"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. Cœlum 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: