After nursing the delusion for more than a quarter of a century, and after having lived intimately with the illusion for a similar period, the cloud began to lift from his mind, the scales to drop from his eyes. The delusion gradually left him and the illusion faded and vanished. Then his mind became the prey of a question: whether he might not have developed more harmoniously and survived more effectively had he remained in America. The question obsessed him and, strangely enough, since obsessions do not usually condition deliberate conduct, it compelled him to formulate a plan to “go back to America, to retrace the past, to see for himself, to recover on the spot some echo of ghostly footsteps, the sound as of taps on the window-pane heard in the glimmering dawn.” He had been in cotton-wool too long, he must experience some of the perils of exposure, otherwise, he would succumb to the first draught; moreover, he was hungry for material, for an “all-round renovation of his too monotonised grab-bag”; he needed shocks.
Had I not such a high regard for Mr. Brooks as author and interpreter, I should reply to him as M’Liss did to the school-examiner who sought to humble her beloved schoolteacher by posing the question: “Has the sun ever stood still in the heavens?” But as I have such esteem of him, of his sincerity and artistry, I content myself with saying, “It is not true.” To bring Mr. Hueffer (I assume he means Ford Madox Ford) forward to give corroborative testimony does not bolster up the case. Mr. Ford is a discredited witness; his reputation for veracity has had a tremendous dent put in it recently by Mrs. Conrad. And I am in as favourable a position to give testimony as even Mr. Gosse. When Henry James made this “come back” attempt which Mr. Brooks elaborates in the chapter entitled “The Altar of the Dead,” the arterial disease to which he finally succumbed had already progressed to such a stage as to give great anxiety and concern to his intimates. He put himself under my professional care and I saw him at close range nearly every day for two months; and talked with him, or listened to him, on countless subjects. I believe that it would not have been possible for him to have harboured and essayed the plan that Mr. Brooks credits him with having, or to have ruminated on it as he says he did, without my having become aware of its existence in his mind.
Henry James was a man out of the ordinary. He was the type of man that one, no matter how widely travelled, meets but once or twice in a lifetime. It would take a long time to enumerate his virtues, for he had them all, the cardinal and the trivial. He loved bread, music and the laugh of a child, hence no one kept him three paces distant. It would also take a long time to enumerate his defects, for though he had few of the major ones, he had a multitude of the minor.
I have always questioned whether it facilitates an understanding of Henry James the artist to understand Henry James the man. In my own case, I am sure I had as comprehensive a peep into his artistic soul after I had read The Turn of the Screw, The Princess Casamasima, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, as after I had come to know him intimately, when he was engrossed in the problem of abstract design and fundamental organisation.
Henry James had an enormous amalgam of the feminine in his make-up; he displayed many of the characteristics of adult infantilism; he had a singular capacity for detachment from reality and with it a dependence upon realities that was even pathetic. He had a dread of ugliness in all forms, banality and vulgarity that the devil is reputed to have for Holy Water, and he was solitary hearted. Unlike Hartley Coleridge’s queen of noble nature’s crowning, he had love and he had understanding friends, but he had small capacity to avail himself of the gifts which they desired to lavish on him. His life had been devoted to the pursuit of an ideal; he had never been able to formulate with precision, or to describe that ideal with words. He came as near to it in the little story called The Figure in the Carpet as he could come to it. If he were not able to describe this ideal with the lucidity and comprehensibility with which Leonardo described his, when he was at the zenith of his creative power, why are we astonished at his inability to do it when these powers were undermined by arteriosclerosis?
The great defect in the make-up of Henry James was in the amatory side of his nature. His amatory coefficient was comparatively low; his gonadal sweep was narrow. Had he had a quarter of the former that Goethe possessed or one-half the sweep of Anatole France, it would be safe to say that Henry James would have been the greatest literary figure that ever came out of America, and that there would now be many James carrying his name to perpetuity. It is a measureless impediment, inability to fall in love; it is a dreadful handicap to have feminine and masculine characteristics nearly equally proportioned in one’s make-up; adult infantilism makes tremendously for dissatisfaction with what life brings, and a low basal metabolic rate which gives rise to a race of fletcherisers or other faddists is a burden that many find too hard to bear.
Henry James had them all. Had he not had them, he would have been happier and possibly he would have had a more successful career as an author, if success is measured by the rule of popularity. If his grandfathers had not been Irish; if he had spent his youth in Hoboken and not in Newport; if he had gone to school in the fifth ward and not in Switzerland; if he had had a little judicial starving meted out to him in his early maturity, he might have had a happier old age and fewer yearnings, fewer regrets that his life had not been fuller. Not that I admit for one moment that his old age was unhappy, or that he had such regrets or yearnings. The idea is Mr. Brooks’. It is in his book we find that here was a sort of a lost soul, beating its enfeebled wings against a cage from which time had not only removed the gild, but which it had rusted as well.
Henry James did not dislike America, but the people he met here with few exceptions did not interest him, and most of them annoyed him, sometimes to the point of explosion. He had had many pleasant experiences in Italy and in France, and he treasured them as a prima donna treasures programmes and testimonials. He often took them from the strongboxes of his memory and re-invoked the pleasurable sensations that he had had in acquiring them. Above everything in the world he valued good form, and all that it implies; good taste, good manners, good breeding, good conduct, and he had convinced himself from taking thought and from experience that it was to be had in England, even without the asking. He took his tree of life there and planted it and only one root developed, the social root. The political, the scholastic, the religious, the marathon roots, did not develop. In other words, the roots that make the tree of life so compelling of admiration in England did not grow from the tree that Henry James planted there. The tree that did grow was, however, sturdy and majestic. It has given shade and protection to many travellers since its full growth. The man who planted it insured, so far as he could, that it should not soon be cut down, by making, a few months before his death, the supreme genuflection to the country of his adoption. He forfeited citizenship in the country of his birth and obtained citizenship in the country that had sheltered him during the years of his fruition. How could any such thesis as that of Mr. Brooks be maintained in view of this last great gesture of Henry James, and why is the act not mentioned in a book that aims to describe his pilgrimage?
Had James known that England is full of men like Jacob Heming, one of Stella Benson’s Pipers, he probably would not have settled there; he might have gone to Spain. There are many things about that priest-infested, ceremonious country that would have appealed to Henry James. He would have fitted Toledo as an oyster its shell.
No one need concern himself with proving to me that a man sheds his inherited possessions only with the greatest difficulty. Among his inherited possessions I place his religion, his politics, and his “Patrie.” If a man whose father was known to me as a Democrat tells me he is a Republican, I do not believe him. If a man whose parents were Roman Catholics and who was brought up in that faith tells me that he is a Baptist, I suspect his veracity. If I encounter a man living in England without obvious reason who tells me that he is an American, I immediately surmise that his conduct has been an offence to his own land. And all this despite the fact that I have known the sons of a Democrat who have always voted the Republican ticket, that I am on terms of intimacy with an Unitarian clergyman who was formerly a Roman Catholic priest, and that Mr. George Santayana seems to find England more sympathetic as a permanent residence than Massachusetts. Moreover, I do not recall having heard of a lament from Joseph Conrad that he was not back in Poland or that he could not see Marseilles every now and then. I know an American family named James whose members have identified themselves conspicuously with the material and scientific progress of this country who sent a branch to England two generations ago and its members are more English than Winston Churchill; but that knowledge does not separate me from the belief that one of the most difficult things in the world to accomplish is to transfer a human tree, after it has had vigorous growth, from the soil of one country to another with the confident anticipation that it will bear abundant fruit. In the majority of cases, it will die; very rarely will it bear lusciously as it did in the case of Joseph Conrad. In some instances it will bear every few years, but then not copiously as it did in the case of Henry James.