spills one into a rose-garden, and when Mr James produced a picture
gallery when he had intended a grave study of social differences, he was
in much that case. But already in _The Author of Beltraffio_ (1884) he
had shown his awareness of a movement which had started with the
intention of destroying both Christian morality and rationalism, and
otherwise making us fearfully gay, and which actually achieved the
slight mitigation of the offensiveness of plumbers' shop windows and the
recovery by Mr Henry James of control over his machine. That story is
not one of Mr James' best; the author makes his readers regard his scene
through so small a peephole that even the characters who are to be
conceived as above all retiring have to come grossly near if their
audience is to make anything of the drama at all. The theme is that an
author's wife who considers her husband's books objectionable lets her
child die rather than that he should grow up in the companionship of one
so utterly without reserve; yet, since the tale is told by a total
stranger who is visiting them for the week-end, she has necessarily to
behave with a lack of reserve that makes her imputed motive incredible.
The special value of the story lies in the moments when the author of
_Beltraffio_, whose affectation of a velveteen coat and a remote foreign
air makes us desire to scream out to the weekend visitor that he is
being fooled, and this is no writer but an artistic photographer,
remarks with some complacency that to the conventional he appears "no
better than an ancient Greek" and professes a thirst for "the
cultivation of beauty without reserve or precautions." Our happy
generation cannot understand these phrases which doubtless had their
salutary meaning for that distant day when England fed herself on so low
a diet that _Jude the Obscure_ seemed to her a maddening draught. But
they interest us by showing that even Mr James, who ordinarily turned
aside with so chill a wince from the ridiculous, had exposed his
consciousness to the aesthetic movement which had been remotely
engendered by Leigh Hunt's Cockney crow of joy at Italy and afterwards
fostered by Ruskin as one of his wild repartees to the railway train,
and which was then being given the middle-class touch by Oscar Wilde.
We feel surprised at Mr James' cognisance of anything so second-rate as
this Decadent Movement of the late eighties and early nineties, because
most of us basely judge it by its lack of worldly success instead of by
its moral mission. The elect of the movement, if one delves in the
memory of older Londoners, were certainly silly young men who were
careful about the laundering of their evening shirts and who tried to
introduce the tone of public-school life into ordinary society. And it
is true that for all their talk of art they produced nothing but one
good farce and a cartload of such weak, sweet verse as schoolgirls copy
into exercise-books, and that from this small effort they sank
exhausted down to prison, drink, madness, suicide; and struck whatever
other notes there be in the descending scale of personal disgrace. And
yet, for all its fruitlessness, that prattle about art gave them a valid
claim on our respect. Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was
poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were
confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who
wrote as though he were the offspring of two _Times_ leaders; among
novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too
prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach;
and in criticism Andrew Lang, who had admired Scott and Dickens in his
schooldays and was not going to let himself down by admiring anybody
nearer his own generation, greeted every exponent of the real with a
high piercing northern sneer. It was of inestimable value that it should
be cried, no matter in how pert a voice, that words are jewels which,
wisely set, make by their shining mental light. That the cry could not
save the young men who raised it, bore out their contention of the
time's need for it; if they, seeking new beauty, could but celebrate the
old dingy sins of towns, it showed in what a base age they had been
bred. And if they could not save themselves they saved others. Arnold
Bennett and H. G. Wells set off in the nineties in a world encouragingly
full of talk about good writing. Conrad, mouthing his difficult strange
tales about the sea, found an audience that would sit hushed. And in the
brain of one who, being then between forty and fifty years of age, might
have been thought inaccessible to new conceptions of the art that had
for so long preoccupied him, there passed important thoughts.
"That idea I picked up when I corrected George Eliot's proofs, oh! so
long ago!" one can imagine Mr James saying, "that idea that art must be
ballasted by didacticism can't be true for me. I've fined it down, in my
reading of the French, to an opinion that the artist should use his
fancy work to decorate useful articles; but still it isn't true for me.
For I must, before I can decorate them, make the useful articles of
thought my own, and they are just the one thing that for all my mental
wealth I can't acquire. I see them often enough in the shop-windows--the
moral and political and philosophical problems so prodigiously produced
by my age--and many times have tried the door, but to my touch it never
opens, so I have to describe them as I see them through the glass,
without having felt or known them with the intimacy of possession! It's
true I did once deal with a situation in the history of two peoples, but
I see now that in its international character there was an intimation
that it was the last with which I should ever effectively concern
myself. For I'm destructively not national; my mind is engraved with the
sights and social customs of half-a-dozen countries, and with the deep
traditions of not one, and how can I deal deeply with the conduct of a
people when I haven't a notion of the quality or quantity of the
traditions which are, after all, its mainspring? It seems to me that
the cry of "Art for Art's sake," which is being raised by those young
men, and which certainly isn't true for _them_, may be true for _me_.
What if henceforth I release the winged steed of my recording art from
the obligation of dragging up the steep hill of my inaptitude the dray
filled with the heavy goods which I have amassed in my perhaps so
mistaken desire for a respectably weighty subject, and let the poor
thing just beautifully soar?"
One perceives how far this mood had gone with Mr James when the hero of
_The Tragic Muse_ (1890) refuses a seat in Parliament and the hand of a
wealthy widow in order that he might go on painting. From Mr James, to
whom marrying a widow appeared as much superior to marrying a spinster
as privately acquiring a "piece" from the dispersed collection of a
deceased connoisseur of repute is to buying old furniture with no
guarantee but one's own approval, this was a portentous incident. And
there is vast significance in his sympathetic representation of Miriam
Rooth, the young actress to whom the title refers, for before this
period he would never have accepted the genius of the black-browed,
untidy girl as an excuse for her lack of money and social position and
manners. It had hitherto been his grimly expressed opinion that "the
life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations," and he
had refused to dramatise in his imagination anything concerning women
save their failures and successes as sexual beings; which is like
judging a cutlet not by its flavour, but by the condition of its
pink-paper frill. That time had gone. He had abandoned all his
prejudices in despair, and for many years to come was to show a divine
charity, freely permitting every encountered thing to impress its
essence on the receptive wax of his consciousness. For the next twelve
years "impressions," as in his happy foreign childhood, "were not merely
all right, but were the dearest things in the world."
IV
THE CRYSTAL BOWL
In that octagonal room at the Prado, where each wall is an altar raised
to beauty, because it is hung with pictures by Velasquez, in all the
lesser works one finds some intimation of the grave, fine personality
who produced all this wonder. At the sacred picture that was his first
one says, "He was a pupil, and very proud of painting the old things
better than the old men could, even though they meant nothing to him";
at the squat, black dwarfs, "He was so sure that the truth about the
world was kind that he could look upon horror without fear"; and at the
sketches of the Villa Medici Gardens, "After hot, bleak Spain he loved
Italy as one who has known passion loves a passionless girl." And the
recreated personality, tangible enough to be liked, passes with one
about the gallery until suddenly, before the masterpieces, it vanishes.
With those it had nothing to do; the thing that was his character,
shaped out of the innate traits of his dark stock by the raw beauty of
the land and the stiff rich life of the court, brought him to the
conception of these works but lay sleeping through their execution. When
he was painting _Las Hilanderas_ he knew nothing save that the weavers'
flesh glowed golden in the dusty sunlight of the factory; for the state
of genius consists of an utter surrender of the mind to the subject. The
artist at the moment of creation must be like a saint awaiting the
embrace of God, scourging appetite out of him, shrinking from sensation
as though it were a sin, deleting self, lifting his consciousness like
an empty cup to receive the heavenly draught.
And so, with the beginning of his second period of genius, the reading
of Mr James ceased to give us the companionship of the gentle, very
pleasant American who seemed homeless but quite serene, as though he
were tired of living in his boxes, but on the other hand was very fond
of travelling, that we had grown to like in his books of the eighties.
He went away and sent no letter; but instead, with a lavishness one
would never have suspected from his uneasy bearing, sent a succession of
jewels, great globed jewels of experience, from which marvellously
conceived characters gave out their milky gleams or fiery rays. The
first tentative try at the mere impression, _The Aspern Papers_ (1888),
gave an earnest of his generosity. There one passes into the golden glow
of Venice, "where the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of
the palaces all shimmer and melt together.... The gondola stopped, the
old palace was there.... How charming! it's grey and pink!" And under
the painted ceiling of the old palace sits bleached and shrivelled
Juliana Bordereau, the memory of her love affair with the great poet
Aspern hanging in the air like incense and filling the mind with tears
that such splendid lovers buy no immortality, but grow old like the
rest. Above its mere amusing story the tale breathes an elegy on the
many good things that are slain by age before death comes and decently
inters the body. For one watches, with a kind of comic horror that such
grimaces should touch the face that Jeffery Aspern kissed, the grin of
senile irony with which she meets the young American who comes to
wheedle her lover's letters out of her, with which she wheedles money
out of him that she may provide for the future of the poor spinster
niece who moves tremulously about her chair like a silly baaing sheep;
with which, one thinks, she possibly anticipates the dreadful moment
after her death when the spinster dodderingly informs the American that
she could give him her aunt's papers only "if you were a relation ... if
you weren't a stranger...." Every drop of beauty is squeezed out of the
material by a pressure so cool and controlled that, remembering how
Benvenuto Cellini "fell in his clothes and slept" after he had taken
similar small masterpieces from the furnace, one waits for his
exhaustion. But it was given to Mr James, perhaps because he was an
American and so of a stock oxygenated by contact with the free airs of
the new free lands, to swim longer in the sea of perfection than any
other writer. It was not until fifteen years later, when he was old and
the disciples of the movement which had stimulated him all shabbily
dead, and talk about art locked away in a dusty cupboard with the
Japanese fans and the blue china pots, that he turned tired and came to
shore.
He was sustained in this long swim by two beloved subjects, one bitter
and one sweet. The literary life was written about in those days almost
as much as it was talked about, and it was continually being used by the
young decadents as the occasion for predictions of their own later
squalor in which morphia and dark ladies, moulded in the likeness of
beautiful young Mrs Patrick Campbell, played parts which in the
subsequent realisation were taken by plain beer and plainer barmaids. Mr
James took up the poor, scribbled-about thing and turned it over very
reverently, none knowing better than he that the artist was the _sacer
vates_ of his time, and very sadly, because he had now close on thirty
years of intimacy with artists behind him. He had known Turgeniev, the
most "beautiful genius" of his age, and had found him rather lonely and
pre-eminently not eminent in the eyes of the world; he had seen the dark
days of Rossetti; he had trod so close on the heels of Alfred de Musset
as to know that _il s'absente trop de l'Academie parcequ'il s'absinthe
trop_; he had seen poor, fat little Zola, who thought that though one
could not build Rome in a day one could describe it in less, plodding
and sweating up the wrong road to art. And so, in a mood of clear
melancholy, with an occasional flash of irony which was doubtless the
sole comment wrung from his urbanity by the fact that that age, when the
change of the novel's price from thirty-one and sixpence to six
shillings had enormously increased the reading public, had brought no
enlargement of his circle of readers, he wrote that wonderful series of
stories which began with _The Lesson of the Master_ (1888) and included
_The Middle Years_ (1893), _The Next Time_ (1895), and _The Death of the
Lion_ (1894). Save for that roaring joke, _The Coxon Fund_ (1894), where
one sees Frank Saltram, a "free rearrangement of Coleridge," charming
and sponging on the rich, bringing into their drawing-rooms a swaying
body that should be taken home at once in a cab and a mind "like a
crystal suspended in the moral world--swinging and shining and flashing
there," these are all sad stories. The master is bullied out of being a
master by the financial importunities of a smart wife and comely
children; the author of _The Middle Years_ dies with none but an
acquaintance picked up at the seaside to hold his hand; Ralph Limbert is
killed by worry because he could not stop producing masterpieces when it
was the damned marketable asset that was required to pay the wages of
his wife's maid; the lion dies in a cold country house, with no fire in
his bedroom, while his hostess gets paragraphed for her charity to the
wild literary, and his last manuscript goes astray downstairs somewhere
between Lord Dorimont's man and Lady Augusta's maid. One knows next to
nothing at all about the faith consciously rejected or adopted by Henry
James, and whether the atmosphere of speculative theology in which he
was bred had made him think religion as far beyond his mental range as
mathematics, or whether Christianity seemed to him just the excuse of
the Latin races for building high cool places, very grateful in the
heat, and filling them with incense and images of kind, interceding
people. But in this melancholy series, and indeed in all his later
works--for right on to _The Golden Bowl_ (1905) he presents his
characters as being worthy of treatment just because they are in some
way or other struggling to preserve some decency from engulfment in the
common lot of nastiness--one perceives that he had been born with the
grim New England faith like a cold drop in his blood. The earth was a
vale of tears, and all one could do was to go on, uninfluenced by
weeping or the fear of weeping, to some high goal. This sad belief,
accompanied by so intense a consciousness that his particular goal, the
art of great writing, was reached by a stonier and longer path than any,
might have been expected to provoke him rather to the fury of Landor or
the gloomy pomposity of Wordsworth than to the unhurried, unimpassioned
production of these wonderful stories, these exquisite vessels that
swaggeringly hold and clearly show the contained draught of truth, like
tall-stemmed goblets of Venetian glass. But glass is the wrong image;
for no hand could ever break these, no critical eye detect a crack. They
are so truthfully conceived that one could compare them only to some
nobly infrangible substance, so realistic and yet so charged with
significance by their fashioning that their likeness must be something
which is transparent and yet gives the light a white fire as it passed
through. It is of crystal they are made, hard, luminous crystal.
Mr James' second subject, which began to show its white flowers in _The
Other House_ (1896) and went on blossoming long after winter had fallen
on his genius in _The Golden Bowl_, also showed him a son of New
England. For it consists of nothing else than the demonstration, in
varying and exquisitely selected circumstances, that blessed are the
pure in heart; and that was certainly the beatitude that New England,
with its fear of passion and publicity and its respect for spinsters and
pastors of bleached lives, most regarded. Mr James demonstrated it in no
spirit of moral propaganda, but for the technical reason that a
situation is greatly elucidated if one of the persons engaged presents a
consciousness like a polished silver surface, unobscured by any tracery
of selfish preoccupations, which clearly mirrors the other participients
and their movements. Perhaps he thereby discovered the real meaning of
the beatitude, which may be no more than an expression of the obvious
truth that he who receives the fullest impression of the world is likely
to react most valuably to it. Certainly he invented a technical trick
which in its way was as important as the discovery which Ibsen was
making about the same time and which he himself used later in his last
masterpiece, that if one had a really "great" scene one ought to leave
it out and describe it simply by the full relation of its consequences.
He showed that all sorts of things that are amusing enough to write
about and are yet too ignoble for dignified art are lent the required
nobility by being witnessed by grave candour; and that characters whose
special claim is that they are "strange," but whose strangeness cannot
be laboured by direct description lest they become crude, can have the
gaps in their representation filled out by their effect on the simple.
Rose Armiger, in _The Other House_, is made much more horrible because
she exposes her dreadful passion before the simplicity of Tony Bream,
just as a striped poisonous snake would seem more striped and poisonous
if it flickered its black fang from an English rose-bush. The awfulness
of Ida Farange, whose handsome appearance constituted "an abuse of
visibility," of Beale Farange, whose vast scented beard was, since odd
ladies liked to play with it, ultimately his chief source of income,
would never have been important enough to be recorded if they had not
formed a part of _What Maisie Knew_ (1897); and the ensnarement of Sir
Claude, her first step-parent, who was such a good fellow to talk to
when his gaze didn't wander to the dark young woman in red who was
sweeping into dinner or to the shining limbs of a Dieppe fishwife, by
the beautiful, genteel young trollop who was her second step-parent,
would have been a matter too _louche_ for representation if Maisie had
not so beautifully cared for him. The battle over _The Spoils of
Poynton_ (1897), where the greedy mother tries to defend the fine
"things" of her dead husband's house from her imbecile son's vulgar
bride, would be too unrelievedly a history of greed to be borne were not
exquisite Fleda Vetch in the foreground, being fond of the mother,
loving the son. The best ghost story in the world, _The Turn of the
Screw_ (1898), is the more ghostly because the apparitions of the valet
and the governess, appearing at the dangerous place, the top of the
tower on the other side of the lake, that they may tempt the children
they corrupted in their lives to join them in their eternal torment, are
seen by the clear eyes of the honourable and fearless lady who tells the
tale. And _In the Cage_ (1898) has no subject but the purity of the
romantic little telegraphist who sits behind the wire netting at the
grocer's. Her heart is like a well of clear water, through which, when
the handsome Guardsman comes in to send a telegram to his mistress, love
strikes down like a shaft of light.
One pauses, horrified to find oneself ticking off these masterpieces on
one's fingers, as though they were so many books by Mrs Humphry Ward or
buns by Lyons. And yet what can one do? Criticism must break down when
it comes to masterpieces. For if one is creative one wants to go away
and spend oneself utterly on this sacred business of creation, wring out
of oneself every drop of this inestimable thing art; and if one is not
creative one can only put out a tremulous finger to touch the marvellous
shining crystal, and be silent with wonder. Deep wonder, since these are
not, as fools have pretended, merely rich treatments of the trivial. For
although he could not grasp a complicated abstraction, was teased by the
implications of a great cause, and angered by an idea that could be
understood only by the synthesis of many references, he could dive down
serenely, like a practised diver going under the sea for pearls, into
the twilit depths of the heart to seize his secrets. There is in
humanity an instinct for ritual, there lies in all of us a desire to
commemorate our deep emotions, that would otherwise glow in our bosoms
and die down for ever, by some form that adds to the beauty of the
world; but there is only one expression of it in literature that is not
poisonously silly. Newman and the Tractarians and Monsignor Benson make
the ritualist seem as big a fool as the old woman who carries a potato
in her pocket to ward off rheumatism. Sabatier makes him seem the kind
of person who takes sugar in his tea, paints in water-colour and likes
_The Roadmender_. But there is a story by Henry James called _The Altar
of the Dead_, rejected again and again by the caste of cretins who edit
the magazines and reviews of this unhappy country, although of so
perfect a beauty that one can read every separate paragraph every day of
one's life for the music of the sentences and the loveliness of the
presented images, which takes ritual from the trembling hands of the
coped old men and exhibits it as something that those who love the
natural frame of things and hate superstition need not fear to accept.
It tells how an ageing man acquires an altar in a Roman Catholic church
and burns at it candles to his many dead, and by worshipping there keeps
so close company with their charity and sweetness that, at his end, the
blaze of white lights inspires him to a last supreme act of forgiveness
to an enemy; and the beautiful recital makes one's mind no longer fear
to admit that the splendour of a Cathedral Mass may, although one's
unbelief fly like an arrow through the show and transfix even the Cross
itself, fulfil a noble need. Once at least Henry James poured into his
crystal goblet the red wine that nourishes the soul.