HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)

James's grandfather was an Irishman who had so successful a business career in Albany, New York, as to leave several millions of dollars to be divided among some twelve heirs. Thus his father was not a man of great wealth by present-day standards, but had means ample for a completely independent life. He was a theologian of philosophic temper who, like many other Americans of his day, owed the starting-point of his intellectual life to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Gifted with an original, independent mind and with an attractive and vivid style, he wrote a number of books which fell strangely dead from the press and which now lie wholly, though very unjustly, neglected. He married Mary Walsh, a New York woman of Scotch descent, and they had five children, of whom the philosopher William James was the eldest, and Henry the second (born on 15 April, 1843). It was the wish of Henry's father that his children's education should not cramp the free development of their individualities. To this end he kept them from remaining any long time under the care of any one teacher or school, while he also varied their youthful impressions by carrying them often from one city or country to another. They were to be made citizens of the great world, and were only to form allegiances when they were capable of doing so deliberately and consciously. In appearance their education was extraordinarily haphazard, but its actual results seem to have been pretty nearly those aimed at. Henry was carried from New York to Europe in the summer of 1844, then back to Albany for rather more than a year, and then to New York, where the family remained, save in the summers, until 1855, when they departed for Europe, to stay three years. In Europe they lived in Geneva, London, Paris, and Boulogne. In 1858 and 1859 they were back in America, living at Newport for a year, but the winter of 1859-1860 saw them again in Europe, at Geneva, and in the summer of 1860 Henry was at Bonn, as the private pupil of a professor there. But in the autumn they returned to Newport in order that William might study painting under William Hunt. Henry was now seventeen, and was asking what he was to do with his life. But even then the question was really decided. On the one hand, he later thought that he had been infected by the "European virus" in the years 1855-1858; on the other, he was already in 1860 writing many romantic stories, under the influence of Balzac. He was not yet prepared, however, to declare for a literary career, and the outbreak of the Civil War found him still in Newport with the question of his future still undetermined. He was prevented by a strain, which long made his health uncertain, from enlisting, as did his two younger brothers, and in 1862 he went to Harvard and enrolled himself in the Law School. Apparently he had no serious intention of becoming a lawyer, but took this step in the lack of any other definite plan. It proved fortunate. James was thrown into a literary circle in Cambridge, soon became the friend of Charles Eliot Norton, and presently was contributing critical papers to the North American Review and the Nation. A few years later he became acquainted with William Dean Howells when he came to Boston as assistant editor of the Atlantic, and many years afterward he wrote to Howells gratefully: "You held out your open editorial hand to me at the time I began to write-and I allude especially to the summer of 1866-with a frankness and sweetness of hospitality that was really the making of me, the making of the confidence that required help and sympathy and that I should otherwise, I think, have strayed and stumbled about a long time without acquiring. You showed me the way and opened me the door." The door was opened to tales which exhibited the young James working under the influence of Hawthorne and, less noticeably, of George Eliot and Balzac. Later he was to feel the influence of Flaubert and was to become the almost enchanted admirer of Turgenev. Meanwhile, after several years of literary work the desire to revisit Europe became overpowering, and in the spring of 1869 he sailed for London, to remain there and on the Continent until the spring of 1870. His first serial publication in the Atlantic had been Gabrielle de Bergerac, a charming French tale (1869, not reprinted until 1918). He now contributed another to the same periodical, Watch and Ward, a slight performance which he later practically disowned (1871, reprinted 1878), but he did not yet trust himself for a really long flight, and he was hardly back in America before he felt again, and insistently, the call of Europe. It was only later, as far as is known, that he consciously formulated his reasons, but the trend of his desires appears clearly in a sentence written at the beginning of 1872, when he still thought it a duty to live in America: “It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe." In the spring of 1872 he went to Eng land, and remained abroad, spending most of his time on the Continent, until the fall of 1874. He had

a commission to write his Transatlantic Sketches for the Nation (reprinted 1875, when his first volume of fiction, A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales, was also published); and during the latter part of this period he wrote for the Atlantic his first full-length novel, Roderick Hudson (reprinted 1876). This, despite certain weaknesses, is a mature piece of work, and it clearly marks the end of James's literary apprenticeship.

Another momentous period in his life was marked in the autumn of 1875 by his return to Europe with the definite intention of making his home there. His reasons appear plainly in much of his fiction, but were most explicitly announced in the volume on Hawthorne which he contributed (1879) to the "English Men of Letters" series, where he condemned American life as provincial and uninteresting. When his friend Howells protested, he replied that Americans were necessarily provincial, just as were Russians, the Portuguese, Danes, Laplanders, and Australians, and for the same reason: because all of these peoples live on the edges of civilization and derive their culture, such as it may be, not from their own long, indigenous development, but from the center, from Italy, France, and England. And, he continued, "I sympathize even less with your protest against the idea that it takes an old civilization to set a novelist in motion-a proposition that seems to me so true as to be a truism. It is on manners, customs, usages, habits, forms, upon all these things matured and established, that a novelist lives-they are the very stuff his work is made of; and in saying that in the absence of those 'dreary and worn-out paraphernalia' which I enumerate as being wanting in American society, 'we have simply the whole of human life left,' you beg (to my sense) the question. I should say we had just so much less of it as these same 'paraphernalia' represent, and I think they represent an enormous quantity of it." He went to Europe, then, in order to experience the impact of the highest civilization, in order to know social life at its fullest and richest, in order to exhibit in his novels, not a culturally impoverished and jejune society, but one which was the flower of a long native growth, set off against a deep background of multiplied traditions and elaborate decorum. Since he sought experiential truth concerning society, he desired the best and richest experience. Since, also, he was an American in Europe, he inevitably considered what he learned to some extent in terms of international social contacts;-he wrote of Americans in Europe, and became identified with the so-called international novel.

When he migrated to Europe he first settled himself in Paris, but after a year he found that as a foreigner he could only hope to hover on the edge of tightly closed French intellectual and social circles. Hence he could not find in Paris real nourishment for his imagination, and, upon reflection, he saw little in this to regret. He confessed that Frenchmen were likely to dazzle upon a first acquaintance, but added that they were also likely to appear as something less than remarkable upon further observation. Accordingly, he removed to London before the close of 1876, and England remained his home through the rest of his life. He made many visits to the Continent, and spent the winters of 1881-1882, 1882-1883, and 1904-1905 in America, but these were interludes. In later years he established himself at Lamb House, in Rye, though he always maintained quarters in London. During his earlier English years his chief novels and tales were: The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), An International Episode (1879), Confidence (1880), Washington Square (1881), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Daisy Miller was "a really quite extraordinary hit," as James told his mother, and The Portrait of a Lady has been very generally regarded as one of the best of all his novels. A volume of substantial essays in criticism was also published at this time, French Poets and Novelists (1878), to be followed after an interval of ten years by another volume of critical papers, Partial Portraits (1888). Meanwhile tales and novels had continued to appear, besides several travel-books, and with the publication of The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima (both 1886) James fairly discovered that the public for his work was not to be a large one. Earlier indications had pointed towards approaching popular success, and he was disappointed. He attempted to capture a large public through plays, and was again disappointed. The result was not to turn him from his work, but to send him to it with a freer mind, which was not altogether fortunate. He proceeded to compose fiction without regard for the public which did not regard him, aiming to please only his own exacting

taste.

In following years he was never without devoted admirers and his high position was never seriously questioned, but he did almost hopelessly alienate the general public. Difficulty, he confessed, was what most attracted him and aroused his powers, and he tended to become excessively subtle in his thought and over-elaborate in his expression, so that he became proverbial not only among the empty-headed and the frivolous, but even among serious readers, for unintelligibility. And this unfortunate, and on the whole not really justified, reputation helped to prevent adequate appreciation of the greatness of his achievement in many of his later tales and in three of his later novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). In these three perfect books -most of all in The Ambassadors, which he himself rightly considered the best of his novels-he reached a purity of form and a height of imaginative creation which has not been equaled or even

approached by any other American writer, and which is not soon likely to be. In his last years, when other work tended to become impossible because of failing health, he turned to reminiscence, and published two autobiographical volumes, A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), while he left a third (The Middle Years, 1917) unfinished at his death. He died on 28 February, 1916. In July, 1915, he had become naturalized as a British subject, taking this step chiefly by way of protest against America's failure promptly to support the Allies in the Great War. In January, 1916, the British Government bestowed upon him the Order of Merit, the highest distinction which it could give him, and one which has been awarded to very few men of letters.

James wrote a subtle and invaluable commentary upon his own work and, at the same time, upon the art of fiction in the series of prefaces which he contributed to the New York Edition of his novels and tales (26 volumes, 1907-1917). Notwithstanding his helping hand thus extended to them, however, his work has continued singularly to baffle critics. Here it must suffice to say that as early as 1888 he confessed himself “deadly weary of the whole ‘international' state of mind”; and that the “international" aspect of his work was never primary with him, but only a means to a far deeper end. He was devoted to the practice of his art, not, as some have contended, to the exclusion or at least subordination of life, but precisely because he saw in imaginative creation at once the highest exercise of man's faculties and the unique gateway to a genuine appreciation of spiritual values, of goodness and beauty and truth, as eternally supreme for humanity even amidst inevitable temporal defeat. The most illuminating comment which has thus far been made upon the real character of his thought and work has come from Miss Theodora Bosanquet (Henry James at Work, "Hogarth Essays"): "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, defenseless 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 fiber 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. We may conclude that the nationalities of his betrayed and triumphant victims are not an important factor. . . . The essential fact is that wherever he looked Henry James saw finene, apparently sac rificed to grossness, beauty to avarice, truth to a bold front. He realized how constantly the tenderness of growing life is at the mercy of personal tyranny and he hated the tyranny of persons over each other. His novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperiled by reckless and barbarous stupidity. He was himself most scrupulously careful not to exercise any tyrannical power over other people. . . . His Utopia was an anarchy where nobody would be responsible for any other human being but only for his own civilized character."

THE DEATH OF THE LION1

I

I HAD Simply, I suppose, a change of heart, and it must have begun when I received my Mr. manuscript back from Mr. Pinhorn. Pinhorn was my "chief," as he was called

1 First published in The Yellow Book, 1894. Republished in Terminations, 1895, from which it is here reprinted with the permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers. James included this tale in the New York Edition-and in the Preface to the volume containing it has delightfully told of the visit which Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley made, to invite him to contribute to The Yellow Book-but it has seemed preferable to reproduce the tale in its earlier form, even though in this instance the alterations which were made for the New York Edition were relatively slight.

...

in the office: he had accepted the high mission of bringing the paper up. This was a weekly periodical, and had been supposed to be almost past redemption when he took hold of it. It was Mr. Deedy who had let it down so dreadfully: he was never mentioned in the office now save in connection with that misdemeanor. Young as I was I had been in a manner taken over from Mr. Deedy, who had been owner as well as editor; forming part of a promiscuous lot, mainly plant and office-furniture, which poor Mrs. Deedy, in her bereavement and depression, parted with at a rough valuation. I could account for my continuity only on the supposition that I had been cheap. I rather resented the practice of fathering all flatness