Henry James at Work

by Theodora Bosanquet

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.