warehouses of that meandering chasm which is Wapping High Street are
like weathered and unequal cliffs. It is hard to believe sunlight ever
falls there. It could not get down. It is not easy to believe the river
is near. It seldom shows. You think at times you hear the distant call
of a ship. But what would that be? Something in the mind. It happened
long ago. You, too, are a ghost left by the vanished past. There is a
man above at a high loophole, the topmost cave of a warehouse which
you can see has been exposed to commerce and the elements for ages; he
pulls in a bale pendulous from the cable of a derrick. Below him one
of the horses of a van tosses its nosebag. There is no other movement.
A carman leans against an iron post, and cuts bread and cheese with a
clasp knife. It was curious to hear that steamer call, but we know what
it was. It was from a ship that went down, we have lately heard, in the
war, and her spectre reminds us, from a voyage which is over, of men
who have gone. But the call comes again just where the Stairs, like a
shining wedge of day, holds the black warehouses asunder, and shows the
light of the river and a release to the outer world. And there, moving
swiftly across the brightness, goes a steamer outward bound.
That was what we wanted to know. She confirms it, and her signal,
to whomever it was made, carries farther than she would guess. It
is understood. The past for some of us now is our only populous and
habitable world, invisible to others, but alive with whispers for us.
Yet the sea still moves daily along the old foreshore, and ships still
go and come, and do not, like us, run aground on what now is not there.
OF PROSE
A FRAGMENT[30]
[30] Translated from the Dutch by Alexander Teixeira de
Mattos.
By LODEWIJK VAN DEIJSSEL
I love the prose that comes towards me like a man, with sparkling eyes,
with a loud voice, breathing hard and with great gestures of the hands.
I want to hear the writer laugh and cry in it, to hear him whisper and
shout, to feel him sigh and pant. I want his language to loom up before
me like a tangible and resounding organism; I want him, when I read him
in my room, to reveal to me, from the characters that shimmer before my
eyes, a spirit that enters into me and seems to ascend within me from
out of his pages.
I love the prose that comes rolling up from the infinity of the
artist's soul, like a sea of sound, flowing calmly with its wide
waves, drawing nearer, nearer, ever nearer, smooth and broad, suddenly
illumined by intense gleams of light.
I love the prose that clashes towards me, rushes up to me, thunders
down upon me in a raging torrent of passion.
I love the prose that is motionless and awful as mountain ridges.
I love the prose that plays and rejoices like a waving forest filled
with birds in summer.
I love the prose which I see standing there before me, with its
sentences, like a city of marble.
I love the prose that descends upon me like a golden shower of words.
I love the sentences that march like troops of broad-backed men,
walking abreast, shoulder to shoulder, following one on the other
in ever-widening ranks, up hill, down dale, with the tramp of their
footsteps and the heavy movement of their strides. I love sentences
that sound like voices underground, but come rising, rising, louder and
in greater numbers, and pass and rise and ring and echo in the heavens.
I love words that arrive suddenly, as though from very far, shooting
forth in golden brilliancy from a rift in the blue sky, or toppling
high in the air, like dark rocks discharged from a straining volcano.
I love words that bang down upon me like falling rafters, or words that
hiss past me like bullets.
I love words which I see standing there unexpectedly, like poppies or
blue cornflowers in a field.
I love words that suddenly waft a perfume to me from the course of
the style, like incense from a church-door or scent from a woman's
handkerchief in the street.
I love words that in a moment rise softly, like a child's murmuring
voice, from under the droning style.
I love words that just gurgle, like little stifled sobs.
I love the prose that blazes its joy and its rapture like stars above
me, that lights glowing suns of love, that carries me over the thin
ice of its disdain, through the rough black nights of its hatred,
that clangs down upon me the green, copper voice of its irony and its
laughter.
If you would please me, then stretch over my head a rainbow of language
in which I shall see red anger raging, blue gladness rejoicing and
yellow mockery laughing.
Take me up and carry me where you will: I crave for nothing more than
to be powerless against the power of your Word.
Strike me with your Word, torture me with your Word and then let your
Word fall down upon me like a rain of kisses....
HENRY JAMES
By EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.
I
Voluminous as had been the writings of Henry James[31] since 1875,
it was not until he approached the end of his career that he began
to throw any light on the practical events and social adventures
of his own life. He had occasionally shown that he could turn from
the psychology of imaginary characters to the record of real lives
without losing any part of his delicate penetration or his charm of
portraiture. He had, in particular, written the _Life of Hawthorne_
in 1879, between _Daisy Miller_ and _An International Episode_; and
again in 1903, at the height of his latest period, he had produced
a specimen of that period in his elusive and parenthetical but very
beautiful so-called _Life of W. W. Story_. But these biographies threw
no more light upon his own adventures than did his successive volumes
of critical and topographical essays, in which the reader may seek long
before he detects the sparkle of a crumb of personal fact. Henry James,
at the age of seventy, had not begun to reveal himself behind the mask
which spoke in the tones of a world of imaginary characters.
[31] Messrs. Macmillan are about to publish Mr. Lubbock's
edition of James's Letters.
So saying, I do not forget that in the general edition of his
collected, or rather selected, novels and tales, published from
1908 onwards, Henry James prefixed to each volume an introduction
which assumed to be wholly biographical. He yielded, he said, "to
the pleasure of placing on record the circumstances" in which each
successive tale was written. I well recollect the terms in which he
spoke of these prefaces before he began to write them. They were to be
full and confidential, they were to throw to the winds all restraints
of conventional reticence, they were to take us, with eyes unbandaged,
into the inmost sanctum of his soul. They appeared at last, in small
print, and they were extremely extensive, but truth obliges me to
say that I found them highly disappointing. Constitutionally fitted
to take pleasure in the accent of almost everything that Henry James
ever wrote, I have to confess that these prefaces constantly baffle my
eagerness. Not for a moment would I deny that they throw interesting
light on the technical craft of a self-respecting novelist, but they
are dry, remote, and impersonal to a strange degree. It is as though
the author felt a burning desire to confide in the reader, whom he
positively button-holes in the endeavour, but that the experience
itself evades him, fails to find expression, and falls still-born,
while other matters, less personal and less important, press in and
take their place against the author's wish. Henry James proposed, in
each instance, to disclose "the contributive value of the accessory
facts in a given artistic case." This is, indeed, what we require
in the history or the autobiography of an artist, whether painter
or musician or man of letters. But this includes the production of
anecdotes, of salient facts, of direct historical statements, which
Henry James seemed in 1908 to be completely incapacitated from giving,
so that really, in the introductions to some of these novels in the
Collected Edition, it is difficult to know what the beloved novelist
is endeavouring to divulge. He becomes almost chimæra bombinating in a
vacuum.
Had we lost him soon after the appearance of the latest of these
prefaces--that prefixed to _The Golden Bowl_, in which the effort to
reveal something which is not revealed amounts almost to an agony--it
would have been impossible to reconstruct the life of Henry James
by the closest examination of his published writings. Ingenious
commentators would have pieced together conjectures from such tales
as _The Altar of the Dead_ and _The Lesson of the Master_, and have
insisted, more or less plausibly, on their accordance with what the
author _must_ have thought or done, endured or attempted. But, after
all, these would have been "conjectures," not more definitely based
than what bold spirits use when they construct lives of Shakespeare,
or, for that matter, of Homer. Fortunately, in 1913, the desire to
place some particulars of the career of his marvellous brother William
in the setting of his "immediate native and domestic air," led Henry
James to contemplate, with minuteness, the fading memories of his own
childhood. Starting with a biographical study of William James, he
found it impossible to treat the family development at all adequately
without extending the survey to his own growth as well, and thus,
at the age of seventy, Henry became for the first time, and almost
unconsciously, an autobiographer.
He had completed two large volumes of _Memories_, and was deep in a
third, when death took him from us. _A Small Boy and Others_ deals
with such extreme discursiveness as is suitable in a collection of
the fleeting impressions of infancy, from his birth in 1843 to his
all but fatal attack of typhus fever at Boulogne-sur-Mer in (perhaps)
1857. I say "perhaps" because the wanton evasion of any sort of help
in the way of dates is characteristic of the narrative, as it would
be of childish memories. The next instalment was _Notes of a Son and
Brother_, which opens in 1860, a doubtful period of three years being
leaped over lightly, and closes--as I guess from an allusion to George
Eliot's _Spanish Gypsy_--in 1868. The third instalment, dictated in
the autumn of 1914 and laid aside unfinished, is the posthumous _The
Middle Years_, faultlessly edited by the piety of Mr. Percy Lubbock in
1917. Here the tale is taken up in 1869, and is occupied, without much
attempt at chronological order, with memories of two years in London.
As Henry James did not revise, or perhaps even re-read, these pages,
we are free to form our conclusion as to whether he would or would not
have vouchsafed to put their disjected parts into some more anatomical
order.
Probably he would not have done so. The tendency of his genius had
never been, and at the end was less than ever, in the direction of
concinnity. He repudiated arrangement, he wilfully neglected the
precise adjustment of parts. The three autobiographical volumes will
always be documents precious in the eyes of his admirers. They are
full of beauty and nobility, they exhibit with delicacy, and sometimes
even with splendour, the qualities of his character. But it would be
absurd to speak of them as easy to read, or as fulfilling what is
demanded from an ordinary biographer. They have the tone of Veronese,
but nothing of his definition. A broad canvas is spread before us,
containing many figures in social conjuncture. But the plot, the single
"story" which is being told, is drowned in misty radiance. Out of this
_chiaroscuro_ there leap suddenly to our vision a sumptuous head and
throat, a handful of roses, the glitter of a satin sleeve, but it is
only when we shut our eyes and think over what we have looked at that
any coherent plan is revealed to us, or that we detect any species of
composition. It is a case which calls for editorial help, and I hope
that when the three fragments of autobiography are reprinted as a
single composition, no prudery of hesitation to touch the sacred ark
will prevent the editor from prefixing a skeleton chronicle of actual
dates and facts. It will take nothing from the dignity of the luminous
reveries in their original shape.
Such a skeleton will tell us that Henry James was born at 2 Washington
Place, New York, on April 15th, 1843, and that he was the second
child of his parents, the elder by one year being William, who grew
up to be the most eminent philosopher whom America has produced.
Their father, Henry James the elder, was himself a philosopher, whose
ideas, which the younger Henry frankly admitted to be beyond his
grasp, were expounded by William James in 1884, in a preface to their
father's posthumous papers. Henry was only one year old when the family
paid a long visit to Paris, but his earliest recollections were of
Albany, whence the Jameses migrated to New York until 1855. They then
transferred their home to Europe for three years, during which time the
child Henry imbibed what he afterwards called "the European virus." In
1855 he was sent to Geneva for purposes of education, which were soon
abandoned, and the whole family began an aimless wandering through
London, Paris, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Newport, Geneva, and America again,
nothing but the Civil War sufficing to root this fugitive household in
one abiding home.
Henry James's health forced him to be a spectator of the war, in which
his younger brothers fought. He went to Harvard in 1862 to study
law, but was now beginning to feel a more and more irresistible call
to take up letters as a profession, and the Harvard Law School left
little or no direct impression upon him. He formed a close and valuable
friendship with Mr. Howells, seven years his senior, and the pages
of the _Atlantic Monthly_, of which Mr. Howells was then assistant
editor, were open to him from 1865. He lived for the next four years
in very poor health, and with no great encouragement from himself or
others, always excepting Mr. Howells, at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Early in 1869 he ventured to return to Europe, where he spent fifteen
months in elegant but fruitful vagabondage. There was much literary
work done, most of which he carefully suppressed in later life. The
reader will, however, discover, tucked away in the thirteenth volume
of the Collected Edition, a single waif from this rejected epoch, the
tale called _A Passionate Pilgrim_, written on his return to America
in 1870. This visit to Europe absolutely determined his situation; his
arrival in New York stimulated and tortured his nostalgia for the old
world, and in May, 1872, he flew back here once more to the European
enchantment.
Here, practically, the biographical information respecting Henry
James which has hitherto been given to the world ceases, for the
fragment of _The Middle Years_, so far as can be gathered, contains
few recollections which can be dated later than his thirtieth year.
It was said of Marivaux that he cultivated no faculty but that _de ne
vivre que pour voir et pour entendre_. In a similar spirit Henry James
took up his dwelling in fashionable London lodgings in March, 1869.
He had come from America with the settled design of making a profound
study of English manners, and there were two aspects of the subject
which stood out for him above all others. One of these was the rural
beauty of ancient country places, the other was the magnitude--"the
inconceivable immensity," as he put it--of London. He told his sister,
"The place sits on you, broods on you, stamps on you with the feet
of its myriad bipeds and quadrupeds." From his lodgings in Half Moon
Street, quiet enough in themselves, he had the turmoil of the West End
at his elbow, Piccadilly, Park Lane, St. James's Street, all within
the range of a five minutes' stroll. He plunged into the vortex with
incredible gusto, "knocking about in a quiet way and deeply enjoying my
little adventures." This was his first mature experience of London, of
which he remained until the end of his life perhaps the most infatuated
student, the most "passionate pilgrim" that America has ever sent us.
But his health was still poor, and for his constitution's sake he
went in the summer of 1869 to Great Malvern. He went alone, and it is
to be remarked of him that, social as he was, and inclined to a deep
indulgence in the company of his friends, his habit of life was always
in the main a solitary one. He had no constant associates, and he did
not shrink from long periods of isolation, which he spent in reading
and writing, but also in a concentrated contemplation of the passing
scene, whatever it might be. It was alone that he now made a tour of
the principal English cathedral and university towns, expatiating to
himself on the perfection of the weather--"the dozen exquisite days of
the English year, days stamped with a purity unknown in climates where
fine weather is cheap." It was alone that he made acquaintance with
Oxford, of which city he became at once the impassioned lover which he
continued to be to the end, raving from Boston in 1870 of the supreme
gratifications of Oxford as "the most dignified and most educated" of
the cradles of our race. It was alone that during these enchanting
weeks he made himself acquainted with the unimagined loveliness of
English hamlets buried in immemorial leafage and whispered to by
meandering rivulets in the warm recesses of antiquity. These, too,
found in Henry James a worshipper more ardent, it may almost be
averred, than any other who had crossed the Atlantic to their shrine.
Having formed this basis for the main predilection of his English
studies, Henry James passed over to the Continent, and conducted a
similar pilgrimage of entranced obsession through Switzerland and
Italy. His wanderings, "rapturous and solitary," were, as in England,
hampered by no social engagement; "I see no people to speak of," he
wrote, "or for that matter to speak to." He returned to America in
April, 1870, at the close of a year which proved critical in his
career, and which laid its stamp on the whole of his future work. He
had been kindly received in artistic and literary circles in London;
he had conversed with Ruskin, with William Morris, with Aubrey de
Vere, but it is plain that while he observed the peculiarities of
these eminent men with the closest avidity, he made no impression
whatever upon them. The time for Henry James to "make an impression"
on others was not come yet; he was simply the well-bred, rather shy,
young American invalid, with excellent introductions, who crossed the
path of English activities, almost without casting a shadow. He had
published no book; he had no distinct calling; he was a deprecating
and punctilious young stranger from somewhere in Massachusetts,
immature-looking for all his seven-and-twenty years.
Some further uneventful seasons, mainly spent in America but
diversified by tours in Germany and Italy, bring us to 1875, when
Henry James came over from Cambridge with the definite project, at
last, of staying in Europe "for good." He took rooms in Paris, at 29
Rue de Luxembourg, and he penetrated easily into the very exclusive
literary society which at that time revolved around Flaubert and Edmond
de Goncourt. This year in Paris was another highly critical period in
Henry James's intellectual history. He was still, at the mature age of
thirty-two, almost an amateur in literature, having been content, up to
that time, to produce scarcely anything which his mature taste did not
afterwards repudiate. _The Passionate Pilgrim_ (1870), of which I have
spoken above, is the only waif and stray of the pre-1873 years which he
has permitted to survive. The first edition of this short story is now
not easy of reference, and I have not seen it; the reprint of 1908 is
obviously, and is doubtless vigorously, re-handled. Enough, however,
remains of what must be original to show that, in a rather crude, and
indeed almost hysterical form, the qualities of Henry James's genius
were, in 1869, what they continued to be in 1909. He has conquered,
however, in _A Passionate Pilgrim_, no command yet over his enthusiasm,
his delicate sense of beauty, his apprehension of the exquisite colour
of antiquity.
From the French associates of this time he derived practical help
in his profession, though without their being aware of what they
gave him. He was warmly attracted to Gustave Flaubert, who had just
published _La Tentation de St. Antoine_, a dazzled admiration of
which was the excuse which threw the young American at the feet of
the Rouen giant. This particular admiration dwindled with the passage
of time, but Henry James continued faithful to the author of _Madame
Bovary_. It was Turgenev who introduced him to Flaubert, from whom he
passed to Guy de Maupassant, then an athlete of four-and-twenty, and
still scintillating in that blaze of juvenile virility which always
fascinated Henry James. In the train of Edmond de Goncourt came Zola,
vociferous over his late tribulation of having _L'Assommoir_ stopped in
its serial issue; Alphonse Daudet, whose recent _Jack_ was exercising
over tens of thousands of readers the tyranny of tears; and François
Coppée, the almost exact coeval of Henry James, and now author of a
_Luthier de Cremone_, which had placed him high among French poets.
That the young American, with no apparent claim to attention except
the laborious perfection of his French speech, was welcomed and
ultimately received on terms of intimacy in this the most exclusive of
European intellectual circles is curious. Henry James was accustomed to
deprecate the notion that these Frenchmen took the least interest in
him: "they have never read a line of me, they have never even persuaded
themselves that there was a line of me which anyone could read," he
once said to me. How should they, poor charming creatures, in their
self-sufficing Latin intensity, know what or whether some barbarian had
remotely "written"? But this does not end the marvel, because, read or
not read, there was Henry James among them, affectionately welcomed,
talked to familiarly about "technique," and even about "sales," like
a fellow-craftsman. There must evidently have developed by this time
something modestly "impressive" about him, and I cannot doubt that
these Parisian masters of language more or less dimly divined that he
too was, in some medium not by them to be penetrated, a master.
After this fruitful year in Paris, the first result of which was the
publication in London of his earliest surviving novel, _Roderick
Hudson_, and the completion of _The American_, Henry James left
his "glittering, charming, civilised Paris" and settled in London.
He submitted himself, as he wrote to his brother William in 1878,
"without reserve to that Londonising process of which the effect
is to convince you that, having lived here, you may, if need be,
abjure civilisation and bury yourself in the country, but may not,
in pursuit of civilisation, live in any smaller town." He plunged
deeply into the study of London, externally and socially, and into
the production of literature, in which he was now as steadily active
as he was elegantly proficient. These novels of his earliest period
have neither the profundity nor the originality of those of his middle
and final periods, but they have an exquisite freshness of their own,
and a workmanship the lucidity and logic of which he owed in no small
measure to his conversations with Daudet and Maupassant, and to his, at
that time almost exclusive, reading of the finest French fiction. He
published _The American_ in 1877, _The Europeans_ and _Daisy Miller_
in 1878, and _An International Episode_ in 1879. He might advance in
stature and breadth; he might come to disdain the exiguous beauty of
these comparatively juvenile books, but now at all events were clearly
revealed all the qualities which were to develop later, and to make
Henry James unique among writers of Anglo-Saxon race.