt in serviceable labour for the State. And yet what, in +this particular case, did all that matter? What need was there for Mr +James to know anything but that ink makes black, expressive marks on +paper, when he could tell so exquisitely how the Château de Chenonceaux +sends out its white galleries across the clear water of the Cher, how +the crenellated ramparts of the Château d'Amboise look down over hanging +gardens to the far-shining Loire,<a name="page_063" id="page_063"></a> and with what peculiar wonder +Carcassonne, Aigues-Mortes and all the other towns with lovely names, +glow in the clear bright light of France? It was enough that there was +no beauty on earth that could daunt his power of description.</p> + +<p>The record of his mental wanderings is not quite so happy. Mr James has +an immense prestige as critic, but a certain sentence that occurred more +than once in his obituary notices made it doubtful whether this does not +merely mean that people have run their eyes over the titles of Mr James' +essays and have accepted the fact that he dealt with authors rarely read +by the British as a guarantee of their rareness of merit. That it should +be reverently remarked on that most solemn occasion that Flaubert was Mr +James' adored master, when he had written more than one exquisitely +feline essay to delicately convey what a fluke it was that this fellow +who panted under his phrase like a bricklayer under his hod should have +produced <i>Madame Bovary</i>, is just such an ironic happening as<a name="page_064" id="page_064"></a> he would +have liked to be introduced into one of his humorous studies of the +literary life. Such intimations make one guess that the homage which +England loves to pay to the unread is responsible for half Mr James' +reputation as a critic; and probably he owed the other half to the +gratitude of his readers for a pleasure which is undoubtedly given by +his critical writings, but which nevertheless does not prove them great +criticism. It is true that <i>French Poets and Novelists</i> are the best +reviews ever written, and that it is good to listen to the old author +gossiping in <i>Notes on Novelists</i> (1914) about the authors he had known +long ago and to watch him tracing, with all his supreme genius for +detecting personality, the imprint of dead masters on the fading surface +of old work. But he is always entirely lacking in that necessary element +of great criticism, the capacity for universal reference. The eye that +judges a work of art should have surveyed the whole human field, so that +it can tell from what clay this precious thing was made, in what +craftsman'<a name="page_065" id="page_065"></a>s cot that trick of fashioning was learned, what natural +beauty suggested to the creative impulse this appropriate form, what +human institution helped or hindered its making. Of that general culture +Mr James was so deficient that he was capable of inserting in quite an +intelligent essay on Théophile Gautier this amazing sentence: "Even his +æsthetic principles are held with a good-humoured laxity that allows +him, for instance, to say in a hundred places the most delightfully +sympathetic and pictorial things about the romantic or Shakespearean +drama, and yet to describe a pedantically classical revival of the +<i>Antigone</i> at Münich with the most ungrudging relish." And while this +ignorance was perpetually blinding him to the purpose of many fair +artistic structures his literary power was perpetually betraying him +into the graceful and forceful publication of his blindness. Long after +one has forgotten all the deliverances of critics with greater wisdom +but less craft of phrase, one remembers his extraordinary opinion that +Flaubert's <i>La Tentation<a name="page_066" id="page_066"></a> de Saint Antoine</i>, that book which will appeal +in every generation to those who have been visited by the angel of +speculative thought, which is not only itself a beautiful growth but has +borne beautiful fruit in <i>Thaïs</i>, is merely "strange" and has no more +reference to life than the gimcrack Eastern Pavilion at an Exposition. +And he lacked, moreover, that necessary attribute of the good critic, +the power to bid bad authors to go to the devil. There are certain +Victorian works of art which, however much esteemed by the many, are no +more matter for criticism than a pair of elastic-sided boots; yet there +is a paper in <i>Essays in London</i> (1893) in which Mr James talks of "the +numbers of sorts of distinction, the educated insight, the comprehensive +ardour of Mrs Humphry Ward...." It recalls that the art which he +privately cultivated was courtesy, but it suggests that his criticism +was bound to consist for the most part of just such pleasant footnotes +to the obvious as <i>Partial Portraits</i> (1888) which, with the exception +of some<a name="page_067" id="page_067"></a> interesting personal recollections of Turgeniev, tell us +nothing more startling than that de Maupassant wrote a hard prose and +that Daudet was a Provençal.</p> + +<p>How greatly he needed the intellectual basis which he found in none of +these researches becomes increasingly plain in each novel that he +published during this period. <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i> (1881) is given a +superficial unity by the beauty of its heroine; on the first reading one +cannot take one's eyes off the clear gaze that Isabel Archer levels at +life. As she moves forward to meet the world, holding her fortune in +hand without avarice yet very carefully, lest she should buy anything +gross with it, one thinks that there never was a heroine who deserved +better of life. "She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, and +bravery, and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the +world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible +action; she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She +had an infinite hope that<a name="page_068" id="page_068"></a> she would never do anything wrong." One is +glad to see that the girl has the most wonderful friend, a woman who is +at once the most flexible <i>femme du monde</i> and the freshest and most +candid soul; and among the kindnesses this friend does her is her +introduction to a certain Tuscan villa that looks down on the valley of +the Arno, where on a mossy stone bench tangled with wild roses there +sits Gilbert Osmond, a gentleman of great dignity who has been too fine +to partake in the common struggle and so lives in honest poverty, with +his daughter Pansy, a little girl from whose character conventual +training has removed every attribute save whiteness and sweetness, so +that she lies under life like a fine cloth on a sunny bleaching-green. +Here, of all places in the world, she is least likely to meet the +jealousy and falseness and cruelty which were the only things she +feared, and so she marries Osmond in the happy faith that henceforth +nothing will be admitted to her life save nobility. But all her marriage +brings the girl is evidence<a name="page_069" id="page_069"></a> of increasing painfulness that her friend +is a squalid adventuress who has preserved her appearance of freshness +as carefully as a strolling musician his fiddle, in order that she might +charm such honest fools as Isabel; that Osmond has withdrawn from the +world, not because he is too fine for it, but because he is a hating +creature, and hates the world as he now hates his wife; that Pansy is +the illegitimate child of these two, and her need of a dowry the chief +reason why Osmond has married Isabel. It is a tale which would draw +tears from a reviewer, and yet the conduct invented for Isabel is so +inconsistent and so suggestive of the nincompoop, and so clearly +proceeding from a brain whose ethical world was but a chaos, that it is +a mistake to subject the book to the white light of a second reading. +When we are told that Isabel married Osmond because "there had been +nothing very delicate in inheriting seventy thousand pounds, and she +hoped he might use her fortune in a way that might make her think better +of it and would rub off a certain<a name="page_070" id="page_070"></a> grossness attaching to the good luck +of an unexpected inheritance," we feel that this is mere simpering; for +there could be nothing less delicate than to marry a person for any +reason but the consciousness of passion. And the grand climax of her +conduct, her return to Osmond after the full revelation of his guilt has +come to augment her anguish at his unkindness, proves her not the very +paragon of ladies but merely very ladylike. If their marriage was to be +a reality it was to be a degradation of the will whose integrity the +whole book is an invitation to admire; if it was to be a sham it was +still a larger concession to society than should have been made by an +honest woman. Yet for all the poor quality of the motives which furnish +Isabel's moral stuffing, <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i> is entirely n +successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too +radiantly good for this world.</p> + +<p>While that novel reminds one, in the way it "comes off," of a sum in +which the right answer is got by wrong working, <i>The<a name="page_071" id="page_071"></a> Bostonians</i> (1886) +reminds one of a foolish song set to a good tune in the way it fails to +"come off." The beauty of the writing is so great that there are +descriptions of the shabby petticoats of a pioneer, or the vestibule in +a mean block of flats, that one would like to learn by heart, so that +one might turn the phrases over in the mind when one wants to hear the +clinking of pure gold. And the theme, the aptness of young persons +possessed of that capacity for contagious enthusiasm which makes the +good propagandist to be exploited by the mercenary and to deteriorate +under the strain of public life, is specially interesting to our +generation. Few of us there are who have not seen with our own eyes +elderly egoists building up profitable autocracies out of the ardour of +young girls, or fierce advocates of the brotherhood of man mellowing +into contemplative emptiers of pint-pots. But, just as the most +intellectual conversation may be broken up by the continued squeal of a +loose chimney-cowl, so this musical disclosure of fine material is +interrupted<a name="page_072" id="page_072"></a> past any reader's patience by a nagging hostility to +political effort. This is not so disgraceful to Mr James as it might +seem, for it is simply the survival of an affectation which was forced +upon the cultured American of his youth. The pioneers who wanted to +raise the small silvery song of art had to tempt their audiences somehow +from the big brass band of America's political movements; and so +straining was this task that even Emerson, who vibrated to the chord of +reform as to no other, was sometimes vexed into such foolish inquiries +as "Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day in his own +garden than he who goes to the abolition meetings and makes a speech?" +It was just one of the results of Mr James' condition at this period +that he presented to the world so deliberately and so vividly, and with +such an air of feeling, what was no more than the misty reflection of +some dead men's transitory irritations.</p> + +<p>Politics play a very great part, and in the<a name="page_073" id="page_073"></a> same sense, in <i>The +Princess Casamassima</i> (1886), but it is the peculiar magic of that +strange book which is at once able and distraught, wild and meticulous, +that in it all perversities are somehow transmuted into loveliness. It +is one of the big jokes in literature that it was the writer who among +all his contemporaries held the most sophisticated view of his art, who +prided himself that on him there gleamed no drop of the dew of naïvetê, +that brought back to fiction the last delicious breath of the time when +even the best books ran on like this: "It happened that one dark and +stormy night in March I, Sebastian Melmoth, was traversing the plain of +La Mancha.... 'Have at you!' cried the guard.... 'Seat yourself,' said +the stranger, signing to his Hindu attendant that the bodies should be +removed, and commencing to cleanse the blood from his sword with a +richly embroidered handkerchief, 'and I will tell you the story of my +life.'" There is always something doing in <i>The Princess Casamassima</i>, +and it is<a name="page_074" id="page_074"></a> usually something great, and as a rule it is doing it quite +on its own. As a portal to the disordered tale there stands one of the +finest short stories in the world; how Miss Pynsent, the shabby little +dressmaker who has brought up Hyacinth, the bastard child of a French +work-girl now in Millbank for the murder of the peer who betrayed her, +is suddenly bidden to bring the boy to his mother's prison deathbed, and +how the poor woman drags him up to the brown, windowless walls, the vast +blank gate, the looming corridors infused with sallow light, is such a +study of the way the institutions devised by man in the interests of +justice and order make a child's soul scream, that the reader will for +ever after think a great deal less of Pip's adventures on the marshes in +<i>Great Expectations</i>. Dickens could never have suffused his story with +so exquisite and so relevant an emotional effect as the aching of poor +Miss Pynsent's heart over this rough introduction of her cherished lamb +to the horrible; nor could he have invented that wonderful moment when +the child turns<a name="page_075" id="page_075"></a> from the ravenous embrace of the wasted and disfigured +stranger with, "I won't kiss her; Pinnie says she stole a watch!" at +which the murderess screams, "<i>Ah! quelle infamie!</i> I never stole +anything!" and the wardress says with dignity: "I'm sure you needn't put +more on her than she has by rights," to which the poor virgin, quite +unable to understand the peculiar cachet attaching to a <i>crime +passionel</i>, cries contritely, "Mercy, more! I thought it so much less!"</p> + +<p>And from this portal the book goes on to incidents and persons not less +exquisite but still disconcertingly mere portals. It is as though in a +mad dream one found oneself passing through the arch in the mellow +redness of Hampton Court and straightway emerged on the colonnade of St +Paul's, through whose little swing-doors one surprisingly stepped to the +prim front of Kensington Palace. There is M. Poupin, the exiled +Communist who cannot communicate with the world, or the moustached +female companion with whom he dwells in a scrupulously<a name="page_076" id="page_076"></a> unmarried state, +save by platitudes concerning the social organisation: "I'm suffering +extremely, but we must all suffer so long as the social question is so +abominably, so iniquitously neglected," is his way of intimating a sore +throat. There is poor Lady Aurora Langrish, the aristocratic precursor +of the sad Miss Huxtables in <i>The Madras House</i>: "My father isn't rich, +and there's only one of us, Eva, married, and we're not at all +handsome.... They go into the country all the autumn, all the winter, +when there's no one here (except three or four millions) and the rain +drips, drips, drips from the trees in the big dull park where my people +live, and nothing to do but to go out with three or four others in +mackintoshes...." There is dry old Mr Vetch who plays the fiddle in the +orchestra at night and fills all the rest of the empty day with love for +Hyacinth; and there is Captain Sholto, the Piccadilly swell; and Miss +Hennings, the sales-lady, and half-a-dozen admirable others casually +affixed by the stretched string of circumstance<a name="page_077" id="page_077"></a> or the glue of +coincidence. And quite the preciousest "piece" in the collection is the +account of how the Princess Casamassima, who is Christina Light of +<i>Roderick Hudson</i>, grown to perilous maturity of beauty and perversity, +calls young Hyacinth to her country house, and there in the beechy park +and flowery lanes makes him talk of the plots against the rich which +later are to cause his death, and brings him nearer to it by lifting a +face wonderfully pale and pure with enthusiasm. It is so like that +Titian in the Prado which shows, against a window looking on a park +where lovers walk in golden air under silver poplars, Venus lying on a +satin couch while a young man makes music for her at an organ; her eyes +are softly intent, and the youth thinks she is suspended over the world +in his music, but really she is brooding on the whiteness of his skin +beneath his black beard. That likeness suggests that <i>The Princess +Casamassima</i> should be taken, not as a novel, but as the small, fine +picture gallery that Mr James thought fit to add to his mental palace,<a name="page_078" id="page_078"></a> +already so rich in mere sane living rooms.</p> + +<p>It is unpleasant to travel in a runaway motor-car, even if it ultimately +spills one into a rose-garden, and when Mr James produced a picture +gallery when he had intended a grave study of social differences, he was +in much that case. But already in <i>The Author of Beltraffio</i> (1884) he +had shown his awareness of a movement which had started with the +intention of destroying both Christian morality and rationalism, and +otherwise making us fearfully gay, and which actually achieved the +slight mitigation of the offensiveness of plumbers' shop windows and the +recovery by Mr Henry James of control over his machine. That story is +not one of Mr James' best; the author makes his readers regard his scene +through so small a peephole that even the characters who are to be +conceived as above all retiring have to come grossly near if their +audience is to make anything of the drama at all. The theme is that an +author's wife who considers her husband's<a name="page_079" id="page_079"></a> books objectionable lets her +child die rather than that he should grow up in the companionship of one +so utterly without reserve; yet, since the tale is told by a total +stranger who is visiting them for the week-end, she has necessarily to +behave with a lack of reserve that makes her imputed motive incredible. +The special value of the story lies in the moments when the author of +<i>Beltraffio</i>, whose affectation of a velveteen coat and a remote foreign +air makes us desire to scream out to the weekend visitor that he is +being fooled, and this is no writer but an artistic photographer, +remarks with some complacency that to the conventional he appears "no +better than an ancient Greek" and professes a thirst for "the +cultivation of beauty without reserve or precautions." Our happy +generation cannot understand these phrases which doubtless had their +salutary meaning for that distant day when England fed herself on so low +a diet that <i>Jude the Obscure</i> seemed to her a maddening draught. But +they interest us by showing that even Mr<a name="page_080" id="page_080"></a> James, who ordinarily turned +aside with so chill a wince from the ridiculous, had exposed his +consciousness to the æsthetic movement which had been remotely +engendered by Leigh Hunt's Cockney crow of joy at Italy and afterwards +fostered by Ruskin as one of his wild repartees to the railway train, +and which was then being given the middle-class touch by Oscar Wilde.</p> + +<p>We feel surprised at Mr James' cognisance of anything so second-rate as +this Decadent Movement of the late eighties and early nineties, because +most of us basely judge it by its lack of worldly success instead of by +its moral mission. The elect of the movement, if one delves in the +memory of older Londoners, were certainly silly young men who were +careful about the laundering of their evening shirts and who tried to +introduce the tone of public-school life into ordinary society. And it +is true that for all their talk of art they produced nothing but one +good farce and a cartload of such weak, sweet verse as schoolgirls copy +into exercise-<a name="page_081" id="page_081"></a>books, and that from this small effort they sank +exhausted down to prison, drink, madness, suicide; and struck whatever +other notes there be in the descending scale of personal disgrace. And +yet, for all its fruitlessness, that prattle about art gave them a valid +claim on our respect. Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was +poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were +confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who +wrote as though he were the offspring of two <i>Times</i> leaders; among +novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too +prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach; +and in criticism Andrew Lang, who had admired Scott and Dickens in his +schooldays and was not going to let himself down by admiring anybody +nearer his own generation, greeted every exponent of the real with a +high piercing northern sneer. It was of inestimable value that it should +be cried, no matter in how pert a voice, that words are jewels which, +wisely set, make by<a name="page_082" id="page_082"></a> their shining mental light. That the cry could not +save the young men who raised it, bore out their contention of the +time's need for it; if they, seeking new beauty, could but celebrate the +old dingy sins of towns, it showed in what a base age they had been +bred. And if they could not save themselves they saved others. Arnold +Bennett and H. G. Wells set off in the nineties in a world encouragingly +full of talk about good writing. Conrad, mouthing his difficult strange +tales about the sea, found an audience that would sit hushed. And in the +brain of one who, being then between forty and fifty years of age, might +have been thought inaccessible to new conceptions of the art that had +for so long preoccupied him, there passed important thoughts.</p> + +<p>"That idea I picked up when I corrected George Eliot's proofs, oh! so +long ago!" one can imagine Mr James saying, "that idea that art must be +ballasted by didacticism can't be true for me. I've fined it down, in my +reading of the French, to an opinion that the artist should use his +fancy<a name="page_083" id="page_083"></a> work to decorate useful articles; but still it isn't true for me. +For I must, before I can decorate them, make the useful articles of +thought my own, and they are just the one thing that for all my mental +wealth I can't acquire. I see them often enough in the shop-windows—the +moral and political and philosophical problems so prodigiously produced +by my age—and many times have tried the door, but to my touch it never +opens, so I have to describe them as I see them through the glass, +without having felt or known them with the intimacy of possession! It's +true I did once deal with a situation in the history of two peoples, but +I see now that in its international character there was an intimation +that it was the last with which I should ever effectively concern +myself. For I'm destructively not national; my mind is engraved with the +sights and social customs of half-a-dozen countries, and with the deep +traditions of not one, and how can I deal deeply with the conduct of a +people when I haven't a notion of the quality or quantity of the +traditions which are,<a name="page_084" id="page_084"></a> after all, its mainspring? It seems to me that +the cry of "Art for Art's sake," which is being raised by those young +men, and which certainly isn't true for <i>them</i>, may be true for <i>me</i>. +What if henceforth I release the winged steed of my recording art from +the obligation of dragging up the steep hill of my inaptitude the dray +filled with the heavy goods which I have amassed in my perhaps so +mistaken desire for a respectably weighty subject, and let the poor +thing just beautifully soar?"</p> + +<p>One perceives how far this mood had gone with Mr James when the hero of +<i>The Tragic Muse</i> (1890) refuses a seat in Parliament and the hand of a +wealthy widow in order that he might go on painting. From Mr James, to +whom marrying a widow appeared as much superior to marrying a spinster +as privately acquiring a "piece" from the dispersed collection of a +deceased connoisseur of repute is to buying old furniture with no +guarantee but one's own approval, this was a portentous incident. And +there is vast significance in his sympathetic representation<a name="page_085" id="page_085"></a> of Miriam +Rooth, the young actress to whom the title refers, for before this +period he would never have accepted the genius of the black-browed, +untidy girl as an excuse for her lack of money and social position and +manners. It had hitherto been his grimly expressed opinion that "the +life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations," and he +had refused to dramatise in his imagination anything concerning women +save their failures and successes as sexual beings; which is like +judging a cutlet not by its flavour, but by the condition of its +pink-paper frill. That time had gone. He had abandoned all his +prejudices in despair, and for many years to come was to show a divine +charity, freely permitting every encountered thing to impress its +essence on the receptive wax of his consciousness. For the next twelve +years "impressions," as in his happy foreign childhood, "were not merely +all right, but were the dearest things in the world."<a name="page_086" id="page_086"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV<br /><br /> +THE CRYSTAL BOWL</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">I</span><b>N</b> that octagonal room at the Prado, where each wall is an altar raised +to beauty, because it is hung with pictures by Velasquez, in all the +lesser works one finds some intimation of the grave, fine personality +who produced all this wonder. At the sacred picture that was his first +one says, "He was a pupil, and very proud of painting the old things +better than the old men could, even though they meant nothing to him"; +at the squat, black dwarfs, "He was so sure that the truth about the +world was kind that he could look upon horror without fear"; and at the +sketches of the Villa Medici Gardens, "After hot, bleak Spain he loved +Italy as one who has known passion loves a passionless girl." And the +recreated personality, tangible enough to be liked, passes with one +about the gallery<a name="page_087" id="page_087"></a> until suddenly, before the masterpieces, it vanishes. +With those it had nothing to do; the thing that was his character, +shaped out of the innate traits of his dark stock by the raw beauty of +the land and the stiff rich life of the court, brought him to the +conception of these works but lay sleeping through their execution. When +he was painting <i>Las Hilanderas</i> he knew nothing save that the weavers' +flesh glowed golden in the dusty sunlight of the factory; for the state +of genius consists of an utter surrender of the mind to the subject. The +artist at the moment of creation must be like a saint awaiting the +embrace of God, scourging appetite out of him, shrinking from sensation +as though it were a sin, deleting self, lifting his consciousness like +an empty cup to receive the heavenly draught.</p> + +<p>And so, with the beginning of his second period of genius, the reading +of Mr James ceased to give us the companionship of the gentle, very +pleasant American who seemed homeless but quite serene, as though he +were tired of living in his boxes, but on the other<a name="page_088" id="page_088"></a> hand was very fond +of travelling, that we had grown to like in his books of the eighties. +He went away and sent no letter; but instead, with a lavishness one +would never have suspected from his uneasy bearing, sent a succession of +jewels, great globed jewels of experience, from which marvellously +conceived characters gave out their milky gleams or fiery rays. The +first tentative try at the mere impression, <i>The Aspern Papers</i> (1888), +gave an earnest of his generosity. There one passes into the golden glow +of Venice, "where the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of +the palaces all shimmer and melt together.... The gondola stopped, the +old palace was there.... How charming! it's grey and pink!" And under +the painted ceiling of the old palace sits bleached and shrivelled +Juliana Bordereau, the memory of her love affair with the great poet +Aspern hanging in the air like incense and filling the mind with tears +that such splendid lovers buy no immortality, but grow old like the +rest. Above its mere amusing story the tale<a name="page_089" id="page_089"></a> breathes an elegy on the +many good things that are slain by age before death comes and decently +inters the body. For one watches, with a kind of comic horror that such +grimaces should touch the face that Jeffery Aspern kissed, the grin of +senile irony with which she meets the young American who comes to +wheedle her lover's letters out of her, with which she wheedles money +out of him that she may provide for the future of the poor spinster +niece who moves tremulously about her chair like a silly baaing sheep; +with which, one thinks, she possibly anticipates the dreadful moment +after her death when the spinster dodderingly informs the American that +she could give him her aunt's papers only "if you were a relation ... if +you weren't a stranger...." Every drop of beauty is squeezed out of the +material by a pressure so cool and controlled that, remembering how +Benvenuto Cellini "fell in his clothes and slept" after he had taken +similar small masterpieces from the furnace, one waits for his +exhaustion. But it was given to Mr James, perhaps<a name="page_090" id="page_090"></a> because he was an +American and so of a stock oxygenated by contact with the free airs of +the new free lands, to swim longer in the sea of perfection than any +other writer. It was not until fifteen years later, when he was old and +the disciples of the movement which had stimulated him all shabbily +dead, and talk about art locked away in a dusty cupboard with the +Japanese fans and the blue china pots, that he turned tired and came to +shore.</p> + +<p>He was sustained in this long swim by two beloved subjects, one bitter +and one sweet. The literary life was written about in those days almost +as much as it was talked about, and it was continually being used by the +young decadents as the occasion for predictions of their own later +squalor in which morphia and dark ladies, moulded in the likeness of +beautiful young Mrs Patrick Campbell, played parts which in the +subsequent realisation were taken by plain beer and plainer barmaids. Mr +James took up the poor, scribbled-about thing and turned it over very +reverently, none<a name="page_091" id="page_091"></a> knowing better than he that the artist was the <i>sacer +vates</i> of his time, and very sadly, because he had now close on thirty +years of intimacy with artists behind him. He had known Turgeniev, the +most "beautiful genius" of his age, and had found him rather lonely and +pre-eminently not eminent in the eyes of the world; he had seen the dark +days of Rossetti; he had trod so close on the heels of Alfred de Musset +as to know that <i>il s'absente trop de l'Académie parcequ'il s'absinthe +trop</i>; he had seen poor, fat little Zola, who thought that though one +could not build Rome in a day one could describe it in less, plodding +and sweating up the wrong road to art. And so, in a mood of clear +melancholy, with an occasional flash of irony which was doubtless the +sole comment wrung from his urbanity by the fact that that age, when the +change of the novel's price from thirty-one and sixpence to six +shillings had enormously increased the reading public, had brought no +enlargement of his circle of readers, he wrote that wonderful series of +stories which began with<a name="page_092" id="page_092"></a> <i>The Lesson of the Master</i> (1888) and included +<i>The Middle Years</i> (1893), <i>The Next Time</i> (1895), and <i>The Death of the +Lion</i> (1894). Save for that roaring joke, <i>The Coxon Fund</i> (1894), where +one sees Frank Saltram, a "free rearrangement of Coleridge," charming +and sponging on the rich, bringing into their drawing-rooms a swaying +body that should be taken home at once in a cab and a mind "like a +crystal suspended in the moral world—swinging and shining and flashing +there," these are all sad stories. The master is bullied out of being a +master by the financial importunities of a smart wife and comely +children; the author of <i>The Middle Years</i> dies with none but an +acquaintance picked up at the seaside to hold his hand; Ralph Limbert is +killed by worry because he could not stop producing masterpieces when it +was the damned marketable asset that was required to pay the wages of +his wife's maid; the lion dies in a cold country house, with no fire in +his bedroom, while his hostess gets paragraphed for her charity to the +wild literary, and his last<a name="page_093" id="page_093"></a> manuscript goes astray downstairs somewhere +between Lord Dorimont's man and Lady Augusta's maid. One knows next to +nothing at all about the faith consciously rejected or adopted by Henry +James, and whether the atmosphere of speculative theology in which he +was bred had made him think religion as far beyond his mental range as +mathematics, or whether Christianity seemed to him just the excuse of +the Latin races for building high cool places, very grateful in the +heat, and filling them with incense and images of kind, interceding +people. But in this melancholy series, and indeed in all his later +works—for right on to <i>The Golden Bowl</i> (1905) he presents his +characters as being worthy of treatment just because they are in some +way or other struggling to preserve some decency from engulfment in the +common lot of nastiness—one perceives that he had been born with the +grim New England faith like a cold drop in his blood. The earth was a +vale of tears, and all one could do was to go on, uninfluenced by +weeping or the fear of weeping,<a name="page_094" id="page_094"></a> to some high goal. This sad belief, +accompanied by so intense a consciousness that his particular goal, the +art of great writing, was reached by a stonier and longer path than any, +might have been expected to provoke him rather to the fury of Landor or +the gloomy pomposity of Wordsworth than to the unhurried, unimpassioned +production of these wonderful stories, these exquisite vessels that +swaggeringly hold and clearly show the contained draught of truth, like +tall-stemmed goblets of Venetian glass. But glass is the wrong image; +for no hand could ever break these, no critical eye detect a crack. They +are so truthfully conceived that one could compare them only to some +nobly infrangible substance, so realistic and yet so charged with +significance by their fashioning that their likeness must be something +which is transparent and yet gives the light a white fire as it passed +through. It is of crystal they are made, hard, luminous crystal.</p> + +<p>Mr James' second subject, which began to show its white flowers in <i>The +Other House</i><a name="page_095" id="page_095"></a> (1896) and went on blossoming long after winter had fallen +on his genius in <i>The Golden Bowl</i>, also showed him a son of New +England. For it consists of nothing else than the demonstration, in +varying and exquisitely selected circumstances, that blessed are the +pure in heart; and that was certainly the beatitude that New England, +with its fear of passion and publicity and its respect for spinsters and +pastors of bleached lives, most regarded. Mr James demonstrated it in no +spirit of moral propaganda, but for the technical reason that a +situation is greatly elucidated if one of the persons engaged presents a +consciousness like a polished silver surface, unobscured by any tracery +of selfish preoccupations, which clearly mirrors the other participients +and their movements. Perhaps he thereby discovered the real meaning of +the beatitude, which may be no more than an expression of the obvious +truth that he who receives the fullest impression of the world is likely +to react most valuably to it. Certainly he invented a technical trick +which in its way was as important as<a name="page_096" id="page_096"></a> the discovery which Ibsen was +making about the same time and which he himself used later in his last +masterpiece, that if one had a really "great" scene one ought to leave +it out and describe it simply by the full relation of its consequences. +He showed that all sorts of things that are amusing enough to write +about and are yet too ignoble for dignified art are lent the required +nobility by being witnessed by grave candour; and that characters whose +special claim is that they are "strange," but whose strangeness cannot +be laboured by direct description lest they become crude, can have the +gaps in their representation filled out by their effect on the simple. +Rose Armiger, in <i>The Other House</i>, is made much more horrible because +she exposes her dreadful passion before the simplicity of Tony Bream, +just as a striped poisonous snake would seem more striped and poisonous +if it flickered its black fang from an English rose-bush. The awfulness +of Ida Farange, whose handsome appearance constituted "an abuse of +visibility," of Beale Farange, whose vast scented beard<a name="page_097" id="page_097"></a> was, since odd +ladies liked to play with it, ultimately his chief source of income, +would never have been important enough to be recorded if they had not +formed a part of <i>What Maisie Knew</i> (1897); and the ensnarement of Sir +Claude, her first step-parent, who was such a good fellow to talk to +when his gaze didn't wander to the dark young woman in red who was +sweeping into dinner or to the shining limbs of a Dieppe fishwife, by +the beautiful, genteel young trollop who was her second step-parent, +would have been a matter too <i>louche</i> for representation if Maisie had +not so beautifully cared for him. The battle over <i>The Spoils of +Poynton</i> (1897), where the greedy mother tries to defend the fine +"things" of her dead husband's house from her imbecile son's vulgar +bride, would be too unrelievedly a history of greed to be borne were not +exquisite Fleda Vetch in the foreground, being fond of the mother, +loving the son. The best ghost story in the world, <i>The Turn of the +Screw</i> (1898), is the more ghostly because the apparitions of the valet<a name="page_098" id="page_098"></a> +and the governess, appearing at the dangerous place, the top of the +tower on the other side of the lake, that they may tempt the children +they corrupted in their lives to join them in their eternal torment, are +seen by the clear eyes of the honourable and fearless lady who tells the +tale. And <i>In the Cage</i> (1898) has no subject but the purity of the +romantic little telegraphist who sits behind the wire netting at the +grocer's. Her heart is like a well of clear water, through which, when +the handsome Guardsman comes in to send a telegram to his mistress, love +strikes down like a shaft of light.</p> + +<p>One pauses, horrified to find oneself ticking off these masterpieces on +one's fingers, as though they were so many books by Mrs Humphry Ward or +buns by Lyons. And yet what can one do? Criticism must break down when +it comes to masterpieces. For if one is creative one wants to go away +and spend oneself utterly on this sacred business of creation, wring out +of oneself every drop of this inestimable thing art; and if one is<a name="page_099" id="page_099"></a> not +creative one can only put out a tremulous finger to touch the marvellous +shining crystal, and be silent with wonder. Deep wonder, since these are +not, as fools have pretended, merely rich treatments of the trivial. For +although he could not grasp a complicated abstraction, was teased by the +implications of a great cause, and angered by an idea that could be +understood only by the synthesis of many references, he could dive down +serenely, like a practised diver going under the sea for pearls, into +the twilit depths of the heart to seize his secrets. There is in +humanity an instinct for ritual, there lies in all of us a desire to +commemorate our deep emotions, that would otherwise glow in our bosoms +and die down for ever, by some form that adds to the beauty of the +world; but there is only one expression of it in literature that is not +poisonously silly. Newman and the Tractarians and Monsignor Benson make +the ritualist seem as big a fool as the old woman who carries a potato +in her pocket to ward off rheumatism. Sabatier makes him seem the kind +of<a name="page_100" id="page_100"></a> person who takes sugar in his tea, paints in water-colour and likes +<i>The Roadmender</i>. But there is a story by Henry James called <i>The Altar +of the Dead</i>, rejected again and again by the caste of cretins who edit +the magazines and reviews of this unhappy country, although of so +perfect a beauty that one can read every separate paragraph every day of +one's life for the music of the sentences and the loveliness of the +presented images, which takes ritual from the trembling hands of the +coped old men and exhibits it as something that those who love the +natural frame of things and hate superstition need not fear to accept. +It tells how an ageing man acquires an altar in a Roman Catholic church +and burns at it candles to his many dead, and by worshipping there keeps +so close company with their charity and sweetness that, at his end, the +blaze of white lights inspires him to a last supreme act of forgiveness +to an enemy; and the beautiful recital makes one's mind no longer fear +to admit that the splendour of a Cathedral Mass may, although one's<a name="page_101" id="page_101"></a> +unbelief fly like an arrow through the show and transfix even the Cross +itself, fulfil a noble need. Once at least Henry James poured into his +crystal goblet the red wine that nourishes the soul.</p> + +<p>And it held, too, a liberal draught of the least trivial distillation of +man's mind, which is tragedy, in <i>The Wings of the Dove</i> (1902). That +story is the perfect example of what he had declared in <i>The Tragic +Muse</i> the artistic performance should always be: "the application, clear +and calculated, crystal-firm, as it were, of the idea conceived in the +glow of experience, of suffering, of joy." For Milly Theale, the +American heiress, "who had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great +account could have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived +with them; such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet +making it light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it +clear as noon; of being unmistakably sad and yet making it soft as +dusk," whose hopeful progress through Europe stops suddenly at the dark +portal<a name="page_102" id="page_102"></a> in Harley Street, is but the ghost of Mary Temple, whose death +thirty years before had been felt by Henry and William James as the end +of their youth. All those years he had held in his heart the memory of +that poor girl, "conscious of a great capacity for life, but early +stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite while also +enamoured of the world; aware, moreover, of the condemnation and +passionately desiring to 'put in' before extinction as many of the finer +vibrations as possible and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the +sense of having lived"; but with the prescience of the artist he had +delayed until he had perfected his art to undertake the heavy task of +presenting her tragedy without mitigation and yet making it bearable and +beautiful. Then he lavished his technical resources on her history as he +might have laid flowers on her grave. There is nothing more miraculous +in all his works than the way he contrives that, when her agony becomes +too great to be directly represented and has to be suggested by its +effect upon others, he<a name="page_103" id="page_103"></a> yet breaks no link of the intimacy between the +reader and his heroine, but provides that her increasing physical +absence shall be so compensated for by her spiritual presence that her +rare appearances are like long-expected visits from a distant friend. +One's knowledge of her glows into love when one sees her holding a +reception in the faded golden splendours of the Venetian palace to which +she has dragged herself to die, smiling bravely at her guests, bidding +musicians strike up to keep them gay, playing, to preserve her hands +from any gesture of anguish or appearance of lassitude, with the rope of +pearls that seems to weigh down her wasted body. Yet one gets one's +vision through the hard, envious eyes of Kate Croy, who is the hawk +circling over the poor dying dove, and the appalled gaze of Merton +Densher, Kate's secret lover, whom she has trapped into a profession of +love for Milly so that the deluded girl will leave him her fortune. And +one sees her most radiantly of all in the interview which she grants to +Densher when she has discovered the cruel<a name="page_104" id="page_104"></a> fraud practised on her and is +dying of the knowledge, although one is told no more than that "she +received me just as usual, in that glorious great <i>salone</i>, in the dress +she always wears, from her inveterate corner of her sofa." From the love +it lit in his heart, a love so great that for very shame Kate cannot +marry him even when her machinations have achieved complete success at +Milly's death, one perceives that this was the dying girl's assumption, +that her sweetness and strength must at that hour have flowered so +divinely that the skies opened and they were no longer matter for a +human history. But about this masterpiece, too, there can be nothing +said. One just sits and looks up, while the Master lifts his old grief, +changed by his craftsmanship into eternal beauty as the wafer is changed +to the Host by the priest's liturgy, enclosed from decay, prisoned in +perfection, in the great shining crystal bowl of his art.<a name="page_105" id="page_105"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="V" id="V"></a>V<br /><br /> +THE GOLDEN BOWL</h3> + +<p class="nind"><span class="letra">T</span><b>HE</b> signs of age appeared in Mr James' work like white streaks in a +black beard; between two vital and vigorous books there would appear one +that in its garrulity and complacent surrender to mannerism predicted +decay. It became clear, first of all, that he was no longer able to bear +up with serenity under his deep sense that life was a vale of tears. How +much he wished it would all stop is manifest in that strangest of all +visions of Paradise, <i>The Great Good Place</i> (1900). We all have our +hopes of what gifts the hereafter may bring us, and in most cases we +desire some compensation for the limitations of our human knowledge; we +promise ourselves that when we lean over the gold bar of heaven a +competent angel will bustle up, clasping innumerable divinely clear +text-<a name="page_106" id="page_106"></a>books under its wings, to tell us absolutely everything about +physics, with special reference to the movements of the heavenly bodies +spinning below. But it is the essence of Mr James' Paradise that there +is nothing there at all but a climate, a sweet soft climate in which the +most that happens is one of those summer sprinkles that brings out +smells. This fatigue of life, this hunger for the peace of nothingness, +showed itself in his increasing preference for laying the scene of his +novels in the great good places of this earth, where there is nothing +more dangerous in the parks and on the terraces than deer and peacocks, +and nothing more disturbing to the soul in the high rooms and +interminable galleries than well-bred women. It was not a gain to his +art; under its influence he committed the twittering over teacups which +compose the collection of short stories called <i>The Better Sort</i> (1903), +and the incidentally beautiful but devastatingly artificial <i>The Awkward +Age</i> (1899), in which the reader is perpetually confused because Nanda +Brookenham, one<a name="page_107" id="page_107"></a> of the most charming of Mr James' "pure in heart," is +wept over as though she had been violated body and soul, when all that +has happened is that she has been brought up in a faster set than the +world thinks desirable for a young unmarried girl. And it was peculiarly +unfortunate that, while his subjects grew flimsier and his settings more +impressive, his style became more and more elaborate. With sentences +vast as the granite blocks of the Pyramids and a scene that would have +made a site for a capital he set about constructing a story the size of +a hen-house. The type of these unhappier efforts of Mr James' genius is +<i>The Sacred Fount</i> (1901), where, with a respect for the mere gross +largeness and expensiveness of the country house which almost makes one +write the author Mr Jeames, he records how a week-end visitor spends +more intellectual force than Kant can have used on <i>The Critique of Pure +Reason</i> in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists +between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more +interesting<a name="page_108" id="page_108"></a> among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows. The +finely wrought descriptions of the leisured life make one feel as though +one sat in a beautiful old castle, granting its beauty but not pleased, +because one is a prisoner, while the small, mean story worries one like +a rat nibbling at the wainscot. One takes it as significant that the +unnamed host and hostess of the party never appear save to "give +signals." The tiny, desperate figures this phrase shows to the mind's +eye, semaphoring to each other across incredibly extended polished +vistas to keep up their courage under these looming, soaring vaults, may +be taken as symbols of the heart and intellect which Mr James had now +forgotten in his elaboration of their social envelope.</p> + +<p>But with this method, as in every form of literary activity save only +playwriting, in which he was rather worse than Sidney Grundy in much the +same way, Mr James gained his radiant triumphs. There could be nothing +more trivial than the <i>donnée</i> of <i>The Ambassadors</i> (1903); there is no +dignity<a name="page_109" id="page_109"></a> or significance in the situation of Lambert Strether, an +American who is engaged, in that odd way common to Mr James' characters, +to a woman whom he certainly does not love and hardly seems to like, and +goes at her bidding to Paris to cut her cubbish son clear from an +entanglement with a Frenchwoman. And yet so artfully is the tale +displayed in the setting of lovely, clean, white Paris and green France, +lifting her poplars into the serene strong light of the French sky, that +the reader holds his breath over the story of how Strether "had come +with a view that might have been figured by a clear, green liquid, say, +in a neat glass phial; and the liquid, once poured into the open cup of +<i>application</i>, once exposed to the action of another air, had begun to +turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on +its way to purple, to black, to yellow"; how, in fact, the old +"international situation" acted on the new generation of Americans. But +that book is not typical of this period, for it is singularly free from +those great sentences which sprawl<a name="page_110" id="page_110"></a> over the pages of <i>The Golden Bowl</i> +with such an effect of rank vegetable growth that one feels that if one +took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden. And it is +those sentences which absorb, at the last, the whole of Mr James' +attention.</p> + +<p>For he ceased, as time went on, to pay any attention to the emotional +values of his stories; it is one of the strangest things about <i>The +Golden Bowl</i> that the frame on which there hangs the most elaborate +integument of suggestion and exposition ever woven by the mind of man is +an ugly and incompletely invented story about some people who are +sexually mad. Adam Verver, an American millionaire, buys an Italian +prince for his daughter Maggie, and in her turn she arranges a marriage +between her father and Charlotte, her school friend, because she thinks +he may be lonely without her. And although it is plain that people who +buy "made-up" marriages are more awful than the admittedly awful people +who buy "made-up" ties, they are presented to one as vibrating +exquisitely to<a name="page_111" id="page_111"></a> every fine chord of life, as thinking about each other +with the anxious subtlety of lovers, as so steeped in a sense of one +another that they invent a sea of poetic phrases, beautiful images, +discerning metaphors that break on the reader's mind like the unceasing +surf. And when one tries to discover from the recorded speeches of these +people whether there was no palliation of their ugly circumstances one +finds that the dialogue, usually so compact a raft for the conveyance of +the meaning of Mr James' novels, has been smashed up on this sea of +phrases and drifts in, a plank at a time, on the copious flood:</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>"Maggie happened to learn, by some other man's greeting of him, in +the bright Roman way, from a street corner as we passed, that one +of the Prince's baptismal names, the one always used for him among +his relations, was Amerigo; which—as you probably don't know, +however, even after a lifetime of <i>me</i>—was the name, four hundred +years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the +sea,<a name="page_112" id="page_112"></a> in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had +failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new +continent; so the thought of any connection with him can even now +thrill our artless breasts."</p></div> + +<p>And as if it was not enough that these people should say literally +unspeakable sentences like that, and do incredible things, the phrases +make them do things which they never did. For the metaphors are so +beautifully and completely presented to the mind that it retains them as +having as real and physical an existence as the facts. When we learn +that the relationship between Charlotte and the Prince had reared itself +in Maggie's life like "some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, +a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and +adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled ever +so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs," and the simile is cunningly +developed for seven or eight hundred words, one is left<a name="page_113" id="page_113"></a> with a confused +impression that a pagoda formed part of the furniture at Portland Place +and that Maggie oddly elected to keep her husband inside it. And to cap +it all these people are not even human, for their thoughts concerning +their relationships are so impassioned and so elaborate that they can +never have had either energy or time for the consideration of anything +else in the world. A race of creatures so inveterately specialist as +Maggie Verver could never have attained man's mastery over environment, +but would still be specialising on the cocoa-nut or some such simple +form of diet.</p> + +<p>Decidedly <i>The Golden Bowl</i> is not good as a novel; but what it is +supremely good as can be discovered when one learns how, in these later +days, Mr James used to compose his novels. He began by dictating a short +draft which, even in the case of such a cartload of apes and ivory as +<i>The Golden Bowl</i>, might be no longer than thirty thousand words. Then +he would take this draft in his hand and would dictate it all over again +with what he intended to be<a name="page_114" id="page_114"></a> enlightening additions, but which, since +the mere act of talking set all his family on to something quite +different from the art of letters, made it less and less of a novel. For +the James family had, as was shown by their father's many reported +phrases, by William James' charm as a lecturer, and by the social +greatness of Robertson James, a genius for conversation. For long years +it had remained latent in Henry James, who had in youth suffered much +from that stockishness which often comes to those who are burning all +their energy for creative purposes and have none left for personal +display; but latterly it had been liberated by the consciousness of +maturity and fame. At last it became a passion with him, and he decided +to converse, not only with his friends, but with his public. This was +bad for his novels, so long as one considered them as such, since a +novel should be the presentation and explanation of a subject while a +conversation is a fantasia of entertaining phrases on themes the +essentials of which are to some extent already in the<a name="page_115" id="page_115"></a> possession of the +interlocutors. But once one considers them as a flow of bright things +said about people Mr James knows and that one rather thinks one has met, +but is not quite sure, one perceives that the crystal bowl of Mr James' +art was not, as one had feared, broken. He had but gilded its clear +sides with the gold of his genius for phrase-making, and now, instead of +lifting it with a priest-like gesture to exhibit a noble subject, held +it on his knees as a treasured piece of bric-à-brac and tossed into it, +with an increasing carelessness, any sort of subject—a jewel, a rose, a +bit of string, a visiting-card—confident that the surrounding golden +glow would lend it beauty. Indiscriminately he dropped into it his +precious visions of his revisited motherland, in <i>The American Scene</i> +(1907); the dry little anecdotes of <i>The Finer Grain</i> (1910); the +tittering triviality of <i>The Outcry</i> (1911); and his judgment of his own +works in the prefaces to the New York edition of the <i>Novels and Tales +of Henry James</i> (1908-1909).<a name="page_116" id="page_116"></a></p> + +<p>Always it was good, rambling talk, although fissured now and then with +an old man's lapses into tiresomeness, when he split hairs until there +were no longer any hairs to split and his mental gesture became merely +the making of agitated passes over a complete baldness.</p> + +<p>And here and there the prose achieves a beauty of its own; but it is no +longer the beauty of a living thing, but rather the "made" beauty which +bases its claims to admiration chiefly on its ingenuity, like those +crystal clocks with jewelled works and figures moving as the hours +chimed, which were the glory of mediæval palaces.</p> + +<p> +<br /> +</p> + +<p>William James died in 1910, and Henry James, who had already begun to +savour the bitterness of outliving brothers and friends and pets, whiled +away the next few years of separation from his adored brother in the +composition of two beautiful books about their childhood and youth, <i>A +Small Boy</i> (1913), and <i>Notes of a Son and Brother</i> (1914), and a third +autobiographical volume<a name="page_117" id="page_117"></a> which is not yet published. Then came the +European War, in which he enlisted as a spiritual soldier. By +innumerable beautiful acts, by kindly visits to French and Belgian +refugees and wounded soldiers, by gifts of money and writings to war +charities, he raised an altar to the dead who had died for the countries +which he had always loved at the hands of the country which, ever since +he was a student at Bonn, he had always loathed. In July, 1915, he took +the great step, fraught for him with the deepest emotions, of renouncing +his American citizenship and becoming a naturalised British subject; and +in January, 1916, he did England the further honour of accepting the +Order of Merit. And on 28th February, 1916, he died, leaving the white +light of his genius to shine out for the eternal comfort of the mind of +man.</p> + +<p><a name="page_118" id="page_118"></a></p> + +<p><a name="page_119" id="page_119"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="BIBLIOGRAPHY" id="BIBLIOGRAPHY"></a>A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MR HENRY JAMES' PRINCIPAL WORKS</h3> + +<p class="hang">[A complete bibliography of the works of Mr James would form a much +thicker volume than this book. A useful bibliography up to 1906, +compiled by Mr. Frederick Allen King, is included as an appendix in Miss +Elisabeth Luther Cary's <i>The Novels of Henry James</i> (Putnam); and a +complete bibliography covering the same period, which gives an +interesting list of his early unsigned contributions to periodicals, has +been compiled by Mr Leroy Phillips and published by Messrs Constable. +The following bibliography records only the first editions of +publications in book form.]</p> + +<p class="hang">The American (<i>Ward, Lock</i>). 1877.</p> + +<p class="hang">French Poets and Novelists (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1878.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Europeans (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1878.</p> + +<p class="hang">Roderick Hudson (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1879.</p> + +<p class="hang">Daisy Miller. An International Episode. Four Meetings (<i>Macmillan</i>). +1879.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Madonna of the Future. Longstaff's Marriage. Madame de Mauves. +Eugene Pickering. The Diary of a Man of Fifty. Benvolio (<i>Macmillan</i>). +1879.</p> + +<p class="hang">Hawthorne (<i>Macmillan</i>). Included in English Men of Letters Series, +edited by John Morley. 1879.</p> + +<p class="hang">Confidence (<i>Chatto & Windus</i>). 1880.</p> + +<p class="hang">Washington Square. The Pension Beaurepas. A Bundle of Letters +(<i>Macmillan</i>). 1881.<a name="page_120" id="page_120"></a></p> + +<p class="hang">The Portrait of a Lady (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1881.</p> + +<p class="hang">Portraits of Places (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1883.</p> + +<p class="hang">Tales of Three Cities: The Impressions of a Cousin. Lady Barbarina. A +New England Winter (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1884.</p> + +<p class="hang">Stories Revived: Vol. I. The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. The Path of +Duty. A Day of Days. A Light Man. Vol. II. Georgina's Reasons. A +Passionate Pilgrim. A Landscape Painter. Rose-Agathe. Vol. III. Poor +Richard. The Last of the Valerii. Master Eustace. The Romance of Certain +Old Clothes. A Most Extraordinary Case (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1885.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Bostonians (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1886.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Princess Casamassima (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1886.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Reverberator (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1888.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Aspern Papers. Louisa Pallant. The Modern Warning (<i>Macmillan</i>). +1888.</p> + +<p class="hang">Partial Portraits (Macmillan). 1888.</p> + +<p class="hang">A London Life. The Patagonia. The Liar. Mrs Temperley (<i>Macmillan</i>). +1889.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Tragic Muse (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1890.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Lesson of the Master. The Marriages. The Pupil. Brooksmith. The +Solution. Sir Edmund Orme (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1892.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Real Thing. Sir Dominick Ferrand. Nona Vincent. The Chaperon. +Greville Fane (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1893.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Private Life. The Wheel of Time. Lord Beaupré. The Visits. +Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (<i>Osgood, McIlvaine</i>). 1893.</p> + +<p class="hang">Essays in London (<i>Osgood, McIlvaine</i>). 1893.</p> + +<p class="hang">Theatricals: Two Comedies. Tenants. Disengaged (<i>Osgood, McIlvaine</i>). +1894.</p> + +<p class="hang">Theatricals: Second Series. The Album. The Reprobate (<i>Osgood, +McIlvaine</i>). 1895.<a name="page_121" id="page_121"></a></p> + +<p class="hang">Terminations: The Death of the Lion. The Coxon Fund. The Middle Years. +The Altar of the Dead (<i>Heinemann</i>). 1895.</p> + +<p class="hang">Embarrassments: The Figure in the Carpet. Glasses. The Next Time. The +Way it Came (<i>Heinemann</i>) 1896.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Other House (<i>Heinemann</i>). 1896.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Spoils of Poynton (<i>Heinemann</i>). 1897.</p> + +<p class="hang">What Maisie Knew (<i>Heinemann</i>). 1897.</p> + +<p class="hang">In the Cage (<i>Duckworth</i>). 1898.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Two Magics. The Turn of the Screw. Covering End (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1898.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Awkward Age (<i>Heinemann</i>). 1899.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Soft Side: The Great Good Place. "Europe." Paste. The Real Right +Thing. The Great Condition. The Tree of Knowledge. The Abasement of the +Northmores. The Given Case. John Delavoy. The Third Person. Maud-Evelyn. +Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie (<i>Methuen</i>). 1900.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Sacred Fount (<i>Methuen</i>). 1901.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Wings of the Dove (<i>Constable</i>). 1902.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Better Sort: Broken Wings. The Beldonald Holbein. The Two Faces. The +Tone of Time. The Special Type. Mrs Medwin. Flickerbridge. The Story in +It. The Beast in the Jungle. The Birthplace. The Papers (<i>Methuen</i>). +1903.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Ambassadors (<i>Methuen</i>). 1903.</p> + +<p class="hang">William Wetmore Story and his Friends (<i>Blackwood</i>). 1903.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Golden Bowl (<i>Methuen</i>). 1905.</p> + +<p class="hang">English Hours (<i>Heinemann</i>). 1905.</p> + +<p class="hang">The American Scene (<i>Chapman & Hall</i>). 1907.</p> + +<p class="hang">Italian Hours (<i>Heinemann</i>). 1909.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Finer Grain: The Velvet Glove. Mora Montravers. A Round of Visits. +Crapy Cornelia. The Bench of Desolation (<i>Methuen</i>). 1910.<a name="page_122" id="page_122"></a></p> + +<p class="hang">The Outcry (<i>Methuen</i>). 1911.</p> + +<p class="hang">A Small Boy (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1913.</p> + +<p class="hang">Notes of a Son and Brother (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1914.</p> + +<p class="hang">Notes on Novelists (<i>Dent</i>). 1914.</p> + +<p> +<br /> +</p> + +<p>A Collection of Novels and Tales by Henry James was published by Messrs +Macmillan in 1883. This consisted of reprints of The Portrait of a Lady, +Roderick Hudson, The American, Washington Square, The Europeans, +Confidence, Madame de Mauves, An International Episode, The Pension +Beaurepas, Daisy Miller, Four Meetings, Longstaff's Marriage, Benvolio, +The Madonna of the Future, A Bundle of Letters, The Diary of a Man of +Fifty, and Eugene Pickering; and two stories, The Siege of London and +The Point of View, which had not before been published in England.</p> + +<p> +<br /> +</p> + +<p>The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was +published by Messrs Macmillan during 1908-1909. Each novel and each +volume of short stories has a critical preface by the author, and each +volume has a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn as frontispiece. The +following is the order:—</p> + +<p>1. Roderick Hudson. 2. The American. 3, 4. The Portrait of a Lady. 5, 6. +The Princess Casamassima. 7, 8. The Tragic Muse. 9. The Awkward Age. 10. +The Spoils of Poynton; A London Life; The Chaperon. 11. What Maisie +Knew; In the Cage; The Pupil. 12. The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the +Screw; The Liar; The Two Faces. 13. The Reverberator; Madame de Mauves; +A Passionate Pilgrim; The Madonna of the Future; Louisa Pallant. 14. +Lady Barbarina; The Siege of London; An International Episode; The +Pension Beaurepas; A Bundle of Letters; The Point of View. 15. The +Lesson of the Master; The Death of the Lion;<a name="page_123" id="page_123"></a> The Next Time; The Figure +in the Carpet; The Coxon Fund. 16. The Author of Beltraffio; The Middle +Years; Greville Fane; Broken Wings; The Tree of Knowledge; The Abasement +of the Northmores; The Great Good Place; Four Meetings; Paste; Europe; +Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie; Fordham Castle. 17. The Altar of the Dead; +The Beast in the Jungle; The Birthplace; The Private Life; Owen +Wingrave; The Friends of the Friends; Sir Edmund Orme; The Real Right +Thing; The Jolly Corner; Julia Bride. 18. Daisy Miller; Pandora; The +Patagonia; The Marriages; The Real Thing; Brooksmith; The Beldonald +Holbein; The Story in It; Flickerbridge; Mrs Medwin. 19, 20. The +Ambassadors. 21, 22. The Wings of the Dove. 23, 24. The Golden Bowl.</p> + +<p>Fordham Castle, The Jolly Corner and Julia Bride had not previously been +published. All the early works have been subjected to a revision which +in several cases, notably Daisy Miller and Four Meetings, amounts to +their ruin.<a name="page_124" id="page_124"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="AMERICAN_BIBLIOGRAPHY" id="AMERICAN_BIBLIOGRAPHY"></a>AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY</h3> + +<p class="hang">[When the contents of collections of short stories have been given in +full in the English bibliography they are entered here by their title +only.]</p> + +<p class="hang">A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales: The Last of the Valerii. Eugene +Pickering. The Madonna of the Future. The Romance of Certain Old +Clothes. Madame de Mauves (<i>James R. Osgood</i>; present publisher, +<i>Houghton, Mifflin</i>). 1875.</p> + +<p class="hang">Transatlantic Sketches: Articles reprinted from <i>The Nation</i>, <i>The +Atlantic Monthly</i>, and <i>The Galaxy</i> (<i>James R. Osgood</i>; present +publishers, <i>Houghton, Mifflin</i>). 1875.</p> + +<p class="hang">Roderick Hudson (<i>James R. Osgood</i>; present publisher, <i>Houghton, +Mifflin</i>). 1876.</p> + +<p class="hang">The American (<i>James R. Osgood</i>; present publisher, <i>Houghton, +Mifflin</i>). 1877.</p> + +<p class="hang">Watch and Ward (<i>Houghton, Osgood</i>; present publisher, <i>Houghton, +Mifflin</i>). 1878.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Europeans (<i>Houghton, Osgood</i>; present publisher, <i>Houghton, +Mifflin</i>). 1878.</p> + +<p class="hang">Daisy Miller (<i>Harper</i>). 1878.</p> + +<p class="hang">An International Episode (<i>Harper</i>). 1878.</p> + +<p class="hang">Hawthorne (<i>Harper</i>). 1880.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Diary of a Man of Fifty and A Bundle of Letters (<i>Harper</i>). 1880.</p> + +<p class="hang">Confidence (<i>Houghton, Osgood</i>; present publisher, <i>Houghton Mifflin</i>). +1880.</p> + +<p class="hang">Washington Square. Illustrated by George du Maurier (<i>Harper</i>). 1881.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Portrait of a Lady (<i>Houghton, Mifflin</i>). 1881.<a name="page_125" id="page_125"></a></p> + +<p class="hang">Daisy Miller: A Comedy. Privately printed. 1882.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of View +(<i>James R. Osgood</i>; present publisher, <i>Houghton, Mifflin</i>). 1883.</p> + +<p class="hang">Portraits of Places (<i>James R. Osgood</i>; present publisher, <i>Houghton, +Mifflin</i>). 1883.</p> + +<p class="hang">Tales of Three Cities (<i>James R. Osgood</i>; present publisher, <i>Houghton, +Mifflin</i>). 1884.</p> + +<p class="hang">A Little Tour in France (<i>James R. Osgood</i>; present publisher, +<i>Houghton, Mifflin</i>). 1884.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. Georgina's Reasons. The Path of Duty. +Four Meetings (<i>James R. Osgood</i>; present publisher, <i>Houghton, +Mifflin</i>). 1885.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Bostonians (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1886.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Princess Casamassima (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1886.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Reverberator (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1888.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Aspern Papers (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1888.</p> + +<p class="hang">Partial Portraits (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1888.</p> + +<p class="hang">A London Life (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1889.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Tragic Muse (<i>Houghton, Mifflin</i>). 1890.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Lesson of the Master (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1892.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Real Thing (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1893.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Private Life. Lord Beaupré. The Visits (<i>Harper</i>). 1893.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Wheel of Time. Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (<i>Harper</i>). 1893.</p> + +<p class="hang">Picture and Text. Essays on Art (<i>Harper</i>). 1893.</p> + +<p class="hang">Essays in London (<i>Harper</i>). 1893.</p> + +<p class="hang">Theatricals (<i>Harper</i>). 1894.</p> + +<p class="hang">Theatricals: Second Series (<i>Harper</i>). 1895.</p> + +<p class="hang">Terminations (<i>Harper</i>). 1895.</p> + +<p class="hang">Embarrassments (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1896.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Other House (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1896.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Spoils of Poynton (<i>Houghton, Mifflin</i>). 1897.</p> + +<p class="hang">What Maisie Knew (<i>Herbert S. Stone</i>). 1897.<a name="page_126" id="page_126"></a></p> + +<p class="hang">In the Cage (<i>Herbert S. Stone</i>). 1898.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Two Magics (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1898.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Awkward Age (<i>Harper</i>). 1899.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Soft Side (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1900.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Sacred Fount (<i>Scribner's</i>). 1901.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Wings of the Dove (<i>Scribner's</i>). 1902.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Better Sort (<i>Scribner's</i>). 1903.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Ambassadors (<i>Harper</i>). 1903.</p> + +<p class="hang">William Wetmore Story (<i>Houghton, Mifflin</i>). 1903.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Golden Bowl (<i>Scribner's</i>). 1904.</p> + +<p class="hang">English Hours (<i>Houghton, Mifflin</i>). 1905.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Question of our Speech. The Lesson of Balzac (<i>Houghton, Mifflin</i>). +1905.</p> + +<p class="hang">The American Scene (<i>Harper</i>). 1907.</p> + +<p class="hang">Italian Hours (Houghton. Mifflin). 1909.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Finer Grain (<i>Scribner's</i>). 1910.</p> + +<p class="hang">The Outcry (<i>Scribner's</i>). 1911.</p> + +<p class="hang">A Small Boy (<i>Scribner's</i>). 1913.</p> + +<p class="hang">Notes of a Son and Brother (<i>Scribner's</i>). 1914.</p> + +<p class="hang">Notes on Novelists (<i>Scribner's</i>). 1914.</p> + +<p class="hang">The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was +published in America by Messrs Scribner's Sons.<a name="page_127" id="page_127"></a></p> + +<h3><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h3> + +<ul> +<li><i>Altar of the Dead, The</i>, <a href="#page_100">100</a></li> + +<li><i>Ambassadors, The</i>, <a href="#page_108">108-110</a></li> + +<li><i>American Scene, The</i>, <a href="#page_115">115</a></li> + +<li><i>American, The</i>, <a href="#page_038">38-40</a></li> + +<li><i>Aspern Papers, The</i>, <a href="#page_088">88-89</a></li> + +<li><i>Atlantic Monthly, The</i>, <a href="#page_021">21</a>, <a href="#page_024">24</a></li> + +<li><i>Author of Beltraffio, The</i>, <a href="#page_078">78-80</a></li> + +<li><i>Awkward Age, The</i>, <a href="#page_106">106-107</a></li> +<li> </li> + +<li><i>Better Sort, The</i>, <a href="#page_106">106</a></li> + +<li><i>Bostonians, The</i>, <a href="#page_071">71-72</a></li> +<li> </li> + +<li>Civil War, <a href="#page_019">19</a>, <a href="#page_021">21</a></li> + +<li><i>Coxon Fund, The</i>, <a href="#page_092">92</a></li> + +<li>Criticism, <a href="#page_063">63-71</a></li> + +<li> </li> + +<li><i>Daisy Miller</i>, <a href="#page_044">44-48</a></li> + +<li><i>Death of the Lion, The</i>, <a href="#page_092">92-93</a></li> + +<li>Decadent Movement, <a href="#page_079">79-84</a>, <a href="#page_090">90</a></li> + +<li> </li> +<li>Eliot, George, <a href="#page_022">22</a>, <a href="#page_082">82</a></li> + +<li>Emerson, <a href="#page_010">10</a>, <a href="#page_072">72</a></li> + +<li><i>Essays in London</i>, <a href="#page_066">66</a></li> + +<li>European War, <a href="#page_117">117</a></li> + +<li><i>Europeans, The</i>, <a href="#page_041">41-44</a></li> +<li> </li> + +<li><i>Finer Grain, The</i>, <a href="#page_115">115</a></li> + +<li>Flaubert, <a href="#page_058">58</a>, <a href="#page_063">63</a>, <a href="#page_065">65-66</a></li> + +<li>French literature, <a href="#page_038">38</a>, <a href="#page_052">52</a>, <a href="#page_058">58</a>, <a href="#page_091">91</a></li> + +<li><i>French Poets and Novelists</i>, <a href="#page_037">37</a>, <a href="#page_064">64</a></li> + +<li> </li> +<li><i>Galaxy, The</i>, <a href="#page_024">24</a></li> + +<li><i>Golden Bowl, The</i>, <a href="#page_025">25</a>, <a href="#page_093">93</a>, <a href="#page_095">95</a>, <a href="#page_110">110-113</a></li> + +<li><i>Great Good Place, The</i>, <a href="#page_105">105</a></li> + +<li> </li> +<li>Hawthorne, <a href="#page_010">10</a>, <a href="#page_024">24</a>, <a href="#page_031">31</a></li> + +<li>Historic sense, <a href="#page_060">60-63</a></li> + +<li> </li> +<li>International situation, <a href="#page_030">30-33</a>, <a href="#page_109">109</a></li> + +<li><i>In the Cage</i>, <a href="#page_098">98</a></li> + +<li> </li> +<li>James, Rev. Henry, <a href="#page_012">12-13</a>, <a href="#page_017">17-19</a>, <a href="#page_114">114</a></li> + +<li> </li> +<li><i>Lady Barbarina</i>, <a href="#page_049">49</a></li> + +<li><i>Lesson of the Master, The</i>, 92<a name="page_128" id="page_128"></a></li> + +<li><i>Little Tour in France, A</i>, <a href="#page_060">60-61</a></li> + +<li><i>London Life, A</i>, <a href="#page_050">50</a>, <a href="#page_054">54</a></li> + +<li> </li> +<li><i>Madame de Mauves</i>, <a href="#page_028">28-30</a></li> + +<li><i>Madonna of the Future, The</i>, <a href="#page_028">28</a></li> + +<li><i>Middle Years, The</i>, <a href="#page_092">92</a></li> + +<li> </li> +<li>Naturalisation, <a href="#page_117">117</a></li> + +<li><i>Next Time, The</i>, <a href="#page_092">92</a></li> + +<li>New York Edition of, <i>Novels and Tales, The</i>, <a href="#page_115">115</a></li> + +<li><i>Notes of a Son and Brother</i>, <a href="#page_116">116</a></li> + +<li><i>Notes on Novelists</i>, <a href="#page_064">64</a></li> + +<li> </li> +<li><i>Other House, The</i>, <a href="#page_096">96</a></li> + +<li><i>Outcry, The</i>, <a href="#page_115">115</a></li> +<li> </li> + +<li><i>Pandora</i>, <a href="#page_049">49</a></li> + +<li><i>Partial Portraits</i>, <a href="#page_067">67</a></li> + +<li><i>Passionate Pilgrim, The</i>, <a href="#page_025">25-27</a>, <a href="#page_061">61</a></li> + +<li><i>Pension Beaurepas, The</i>, <a href="#page_048">48</a></li> + +<li>Playwriting, <a href="#page_108">108</a></li> + +<li><i>Portrait of a Lady, The</i>, <a href="#page_067">67-70</a></li> + +<li><i>Princess Casamassima, The</i>, <a href="#page_073">73-78</a></li> +<li> </li> + +<li><i>Religion</i>, <a href="#page_017">17-19</a>, <a href="#page_093">93</a>, <a href="#page_099">99-101</a>, <a href="#page_105">105-106</a></li> + +<li><i>Reverberator, The</i>, <a href="#page_050">50</a></li> + +<li><i>Roderick Hudson</i>, <a href="#page_033">33-36</a></li> + +<li><i>Romance of Certain Old Clothes</i>, <a href="#page_024">24</a></li> +<li> </li> + +<li><i>Sacred Fount, The</i>, <a href="#page_107">107</a></li> + +<li><i>Siege of London, The</i>, <a href="#page_048">48</a></li> + +<li><i>Small Boy, A</i>, <a href="#page_116">116</a></li> + +<li><i>Spoils of Poynton, The</i>, <a href="#page_097">97</a></li> +<li> </li> + +<li>Temple, Mary, <a href="#page_023">23</a>, <a href="#page_102">102</a></li> + +<li><i>Tragic Muse, The</i>, <a href="#page_084">84</a>, <a href="#page_101">101</a></li> + +<li>Turgeniev, <a href="#page_056">56-59</a>, <a href="#page_091">91</a></li> + +<li><i>Turn of the Screw, The</i>, <a href="#page_097">97</a></li> +<li> </li> + +<li>Velasquez, <a href="#page_086">86</a></li> + +<li> </li> +<li>Ward, Mrs Humphry, <a href="#page_066">66</a></li> + +<li><i>Washington Square</i>, <a href="#page_055">55-59</a></li> + +<li><i>What Maisie Knew</i>, <a href="#page_097">97</a></li> + +<li><i>Wings of the Dove</i>, <a href="#page_101">101</a>, <a href="#page_104">104</a></li> +</ul> + +<hr class="full" /> + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry James, by Rebecca West + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY JAMES *** + +***** This file should be named 37300-h.htm or 37300-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/7/3/0/37300/ + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Henry James + +Author: Rebecca West + +Release Date: September 3, 2011 [EBook #37300] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY JAMES *** + + + + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + + + + + + +HENRY JAMES + +[Illustration: Photo portrait of Henry James] + + + + +HENRY JAMES + +By + +REBECCA WEST + +KENNIKAT PRESS, INC. / PORT WASHINGTON, N. Y. + + + + +HENRY JAMES + +First Published in 1916 +Reissued in 1968 by Kennikat Press + +Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 67-27663 + +Manufactured in the United States of America + + + + +AUTHOR'S NOTE + + +_I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness for help in compiling the +bibliography to Mr James B. Pinker, Miss Wilma Meikle, and Messrs +Constable; and to Messrs Macmillan for the loan of the New York Edition +of the Novels and Tales of Henry James._ + +R. W. + + + + +CONTENTS + + + PAGE + + I. THE SOURCES 9 + + II. THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION 24 + +III. TRANSITION 55 + + IV. THE CRYSTAL BOWL 86 + + V. THE GOLDEN BOWL 105 + + BIBLIOGRAPHY 119 + + AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY 124 + + INDEX 127 + + + + +I + +THE SOURCES + + +At various times during the latter half of the eighteenth century there +crossed the Atlantic two Protestant Irishmen, a Lowland Scotsman, and an +Englishman, and thereby they fixed the character of Mr Henry James' +genius. For the essential thing about Mr James was that he was an +American; and that meant, for his type and generation, that he could +never feel at home until he was in exile. He came of a stock that was +the product of culture and needed it as part of its environment. But at +the time of his childhood and youth--he was born in 1843--culture was a +thing that was but budding here and there in America, in such corners as +were not being used in the business of establishing the material +civilisation of the new country. The social life of old New York and +Boston had its delicacy, its homespun honesty of texture, its austerer +sort of beauty; but plainly the American people were too preoccupied by +their businesses and professions to devote their money to the +embellishment of _salons_ or their intelligence to the development of +manners. Hawthorne and Emerson and Margaret Fuller and their friends +were trying to make a culture against time; but any record of their +lives which gives a candid account of how desperately these people had +to struggle to make the meanest living shows that the poor American ants +were then utterly unable to form the leisured community which is the +necessary environment for grasshoppers. "The impression of Emerson's +personal history is condensed into the single word Concord," wrote Mr +James later, "and all the condensation in the world will not make it +rich." There was no blinking the fact that in attempting to set up in +this unfinished country Art was like a delicate lady who moves into a +house before the plaster is dried on the walls; she was bound to lead an +invalid existence. + +This incapacity of America to supply the colour of life became obvious +to Henry and William James, the two charming little boys in tight +trousers and brass-buttoned jackets, one of whom grew up to write +fiction as though it were philosophy and the other to write philosophy +as though it were fiction, at a very early age. It did not escape their +infant observation that the ladies and gentlemen who fascinated them by +dancing on the tight-rope at Barnum's Museum always bore exotic names, +and when they grew older and developed the youthful taste for anecdotic +art they found it could be gratified only by such European importations +as Thorwaldsen's _Christ and His Disciples_, the great white images of +which were ranged round the maroon walls of the New York Crystal Palace, +or Benjamin's Haydon's pictures in the Duesseldorf collection in +Broadway. And when they grew older still and began to show a fine talent +for painting and drawing their unfolding artistic sense found more and +more intimations of the wonder of Europe. _A View of Tuscany_ that hung +in the Jameses' home was pronounced by a friend who had lived much in +Italy not to be of Tuscany at all. Colours in Tuscany were softer; but +such brightness might be found in other parts of Italy. So Europe was as +various as that--a place of innumerable changing glories like a sunrise, +but better than a sunrise, inasmuch as every glory was encrusted with +the richness of legend. + +But most powerful of all influences that made the Jameses rebel against +the narrowness of Broadway and the provincial spareness of the old New +York, which must have been something like a neat virgin Bloomsbury, was +their father. The Reverend Henry James was wasted on young America; it +had developed neither the creative stream that would have inspired him +nor the intellectual follies that he could slay with that beautiful wit +which made him one of the great letter-writers of the world. "Carlyle is +the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease, only +infinitely _more_ unreconciled to the blest Providence which guides +human affairs. He names God frequently and alludes to the highest things +as if they were realities, but all only as for a picturesque effect, so +completely does he seem to regard them as habitually circumvented and +set at naught by the politicians." The man who could write that should +have been a strong and salutary influence on English culture, and he +knew it. It is probable that when he and his wife paid what Mr James +tells us was their "first (that is our mother's first) visit to Europe, +which had quite immediately followed my birth, which appears to have +lasted some year and a half"--the last clause of this sentence is +unfortunate for a novelist famous for his deliberation--he brought his +babies with him with a solemnity of intention, as if to dip them in a +holy well. Thus it was that the little Jameses not only bore themselves +proudly through their childhood as became those who had lived as babies +in Piccadilly, and read _Punch_ with a proprietary instinct, but were +also possessed in spirit by something that was more than the discontent +with the flatness of daily life and the desire for a brighter scene that +comes to the ordinary child. From their father's preoccupation they +gained a rationalised consciousness that America was an incomplete +environment, that in Europe there were many mines of treasure which they +must find and rifle if they hoped for the health of their minds and the +salvation of their souls. + +In 1855, when Henry James was twelve, the family yielded to its passion +and crossed the Atlantic. The following four years were of immense +importance to Mr James, and consequently to ourselves, for he had been +born with a mind that received impressions as if they had been embraces +and remembered them with as fierce a leaping of the blood; just as his +brother William's mind acquired and created systems of thought as +joyously as other men like meeting friends and establishing a family. He +found London in the main jolly, rather ugly, but comfortable and full of +character, just as he had seen it in _Punch_, but here and there +detected--notably on a drive from London Bridge--black outcrops of +Hogarth's London. "It was a soft June evening, with a lingering light +and swarming crowds, as they then seemed to me, of figures reminding me +of George Cruikshank's Artful Dodger and his Bill Sykes and his Nancy, +only with the bigger brutality of life, which pressed upon the cab, the +Early Victorian four-wheeler, as we jogged over the Bridge, and cropped +up in more and more gas-lit patches for all our course, culminating, +somewhere far to the west, in the vivid picture, framed by the cab +window, of a woman reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground +with a blow in the face." He knew Paris, then being formed by the free +flourish of Baron Haussmann into its present splendours of wide +regularity, yet still homely with remnants of the dusty ruralism of its +pre-Napoleonic state; he saw all the pretty show of the Second Empire, +he stood in the Champs-Elysees and watched the baby Prince Imperial roll +by to St. Cloud with his escort of blue and silver _cent-gardes_; and +the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre, its floors gleaming with polished +wood, its walls glowing with masterpieces, and its proportions awesomely +interminable and soaring, was the scene of his young imaginative life. +Those were the great places; but there were also Geneva and Boulogne and +Zurich and Bonn, the differences of which he savoured, and above all the +richness of desultory contact with arts and persons of the various +countries. He gaped at the exquisiteness of ugly Rose Cheri at the +Gymnase, copied Delacroix, read _Evan Harrington_ as it came out in +_Once a Week_; was at school with a straight-nosed boy called Henry +Houssaye and a snub-nosed boy called Coquelin; was tutored by Robert +Thompson, the famous Edinburgh teacher who was afterwards to instruct +Robert Louis Stevenson and many other eminent Scots in Jacobite +sympathies as well as the more usual subjects, and by M. Lerambert whose +verse had been praised by Sainte-Beuve in his _Causeries_. +"Impressions," writes Mr James of this period, "were not merely all +right but were the dearest things in the world." + +And one must remember that not only were impressions much to young Henry +James, they were all he had. His mental life consisted of nothing else. +His natural inaptitude for acquiring systematised knowledge was probably +intensified by the study of foreign languages entailed by this travel; +for if a child spends its time learning several systems of naming things +it plainly has less energy to spare for learning systems of arranging +things. At any rate his inability to grasp the elements of arithmetic +and mathematics led to his removal from the Polytechnic School at +Zurich, and was the cause of despair in all his tutors. But most minds, +however incapable they may be of following the exact sciences or +speculative thought, have some sort of idea of the system of the +universe inserted into them by early instruction in one or other of the +religious faiths. This unifying influence was refused to Henry James by +the circumstance that his father had found certain religious doubts +that had almost driven him from the ministry solved in the works of +Swedenborg, which he found not at all incredible but--as he once said in +a phrase that showed him his son's own father--fairly "insipid with +veracity." On this foundation of Swedenborgianism he had built up for +himself a religion which was "nothing if not a philosophy, +extraordinarily complex and worked out and original, intensely personal +as an exposition, yet not only susceptible of application, but clamorous +for it, to the whole field of consciousness, nature and society, +history, knowledge, all human relations and questions, every pulse of +the process of our destiny." This was no playground for the young +intelligence, so young Henry James was told to prepare himself by +drinking from such springs as seemed to him refreshing. When he was +asked to what church he went he was bidden by his father to reply that +"we could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom, +and that there was no communion, even that of the Catholics, even that +of the Jews, even that of the Swedenborgians, from which we need find +ourselves excluded." He certainly liked to exercise this privilege, but +he admits that "my grounds may have been but the love of the +_exhibition_ in general, thanks to which figures, faces, furniture, +sounds, smells and colours became for me, wherever enjoyed, and enjoyed +most where most collected, a positive little orgy of the senses and riot +of the mind." Which was to be expected; as also was the fact that he +never broke his childish habit of regarding his father's religion as a +closed temple standing in the centre of his family life, the general +holiness of which he took for granted so thoroughly that it never +occurred to him to investigate its particulars. + +This European visit came to an end in 1859, and William and Henry James +spent the next year or so at Newport studying art under the direction of +their friend John La Farge, with the result that William painted +extremely well in the style of Manet, and Henry showed as little ability +in this direction as he had shown in any other. In 1861 the Civil War +broke out; and had it not been for an accident the whole character of +Mr James' genius would have been altered. If he had seen America by the +light of bursting shells and flaming forest he might never have taken +his eyes off her again, he might have watched her fascinated through all +the changes of tone and organisation which began at the close of the +war, he might have been the Great American Novelist in subject as well +as origin. But it happened, in that soft spring when he and every other +young man of the North realised that there was a crisis at hand in which +their honour was concerned and they must answer Lincoln's appeal for +recruits, that he was one day called to help in putting out a fire. In +working the fire-engine he sustained an injury so serious that he could +never hope to share the Northern glory, that there were before him years +of continuous pain and weakness, that ultimately he formed a curious and +on the whole mischievous conception of himself. For his humiliating +position as a delicate and unpromising student at Harvard Law School +while his younger brothers, Wilky and Robertson, were officers in the +Northern Army and William was pursuing a brilliant academic career or +naturalising with Agassiz in South America, seemed a confirmation of his +tutors' opinion that he was an inarticulate mediocrity who would never +be able to take a hand in the business of life. And so he worked out a +scheme of existence, which he accepted finally in an hour of glowing +resignation when he was returning by steamer to Newport from a visit to +a camp of wounded soldiers at Portsmouth Grove, in which the one who +stood aside and felt rather than acted acquired thereby a mystic value, +a spiritual supremacy, which--but this was perhaps a later development +of the theory--would be rubbed off by participation in action. + +It was, therefore, with defiant industry, with the intention of proving +that such as he was he had his peculiar worth, that he set to work to +become a writer. His first story was published in _The Atlantic Monthly_ +when he was twenty-one, and it was followed by a number of stories, +travel sketches, and critical essays, some of which have been +reprinted, and a few farces which have not. He also went through a +necessary preface of the literary life by reading the proofs of George +Eliot's novels before they appeared in the _Atlantic_ and reviewing; the +profession of literature differs from that of the stage in that the +stars begin instead of ending as dressers. In 1869 he went to Europe +and, gaining certain impressions that had been inaccessible to him as a +child, finally fixed the dye in which his talent was to be immersed for +the rest of his life. He stepped for the first time into "a private park +of great oaks ... where I knew my first sense of a matter afterwards, +through fortunate years, to be more fully disclosed: the springtime in +such places, the adored footpath, the first primroses, the stir and +scent of renascence in the watered sunshine and under spreading boughs +that were somehow before aught else the still reach of the remembered +lines of Tennyson...." He was admitted to the homes of Ruskin, Rossetti, +Morris, Darwin, and George Eliot, and allowed to see the wheels go +round. But the real significance of this journey to Mr James' genius is +the part it played in the last days of his beautiful cousin, Mary +Temple. She should have had before her a long career of nobility, for +"she was absolutely afraid of nothing she might come to by living with +enough sincerity and enough wonder." She pretended not to know that she +had been cheated out of this, but as she lay on the death-bed that she +would not admit to be even a sick-bed, her eyes were fixed intensely on +the progress of her cousin through all the experiences that should have +been hers. There came a day when all illusion failed, and she died +dreadfully, clinging to consciousness. Her death was felt by Henry and +William James as the end of their youth. + + * * * * * + +That, as Mr James would have said, is the _donnee_. The must was trodden +out, it had only to ferment, to be bottled, to be mellowed by time into +the perfect wine. There is nothing in all the innumerable volumes that +Mr James was to pour out in the next forty-five years of which the +intimation is not present in these first adventures. + + + + +II + +THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION + + +It is no use turning up those first stories that appeared in _The +Atlantic Monthly_ and _The Galaxy_ unless one has formed an affection +for the literary personality of Mr James. The image they provoke of the +literary prentice bending over his task with the tip of his tongue +reflectively protruding like a small boy drawing on his slate, is +amusing enough; but they themselves are such pale dreams as might visit +a New England spinster looking out from her snuff-coloured parlour on a +grey drizzling day. Where there is any richness of effect, as in _The +Romance of Certain Old Clothes_, it comes from the influence of +Nathaniel Hawthorne. That story, which tells how a girl loved her +sister's husband, waited eagerly for her death that she might marry him, +and later wheedled from him the key of the chest in which the dead wife +had left her finery to await her baby daughter's maturity, is +seven-eighths prelude, and the catastrophe, which is the finding of the +girl kneeling dead beside the chest with the mark of phantom fingers on +her throat, comes with too short and small a report. But in spite of its +pitiful construction it is the only one of the dozen stories which Mr +James published before his visit to Europe in 1869 that shows any of the +imaginative exuberance which one accepts as an earnest of coming genius. + +Hawthorne was not altogether a happy influence--it is due to him that Mr +James' characters have "almost wailed" their way from _The Passionate +Pilgrim_ to _The Golden Bowl_--but he certainly shepherded Mr James into +the European environment and lent him a framework on which to drape his +emotions until he had discovered his own power to build up an +imaginative structure. The plot of _The Passionate Pilgrim_, with its +American who comes to England to claim a cousin's estate, falls in love +with the usurper's sister, is driven from the door, and dies just after +the usurper's death has delivered to him all he wants, is very clumsy +Hawthorne, but in those days Mr James could not draw normal events and +he had to have some medium for expressing his wealth of feeling about +England. It is amazing to see how rich that wealth already was, how much +deeper than mere pleasure in travel was his delight in the parks and +private grandeurs of England; and how, too, a fundamental fallacy was +already perverting it to an almost Calvinist distrust of the activities +of the present. + + "I entered upon life a perfect gentleman," says the American as he + sits in Hampton Court. "I had the love of old forms and pleasant + rites, and I found them nowhere--found a world all hard lines and + harsh lights, without lines, without composition, as they say of + pictures, without the lovely mystery of colour.... Sitting here, in + this old park, in this old country, I feel that I hover on the + misty verge of what might have been! I should have been born here, + not there; here my makeshift distinctions would have found things + they'd have been true of.... This is a world I could have got on + with beautifully." + +There you have the first statement of the persistent illusion, to which +he was helped by his odd lack of the historic sense and which confused +his estimate of modern life, that the past would have been a happier +home for those who like himself loved fastidious living. He had a +tremendous sense of the thing that is and none at all of the thing that +has been, and thus he was always being misled by such lovely shells of +the past as Hampton Court into the belief that the past which inhabited +them was as lovely. The calm of Canterbury Close appeared to him as a +remnant of a time when all England, bowed before the Church, was as +calm; whereas the calm is really a modern condition brought about when +the Church ceased to have anything to do with England. He never +perceived that life is always a little painful at the moment, not only +at this moment but at all moments; that the wine of experience always +makes a raw draught when it has just been trodden out from bruised +grapes by the pitiless feet of men, that it must be subject to time +before it acquires suavity. The lack of this perception matters little +in his early work but it is vastly important in shaping his later +phases. + +There are no such personal revelations in _The Madonna of the Future_, +nor anything, indeed, at all characteristic of Mr James. There is beauty +in the tale of the American painter who dreams over a model for twenty +years, while he and she grow old, and leaves at his death nothing more +to show for his dreams than a cracked blank canvas; and the Florentine +background is worked on diligently and affectionately. But it is +admirable in quite an uncharacteristic way, like a figure picture +painted with the utmost brilliance of technique and from perfect models +by a painter whose real passion was for landscape. Yet it was only a +year later, in _Madame de Mauves_, that Mr James found himself, both his +manner and the core of the matter which was to occupy him for the +happiest part of his literary life. Euphemia de Mauves, the prim young +American who moves languidly through the turfy avenues of the French +forest, her faith in decency of living perpetually outraged by her +husband's infidelities and his odd demand that she should make him a +cuckold so that at least he should not have the discomfort of looking up +at her, is the first of the many exquisite women whom Mr James brought +into being by his capacity to imagine characters solidly and completely, +his perception of the subtle tones of life, and his extreme verbal +delicacy. And she is given a still greater importance by the queer twist +at the end of the story by which M. de Mauves blows his brains out for +no reason at all but that he is hopelessly, helplessly, romantically in +love with this cold wife who will be so unreasonable about trifles. Mr +James writes her story not only as though he stood upon the Atlantic +shores looking eastward at the plight of a compatriot domiciled with +lewd men and light women, but also as though he sat in the company of +certain gracious men and women of the world who could not get under way +with their accomplishment of charm because the grim alien in the corner +will keep prodding them with a disapproval as out of place in this salon +as a deal plank. Madame de Mauves, in fine, is the first figure invented +by Mr James to throw light upon what he called "the international +situation." + +It took all Mr James' cosmopolitan training to see that there existed an +international situation, that the fact that Americans visited Europe +constituted a drama. An Englishman who visited Italy did no more than +take a look at a more richly coloured order of life that braced him up, +as any gay spectacle might have done, to return to his own; his travel +was a pleasure, or, at most, if he happened to be a Landor or a +Browning, an inspiration. It might reasonably be supposed that the visit +to Europe of an American was no greater matter. But Mr James knew that +the wealthy American was in the position of a man who has built a +comfortable house and has plenty of money over, yet cannot furnish it +because furniture is neither made nor sold in his country; until he has +crossed the sea to the land where they do make furniture he must sleep +and eat on the floor. + + "One might enumerate," he writes in those early days, "the items of + high civilisation as it exists in other countries, which are absent + from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder + what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and + indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no + personal loyalty, no aristocracy...." + +There follows a long list, so long as to provoke the "natural remark ... +that if these things are left out everything is left out." And, Mr James +goes on to complain, "it takes so many things--such an accumulation of +history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a +fund of suggestion for a novelist." He wrote novelist because at the +moment he was criticising Hawthorne, but he would certainly have applied +his phrase to anyone who desired his life to be not a corduroy track +but a marble terrace with palaces on the one hand and fair gardens on +the other. + +Since the pilgrimage for these items of high civilisation appeared to +Europeans--as innumerable contemporary allusions show it did--as mere +globe-trottings, the pilgrims themselves were likely to be as +misunderstood. For one thing, although they were unorganised so far as +culture went, they formed at home a very cohesive moral community. The +American women who came to Europe took for granted that however people +might be habited--people, that is, whose manners showed them "nice"--and +in whatever frivolous array they might be flounced and ribboned, they +were certain to wear next their skin the hair-shirt of Puritan +rectitude. The innocent freedoms which they permitted themselves because +they held this supposition, and the terrifying surmises to which these +gave rise in the mind of the Old World, unaware of the innocence of the +New, made much material for drama. And more dramatic still was the +moment, which came to so many of the travellers who formed close +personal relationships with Europeans, when they realised that the moral +standards to which they had nationally pledged themselves, and which +they individually obeyed with extraordinary fidelity, were here regarded +as simply dowdy. "Compromise!" was the cry of Latin and even English +society. "Compromise on every and any of the Commandments you like! Do +anything you can, in fact, to rub down those rude angles you present to +human intercourse!" And yet it was not to be deduced that Europe was +lax. One had only to look behind the superficial show to see that it had +its own religion, perhaps a more terrible religion than any New England +ever knew, and that what seemed its laziest pleasures were sometimes its +most dreadful rites. + +This last conception of Europe is the subject of _Roderick Hudson_ +(1875). _Roderick Hudson_ is not a good book. It throws a light upon the +lack of attention given at that period to the art of writing that within +a few years of each other two men of great genius--Thomas Hardy and +Henry James--wrote in their thirties first novels spoilt by technical +blemishes of a sort that the most giftless modern miss with a +subscription to Mudie's would never commit in her first literary +experiment. _Roderick Hudson_ is wooden, it is crammed with local colour +like a schoolmistress's bedroom full of photographs of Rome, it has a +plain boiled suet heroine called Mary. But its idea is magnificent. An +American of fortune takes Hudson, who has already shown talent as a +sculptor, from his stool in a lawyer's office in Northampton, +Massachusetts, and sets him up in a studio in Rome. It is the fear of +old Mrs Hudson and of Mary, his fiancee, that European life will be too +soft for him. But the very opposite occurs; it is he who is too soft for +European life. The business of art means not only lounging under the +pines of the Villa Ludovisi and chiselling the noble substance of +Carrara marble; it means also the painful toil of creation, which +demands from the artist an austerer renunciation of every grossness than +was ever expected of any law-abiding citizen of Northampton, which +sends a man naked and alone to awful moments which, if he be strong, +give him spiritual strength, but if he be weak heap on him the black +weakness of neurasthenia. And when that has turned him into a raw, hurt, +raging creature he is further snared by the loveliness of Christina +Light, who is characteristically European in that her circumstances have +not the same clear beauty as her face. She is being hawked over the +Continent to find a rich husband by her mother and a Cavaliere who is +really her father, and this ugly girlhood has so corrupted her vigorous +spirit that the young American's courtship provokes from her nothing but +eccentric favours or perverse insults. After the collapse of his art and +his love Roderick falls over a precipice in a too minutely described +Switzerland, hurled by a _denouement_ which has inspired Mr James to one +of his broadest jokes. In the first edition Roderick, on hearing that, +while he has been vexing his benefactor with his moods, that gentleman +has been manfully repressing a passion for Mary, exclaims, "It's like +something in a novel!" which Mr James in the definitive edition has +altered to, "It's like something in a bad novel!" + +This conception of Europe as a complex organism which would have no use, +or only a cruel use, for those bred by the simple organism of America, +animates _Four Meetings_ (1877), that exquisite short story which came +first of all of the many masterpieces that Mr James was to produce. It +is the tale of a little schoolmistress who, having long nourished a +passion for Europe upon such slender intimations as photographs of the +Castle of Chillon, at last collects a sum for the trip, is met at Havre +by a cousin, one of those Americans on whom Continental life has acted +as a solvent of all decent moral tissues, and is tricked out of her +money by his story of a runaway marriage with a Countess; returns to New +England hoping to "see something of this dear old Europe yet," and has +that hope ironically fulfilled by the descent upon her for life of the +said Countess, who is so distinctly "something of this dear old Europe" +that the very sight of her transports the travelled recounter of the +story to "some dusky landing before a shabby Parisian _quatrieme_--to an +open door revealing a greasy ante-chamber, and to Madame, leaning over +the banisters, while she holds a faded dressing-gown together and bawls +down to the portress to bring up her coffee." It is one of the saddest +stories in the world, and one of the cleverest. There is not one of its +simple phrases but has its beautiful bearing on the subject, and in the +treatment of emotional values one sees that the essays on _French Poets +and Novelists_ (1878), which for some years he had been sending to +America with the excited air of a missionary, were the notes of an +attentive pupil. "Detachment" was the lesson that that period preached +in its reaction against the George Sand method, whereby the author +rolled through his pages locked in an embrace with his subject. We have +forgotten its real significance, so frequently has it been used as an +excuse for the treatment of emotional situations with encyclopaedic +detail of circumstance and not a grain of emotional realisation, but +here we can recover it. The author's pity for the schoolmistress is +never allowed to make his Countess sinister instead of gross, and his +sense of the comic in the Countess is never allowed to make the +schoolmistress's woe more dreary; the situation stands as solid and has +as many aspects as it would have in life. + +_The American_ (1877) still holds this view of Europe. Its theme, to +quote Mr James in the preface of the definitive edition, is "the +situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some +robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged +compatriot; the point being in especial that he should suffer at the +hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible +civilisation and to be of an order far superior to his own." Christopher +Newman, the robust compatriot, is such a large, simple, lovable person +that the rest of the story leads one to suspect that one may say of Mr +James, as he said of Balzac, that "his figures, as a general thing, are +better than the use he makes of them." He walks through Europe examining +its culture with such an effect on the natives as an amiable buffalo +traversing the Galerie d'Apollon might produce upon the copyists of the +Louvre, and finally presents himself at the house where he is least +welcome in the world, the home of the de Bellegardes, a proud and +ancient Royalist family. Thereafter, the novel is an exposition of the +way things do not happen. Claire de Cintre, the widowed daughter whom +Newman desires to marry, is represented as having above all things +beauty of character; but when her family snatches her from him in a +frenzy of pride she allows herself to be bundled into a convent with a +weakness that would convict of imbecility any woman of twenty-eight. And +since her mother and brother had murdered her father by refusing him +medicine at a physical crisis, and sustained themselves in the act by +the reflection that after all they were only keeping up the good old +family tone, one wonders where she got this beauty of character. The +child of this damned house might have flamed with a strange fire, but +she could not have diffused a rectory lamp-light. But the series of +inconsistencies of which this is only one leads, like a jolting +motor-bus that puts one down at Hampton Court, to an exquisite +situation. Newman discovers the secret of the Marquis' murder and +intends to publish it as a punishment for the cruel wrong the de +Bellegardes have done him, but sacrifices this satisfaction simply +because there can be no link--not even the link of revenge--between such +as they and such as he. In all literature there is no passage so full of +the very passion of moral exaltation as the description of how Newman +stands before the Carmelite house in the Rue d'Enfer and looks up at the +blank, discoloured wall, behind which his lost lady is immured, then +walks back to Notre Dame and there, "the far-away bells chiming off into +space, at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word," decides +that such things as revenge "were really not his game." So it is with +Mr James to the end. The foreground is as often as not red with the +blood of slaughtered probabilities; a gentleman at a dinner-party tells +the lady on his left (a perfect stranger who never appears again in the +story) that some years ago he proposed to the lady in white sitting +opposite to them; a curio dealer calls on a lady in Portland Place just +to wind up the plot. But the great glow at the back, the emotional +conflagration, is always right. + +_The Europeans_ (1878) marks the first time when Mr James took the +international situation as a joke, and he could joke very happily in +those days when his sentence was a straight young thing that could run +where it liked, instead of a delicate creature swathed in relative +clauses as an invalid in shawls. There is no other book by Mr James +which has quite the clear, sunlit charm of this description of the visit +of Eugenia, the morganatically married Baroness, and her brother Felix, +the Bohemian painter, to their cousins' New England farm. There is +nothing at all to their discredit in the past of these two graceful +young people, but they resemble Harlequin and Columbine in the +instability of their existence and the sharp line they draw between +their privacy and their publicity. It appears to them natural that the +private life should be spent largely in wondering how the last public +appearance went off and planning effects for the next, a point of view +which arouses the worst suspicions in their cousins, who are accustomed +to live as though the sky were indeed a broad open eye. So Felix has the +greatest difficulty in persuading his uncle, who takes thirty-two bites +to a moral decision, just as Mr Gladstone took thirty-two bites to a +mouthful, that he is a suitable husband for his cousin Gertrude; and +poor Eugenia fails altogether in an environment where a lie from her +lips is not treated as _un petit peche d'une petite femme_, but remains +simply a lie. The frame of mind this state of affairs produces in the +poor lady is exquisitely described in a passage which shows her going +wistfully through the house of the man who did not propose to her +because he detected her lie, after a visit to his dying mother. + + "Mrs Acton had told Eugenia that her waiting-woman would be in the + hall to show her downstairs; but the large landing outside her door + was empty, and Eugenia stood there looking about.... She passed + slowly downstairs, still looking about. The broad staircase made a + great bend, and in the angle was a high window, looking westward, + with a deep bench, covered with a row of flowering plants in + curious old pots of blue China-ware. The yellow afternoon light + came in through the flowers and flickered a little on the white + wainscots. Eugenia paused a moment; the house was perfectly still, + save for the ticking, somewhere, of a great clock. The lower hall + stretched away at the foot of the stairs, half covered over with a + large Oriental rug. Eugenia lingered a little, noticing a great + many things. '_Comme c'est bien!_' she said to herself; such a + large, solid, irreproachable basis of existence the place seemed to + her to indicate. And then she reflected that Mrs Acton was soon to + withdraw from it. The reflection accompanied her the rest of the + way downstairs, where she paused again, making more observations. + The hall was extremely broad, and on either side of the front door + was a wide, deeply-set window, which threw the shadows of + everything back into the house. There were high-backed chairs along + the wall and big Eastern vases upon tables, and, on either side, a + large cabinet with a glass front and little curiosities within, + dimly gleaming. The doors were open--into the darkened parlour, the + library, the dining-room. All these rooms seemed empty. Eugenia + passed along and stopped a moment on the threshold of each. '_Comme + c'est bien!_' she murmured again; she had thought of just such a + house as this when she decided to come to America. She opened the + front door for herself--her light tread had summoned none of the + servants--and on the threshold she gave a last look...." + +That is the pure note of the early James, like a pipe played carefully +by a boy. It sounds as beautifully in _Daisy Miller_, that short novel +which, though it deals with conditions peculiar to a small section of +continental life forty years ago, will strike each new generation afresh +as sad and lovely. Daisy, who is like one of those girls who smile upon +us from the covers of American magazines, glaringly beautiful and +healthy but without the "tone" given by diligent study of the grace of +conduct, comes to Europe and plays in its sunshine like a happy child. +She wants to go to the Castle of Chillon, so she accepts the escort for +the afternoon of a young American who is staying at the same hotel; she +likes to walk in the Pincian, so she takes a stroll there one afternoon +with a certain liquid-eyed Roman. The woman who does a thing for the +sake of the thing in itself is always suspected by society, and the +American colony, which professes the mellow conventions of Europe with +all its own national crudity, accuses her of vulgarity and even +lightness. They talk so bitterly that when the young American, who is +half in love with Daisy, finds her viewing the Colosseum by moonlight +with the Roman, he leaps to the conclusion that she is a disreputable +woman. Why he does so is not quite clear, since surely it is the +essential thing about a disreputable woman that her evenings are not +free for visits to the Colosseum. Poor Daisy takes in part of his +meaning and, saying in a little strange voice, "I don't care whether I +get Roman fever or not!" goes back to her hotel and dies of malaria. And +the young American, "staring at the raw protuberance among the April +daisies" in the Protestant cemetery, learns from the Roman's lips that +Daisy was "most innocent." + +It is a lyric whose beauty may be measured by the attention which, in +spite of its tragedy, it everywhere provoked. It was interesting to note +how often in the obituary notices of Mr James it was said that he had +never attained popularity, for it shows how soon London forgets its +gifts of fame. From 1875 to 1885 (to put it roughly) all England and +America were as captivated by the clear beauty of Mr James' work as in +the nineties they were hypnotised by the bright-coloured beauty of Mr +Kipling's art. On London staircases everyone turned to look at the +American with the long, silky, black beard which, I am told by one who +met him then, gave him the appearance of "an Elizabethan sea captain." +But for all the exquisiteness of _Daisy Miller_ there were discernible +in it certain black lines which, like the dark veining in a crocus that +foretells its decay, showed that this was a loveliness which was in the +very act of passing. The young American might have been so worked upon +by his friends that he could readily believe his Daisy a light woman, +but he need not have manifested his acceptance of this belief by being +grossly rude to her and by reflecting that if "after Daisy's return +there had been an exchange of jokes between the porter and the +cab-driver ... it had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him +that the little American flirt should be 'talked about' by low-minded +menials." When one remembers the grave courtesy with which Christopher +Newman treated Mlle Noemie Nioche, the little French drab who called +herself _un esprit libre_, it is plain that we are no longer dealing +with the same Mr James. The Mr James we are to deal with henceforth had +ceased to be an American and had lost his native reactions to emotional +stimuli. He was becoming a European and for several years to come was to +spend his time slowly mastering its conventions; which means that he was +learning a new emotional language. + +The first works he produced when he was at once a finished writer and +only the cocoon of a European, present the paradoxical appearance of +being perfect in phrase and incredibly naive in their estimates of +persons and situations. _The Pension Beaurepas_ (1879), that melancholy +tale of the ailing old American whose wife and daughter have dragged him +off on an expensive trip to Europe, while ruin falls on his untended +business in New York, has its tone of pathos spoiled by extraordinarily +cold-blooded and, to women of to-day, extremely unsavoury discussions of +how a girl ought to behave if she wants to be married. _The Siege of +London_ (1883), which is the story of a Texan adventuress of many +divorces who marries into an English county family, fails to produce the +designed effect of outrage, because the adventuress is the only person +who shows any signs of human worth, and the life which she is supposed +to have violated by her marriage is suggested simply by statements that +the people concerned had titles and lived in large houses. In _Pandora_ +(1884), which describes a German diplomat's amazement that an unmarried +girl can be a social success in America, we feel as bored as we would if +we were forced to listen to the exclamations of a dog-fancier on finding +that a Pekingese with regular features had got a prize at a dog show. In +_Lady Barbarina_ (1884), which tells how a peer's daughter who marries +an American millionaire refuses to live in America, the American picture +is painted with the flatness of a flagging interest, and we suspect Mr +James of taking English architecture as an index of English character; +he had still to grasp the paradox that the people who live in the +solidities of Grosvenor Square are the best colonising and seafaring +stock in the world. In _The Reverberator_ (1888), wherein an American +girl guilelessly prattles to a newspaper correspondent about the affairs +of her French fiance's family and is cast out by them when he publishes +her prattlings in the States, we seem to see the international situation +slowly fading from Mr James' immediate consciousness. In turning over +its pages we see the author sitting down before a pile of white paper +and finely inscribing it with memories of past contacts with Americans; +we do not see him entering his study with traces still on his lips of a +smile provoked in the street outside by the loveliness and innocent +barbarism of his compatriots. In those days he had lost America and had +not yet found Europe, but he was to find it very soon. In _A London +Life_ (1889), the tale of an innocent American girl who comes over to +live with her sister and her aristocratic English husband, and stands +appalled at their debts, their debaucheries, their infidelities, he has +rendered beautifully the feeling caused by ill lives when led in old +homes of elmy parks and honourable histories. It is a sense of disgust +such as comes to the early-rising guest who goes into a drawing-room in +the morning and finds last night's coffee-cups and decanters and +cigarette ends looking dreadful in the sunlight. The house is being +badly managed; it will go to rack and ruin. That is an aspect of +England; but the American onlooker is just a clean-minded little thing +that might have bloomed anywhere, and all references to her Americanness +are dragged in with an effort. It is plain that he had lost all his love +for the international situation. + +That Mr James continued to write about Americans in Europe long after +their common motive and their individual adventures had ceased to excite +his wonder or his sympathy, was the manifestation of a certain delusion +about his art which was ultimately to do him a mischief. He believed +that if one _knew_ a subject one could write about it; and since there +was no aspect of the international situation with which he was not +familiar, he could not see why the description of these aspects should +not easily make art. The profound truth that an artist should feel +passion for his subject was naturally distasteful to one who wanted to +live wholly without violence even of the emotions; a preference for +passionless detachment was at that date the mode in French literature, +which was the only literature that he studied with any attention. The de +Goncourts, Zola, and even de Maupassant thought that an artist ought to +be able to lift any subject into art by his treatment, just as an +advertising agent ought to be able to "float" any article into +popularity by his posters. But human experience, which includes a +realisation of the deadness of most of the de Goncourts' and Zola's +productions, proves the contrary. Unless a subject is congenial to the +character of the artist the subconscious self will not wake up and +reward the busy conscious mind by distributions of its hoarded riches in +the form of the right word, the magic phrase, the clarifying incident. +Why are books about ideas so commonly bad, since the genius of M. +Anatole France and Mr Wells have proved that they need not be so, if it +be not that the majority of people reserve passion for their personal +relationships and therefore never "feel" an idea with the sensitive +finger-tips of affection? + +The absence of this necessary attitude to his subject explains in part +the tenuity of Mr James' later novels on the international situation; +but there is also another element that irritates present-day readers and +makes the texture of the life represented seem poor. That element, which +is not peculiar to Mr James, but is a part of the social atmosphere of +his time, is the persistent presentation of woman not as a human, but as +a sexual being. One can learn nothing of the heroine's beliefs and +character for the hullabaloo that has been set up because she has come +in too late or gone out too early or omitted to provide herself with +that figure of questionable use--for the dove-like manners of the young +men forbid the thought that she was there to protect the girl from +assault, and the mild tongues of the young ladies make it unlikely that +the duel of the sexes was then so bitter that they required an +umpire--the chaperon. It appears that the young woman of that period +could get through the world only by perpetually jumping through hoops +held up to her by society, a method of progression which was more suited +to circus girls than to persons of dignity, and which sometimes caused +nasty falls. There is nothing more humiliating to women in all fiction +than the end of _A London Life_, where the heroine, appalled at having +been left in an opera box alone with a young man, turns to him and begs +him, although she knows well that he does not love her, to marry her and +save her good name. Purity and innocence are excellent things, but a +world in which they have to be guarded by such cramping contrivances of +conduct is as ridiculous as a heaven where the saints all go about with +their haloes protected by mackintosh covers. + + + + +III + +TRANSITION + + +_Washington Square_ (1881), Mr James' first important work that does not +deal with the international situation, is a work of great genius. Into +the small mould of the story of how a plain and stupid girl was jilted +by a fortune-hunter when he discovered that she would be disinherited by +her contemptuous father on her marriage, Mr James concentrated all the +sense which he had absorbed throughout his childhood of the simple, +provincial life which went on behind the brown stone of old New York. It +has in it a wealth of feeling that does not seem to have originated with +Mr James, just as an old wives' tale told over and over again by the +fireside becomes charged with a synthetic emotion derived from the +comments and expressions of innumerable auditors; and one may surmise +that Catherine's tragedy was first presented to him as an item of local +gossip, sympathetically discussed by his charming New York cousins and +friends. Certainly the tale of this dull girl, who was "twenty years old +before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a red satin gown +trimmed with gold fringe," and progressed by such clumsinesses through a +career of which the only remarkable facts were that "Morris Townsend had +trifled with her affection, and that her father had broken its spring," +is consecrated by an element of pity which was afterwards signally to +disappear from Mr James' work. + +The book so beautifully expresses the woe of all those people to whom +nothing ever happens, who are aware of the gay challenge of life but are +prevented by something leaden in their substance from responding, that +one is not surprised to find that like most good stories about +inarticulate people--like _Une Vie_ and _Un Coeur Simple_--it is +written with the most deliberate cunning. The story is evoked according +to Turgeniev's method of calling his novels out of the inchoate real +world; and what that is had better, since Mr James had been using it +with increasing power since _Roderick Hudson_, be stated in his own +words. + + "I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years + ago from the lips of Ivan Turgeniev in regard to his own experience + of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost + always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered + before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, + interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what + they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as _disponibles_, saw them + subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw + them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, + those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and + select and piece together the situations most useful and favourable + to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they + would be most likely to produce and to feel. + + "'To arrive at these things is to arrive at my "story,"' he said, + 'and that's the way I look for it. The result is that I'm often + accused of not having "story" enough. I seem to myself to have as + much as I need--to show my people, to exhibit their relations with + each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough + I see them come together, I see them _placed_, I see them engaged + in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look + and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found + for them, is my account of them--of which I dare say, alas, _que + cela manque souvent d'architecture_....'" + +And as regards the statement in prose of the conception thus formed it +is plain that, although Mr James had formed his irrational dislike of +Flaubert many years before, it was that great master who had taught him +his art of rubbing down the too brilliant phrase to tone with the quiet +harmony of the whole, of obliterating the exotic effect that would +compromise the lorn simplicity of the subject. This masterly use of +technical resource to unfold an idea whose beauty would to a lesser +artist have seemed hopelessly sheathed in obscurity, makes _Washington +Square_ the perfect termination to Mr James' first period of genius. + +It was unfortunately quite definitely a termination; for until ten years +had passed Mr James was doomed to produce no work which was not to have +the solidity of its characters and the beauty of its prose rendered +slightly ridiculous by its lack of purpose and unity. In those days, +when the international theme was slipping from Mr James' grasp and he +was looking round for another, one could no more expect him to produce +work completely and serenely formed by the imagination than one could +ask an author to continue his industry on a journey from Paris to +Madrid, with the jolting of the train destroying his physical calm and +the new land crying for his attention at the carriage window. For Mr +James was literally travelling all through the eighties; he was touring +either the countries of Europe with his body or the art of Europe with +his mind. It was his intention to find that intellectual basis without +which, his blood and upbringing assured him, he would be unable to use +his genius with noble or permanent results. + +How difficult this search was to be, and yet how ultimately fruitful, +can be judged from _A Little Tour in France_ (1884). That is one of the +happiest and sunniest travel books in all literature. _Coelum non +animum mutant qui trans mare currunt_; but Mr James did, and it is as +pleasant to see his intelligence sunning itself on the hot Latin soil, +fresh and cool as though he had not years of the creative struggle +behind him and years more to come, as it is to see a lizard crawl from +the crevice of a Provencal rock and play among the tufts of rosemary. +Yet whenever Mr James has to note some detail in his description of +French towns which refers to the life which has formed them, the +reader's fury mounts. It is horrible that his references to the +Franco-Prussian War should be faintly jocular, and one burns with shame +for them until one comes to an amazing sentence about the French +Revolution, in which it is plainly implied that the rightness and +necessity of that declaration of the principle of freedom are still +debatable questions. One perceives with relief that he said these things +because, as one guessed in _The Passionate Pilgrim_, his strong sight of +the thing that is was accompanied by blindness to the thing that has +been. He did not know whether the Franco-Prussian War was horrible or +not, because he had been out of Europe when it raged; and because he had +not been born at the time he could no more speak well of the French +Revolution than he could propose for his club a person whom he had never +met. And for the same reason he failed to envisage the Roman Empire save +as a source of agreeable ruins which, since he did not understand the +spirit that built them, he imagined might have been made still more +agreeable. Their vastness did not impress him as the merging-point of +the geological record and history, but stirred in him that benevolence +which is often aroused by clumsy largeness. He patted the Roman Theatre +at Arles as though it were Jumbo at the Zoo, and remarked, quite in the +manner of Horace Walpole, that the pavement of coloured marble "gives an +idea of the _elegance_ of the interior"; but the arena at Nimes and that +vast, high, yellow aqueduct, whose three tiers appal the valley of the +Gardon, were too much for him, and he pronounced them "not at all +_exquisite_." The man who could write those phrases was incapable of +forming a philosophy, for no man can fully understand his kind unless he +have a revelation of old Rome and perceive in its works a record of the +pride men felt in serviceable labour for the State. And yet what, in +this particular case, did all that matter? What need was there for Mr +James to know anything but that ink makes black, expressive marks on +paper, when he could tell so exquisitely how the Chateau de Chenonceaux +sends out its white galleries across the clear water of the Cher, how +the crenellated ramparts of the Chateau d'Amboise look down over hanging +gardens to the far-shining Loire, and with what peculiar wonder +Carcassonne, Aigues-Mortes and all the other towns with lovely names, +glow in the clear bright light of France? It was enough that there was +no beauty on earth that could daunt his power of description. + +The record of his mental wanderings is not quite so happy. Mr James has +an immense prestige as critic, but a certain sentence that occurred more +than once in his obituary notices made it doubtful whether this does not +merely mean that people have run their eyes over the titles of Mr James' +essays and have accepted the fact that he dealt with authors rarely read +by the British as a guarantee of their rareness of merit. That it should +be reverently remarked on that most solemn occasion that Flaubert was Mr +James' adored master, when he had written more than one exquisitely +feline essay to delicately convey what a fluke it was that this fellow +who panted under his phrase like a bricklayer under his hod should have +produced _Madame Bovary_, is just such an ironic happening as he would +have liked to be introduced into one of his humorous studies of the +literary life. Such intimations make one guess that the homage which +England loves to pay to the unread is responsible for half Mr James' +reputation as a critic; and probably he owed the other half to the +gratitude of his readers for a pleasure which is undoubtedly given by +his critical writings, but which nevertheless does not prove them great +criticism. It is true that _French Poets and Novelists_ are the best +reviews ever written, and that it is good to listen to the old author +gossiping in _Notes on Novelists_ (1914) about the authors he had known +long ago and to watch him tracing, with all his supreme genius for +detecting personality, the imprint of dead masters on the fading surface +of old work. But he is always entirely lacking in that necessary element +of great criticism, the capacity for universal reference. The eye that +judges a work of art should have surveyed the whole human field, so that +it can tell from what clay this precious thing was made, in what +craftsman's cot that trick of fashioning was learned, what natural +beauty suggested to the creative impulse this appropriate form, what +human institution helped or hindered its making. Of that general culture +Mr James was so deficient that he was capable of inserting in quite an +intelligent essay on Theophile Gautier this amazing sentence: "Even his +aesthetic principles are held with a good-humoured laxity that allows +him, for instance, to say in a hundred places the most delightfully +sympathetic and pictorial things about the romantic or Shakespearean +drama, and yet to describe a pedantically classical revival of the +_Antigone_ at Munich with the most ungrudging relish." And while this +ignorance was perpetually blinding him to the purpose of many fair +artistic structures his literary power was perpetually betraying him +into the graceful and forceful publication of his blindness. Long after +one has forgotten all the deliverances of critics with greater wisdom +but less craft of phrase, one remembers his extraordinary opinion that +Flaubert's _La Tentation de Saint Antoine_, that book which will appeal +in every generation to those who have been visited by the angel of +speculative thought, which is not only itself a beautiful growth but has +borne beautiful fruit in _Thais_, is merely "strange" and has no more +reference to life than the gimcrack Eastern Pavilion at an Exposition. +And he lacked, moreover, that necessary attribute of the good critic, +the power to bid bad authors to go to the devil. There are certain +Victorian works of art which, however much esteemed by the many, are no +more matter for criticism than a pair of elastic-sided boots; yet there +is a paper in _Essays in London_ (1893) in which Mr James talks of "the +numbers of sorts of distinction, the educated insight, the comprehensive +ardour of Mrs Humphry Ward...." It recalls that the art which he +privately cultivated was courtesy, but it suggests that his criticism +was bound to consist for the most part of just such pleasant footnotes +to the obvious as _Partial Portraits_ (1888) which, with the exception +of some interesting personal recollections of Turgeniev, tell us +nothing more startling than that de Maupassant wrote a hard prose and +that Daudet was a Provencal. + +How greatly he needed the intellectual basis which he found in none of +these researches becomes increasingly plain in each novel that he +published during this period. _The Portrait of a Lady_ (1881) is given a +superficial unity by the beauty of its heroine; on the first reading one +cannot take one's eyes off the clear gaze that Isabel Archer levels at +life. As she moves forward to meet the world, holding her fortune in +hand without avarice yet very carefully, lest she should buy anything +gross with it, one thinks that there never was a heroine who deserved +better of life. "She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, and +bravery, and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the +world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible +action; she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She +had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong." One is +glad to see that the girl has the most wonderful friend, a woman who is +at once the most flexible _femme du monde_ and the freshest and most +candid soul; and among the kindnesses this friend does her is her +introduction to a certain Tuscan villa that looks down on the valley of +the Arno, where on a mossy stone bench tangled with wild roses there +sits Gilbert Osmond, a gentleman of great dignity who has been too fine +to partake in the common struggle and so lives in honest poverty, with +his daughter Pansy, a little girl from whose character conventual +training has removed every attribute save whiteness and sweetness, so +that she lies under life like a fine cloth on a sunny bleaching-green. +Here, of all places in the world, she is least likely to meet the +jealousy and falseness and cruelty which were the only things she +feared, and so she marries Osmond in the happy faith that henceforth +nothing will be admitted to her life save nobility. But all her marriage +brings the girl is evidence of increasing painfulness that her friend +is a squalid adventuress who has preserved her appearance of freshness +as carefully as a strolling musician his fiddle, in order that she might +charm such honest fools as Isabel; that Osmond has withdrawn from the +world, not because he is too fine for it, but because he is a hating +creature, and hates the world as he now hates his wife; that Pansy is +the illegitimate child of these two, and her need of a dowry the chief +reason why Osmond has married Isabel. It is a tale which would draw +tears from a reviewer, and yet the conduct invented for Isabel is so +inconsistent and so suggestive of the nincompoop, and so clearly +proceeding from a brain whose ethical world was but a chaos, that it is +a mistake to subject the book to the white light of a second reading. +When we are told that Isabel married Osmond because "there had been +nothing very delicate in inheriting seventy thousand pounds, and she +hoped he might use her fortune in a way that might make her think better +of it and would rub off a certain grossness attaching to the good luck +of an unexpected inheritance," we feel that this is mere simpering; for +there could be nothing less delicate than to marry a person for any +reason but the consciousness of passion. And the grand climax of her +conduct, her return to Osmond after the full revelation of his guilt has +come to augment her anguish at his unkindness, proves her not the very +paragon of ladies but merely very ladylike. If their marriage was to be +a reality it was to be a degradation of the will whose integrity the +whole book is an invitation to admire; if it was to be a sham it was +still a larger concession to society than should have been made by an +honest woman. Yet for all the poor quality of the motives which furnish +Isabel's moral stuffing, _The Portrait of a Lady_ is entirely n +successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too +radiantly good for this world. + +While that novel reminds one, in the way it "comes off," of a sum in +which the right answer is got by wrong working, _The Bostonians_ (1886) +reminds one of a foolish song set to a good tune in the way it fails to +"come off." The beauty of the writing is so great that there are +descriptions of the shabby petticoats of a pioneer, or the vestibule in +a mean block of flats, that one would like to learn by heart, so that +one might turn the phrases over in the mind when one wants to hear the +clinking of pure gold. And the theme, the aptness of young persons +possessed of that capacity for contagious enthusiasm which makes the +good propagandist to be exploited by the mercenary and to deteriorate +under the strain of public life, is specially interesting to our +generation. Few of us there are who have not seen with our own eyes +elderly egoists building up profitable autocracies out of the ardour of +young girls, or fierce advocates of the brotherhood of man mellowing +into contemplative emptiers of pint-pots. But, just as the most +intellectual conversation may be broken up by the continued squeal of a +loose chimney-cowl, so this musical disclosure of fine material is +interrupted past any reader's patience by a nagging hostility to +political effort. This is not so disgraceful to Mr James as it might +seem, for it is simply the survival of an affectation which was forced +upon the cultured American of his youth. The pioneers who wanted to +raise the small silvery song of art had to tempt their audiences somehow +from the big brass band of America's political movements; and so +straining was this task that even Emerson, who vibrated to the chord of +reform as to no other, was sometimes vexed into such foolish inquiries +as "Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day in his own +garden than he who goes to the abolition meetings and makes a speech?" +It was just one of the results of Mr James' condition at this period +that he presented to the world so deliberately and so vividly, and with +such an air of feeling, what was no more than the misty reflection of +some dead men's transitory irritations. + +Politics play a very great part, and in the same sense, in _The +Princess Casamassima_ (1886), but it is the peculiar magic of that +strange book which is at once able and distraught, wild and meticulous, +that in it all perversities are somehow transmuted into loveliness. It +is one of the big jokes in literature that it was the writer who among +all his contemporaries held the most sophisticated view of his art, who +prided himself that on him there gleamed no drop of the dew of naivete, +that brought back to fiction the last delicious breath of the time when +even the best books ran on like this: "It happened that one dark and +stormy night in March I, Sebastian Melmoth, was traversing the plain of +La Mancha.... 'Have at you!' cried the guard.... 'Seat yourself,' said +the stranger, signing to his Hindu attendant that the bodies should be +removed, and commencing to cleanse the blood from his sword with a +richly embroidered handkerchief, 'and I will tell you the story of my +life.'" There is always something doing in _The Princess Casamassima_, +and it is usually something great, and as a rule it is doing it quite +on its own. As a portal to the disordered tale there stands one of the +finest short stories in the world; how Miss Pynsent, the shabby little +dressmaker who has brought up Hyacinth, the bastard child of a French +work-girl now in Millbank for the murder of the peer who betrayed her, +is suddenly bidden to bring the boy to his mother's prison deathbed, and +how the poor woman drags him up to the brown, windowless walls, the vast +blank gate, the looming corridors infused with sallow light, is such a +study of the way the institutions devised by man in the interests of +justice and order make a child's soul scream, that the reader will for +ever after think a great deal less of Pip's adventures on the marshes in +_Great Expectations_. Dickens could never have suffused his story with +so exquisite and so relevant an emotional effect as the aching of poor +Miss Pynsent's heart over this rough introduction of her cherished lamb +to the horrible; nor could he have invented that wonderful moment when +the child turns from the ravenous embrace of the wasted and disfigured +stranger with, "I won't kiss her; Pinnie says she stole a watch!" at +which the murderess screams, "_Ah! quelle infamie!_ I never stole +anything!" and the wardress says with dignity: "I'm sure you needn't put +more on her than she has by rights," to which the poor virgin, quite +unable to understand the peculiar cachet attaching to a _crime +passionel_, cries contritely, "Mercy, more! I thought it so much less!" + +And from this portal the book goes on to incidents and persons not less +exquisite but still disconcertingly mere portals. It is as though in a +mad dream one found oneself passing through the arch in the mellow +redness of Hampton Court and straightway emerged on the colonnade of St +Paul's, through whose little swing-doors one surprisingly stepped to the +prim front of Kensington Palace. There is M. Poupin, the exiled +Communist who cannot communicate with the world, or the moustached +female companion with whom he dwells in a scrupulously unmarried state, +save by platitudes concerning the social organisation: "I'm suffering +extremely, but we must all suffer so long as the social question is so +abominably, so iniquitously neglected," is his way of intimating a sore +throat. There is poor Lady Aurora Langrish, the aristocratic precursor +of the sad Miss Huxtables in _The Madras House_: "My father isn't rich, +and there's only one of us, Eva, married, and we're not at all +handsome.... They go into the country all the autumn, all the winter, +when there's no one here (except three or four millions) and the rain +drips, drips, drips from the trees in the big dull park where my people +live, and nothing to do but to go out with three or four others in +mackintoshes...." There is dry old Mr Vetch who plays the fiddle in the +orchestra at night and fills all the rest of the empty day with love for +Hyacinth; and there is Captain Sholto, the Piccadilly swell; and Miss +Hennings, the sales-lady, and half-a-dozen admirable others casually +affixed by the stretched string of circumstance or the glue of +coincidence. And quite the preciousest "piece" in the collection is the +account of how the Princess Casamassima, who is Christina Light of +_Roderick Hudson_, grown to perilous maturity of beauty and perversity, +calls young Hyacinth to her country house, and there in the beechy park +and flowery lanes makes him talk of the plots against the rich which +later are to cause his death, and brings him nearer to it by lifting a +face wonderfully pale and pure with enthusiasm. It is so like that +Titian in the Prado which shows, against a window looking on a park +where lovers walk in golden air under silver poplars, Venus lying on a +satin couch while a young man makes music for her at an organ; her eyes +are softly intent, and the youth thinks she is suspended over the world +in his music, but really she is brooding on the whiteness of his skin +beneath his black beard. That likeness suggests that _The Princess +Casamassima_ should be taken, not as a novel, but as the small, fine +picture gallery that Mr James thought fit to add to his mental palace, +already so rich in mere sane living rooms. + +It is unpleasant to travel in a runaway motor-car, even if it ultimately +spills one into a rose-garden, and when Mr James produced a picture +gallery when he had intended a grave study of social differences, he was +in much that case. But already in _The Author of Beltraffio_ (1884) he +had shown his awareness of a movement which had started with the +intention of destroying both Christian morality and rationalism, and +otherwise making us fearfully gay, and which actually achieved the +slight mitigation of the offensiveness of plumbers' shop windows and the +recovery by Mr Henry James of control over his machine. That story is +not one of Mr James' best; the author makes his readers regard his scene +through so small a peephole that even the characters who are to be +conceived as above all retiring have to come grossly near if their +audience is to make anything of the drama at all. The theme is that an +author's wife who considers her husband's books objectionable lets her +child die rather than that he should grow up in the companionship of one +so utterly without reserve; yet, since the tale is told by a total +stranger who is visiting them for the week-end, she has necessarily to +behave with a lack of reserve that makes her imputed motive incredible. +The special value of the story lies in the moments when the author of +_Beltraffio_, whose affectation of a velveteen coat and a remote foreign +air makes us desire to scream out to the weekend visitor that he is +being fooled, and this is no writer but an artistic photographer, +remarks with some complacency that to the conventional he appears "no +better than an ancient Greek" and professes a thirst for "the +cultivation of beauty without reserve or precautions." Our happy +generation cannot understand these phrases which doubtless had their +salutary meaning for that distant day when England fed herself on so low +a diet that _Jude the Obscure_ seemed to her a maddening draught. But +they interest us by showing that even Mr James, who ordinarily turned +aside with so chill a wince from the ridiculous, had exposed his +consciousness to the aesthetic movement which had been remotely +engendered by Leigh Hunt's Cockney crow of joy at Italy and afterwards +fostered by Ruskin as one of his wild repartees to the railway train, +and which was then being given the middle-class touch by Oscar Wilde. + +We feel surprised at Mr James' cognisance of anything so second-rate as +this Decadent Movement of the late eighties and early nineties, because +most of us basely judge it by its lack of worldly success instead of by +its moral mission. The elect of the movement, if one delves in the +memory of older Londoners, were certainly silly young men who were +careful about the laundering of their evening shirts and who tried to +introduce the tone of public-school life into ordinary society. And it +is true that for all their talk of art they produced nothing but one +good farce and a cartload of such weak, sweet verse as schoolgirls copy +into exercise-books, and that from this small effort they sank +exhausted down to prison, drink, madness, suicide; and struck whatever +other notes there be in the descending scale of personal disgrace. And +yet, for all its fruitlessness, that prattle about art gave them a valid +claim on our respect. Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was +poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were +confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who +wrote as though he were the offspring of two _Times_ leaders; among +novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too +prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach; +and in criticism Andrew Lang, who had admired Scott and Dickens in his +schooldays and was not going to let himself down by admiring anybody +nearer his own generation, greeted every exponent of the real with a +high piercing northern sneer. It was of inestimable value that it should +be cried, no matter in how pert a voice, that words are jewels which, +wisely set, make by their shining mental light. That the cry could not +save the young men who raised it, bore out their contention of the +time's need for it; if they, seeking new beauty, could but celebrate the +old dingy sins of towns, it showed in what a base age they had been +bred. And if they could not save themselves they saved others. Arnold +Bennett and H. G. Wells set off in the nineties in a world encouragingly +full of talk about good writing. Conrad, mouthing his difficult strange +tales about the sea, found an audience that would sit hushed. And in the +brain of one who, being then between forty and fifty years of age, might +have been thought inaccessible to new conceptions of the art that had +for so long preoccupied him, there passed important thoughts. + +"That idea I picked up when I corrected George Eliot's proofs, oh! so +long ago!" one can imagine Mr James saying, "that idea that art must be +ballasted by didacticism can't be true for me. I've fined it down, in my +reading of the French, to an opinion that the artist should use his +fancy work to decorate useful articles; but still it isn't true for me. +For I must, before I can decorate them, make the useful articles of +thought my own, and they are just the one thing that for all my mental +wealth I can't acquire. I see them often enough in the shop-windows--the +moral and political and philosophical problems so prodigiously produced +by my age--and many times have tried the door, but to my touch it never +opens, so I have to describe them as I see them through the glass, +without having felt or known them with the intimacy of possession! It's +true I did once deal with a situation in the history of two peoples, but +I see now that in its international character there was an intimation +that it was the last with which I should ever effectively concern +myself. For I'm destructively not national; my mind is engraved with the +sights and social customs of half-a-dozen countries, and with the deep +traditions of not one, and how can I deal deeply with the conduct of a +people when I haven't a notion of the quality or quantity of the +traditions which are, after all, its mainspring? It seems to me that +the cry of "Art for Art's sake," which is being raised by those young +men, and which certainly isn't true for _them_, may be true for _me_. +What if henceforth I release the winged steed of my recording art from +the obligation of dragging up the steep hill of my inaptitude the dray +filled with the heavy goods which I have amassed in my perhaps so +mistaken desire for a respectably weighty subject, and let the poor +thing just beautifully soar?" + +One perceives how far this mood had gone with Mr James when the hero of +_The Tragic Muse_ (1890) refuses a seat in Parliament and the hand of a +wealthy widow in order that he might go on painting. From Mr James, to +whom marrying a widow appeared as much superior to marrying a spinster +as privately acquiring a "piece" from the dispersed collection of a +deceased connoisseur of repute is to buying old furniture with no +guarantee but one's own approval, this was a portentous incident. And +there is vast significance in his sympathetic representation of Miriam +Rooth, the young actress to whom the title refers, for before this +period he would never have accepted the genius of the black-browed, +untidy girl as an excuse for her lack of money and social position and +manners. It had hitherto been his grimly expressed opinion that "the +life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations," and he +had refused to dramatise in his imagination anything concerning women +save their failures and successes as sexual beings; which is like +judging a cutlet not by its flavour, but by the condition of its +pink-paper frill. That time had gone. He had abandoned all his +prejudices in despair, and for many years to come was to show a divine +charity, freely permitting every encountered thing to impress its +essence on the receptive wax of his consciousness. For the next twelve +years "impressions," as in his happy foreign childhood, "were not merely +all right, but were the dearest things in the world." + + + + +IV + +THE CRYSTAL BOWL + + +In that octagonal room at the Prado, where each wall is an altar raised +to beauty, because it is hung with pictures by Velasquez, in all the +lesser works one finds some intimation of the grave, fine personality +who produced all this wonder. At the sacred picture that was his first +one says, "He was a pupil, and very proud of painting the old things +better than the old men could, even though they meant nothing to him"; +at the squat, black dwarfs, "He was so sure that the truth about the +world was kind that he could look upon horror without fear"; and at the +sketches of the Villa Medici Gardens, "After hot, bleak Spain he loved +Italy as one who has known passion loves a passionless girl." And the +recreated personality, tangible enough to be liked, passes with one +about the gallery until suddenly, before the masterpieces, it vanishes. +With those it had nothing to do; the thing that was his character, +shaped out of the innate traits of his dark stock by the raw beauty of +the land and the stiff rich life of the court, brought him to the +conception of these works but lay sleeping through their execution. When +he was painting _Las Hilanderas_ he knew nothing save that the weavers' +flesh glowed golden in the dusty sunlight of the factory; for the state +of genius consists of an utter surrender of the mind to the subject. The +artist at the moment of creation must be like a saint awaiting the +embrace of God, scourging appetite out of him, shrinking from sensation +as though it were a sin, deleting self, lifting his consciousness like +an empty cup to receive the heavenly draught. + +And so, with the beginning of his second period of genius, the reading +of Mr James ceased to give us the companionship of the gentle, very +pleasant American who seemed homeless but quite serene, as though he +were tired of living in his boxes, but on the other hand was very fond +of travelling, that we had grown to like in his books of the eighties. +He went away and sent no letter; but instead, with a lavishness one +would never have suspected from his uneasy bearing, sent a succession of +jewels, great globed jewels of experience, from which marvellously +conceived characters gave out their milky gleams or fiery rays. The +first tentative try at the mere impression, _The Aspern Papers_ (1888), +gave an earnest of his generosity. There one passes into the golden glow +of Venice, "where the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of +the palaces all shimmer and melt together.... The gondola stopped, the +old palace was there.... How charming! it's grey and pink!" And under +the painted ceiling of the old palace sits bleached and shrivelled +Juliana Bordereau, the memory of her love affair with the great poet +Aspern hanging in the air like incense and filling the mind with tears +that such splendid lovers buy no immortality, but grow old like the +rest. Above its mere amusing story the tale breathes an elegy on the +many good things that are slain by age before death comes and decently +inters the body. For one watches, with a kind of comic horror that such +grimaces should touch the face that Jeffery Aspern kissed, the grin of +senile irony with which she meets the young American who comes to +wheedle her lover's letters out of her, with which she wheedles money +out of him that she may provide for the future of the poor spinster +niece who moves tremulously about her chair like a silly baaing sheep; +with which, one thinks, she possibly anticipates the dreadful moment +after her death when the spinster dodderingly informs the American that +she could give him her aunt's papers only "if you were a relation ... if +you weren't a stranger...." Every drop of beauty is squeezed out of the +material by a pressure so cool and controlled that, remembering how +Benvenuto Cellini "fell in his clothes and slept" after he had taken +similar small masterpieces from the furnace, one waits for his +exhaustion. But it was given to Mr James, perhaps because he was an +American and so of a stock oxygenated by contact with the free airs of +the new free lands, to swim longer in the sea of perfection than any +other writer. It was not until fifteen years later, when he was old and +the disciples of the movement which had stimulated him all shabbily +dead, and talk about art locked away in a dusty cupboard with the +Japanese fans and the blue china pots, that he turned tired and came to +shore. + +He was sustained in this long swim by two beloved subjects, one bitter +and one sweet. The literary life was written about in those days almost +as much as it was talked about, and it was continually being used by the +young decadents as the occasion for predictions of their own later +squalor in which morphia and dark ladies, moulded in the likeness of +beautiful young Mrs Patrick Campbell, played parts which in the +subsequent realisation were taken by plain beer and plainer barmaids. Mr +James took up the poor, scribbled-about thing and turned it over very +reverently, none knowing better than he that the artist was the _sacer +vates_ of his time, and very sadly, because he had now close on thirty +years of intimacy with artists behind him. He had known Turgeniev, the +most "beautiful genius" of his age, and had found him rather lonely and +pre-eminently not eminent in the eyes of the world; he had seen the dark +days of Rossetti; he had trod so close on the heels of Alfred de Musset +as to know that _il s'absente trop de l'Academie parcequ'il s'absinthe +trop_; he had seen poor, fat little Zola, who thought that though one +could not build Rome in a day one could describe it in less, plodding +and sweating up the wrong road to art. And so, in a mood of clear +melancholy, with an occasional flash of irony which was doubtless the +sole comment wrung from his urbanity by the fact that that age, when the +change of the novel's price from thirty-one and sixpence to six +shillings had enormously increased the reading public, had brought no +enlargement of his circle of readers, he wrote that wonderful series of +stories which began with _The Lesson of the Master_ (1888) and included +_The Middle Years_ (1893), _The Next Time_ (1895), and _The Death of the +Lion_ (1894). Save for that roaring joke, _The Coxon Fund_ (1894), where +one sees Frank Saltram, a "free rearrangement of Coleridge," charming +and sponging on the rich, bringing into their drawing-rooms a swaying +body that should be taken home at once in a cab and a mind "like a +crystal suspended in the moral world--swinging and shining and flashing +there," these are all sad stories. The master is bullied out of being a +master by the financial importunities of a smart wife and comely +children; the author of _The Middle Years_ dies with none but an +acquaintance picked up at the seaside to hold his hand; Ralph Limbert is +killed by worry because he could not stop producing masterpieces when it +was the damned marketable asset that was required to pay the wages of +his wife's maid; the lion dies in a cold country house, with no fire in +his bedroom, while his hostess gets paragraphed for her charity to the +wild literary, and his last manuscript goes astray downstairs somewhere +between Lord Dorimont's man and Lady Augusta's maid. One knows next to +nothing at all about the faith consciously rejected or adopted by Henry +James, and whether the atmosphere of speculative theology in which he +was bred had made him think religion as far beyond his mental range as +mathematics, or whether Christianity seemed to him just the excuse of +the Latin races for building high cool places, very grateful in the +heat, and filling them with incense and images of kind, interceding +people. But in this melancholy series, and indeed in all his later +works--for right on to _The Golden Bowl_ (1905) he presents his +characters as being worthy of treatment just because they are in some +way or other struggling to preserve some decency from engulfment in the +common lot of nastiness--one perceives that he had been born with the +grim New England faith like a cold drop in his blood. The earth was a +vale of tears, and all one could do was to go on, uninfluenced by +weeping or the fear of weeping, to some high goal. This sad belief, +accompanied by so intense a consciousness that his particular goal, the +art of great writing, was reached by a stonier and longer path than any, +might have been expected to provoke him rather to the fury of Landor or +the gloomy pomposity of Wordsworth than to the unhurried, unimpassioned +production of these wonderful stories, these exquisite vessels that +swaggeringly hold and clearly show the contained draught of truth, like +tall-stemmed goblets of Venetian glass. But glass is the wrong image; +for no hand could ever break these, no critical eye detect a crack. They +are so truthfully conceived that one could compare them only to some +nobly infrangible substance, so realistic and yet so charged with +significance by their fashioning that their likeness must be something +which is transparent and yet gives the light a white fire as it passed +through. It is of crystal they are made, hard, luminous crystal. + +Mr James' second subject, which began to show its white flowers in _The +Other House_ (1896) and went on blossoming long after winter had fallen +on his genius in _The Golden Bowl_, also showed him a son of New +England. For it consists of nothing else than the demonstration, in +varying and exquisitely selected circumstances, that blessed are the +pure in heart; and that was certainly the beatitude that New England, +with its fear of passion and publicity and its respect for spinsters and +pastors of bleached lives, most regarded. Mr James demonstrated it in no +spirit of moral propaganda, but for the technical reason that a +situation is greatly elucidated if one of the persons engaged presents a +consciousness like a polished silver surface, unobscured by any tracery +of selfish preoccupations, which clearly mirrors the other participients +and their movements. Perhaps he thereby discovered the real meaning of +the beatitude, which may be no more than an expression of the obvious +truth that he who receives the fullest impression of the world is likely +to react most valuably to it. Certainly he invented a technical trick +which in its way was as important as the discovery which Ibsen was +making about the same time and which he himself used later in his last +masterpiece, that if one had a really "great" scene one ought to leave +it out and describe it simply by the full relation of its consequences. +He showed that all sorts of things that are amusing enough to write +about and are yet too ignoble for dignified art are lent the required +nobility by being witnessed by grave candour; and that characters whose +special claim is that they are "strange," but whose strangeness cannot +be laboured by direct description lest they become crude, can have the +gaps in their representation filled out by their effect on the simple. +Rose Armiger, in _The Other House_, is made much more horrible because +she exposes her dreadful passion before the simplicity of Tony Bream, +just as a striped poisonous snake would seem more striped and poisonous +if it flickered its black fang from an English rose-bush. The awfulness +of Ida Farange, whose handsome appearance constituted "an abuse of +visibility," of Beale Farange, whose vast scented beard was, since odd +ladies liked to play with it, ultimately his chief source of income, +would never have been important enough to be recorded if they had not +formed a part of _What Maisie Knew_ (1897); and the ensnarement of Sir +Claude, her first step-parent, who was such a good fellow to talk to +when his gaze didn't wander to the dark young woman in red who was +sweeping into dinner or to the shining limbs of a Dieppe fishwife, by +the beautiful, genteel young trollop who was her second step-parent, +would have been a matter too _louche_ for representation if Maisie had +not so beautifully cared for him. The battle over _The Spoils of +Poynton_ (1897), where the greedy mother tries to defend the fine +"things" of her dead husband's house from her imbecile son's vulgar +bride, would be too unrelievedly a history of greed to be borne were not +exquisite Fleda Vetch in the foreground, being fond of the mother, +loving the son. The best ghost story in the world, _The Turn of the +Screw_ (1898), is the more ghostly because the apparitions of the valet +and the governess, appearing at the dangerous place, the top of the +tower on the other side of the lake, that they may tempt the children +they corrupted in their lives to join them in their eternal torment, are +seen by the clear eyes of the honourable and fearless lady who tells the +tale. And _In the Cage_ (1898) has no subject but the purity of the +romantic little telegraphist who sits behind the wire netting at the +grocer's. Her heart is like a well of clear water, through which, when +the handsome Guardsman comes in to send a telegram to his mistress, love +strikes down like a shaft of light. + +One pauses, horrified to find oneself ticking off these masterpieces on +one's fingers, as though they were so many books by Mrs Humphry Ward or +buns by Lyons. And yet what can one do? Criticism must break down when +it comes to masterpieces. For if one is creative one wants to go away +and spend oneself utterly on this sacred business of creation, wring out +of oneself every drop of this inestimable thing art; and if one is not +creative one can only put out a tremulous finger to touch the marvellous +shining crystal, and be silent with wonder. Deep wonder, since these are +not, as fools have pretended, merely rich treatments of the trivial. For +although he could not grasp a complicated abstraction, was teased by the +implications of a great cause, and angered by an idea that could be +understood only by the synthesis of many references, he could dive down +serenely, like a practised diver going under the sea for pearls, into +the twilit depths of the heart to seize his secrets. There is in +humanity an instinct for ritual, there lies in all of us a desire to +commemorate our deep emotions, that would otherwise glow in our bosoms +and die down for ever, by some form that adds to the beauty of the +world; but there is only one expression of it in literature that is not +poisonously silly. Newman and the Tractarians and Monsignor Benson make +the ritualist seem as big a fool as the old woman who carries a potato +in her pocket to ward off rheumatism. Sabatier makes him seem the kind +of person who takes sugar in his tea, paints in water-colour and likes +_The Roadmender_. But there is a story by Henry James called _The Altar +of the Dead_, rejected again and again by the caste of cretins who edit +the magazines and reviews of this unhappy country, although of so +perfect a beauty that one can read every separate paragraph every day of +one's life for the music of the sentences and the loveliness of the +presented images, which takes ritual from the trembling hands of the +coped old men and exhibits it as something that those who love the +natural frame of things and hate superstition need not fear to accept. +It tells how an ageing man acquires an altar in a Roman Catholic church +and burns at it candles to his many dead, and by worshipping there keeps +so close company with their charity and sweetness that, at his end, the +blaze of white lights inspires him to a last supreme act of forgiveness +to an enemy; and the beautiful recital makes one's mind no longer fear +to admit that the splendour of a Cathedral Mass may, although one's +unbelief fly like an arrow through the show and transfix even the Cross +itself, fulfil a noble need. Once at least Henry James poured into his +crystal goblet the red wine that nourishes the soul. + +And it held, too, a liberal draught of the least trivial distillation of +man's mind, which is tragedy, in _The Wings of the Dove_ (1902). That +story is the perfect example of what he had declared in _The Tragic +Muse_ the artistic performance should always be: "the application, clear +and calculated, crystal-firm, as it were, of the idea conceived in the +glow of experience, of suffering, of joy." For Milly Theale, the +American heiress, "who had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great +account could have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived +with them; such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet +making it light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it +clear as noon; of being unmistakably sad and yet making it soft as +dusk," whose hopeful progress through Europe stops suddenly at the dark +portal in Harley Street, is but the ghost of Mary Temple, whose death +thirty years before had been felt by Henry and William James as the end +of their youth. All those years he had held in his heart the memory of +that poor girl, "conscious of a great capacity for life, but early +stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite while also +enamoured of the world; aware, moreover, of the condemnation and +passionately desiring to 'put in' before extinction as many of the finer +vibrations as possible and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the +sense of having lived"; but with the prescience of the artist he had +delayed until he had perfected his art to undertake the heavy task of +presenting her tragedy without mitigation and yet making it bearable and +beautiful. Then he lavished his technical resources on her history as he +might have laid flowers on her grave. There is nothing more miraculous +in all his works than the way he contrives that, when her agony becomes +too great to be directly represented and has to be suggested by its +effect upon others, he yet breaks no link of the intimacy between the +reader and his heroine, but provides that her increasing physical +absence shall be so compensated for by her spiritual presence that her +rare appearances are like long-expected visits from a distant friend. +One's knowledge of her glows into love when one sees her holding a +reception in the faded golden splendours of the Venetian palace to which +she has dragged herself to die, smiling bravely at her guests, bidding +musicians strike up to keep them gay, playing, to preserve her hands +from any gesture of anguish or appearance of lassitude, with the rope of +pearls that seems to weigh down her wasted body. Yet one gets one's +vision through the hard, envious eyes of Kate Croy, who is the hawk +circling over the poor dying dove, and the appalled gaze of Merton +Densher, Kate's secret lover, whom she has trapped into a profession of +love for Milly so that the deluded girl will leave him her fortune. And +one sees her most radiantly of all in the interview which she grants to +Densher when she has discovered the cruel fraud practised on her and is +dying of the knowledge, although one is told no more than that "she +received me just as usual, in that glorious great _salone_, in the dress +she always wears, from her inveterate corner of her sofa." From the love +it lit in his heart, a love so great that for very shame Kate cannot +marry him even when her machinations have achieved complete success at +Milly's death, one perceives that this was the dying girl's assumption, +that her sweetness and strength must at that hour have flowered so +divinely that the skies opened and they were no longer matter for a +human history. But about this masterpiece, too, there can be nothing +said. One just sits and looks up, while the Master lifts his old grief, +changed by his craftsmanship into eternal beauty as the wafer is changed +to the Host by the priest's liturgy, enclosed from decay, prisoned in +perfection, in the great shining crystal bowl of his art. + + + + +V + +THE GOLDEN BOWL + + +The signs of age appeared in Mr James' work like white streaks in a +black beard; between two vital and vigorous books there would appear one +that in its garrulity and complacent surrender to mannerism predicted +decay. It became clear, first of all, that he was no longer able to bear +up with serenity under his deep sense that life was a vale of tears. How +much he wished it would all stop is manifest in that strangest of all +visions of Paradise, _The Great Good Place_ (1900). We all have our +hopes of what gifts the hereafter may bring us, and in most cases we +desire some compensation for the limitations of our human knowledge; we +promise ourselves that when we lean over the gold bar of heaven a +competent angel will bustle up, clasping innumerable divinely clear +text-books under its wings, to tell us absolutely everything about +physics, with special reference to the movements of the heavenly bodies +spinning below. But it is the essence of Mr James' Paradise that there +is nothing there at all but a climate, a sweet soft climate in which the +most that happens is one of those summer sprinkles that brings out +smells. This fatigue of life, this hunger for the peace of nothingness, +showed itself in his increasing preference for laying the scene of his +novels in the great good places of this earth, where there is nothing +more dangerous in the parks and on the terraces than deer and peacocks, +and nothing more disturbing to the soul in the high rooms and +interminable galleries than well-bred women. It was not a gain to his +art; under its influence he committed the twittering over teacups which +compose the collection of short stories called _The Better Sort_ (1903), +and the incidentally beautiful but devastatingly artificial _The Awkward +Age_ (1899), in which the reader is perpetually confused because Nanda +Brookenham, one of the most charming of Mr James' "pure in heart," is +wept over as though she had been violated body and soul, when all that +has happened is that she has been brought up in a faster set than the +world thinks desirable for a young unmarried girl. And it was peculiarly +unfortunate that, while his subjects grew flimsier and his settings more +impressive, his style became more and more elaborate. With sentences +vast as the granite blocks of the Pyramids and a scene that would have +made a site for a capital he set about constructing a story the size of +a hen-house. The type of these unhappier efforts of Mr James' genius is +_The Sacred Fount_ (1901), where, with a respect for the mere gross +largeness and expensiveness of the country house which almost makes one +write the author Mr Jeames, he records how a week-end visitor spends +more intellectual force than Kant can have used on _The Critique of Pure +Reason_ in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists +between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more +interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows. The +finely wrought descriptions of the leisured life make one feel as though +one sat in a beautiful old castle, granting its beauty but not pleased, +because one is a prisoner, while the small, mean story worries one like +a rat nibbling at the wainscot. One takes it as significant that the +unnamed host and hostess of the party never appear save to "give +signals." The tiny, desperate figures this phrase shows to the mind's +eye, semaphoring to each other across incredibly extended polished +vistas to keep up their courage under these looming, soaring vaults, may +be taken as symbols of the heart and intellect which Mr James had now +forgotten in his elaboration of their social envelope. + +But with this method, as in every form of literary activity save only +playwriting, in which he was rather worse than Sidney Grundy in much the +same way, Mr James gained his radiant triumphs. There could be nothing +more trivial than the _donnee_ of _The Ambassadors_ (1903); there is no +dignity or significance in the situation of Lambert Strether, an +American who is engaged, in that odd way common to Mr James' characters, +to a woman whom he certainly does not love and hardly seems to like, and +goes at her bidding to Paris to cut her cubbish son clear from an +entanglement with a Frenchwoman. And yet so artfully is the tale +displayed in the setting of lovely, clean, white Paris and green France, +lifting her poplars into the serene strong light of the French sky, that +the reader holds his breath over the story of how Strether "had come +with a view that might have been figured by a clear, green liquid, say, +in a neat glass phial; and the liquid, once poured into the open cup of +_application_, once exposed to the action of another air, had begun to +turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on +its way to purple, to black, to yellow"; how, in fact, the old +"international situation" acted on the new generation of Americans. But +that book is not typical of this period, for it is singularly free from +those great sentences which sprawl over the pages of _The Golden Bowl_ +with such an effect of rank vegetable growth that one feels that if one +took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden. And it is +those sentences which absorb, at the last, the whole of Mr James' +attention. + +For he ceased, as time went on, to pay any attention to the emotional +values of his stories; it is one of the strangest things about _The +Golden Bowl_ that the frame on which there hangs the most elaborate +integument of suggestion and exposition ever woven by the mind of man is +an ugly and incompletely invented story about some people who are +sexually mad. Adam Verver, an American millionaire, buys an Italian +prince for his daughter Maggie, and in her turn she arranges a marriage +between her father and Charlotte, her school friend, because she thinks +he may be lonely without her. And although it is plain that people who +buy "made-up" marriages are more awful than the admittedly awful people +who buy "made-up" ties, they are presented to one as vibrating +exquisitely to every fine chord of life, as thinking about each other +with the anxious subtlety of lovers, as so steeped in a sense of one +another that they invent a sea of poetic phrases, beautiful images, +discerning metaphors that break on the reader's mind like the unceasing +surf. And when one tries to discover from the recorded speeches of these +people whether there was no palliation of their ugly circumstances one +finds that the dialogue, usually so compact a raft for the conveyance of +the meaning of Mr James' novels, has been smashed up on this sea of +phrases and drifts in, a plank at a time, on the copious flood: + + "Maggie happened to learn, by some other man's greeting of him, in + the bright Roman way, from a street corner as we passed, that one + of the Prince's baptismal names, the one always used for him among + his relations, was Amerigo; which--as you probably don't know, + however, even after a lifetime of _me_--was the name, four hundred + years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the + sea, in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had + failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new + continent; so the thought of any connection with him can even now + thrill our artless breasts." + +And as if it was not enough that these people should say literally +unspeakable sentences like that, and do incredible things, the phrases +make them do things which they never did. For the metaphors are so +beautifully and completely presented to the mind that it retains them as +having as real and physical an existence as the facts. When we learn +that the relationship between Charlotte and the Prince had reared itself +in Maggie's life like "some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, +a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and +adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled ever +so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs," and the simile is cunningly +developed for seven or eight hundred words, one is left with a confused +impression that a pagoda formed part of the furniture at Portland Place +and that Maggie oddly elected to keep her husband inside it. And to cap +it all these people are not even human, for their thoughts concerning +their relationships are so impassioned and so elaborate that they can +never have had either energy or time for the consideration of anything +else in the world. A race of creatures so inveterately specialist as +Maggie Verver could never have attained man's mastery over environment, +but would still be specialising on the cocoa-nut or some such simple +form of diet. + +Decidedly _The Golden Bowl_ is not good as a novel; but what it is +supremely good as can be discovered when one learns how, in these later +days, Mr James used to compose his novels. He began by dictating a short +draft which, even in the case of such a cartload of apes and ivory as +_The Golden Bowl_, might be no longer than thirty thousand words. Then +he would take this draft in his hand and would dictate it all over again +with what he intended to be enlightening additions, but which, since +the mere act of talking set all his family on to something quite +different from the art of letters, made it less and less of a novel. For +the James family had, as was shown by their father's many reported +phrases, by William James' charm as a lecturer, and by the social +greatness of Robertson James, a genius for conversation. For long years +it had remained latent in Henry James, who had in youth suffered much +from that stockishness which often comes to those who are burning all +their energy for creative purposes and have none left for personal +display; but latterly it had been liberated by the consciousness of +maturity and fame. At last it became a passion with him, and he decided +to converse, not only with his friends, but with his public. This was +bad for his novels, so long as one considered them as such, since a +novel should be the presentation and explanation of a subject while a +conversation is a fantasia of entertaining phrases on themes the +essentials of which are to some extent already in the possession of the +interlocutors. But once one considers them as a flow of bright things +said about people Mr James knows and that one rather thinks one has met, +but is not quite sure, one perceives that the crystal bowl of Mr James' +art was not, as one had feared, broken. He had but gilded its clear +sides with the gold of his genius for phrase-making, and now, instead of +lifting it with a priest-like gesture to exhibit a noble subject, held +it on his knees as a treasured piece of bric-a-brac and tossed into it, +with an increasing carelessness, any sort of subject--a jewel, a rose, a +bit of string, a visiting-card--confident that the surrounding golden +glow would lend it beauty. Indiscriminately he dropped into it his +precious visions of his revisited motherland, in _The American Scene_ +(1907); the dry little anecdotes of _The Finer Grain_ (1910); the +tittering triviality of _The Outcry_ (1911); and his judgment of his own +works in the prefaces to the New York edition of the _Novels and Tales +of Henry James_ (1908-1909). + +Always it was good, rambling talk, although fissured now and then with +an old man's lapses into tiresomeness, when he split hairs until there +were no longer any hairs to split and his mental gesture became merely +the making of agitated passes over a complete baldness. + +And here and there the prose achieves a beauty of its own; but it is no +longer the beauty of a living thing, but rather the "made" beauty which +bases its claims to admiration chiefly on its ingenuity, like those +crystal clocks with jewelled works and figures moving as the hours +chimed, which were the glory of mediaeval palaces. + + * * * * * + +William James died in 1910, and Henry James, who had already begun to +savour the bitterness of outliving brothers and friends and pets, whiled +away the next few years of separation from his adored brother in the +composition of two beautiful books about their childhood and youth, _A +Small Boy_ (1913), and _Notes of a Son and Brother_ (1914), and a third +autobiographical volume which is not yet published. Then came the +European War, in which he enlisted as a spiritual soldier. By +innumerable beautiful acts, by kindly visits to French and Belgian +refugees and wounded soldiers, by gifts of money and writings to war +charities, he raised an altar to the dead who had died for the countries +which he had always loved at the hands of the country which, ever since +he was a student at Bonn, he had always loathed. In July, 1915, he took +the great step, fraught for him with the deepest emotions, of renouncing +his American citizenship and becoming a naturalised British subject; and +in January, 1916, he did England the further honour of accepting the +Order of Merit. And on 28th February, 1916, he died, leaving the white +light of his genius to shine out for the eternal comfort of the mind of +man. + + + + +A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MR HENRY JAMES' PRINCIPAL WORKS + +[A complete bibliography of the works of Mr James would form a much +thicker volume than this book. A useful bibliography up to 1906, +compiled by Mr. Frederick Allen King, is included as an appendix in Miss +Elisabeth Luther Cary's _The Novels of Henry James_ (Putnam); and a +complete bibliography covering the same period, which gives an +interesting list of his early unsigned contributions to periodicals, has +been compiled by Mr Leroy Phillips and published by Messrs Constable. +The following bibliography records only the first editions of +publications in book form.] + +The American (_Ward, Lock_). 1877. + +French Poets and Novelists (_Macmillan_). 1878. + +The Europeans (_Macmillan_). 1878. + +Roderick Hudson (_Macmillan_). 1879. + +Daisy Miller. An International Episode. Four Meetings (_Macmillan_). +1879. + +The Madonna of the Future. Longstaff's Marriage. Madame de Mauves. +Eugene Pickering. The Diary of a Man of Fifty. Benvolio (_Macmillan_). +1879. + +Hawthorne (_Macmillan_). Included in English Men of Letters Series, +edited by John Morley. 1879. + +Confidence (_Chatto & Windus_). 1880. + +Washington Square. The Pension Beaurepas. A Bundle of Letters +(_Macmillan_). 1881. + +The Portrait of a Lady (_Macmillan_). 1881. + +Portraits of Places (_Macmillan_). 1883. + +Tales of Three Cities: The Impressions of a Cousin. Lady Barbarina. A +New England Winter (_Macmillan_). 1884. + +Stories Revived: Vol. I. The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. The Path of +Duty. A Day of Days. A Light Man. Vol. II. Georgina's Reasons. A +Passionate Pilgrim. A Landscape Painter. Rose-Agathe. Vol. III. Poor +Richard. The Last of the Valerii. Master Eustace. The Romance of Certain +Old Clothes. A Most Extraordinary Case (_Macmillan_). 1885. + +The Bostonians (_Macmillan_). 1886. + +The Princess Casamassima (_Macmillan_). 1886. + +The Reverberator (_Macmillan_). 1888. + +The Aspern Papers. Louisa Pallant. The Modern Warning (_Macmillan_). +1888. + +Partial Portraits (Macmillan). 1888. + +A London Life. The Patagonia. The Liar. Mrs Temperley (_Macmillan_). +1889. + +The Tragic Muse (_Macmillan_). 1890. + +The Lesson of the Master. The Marriages. The Pupil. Brooksmith. The +Solution. Sir Edmund Orme (_Macmillan_). 1892. + +The Real Thing. Sir Dominick Ferrand. Nona Vincent. The Chaperon. +Greville Fane (_Macmillan_). 1893. + +The Private Life. The Wheel of Time. Lord Beaupre. The Visits. +Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1893. + +Essays in London (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1893. + +Theatricals: Two Comedies. Tenants. Disengaged (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). +1894. + +Theatricals: Second Series. The Album. The Reprobate (_Osgood, +McIlvaine_). 1895. + +Terminations: The Death of the Lion. The Coxon Fund. The Middle Years. +The Altar of the Dead (_Heinemann_). 1895. + +Embarrassments: The Figure in the Carpet. Glasses. The Next Time. The +Way it Came (_Heinemann_) 1896. + +The Other House (_Heinemann_). 1896. + +The Spoils of Poynton (_Heinemann_). 1897. + +What Maisie Knew (_Heinemann_). 1897. + +In the Cage (_Duckworth_). 1898. + +The Two Magics. The Turn of the Screw. Covering End (_Macmillan_). 1898. + +The Awkward Age (_Heinemann_). 1899. + +The Soft Side: The Great Good Place. "Europe." Paste. The Real Right +Thing. The Great Condition. The Tree of Knowledge. The Abasement of the +Northmores. The Given Case. John Delavoy. The Third Person. Maud-Evelyn. +Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie (_Methuen_). 1900. + +The Sacred Fount (_Methuen_). 1901. + +The Wings of the Dove (_Constable_). 1902. + +The Better Sort: Broken Wings. The Beldonald Holbein. The Two Faces. The +Tone of Time. The Special Type. Mrs Medwin. Flickerbridge. The Story in +It. The Beast in the Jungle. The Birthplace. The Papers (_Methuen_). +1903. + +The Ambassadors (_Methuen_). 1903. + +William Wetmore Story and his Friends (_Blackwood_). 1903. + +The Golden Bowl (_Methuen_). 1905. + +English Hours (_Heinemann_). 1905. + +The American Scene (_Chapman & Hall_). 1907. + +Italian Hours (_Heinemann_). 1909. + +The Finer Grain: The Velvet Glove. Mora Montravers. A Round of Visits. +Crapy Cornelia. The Bench of Desolation (_Methuen_). 1910. + +The Outcry (_Methuen_). 1911. + +A Small Boy (_Macmillan_). 1913. + +Notes of a Son and Brother (_Macmillan_). 1914. + +Notes on Novelists (_Dent_). 1914. + +A Collection of Novels and Tales by Henry James was published by Messrs +Macmillan in 1883. This consisted of reprints of The Portrait of a Lady, +Roderick Hudson, The American, Washington Square, The Europeans, +Confidence, Madame de Mauves, An International Episode, The Pension +Beaurepas, Daisy Miller, Four Meetings, Longstaff's Marriage, Benvolio, +The Madonna of the Future, A Bundle of Letters, The Diary of a Man of +Fifty, and Eugene Pickering; and two stories, The Siege of London and +The Point of View, which had not before been published in England. + +The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was +published by Messrs Macmillan during 1908-1909. Each novel and each +volume of short stories has a critical preface by the author, and each +volume has a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn as frontispiece. The +following is the order:-- + +1. Roderick Hudson. 2. The American. 3, 4. The Portrait of a Lady. 5, 6. +The Princess Casamassima. 7, 8. The Tragic Muse. 9. The Awkward Age. 10. +The Spoils of Poynton; A London Life; The Chaperon. 11. What Maisie +Knew; In the Cage; The Pupil. 12. The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the +Screw; The Liar; The Two Faces. 13. The Reverberator; Madame de Mauves; +A Passionate Pilgrim; The Madonna of the Future; Louisa Pallant. 14. +Lady Barbarina; The Siege of London; An International Episode; The +Pension Beaurepas; A Bundle of Letters; The Point of View. 15. The +Lesson of the Master; The Death of the Lion; The Next Time; The Figure +in the Carpet; The Coxon Fund. 16. The Author of Beltraffio; The Middle +Years; Greville Fane; Broken Wings; The Tree of Knowledge; The Abasement +of the Northmores; The Great Good Place; Four Meetings; Paste; Europe; +Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie; Fordham Castle. 17. The Altar of the Dead; +The Beast in the Jungle; The Birthplace; The Private Life; Owen +Wingrave; The Friends of the Friends; Sir Edmund Orme; The Real Right +Thing; The Jolly Corner; Julia Bride. 18. Daisy Miller; Pandora; The +Patagonia; The Marriages; The Real Thing; Brooksmith; The Beldonald +Holbein; The Story in It; Flickerbridge; Mrs Medwin. 19, 20. The +Ambassadors. 21, 22. The Wings of the Dove. 23, 24. The Golden Bowl. + +Fordham Castle, The Jolly Corner and Julia Bride had not previously been +published. All the early works have been subjected to a revision which +in several cases, notably Daisy Miller and Four Meetings, amounts to +their ruin. + + +AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY + +[When the contents of collections of short stories have been given in +full in the English bibliography they are entered here by their title +only.] + +A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales: The Last of the Valerii. Eugene +Pickering. The Madonna of the Future. The Romance of Certain Old +Clothes. Madame de Mauves (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, +_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1875. + +Transatlantic Sketches: Articles reprinted from _The Nation_, _The +Atlantic Monthly_, and _The Galaxy_ (_James R. Osgood_; present +publishers, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1875. + +Roderick Hudson (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1876. + +The American (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1877. + +Watch and Ward (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1878. + +The Europeans (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1878. + +Daisy Miller (_Harper_). 1878. + +An International Episode (_Harper_). 1878. + +Hawthorne (_Harper_). 1880. + +The Diary of a Man of Fifty and A Bundle of Letters (_Harper_). 1880. + +Confidence (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton Mifflin_). +1880. + +Washington Square. Illustrated by George du Maurier (_Harper_). 1881. + +The Portrait of a Lady (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1881. + +Daisy Miller: A Comedy. Privately printed. 1882. + +The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of View +(_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1883. + +Portraits of Places (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1883. + +Tales of Three Cities (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1884. + +A Little Tour in France (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, +_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1884. + +The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. Georgina's Reasons. The Path of Duty. +Four Meetings (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, +Mifflin_). 1885. + +The Bostonians (_Macmillan_). 1886. + +The Princess Casamassima (_Macmillan_). 1886. + +The Reverberator (_Macmillan_). 1888. + +The Aspern Papers (_Macmillan_). 1888. + +Partial Portraits (_Macmillan_). 1888. + +A London Life (_Macmillan_). 1889. + +The Tragic Muse (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1890. + +The Lesson of the Master (_Macmillan_). 1892. + +The Real Thing (_Macmillan_). 1893. + +The Private Life. Lord Beaupre. The Visits (_Harper_). 1893. + +The Wheel of Time. Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (_Harper_). 1893. + +Picture and Text. Essays on Art (_Harper_). 1893. + +Essays in London (_Harper_). 1893. + +Theatricals (_Harper_). 1894. + +Theatricals: Second Series (_Harper_). 1895. + +Terminations (_Harper_). 1895. + +Embarrassments (_Macmillan_). 1896. + +The Other House (_Macmillan_). 1896. + +The Spoils of Poynton (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1897. + +What Maisie Knew (_Herbert S. Stone_). 1897. + +In the Cage (_Herbert S. Stone_). 1898. + +The Two Magics (_Macmillan_). 1898. + +The Awkward Age (_Harper_). 1899. + +The Soft Side (_Macmillan_). 1900. + +The Sacred Fount (_Scribner's_). 1901. + +The Wings of the Dove (_Scribner's_). 1902. + +The Better Sort (_Scribner's_). 1903. + +The Ambassadors (_Harper_). 1903. + +William Wetmore Story (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1903. + +The Golden Bowl (_Scribner's_). 1904. + +English Hours (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1905. + +The Question of our Speech. The Lesson of Balzac (_Houghton, Mifflin_). +1905. + +The American Scene (_Harper_). 1907. + +Italian Hours (Houghton. Mifflin). 1909. + +The Finer Grain (_Scribner's_). 1910. + +The Outcry (_Scribner's_). 1911. + +A Small Boy (_Scribner's_). 1913. + +Notes of a Son and Brother (_Scribner's_). 1914. + +Notes on Novelists (_Scribner's_). 1914. + +The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was +published in America by Messrs Scribner's Sons. + + + + +INDEX + + +_Altar of the Dead, The_, 100 + +_Ambassadors, The_, 108-110 + +_American Scene, The_, 115 + +_American, The_, 38-40 + +_Aspern Papers, The_, 88-89 + +_Atlantic Monthly, The_, 21, 24 + +_Author of Beltraffio, The_, 78-80 + +_Awkward Age, The_, 106-107 + + +_Better Sort, The_, 106 + +_Bostonians, The_, 71-72 + + +Civil War, 19, 21 + +_Coxon Fund, The_, 92 + +Criticism, 63-71 + + +_Daisy Miller_, 44-48 + +_Death of the Lion, The_, 92-93 + +Decadent Movement, 79-84, 90 + + +Eliot, George, 22, 82 + +Emerson, 10, 72 + +_Essays in London_, 66 + +European War, 117 + +_Europeans, The_, 41-44 + + +_Finer Grain, The_, 115 + +Flaubert, 58, 63, 65-66 + +French literature, 38, 52, 58, 91 + +_French Poets and Novelists_, 37, 64 + + +_Galaxy, The_, 24 + +_Golden Bowl, The_, 25, 93, 95, 110-113 + +_Great Good Place, The_, 105 + + +Hawthorne, 10, 24, 31 + +Historic sense, 60-63 + + +International situation, 30-33, 109 + +_In the Cage_, 98 + + +James, Rev. Henry, 12-13, 17-19, 114 + + +_Lady Barbarina_, 49 + +_Lesson of the Master, The_, 92 + +_Little Tour in France, A_, 60-61 + +_London Life, A_, 50, 54 + + +_Madame de Mauves_, 28-30 + +_Madonna of the Future, The_, 28 + +_Middle Years, The_, 92 + + +Naturalisation, 117 + +_Next Time, The_, 92 + +New York Edition of, _Novels and Tales, The_, 115 + +_Notes of a Son and Brother_, 116 + +_Notes on Novelists_, 64 + + +_Other House, The_, 96 + +_Outcry, The_, 115 + + +_Pandora_, 49 + +_Partial Portraits_, 67 + +_Passionate Pilgrim, The_, 25-27, 61 + +_Pension Beaurepas, The_, 48 + +Playwriting, 108 + +_Portrait of a Lady, The_, 67-70 + +_Princess Casamassima, The_, 73-78 + + +_Religion_, 17-19, 93, 99-101, 105-106 + +_Reverberator, The_, 50 + +_Roderick Hudson_, 33-36 + +_Romance of Certain Old Clothes_, 24 + + +_Sacred Fount, The_, 107 + +_Siege of London, The_, 48 + +_Small Boy, A_, 116 + +_Spoils of Poynton, The_, 97 + + +Temple, Mary, 23, 102 + +_Tragic Muse, The_, 84, 101 + +Turgeniev, 56-59, 91 + +_Turn of the Screw, The_, 97 + + +Velasquez, 86 + + +Ward, Mrs Humphry, 66 + +_Washington Square_, 55-59 + +_What Maisie Knew_, 97 + +_Wings of the Dove_, 101, 104 + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Henry James, by Rebecca West + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY JAMES *** + +***** This file should be named 37300.txt or 37300.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/7/3/0/37300/ + +Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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