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 Francois Coppee, 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, civilized Paris" and settled in London. He
submitted himself, as he wrote to his brother William in 1878, "without
reserve to that Londonizing process of which the effect is to convince
you that, having lived here, you may, if need be, abjure civilization
and bury yourself in the country, but may not, in pursuit of
civilization, 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.
His welcome into English society was remarkable if we reflect that he
seemed to have little to give in return for what it offered except his
social adaptability, his pleasant and still formal amenity, and his
admirable capacity for listening. It cannot be repeated too clearly that
the Henry James of those early days had very little of the
impressiveness of his later manner. He went everywhere, sedately,
watchfully, graciously, but never prominently. In the winter of 1878-79
it is recorded that he dined out in London 107 times, but it is highly
questionable whether this amazing assiduity at the best dinner-tables
will be found to have impressed itself on any Greville or Crabb Robinson
who was taking notes at the time. He was strenuously living up to his
standard, "my charming little standard of wit, of grace, of good
manners, of vivacity, of urbanity, of intelligence, of what makes an
easy and natural style of intercourse." He was watching the rather gross
and unironic, but honest and vigorous, English upper-middle-class of
that day with mingled feelings, in which curiosity and a sort of remote
sympathy took a main part. At 107 London dinners he observed the
ever-shifting pieces of the general kaleidoscope with tremendous
acuteness, and although he thought their reds and yellows would have
been improved by a slight infusion of the Florentine harmony, on the
whole he was never weary of watching their evolutions. In this way the
years slipped by, while he made a thousand acquaintances and a dozen
durable friendships. It is a matter of pride and happiness to me that I
am able to touch on one of the latter.
It is often curiously difficult for intimate friends, who have the
impression in later years that they must always have known one another,
to recall the occasion and the place where they first met. That was the
case with Henry James and me. Several times we languidly tried to
recover those particulars, but without success. I think, however, that
it was at some dinner-party that we first met, and as the incident is
dubiously connected with the publication of the _Hawthorne_ in 1879,
and with Mr. (now Lord) Morley, whom we both frequently saw at that
epoch, I am pretty sure that the event took place early in 1880. The
acquaintance, however, did not "ripen," as people say, until the summer
of 1882, when in connexion with an article on the drawings of George Du
Maurier, which I was anxious Henry James should write--having heard him
express himself with high enthusiasm regarding these works of art--he
invited me to go to see him and to talk over the project. I found him,
one sunshiny afternoon, in his lodgings on the first floor of No. 3
Bolton Street, at the Piccadilly end of the street, where the houses
look askew into Green Park. Here he had been living ever since he came
over from France in 1876, and the situation was eminently characteristic
of the impassioned student of London life and haunter of London society
which he had now become.
Stretched on the sofa and apologizing for not rising to greet me, his
appearance gave me a little shock, for I had not thought of him as an
invalid. He hurriedly and rather evasively declared that he was not
that, but that a muscular weakness of his spine obliged him, as he said,
"to assume the horizontal posture" during some hours of every day in
order to bear the almost unbroken routine of evening engagements. I
think that this weakness gradually passed away, but certainly for many
years it handicapped his activity. I recall his appearance, seen then
for the first time by daylight; there was something shadowy about it,
the face framed in dark brown hair cut short in the Paris fashion, and
in equally dark beard, rather loose and "fluffy." He was in deep
mourning, his mother having died five or six months earlier, and he
himself having but recently returned from a melancholy visit to America,
where he had unwillingly left his father, who seemed far from well. His
manner was grave, extremely courteous, but a little formal and
frightened, which seemed strange in a man living in constant
communication with the world. Our business regarding Du Maurier was soon
concluded, and James talked with increasing ease, but always with a
punctilious hesitancy, about Paris, where he seemed, to my dazzlement,
to know even a larger number of persons of distinction than he did in
London.
He promised, before I left, to return my visit, but news of the alarming
illness of his father called him suddenly to America. He wrote to me
from Boston in April, 1883, but he did not return to London until the
autumn of that year. Our intercourse was then resumed, and, immediately,
on the familiar footing which it preserved, without an hour's abatement,
until the sad moment of his fatal illness. When he returned to Bolton
Street--this was in August, 1883--he had broken all the ties which held
him to residence in America, a country which, as it turned out, he was
not destined to revisit for more than twenty years. By this means Henry
James became a homeless man in a peculiar sense, for he continued to be
looked upon as a foreigner in London, while he seemed to have lost
citizenship in the United States. It was a little later than this that
that somewhat acidulated patriot, Colonel Higginson, in reply to someone
who said that Henry James was a cosmopolitan, remarked, "Hardly! for a
cosmopolitan is at home even in his own country!" This condition made
James, although superficially gregarious, essentially isolated, and
though his books were numerous and were greatly admired, they were
tacitly ignored alike in summaries of English and of American current
literature. There was no escape from this dilemma. Henry James was
equally determined not to lay down his American birthright and not to
reside in America. Every year of his exile, therefore, emphasized the
fact of his separation from all other Anglo-Saxons, and he endured, in
the world of letters, the singular fate of being a man without a
country.
The collection of his private letters, therefore, which has just been
published under the sympathetic editorship of Mr. Percy Lubbock, reveals
the adventures of an author who, long excluded from two literatures, is
now eagerly claimed by both of them, and it displays those movements of
a character of great energy and singular originality which
circumstances have hitherto concealed from curiosity. There was very
little on the surface of his existence to bear evidence to the
passionate intensity of the stream beneath. This those who have had the
privilege of seeing his letters know is marvellously revealed in his
private correspondence. A certain change in his life was brought about
by the arrival in 1885 of his sister Alice, who, in now confirmed
ill-health, was persuaded to make Bournemouth and afterwards Leamington
her home. He could not share her life, but at all events he could
assiduously diversify it by his visits, and Bournemouth had a second
attraction for him in the presence of Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom
he had by this time formed one of the closest of his friendships.
Stevenson's side of the correspondence has long been known, and it is
one of the main attractions which Mr. Lubbock held out to his readers
that Henry James's letters to Stevenson are now published. No episode of
the literary history of the time is more fascinating than the
interchange of feeling between these two great artists. The death of
Stevenson, nine years later than their first meeting, though long
anticipated, fell upon Henry James with a shock which he found at first
scarcely endurable. For a long time afterwards he could not bring
himself to mention the name of R. L. S. without a distressing agitation.
In 1886 the publication of _The Bostonians_, a novel which showed an
advance in direct or, as it was then styled, "realistic" painting of
modern society, increased the cleft which now divided him from his
native country, for _The Bostonians_ was angrily regarded as satirizing
not merely certain types, but certain recognizable figures in
Massachusetts, and that with a suggestive daring which was unusual.
Henry James, intent upon making a vivid picture, and already perhaps a
little out of touch with American sentiment, was indignant at the
reception of this book, which he ultimately, to my great disappointment,
omitted from his Collected Edition, for reasons which he gave in a long
letter to myself. Hence, as his works now appear, _The Princess
Casamassima_, of 1886, an essentially London adventure story, takes its
place as the earliest of the novels of his second period, although
preceded by admirable short tales in that manner, the most
characteristic of which is doubtless _The Author of Beltraffio_ (1885).
This exemplifies the custom he had now adopted of seizing an incident
reported to him, often a very slight and bald affair, and weaving round
it a thick and glittering web of silken fancy, just as the worm winds
round the unsightly chrysalis its graceful robe of gold. I speak of _The
Author of Beltraffio_, and after thirty-five years I may confess that
this extraordinarily vivid story was woven around a dark incident in the
private life of an eminent author known to us both, which I, having told
Henry James in a moment of levity, was presently horrified and even
sensibly alarmed to see thus pinnacled in the broad light of day.
After exhausting at last the not very shining amenities of his lodgings
in Bolton Street, where all was old and dingy, he went westward in 1886
into Kensington, and settled in a flat which was both new and bright, at
34 De Vere Gardens, Kensington, where he began a novel called _The
Tragic Muse_, on which he expended an immense amount of pains. He was
greatly wearied by the effort, and not entirely satisfied with the
result. He determined, as he said, "to do nothing but short lengths" for
the future, and he devoted himself to the execution of _contes_. But
even the art of the short story presently yielded to a new and, it must
be confessed, a deleterious fascination, that of the stage. He was
disappointed--he made no secret to his friends of his disillusion--in
the commercial success of his novels, which was inadequate to his needs.
I believe that he greatly over-estimated these needs, and that at no
time he was really pressed by the want of money. But he thought that he
was, and in his anxiety he turned to the theatre as a market in which to
earn a fortune. Little has hitherto been revealed with regard to this
"sawdust and orange-peel phase" (as he called it) in Henry James's
career, but it cannot be ignored any longer. The memories of his
intimate friends are stored with its incidents, his letters will be
found to be full of it.
Henry James wrote, between 1889 and 1894, seven or eight plays, on each
of which he expended an infinitude of pains and mental distress. At the
end of this period, unwillingly persuaded at last that all his agony was
in vain, and that he could never secure fame and fortune, or even a
patient hearing from the theatre-going public by his dramatic work, he
abandoned the hopeless struggle. He was by temperament little fitted to
endure the disappointments and delays which must always attend the
course of a dramatist who has not conquered a position which enables him
to browbeat the tyrants behind the stage. Henry James was punctilious,
ceremonious, and precise; it is not to be denied that he was apt to be
hasty in taking offence, and not very ready to overlook an impertinence.
The whole existence of the actor is lax and casual; the manager is the
capricious leader of an irresponsible band of egotists. Henry James lost
no occasion of dwelling, in private conversation, on this aspect of an
amiable and entertaining profession. He was not prepared to accept young
actresses at their own valuation, and the happy-go-lucky democracy of
the "mimes," as he bracketed both sexes, irritated him to the verge of
frenzy.
It was, however, with a determination to curb his impatience, and with a
conviction that he could submit his idiosyncrasies to what he called the
"passionate economy" of play-writing, that he began, in 1889, to
dedicate himself to the drama, excluding for the time being all other
considerations. He went over to Paris in the winter of that year,
largely to talk over the stage with Alphonse Daudet and Edmond de
Goncourt, and he returned to put the finishing touches on _The
American_, a dramatic version of one of his earliest novels. He finished
this play at the Palazzo Barbaro, the beautiful home of his friends, the
Daniel Curtises, in Venice, in June, 1890, thereupon taking a long
holiday, one of the latest of his extended Italian tours, through
Venetia and Tuscany. Edward Compton had by this time accepted _The
American_, being attracted by his own chances in the part of Christopher
Newman. When Henry James reappeared in London, and particularly when
the rehearsals began, we all noticed how deeply the theatrical virus had
penetrated his nature. His excitement swelled until the evening of
January 3rd, 1891, when _The American_ was acted at Southport by
Compton's company in anticipation of its appearance in London. Henry
James was kind enough to wish me to go down on this occasion with him to
Southport, but it was not possible. On the afternoon of the ordeal he
wrote to me from the local hotel: "After eleven o'clock to-night I may
be the world's--you know--and I may be the undertaker's. I count upon
you and your wife both to spend this evening in fasting, silence, and
supplication. I will send you a word in the morning, a wire if I can."
He was "so nervous that I miswrite and misspell."
The result, in the provinces, of this first experiment was not decisive.
It is true that he told Robert Louis Stevenson that he was enjoying a
success which made him blush. But the final result in London, where _The
American_ was not played until September, 1891, was only partly
encouraging. Henry James was now cast down as unreasonably as he had
been uplifted. He told me that "the strain, the anxiety, the peculiar
form and colour of the ordeal (not to be divined in the least in
advance)" had "sickened him to death." He used language of the most
picturesque extravagance about the "purgatory" of the performances,
which ran at the Opera Comique for two months. There was nothing in the
mediocre fortunes of this play to decide the questions whether Henry
James was or was not justified in abandoning all other forms of art for
the drama. We endeavoured to persuade him that, on the whole, he was not
justified, but he swept our arguments aside, and he devoted himself
wholly to the infatuation of his sterile task.
_The American_ had been dramatized from a published novel. Henry James
now thought that he should do better with original plots, and he wrote
two comedies, the one named _Tenants_ and the other _Disengaged_, of
each of which he formed high expectations. But, although they were
submitted to several managers, who gave them their customary loitering
and fluctuating attention, they were in every case ultimately refused.
Each refusal plunged the dramatist into the lowest pit of furious
depression, from which he presently emerged with freshly-kindled hopes.
Like the moralist, he never was but always to be blest. _The Album_ and
_The Reprobate_--there is a melancholy satisfaction in giving life to
the mere names of these stillborn children of his brain--started with
wild hopes and suffered from the same complete failure to satisfy the
caprice of the managers. At the close of 1893, after one of these
"sordid developments," he made up his mind to abandon the struggle. But
George Alexander promised that, if he would but persevere, he really and
truly would produce him infallibly at no distant date, and poor Henry
James could not but persevere. "I mean to wage this war ferociously for
one year more," and he composed, with infinite agony and deliberation,
the comedy of _Guy Domvile_.
The night of January 5th, 1895, was the most tragical in Henry James's
career. His hopes and fears had been strung up to the most excruciating
point, and I think that I have never witnessed such agonies of
parturition. _Guy Domvile_--which has never been printed--was a delicate
and picturesque play, of which the only disadvantage that I could
discover was that instead of having a last scene which tied up all the
threads in a neat conclusion, it left all those threads loose as they
would be in life. George Alexander was sanguine of success, and to do
Henry James honour such a galaxy of artistic, literary, and scientific
celebrity gathered in the stalls of the St. James's Theatre as perhaps
were never seen in a London playhouse before or since. Henry James was
positively storm-ridden with emotion before the fatal night, and full of
fantastic plans. I recall that one was that he should hide in the bar of
a little public-house down an alley close to the theatre, whither I
should slip forth at the end of the second act and report "how it was
going." This was not carried out, and fortunately Henry James resisted
the temptation of being present in the theatre during the performance.
All seemed to be going fairly well until the close, when Henry James
appeared and was called before the curtain--only to be subjected--to our
unspeakable horror and shame--to a storm of hoots and jeers and catcalls
from the gallery, answered by loud and sustained applause from the
stalls, the whole producing an effect of hell broke loose, in the midst
of which the author, as white as chalk, bowed and spread forth
deprecating hands and finally vanished. It was said at the time, and
confirmed later, that this horrible performance was not intended to
humiliate Henry James, but was the result of a cabal against George
Alexander.
Early next morning I called at 34 De Vere Gardens, hardly daring to
press the bell for fear of the worst of news, so shattered with
excitement had the playwright been on the previous evening. I was
astonished to find him perfectly calm; he had slept well and was
breakfasting with appetite. The theatrical bubble in which he had lived
a tormented existence for five years was wholly and finally broken, and
he returned, even in that earliest conversation, to the discussion of
the work which he had so long and so sadly neglected, the art of direct
prose narrative. And now a remarkable thing happened. The discipline of
toiling for the caprices of the theatre had amounted, for so redundant
an imaginative writer, to the putting on of a mental strait-jacket. He
saw now that he need stoop no longer to what he called "a meek and lowly
review of the right ways to keep on the right side of a body of people
who have paid money to be amused at a particular hour and place." Henry
James was not released from this system of vigorous renunciation without
a very singular result. To write for the theatre the qualities of
brevity and directness, of an elaborate plainness, had been perceived by
him to be absolutely necessary, and he had tried to cultivate them with
dogged patience for five years. But when he broke with the theatre, the
rebound was excessive. I recall his saying to me, after the fiasco of
_Guy Domvile_, "At all events, I have escaped for ever from the foul
fiend Excision!" He vibrated with the sense of release, and he began to
enjoy, physically and intellectually, a freedom which had hitherto been
foreign to his nature.
II