WHEN Henry James wrote the reminiscences of his youth he shewed
conclusively, what indeed could be doubtful to none who knew him, that
it would be impossible for anyone else to write his life. His life was
no mere succession of facts, such as could be compiled and recorded by
another hand; it was a densely knit cluster of emotions and memories,
each one steeped in lights and colours thrown out by the rest, the whole
making up a picture that no one but himself could dream of undertaking
to paint. Strictly speaking this may be true of every human being; but
in most lives experience is taken as it comes and left to rest in the
memory where it happens to fall. Henry James never took anything as it
came; the thing that happened to him was merely the point of departure
for a deliberate, and as time went on a more and more masterly, creative
energy, which could never leave a sight or sound of any kind until it
had been looked at and listened to with absorbed attention, pondered in
thought, linked with its associations, and which did not spend itself
until the remembrance had been crystallised in expression, so that it
could then be appropriated like a tangible object. To recall his habit
of talk is to become aware that he never ceased creating his life in
this way as it was lived; he was always engaged in the poetic fashioning
of experience, turning his share of impressions into rounded and
lasting images. From the beginning this had been his only method of
dealing with existence, and in later years it even meant a tax upon his
strength with which he had consciously to reckon. Not long before his
death he confessed that at last he found himself too much exhausted for
the 'wear and tear of discrimination'; and the phrase indicates the
strain upon him of the mere act of living. Looked at from without his
life was uneventful enough, the even career of a man of letters,
singularly fortunate in all his circumstances. Within, it was a cycle of
vivid and incessant adventure, known only to himself except in so far as
he himself put it into words. So much of it as he left unexpressed is
lost, therefore, like a novel that he might have written, but of which
there can now be no question, since its only possible writer is gone.
Fortunately a great part of it survives in his letters, and it is of
these that his biography must be composed. The material is plentiful,
for he was at all times a copious letter-writer, overflowing into swift
and easy improvisation to his family and to the many friends with whom
he corresponded regularly. His letters have been widely preserved, and
several thousands of them have passed through my hands, ranging from his
twenty-fifth year until within a few days of his last illness. They give
as complete a portrait of him as we can now hope to possess. His was a
nature in which simplicity and complexity were very curiously
contrasted, and it would need all his own power of fusing innumerable
details into coherency to create a picture that would seem sufficient to
those who knew him. Yet even his letters, varied as they are, give full
expression to one side of his life only, the side that he shewed to the
world he lived in and loved. After all the prodigal display of mind that
is given in these volumes, the free outpouring of curiosity and
sympathy and power, a close reader must still be left with the sense
that something, the most essential and revealing strain, is little more
than suggested here and there. The daily drama of his work, with all the
comfort and joy it brought him, does not very often appear as more than
an undertone to the conversation of the letters. It was like a mystery
to which he was dedicated, but of which he shrank from speaking quite
openly. Much as he always delighted in sociable communion, citizen of
the world, child of urbanity as he was, all his friends must have felt
that at heart he lived in solitude and that few were ever admitted into
the inner shrine of his labour. There it was nevertheless that he lived
most intensely and most serenely. In outward matters he was constantly
haunted by anxiety and never looked forward with confidence; he was of
those to whom the future is always ominous, who dread the treachery of
apparent calm even more than actual ill weather. It was very different
in the presence of his work. There he never knew the least failure of
assurance; he threw his full weight on the belief that supported him and
it was never shaken.
That belief was in the sanctity and sufficiency of the life of art. It
was a conviction that needed no reasoning, and he accepted it without
question. It was absolute for him that the work of the imagination was
the highest and most honourable calling conceivable, being indeed
nothing less than the actual creation of life out of the void. He did
not scruple to claim that except through art there is no life that can
be known or appraised. It is the artist who takes over the deed, so
called, from the doer, to give it back again in the form in which it can
be seen and measured for the first time; without the brain that is able
to close round the loose unappropriated fact and render all its
aspects, the fact itself does not exist for us. This was the standard
below which Henry James would never allow the conception of his office
to drop, and he had the reward of complete exemption from any chill of
misgiving. His life as a creator of art, alone with his work, was one of
unclouded happiness. It might be hampered and hindered by external
accidents, but none of them could touch the real core of his security,
which was his faith in his vocation and his knowledge of his genius.
These certainties remained with him always, and he would never trifle
with them in any mood. His impatience with argument on the whole
aesthetic claim was equally great, whether it was argument in defence of
the sanctuary or in profanation of it. Silence, seclusion,
concentration, he held to be the only fitting answer for an artist. He
disliked the idea that the service of art should be questioned and
debated in the open, still more to see it organised and paraded and
publicly celebrated, as though the world could do it any acceptable
honour. He had as little in common with those who would use the artistic
profession to persuade and proselytise as with those who would brandish
it defiantly in the face of the vulgar.
Thus it is that he is seldom to be heard giving voice to the matters
which most deeply occupied him. He preferred to dwell with them apart
and to leave them behind when he emerged. Sometimes he would drop a word
that shewed what was passing beneath; sometimes, on a particular
challenge, or to one in whom he felt an understanding sympathy, he would
speak out with impressive authority. But generally he liked to enter
into other people's thought and to meet them on their own ground. There
his natural kindliness and his keen dramatic interest were both
satisfied at once. He enjoyed friendship, his letters shew how freely
and expansively; and with his steady and vigilant eye he watched the
play of character. He was insatiable for anything that others could give
him from their personal lives. Whatever he could seize in this way was
food for his own ruminating fancy; he welcomed any grain of reality, any
speck of significance round which his imagination could pile its rings.
It was very noticeable how promptly and eagerly he would reach out to
such things, as they floated by in talk; it was as though he feared to
leave them to inexpert hands and felt that other people could hardly be
trusted with their own experience. He remembered how much of his time he
had spent in exploring their consciousness when he spoke of himself as a
confirmed spectator, one who looked on from the brink instead of
plunging on his own account; but if this seemed a pale substitute for
direct contact he knew very well that it was a much richer and more
adventurous life, really, than it is given to most people to lead. There
is no life to the man who does not feel it, no adventure to the man who
cannot see the whole of it; the greatest share goes to the man who can
taste it most fully, however it reaches him. Henry James might sometimes
look back, as he certainly did, with a touch of ruefulness in reflecting
on all the experience he had only enjoyed at second hand; but he could
never doubt that what he had he possessed much more truly than any of
those from whom he had taken it. There was no hour in which he was not
alive with the whole of his sensibility; he could scarcely persuade
himself that he might have had time for more. And indeed at other
moments he would admit that he had lived in the way that was at any rate
the right way for him. Even his very twinges of regret were not wasted;
like everything else they helped to swell the sum of life, as they did
to such purpose for Strether, the 'poor sensitive gentleman' of _The
Ambassadors_, whose manner of living was very near his creator's.
These letters, then, while they shew at every point the abundant life he
led in his surroundings, have to be read with the remembrance that the
central fact of all, the fact that gave everything else its meaning to
himself, is that of which least is told. The gap, moreover, cannot be
filled from other sources; he seems to have taken pains to leave nothing
behind him that should reveal this privacy. He put forth his finished
work to speak for itself and swept away all the traces of its origin.
There was a high pride in his complete lack of tenderness towards the
evidence of past labour--the notes, manuscripts, memoranda that a man of
letters usually accumulates and that shew him in the company of his
work. It is only to the stroke of chance which left two of his novels
unfinished that we owe the outspoken colloquies with himself, since
published, over the germination of those stories--a door of entry into
the presence of his imagination that would have been summarily closed if
he had lived to carry out his plan. And though in the prefaces to the
collected edition of his works we have what is perhaps the most
comprehensive statement ever made of the life of art, a _biographia
literaria_ without parallel for fulness and elaboration, he was there
dealing with his books in retrospect, as a critic from without,
analysing and reconstructing his own creations; or if he went further
than this, and touched on the actual circumstances of their production,
it was because these had for him the charm of an old romance, remote
enough to be recalled without indiscretion. So it is that while in a
sense he was the most personal of writers--for he could not put three
words together without marking them as his own and giving them the very
ring of his voice--yet, compared with other such deliberate craftsmen as
Stevenson or Gustave Flaubert, he baffles and evades curiosity about the
private affairs of his work. If curiosity were merely futile it would be
fitting to suppress the chance relic I shall offer in a moment--for it
so happens that a single glimpse of unique clarity is open to us,
revealing him as no one saw him in his life. But the attempt to picture
the mind of an artist is only an intrusion if it is carried into trivial
and inessential things; it can never be pushed too far, as Henry James
would have been the first to maintain, into a real sharing of his
aesthetic life.
The relic in question consists of certain pencilled pages, found among
his papers, in which he speaks with only himself for listener. They
belong to the same order as the notes for the unfinished novels, but
they are even more informal and confidential. Nothing else of the kind
seems to have survived; the schemes and motives that must have swarmed
in his brain, far too numerously for notation, have all vanished but
this one. At Rye, some years before the end, he began one night to feel
his way towards a novel which he had in mind--a subject afterwards
abandoned in the form projected at first. The rough notes in which he
casts about to clear the ground are mostly filled with the mere details
of his plan--the division of the action, the characters required, a
tentative scenario. These I pass over in order to quote some passages
where he suddenly breaks away, leaves his imaginary scene, and
surrenders to the awe and wonder of finding himself again, where he has
so often stood before, on the threshold and brink of creation. It is as
though for once, at an hour of midnight silence and solitude, he opened
the innermost chamber of his mind and stood face to face with his
genius. There is no moment of all his days in which it is now possible
to approach him more closely. Such a moment represented to himself the
pith of life--the first tremor of inspiration, in which he might be
almost afraid to stir or breathe, for fear of breaking the spell, if it
were not that he goes to meet it with a peculiar confidence.
I take this up again after an interruption--I in fact throw myself
upon it under the _secousse_ of its being brought home to me even
more than I expected that my urgent material reasons for getting
settled at productive work again are of the very most imperative.
Je m'entends--I have had a discomfiture (through a stupid
misapprehension of my own indeed;) and I must now take up projected
tasks--this long time _entrevus_ and brooded over, with the firmest
possible hand. I needn't expatiate on this--on the sharp
consciousness of this hour of the dimly-dawning New Year, I mean; I
simply make an appeal to all the powers and forces and divinities
to whom I've ever been loyal and who haven't failed me yet--after
all: never, never yet! Infinitely interesting--and yet somehow with
a beautiful sharp poignancy in it that makes it strange and rather
exquisitely formidable, as with an unspeakable deep agitation, the
whole artistic question that comes up for me in the train of this
idea ... of the _donnee_ for a situation that I began here the
other day to fumble out. I mean I come back, I come back yet again
and again, to my only seeing it in the dramatic way--as I can only
see everything and anything now; the way that filled my mind and
floated and uplifted me when a fortnight ago I gave my few
indications to X. Momentary side-winds--things of no real
authority--break in every now and then to put their inferior little
questions to me; but I come back, I come back, as I say, I all
throbbingly and yearningly and passionately, oh mon bon, come back
to this way that is clearly the only one in which I can do anything
now, and that will open out to me more and more, and that has
overwhelming reasons pleading all beautifully in its breast. What
really happens is that the closer I get to the problem of the
application of it in any particular case, the more I get _into_
that application, so that the more doubts and torments fall away
from me, the more I know where I am, the more everything spreads
and shines and draws me on and I'm justified of my logic and my
passion.... Causons, causons, mon bon--oh celestial, soothing,
sanctifying process, with all the high sane forces of the sacred
time fighting, through it, on my side! Let me fumble it gently and
patiently out--with fever and fidget laid to rest--as in all the
old enchanted months! It only looms, it only shines and shimmers,
_too_ beautiful and too interesting; it only hangs there too rich
and too full and with too much to give and to pay; it only presents
itself too admirably and too vividly, too straight and square and
vivid, as a little organic and effective Action....
Thus just these first little wavings of the oh so tremulously
passionate little old wand (now!) make for me, I feel, a sort of
promise of richness and beauty and variety; a sort of portent of
the happy presence of the elements. The good days of last August
and even my broken September and my better October come back to me
with their gage of divine possibilities, and I welcome these to my
arms, I press them with unutterable tenderness. I seem to emerge
from these recent bad days--the fruit of blind accident--and the
prospect clears and flushes, and my poor blest old Genius pats me
so admirably and lovingly on the back that I turn, I screw round,
and bend my lips to passionately, in my gratitude, kiss its hands.
To the exaltation of this wonderful unbosoming he had been brought by
fifty years of devout and untiring service. Where so little is heard of
it all, the amount of patience and energy that he had consecrated to it
might easily be mistaken. His immense industry all through his crowded
London years passes almost unnoticed, so little it seems to conflict
with this life in the world, his share in which, with the close
friendships he formed and the innumerable relations he cultivated, could
have been no fuller if he had had nothing to do but to amuse himself
with the spectacle. In one way, however, it is possible to divine how
heavily the weight of his work pressed on him. The change that divides
the general tone and accent of his younger and middle age from that of
his later years is too striking to be overlooked. The impression is
unmistakeable that for a long while, indeed until he was almost an old
man, he felt the constant need of husbanding and economising his
resources; so that except to those who knew him intimately he was apt to
seem a little cold and cautious, hesitating to commit himself freely or
to allow promiscuous claims. Later on all this was very different. There
were certain habits of reserve, perhaps, that he never threw off; all
his friends remember, for example, how carefully he distinguished the
different angles of his affection, so to call them--adjusting his
various relations as though in fear lest they should cross each other
and form an embarrassing complexity. Yet any scruples or precautions of
this sort that still hung about him only enhanced the large and genial
authority of his presence. There seemed to have come a time when after
long preparation and cogitation he was able to relax and to enjoy the
fruit of his labour. Not indeed that his labour was over; it never was
that, while strength lasted; but he gave the effect of feeling himself
to be at length completely the master of his situation, at ease and at
home in his world. The new note is very perceptible in the letters,
which broaden out with opulent vigour as time goes on, reaching their
best comparatively late.
That at last he felt at home was doubtless indeed the literal truth, and
it was enough to account for this ample liberation of spirit. His
decision to settle in Europe, the great step of his life, was
inevitable, though it was not taken without long reflection; but it was
none the less a decision for which he had to pay heavily, as he was
himself very well aware. If he regarded his own part as that of an
onlooker, the sense in which he understood observation was to the
highest degree exacting. He watched indeed, but he watched with every
faculty, and he intended that every thread of intelligence he could
throw out to seize the truth of the old historic world should be as
strong as instruction, study, general indoctrination could make it. It
would be useless for him to live where the human drama most attracted
him unless he could grasp it with an assured hand; and he could never do
this if he was to remain a stranger and a sojourner, merely feeding on
the picturesque surface of appearances. To justify his expatriation he
must work his own life completely into the texture of his new
surroundings, and the story of his middle years is to be read as the
most patient and laborious of attempts to do so. Its extraordinary
success need hardly be insisted on; its failure, necessary and
foredoomed, from certain points of view, is perhaps not less obvious.
But the great fact of interest is the sight of him taking up the task
with eyes, it is needless to say, fully open to all its demands, and
never resting until he could be certain of having achieved all that was
possible. So long as he was in the thick of it, the task occupied the
whole of his attention. He took it with full seriousness; there never
was a scholar more immersed in research than was Henry James in the
study of his chosen world. There were times indeed when he might be
thought to take it even more seriously than the case required. The world
is not used to such deference from a rare critical talent, and it
certainly has much less respect for its own standards than Henry James
had, or seemed to have. His respect was of course very freely mingled
with irony, and yet it would be rash to say that his irony
preponderated. He probably felt that this, in his condition, was a
luxury which he could only afford within limits. He could never forget
that he had somehow to make up to himself for arriving as an alien from
a totally different social climate; for his own satisfaction he had to
wake and toil while others slept, keeping his ever-ready and rebellious
criticism for an occasional hour of relief.
The world with which he thus sought to identify himself was a small
affair, by most of our measurements. It was a circle of sensibilities
that it might be easy to dismiss as hypertrophied and over-civilised,
too deeply smothered in the veils of artificial life to repay so much
patient attention. Yet the little world of urbane leisure satisfied him
because he found a livelier interest, always, in the results and effects
and implications of things than in the groundwork itself; so that the
field of study he desired was that in which initial forces had travelled
furthest from their prime, passing step by step from their origin to the
level where, diffused and transformed, they were still just discernible
to acute perception. It is not through any shy timidity that so often in
his books he requires us to infer the presence of naked emotion from the
faintest stirrings of an all but unruffled surface; it is because these
monitory signals, transmitted from so far, tell a story that would be
weakened by a directer method. The tiny movement that is the last
expression of an act or a fact carries within it the history of all it
has passed through on the way--a treasure of interest that the act, the
fact in itself, had not possessed. And so in the social scene, wherever
its crude beginnings have been left furthest behind, wherever its forms
have been most rubbed and toned by the hands of succeeding generations,
there he found, not an obliteration of sharp character, but a positive
enhancement of it, with the whole of its past crowded into its bosom.
The kind of life, therefore, that might have been thought too trifling
to bear the weight of his grave and powerful scrutiny was exactly the
life that he pursued for its expressive value. He clung to civilisation,
he was faithful throughout to a few yards of town-pavement, not because
he was scared by the rough freedom of the wild, but rather because he
was impatient of its insipidity. He is very often to be heard crying out
against the tyrannous claims of his world, when they interfere with his
work, his leisure, his health; but at the moment of greatest revulsion
he never suggests that the claims may be fraudulent after all, or that
this small corner of modernity is not the best and most fruitful that
the age has to shew.
It must be a matter of pride to an English reader that this corner
happened to be found among ourselves. Henry James came to London,
however, more by a process of exhaustion than by deliberate choice, and
plenty of chastening considerations for a Londoner will appear in his
letters. If he elected to live among thick English wits rather than in
any nimbler atmosphere, it was at first largely because English ways and
manners lay more open to an explorer than the closer, compacter
societies of the mainland. Gradually, as we know well, his affection was
kindled into devoted loyalty. It remained true, none the less, that with
much that is common ground among educated people of our time and place
he was never really in touch. One has only to think of the part played,
in the England he frequented, by school and college, by country-homes,
by church and politics and professions, to understand how much of the
ordinary consciousness was closed to him. Yet it is impossible to say
that these limitations were imposed on him only because he was a
stranger among strangers; they belonged to the conditions of his being
from much further back. They were implied in his queer unanchored youth,
in which he and his greatly gifted family had been able to grow in the
free exercise of their talents without any of the foundations of settled
life. Henry James's genius opened and flourished in the void. His ripe
wisdom and culture seemed to have been able to dispense entirely with
the mere training that most people require before they can feel secure
in their critical outlook and sense of proportion. There could be no
better proof of the fact that imagination, if only there is enough of
it, will do the work of all the other faculties unaided. Whatever were
the gaps in his knowledge--knowledge of life generally, and of the life
of the mind in particular--his imagination covered them all. And so it
was that without ever acquiring a thousand things that go to the making
of a full experience and a sound taste, he yet enjoyed and possessed
everything that it was in them to give.
His taste, indeed, his judgment of quality, seems to have been bestowed
upon him in its essentials like a gift of nature. From the very first he
was sure of his taste and could account for it. His earliest writing
shews, if anything, too large a portion of tact and composure; a critic
might have said that such a perfect control of his means was not the
most hopeful sign in a young author. Henry James reversed the usual
procedure of a beginner, keeping warily to matter well within his power
of management--and this is observable too in his early letters--until he
was ready to deal with matter more robust. In his instinct for
perfection he never went wrong--never floundered into raw enthusiasms,
never lost his way, never had painfully to recover himself; he travelled
steadily forward with no need of guidance, enriching himself with new
impressions and wasting none of them. He accepted nothing that did not
minister in some way to the use of his gifts; whatever struck him as
impossible to assimilate to these he passed by without a glance. He
could not be tempted by any interest unrelated to the central line of
his work. He had enough even so, he felt, to occupy a dozen lives, and
he grudged every moment that did not leave its deposit of stuff
appropriate to his purpose. The play of his thought was so ample and
ardent that it disguised his resolute concentration; he responded so
lavishly and to so much that he seemed ready to take up and transform
and adorn whatever was offered him. But this in truth was far from the
fact, and by shifting the recollection one may see the impatient gesture
with which he would sweep aside the distraction that made no appeal to
him. It was natural that he should care nothing for any abstract
speculation or inquiry; he was an artist throughout, desiring only the
refracted light of human imperfection, never the purity of colourless
reason. More surprising was his refusal, for it was almost that, of the
appeal of music--and not wordless music only, but even the song and
melody of poetry. It cannot be by accident that poetry scarcely appears
at all in such a picture of a literary life as is given by his letters.
The purely lyrical ear seems to have been strangely sealed in him--he
often declared as much himself. And poetry in general, though he could
be deeply stirred by it, he inclined to put away from him, perhaps for
the very reason that it meant too forcible a deflection from the right
line of his energy. All this careful gathering up of his powers, in any
case, this determined deafness to irrelevant voices, gave a commanding
warrant to the critical panoply of his later life. His certainty and
consistency, his principle, his intellectual integrity--by all these the
pitch of his opinions, wherever he delivered them, reached a height that
was unforgettably impressive.
I have tried to touch, so far as possible, on the different strains in
Henry James's artistic experience; but to many who read these letters it
will be another aspect altogether that his name first recalls. They will
remember how much of his life was lived in his relations with his
countless friends, and how generously he poured out his best for them.
But if, as I have suggested, much of his mind appears fitfully and
obscurely in his letters, this side is fully irradiated from first to
last. Never, surely, has any circle of friendship received so
magnificent a tribute of expressed affection and sympathy. It was
lavished from day to day, and all the resources of his art were drawn
upon to present it with due honour. As time goes on a kind of personal
splendour shines through the correspondence, which only becomes more
natural, more direct a communication of himself, as it is uttered with
increasing mastery. The familiar form of the letter was changed under
his hand into what may really be called a new province of art, a
revelation of possibilities hitherto unexplored. Perfect in expression
as they are, these letters are true extemporisations, thrown off always
at great speed, as though with a single sweep of the hand, for all their
richness of texture and roundness of phrase. At their most
characteristic they are like free flights of virtuosity, flung out with
enjoyment in the hours of a master's ease; and the abundance of his
creative vigour is shewn by the fact that there should always be so
much more of it to spare, even after the exhausting strain of his
regular work. But the greater wonder is that this liberal gesture never
became mechanical, never a fixed manner displayed for any and all alike,
without regard to the particular mind addressed. Not for a moment does
he forget to whom he is speaking; he writes in the thought of his
correspondent, always perceptibly turning to that relation, singled out
for the time from all the rest. Each received of his best, but some
peculiar, inalienable share in it.
If anything can give to those who did not know him an impression of
Henry James's talk, it will be some of the finest of these later
letters. One difference indeed is immediately to be marked. His
pondering hesitation as he talked, his search over the whole field of
expression for the word that should do justice to the picture forming in
his mind--this gives place in the letters to a flow unchecked, one
sonorous phrase uncoiling itself after another without effort. Pen in
hand, or, as he finally preferred, dictating to his secretary, it was
apparently easier for him to seize upon the images he sought to detach,
one by one, from the clinging and populous background of his mind. In
conversation the effort seemed to be greater, and save in rare moments
of exceptional fervour--no one who heard him will forget how these
recurred more and more in the last year of his life, under the deep
excitement of the war--he liked to take his time in working out his
thought with due deliberation. But apart from this, the letters exactly
reflect the colour and contour of his talk--his grandiose courtesy, his
luxuriant phraseology, his relish for some extravagantly colloquial turn
embedded in a Ciceronian period, his humour at once so majestic and so
burly. Intercourse with him was not quite easy, perhaps; his style was
too hieratic, too richly adorned and arrayed for that. But it was
enough to surrender simply to the current of his thought; the listener
felt himself gathered up and cared for--felt that Henry James assumed
all the responsibility and would deal with the occasion in his own way.
That way was never to give a mere impersonal display of his own, but to
create and develop a reciprocal relation, to both sides of which he was
more than capable of doing the fullest justice. No words seem
satisfactory in describing the dominance he exerted over any scene in
which he figured--yet exerted by no over-riding or ignoring of the
presence of others, rather with the quickest, most apprehending
susceptibility to it. But better than by any description is this memory
imparted by the eloquent roll and ring of his letters.
He grew old in the honour of a wide circle of friends of all ages, and
of a public which, if small, was deeply devoted. He stood so completely
outside the evolution of English literature that his position was
special and unrelated, but it was a position at last unanimously
acknowledged. Signs of the admiration and respect felt for him by all
who held the belief in the art of letters, even by those whose line of
development most diverged from his--these he unaffectedly enjoyed, and
many came to him. None the less he knew very well that in all he most
cared for, in what was to him the heart and essence of life, he was
solitary to the end. However much his work might be applauded, the
spirit of rapt and fervent faith in which it was conceived was a
hermitage, so he undoubtedly felt, that no one else had perceived or
divined. His story of the Figure in the Carpet was told of himself; no
one brought him what he could accept as true and final comprehension. He
could never therefore feel that he had reached a time when his work was
finished and behind him. Old age only meant an imagination more crowded
than ever, a denser throng of shapes straining to be released before it
was too late. He bitterly resented the hindrances of ill-health, during
some of his last years, as an interruption, a curtailment of the span of
his activity; there were so many and so far better books that he still
wished to write. His interest in life, growing rather than weakening,
clashed against the artificial restraints, as they seemed, of physical
age; whenever these were relaxed, it leaped forward to work again. The
challenge of the war with Germany roused him to a height of passion he
had never touched before in the outer world; and if the strain of it
exhausted his strength, as well it might, it gave him one last year of
the fullest and deepest experience, perhaps, that he had ever known. It
wore out his body, which was too tired and spent to live longer; but he
carried away the power of his spirit still in its prime.