As one reads the last fragment of the autobiography of Henry James, one
cannot help thinking of him as a convert giving his testimony. Henry
James was converted into an Englishman with the same sense of being born
again as is felt by many a convert to Christianity. He can speak of the
joy of it all only in superlatives. He had the convert's sense of--in
his own phrase--"agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know
how endearingly enough to name them I)." He speaks of "this really
prodigious flush" of his first full experience of England. He passes on
the effect of his religious rapture when he tells us that "really
wherever I looked, and still more wherever I pressed, I sank in and in
up to my nose." How breathlessly he conjures up the scene of his
dedication, as he calls it, in the coffee-room of a Liverpool hotel on
that gusty, "overwhelmingly English" March morning in 1869, on which at
the age of almost twenty-six he fortunately and fatally landed on these
shores,
with immediate intensities of appreciation, as I may call the
muffled accompaniment, for fear of almost indecently overnaming it.
He looks back, with how exquisite a humour and seriousness, on that
morning as having finally settled his destiny as an artist. "This doom,"
he writes:--
This doom of inordinate exposure to appearances, aspects, images,
every protrusive item almost, in the great beheld sum of things, I
regard ... as having settled upon me once for all while I observed,
for instance, that in England the plate of buttered muffins and its
cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after hot water had been
ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that circumstance in
a perfect cloud of accompaniments.
It is characteristic of Henry James that he should associate the hour in
which he turned to grace with a plate of buttered muffins. His fiction
remained to the end to some extent the tale of a buttered muffin. He
made mountains out of muffins all his days. His ecstasy and his
curiosity were nine times out of ten larger than their objects. Thus,
though he was intensely interested in English life, he was interested in
it, not in its largeness as life so much as in its littleness as a
museum, almost a museum of _bric-à-brac_. He was enthusiastic about the
waiter in the coffee-room in the Liverpool hotel chiefly as an
illustration of the works of the English novelists.
Again and again in his reminiscences one comes upon evidence that Henry
James arrived in England in the spirit of a collector, a connoisseur, as
well as that of a convert. His ecstasy was that of a convert: his
curiosity was that of a connoisseur. As he recalls his first experience
of a London eating-house of the old sort, with its "small compartments,
narrow as horse-stalls," he glories: in the sordidness of it all,
because "every face was a documentary scrap."
I said to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour
that this it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and
one could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for
one's elbows or one's feet, with an immunity from intermittance of
the "plain boiled" much better than one could dispense with that.
Here, again, one has an instance of the way in which the show of English
life revealed itself to Henry James as an exhibition of eating. "As one
sat there," he says of his reeking restaurant, "one _understood._" It is
in the same mood of the connoisseur on the track of a precious
discovery that he recalls "the very first occasion of my sallying forth
from Morley's Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house of
sustaining, of inspiring hospitality in the Kensington quarter." What an
epicure the man was! "The thrill of sundry invitations to breakfast"
still survived on his palate more than forty years afterwards. Not that
these meals were recalled as gorges of the stomach: they were merely
gorges of sensation, gorges of the sense of the past. The breakfasts
associated him "at a jump" with the ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and
Rogers. They had also a documentary value as "the exciting note of a
social order in which every one wasn't hurled straight, with the
momentum of rising, upon an office or a store...." It was one morning,
"beside Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-room, in Queen's Gate Terrace," that
his "thrilling opportunity" came to sit opposite to Mr. Frederic
Harrison, eminent in the eyes of the young American, not for his own
sake so much as because recently he had been the subject of Matthew
Arnold's banter. Everybody in England, like Mr. Harrison, seemed to
Henry James to _be_ somebody, or at least to have been talked about by
somebody. They were figures, not cyphers. They were characters in a play
with cross-references.
The beauty was ... that people had references, and that a reference
was then, to my mind, whether in a person or an object, the most
glittering, the most becoming ornament possible, a style of
decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures here and there,
whether animate or no, quite groan under the accumulation and the
weight of.
It is surprising that, loving this new life so ecstatically, James
should so seldom attempt to leave any detailed description of it in his
reminiscences. He is constantly describing his raptures: he only
occasionally describes the thing he was rapturous about. Almost all he
tells us about "the extravagant youth of the aesthetic period" is that
to live through it "was to seem privileged to such immensities as
history would find left her to record but with bated breath." He recalls
again "the particular sweetness of wonder" with which he haunted certain
pictures in the National Gallery, but it is himself, not the National
Gallery, that he writes about. Of Titian and Rembrandt and Rubens he
communicates nothing but the fact that "the cup of sensation was thereby
filled to overflowing." He does, indeed, give a slender description of
his first sight of Swinburne in the National Gallery, but the chief fact
even of this incident is that "I thrilled ... with the prodigy of this
circumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same breath with
Mr. Swinburne."
Thus the reminiscences are, in a sense, extraordinarily egotistic. This
is, however, not to condemn them. Henry James is, as I have already
said, his own greatest character, and his portrait of his excitements is
one of the most enrapturing things in the literature of autobiography.
He makes us share these excitements simply by telling us how excited he
was. They are exactly the sort of excitements all of us have felt on
being introduced to people and places and pictures we have dreamed about
from our youth. Who has not felt the same kind of joy as Henry James
felt when George Eliot allowed him to run for the doctor? "I shook off
my fellow-visitor," he relates, "for swifter cleaving of the air, and I
recall still feeling that I cleft it even in the dull four-wheeler."
After he had delivered his message, he "cherished for the rest of the
day the particular quality of my vibration." The occasion of the message
to the doctor seems strangely comic in the telling. On arriving at
George Eliot's, Henry James found one of G.H. Lewes's sons lying in
horrible pain in the middle of the floor, the heritage of an old
accident in the West Indies, or, as Henry James characteristically
describes it:--
a suffered onset from an angry bull, I seem to recall, who had
tossed or otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off, left him
considerably compromised.
There is something still more comic than this, however, to be got out of
his visits to George Eliot. The visit he paid her at Witley under the
"much-waved wing" of the irrepressible Mrs. Greville, who "knew no law
but that of innocent and exquisite aberration," had a superb conclusion,
which "left our adventure an approved ruin." As James was about to
leave, and indeed was at the step of the brougham with Mrs. Greville,
G.H. Lewes called on him to wait a moment. He returned to the
doorstep, and waited till Lewes hurried back across the hall, "shaking
high the pair of blue-bound volumes his allusion to the uninvited, the
verily importunate loan of which by Mrs. Greville had lingered on the
air after his dash in quest of them":--
"Ah, those books--take them away, please, away, away!" I hear him
unreservedly plead while he thrusts them again at me, and I scurry
back into our conveyance.
The blue-bound volumes happened to be a copy of Henry James's own new
book--a presentation copy he had given to Mrs. Greville, and she, in
turn, with the best intentions, had tried to leave with George Eliot, to
be read and admired. George Eliot and Lewes had failed to connect their
young visitor with the volumes. Hence a situation so comic that even its
victim could not but enjoy it:--
Our hosts hadn't so much as connected book with author, or author
with visitor, or visitor with anything but the convenience of his
ridding them of an unconsidered trifle; grudging, as they so
justifiedly did, the impingement of such matters on their
consciousness. The vivid demonstration of one's failure to
penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes's gesture, which
could scarcely have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom.
Henry James Was more fortunate in Tennyson as a host. Tennyson had read
at least one of his stories and liked it. All the same, James was
disappointed in Tennyson. He expected to find him a poet signed and
stamped, and found him only a booming bard. Not only was Tennyson not
Tennysonian: he was not quite real. His conversation came as a shock to
his guest:--
He struck me as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge.
As Tennyson read _Locksley Hall_ to his guests, Henry James had to pinch
himself, "not at all to keep from swooning, but much rather to set up
some rush of sensibility." What a lovely touch of malice there is in his
description of Tennyson on an occasion on which the ineffable Mrs.
Greville quoted some of his own verse to him:--
He took these things with a gruff philosophy, and could always
repay them, on the spot, in heavily-shovelled coin of the same
mint, since it _was_ a question of his genius.
Henry James ever retained a beautiful detachment of intellect, even
after his conversion. He was a wit as well as an enthusiast. _The Middle
Years_, indeed, is precious in every page for its wit as well as for its
confessional raptures. It may be objected that Henry James's wit is only
a new form of the old-fashioned periphrasis. He might be described as
the last of the periphrastic humorists. At the same time, if ever in any
book there was to be found the free play of an original genius--a genius
however limited and even little--it is surely in the autobiography of
Henry James. Those who can read it at all will read it with shining
eyes.