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'Académie 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.
And it held, too, a liberal draught of the least trivial distillation of 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 donnée 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.