Title: Henry James at Work
Author: Bosanquet, Theodora
Language: English
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THE HOGARTH ESSAYS


HENRY JAMES AT WORK


BY



THEODORA BOSANQUET



HENRY JAMES AT WORK



I


I knew nothing of Henry James beyond the revelation of his novels and
tales before the summer of 1907. Then, as I sat in a top-floor office
near Whitehall one August morning, compiling a very full index to the
Report of the Royal Commission on Coast Erosion, my ears were struck by
the astonishing sound of passages from _The Ambassadors_ being dictated
to a young typist. Neglecting my Blue-book, I turned round to watch the
operator ticking off sentences which seemed to be at least as much of a
surprise to her as they were to me. When my bewilderment had broken into
a question, I learnt that Henry James was on the point of coming back
from Italy, that he had asked to be provided with an amanuensis, and
that the lady at the typewriter was making acquaintance with his style.
Without any hopeful design of supplanting her, I lodged an immediate
petition that I might be allowed the next opportunity of filling the
post, supposing she should ever abandon it. I was told, to my amazement,
that I need not wait. The established candidate was not enthusiastic
about the prospect before her, was even genuinely relieved to look in
another direction. If I set about practising typewriting on a Remington
machine at once, I could be interviewed by Henry James as soon as he
arrived in London. Within an hour I had begun work on the typewriter. By
the time he was ready to interview me, I could tap out paragraphs of
_The Ambassadors_ at quite a fair speed.

He asked no questions at that interview about my speed on a typewriter
or about anything else. The friend to whom he had applied for an
amanuensis had told him that I was sufficiently the right young woman
for his purpose and he relied on her word. He had, at the best, little
hope of any young woman beyond docility. We sat in armchairs on either
side of a fireless grate while we observed each other. I suppose he
found me harmless and I know that I found him overwhelming. He was much
more massive than I had expected, much broader and stouter and stronger.
I remembered that someone had told me he used to be taken for a
sea-captain when he wore a beard, but it was clear that now, with the
beard shaved away, he would hardly have passed for, say, an admiral, in
spite of the keen gray eyes set in a face burned to a colourable
sea-faring brown by the Italian sun. No successful naval officer could
have afforded to keep that sensitive mobile mouth. After the interview I
wondered what kind of impression one might have gained from a chance
encounter in some such observation cell as a railway carriage. Would it
have been possible to fit him confidently into any single category? He
had reacted with so much success against both the American accent and
the English manner that he seemed only doubtfully Anglo-Saxon. He might
perhaps have been some species of disguised cardinal, or even a Roman
nobleman amusing himself by playing the part of a Sussex squire. The
observer could at least have guessed that any part he chose to assume
would be finely conceived and generously played, for his features were
all cast in the classical mould of greatness. He might very well have
been a merciful Cæsar or a benevolent Napoleon, and a painter who
worked at his portrait a year or two later was excusably reminded of so
many illustrious makers of history that he declared it to be a hard task
to isolate the individual character of the model.

If the interview was overwhelming, it had none of the usual awkwardness
of such curious conversations. Instead of critical angles and
disconcerting silences, there were only benign curves and ample
reassurances. There was encouraging gaiety in an expanse of bright check
waistcoat. He invited me to ask any questions I liked, but I had none to
ask. I wanted nothing but to be allowed to go to Rye and work his
typewriter. He was prepared, however, with his statements and, once I
was seated opposite to him, the strong, slow stream of his deliberate
speech played over me without ceasing. He had it on his mind to tell me
the conditions of life and labour at Rye, and he unburdened himself
fully, with numberless amplifications and qualifications but without any
real break. It would be a dull business, he warned me, and I should
probably find Rye a dull place. He told me of rooms in Mermaid Street,
"very simple, rustic and antique--but that is the case for everything
near my house, and this particular little old house is very near mine,
and I know the good woman for kind and worthy and a convenient cook and
in short----." It was settled at once that I should take the rooms, that
I should begin my duties in October.



II


Since winter was approaching, Henry James had begun to use a panelled,
green-painted room on the upper floor of Lamb House for his work. It was
known simply as the green room. It had many advantages as a winter
workroom, for it was small enough to be easily warmed and a wide south
window caught all the morning sunshine. The window overhung the smooth,
green lawn, shaded in summer by a mulberry tree, surrounded by roses and
enclosed behind a tall, bride wall. It never failed to give the owner
pleasure to look out of this window at his charming English garden where
he could watch his English gardener digging the flower-beds or mowing
the lawn or sweeping up fallen leaves. There was another window for the
afternoon sun, looking towards Winchelsea and doubly glazed against the
force of the westerly gales. Three high bookcases, two big writing-desks
and an easy chair filled most of the space in the green room, but left
enough dear floor for a restricted amount of the pacing exercise that
was indispensable to literary composition. On summer days Henry James
liked better to work in the large "garden room" which gave him a longer
stretch for perambulation and a window overlooking the cobbled street
that curved up the hill past his door. He liked to be able to relieve
the tension of a difficult sentence by a glance down the street; he
enjoyed hailing a passing friend or watching a motor-car pant up the
sharp little slope. The sight of one of these vehicles could be counted
on to draw from him a vigorous outburst of amazement, admiration, or
horror for the complications of an age that produced such efficient
monsters for gobbling protective distance.

The business of acting as a medium between the spoken and the
typewritten word was at first as alarming as it was fascinating. The
most handsome and expensive typewriters exercise as vicious an influence
as any others over the spelling of the operator, and the new pattern of
a Remington machine which I found installed offered a few additional
problems. But Henry James's patience during my struggles with that
baffling mechanism was unfailing--he watched me helplessly, for he was
one of the few men without the smallest pretension to the understanding
of a machine--and he was as easy to spell from as an open dictionary.
The experience of years had evidently taught him that it was not safe to
leave any word of more than one syllable to luck. He took pains to
pronounce every pronounceable letter, he always spelt out words which
the ear might confuse with others, and he never left a single,
punctuation mark unuttered, except sometimes that necessary point, the
full stop. Occasionally, in a low "aside" he would interject a few words
for the enlightenment of the amanuensis, adding, for instance, after
spelling out "The Newcomes," that the words were the title of a novel by
one Thackeray.

The practice of dictation was begun in the nineties. By 1907 it was a
confirmed habit, its effects being easily recognizable in his style,
which became more and more like free, involved, unanswered talk. "I
know," he once said to me, "that I'm too diffuse when I'm dictating."
But he found dictation not only an easier but a more inspiring method of
composing than writing with his own hand, and he considered that the
gain in expression more than compensated for any loss of concision. The
spelling out of the words, the indication of commas, were scarcely felt
as a drag on the movement of his thought. "It all seems," he once
explained, "to be so much more effectively and unceasingly _pulled_ out
of me in speech than in writing." Indeed, at the time when I began to
work for him, he had reached a stage at which the click of a Remington
machine acted as a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose
to the music of any other make. During a fortnight when the Remington
was out of order he dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident
discomfort, and he found it almost impossibly disconcerting to speak to
something that made no responsive sound at all. Once or twice when he
was ill and in bed I took down a note or two by hand, but as a rule he
liked to have the typewriter moved into his bedroom for even the
shortest letters. Yet there were to the end certain kinds of work which
he was obliged to do with a pen. Plays, if they were to be kept within
the limits of possible performance, and short stories, if they were to
remain within the bounds of publication in a monthly magazine, must be
written by hand. He was well aware that the manual labour of writing was
his best aid to a desired brevity. The plays--such a play as _The
Outcry_, for instance--were copied straight from his manuscript, since
he was too much afraid of "the murderous limits of the English theatre"
to risk the temptation of dictation and embroidery. With the short
stories he allowed himself a little more freedom, dictating them from
his written draft and expanding them as he went to an extent which
inevitably defeated his original purpose. It is almost literally true to
say of the sheaf of tales collected in _The Finer Grain_ that they were
all written in response to a single request for a short story for
_Harper's Monthly Magazine._ The length was to be about 5,000 words and
each promising idea was cultivated in the optimistic belief that it
would produce a flower too frail and small to demand any exhaustive
treatment. But even under pressure of being written by hand, with
dictated interpolations rigidly restricted, each in turn pushed out to
lengths that no chopping could reduce to the word limit. The tale
eventually printed was _Crapy Cornelia_, but, although it was the
shortest of the batch, it was thought too long to be published in one
number and appeared in two sections, to the great annoyance of the
author.



III


The method adopted for full-length novels was very different. With a
clear run of 100,000 words or more before him, Henry James always
cherished the delusive expectation of being able to fit his theme quite
easily between the covers of a volume. It was not until he was more than
half way through that the problem of space began to be embarrassing. At
the beginning he had no questions of compression to attend to, and he
"broke ground," as he said, by talking to himself day by day about the
characters and construction until the persons and their actions were
vividly present to his inward eye. This soliloquy was of course recorded
on the typewriter. He had from far back tended to dramatize all the
material that life gave him, and he more and more prefigured his novels
as staged performances, arranged in acts and scenes, with the characters
making their observed entrances and exits. These scenes he worked out
until he felt himself so thoroughly possessed of the action that he
could begin on the dictation of the book itself--a process which has
been incorrectly described by one critic as re-dictation from a rough
draft. It was nothing of the kind. Owners of the volumes containing _The
Ivory Tower_ or _The Sense of the Past_ have only to turn to the Notes
printed at the end to see that the scenario dictated in advance contains
practically none of the phrases used in the final work. The two sets of
Notes are a different and a much more interesting literary record than a
mere draft. They are the framework set up for imagination to clothe with
the spun web of life. But they are not bare framework. They are
elaborate and abundant. They are the kind of exercise described in _The
Death of the Lion_ as "a great gossiping eloquent letter--the overflow
into talk of an artist's amorous design." But the design was thus mapped
out with the clear understanding that at a later stage and at closer
quarters the subject might grow away from the plan. "In the intimacy of
composition pre-noted proportions and arrangements do most uncommonly
insist on making themselves different by shifts and variations, always
improving, which impose themselves as one goes and keep the door open
always to something more right and _more_ related. It is subject to that
constant possibility, all the while, that one does pre-note and
tentatively sketch."[1]

The preliminary sketch was seldom consulted after the novel began to
take permanent shape, but the same method of "talking out" was resorted
to at difficult points of the narrative as it progressed, always for the
sake of testing in advance the values of the persons involved in a given
situation, so that their creator should ensure their right action both
for the development of the drama and the truth of their relations to
each other. The knowledge of all the conscious motives and concealments
of his creatures, gained by unwearied observation of their attitudes
behind the scenes, enabled Henry James to exhibit them with a final
confidence that dispensed with explanations. Among certain stumbling
blocks in the path of the perfect comprehension of his readers is their
uneasy doubt of the sincerity of the conversational encounters recorded.
Most novelists provide some clue to help their readers to distinguish
truth from falsehood, and in the theatre, although husbands and wives
may be deceived by lies, the audience is usually privy to the plot. But
a study of the Notes to _The Ivory Tower_ will make it clear that
between the people created by Henry James lying is as frequent as among
mortals and not any easier to detect.

For the volumes of memories, _A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and
Brother_, and the uncompleted _Middle Years_, no preliminary work was
needed. A straight dive into the past brought to the surface treasure
after treasure, a wealth of material which became embarrassing. The
earlier book was begun in 1911, after Henry James had returned from a
year in the United States, where he had been called by his brother's
fatal illness. He had come back, after many seasons of country solitude,
to his former love of the friendly London winter, and for the first few
months after his return from America he lodged near the Reform Club and
came to the old house in Chelsea where I was living and where he had
taken a room for his work. It was a quiet room, long and narrow and
rather dark--he used to speak of it as "my Chelsea cellar." There he
settled down to write what, as he outlined it to me, was to be a set of
notes to his brother William's early letters, prefaced by a brief
account of the family into which they were both born. But an entire
volume of memories was finished before bringing William to an age for
writing letters, and _A Small Boy_ came to a rather abrupt end as a
result of the writer's sudden decision that a break must be made at once
if the flood of remembrance was not to drown his pious intention.

It was extraordinarily easy for him to recover the past; he had always
been sensitive to impressions and his mind was stored with records of
exposure. All he had to do was to render his sense of those records as
adequately as he could. Each morning, after reading over the pages
written the day before, he would settle down in a chair for an hour or
so of conscious effort. Then, lifted on a rising tide of inspiration, he
would get up and pace up and down the room, sounding out the periods in
tones of resonant assurance. At such times he was beyond reach of
irrelevant sounds or sights. Hosts of cats--a tribe he usually routed
with shouts of execration--might wail outside the window, phalanxes of
motor-cars bearing dreaded visitors might hoot at the door. He heard
nothing of them. The only thing that could arrest his progress was the
escape of the word he wanted to use. When that had vanished he broke off
the rhythmic pacing and made his way to a chimney-piece or book-case
tall enough to support his elbows while he rested his head in his hands
and audibly pursued the fugitive.


[Footnote 1: _The Ivory Tower_ (Collini, 1917), p. 341.]



IV


In the autumn of 1907, when I began to tap the Remington typewriter at
Henry James's dictation, he was engaged on the arduous task of preparing
his Novels and Tales for the definitive New York edition, published in
1909. Since it was only between breakfast and luncheon that he undertook
what he called "inventive" work, he gave the hours from half-past ten to
half-past one to the composition of the prefaces which are so
interesting a feature of the edition. In the evenings he read over again
the work of former years, treating the printed pages like so many
proof-sheets of extremely corrupt text. The revision was a task he had
seen in advance as formidable. He had cultivated the habit of forgetting
past achievements almost to the pitch of a sincere conviction that
nothing he had written before about 1890 could come with any shred of
credit through the ordeal of a critical inspection. On a morning when he
was obliged to give time to the selection of a set of tales for a
forthcoming volume, he confessed that the difficulty of selection was
mainly the difficulty of reading them at all. "They seem," he said, "so
bad until I _have_ read them that I can't force myself to go through
them except with a pen in my hand, altering as I go the crudities and
ineptitudes that to my sense deform each page." Unfamiliarity and
adverse prejudice are rare advantages for a writer to bring to the task
of choosing among his works. For Henry James the prejudice might give
way to half reluctant appreciation as the unfamiliarity passed into
recognition, but it must be clear to every reader of the prefaces that
he never lost the sense of being paternally responsible for two distinct
families. For the earlier brood, acknowledged fruit of his alliance with
Romance, he claimed indulgence on the ground of their youthful
spontaneity, their confident assurance, their rather touching good
faith. One catches echoes of a plea that these elderly youngsters may
not be too closely compared, to their inevitable disadvantage, with the
richly endowed, the carefully bred, the highly civilized and sensitized
children of his second marriage, contracted with that wealthy bride,
Experience. Attentive readers of the novels may perhaps find the
distinction between the two groups less remarkable than it seemed to
their writer. They may even wonder whether the second marriage was not
rather a silver wedding, with the old romantic mistress cleverly
disguised as a woman of the world. The different note was possibly due
more to the substitution of dictation for pen and ink than to any
profound change of heart. But whatever the reason, their author
certainly found it necessary to spend a good deal of time working on the
earlier tales before he considered them fit for appearance in the
company of those composed later. Some members of the elder family he
entirely cast off, not counting them worth the expense of completely new
clothes. Others he left in their place more from a necessary, though
deprecated, respect for the declared taste of the reading public than
because he loved them for their own sake. It would, for instance, have
been difficult to exclude _Daisy Miller_ from any representative
collection of his work, yet the popularity of the tale had become almost
a grievance. To be acclaimed as the author of _Daisy Miller_ by persons
blandly unconscious of _The Wings of the Dove_ or _The Golden Bowl_ was
a reason among many for Henry James's despair of intelligent
comprehension. Confronted repeatedly with Daisy, he felt himself rather
in the position of some _grande dame_ who, with a jewel-case of
sparkling diamonds, is constrained by her admirers always to appear in
the simple string of moonstones worn at her first dance.

From the moment he began to read over the earlier tales, he found
himself involved in a highly practical examination of the scope and
limits of permissible revision. Poets, as he pointed out, have often
revised their verse with good effect. Why should the novelist not have
equal license? The only sound reason for not altering anything is a
conviction that it cannot be improved. It was Henry James's profound
conviction that he could improve his early writing in nearly every
sentence. Not to revise would have been to confess to a loss of faith in
himself, and it was not likely that the writer who had fasted for forty
years in the wilderness of British and American misconceptions without
yielding a scrap of intellectual integrity to editorial or publishing
tempters should have lost faith in himself. But he was well aware that
the game of revision must be played with a due observance of the rules.
He knew that no novelist can safely afford to repudiate his fundamental
understanding with his readers that the tale he has to tell is at least
as true as history and the figures he has set in motion at least as
independently alive as the people we see in offices and motor-cars. He
allowed himself few freedoms with any recorded appearances or actions,
although occasionally the temptation to correct a false gesture, to make
it "right," was too strong to be resisted. We have a pleasant instance
of this correction in the second version of _The American._ At her first
appearance, the old Marquise de Bellegarde had acknowledged the
introduction of Newman by returning his handshake "with a sort of
British positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the
Earl of St. Dunstan's." In the later edition she behaves differently.
"Newman came sufficiently near to the old lady by the fire to take in
that she would offer him no handshake.... Madame de Bellegarde looked
hard at him and refused what she did refuse with a sort of British
positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the Earl of
St. Dunstan's." There were good reasons why the Marquise should have
denied Newman a welcoming handshake. Her attitude throughout the book
was to be consistently hostile and should never have been compromised by
the significantly British grip. Yet it is almost shocking to see her
snatching back her first card after playing it for so many years. She
was to perform less credible actions than shaking hands with an innocent
American, as her progenitor knew very well. He invited his readers, in
the preface to _The American_, to observe the impossible behaviour of
the noble Bellegarde family, but he realized that since they had been
begotten in absurdity the Bellegardes could under no stress of revision
achieve a very solid humanity. The best he could do for them was to let
a faint consciousness flush the mind of Valentin, the only detached
member of the family. In the first edition Valentin warned his friend of
the Bellegarde peculiarities with the easy good faith of the younger
Henry James under the spell of the magic word "Europe. My mother is
strange, my brother is strange, and I verily believe I am stranger than
either. Old trees have queer cracks, old races have odd secrets." To
this statement he added in the revised version: "We're fit for a museum
or a Balzac novel." A comparable growth of ironic perception was allowed
to Roderick Hudson, whose comment on Rowland's admission of his
heroically silent passion for Mary Garland, "It's like something in a
novel," was altered to: "It's like something in a bad novel."



V


But the legitimate business of revision was, for Henry James, neither
substitution nor re-arrangement. It was the demonstration of values
implicit in the earlier work, the retrieval of neglected opportunities
for adequate "renderings. It was," as he explained in his final
preface, "all sensibly, as if the clear matter being still there, even
as a shining expanse of snow spread over a plain, my exploring tread,
for application to it, had quite unlearned the old pace and found itself
naturally falling into another, which might sometimes more or less agree
with the original tracks, but might most often, or very nearly, break
the surface at other places. What was thus predominantly interesting to
note, at all events, was the high spontaneity of these deviations and
differences, which become thus things not of choice but of immediate and
perfect necessity: necessity to the end of dealing with the quantities
in question at all." On every page the act of re-reading became
automatically one with the act of re-writing, and the revised parts are
just "those rigid conditions of re-perusal, registered; so many close
notes, as who should say, on the particular vision of the matter itself
that experience had at last made the only possible one." These are words
written with the clear confidence of the artist who, in complete
possession of his "faculties," had no need to bother himself with doubts
as to his ability to write better at the end of a lifetime of hard work
and varied experience than at the beginning. He knew he could write
better. His readers have not always agreed with his own view. They have
denounced the multiplication of qualifying clauses, the imposition of a
system of punctuation which, although rigid and orderly, occasionally
fails to act as a guide to immediate comprehension of the writer's
intention, and the increasing passion for adverbial interpositions.
"Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt," was Henry
James's reply to a criticism which once came to his ears.

It must be admitted that the case for the revised version relies on
other merits than simplicity or elegance to make its claim good. It is
not so smooth, nor so easy, nor, on the whole, so pretty as the older
form. But it is nearly always richer and more alive. Abstractions give
place to sharp definite images, loose vague phrases to close-locked
significances. We can find a fair example of this in _The Madonna of the
Future_, a tale first published in 1879. In the original version one of
the sentences runs: "His professions, somehow, were all half
professions, and his allusions to his work and circumstances left
something dimly ambiguous in the background." In the New York Edition
this has become: "His professions were practically somehow, all masks
and screens, and his personal allusions as to his ambiguous background
mere wavings of the dim lantern." In some passages it would be hard to
deny a gain of beauty as well as of significance. There is, for
instance, a sentence in the earlier account of Newman's silent
renunciation of his meditated revenge, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame:
"He sat a long time; he heard far-away bells chiming off, at long
intervals, to the rest of the world." In the definitive edition of _The
American_ the passage has become: "He sat a long time; he heard far-away
bells chiming off into space, at long intervals, the big bronze
syllables of the Word."

A paragraph from _Four Meetings_, a tale worked over with extreme care,
will give a fair idea of the general effect of the revision. It records
a moment of the final Meeting, when the helplessly indignant narrator is
watching poor Caroline ministering to the vulgar French cocotte who has
imposed herself on the hospitality of the innocent little New Englander.

"At this moment," runs the passage of 1879, "Caroline Spencer came out
of the house bearing a coffee pot on a little tray. I noticed that on
her way from the door to the table she gave me a single quick vaguely
appealing glance. I wondered what it signified; I felt that it signified
a sort of half-frightened longing to know what, as a man of the world
who had been in France, I thought of the Countess. It made me extremely
uncomfortable. I could not tell her that the Countess was very possibly
the runaway wife of a little hairdresser. I tried, suddenly, on the
contrary, to show a high consideration for her."

The "particular vision" registered on re-perusal reveals states of mind
much more definite than these wonderings and longings and vague appeals.

"Our hostess moreover at this moment came out of the house, bearing a
coffee-pot and three cups on a neat little tray. I took from her eyes,
as she approached us, a brief but intense appeal--the mute expression,
as I felt, conveyed in the hardest little look she had yet addressed me,
of her longing to know what as a man of the world in general and of the
French world in particular, I thought of these allied forces now so
encamped on the stricken field of her life. I could only 'act,' however,
as they said at North Verona, quite impenetrably--only make no answering
sign. I couldn't intimate, much less could I frankly utter, my inward
sense of the Countess's probable past, with its measure of her virtue,
value and accomplishments, and of the limits of consideration to which
she could properly pretend. I couldn't give my friend a hint of how I
myself personally 'saw' her interesting pensioner--whether as the
runaway wife of a too-jealous hairdresser or of a too-morose
pastry-cook, say; whether as a very small bourgeoise, in fine, who had
vitiated her case beyond patching up, or even some character of the
nomadic sort, less edifying still. I couldn't let in, by the jog of a
shutter, as it were, a hard informing ray and then, washing my hands of
the business, turn my back for ever. I could on the contrary but save
the situation, my own at least, for the moment, by pulling myself
together with a master hand and appearing to ignore everything but that
the dreadful person between us _was_ a 'grande dame.'"

Anyone genuinely interested in "the how and the whence and the why these
intenser lights of experience come into being and insist on shining,"
will find it a profitable exercise to read and compare the old and the
new versions of any of the novels or tales first published during the
'seventies or 'eighties. Such a reader will be qualified to decide for
himself between the opinion of a bold young critic that "all the works
have been subjected to a revision which in several cases, notably _Daisy
Miller_ and _Four Meetings_, amounts to their ruin," and their writer's
confidence that "I shouldn't have breathed upon the old catastrophes and
accidents, the old wounds and mutilations and disfigurements wholly in
vain. . . . I have prayed that the finer air of the better form may
sufficiently seem to hang about them and gild them over--at least for
readers, however few, at all _curious_ of questions of air and form."



VI


Explanatory prefaces and elaborate revisions, short stories and long
memories, were far from being the complete tale of literary labour
during the last eight years of Henry James's life. A new era for English
drama was prophesied in 1907. Led by Miss Horniman, advocates of the
repertory system were marching forward, capturing one by one the
intellectual centres of the provinces. In London, repertory seasons were
announced in two West-end theatres. Actor-managers began to ask for
"non-commercial" plays and when their appeal reached Henry James it met
with a quick response. The theatre had both allured and repelled him for
many years, and he had already been the victim of a theatrical
misadventure. His assertions that he wrote plays solely in the hope of
making money should not, I think, be taken as the complete explanation
of his dramas. It is pretty clear that he wrote plays because he wanted
to write them, because he was convinced that his instinct for dramatic
situations could find a happy outlet in plays, because writing for the
stage is a game rich in precise rules and he delighted in the
multiplication of technical difficulties, and because he lived in
circles more addicted to the intelligent criticism of plays than to the
intelligent criticism of novels. The plays he wrote in the early
'nineties are very careful exercises in technique. They are derived
straight from the light comedies of the Parisian stage, with the
difference that in the 'nineties, for all their advertised naughtiness,
there were even stricter limits to the free representation of Parisian
situations on English stages than there are to-day. In _The Reprobate_,
a play successfully produced a few years ago by the Stage Society, the
lady whose hair has changed from black to red and from red to gold is
the centre of the drama, she holds the key to the position, but all her
complicating effect depends upon the past--pasts being allowed on every
stage comparative license of reference. The compromising evidence is all
a matter of old photographs and letters, and the play loses in vividness
whatever it may gain in respectability. Nobody knew better than the
author that _The Reprobate_ was not a good play. Terror of being cut
forbade him to work on a subject of intrinsic importance. With another
hour guaranteed, a playwright might attempt anything, but "he does not
get his hour, and he will probably begin by missing his subjects. He
takes, in his dread of complication, a minor one, and it's heavy odds
that the minor one, with the habit of small natures, will prove
thankless."

Other early plays had been converted into novels or tales and so
published. One of these, written originally for Miss Ellen Terry but
never produced by her, had appeared as an incongruous companion to _The
Turn of the Screw_ in the volume entitled _The Two Magics._ A few
attentive readers had seen the dramatic possibilities of _Covering End_,
and when it was suggested to Henry James that he should convert it into
a three-act comedy for production by Mr. Forbes Robertson (as he was
then) and Miss Gertrude Elliot, he willingly consented. Flying under a
new flag, as _The High Bid_, the play was produced in London in
February, 1909, but only for a series of matinées, the prodigious
success of _The Passing of the Third Floor Back_ precluding the
possibility of an evening for any other production under the same
management. Under the inspiration of the repertory movement, other
material was re-cast for acting. _The Other House_ was re-dictated as a
tragedy. _Owen Wingrave_ became _The Saloon_, a one-act play produced by
Miss Gertrude Kingston in 1910. Finally an entirely new three-act
comedy, _The Outcry_, was written round the highly topical subject of
the sale of art treasures to rich Americans. It was not produced during
Henry James's life. At the time when it should have been rehearsed he
was ill and the production was postponed. On his recovery, he went to
the United States for a year, and when he came back the day of repertory
performances had died in a fresh night of stars.

When _The Outcry_ was given by the Stage Society in 1917, it was evident
that the actors were embarrassed by their lines, for by 1909, when the
play was written, the men and women of Henry James could talk only in
the manner of their creator. His own speech, assisted by the practice of
dictating, had by that time become so inveterately characteristic that
his questions to a railway clerk about a ticket or to a fishmonger about
a lobster, might easily be recognized as coined in the same mint as his
addresses to the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature.
Apart from this difficulty of enunciating the lines, _The Outcry_ has
all the advantages over the earlier plays. The characters are real and
they act from adequate motives. The solution of the presented problem,
which requires, like most of the author's solutions, a change of heart,
is worked out with admirable art, without any use of the mechanical
shifts and stage properties needed in _The Reprobate._ It is not very
difficult to believe that if Henry James had been encouraged twenty
years earlier to go on writing plays he might have made a name as a
dramatist, but the faithful may be forgiven for rejoicing that the
playwright was sacrificed to the novelist and critic.



VII


Many men whose prime business is the art of writing find rest and
refreshment in other occupations. They marry, or they keep dogs, they
play golf or bridge, they study Sanskrit or collect postage stamps.
Except for a period of ownership of a dachshund, Henry James did none of
these things. He lived a life consecrated to the service of a jealous,
insatiable, and supremely rewarding goddess, and all his activities had
essential reference to that service. He had a great belief in the
virtues of air and exercise, and he was expert at making a walk of two
or three miles last for as many hours by his habit of punctuating
movement with frequent and prolonged halts for meditation or
conversation. He liked the exhilaration of driving in a motor-car, which
gave him, he said, "a sense of spiritual adventure." He liked a
communicative companion. Indeed the cultivation of friendships may be
said to have been his sole recreation. To the very end of his life he
was quick to recognize every chance of forming a friendly relation,
swift to act on his recognition, and beautifully ready to protect and
nourish the warm life of engendered affection. His letters, especially
those written in his later years, are more than anything else great
generous gestures of remembrance, gathering up and embracing his
correspondents much as his talk would gather up his hearers and sweep
them along on a rising flood of eloquence.

But that fine capacity for forming and maintaining a "relation" worked,
inevitably, within definite limits. He was obliged to create impassable
barriers between himself and the rest of mankind before he could stretch
out his eager hands over safe walls to beckon and to bless. He loved his
friends, but he was condemned by the law of his being to keep clear of
any really entangling net of human affection and exaction. His contacts
had to be subordinate, or indeed ancillary, to the vocation he had
followed with a single passion from the time when, as a small boy, he
obtained a report from his tutor as showing no great aptitude for
anything but a felicitous rendering of La Fontaine's fables into
English. Nothing could be allowed to interfere for long with the labour
from which Henry James never rested, unless perhaps during sleep. When
his "morning stint of inventive work" was over, he went forth to the
renewed assault of the impressions that were always lying in wait for
him. He was perpetually and mercilessly exposed, incessantly occupied
with the task of assimilating his experience, freeing the pure workable
metal from the base, remoulding it into new beauty with the aid of every
device of his craft. He used his friends not, as some incompletely
inspired artists do, as in themselves the material of his art, but as
the sources of his material. He took everything they could give and he
gave it back in his books. With this constant preoccupation, it was
natural that the people least interesting to him were the comparatively
dumb. To be "inarticulate" was for him the cardinal social sin. It
amounted to a wilful withholding of treasures of alien experience. And
if he could extract no satisfaction from contemplating the keepers of
golden silence, he could gain little more from intercourse with the
numerous persons he dismissed from his attention as "simple organisms."
These he held to be mere waste of any writer's time, and it was
characteristic that his constant appreciation of the works of Mrs.
Wharton was baffled by the popularity of _Ethan Frome_, because he
considered that the gifted author had spent her labour on creatures too
easily comprehensible to be worth her pains. He greatly preferred _The
Reef_, where, as he said, "she deals with persons really fine and
complicated."

We might arrive at the same conclusion from a study of the prefaces to
the New York Edition. More often than not, the initial idea for a tale
came to Henry James through the medium of other people's talk. From a
welter of anecdote he could unerringly pick out the living nucleus for a
reconstructed and balanced work of art. His instinct for selection was
admirable, and he could afford to let it range freely among a profusion
of proffered subjects, secure that it would alight on the most
promising. But he liked to have the subjects presented with a little
artful discrimination, even in the first instance. He was dependent on
conversation, but it must be educated and up to a point intelligent
conversation. There is an early letter written from Italy in 1874, in
which he complains of having hardly spoken to an Italian creature in
nearly a year's sojourn, "save washerwomen and waiters. This, you'll
say, is my own stupidity," he continues, "but granting this gladly, it
proves that even a creature addicted as much to sentimentalizing as I am
over the whole _mise en scène_ of Italian life, doesn't find an easy
initiation into what lies behind it. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the
pitifulness of this absurd want of reciprocity between Italy itself and
all my rhapsodies about it." Other wanderers might have found more of
Italy in washerwomen and waiters, here guaranteed to be the true native
article, than in all the nobility of Rome or the Anglo-Americans of
Venice, but that was not Henry James's way. For him neither pearls nor
diamonds fell from the lips of waiters and washerwomen, and princesses
never walked in his world disguised as goosegirls.

Friendships are maintained by the communication of speech and letters.
Henry James was a voluminous letter-writer and exhaustively
communicative in his talk upon every subject but one, his own work,
which was his own real life. It was not because he was indifferent to
what people thought of his books that he evaded discussion about them.
He was always touched and pleased by any evidence that he had been
intelligently read, but he never went a step out of his way to seek this
assurance. He found it safest to assume that nobody read him, and he
liked his friends none the worse for their incapacity. Meanwhile, the
volumes of his published works--visible, palpable, readable proof of
that unceasing travail of the creative spirit which was always labouring
behind the barrier of his silence--piled themselves up year after year,
to be dropped on to the tables of booksellers and pushed on to the
shelves of libraries, to be bought and cherished by the faithful,
ignored by the multitude, and treated as a test of mental endurance by
the kind of person who organized the Browning Society. Fortunately for
literature, Henry James did not lend himself to exploitation by any
Jacobean Society. Instead of inventing riddles for prize students, he
scattered about his pages a number of pregnant passages containing all
the clues that are needed for keeping up with him. It was his theory
that if readers didn't keep up with him--as they admittedly didn't
always--the fault was entirely in their failure of attention. There are
revelations in his books, just as he declared them to be in the works of
Neil Paraday. "Extract the opinion, disengage the answer--these are the
real acts of homage."



VIII


From his familiar correspondence we need not hope to extract as
considered an opinion or as definite an answer as from the novels, but
his letters are extraordinarily valuable as sidelights, helping us to
see how it happened that any man was able to progress along so straight
a path from one end of his life to another. The two Volumes of memories
are clear evidence of the kind of temperamental make-up with which Henry
James was gifted, the two volumes of letters show how his life
contributed to preserve and enhance his rare capacity for taking and
keeping impressions. They show him too as unusually impervious to
everything which is not an impression of visual images or a sense of a
human situation. He was very little troubled by a number of ideas which
press with an increasing weight upon the minds of most educated persons.
Not until the outbreak of the Great War was he moved to utter a forcible
"opinion" about affairs outside his personal range. He was delightfully
free from the common delusion that by grouping individuals in arbitrary
classes and by twisting harmless adjectives into abstract nouns it is
possible for us to think of more than one thing at a time and to
conceive of qualities apart from their manifestation. What he saw he
possessed; what he understood he criticized, but he never reckoned it to
be any part of his business to sit in judgment on the deeds of men
working in alien material for inartistic ends, or to speculate about the
nature of the universe or the conflict or reconciliation of science with
religion. He could let Huxley and Gladstone, the combatant champions of
Darwinism and orthodox theology, enrich the pages of a single letter
without any reference to their respective beliefs. "Huxley is a very
genial, comfortable being . . . But of course my talk with him is mere
amiable generalities." Of Gladstone there is a little more, but again
the personal impression is the thing sought. "I was glad of a chance to
feel the 'personality' of a great political leader--or as G. is now
thought here even, I think, by his partisans, ex-leader. That of
Gladstone is very fascinating--his urbanity extreme--his eye that of a
man of genius--and his apparent self-surrender to what he is talking of
without a flaw. He made a great impression on me." One would like to
know what the subject was to which Gladstone had surrendered himself in
his talk with this entranced young American, who must surely, for his
part, have been as much reduced conversationally to "mere amiable
generalities" as on the occasion of his meeting Huxley. It is difficult
to think of a single likely point of contact between the minds of
Gladstone and Henry James. But that, for delicacy of registration, was
an advantage. The recording instrument could perform its work without
the hindrance of any distraction of attention from the man himself to
the matter of his speech, which did not presumably contain any germ for
cultivation into fiction.

His nationality saved Henry James from the common English necessity of
taking a side in the political game; and in the United States nobody of
his world had expected him to be interested in politics. There is a
pleasant account in _The Middle Years_ of his blankness when he was
asked at a London breakfast-table for "distinctness about General
Grant's first cabinet, upon the formation of which the light of the
newspaper happened then to beat." The question was embarrassing. "There
were, it appeared, things of interest taking place in America, and I had
had, in this absurd manner, to come to England to learn it: I had had
over there on the ground itself no conception of any such
matter--nothing of the smallest interest, by any perception of mine, as
I suppose I should still blush to recall, had taken place in America
since the War." Nothing of any great public interest, by any perception
of his, was to take place in Europe until the outbreak of another war at
that time far beyond the range of speculation. But if cabinets and
parties and politics were and remained outside the pale of his
sensibility, he was none the less charmed by the customs of a country
where Members of Parliament and Civil Servants could meet together for a
leisurely breakfast, thus striking "the exciting note of a social order
in which everyone wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising,
upon an office or a store."



IX


Henry James came to England to admire. But his early reverence for the
men and women of an island with so fine and ancient a historic tone as
Great Britain soon faded. He had forgotten, in the first passion of
acquaintance, that the English are born afresh in every generation and
are about as new as young Americans, differing from them chiefly in
having other forms of domestic and ecclesiastical architecture and
smoother lawns to take for granted. He looked at old stone castles and
Tudor brickwork, at great hanging eaves and immemorial gardens, and then
he looked at the heirs of this heritage and listened intently for their
speech. This was disappointing, partly because they spoke so little. "I
rarely remember," he wrote when he had lived through several London
months, "to have heard on English lips any other intellectual verdict
(no matter under what provocation) than this broad synthesis 'so
immensely clever.' What exasperates you is not that they can't say more
but that they wouldn't if they could."

How different was this inarticulate world from the fine civilization of
Boston, from the cultivated circle that gathered round Charles Eliot
Norton at Shady Hill. To that circle he appealed for sympathy,
complaining that he was "sinking into dull British acceptance and
conformity. . . . I am losing my standard--my charming little standard
that I used to think so high; my standard of wit, of grace, of good
manners, of vivacity, of urbanity, of intelligence, of what makes an
easy and natural style of intercourse! And this in consequence of having
dined out during the past winter 107 times!" Great men, or at the least
men with great names, swam into his ken and he condemned them. Ruskin
was "weakness pure and simple." In Paris he found that he could
"easily--more than easily--see all round Flaubert intellectually." A
happy Sunday evening at Madame Viardot's provoked a curious reflection
on the capacity of celebrated Europeans to behave absurdly and the
incapacity of celebrated Americans to indulge in similar antics. "It was
both strange and sweet to see poor Turgenev acting charades of the most
extravagant description, dressed out in old shawls, and masks, going on
all fours, etc. The charades are their usual Sunday evening occupation
and the good faith with which Turgenev, at his age and with his glories,
can go into them is a striking example of the truth of that spontaneity
which Europeans have and we have not. Fancy Longfellow, Lowell, or
Charles Norton doing the like and every Sunday evening!"

Whether or not all celebrated Americans behave with invariable decorum,
the astonished spectator of Turgenev's performance had no temptation to
"do the like." His appearance among a company of artists and writers
gathered together in a country village during the late summer of 1886
has been characteristically recorded by Mr. Edmund Gosse. "Henry James
was the only sedate one of us all--benign, indulgent, but grave, and not
often unbending beyond a genial chuckle. . . . It is remembered with
what affability he wore a garland of flowers at a birthday feast, and
even, nobly descending, took part one night in a cakewalk. But mostly,
though not much our senior, he was serious, mildly avuncular, but very
happy and unupbraiding."

By that time Henry James was at his ease in England. The inhabitants
were no longer either gods or imbeciles. Through the general British fog
he had perceived gleams of intelligence shining on his bewilderment. He
was no longer wholly dependent on Boston for refreshment. He could fall
back upon the company of Mr. Edmund Gosse and he had found a friend in
R. L. Stevenson. The little handful of Islanders possessed of a genuine
interest in the art of letters and the criticism of life emerged from
the obscurity, and he made out that, on the whole, there were perhaps
about as many civilized people in England as in his native land. Yet he
was a little troubled about his position. He wondered, while he reviewed
the past, whether the path he had so carefully chosen for himself was
the right one, whether he might not have missed more by leaving the
United States than he had gained by coming to England. He lamented; in a
letter written to his brother William in 1899, that he had not had the
kind of early experience that might have attached him to his own
country. He earnestly advised a different treatment for his nephews.
"What I most of all feel, and in the light of it conjure you to keep
doing for them, is their being _à même_ to contract local saturations
and attachments in respect to their _own_ great and glorious country, to
learn, and strike roots into, its infinite beauty, as I suppose, and
variety. . . . Its being their 'own' will double their _use_ of it."

It was only after a visit to America in 1904 that he found, on his
return to Rye, that he had a home and a country. He was able after this
discovery to write to Mrs. Wharton that "your only drawback is not
having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and
the affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (comme moi, par
exemple!)"; and he could declare after taking the Oath of Allegiance to
the King of England in 1915 that "I was really too associated before for
any nominal change to matter. The process has only shown me what I
virtually _was_--so that it's rather disappointing in respect to acute
sensation. I _haven't_ any." Associated he certainly was, allied by
innumerable sympathies and affections to the adopted country. But he was
never really English or American or even Cosmopolitan, And it is too
difficult to suppose that even if he had passed all his youth in New
England and contracted all the local saturations and attachments he
urged for his nephews he could ever have melted comfortably into
American uniformity. He, who took nothing in the world for granted,
could surely never have taken New England for granted.

To-day, with the complete record before us--the novels, criticisms,
biographies, plays, and letters--we can understand how little those
international relations that engaged Henry James's attention mattered to
his genius. Wherever he might have lived and whatever human interactions
he might have observed, he would in all probability have reached much
the same conclusion that he arrived at by the way of America, France,
and England. When he walked out of the refuge of his study into the
world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures
of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the
doomed, defenceless children of light. He had the abiding comfort of an
inner certainty (and perhaps he did bring that from New England) that
the children of light had an eternal advantage; he was aware to the
finest fibre of his being that the "poor sensitive gentlemen" he so
numerously treated possessed a treasure that would outlast all the
glittering paste of the world and the flesh; he knew that nothing in
life mattered compared with spiritual decency.

We may conclude that the nationalities of his betrayed and triumphant
victims are not an important factor. They may equally well be innocent
Americans maltreated by odious Europeans, refined Europeans fleeced by
unscrupulous Americans, or young children of any race exposed to evil
influences. The essential fact is that wherever he looked Henry James
saw fineness apparently sacrificed to grossness, beauty to avarice,
truth to a bold front. He realized how constantly the tenderness of
growing life is at the mercy of personal tyranny and he hated the
tyranny of persons over each other. His novels are a repeated exposure
of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest
freedom of development, unimperilled by reckless and barbarous
stupidity.

He was himself most scrupulously careful not to exercise any tyrannical
power over other people. The only advice he ever permitted himself to
offer to a friend was a recommendation to "let your soul live." Towards
the end of his days his horror of interfering, or seeming to interfere,
with the freedom of others became so overpowering that it was a misery
for him to suspect that the plans of his friends might be made with
reference to himself. Much as he enjoyed seeing them, he so disliked to
think that they were undergoing the discomfort of voyages and railway
journeys in order to be near him that he would gladly have prevented
their start if he could. His Utopia was an anarchy where nobody would be
responsible for any other human being but only for his own civilized
character. His circle of friends will easily recall how finely Henry
James had fitted himself to be a citizen of this commonwealth.





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