Henry James came to England to admire. But his early reverence for the
men and women of an island with so fine and ancient a historic tone as
Great Britain soon faded. He had forgotten, in the first passion of
acquaintance, that the English are born afresh in every generation and
are about as new as young Americans, differing from them chiefly in
having other forms of domestic and ecclesiastical architecture and
smoother lawns to take for granted. He looked at old stone castles and
Tudor brickwork, at great hanging eaves and immemorial gardens, and then
he looked at the heirs of this heritage and listened intently for their
speech. This was disappointing, partly because they spoke so little. "I
rarely remember," he wrote when he had lived through several London
months, "to have heard on English lips any other intellectual verdict
(no matter under what provocation) than this broad synthesis 'so
immensely clever.' What exasperates you is not that they can't say more
but that they wouldn't if they could."
How different was this inarticulate world from the fine civilization of
Boston, from the cultivated circle that gathered round Charles Eliot
Norton at Shady Hill. To that circle he appealed for sympathy,
complaining that he was "sinking into dull British acceptance and
conformity. . . . I am losing my standard--my charming little standard
that I used to think so high; my standard of wit, of grace, of good
manners, of vivacity, of urbanity, of intelligence, of what makes an
easy and natural style of intercourse! And this in consequence of having
dined out during the past winter 107 times!" Great men, or at the least
men with great names, swam into his ken and he condemned them. Ruskin
was "weakness pure and simple." In Paris he found that he could
"easily--more than easily--see all round Flaubert intellectually." A
happy Sunday evening at Madame Viardot's provoked a curious reflection
on the capacity of celebrated Europeans to behave absurdly and the
incapacity of celebrated Americans to indulge in similar antics. "It was
both strange and sweet to see poor Turgenev acting charades of the most
extravagant description, dressed out in old shawls, and masks, going on
all fours, etc. The charades are their usual Sunday evening occupation
and the good faith with which Turgenev, at his age and with his glories,
can go into them is a striking example of the truth of that spontaneity
which Europeans have and we have not. Fancy Longfellow, Lowell, or
Charles Norton doing the like and every Sunday evening!"
Whether or not all celebrated Americans behave with invariable decorum,
the astonished spectator of Turgenev's performance had no temptation to
"do the like." His appearance among a company of artists and writers
gathered together in a country village during the late summer of 1886
has been characteristically recorded by Mr. Edmund Gosse. "Henry James
was the only sedate one of us all--benign, indulgent, but grave, and not
often unbending beyond a genial chuckle. . . . It is remembered with
what affability he wore a garland of flowers at a birthday feast, and
even, nobly descending, took part one night in a cakewalk. But mostly,
though not much our senior, he was serious, mildly avuncular, but very
happy and unupbraiding."
By that time Henry James was at his ease in England. The inhabitants
were no longer either gods or imbeciles. Through the general British fog
he had perceived gleams of intelligence shining on his bewilderment. He
was no longer wholly dependent on Boston for refreshment. He could fall
back upon the company of Mr. Edmund Gosse and he had found a friend in
R. L. Stevenson. The little handful of Islanders possessed of a genuine
interest in the art of letters and the criticism of life emerged from
the obscurity, and he made out that, on the whole, there were perhaps
about as many civilized people in England as in his native land. Yet he
was a little troubled about his position. He wondered, while he reviewed
the past, whether the path he had so carefully chosen for himself was
the right one, whether he might not have missed more by leaving the
United States than he had gained by coming to England. He lamented; in a
letter written to his brother William in 1899, that he had not had the
kind of early experience that might have attached him to his own
country. He earnestly advised a different treatment for his nephews.
"What I most of all feel, and in the light of it conjure you to keep
doing for them, is their being _à même_ to contract local saturations
and attachments in respect to their _own_ great and glorious country, to
learn, and strike roots into, its infinite beauty, as I suppose, and
variety. . . . Its being their 'own' will double their _use_ of it."
It was only after a visit to America in 1904 that he found, on his
return to Rye, that he had a home and a country. He was able after this
discovery to write to Mrs. Wharton that "your only drawback is not
having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and
the affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (comme moi, par
exemple!)"; and he could declare after taking the Oath of Allegiance to
the King of England in 1915 that "I was really too associated before for
any nominal change to matter. The process has only shown me what I
virtually _was_--so that it's rather disappointing in respect to acute
sensation. I _haven't_ any." Associated he certainly was, allied by
innumerable sympathies and affections to the adopted country. But he was
never really English or American or even Cosmopolitan, And it is too
difficult to suppose that even if he had passed all his youth in New
England and contracted all the local saturations and attachments he
urged for his nephews he could ever have melted comfortably into
American uniformity. He, who took nothing in the world for granted,
could surely never have taken New England for granted.
To-day, with the complete record before us--the novels, criticisms,
biographies, plays, and letters--we can understand how little those
international relations that engaged Henry James's attention mattered to
his genius. Wherever he might have lived and whatever human interactions
he might have observed, he would in all probability have reached much
the same conclusion that he arrived at by the way of America, France,
and England. When he walked out of the refuge of his study into the
world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures
of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the
doomed, defenceless children of light. He had the abiding comfort of an
inner certainty (and perhaps he did bring that from New England) that
the children of light had an eternal advantage; he was aware to the
finest fibre of his being that the "poor sensitive gentlemen" he so
numerously treated possessed a treasure that would outlast all the
glittering paste of the world and the flesh; he knew that nothing in
life mattered compared with spiritual decency.
We may conclude that the nationalities of his betrayed and triumphant
victims are not an important factor. They may equally well be innocent
Americans maltreated by odious Europeans, refined Europeans fleeced by
unscrupulous Americans, or young children of any race exposed to evil
influences. The essential fact is that wherever he looked Henry James
saw fineness apparently sacrificed to grossness, beauty to avarice,
truth to a bold front. He realized how constantly the tenderness of
growing life is at the mercy of personal tyranny and he hated the
tyranny of persons over each other. His novels are a repeated exposure
of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest
freedom of development, unimperilled by reckless and barbarous
stupidity.
He was himself most scrupulously careful not to exercise any tyrannical
power over other people. The only advice he ever permitted himself to
offer to a friend was a recommendation to "let your soul live." Towards
the end of his days his horror of interfering, or seeming to interfere,
with the freedom of others became so overpowering that it was a misery
for him to suspect that the plans of his friends might be made with
reference to himself. Much as he enjoyed seeing them, he so disliked to
think that they were undergoing the discomfort of voyages and railway
journeys in order to be near him that he would gladly have prevented
their start if he could. His Utopia was an anarchy where nobody would be
responsible for any other human being but only for his own civilized
character. His circle of friends will easily recall how finely Henry
James had fitted himself to be a citizen of this commonwealth.