"squeezing out" his American impressions, which did not flow so easily
as he had hoped they would. Many other enterprises hung temptingly
before him, and distracted his thoughts from that particular occupation.
Moreover, just before his plan for visiting the United States had taken
shape, he had promised to write for a leading firm of English publishers
"a romantical-psychological-pictorial-social" book about London, and in
November, 1905, he returned to this project with vivacity. There is a
peculiar interest about works that great writers mean to compose and
never succeed in producing, and this scheme of a great picturesque book
about London is like a ghost among the realities of Henry James's
invention. He spoke about it more often and more freely than he did
about his solid creations; I feel as though I had handled and almost as
though I had read it. Westminster was to have been the core of the
matter, which was to circle out concentrically to the City and the
suburbs. Henry James put me under gratified contribution by coming
frequently to the House of Lords in quest of "local colour," and I took
him through the corridors and up into garrets of the Palace where never
foreign foot had stepped before. There was not, to make a clean breast
of it, much "local colour" to be wrung out, but Henry James was
indefatigable in curiosity. What really did thrill him was to stand
looking down from one of the windows of the Library on the Terrace,
crowded with its motley afternoon crew of Members of both Houses and
their guests of both sexes. He liked that better than to mingle with the
throng itself, and he should have written a superb page on the scene,
with its background of shining river and misty towers. Alas! it will not
be read until we know what songs the Sirens sang.
All through the quiet autumn and winter of 1906 he was busy preparing
the collective and definite, but far from complete, edition of his
novels and tales which began to appear some twelve months later. This
involved a labour which some of his friends ventured to disapprove of,
since it included a re-writing into his latest style of the early
stories which possessed a charm in their unaffected immaturity. Henry
James was conscious, I think, of the arguments which might be brought
against this reckless revision, but he rejected them with violence. I
was spending a day or two with him at Lamb House when _Roderick Hudson_
was undergoing, or rather had just undergone, the terrible trial; so the
revised copy, darkened and swelled with MS. alterations, was put into my
hands. I thought--I dare say I was quite mistaken--that the whole
perspective of Henry James's work, the evidence of his development and
evolution, his historical growth, were confused and belied by this
wholesale tampering with the original text. Accordingly I exclaimed
against such dribbling of new wine into the old bottles. This was after
dinner, as we sat alone in the garden-room. All that Henry James--though
I confess, with a darkened countenance--said at the time was, "The only
alternative would have been to put the vile thing"--that is to say the
graceful tale of _Roderick Hudson_--"behind the fire and have done with
it!" Then we passed to other subjects, and at length we parted for the
night in unruffled cheerfulness. But what was my dismay, on reaching the
breakfast-table next morning, to see my host sombre and taciturn, with
gloom thrown across his frowning features like a veil. I inquired rather
anxiously whether he had slept well. "Slept!" he answered with dreary
emphasis. "Was I likely to sleep when my brain was tortured with all the
cruel and--to put it plainly to you--monstrous insinuations which you
had brought forward against my proper, my necessary, my absolutely
inevitable corrections of the disgraceful and disreputable style of
_Roderick Hudson_?" I withered, like a guilty thing ashamed, before the
eyes that glared at me over the coffee-pot, and I inly resolved that not
one word of question should ever escape my lips on this subject again.
Early in 1907 he was tempted once more, after so long absence, to
revisit France. While in America he had acquired the habit of motoring,
which he learned to enjoy so much that it became the greatest physical
pleasure of his life, and one which seemed definitely to benefit his
health. He motored through a great part of France, and then proceeded to
his beloved Italy, where he spent some radiant summer days under the
pines near Vallombrosa, and later some more with his lifelong friend
Mrs. Curtis in her wonderful Palazzo Barbaro in Venice. Ten weeks in
Paris must be added to the foreign record of this year, almost the last
of those which Henry James was able to dedicate to the Latin world that
he loved so well and comprehended so acutely. The "nightmare," as he
called it, of his Collected Edition kept him closely engaged for months
after his return--it ultimately ran into a range of twenty-four
volumes--but he was also sketching a novel, _The Ivory Tower_, which was
to embody some of his American recollections; this was never finished.
He met new friends of the younger generation, such as Hugh Walpole and
Rupert Brooke, and they gave him great happiness.
He seemed to be approaching old age in placidity and satisfaction when,
towards the end of 1909, he was seized by a mysterious group of
illnesses which "deprived him of all power to work and caused him
immeasurable suffering of mind." Unfortunately his beloved brother
William was also failing in health, and had come to Europe in the vain
search for recovery; their conditions painfully interacted. The whole
year 1910 was one of almost unmitigated distress. Henry accompanied Mr.
and Mrs. William back to their home in New Hampshire, where in the
autumn not only the eminent philosopher, but a third brother, Robertson
James, died, leaving Henry solitary indeed, and weighed upon by a cloud
of melancholy which forbade him to write or almost to speak. Out of this
he passed in the spring of 1911, and returned to Lamb House, where he
had another sharp attack of illness in the autumn of 1912. It was now
felt that the long pale winters over the marsh at Rye were impossible
for him, and the bedroom at the Reform Club insufficient. He therefore
rented a small flat high up over the Thames in Cheyne Walk, where he was
henceforth to spend half of each year and die. He sat, on the occasion
of his seventieth birthday, to Mr. Sargent for the picture which is now
one of the treasures of the National Portrait Gallery; this was
surprisingly mutilated, while being exhibited at the Royal Academy, by a
"militant suffragette"; Henry James was extraordinarily exhilarated by
having been thus "impaired by the tomahawk of the savage," and displayed
himself as "breasting a wondrous high-tide of postal condolence in this
doubly-damaged state." This was his latest excitement before the war
with Germany drowned every other consideration.
The record of the last months of Henry James's life is told in the
wonderful letters that he wrote between the beginning of August, 1914,
and the close of November, 1915. He was at Rye when the war broke out,
but he found it absolutely impossible to stay there without daily
communication with friends in person, and, contrary to his lifelong
habit, he came posting up to London in the midst of the burning August
weather. He was transfigured by the events of those early weeks,
overpowered, and yet, in his vast and generous excitement, himself
overpowering. He threw off all the languor and melancholy of the recent
years, and he appeared actually grown in size as he stalked the streets,
amazingly moved by the unexpected nightmare, "the huge horror of
blackness" which he saw before him. "The plunge of civilization into the
abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of these two infamous
autocrats" made him suddenly realize that the quiet years of prosperity
which had preceded 1914 had been really, as he put it, "treacherous,"
and that their perfidy had left us unprotected against the tragic
terrors which now faced our world. It was astonishing how great Henry
James suddenly seemed to become; he positively loomed above us in his
splendid and disinterested faith. His first instinct had been horror at
the prospect; his second anger and indignation against the criminals;
but to these succeeded a passion of love and sympathy for England and
France, and an unyielding but anxious and straining confidence in their
ultimate success. Nothing could express this better than the language of
a friend who saw him constantly and studied his moods with penetrating
sympathy. Mr. Percy Lubbock says:
To all who listened to him in those days it must have seemed that
he gave us what we lacked--a voice; there was a trumpet note in it
that was heard nowhere else and that alone rose to the height of
the truth.
The impression Henry James gave in these first months of the war could
not be reproduced in better terms. To be in his company was to be
encouraged, stimulated and yet filled with a sense of the almost
intolerable gravity of the situation; it was to be moved with that
"trumpet note" in his voice, as the men fighting in the dark defiles of
Roncevaux were moved by the sound of the oliphant of Roland. He drew a
long breath of relief in the thought that England had not failed in her
manifest duty to France, nor "shirked any one of the implications of the
Entente." When, as at the end of the first month, things were far from
exhilarating for the Allies, Henry James did not give way to despair,
but he went back to Rye, possessing his soul in waiting patience,
"bracing himself unutterably," as he put it, "and holding on somehow
(though to God knows what!) in presence of the perpetrations so
gratuitously and infamously hideous as the destruction of Louvain and
its accompaniments."
At Lamb House he sat through that gorgeous tawny September, listening
to the German guns thundering just across the Channel, while the advance
of the enemy through those beautiful lands which he knew and loved so
well filled him with anguish. He used to sally forth and stand on the
bastions of his little town, gazing over the dim marsh that became
sand-dunes, and then sea, and then a mirage of the white cliffs of
French Flanders that were actually visible when the atmosphere grew
transparent. The anguish of his execration became almost the howl of
some animal, of a lion of the forest with the arrow in his flank, when
the Germans wrecked Reims Cathedral. He gazed and gazed over the sea
south-east, and fancied that he saw the flicker of the flames. He ate
and drank, he talked and walked and thought, he slept and waked and
lived and breathed only the War. His friends grew anxious, the tension
was beyond what his natural powers, transfigured as they were, could be
expected to endure, and he was persuaded to come back to Chelsea,
although a semblance of summer still made Rye attractive.
During this time his attitude towards America was marked by a peculiar
delicacy. His letters expressed no upbraiding, but a yearning,
restrained impatience that took the form of a constant celebration of
the attitude of England, which he found in those early months
consistently admirable. In his abundant and eloquent letters to America
he dealt incessantly on the shining light which events were throwing on
"England's moral position and attitude, her predominantly incurable
good-nature, the sublimity or the egregious folly, one scarcely knows
which to call it, of her innocence in face of the most prodigiously
massed and worked-out intentions of aggression." He admitted, with every
gesture of courtesy, that America's absence from the feast of allied
friendship on an occasion so unexampled, so infinitely momentous, was a
bitter grief to him, but he was ready to believe it a necessity. For his
own part, almost immediately on his return to London in October, 1914,
Henry James began to relieve the mental high pressure by some kinds of
practical work for which nothing in his previous life had fitted him,
but into which he now threw himself with even exhausting ardour. He had
always shrunk from physical contact with miscellaneous strangers, but
now nothing seemed unwelcome save aloofness which would have divided him
from the sufferings of others. The sad fate of Belgium particularly
moved him, and he found close to his flat in Cheyne Walk a centre for
the relief of Belgian refugees, and he was active in service there. A
little later on he ardently espoused the work of the American Volunteer
Motor Ambulance Corps. His practical experiences and his anxiety to take
part in the great English movement for relief of the Belgians and the
French are reflected in the essays which were collected in 1919 under
the title of _Within the Rim_.
We were, however, made anxious by the effect of all this upon his
nerves. The magnificent exaltation of spirit which made him a trumpeter
in the sacred progress of the Allies was of a nature to alarm us as much
as it inspirited and rejoiced us. When we thought of what he had been in
1911, how sadly he had aged in 1912, it was not credible that in 1915 he
could endure to be filled to overflowing by this tide of febrile
enthusiasm. Some of us, in the hope of diverting his thoughts a little
from the obsession of the war, urged him to return to his proper work;
and he responded in part to our observations, while not abandoning his
charitable service. He was at work on _The Ivory Tower_ when the war
began, but he could not recover the note of placidity which it demanded,
and he abandoned it in favour of a novel begun in 1900 and then laid
aside, _The Sense of the Past_. He continued, at the same time, his
reminiscences, and was writing the fragment published since his death as
_The Middle Years_. But all this work was forced from him with an
effort, very slowly; the old sprightly running of composition was at an
end, the fact being that his thoughts were now incessantly distracted by
considerations of a far more serious order.
The hesitations of Mr. Wilson, and Henry James's conviction that in the
spring of 1915 the United States government was "sitting down in
meekness and silence under the German repudiation of every engagement
she solemnly took with" America, led to his taking a step which he felt
to be in many respects painful, but absolutely inevitable. His heart was
so passionately united with England in her colossal effort, and he was
so dismally discouraged by the unending hesitation of America, that he
determined to do what he had always strenuously refused to do before,
namely, apply for British naturalization. Mr. Asquith (then Prime
Minister), Sir George Prothero (the Editor of the _Quarterly Review_),
and I had the honour and the gratification of being chosen his sponsors.
In the case of so illustrious a claimant the usual formalities were
passed over, and on July 26th, 1915, Henry James became a British
subject. Unhappily he did not live to see America join the Allies, and
so missed the joy for which he longed above all others.
But his radiant enthusiasm was burning him out. In August he had a
slight breakdown, and his autumn was made miserable by an affection of
the heart. He felt, he said, twenty years older, but "still, I
cultivate, I at least attempt, a brazen front." He still got about, and
I saw him at Westminster on the evening of November 29th. This was, I
believe, the last time he went out, and two days later, on the night
between the 1st and the 2nd of December, he had a stroke. He partly
rallied and was able to receive comfort from the presence of his
sister-in-law, Mrs. William James, who hurried across the Atlantic to
nurse him. At the New Year he was awarded the highest honour which the
King can confer on a British man of letters, the Order of Merit, the
insignia of which were brought to his bedside by Lord Bryce. On February
28th, 1916, he died, within two months of his 73rd birthday. His body
was cremated, and the funeral service held at that "altar of the dead"
which he had loved so much, Chelsea Old Church, a few yards from his own
door.
1920.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Let it be said at once that Mr. Henry Festing Jones's _Life of Samuel
Butler_ tells the history of a very remarkable man with a vividness
which leaves nothing to be desired. This is not a vain compliment; it is
a tribute which common justice demands on an unusual occasion. There
were ninety-nine chances in a hundred that Butler's life would never be
adequately, or even intelligently, recorded. Nature and circumstance had
done their best to make him obscure and incomprehensible. The situation
has been saved by two facts: the first, that Butler was excessively
interested in himself; the second, that Mr. Jones was always--not merely
since Butler's death, but always--excessively interested in Butler.
These are not conditions which are essential to the success of biography
in every case, especially when the general unanimity of admiration has
made all the contemporaries of a great man in some sort his biographers,
but they are absolutely required to preserve for us the features of an
eccentric and isolated person who failed almost all through his life to
attract admiration, and who laid himself out to be completely
misunderstood when the tide should at last turn in his favour. We are
preserved from such a loss by the meticulous attention which Samuel
Butler paid to himself, and by the infatuated zeal with which Mr. Jones
adopted, continued, and developed that attention. Butler lives twice
over, or rather has never ceased to live, in the mind and humour of Mr.
Henry Festing Jones.
We move in an age which prides itself more and more on being able to see
the mote in the eye of its immediate predecessor. But Samuel Butler was
the precursor of this rebellion, and is historically notable as the
earliest anti-Victorian. He was born at a moment which was to prove less
rich than almost any other of the remarkable nineteenth century, in
producing men who were to be eminent for intellectual talent. It almost
looks as though Nature, which had been so profuse, and was presently to
become so liberal again, paused for a few years, while she prepared to
let the Victorian Age proper wear itself out. The immediate
contemporaries of Butler were Shorthouse, whose _John Inglesant_ started
a new sentimentality, and William Morris, who combined a fresh aspect of
romance with an investigation of the bases of society which was
essentially revolutionary; with these were T. H. Green, who introduced a
new Hegelian spirit into philosophical speculation, and John Richard
Green, who re-examined the foundations of our history. But none of these
men displayed any real parallelism with Butler, by whose work they were
none of them at any time affected, and of whom perhaps none of them ever
heard. The only other name which can be quoted in this connexion is that
of Lecky, who may indeed be regarded as the exact opposite of Butler in
almost every respect--successful from earliest youth, at peace with the
world, reverently acceptive of every Victorian formula, and blandly
unconscious that everything was not permanently for the best in the best
of all possible worlds.
Butler is a curious example of a man of something very like genius, who
passed through a long life in the midst of intelligent fellow-men, not
rebuffing their attentions, but encouraging them; not escaping by a
mordid modesty from criticism, but doing everything in his power to
exasperate it; and yet failing to be observed. The strange thing about
his case is that he lived, mostly in London, for sixty-six years, and
that until nearly the close of that time scarcely anyone felt more than
the most tepid and casual curiosity about him. The only similar case
that occurs to the memory in the history of nineteenth-century
literature is Borrow, who in like manner, but not with a like desolating
completeness, simply was unable to catch the eye of criticism. When
each of these writers died, it seemed impossible that either of them
would ever occupy half a page in any history of literature. It now seems
equally difficult to suppose that any such history, if possessing the
least pretension to completeness, will in future omit either of them.
This is quite apart from any question which may present itself as to the
probability of a decline in the present "fashion" for them both. It
merely expresses the fact that while Borrow and Butler alike walked all
through their lives invisible, for the rest of time they must both be
patent, whether liked or disliked.
Borrow affected a certain disdain for the laudation which would not come
his way, and in later life seemed to have relinquished any desire to
move in the mouths of men. But Butler never ceased to long for fame, and
probably to expect it. Towards the close of his life, whenever he was
asked what new work might be expected from his ingenious pen, he used to
look demure and answer, "I am editing my remains; I wish 'to leave
everything in order for my executors.'" This was looked upon as a joke,
but it turns out to have been strictly true. No one ever laboured more
to appear at his best--in strict accordance with truth, but still, at
his best--to the world after his decease. His assiduities were like
those of the dying Narcissa--
And Betty, give those cheeks a little red,
One wouldn't, sure, look horrid when one's dead!
He recovered as many of his own letters as he could and annotated them;
he arranged the letters of his friends; he copied, edited, indexed, and
dated all this mass of correspondence, and he prepared those "Notes"
which have since his death provided his admirers with their choicest
repast. In doing all this he displayed an equal _naivete_ and
enthusiasm. Mr. Festing Jones, to whom all this industry has of course
been invaluable, puts the matter in a nutshell when he says that Butler
"was not contemplating publication, but neither was he contemplating
oblivion." He was simply putting the rouge-pot within Betty's reach.
Here is Butler's own account of the matter, and it throws a strong light
upon his character:
People sometimes give me to understand that it is a piece of
ridiculous conceit on my part to jot down so many notes about
myself, since it implies a confidence that I shall one day be
regarded as an interesting person. I answer that neither I nor they
can form any idea as to whether I shall be wanted when I am gone or
no. The chances are that I shall not.
But he was not inclined to take any risks. He was the residuary of his
own temperament, and if by chance posterity were to wake up and take a
violent interest in him, he personally would be to blame, and would
incur a very serious responsibility, if there were no documents
forthcoming to satisfy the curiosity of the new generation. It is to his
frank response to this instinct of self-preservation that we owe the
very exhaustive and faithful narrative of Mr. Festing Jones, as we did
the precious "Note-books" of 1912.
In consideration of the eagerness and sympathy with which Butler is
followed by an active group of admirers among the young writers of
to-day, it may be doubtful whether the extraordinary minuteness of
Butler's observation, continued as it is with an equally extraordinary
fullness by his biographer, may not have an evil effect in encouraging a
taste for excessive discursiveness in authorship of this class. There
have been very distinguished examples lately of abandonment to an
unchecked notation of detail. It is scarcely necessary to refer to the
texture of the later novels of Henry James, or to the amazing _Cote de
chez Swann_ of M. Marcel Proust, which latter is one of the most
characteristic successes of the moment. This widespread tendency to
consider every slight observation, whether phenomenal or emotional,
worthy of the gravest and tenderest analysis, develops at an epoch when
the world is becoming congested with printed matter, and when one might
imagine that conciseness and selection would be the qualities naturally
in fashion. Neither Samuel Butler nor his biographer conceives it
possible that anything can be negligible; to them the meanest flower
that blows by the wayside of experience gives thoughts that cannot be
brought to lie within one or even within ten pages. The complacency with
which Butler annotates his own childish letters to his mother is
equalled only by the gravity with which Mr. Jones examines those very
annotations.