Part 6

But with this method, as in every form of literary activity save only playwriting, in which he was rather worse than Sidney Grundy in much the same way, Mr James gained his radiant triumphs. There could be nothing more trivial than the _donnee_ of _The Ambassadors_ (1903); there is no dignity or significance in the situation of Lambert Strether, an American who is engaged, in that odd way common to Mr James' characters, to a woman whom he certainly does not love and hardly seems to like, and goes at her bidding to Paris to cut her cubbish son clear from an entanglement with a Frenchwoman. And yet so artfully is the tale displayed in the setting of lovely, clean, white Paris and green France, lifting her poplars into the serene strong light of the French sky, that the reader holds his breath over the story of how Strether "had come with a view that might have been figured by a clear, green liquid, say, in a neat glass phial; and the liquid, once poured into the open cup of _application_, once exposed to the action of another air, had begun to turn from green to red, or whatever, and might, for all he knew, be on its way to purple, to black, to yellow"; how, in fact, the old "international situation" acted on the new generation of Americans. But that book is not typical of this period, for it is singularly free from those great sentences which sprawl over the pages of _The Golden Bowl_ with such an effect of rank vegetable growth that one feels that if one took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden. And it is those sentences which absorb, at the last, the whole of Mr James' attention.

For he ceased, as time went on, to pay any attention to the emotional values of his stories; it is one of the strangest things about _The Golden Bowl_ that the frame on which there hangs the most elaborate integument of suggestion and exposition ever woven by the mind of man is an ugly and incompletely invented story about some people who are sexually mad. Adam Verver, an American millionaire, buys an Italian prince for his daughter Maggie, and in her turn she arranges a marriage between her father and Charlotte, her school friend, because she thinks he may be lonely without her. And although it is plain that people who buy "made-up" marriages are more awful than the admittedly awful people who buy "made-up" ties, they are presented to one as vibrating exquisitely to every fine chord of life, as thinking about each other with the anxious subtlety of lovers, as so steeped in a sense of one another that they invent a sea of poetic phrases, beautiful images, discerning metaphors that break on the reader's mind like the unceasing surf. And when one tries to discover from the recorded speeches of these people whether there was no palliation of their ugly circumstances one finds that the dialogue, usually so compact a raft for the conveyance of the meaning of Mr James' novels, has been smashed up on this sea of phrases and drifts in, a plank at a time, on the copious flood:

"Maggie happened to learn, by some other man's greeting of him, in the bright Roman way, from a street corner as we passed, that one of the Prince's baptismal names, the one always used for him among his relations, was Amerigo; which--as you probably don't know, however, even after a lifetime of _me_--was the name, four hundred years ago, or whenever, of the pushing man who followed, across the sea, in the wake of Columbus and succeeded, where Columbus had failed, in becoming godfather, or name-father, to the new continent; so the thought of any connection with him can even now thrill our artless breasts."

And as if it was not enough that these people should say literally unspeakable sentences like that, and do incredible things, the phrases make them do things which they never did. For the metaphors are so beautifully and completely presented to the mind that it retains them as having as real and physical an existence as the facts. When we learn that the relationship between Charlotte and the Prince had reared itself in Maggie's life like "some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly, when stirred by chance airs," and the simile is cunningly developed for seven or eight hundred words, one is left with a confused impression that a pagoda formed part of the furniture at Portland Place and that Maggie oddly elected to keep her husband inside it. And to cap it all these people are not even human, for their thoughts concerning their relationships are so impassioned and so elaborate that they can never have had either energy or time for the consideration of anything else in the world. A race of creatures so inveterately specialist as Maggie Verver could never have attained man's mastery over environment, but would still be specialising on the cocoa-nut or some such simple form of diet.

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-a-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 mediaeval 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.

The Europeans (_Macmillan_). 1878.

Roderick Hudson (_Macmillan_). 1879.

Daisy Miller. An International Episode. Four Meetings (_Macmillan_). 1879.

The Madonna of the Future. Longstaff's Marriage. Madame de Mauves. Eugene Pickering. The Diary of a Man of Fifty. Benvolio (_Macmillan_). 1879.

Hawthorne (_Macmillan_). Included in English Men of Letters Series, edited by John Morley. 1879.

Confidence (_Chatto & Windus_). 1880.

Washington Square. The Pension Beaurepas. A Bundle of Letters (_Macmillan_). 1881.

The Portrait of a Lady (_Macmillan_). 1881.

Portraits of Places (_Macmillan_). 1883.

Tales of Three Cities: The Impressions of a Cousin. Lady Barbarina. A New England Winter (_Macmillan_). 1884.

Stories Revived: Vol. I. The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. The Path of Duty. A Day of Days. A Light Man. Vol. II. Georgina's Reasons. A Passionate Pilgrim. A Landscape Painter. Rose-Agathe. Vol. III. Poor Richard. The Last of the Valerii. Master Eustace. The Romance of Certain Old Clothes. A Most Extraordinary Case (_Macmillan_). 1885.

The Bostonians (_Macmillan_). 1886.

The Princess Casamassima (_Macmillan_). 1886.

The Reverberator (_Macmillan_). 1888.

The Aspern Papers. Louisa Pallant. The Modern Warning (_Macmillan_). 1888.

## Partial Portraits (Macmillan). 1888.

A London Life. The Patagonia. The Liar. Mrs Temperley (_Macmillan_). 1889.

The Tragic Muse (_Macmillan_). 1890.

The Lesson of the Master. The Marriages. The Pupil. Brooksmith. The Solution. Sir Edmund Orme (_Macmillan_). 1892.

The Real Thing. Sir Dominick Ferrand. Nona Vincent. The Chaperon. Greville Fane (_Macmillan_). 1893.

The Private Life. The Wheel of Time. Lord Beaupre. The Visits. Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1893.

Essays in London (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1893.

Theatricals: Two Comedies. Tenants. Disengaged (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1894.

Theatricals: Second Series. The Album. The Reprobate (_Osgood, McIlvaine_). 1895.

Terminations: The Death of the Lion. The Coxon Fund. The Middle Years. The Altar of the Dead (_Heinemann_). 1895.

Embarrassments: The Figure in the Carpet. Glasses. The Next Time. The Way it Came (_Heinemann_) 1896.

The Other House (_Heinemann_). 1896.

The Spoils of Poynton (_Heinemann_). 1897.

What Maisie Knew (_Heinemann_). 1897.

In the Cage (_Duckworth_). 1898.

The Two Magics. The Turn of the Screw. Covering End (_Macmillan_). 1898.

The Awkward Age (_Heinemann_). 1899.

The Soft Side: The Great Good Place. "Europe." Paste. The Real Right Thing. The Great Condition. The Tree of Knowledge. The Abasement of the Northmores. The Given Case. John Delavoy. The Third Person. Maud-Evelyn. Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie (_Methuen_). 1900.

The Sacred Fount (_Methuen_). 1901.

The Wings of the Dove (_Constable_). 1902.

The Better Sort: Broken Wings. The Beldonald Holbein. The Two Faces. The Tone of Time. The Special Type. Mrs Medwin. Flickerbridge. The Story in It. The Beast in the Jungle. The Birthplace. The Papers (_Methuen_). 1903.

The Ambassadors (_Methuen_). 1903.

William Wetmore Story and his Friends (_Blackwood_). 1903.

The Golden Bowl (_Methuen_). 1905.

English Hours (_Heinemann_). 1905.

The American Scene (_Chapman & Hall_). 1907.

Italian Hours (_Heinemann_). 1909.

The Finer Grain: The Velvet Glove. Mora Montravers. A Round of Visits. Crapy Cornelia. The Bench of Desolation (_Methuen_). 1910.

The Outcry (_Methuen_). 1911.

A Small Boy (_Macmillan_). 1913.

Notes of a Son and Brother (_Macmillan_). 1914.

Notes on Novelists (_Dent_). 1914.

A Collection of Novels and Tales by Henry James was published by Messrs Macmillan in 1883. This consisted of reprints of The Portrait of a Lady, Roderick Hudson, The American, Washington Square, The Europeans, Confidence, Madame de Mauves, An International Episode, The Pension Beaurepas, Daisy Miller, Four Meetings, Longstaff's Marriage, Benvolio, The Madonna of the Future, A Bundle of Letters, The Diary of a Man of Fifty, and Eugene Pickering; and two stories, The Siege of London and The Point of View, which had not before been published in England.

The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was published by Messrs Macmillan during 1908-1909. Each novel and each volume of short stories has a critical preface by the author, and each volume has a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn as frontispiece. The following is the order:--

1. Roderick Hudson. 2. The American. 3, 4. The Portrait of a Lady. 5, 6. The Princess Casamassima. 7, 8. The Tragic Muse. 9. The Awkward Age. 10. The Spoils of Poynton; A London Life; The Chaperon. 11. What Maisie Knew; In the Cage; The Pupil. 12. The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the Screw; The Liar; The Two Faces. 13. The Reverberator; Madame de Mauves; A Passionate Pilgrim; The Madonna of the Future; Louisa Pallant. 14. Lady Barbarina; The Siege of London; An International Episode; The Pension Beaurepas; A Bundle of Letters; The Point of View. 15. The Lesson of the Master; The Death of the Lion; The Next Time; The Figure in the Carpet; The Coxon Fund. 16. The Author of Beltraffio; The Middle Years; Greville Fane; Broken Wings; The Tree of Knowledge; The Abasement of the Northmores; The Great Good Place; Four Meetings; Paste; Europe; Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie; Fordham Castle. 17. The Altar of the Dead; The Beast in the Jungle; The Birthplace; The Private Life; Owen Wingrave; The Friends of the Friends; Sir Edmund Orme; The Real Right Thing; The Jolly Corner; Julia Bride. 18. Daisy Miller; Pandora; The Patagonia; The Marriages; The Real Thing; Brooksmith; The Beldonald Holbein; The Story in It; Flickerbridge; Mrs Medwin. 19, 20. The Ambassadors. 21, 22. The Wings of the Dove. 23, 24. The Golden Bowl.

Fordham Castle, The Jolly Corner and Julia Bride had not previously been published. All the early works have been subjected to a revision which in several cases, notably Daisy Miller and Four Meetings, amounts to their ruin.

AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY

[When the contents of collections of short stories have been given in full in the English bibliography they are entered here by their title only.]

A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales: The Last of the Valerii. Eugene Pickering. The Madonna of the Future. The Romance of Certain Old Clothes. Madame de Mauves (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1875.

Transatlantic Sketches: Articles reprinted from _The Nation_, _The Atlantic Monthly_, and _The Galaxy_ (_James R. Osgood_; present publishers, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1875.

Roderick Hudson (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1876.

The American (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1877.

Watch and Ward (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1878.

The Europeans (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1878.

Daisy Miller (_Harper_). 1878.

An International Episode (_Harper_). 1878.

Hawthorne (_Harper_). 1880.

The Diary of a Man of Fifty and A Bundle of Letters (_Harper_). 1880.

Confidence (_Houghton, Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton Mifflin_). 1880.

Washington Square. Illustrated by George du Maurier (_Harper_). 1881.

The Portrait of a Lady (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1881.

Daisy Miller: A Comedy. Privately printed. 1882.

The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of View (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1883.

Portraits of Places (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1883.

Tales of Three Cities (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1884.

A Little Tour in France (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1884.

The Author of Beltraffio. Pandora. Georgina's Reasons. The Path of Duty. Four Meetings (_James R. Osgood_; present publisher, _Houghton, Mifflin_). 1885.

The Bostonians (_Macmillan_). 1886.

The Princess Casamassima (_Macmillan_). 1886.

The Reverberator (_Macmillan_). 1888.

The Aspern Papers (_Macmillan_). 1888.

## Partial Portraits (_Macmillan_). 1888.

A London Life (_Macmillan_). 1889.

The Tragic Muse (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1890.

The Lesson of the Master (_Macmillan_). 1892.

The Real Thing (_Macmillan_). 1893.

The Private Life. Lord Beaupre. The Visits (_Harper_). 1893.

The Wheel of Time. Collaboration. Owen Wingrave (_Harper_). 1893.

Picture and Text. Essays on Art (_Harper_). 1893.

Essays in London (_Harper_). 1893.

Theatricals (_Harper_). 1894.

Theatricals: Second Series (_Harper_). 1895.

Terminations (_Harper_). 1895.

Embarrassments (_Macmillan_). 1896.

The Other House (_Macmillan_). 1896.

The Spoils of Poynton (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1897.

What Maisie Knew (_Herbert S. Stone_). 1897.

In the Cage (_Herbert S. Stone_). 1898.

The Two Magics (_Macmillan_). 1898.

The Awkward Age (_Harper_). 1899.

The Soft Side (_Macmillan_). 1900.

The Sacred Fount (_Scribner's_). 1901.

The Wings of the Dove (_Scribner's_). 1902.

The Better Sort (_Scribner's_). 1903.

The Ambassadors (_Harper_). 1903.

William Wetmore Story (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1903.

The Golden Bowl (_Scribner's_). 1904.

English Hours (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1905.

The Question of our Speech. The Lesson of Balzac (_Houghton, Mifflin_). 1905.

The American Scene (_Harper_). 1907.

Italian Hours (Houghton. Mifflin). 1909.

The Finer Grain (_Scribner's_). 1910.

The Outcry (_Scribner's_). 1911.

A Small Boy (_Scribner's_). 1913.

Notes of a Son and Brother (_Scribner's_). 1914.

Notes on Novelists (_Scribner's_). 1914.

The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Mr Henry James was published in America by Messrs Scribner's Sons.

INDEX

_Altar of the Dead, The_, 100

_Ambassadors, The_, 108-110

_American Scene, The_, 115

_American, The_, 38-40

_Aspern Papers, The_, 88-89

_Atlantic Monthly, The_, 21, 24

_Author of Beltraffio, The_, 78-80

_Awkward Age, The_, 106-107

_Better Sort, The_, 106

_Bostonians, The_, 71-72

Civil War, 19, 21

_Coxon Fund, The_, 92

Criticism, 63-71

_Daisy Miller_, 44-48

_Death of the Lion, The_, 92-93

Decadent Movement, 79-84, 90

Eliot, George, 22, 82

Emerson, 10, 72

_Essays in London_, 66

European War, 117

_Europeans, The_, 41-44

_Finer Grain, The_, 115

Flaubert, 58, 63, 65-66

French literature, 38, 52, 58, 91

_French Poets and Novelists_, 37, 64

_Galaxy, The_, 24

_Golden Bowl, The_, 25, 93, 95, 110-113

_Great Good Place, The_, 105

Hawthorne, 10, 24, 31

Historic sense, 60-63

International situation, 30-33, 109

_In the Cage_, 98

James, Rev. Henry, 12-13, 17-19, 114

_Lady Barbarina_, 49

_Lesson of the Master, The_, 92

_Little Tour in France, A_, 60-61

_London Life, A_, 50, 54

_Madame de Mauves_, 28-30

_Madonna of the Future, The_, 28

_Middle Years, The_, 92

Naturalisation, 117

_Next Time, The_, 92

New York Edition of, _Novels and Tales, The_, 115

_Notes of a Son and Brother_, 116

_Notes on Novelists_, 64

_Other House, The_, 96

_Outcry, The_, 115

_Pandora_, 49

_Partial Portraits_, 67

_Passionate Pilgrim, The_, 25-27, 61

_Pension Beaurepas, The_, 48

Playwriting, 108

_Portrait of a Lady, The_, 67-70

_Princess Casamassima, The_, 73-78

_Religion_, 17-19, 93, 99-101, 105-106

_Reverberator, The_, 50

_Roderick Hudson_, 33-36

_Romance of Certain Old Clothes_, 24

_Sacred Fount, The_, 107

_Siege of London, The_, 48

_Small Boy, A_, 116

_Spoils of Poynton, The_, 97

Temple, Mary, 23, 102

_Tragic Muse, The_, 84, 101

Turgeniev, 56-59, 91

_Turn of the Screw, The_, 97

Velasquez, 86

Ward, Mrs Humphry, 66

_Washington Square_, 55-59

_What Maisie Knew_, 97

_Wings of the Dove_, 101, 104