Old and New Masters

by Robert Lynd

with immediate intensities of appreciation, as I may call the muffled accompaniment, for fear of almost indecently overnaming it.

He looks back, with how exquisite a humour and seriousness, on that morning as having finally settled his destiny as an artist. "This doom," he writes:—

This doom of inordinate exposure to appearances, aspects, images, every protrusive item almost, in the great beheld sum of things, I regard ... as having settled upon me once for all while I observed, for instance, that in England the plate of buttered muffins and its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after hot water had been ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that circumstance in a perfect cloud of accompaniments.

It is characteristic of Henry James that he should associate the hour in which he turned to grace with a plate of buttered muffins. His fiction remained to the end to some extent the tale of a buttered muffin. He made mountains out of muffins all his days. His ecstasy and his curiosity were nine times out of ten larger than their objects. Thus, though he was intensely interested in English life, he was interested in it, not in its largeness as life so much as in its littleness as a museum, almost a museum of bric-à-brac. He was enthusiastic about the waiter in the coffee-room in the Liverpool hotel chiefly as an illustration of the works of the English novelists.

Again and again in his reminiscences one comes upon evidence that Henry James arrived in England in the spirit of a collector, a connoisseur, as well as that of a convert. His ecstasy was that of a convert: his curiosity was that of a connoisseur. As he recalls his first experience of a London eating-house of the old sort, with its "small compartments, narrow as horse-stalls," he glories: in the sordidness of it all, because "every face was a documentary scrap."

I said to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour that this it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and one could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one's elbows or one's feet, with an immunity from intermittance of the "plain boiled" much better than one could dispense with that.

Here, again, one has an instance of the way in which the show of English life revealed itself to Henry James as an exhibition of eating. "As one sat there," he says of his reeking restaurant, "one understood." It is in the same mood of the connoisseur on the track of a precious discovery that he recalls "the very first occasion of my sallying forth from Morley's Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house of sustaining, of inspiring hospitality in the Kensington quarter." What an epicure the man was! "The thrill of sundry invitations to breakfast" still survived on his palate more than forty years afterwards. Not that these meals were recalled as gorges of the stomach: they were merely gorges of sensation, gorges of the sense of the past. The breakfasts associated him "at a jump" with the ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Rogers. They had also a documentary value as "the exciting note of a social order in which every one wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon an office or a store...." It was one morning, "beside Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-room, in Queen's Gate Terrace," that his "thrilling opportunity" came to sit opposite to Mr. Frederic Harrison, eminent in the eyes of the young American, not for his own sake so much as because recently he had been the subject of Matthew Arnold's banter. Everybody in England, like Mr. Harrison, seemed to Henry James to be somebody, or at least to have been talked about by somebody. They were figures, not cyphers. They were characters in a play with cross-references.

The beauty was ... that people had references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures here and there, whether animate or no, quite groan under the accumulation and the weight of.

It is surprising that, loving this new life so ecstatically, James should so seldom attempt to leave any detailed description of it in his reminiscences. He is constantly describing his raptures: he only occasionally describes the thing he was rapturous about. Almost all he tells us about "the extravagant youth of the aesthetic period" is that to live through it "was to seem privileged to such immensities as history would find left her to record but with bated breath." He recalls again "the particular sweetness of wonder" with which he haunted certain pictures in the National Gallery, but it is himself, not the National Gallery, that he writes about. Of Titian and Rembrandt and Rubens he communicates nothing but the fact that "the cup of sensation was thereby filled to overflowing." He does, indeed, give a slender description of his first sight of Swinburne in the National Gallery, but the chief fact even of this incident is that "I thrilled ... with the prodigy of this circumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same breath with Mr. Swinburne."

Thus the reminiscences are, in a sense, extraordinarily egotistic. This is, however, not to condemn them. Henry James is, as I have already said, his own greatest character, and his portrait of his excitements is one of the most enrapturing things in the literature of autobiography. He makes us share these excitements simply by telling us how excited he was. They are exactly the sort of excitements all of us have felt on being introduced to people and places and pictures we have dreamed about from our youth. Who has not felt the same kind of joy as Henry James felt when George Eliot allowed him to run for the doctor? "I shook off my fellow-visitor," he relates, "for swifter cleaving of the air, and I recall still feeling that I cleft it even in the dull four-wheeler." After he had delivered his message, he "cherished for the rest of the day the particular quality of my vibration." The occasion of the message to the doctor seems strangely comic in the telling. On arriving at George Eliot's, Henry James found one of G.H. Lewes's sons lying in horrible pain in the middle of the floor, the heritage of an old accident in the West Indies, or, as Henry James characteristically describes it:—