A Writer's Recollections Volume II Part 9

Yes!-- ... He was a priest to us all Of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we saw with his eyes and were glad.

For that was indeed true of Henry James as of Wordsworth. The "wonder and bloom," no less than the ugly or heartbreaking things, which, like the disfiguring rags of old Laertes, hide them from us--he could weave them all, with an untiring hand, into the many-colored web of his art.

Olive Chancellor, Madame Mauve, Milly, in _The Wings of a Dove_--the most exquisite, in some ways, of all his women--Roderick Hudson, St.

George, the woman doctor in the _Bostonians,_ the French family in the _Reverberation_, Brooksmith--and innumerable others--it was the wealth and facility of it all that was so amazing! There is enough observation of character in a chapter of the _Bostonians,_ a story he thought little of, and did not include in his collected edition, to shame a Wells novel of the newer sort, with its floods of clever, half-considered journalism in the guise of conversation, hiding an essential poverty of creation.

_Ann Veronica_ and the _New Machiavelli_, and several other tales by the same writer, set practically the same scene, and handle the same characters under different names. Of an art so false and confused Henry James could never have been capable. His people, his situations, have the sharp separateness--and something of the inexhaustibleness--of nature, which does not mix her molds.

As to method, naturally I often discussed with him some of the difficult problems of presentation. The posthumous sketches of work in progress, published since his death, show how he delighted in these problems, in their very difficulties, in their endless opportunities. As he often said to me, he could never read a novel that interested him without taking it mentally to pieces and rewriting it in his own way. Some of his letters to me are brilliant examples of this habit of his.

Technique, presentation, were then immensely important to him; important as they never could have been to Tolstoy, who probably thought very little consciously about them. Mr. James, as we all know, thought a great deal about them--sometimes, I venture to think, too much. In _The Wings of a Dove_, for instance, a subject full of beauty and tragedy is almost spoiled by an artificial technique, which is responsible for a scene on which, as it seems to me, the whole illusion of the book is shattered. The conversation in the Venice apartment where the two fiance's--one of whom, at least, the man, is commended to our sympathy as a decent and probable human being--make their cynical bargain in the very presence of the dying Milly, for whose money they are plotting, is in some ways a _tour de force_ of construction. It is the central point on which many threads converge and from which many depart. But to my mind, as I have said, it invalidates the story. Mr. James is here writing as a _virtuoso_, and not as the great artist we know him to be.

And the same, I think, is true of _The Golden Bowl._ That again is a wonderful exercise in virtuosity; but a score of his slighter sketches seem to me infinitely nearer to the truth and vitality of great art. The book in which perhaps technique and life are most perfectly blended--at any rate, among the later novels--is _The Amba.s.sador_. There, the skill with which a deeply interesting subject is focused from many points of view, but always with the fascinating unity given to it, both by the personality of the "Amba.s.sador" and by the mystery to which every character in the book is related, is kept in its place, the servant, not the master, of the theme. And the climax--which is the river scene, when the "Amba.s.sador" penetrates at last the long-kept secret of the lovers--is as right as it is surprising, and sinks away through admirable modulations to the necessary close. And what beautiful things in the course of the handling!--the old French Academician and his garden, on the _rive gauche_, for example; or the summer afternoon on the upper Seine, with its pleasure-boats, and the red parasol which finally tells all--a picture drawn with the sparkle and truth of a Daubigny, only the better to bring out the unwelcome fact which is its center. _The Amba.s.sador_ is the masterpiece of Mr. James's later work and manner, just as _The Portrait of a Lady_ is the masterpiece of the earlier.

And the whole?--his final place?--when the stars of his generation rise into their place above the spent field? I, at least, have no doubt whatever about his security of fame; though very possibly he may be no more generally read in the time to come than are most of the other great masters of literature. Personally, I regret that, from _What Maisie Knew_ onward, he adopted the method of dictation. A mind so teeming, and an art so flexible, were surely the better for the slight curb imposed by the physical toil of writing. I remember how and when we first discussed the _pros_ and _cons_ of dictation, on the fell above Cartmel Chapel, when he was with us at Levens in 1887. He was then enchanted by the endless vistas of work and achievement which the new method seemed to open out. And indeed it is plain that he produced more with it than he could have produced without it. Also, that in the use of dictation, as in everything else, he showed himself the extraordinary craftsman that he was, to whom all difficulty was a challenge, and the conquest of it a delight. Still, the diffuseness and over-elaboration which were the natural snares of his astonis.h.i.+ng gifts were encouraged rather than checked by the new method; and one is jealous of anything whatever that may tend to stand between him and the unstinted pleasure of those to come after.

But when these small cavils are done, one returns in delight and wonder to the accomplished work. To the _wealth_ of it, above all--the deep draughts from human life that it represents. It is true indeed that there are large tracts of modern existence which Mr. James scarcely touches, the peasant life, the industrial life, the small-trading life, the political life; though it is clear that he divined them all, enough, at least, for his purposes. But in his vast, indeterminate range of busy or leisured folk, men and women with breeding and without it, backed with ancestors or merely the active "sons of their works," young girls and youths and children, he is a master indeed, and there is scarcely anything in human feeling, normal or strange, that he cannot describe or suggest. If he is without pa.s.sion, as some are ready to declare, so are Stendhal and Turguenieff, and half the great masters of the novel; and if he seems sometimes to evade the tragic or rapturous moments, it is perhaps only that he may make his reader his co-partner, that he may evoke from us that heat of sympathy and intelligence which supplies the necessary atmosphere for the subtler and greater kinds of art.

And all through, the dominating fact is that it is "Henry James"

speaking--Henry James, with whose delicate, ironic mind and most human heart we are in contact. There is much that can be _learned_ in fiction; the resources of mere imitation, which we are pleased to call realism, are endless; we see them in scores of modern books. But at the root of every book is the personality of the man who wrote it. And in the end, that decides.

CHAPTER VIII

ROMAN FRIENDS. _ELEANOR_

The spring of the following year (1900) saw us again in Rome. We spent our April fortnight there, of which I specially remember some amusing hours with Sir William Harcourt. I see myself, for instance, as a rather nervous tourist in his wake and that of the very determined wife of a young diplomat, storming the Vatican library at an hour when a bland _custode_ a.s.sured us firmly it was _not_ open to visitors. But Sir William's great height and bulk, aided by his pretty companion's self-will, simply carried us through the gates by their natural momentum. Father Ehrle was sent for and came, and we spent a triumphant and delightful hour. After all, one is not an ex-British Cabinet Minister for nothing. Sir William was perfectly civil to everybody, with a blinking smile like that of the Ches.h.i.+re cat; but nothing stopped him.

I laugh still at the remembrance. On the way home it was wet, and he and I shared a _legno_. I remember we talked of Mr. Chamberlain, with whom at that moment--May, 1899--Sir William was not in love; and of Lord Hartington. "Hartington came to me one day when we were both serving under Mr. G., and said to me in a temper, 'I wish I could get Gladstone to answer letters.' 'My dear fellow, he always answers letters.' 'Well, I have been trying to do something and I can't get a word out of him.'

'What have you been trying to do?' 'Well, to tell the truth, I've been trying to make a bishop.' 'Have you? Not much in your line, I should think. Now if it had been something about a horse--' 'Don't be absurd.

He would have made a very good bishop. C---- and S---- [naming two well-known Liberals] told me I must--so I wrote--- and not a word! Very uncivil, I call it.' 'Who was it?' 'Oh, I can't remember. Let me think.

Oh yes, it was a man with a double name--Llewellyn-Davies.' Sir William, with a shout of laughter, 'Why, it took me five years to get him made a Canon!'"

The following year I sent him _Eleanor_, as a reminder of our meeting in Rome, and he wrote:

To me the revisiting of Rome is the brightest spot of the day-dreams of life, and I treasure all its recollections. After the disappointment of the day when we were to have seen Albano and Nemi under your guidance, we managed the expedition, and were entranced with the scene even beyond our hopes, and since that time I have lived through it again in the pages of _Eleanor_, which I read with greediness, waiting each number as it appeared.

Now about Manisty. What a fortunate beggar, to have two such charming women in love with him! It is always so. The less a man deserves it the more they adore him. That is the advantage you women writers have. You always figure men as they are and women as they ought to be. If I had the composition of the history I should never represent two women behaving so well to one another under the circ.u.mstances. Even American girls, according to my observation, do not show so much toleration to their rivals, even though in the end they carry off their man....

Your sincerely attached

W. V. HARCOURT.

Let me detach a few other figures from a gay and crowded time, the ever-delightful and indefatigable Boni--Commendatore Boni--for instance.

To hear him talk in the Forum or hold forth at a small gathering of friends on the problems of the earliest Italian races, and the causes that met in the founding and growth of Rome, was to understand how no scholar or archeologist can be quite first-rate who is not also something of a poet. The sleepy blue eyes, so suddenly alive; the apparently languid manner which was the natural defense against the outer world of a man all compact of imagination and sleepless energy; the touch in him of "the imperishable child," combined with the brooding intensity of the explorer who is always guessing at the next riddle; the fun, simplicity, _bonhomie_ he showed with those who knew him well--all these are vividly present to me.

So, too, are the very different characteristics of Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne, the French Lord Acton; like him, a Liberal, and a man of vast learning, tarred with the Modernist brush in the eyes of the Vatican, but at heart also like Lord Acton, by the testimony of all who know, a simple and convinced believer.

When we met Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne at the house of Count Ugo Balzani, or in the drawing-room of the French Emba.s.sy, all that showed, at first, was the witty ecclesiastic of the old school, an abbe of the eighteenth century, _fin_, shrewd, well versed in men and affairs, and capable of throwing an infinity of meaning into the inflection of a word or the lift of an eyebrow. I remember listening to an account by him of certain ceremonies in the catacombs in which he had taken part, in the train of an Ultramontane Cardinal whom he particularly disliked. He himself had preached the sermon. A member of the party said, "I hear your audience were greatly moved, Monsignore." d.u.c.h.esne bowed, with just a touch of irony. Then some one who knew the Cardinal well and the relation between him and d.u.c.h.esne, said, with _malice prepense_, "Was his Eminence moved, Monsignore?" d.u.c.h.esne looked up and shook off the end of his cigarette.

"_Non, Monsieur_," he said, dryly, "his Eminence was not moved--oh, not at all!" A ripple of laughter went round the group which had heard the question. For a second, d.u.c.h.esne's eyes laughed, too, and were then as impenetrable as before. My last remembrance of him is as the center of a small party in one of the famous rooms of the Palazzo Borghese which were painted by the Caracci, this time in a more serious and communicative mood, so that one realized in him more clearly the cosmopolitan and liberal scholar, whose work on the early Papacy, and the origins of Christianity in Rome, is admired and used by men of all faiths and none. Shortly afterward, a Roman friend of ours, an Englishman who knew Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne well, described to me the impressions of an English Catholic who had gone with him to Egypt on some learned mission, and had been thrown for a time into relations of intimacy with him. My friend reported the touch of astonishment in the Englishman's mind, as he became aware of the religious pa.s.sion in his companion, the devotion of his daily ma.s.s, the rigor and simplicity of his personal life; and we both agreed that as long as Catholicism could produce such types, men at once so daring and so devout, so free, and yet so penetrated with--so steeped in--the immemorial life of Catholicism, the Roman Church was not likely to perish out of Europe.

Let me, however, contrast with Monseigneur d.u.c.h.esne another Catholic personality--that of Cardinal Vaughan. I remember being asked to join a small group of people who were to meet Cardinal Vaughan on the steps of St. Peter's, and to go with him, and Canon Oakley, an English convert to Catholicism, through the famous crypt and its monuments. We stood for some twenty minutes outside St. Peter's, while Cardinal Vaughan, in the manner of a cicerone reeling off his task, gave us _in extenso_ the legendary stories of St. Peter's and St. Paul's martyrdoms. Not a touch of criticism, of knowledge, of insight--a childish tale, told by a man who had never asked himself for a moment whether he really believed it.

I stood silently by him, inwardly comparing the performance with certain pages by the Abbe d.u.c.h.esne, which I had just been reading. Then we descended to the crypt, the Cardinal first kneeling at the statue of St.

Peter. The crypt, as every one knows, is full of fragments from Christian antiquity, sarcophagi of early Popes, indications of the structures that preceded the present building, fragments from papal tombs, and so on. But it was quite useless to ask the Cardinal for an explanation or a date. He knew nothing, and he had never cared to know.

Again and again, I thought, as we pa.s.sed some shrine or sarcophagus bearing a name or names that sent a thrill through one's historical sense--"If only J.R. Green were here!--how these dead bones would live!"

But the agnostic historian was in his grave, and the Prince of the Roman Church pa.s.sed ignorantly and heedlessly by.

A little while before, I had sat beside the Cardinal at a luncheon-party, where the case of Doctor Sch.e.l.l, the Rector of the Catholic University of Wurzburg, who had published a book condemned by the Congregation of the Index, came up for discussion. Doctor Sch.e.l.l's book, _Catholicismus und Fortschritt_, was a plea on behalf of the Catholic Universities of Bavaria against the Jesuit seminaries which threatened to supplant them; and he had shown with striking clearness the disastrous results which the gradual narrowing of Catholic education had had on the Catholic culture of Bavaria. The Jesuit influence at Rome had procured the condemnation of the book. Doctor Sch.e.l.l at first submitted; then, just before the luncheon-party at which I was present, withdrew his submission.

I saw the news given to the Cardinal. He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, poor fellow!" he said. "Poor fellow!" It was not said unkindly, rather with a kind of easy pity; but the recollection came back to me in the crypt of St. Peter's, and I seemed to see the man who could not shut his ear to knowledge and history struggling in the grip of men like the Cardinal, who knew no history.

Echoes and reflections from these incidents will be found in _Eleanor_, and it was the case of Doctor Sch.e.l.l that suggested Father Benecke.

So the full weeks pa.s.sed on. Half _Eleanor_ had been written, and in June we turned homeward. But before then, one visitor came to the Villa Barberini in our last weeks there, who brought with him, for myself, a special and peculiar joy. My dear father, with his second wife, arrived to spend a week with us. Never before, throughout all his ardent Catholic life, had it been possible for him to tread the streets of Rome or kneel in St. Peter's. At last, the year before his death, he was to climb the Janiculum, and to look out over the city and the plain whence Europe received her civilization and the vast system of the Catholic Church. He felt as a Catholic; but hardly less as a scholar, one to whom Horace and Virgil had been familiar from his boyhood, the greater portion of them known by heart, to a degree which is not common now. I remember well that one bright May morning at Castle Gandolfo, he vanished from the villa, and presently, after some hours, reappeared with s.h.i.+ning eyes.

"I have been on the Appian Way--I have walked where Horace walked!"

In his own autobiography he writes: "In proportion to a man's good sense and soundness of feeling are the love and admiration, increasing with his years, which he bears toward Horace." An old-world judgment, some will say, which to us, immersed in this deluge of war which is changing the face of all things, may sound, perhaps, as a thin and ghostly voice from far away. It comes from the Oxford of Newman and Matthew Arnold, of Jowett and Clough; and for the moment, amid the thunder and anguish of our time, it is almost strange to our ears. But when the tumult and the shouting die, and "peace has calmed the world," whatever else may have pa.s.sed, the poets and the thinkers will be still there, safe in their old shrines, for they are the "ageless mouths" of all mankind, when men are truly men. The supposed reformers, who thirst for the death of cla.s.sical education, will not succeed, because man doth not live by bread alone, and certain imperishable needs in him have never been so fully met as by some Greeks and some Latins, writing in a vanished society, which yet, by reason of their thought and genius, is still in some real sense ours. More science? More foreign languages? More technical arts? Yes! All these. But if democracy is to mean the disappearance of the Greek and Latin poets from the minds of the future leaders of our race, the history of three thousand years is there to show what the impoverishment will be.

As to this, a personal experience, even from one who in Greek literature is only a "proselyte of the gate," may not be without interest. I shall never forget the first time, when, in middle life, I read in the Greek, so as to understand and enjoy, the "Agamemnon" of aeschylus. The feeling of sheer amazement at the range and power of human thought--and at such a date in history--which a leisurely and careful reading of that play awakened in me, left deep marks behind. It was as though for me, thenceforward, the human intellect had been suddenly related, much more clearly than ever before, to an absolute, ineffable source, "not itself." So that, in realizing the greatness of the mind of Aeschylus, the creative Mind from which it sprang had in some new and powerful way touched my own; with both new light on the human Past, and mysterious promise for the Future. Now, for many years, the daily reading of Greek and Latin has been not only a pleasure, but the only continuous bit of mental discipline I have been able to keep up.

I do not believe this will seem exaggerated to those on whom Greek poetry and life have really worked. My father, or the Master, or Matthew Arnold, had any amateur spoken in similar fas.h.i.+on to them, would have smiled, but only as those do who are in secure possession of some precious thing, on the eagerness of the novice who has just laid a precarious hold upon it.

At any rate, as I look back upon my father's life of constant labor and many baffled hopes, there are at least two bright lights upon the scene.

He had the comfort of religious faith, and the double joy of the scholar and of the enthusiast for letters. He would not have bartered these great things, these seeming phantoms--

Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew--

for any of the baser goods that we call real. A year and a half after his visit to Rome, he died in Dublin, where he had been for years a Fellow and Professor of the Irish University, occupied in lecturing on English literature, and in editing some of the most important English Chronicles for the Rolls Series. His monument, a beautiful medallion by Mr. Derwent Wood, which recalls him to the life, hangs on the wall of the University Church, in Stephen's Green, which was built in Newman's time and under his superintendence. The only other monument in the church is that to the great Cardinal himself. So once more, as in 1886, they--the preacher and his convert--are together. "_Domine, Deus meus, in Te speravi_." So, on my father's tablet, runs the text below the quiet, sculptured face. It expresses the root fact of his life.

A few weeks before my father's death _Eleanor_ appeared. It had taken me a year and a quarter to write, and I had given it full measure of work.

Henry James wrote to me, on receipt of it, that it gave him

. . . the chance to overflow into my favorite occupation of rewriting as I read, such fiction as--I can read. I took this liberty in an inordinate degree with Eleanor--and I always feel it the highest tribute I can pay. I recomposed and reconstructed her from head to foot--which I give you for the real measure of what I think of her.

I think her, less obscurely--a thing of rare beauty, a large and n.o.ble performance, rich, complex, comprehensive, deeply interesting and highly distinguished. I congratulate you heartily on having _mene a bonne fin_ so intricate and difficult a problem, and on having seen your subject so wrapped in its air and so bristling with its relations. I should say that you had done nothing more h.o.m.ogeneous, nor more hanging and moving together. It has Beauty--the book, the theme and treatment alike, is magnificently mature, and is really a delightful thing to have been able to do--to have laid at the old golden door of the beloved Italy. You deserve well of her. I can't "criticize"--though I _could_ (that is, I _did_--but can't do it again)--rewrite. The thing's infinitely delightful and distinguished, and that's enough. The success of it, specifically, to my sense is Eleanor, admirably sustained in the "high-note" way, without a break or a drop. She is a very exquisite and very rendered conception. I won't grossly pretend to you that I think the book hasn't a weakness and rather a grave one, or you will doubt of my intelligence. It _has_ one, and in this way, to my troubled sense: that the anti-thesis on which your subject rests isn't a real, valid anti-thesis. It was utterly built, your subject, by your intention, of course, on one; but the one you chose seems to me not efficiently to have operated, so that if the book is so charming and touching even so, that is a proof of your affluence.

Lucy has in respect to Eleanor--that is, the image of Lucy that you have tried to teach yourself to see--has no true, no adequate, no logical ant.i.thetic force--and this is not only, I think, because the girl is done a little more _de chic_ than you would really have liked to do her, but because the _nearer_ you had got to her type the less she would have served that particular condition of your subject. You went too far for her, or, going so far, should have brought her back--roughly speaking--stronger. (Irony--and various things!--should at its hour have presided.) But I throw out that more imperfectly, I recognize, than I should wish. It doesn't matter, and not a solitary reader in your millions, or critic in your hundreds, will either have missed, or have made it! And when a book's beautiful, nothing _does_ matter! I hope greatly to see you after the New Year. Good night. It's my usual 1.30 A.M.

Yours, dear Mrs. Ward, always,

HENRY JAMES.

I could not but feel, indeed, that the book had given great pleasure to those I might well wish to please. My old friend, Mr. Frederic Harrison, wrote to me:--"I have read it all through with great attention and delight, and have returned to it again and again.... I am quite sure that it is the most finished and artistic of all your books and one of the most subtle and graceful things in all our modern fiction." And Charles Eliot Norton's letter from Shady Hill, the letter of one who never praised perfunctorily or insincerely, made me glad:

"It would be easier to write about the book to any one else but you.... You have added to the treasures of English imaginative literature, and no higher reward than this can any writer hope to gain." The well-known and much-loved editor of the _Century_, Richard Watson Gilder, "on this the last Sunday of the nineteenth century"--so he headed his letter--sat down to give a long hour of precious time to _Eleanor's_ distant author.

How can you reconcile it to your conscience to write a book like _Eleanor_ that keeps a poor fellow reading it to a finish till after three in the morning? Not only that--but that keeps him sobbing and sighing "like a furnace," that charms him and makes him angry--that hurts and delights him, and will not let him go till all is done!