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-à-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 mediæval 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.