man's mind, which is tragedy, in _The Wings of the Dove_ (1902). That
story is the perfect example of what he had declared in _The Tragic
Muse_ the artistic performance should always be: "the application, clear
and calculated, crystal-firm, as it were, of the idea conceived in the
glow of experience, of suffering, of joy." For Milly Theale, the
American heiress, "who had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great
account could have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived
with them; such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet
making it light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it
clear as noon; of being unmistakably sad and yet making it soft as
dusk," whose hopeful progress through Europe stops suddenly at the dark
portal in Harley Street, is but the ghost of Mary Temple, whose death
thirty years before had been felt by Henry and William James as the end
of their youth. All those years he had held in his heart the memory of
that poor girl, "conscious of a great capacity for life, but early
stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite while also
enamoured of the world; aware, moreover, of the condemnation and
passionately desiring to 'put in' before extinction as many of the finer
vibrations as possible and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the
sense of having lived"; but with the prescience of the artist he had
delayed until he had perfected his art to undertake the heavy task of
presenting her tragedy without mitigation and yet making it bearable and
beautiful. Then he lavished his technical resources on her history as he
might have laid flowers on her grave. There is nothing more miraculous
in all his works than the way he contrives that, when her agony becomes
too great to be directly represented and has to be suggested by its
effect upon others, he yet breaks no link of the intimacy between the
reader and his heroine, but provides that her increasing physical
absence shall be so compensated for by her spiritual presence that her
rare appearances are like long-expected visits from a distant friend.
One's knowledge of her glows into love when one sees her holding a
reception in the faded golden splendours of the Venetian palace to which
she has dragged herself to die, smiling bravely at her guests, bidding
musicians strike up to keep them gay, playing, to preserve her hands
from any gesture of anguish or appearance of lassitude, with the rope of
pearls that seems to weigh down her wasted body. Yet one gets one's
vision through the hard, envious eyes of Kate Croy, who is the hawk
circling over the poor dying dove, and the appalled gaze of Merton
Densher, Kate's secret lover, whom she has trapped into a profession of
love for Milly so that the deluded girl will leave him her fortune. And
one sees her most radiantly of all in the interview which she grants to
Densher when she has discovered the cruel fraud practised on her and is
dying of the knowledge, although one is told no more than that "she
received me just as usual, in that glorious great _salone_, in the dress
she always wears, from her inveterate corner of her sofa." From the love
it lit in his heart, a love so great that for very shame Kate cannot
marry him even when her machinations have achieved complete success at
Milly's death, one perceives that this was the dying girl's assumption,
that her sweetness and strength must at that hour have flowered so
divinely that the skies opened and they were no longer matter for a
human history. But about this masterpiece, too, there can be nothing
said. One just sits and looks up, while the Master lifts his old grief,
changed by his craftsmanship into eternal beauty as the wafer is changed
to the Host by the priest's liturgy, enclosed from decay, prisoned in
perfection, in the great shining crystal bowl of his art.
V
THE GOLDEN BOWL
The signs of age appeared in Mr James' work like white streaks in a
black beard; between two vital and vigorous books there would appear one
that in its garrulity and complacent surrender to mannerism predicted
decay. It became clear, first of all, that he was no longer able to bear
up with serenity under his deep sense that life was a vale of tears. How
much he wished it would all stop is manifest in that strangest of all
visions of Paradise, _The Great Good Place_ (1900). We all have our
hopes of what gifts the hereafter may bring us, and in most cases we
desire some compensation for the limitations of our human knowledge; we
promise ourselves that when we lean over the gold bar of heaven a
competent angel will bustle up, clasping innumerable divinely clear
text-books under its wings, to tell us absolutely everything about
physics, with special reference to the movements of the heavenly bodies
spinning below. But it is the essence of Mr James' Paradise that there
is nothing there at all but a climate, a sweet soft climate in which the
most that happens is one of those summer sprinkles that brings out
smells. This fatigue of life, this hunger for the peace of nothingness,
showed itself in his increasing preference for laying the scene of his
novels in the great good places of this earth, where there is nothing
more dangerous in the parks and on the terraces than deer and peacocks,
and nothing more disturbing to the soul in the high rooms and
interminable galleries than well-bred women. It was not a gain to his
art; under its influence he committed the twittering over teacups which
compose the collection of short stories called _The Better Sort_ (1903),
and the incidentally beautiful but devastatingly artificial _The Awkward
Age_ (1899), in which the reader is perpetually confused because Nanda
Brookenham, one of the most charming of Mr James' "pure in heart," is
wept over as though she had been violated body and soul, when all that
has happened is that she has been brought up in a faster set than the
world thinks desirable for a young unmarried girl. And it was peculiarly
unfortunate that, while his subjects grew flimsier and his settings more
impressive, his style became more and more elaborate. With sentences
vast as the granite blocks of the Pyramids and a scene that would have
made a site for a capital he set about constructing a story the size of
a hen-house. The type of these unhappier efforts of Mr James' genius is
_The Sacred Fount_ (1901), where, with a respect for the mere gross
largeness and expensiveness of the country house which almost makes one
write the author Mr Jeames, he records how a week-end visitor spends
more intellectual force than Kant can have used on _The Critique of Pure
Reason_ in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists
between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more
interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows. The
finely wrought descriptions of the leisured life make one feel as though
one sat in a beautiful old castle, granting its beauty but not pleased,
because one is a prisoner, while the small, mean story worries one like
a rat nibbling at the wainscot. One takes it as significant that the
unnamed host and hostess of the party never appear save to "give
signals." The tiny, desperate figures this phrase shows to the mind's
eye, semaphoring to each other across incredibly extended polished
vistas to keep up their courage under these looming, soaring vaults, may
be taken as symbols of the heart and intellect which Mr James had now
forgotten in his elaboration of their social envelope.
But with this method, as in every form of literary activity save only
playwriting, in which he was rather worse than Sidney Grundy in much the
same way, Mr James gained his radiant triumphs. There could be nothing
more trivial than the _donnee_ of _The Ambassadors_ (1903); there is no
dignity or significance in the situation of Lambert Strether, an
American who is engaged, in that odd way common to Mr James' characters,
to a woman whom he certainly does not love and hardly seems to like, and
goes at her bidding to Paris to cut her cubbish son clear from an
entanglement with a Frenchwoman. And yet so artfully is the tale
displayed in the setting of lovely, clean, white Paris and green France,
lifting her poplars into the serene strong light of the French sky, that
the reader holds his breath over the story of how Strether "had come
with a view that might have been figured by a clear, green liquid, say,
in a neat glass phial; and the liquid, once poured into the open cup of
_application_, once exposed to the action of another air, had begun to
turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on
its way to purple, to black, to yellow"; how, in fact, the old
"international situation" acted on the new generation of Americans. But
that book is not typical of this period, for it is singularly free from
those great sentences which sprawl over the pages of _The Golden Bowl_
with such an effect of rank vegetable growth that one feels that if one
took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden. And it is
those sentences which absorb, at the last, the whole of Mr James'
attention.
For he ceased, as time went on, to pay any attention to the emotional
values of his stories; it is one of the strangest things about _The
Golden Bowl_ that the frame on which there hangs the most elaborate
integument of suggestion and exposition ever woven by the mind of man is
an ugly and incompletely invented story about some people who are
sexually mad. Adam Verver, an American millionaire, buys an Italian
prince for his daughter Maggie, and in her turn she arranges a marriage
between her father and Charlotte, her school friend, because she thinks
he may be lonely without her. And although it is plain that people who
buy "made-up" marriages are more awful than the admittedly awful people
who buy "made-up" ties, they are presented to one as vibrating
exquisitely to every fine chord of life, as thinking about each other
with the anxious subtlety of lovers, as so steeped in a sense of one
another that they invent a sea of poetic phrases, beautiful images,
discerning metaphors that break on the reader's mind like the unceasing
surf. And when one tries to discover from the recorded speeches of these
people whether there was no palliation of their ugly circumstances one
finds that the dialogue, usually so compact a raft for the conveyance of
the meaning of Mr James' novels, has been smashed up on this sea of
phrases and drifts in, a plank at a time, on the copious flood:
"Maggie happened to learn, by some other man's greeting of him, in
the bright Roman way, from a street corner as we passed, that one
of the Prince's baptismal names, the one always used for him among
his relations, was Amerigo; which--as you probably don't know,
however, even after a lifetime of _me_--was the name, four hundred
years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the
sea, in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had
failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new
continent; so the thought of any connection with him can even now
thrill our artless breasts."
And as if it was not enough that these people should say literally
unspeakable sentences like that, and do incredible things, the phrases
make them do things which they never did. For the metaphors are so
beautifully and completely presented to the mind that it retains them as
having as real and physical an existence as the facts. When we learn
that the relationship between Charlotte and the Prince had reared itself
in Maggie's life like "some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda,
a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and
adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled ever
so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs," and the simile is cunningly
developed for seven or eight hundred words, one is left with a confused
impression that a pagoda formed part of the furniture at Portland Place
and that Maggie oddly elected to keep her husband inside it. And to cap
it all these people are not even human, for their thoughts concerning
their relationships are so impassioned and so elaborate that they can
never have had either energy or time for the consideration of anything
else in the world. A race of creatures so inveterately specialist as
Maggie Verver could never have attained man's mastery over environment,
but would still be specialising on the cocoa-nut or some such simple
form of diet.
Decidedly _The Golden Bowl_ is not good as a novel; but what it is
supremely good as can be discovered when one learns how, in these later
days, Mr James used to compose his novels. He began by dictating a short
draft which, even in the case of such a cartload of apes and ivory as
_The Golden Bowl_, might be no longer than thirty thousand words. Then
he would take this draft in his hand and would dictate it all over again
with what he intended to be enlightening additions, but which, since
the mere act of talking set all his family on to something quite
different from the art of letters, made it less and less of a novel. For
the James family had, as was shown by their father's many reported
phrases, by William James' charm as a lecturer, and by the social
greatness of Robertson James, a genius for conversation. For long years
it had remained latent in Henry James, who had in youth suffered much
from that stockishness which often comes to those who are burning all
their energy for creative purposes and have none left for personal
display; but latterly it had been liberated by the consciousness of
maturity and fame. At last it became a passion with him, and he decided
to converse, not only with his friends, but with his public. This was
bad for his novels, so long as one considered them as such, since a
novel should be the presentation and explanation of a subject while a
conversation is a fantasia of entertaining phrases on themes the
essentials of which are to some extent already in the possession of the
interlocutors. But once one considers them as a flow of bright things
said about people Mr James knows and that one rather thinks one has met,
but is not quite sure, one perceives that the crystal bowl of Mr James'
art was not, as one had feared, broken. He had but gilded its clear
sides with the gold of his genius for phrase-making, and now, instead of
lifting it with a priest-like gesture to exhibit a noble subject, held
it on his knees as a treasured piece of bric-a-brac and tossed into it,
with an increasing carelessness, any sort of subject--a jewel, a rose, a
bit of string, a visiting-card--confident that the surrounding golden
glow would lend it beauty. Indiscriminately he dropped into it his
precious visions of his revisited motherland, in _The American Scene_
(1907); the dry little anecdotes of _The Finer Grain_ (1910); the
tittering triviality of _The Outcry_ (1911); and his judgment of his own
works in the prefaces to the New York edition of the _Novels and Tales
of Henry James_ (1908-1909).
Always it was good, rambling talk, although fissured now and then with
an old man's lapses into tiresomeness, when he split hairs until there
were no longer any hairs to split and his mental gesture became merely
the making of agitated passes over a complete baldness.
And here and there the prose achieves a beauty of its own; but it is no
longer the beauty of a living thing, but rather the "made" beauty which
bases its claims to admiration chiefly on its ingenuity, like those
crystal clocks with jewelled works and figures moving as the hours
chimed, which were the glory of mediaeval palaces.
* * * * *
William James died in 1910, and Henry James, who had already begun to
savour the bitterness of outliving brothers and friends and pets, whiled
away the next few years of separation from his adored brother in the
composition of two beautiful books about their childhood and youth, _A
Small Boy_ (1913), and _Notes of a Son and Brother_ (1914), and a third
autobiographical volume which is not yet published. Then came the
European War, in which he enlisted as a spiritual soldier. By
innumerable beautiful acts, by kindly visits to French and Belgian
refugees and wounded soldiers, by gifts of money and writings to war
charities, he raised an altar to the dead who had died for the countries
which he had always loved at the hands of the country which, ever since
he was a student at Bonn, he had always loathed. In July, 1915, he took
the great step, fraught for him with the deepest emotions, of renouncing
his American citizenship and becoming a naturalised British subject; and
in January, 1916, he did England the further honour of accepting the
Order of Merit. And on 28th February, 1916, he died, leaving the white
light of his genius to shine out for the eternal comfort of the mind of
man.
A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MR HENRY JAMES' PRINCIPAL WORKS
[A complete bibliography of the works of Mr James would form a much
thicker volume than this book. A useful bibliography up to 1906,
compiled by Mr. Frederick Allen King, is included as an appendix in Miss
Elisabeth Luther Cary's _The Novels of Henry James_ (Putnam); and a
complete bibliography covering the same period, which gives an
interesting list of his early unsigned contributions to periodicals, has
been compiled by Mr Leroy Phillips and published by Messrs Constable.
The following bibliography records only the first editions of
publications in book form.]
The American (_Ward, Lock_). 1877.
French Poets and Novelists (_Macmillan_). 1878.
The Europeans (_Macmillan_). 1878.
Roderick Hudson (_Macmillan_). 1879.
Daisy Miller. An International Episode. Four Meetings (_Macmillan_).
1879.
The Madonna of the Future. Longstaff's Marriage. Madame de Mauves.
Eugene Pickering. The Diary of a Man of Fifty. Benvolio (_Macmillan_).
1879.
Hawthorne (_Macmillan_). Included in English Men of Letters Series,
edited by John Morley. 1879.
Confidence (_Chatto & Windus_). 1880.
Washington Square. The Pension Beaurepas. A Bundle of Letters
(_Macmillan_). 1881.
The Portrait of a Lady (_Macmillan_). 1881.
Portraits of Places (_Macmillan_). 1883.
Tales of Three Cities: The Impressions of a Cousin. Lady Barbarina. A
New England Winter (_Macmillan_). 1884.
Stories Revived: Vol. I. The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. The Path of
Duty. A Day of Days. A Light Man. Vol. II. Georgina's Reasons. A
Passionate Pilgrim. A Landscape Painter. Rose-Agathe. Vol. III. Poor
Richard. The Last of the Valerii. Master Eustace. The Romance of Certain
Old Clothes. A Most Extraordinary Case (_Macmillan_). 1885.
The Bostonians (_Macmillan_). 1886.
The Princess Casamassima (_Macmillan_). 1886.
The Reverberator (_Macmillan_). 1888.
The Aspern Papers. Louisa Pallant. The Modern Warning (_Macmillan_).
1888.
Partial Portraits (Macmillan). 1888.
A London Life. The Patagonia. The Liar. Mrs Temperley (_Macmillan_).
1889.
The Tragic Muse (_Macmillan_). 1890.
The Lesson of the Master. The Marriages. The Pupil. Brooksmith. The
Solution. Sir Edmund Orme (_Macmillan_). 1892.
The Real Thing. Sir Dominick Ferrand. Nona Vincent. The Chaperon.
Greville Fane (_Macmillan_). 1893.
The Private Life. The Wheel of Time. Lord Beaupre. The Visits.
Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1893.
Essays in London (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1893.
Theatricals: Two Comedies. Tenants. Disengaged (_Osgood, McIlvaine_).
1894.
Theatricals: Second Series. The Album. The Reprobate (_Osgood,
McIlvaine_). 1895.
Terminations: The Death of the Lion. The Coxon Fund. The Middle Years.
The Altar of the Dead (_Heinemann_). 1895.
Embarrassments: The Figure in the Carpet. Glasses. The Next Time. The
Way it Came (_Heinemann_) 1896.
The Other House (_Heinemann_). 1896.
The Spoils of Poynton (_Heinemann_). 1897.
What Maisie Knew (_Heinemann_). 1897.
In the Cage (_Duckworth_). 1898.
The Two Magics. The Turn of the Screw. Covering End (_Macmillan_). 1898.
The Awkward Age (_Heinemann_). 1899.
The Soft Side: The Great Good Place. "Europe." Paste. The Real Right
Thing. The Great Condition. The Tree of Knowledge. The Abasement of the
Northmores. The Given Case. John Delavoy. The Third Person. Maud-Evelyn.
Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie (_Methuen_). 1900.
The Sacred Fount (_Methuen_). 1901.
The Wings of the Dove (_Constable_). 1902.
The Better Sort: Broken Wings. The Beldonald Holbein. The Two Faces. The
Tone of Time. The Special Type. Mrs Medwin. Flickerbridge. The Story in
It. The Beast in the Jungle. The Birthplace. The Papers (_Methuen_).
1903.
The Ambassadors (_Methuen_). 1903.
William Wetmore Story and his Friends (_Blackwood_). 1903.
The Golden Bowl (_Methuen_). 1905.
English Hours (_Heinemann_). 1905.
The American Scene (_Chapman & Hall_). 1907.
Italian Hours (_Heinemann_). 1909.
The Finer Grain: The Velvet Glove. Mora Montravers. A Round of Visits.
Crapy Cornelia. The Bench of Desolation (_Methuen_). 1910.
The Outcry (_Methuen_). 1911.
A Small Boy (_Macmillan_). 1913.
Notes of a Son and Brother (_Macmillan_). 1914.
Notes on Novelists (_Dent_). 1914.
A Collection of Novels and Tales by Henry James was published by Messrs
Macmillan in 1883. This consisted of reprints of The Portrait of a Lady,
Roderick Hudson, The American, Washington Square, The Europeans,
Confidence, Madame de Mauves, An International Episode, The Pension
Beaurepas, Daisy Miller, Four Meetings, Longstaff's Marriage, Benvolio,
The Madonna of the Future, A Bundle of Letters, The Diary of a Man of
Fifty, and Eugene Pickering; and two stories, The Siege of London and
The Point of View, which had not before been published in England.
The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was
published by Messrs Macmillan during 1908-1909. Each novel and each
volume of short stories has a critical preface by the author, and each
volume has a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn as frontispiece. The
following is the order:--
1. Roderick Hudson. 2. The American. 3, 4. The Portrait of a Lady. 5, 6.
The Princess Casamassima. 7, 8. The Tragic Muse. 9. The Awkward Age. 10.
The Spoils of Poynton; A London Life; The Chaperon. 11. What Maisie
Knew; In the Cage; The Pupil. 12. The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the
Screw; The Liar; The Two Faces. 13. The Reverberator; Madame de Mauves;
A Passionate Pilgrim; The Madonna of the Future; Louisa Pallant. 14.
Lady Barbarina; The Siege of London; An International Episode; The
Pension Beaurepas; A Bundle of Letters; The Point of View. 15. The
Lesson of the Master; The Death of the Lion; The Next Time; The Figure
in the Carpet; The Coxon Fund. 16. The Author of Beltraffio; The Middle
Years; Greville Fane; Broken Wings; The Tree of Knowledge; The Abasement
of the Northmores; The Great Good Place; Four Meetings; Paste; Europe;
Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie; Fordham Castle. 17. The Altar of the Dead;
The Beast in the Jungle; The Birthplace; The Private Life; Owen
Wingrave; The Friends of the Friends; Sir Edmund Orme; The Real Right
Thing; The Jolly Corner; Julia Bride. 18. Daisy Miller; Pandora; The
Patagonia; The Marriages; The Real Thing; Brooksmith; The Beldonald
Holbein; The Story in It; Flickerbridge; Mrs Medwin. 19, 20. The
Ambassadors. 21, 22. The Wings of the Dove. 23, 24. The Golden Bowl.
Fordham Castle, The Jolly Corner and Julia Bride had not previously been
published. All the early works have been subjected to a revision which
in several cases, notably Daisy Miller and Four Meetings, amounts to
their ruin.
AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
[When the contents of collections of short stories have been given in
full in the English bibliography they are entered here by their title
only.]
A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales: The Last of the Valerii. Eugene
Pickering. The Madonna of the Future. The Romance of Certain Old
Clothes. Madame de Mauves (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher,
_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1875.
Transatlantic Sketches: Articles reprinted from _The Nation_, _The
Atlantic Monthly_, and _The Galaxy_ (_James R. Osgood_; present
publishers, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1875.
Roderick Hudson (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton,
Mifflin_). 1876.
The American (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton,
Mifflin_). 1877.
Watch and Ward (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton,
Mifflin_). 1878.
The Europeans (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton,
Mifflin_). 1878.
Daisy Miller (_Harper_). 1878.
An International Episode (_Harper_). 1878.
Hawthorne (_Harper_). 1880.
The Diary of a Man of Fifty and A Bundle of Letters (_Harper_). 1880.
Confidence (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton Mifflin_).
1880.