V.

Though there was a shifting in temper of hostility in their minds as far as regarded persons, they only combated the same enemy opposed to them under a different shape; and that enemy was the spirit of selfish tyranny and lawless ambition.

That is a just defence. But the undeniable fact is that, after that time, Wordsworth ceased to combat the spirit of selfish tyranny and lawless ambition as he once had done. There is no need to blame him: also there is no need to defend him. He was human; he was tired; he was growing old. The chief danger of a book like Mr. Dicey's is that, in accepting its defence of Wordsworth's maturity, we may come to disparage his splendid youth. Mr. Dicey's book, however, is exceedingly interesting in calling attention to the great part politics may play in the life of a poet. Wordsworth said, in 1833, that "although he was known to the world only as a poet, he had given twelve hours' thought to the condition and prospects of society, for one to poetry." He did not retire into a "wise passiveness" as regards the world's affairs until he had written some of the greatest political literature—and, in saying this, I am thinking of his sonnets rather than of his political prose—that has appeared in England since the death of Milton.

Sir Sidney Colvin deserves praise for the noble architecture of the temple he has built in honour of Keats. His great book,John Keats: His Life and Poetry; His Friends, Critics, and After-fame, is not only a temple, indeed, but a museum. Sir Sidney has brought together here the whole of Keats's world, or at least all the relics of his world that the last of a band of great collectors has been able to recover; and in the result we can accompany Keats through the glad and sad and mad and bad hours of his short and marvellous life as we have never been able to do before under the guidance of a single biographer. We are still left in the dark, it is true, as to Keats's race and descent. Whether Keats's father came to London from Cornwall or not, Sir Sidney has not been able to decide on the rather shaky evidence that has been put forward. If it should hereafter turn out that Keats was a Cornishman at one remove, Matthew Arnold's conjecture as to the "Celtic element" in him, as in other English poets, may revive in the general esteem.

In the present state of our knowledge, however, we must be content to accept Keats as a Londoner without ancestors beyond the father who was head-ostler at the sign of the "Swan and Hoop," Finsbury Pavement, and married his master's daughter. It was at the stable at the "Swan and Hoop"—not a public-house, by the way, but a livery-stable—that Keats was prematurely born at the end of October 1795. He was scarcely nine years old when his father was killed by a fall from a horse. He was only fourteen when his mother (who had re-married unhappily and then been separated from her husband) died, a victim of chronic rheumatism and consumption. It is from his mother that Keats seems to have inherited his impetuous and passionate nature. There is the evidence of a certain wholesale tea-dealer—the respectability of whose trade may have inclined him to censoriousness—to the effect that, both as girl and woman, she "was a person of unbridled temperament, and that in her later years she fell into loose ways, and was no credit to the family." That she had other qualities besides those mentioned by the tea-dealer is shown by the passionate affection that existed between her and her son John. "Once as a young child, when she was ordered to be kept quiet during an illness, he is said to have insisted on keeping watch at her door with an old sword, and allowing no one to go in." As she lay dying, "he sat up whole nights with her in a great chair, would suffer nobody to give her medicine, or even cook her food, but himself, and read novels to her in her intervals of ease." The Keats children were fortunately not left penniless. Their grandfather, the proprietor of the livery-stable, had bequeathed a fortune of £13,000, a little of which was spent on sending Keats to a good school till the age of sixteen, and afterwards enabled him to attend Guy's Hospital as a medical student.

It is almost impossible to credit the accepted story that he passed all his boyhood without making any attempt at writing poetry. "He did not begin to write," says Sir Sidney Colvin, "till he was near eighteen." If this is so, one feels all the more grateful to his old schoolfellow, Cowden Clarke, who lent himThe Faëry Queene, with a long list of other books, and in doing so presented him with the key that unlocked the unsuspected treasure of his genius. There is only one person, indeed, in all the Keats circle to whom one is more passionately grateful than to Cowden Clarke: that is Fanny Brawne. Keats no doubt had laboured to some purpose—occasionally, to fine purpose—with his genius before the autumn of 1818, when he met Fanny Brawne for the first time. None the less, had he died before that date, he would have been remembered in literature not as a marvellous original artist, but rather as one of those "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" among whom Shelley surprisingly placed him. Fanny Brawne may (or may not) have been the bad fairy of Keats as a man. She was unquestionably his good fairy as a poet.

This is the only matter upon which one is seriously disposed to quarrel with Sir Sidney Colvin as a biographer. He does not emphasize as he ought the debt we are under to Fanny Brawne as the intensifier of Keats's genius—the "minx," as Keats irritably called her, who transformed him in a few months from a poet of still doubtful fame into a master and an immortal. The attachment, Sir Sidney thinks, was a misfortune for him, though he qualifies this by adding that "so probably under the circumstances must any passion for a woman have been." Well, let us test this "misfortune" by its consequences. The meeting with Fanny took place, as I have said, in the autumn of 1818. During the winter Keats continued to writeHyperion, which he seems already to have begun. In January 1819 he wroteThe Eve of St. Agnes. During the spring of that year, he wrote theOde to Psyche, theOde on a Grecian Urn, theOde to a Nightingale, andLa Belle Dame sans Merci. In the autumn he finishedLamia, and wrote theOde to Autumn. To the same year belongs the second greatest of his sonnets,Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art. In other words, practically all the fine gold of Keats's work was produced in the months in which his passion for Fanny Brawne was consuming him as with fire. His greatest poems we clearly owe to that heightened sense of beauty which resulted from his translation into a lover. It seems to me a treachery to Keats's memory to belittle a woman who was at least the occasion of such a passionate expenditure of genius. Sir Sidney Colvin does his best to be fair to Fanny, but his presentation of the story of Keats's love for her will, I am afraid, be regarded by the long line of her disparagers as an endorsement of their blame.

I can understand the dislike of Fanny Brawne on the part of those who dislike Keats and all his works. But if we accept Keats andThe Eve of St. Agnes, we had better be honest and also accept Fanny, who inspired them. Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems belong to the literature of the higher sensualism. They reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature. He seems to have admired women vulgarly as creatures whose hands were waiting to be squeezed, rather than as equal human beings; the eminent exception to this being his sister-in-law, Georgiana. His famous declaration of independence of them—that he would rather give them a sugar-plum than his time—was essentially a cynicism in the exhausted-Don-Juan mood. Hence, Keats was almost doomed to fall in love with provocation rather than with what the Victorians called "soul." His destiny was not to be a happy lover, but the slave of a "minx." It was not a slavery without dignity, however. It had the dignity of tragedy. Sir Sidney Colvin regrets that the love-letters of Keats to Fanny were ever published. It would be as reasonable, in my opinion, to regret the publication ofLa Belle Dame sans Merci.La Belle Dame sans Mercisays in literature merely what the love-letters say in autobiography. The love-letters, indeed, like the poem, affect us as great literature does. They unquestionably take us down into the depths of suffering—those depths in which tortured souls cry out almost inarticulately in their anguish. The torture of the dying lover, as he sails for Italy and leaves Fanny, never to see her again, has almost no counterpart in biographical literature. "The thought of leaving Miss Brawne," he writes to Brown from Yarmouth, "is beyond everything horrible—the sense of darkness coming over me—I eternally see her figure eternally vanishing." And when he reaches Naples he writes to the same friend:—

I can bear to die—I cannot bear to leave her. O God! God! God! Everything that I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her—I see her—I hear her.... O that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her—to receive a letter from her. To see her handwriting would break my heart—even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written, would be more than I can bear.

Sir Sidney Colvin does not attempt to hide Keats's love-story away in a corner. Where he goes wrong, it seems to me, is in his failure to realize that this love-story was the making of Keats as a man of genius. Had Sir Sidney fully grasped the part played by Fanny Brawne as, for good or evil, the presiding genius of Keats as a poet, he would, I fancy, have found a different explanation of the changes introduced into the later version ofLa Belle Dame sans Merci. Sir Sidney is all in favour—and there is something to be said for his preference—of the earlier version, which begins:—

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,Alone and palely loitering!

But he does not perceive the reasons that led Keats to alter this in the version he published in Leigh Hunt'sIndicatorto:—

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,

and so on. Sir Sidney thinks that this and other changes, "which are all in the direction of the slipshod and the commonplace, were made on Hunt's suggestion, and that Keats acquiesced from fatigue or indifference." To accuse Hunt of wishing to alter "knight-at-arms" to "wretched wight" seems to me unwarrantable guessing. Surely a much more likely explanation is that Keats, who in this poem wrote his own biography as an unfortunate lover, came in a realistic mood to dislike "knight-at-arms" as a too romantic image of himself. He decided, I conjecture, that "wretched wight" was a description nearer the bitter truth. Hence his emendation. The other alterations also seem to me to belong to Keats rather than to Hunt. This does not mean that the "knight-at-arms" version is not also beautiful. But, in spite of this, I trust the Delegates of the Oxford University Press will not listen to Sir Sidney Colvin's appeal to banish the later version from their editions of Keats. Every edition of Keats ought to contain both versions just as it ought to contain both versions ofHyperion.

Nothing that I have written will be regarded, I trust, as depreciating the essential excellence, power, and (in its scholarly way) even the greatness of Sir Sidney Colvin's book. But a certain false emphasis here and there, an intelligible prejudice in favour of believing what is good of his subject, has left his book almost too ready to the hand of those who cannot love a man of genius without desiring to "respectabilize" him. Sir Sidney sees clearly enough the double nature of Keats—his fiery courage, shown in his love of fighting as a schoolboy, his generosity, his virtue of the heart, on the one hand, and his luxurious love of beauty, his tremulous and swooning sensitiveness in the presence of nature and women, his morbidness, his mawkishness, his fascination as by serpents, on the other. But in the resultant portrait, it is a too respectable and virile Keats that emerges. Keats was more virile as a man than is generally understood. He does not owe his immortality to his virility, however. He owes it to his servitude to golden images, to his citizenship of the world of the senses, to his bondage to physical love. Had he lived longer he might have invaded other worlds. His recasting ofHyperionopens with a cry of distrust in the artist who is content to live in the little world of his art. His very revulsion against the English of Milton was a revulsion against the dead language of formal beauty. But it is in formal beauty—the formal beauty especially of theOde on a Grecian Urn, which has never been surpassed in literature—that his own achievement lies. He is great among the pagans, not among the prophets. Unless we keep this clearly in mind our praise of him will not be appreciation. It will be but a sounding funeral speech instead of communion with a lovely and broken spirit, the greatest boast of whose life was: "I have loved the principle of beauty in all things."

Matthew Arnold has often been attacked for his essay on Shelley. His essay on Keats, as a matter of fact, is much less sympathetic and penetrating. Here, more than anywhere else in his work, he seems to be a professor with whiskers drinking afternoon tea and discoursing on literature to a circle of schoolgirls. It is not that Matthew Arnold under-estimated Keats. "He is with Shakespeare," he declared; and in another sentence: "In what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare." One may disagree with this—for in natural magic Keats does not rank even with Shelley—and, at the same time, feel that Matthew Arnold gives Keats too little rather than too much appreciation. He divorced Keats's poetry too gingerly from Keats's life. He did not sufficiently realize the need for understanding all that passion and courage and railing and ecstasy of which the poems are the expression. He was a little shocked; he would have liked to draw a veil; he did not approve of a young man who could make love in language so unlike the measured ardour of one of Miss Austen's heroes. The impression left by the letters to Fanny Brawne, he declared, was "unpleasing." After quoting one of the letters, he goes on to comment:—

One is tempted to say that Keats's love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice, which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court.

Applied to the letter which Arnold had just quoted there could not be a more foolish criticism. Keats was dogged by a curious vulgarity (which produced occasional comic effects in his work), but his self-abandonment was not vulgar. It may have been in a sense immoral: he was an artist who practised the philosophy of exquisite moments long before Pater wrote about it. He abandoned himself to the sensations of love and the sensations of an artist like a voluptuary. The best of his work is day-dreams of love and art. The degree to which his genius fed itself upon art and day-dreams of art is suggested by the fact that the most perfect of his early poems, written at the age of twenty, was the sonnet on Chapman's Homer, and that the most perfect of his later poems was theOde on a Grecian Urn. His magic was largely artistic magic, not natural magic. He writes about Pan and the nymphs, but we do not feel that they were shapes of earth and air to him, as they were to Shelley; rather they seem like figures copied out of his friends' pictures. Consider, for example, the picture of a nymph who appeared to Endymion:—

It was a nymph uprising to the breastIn the fountain's pebbly margin, and she stood'Mong lilies, like the youngest of her brood.To him her dripping hand she softly kist,And anxiously began to plait and twist

The gestures of the nymph are as ludicrous as could be found in an Academy or Salon picture. Keats's human or quasi-human beings are seldom more than decorations, but this is a commonplace decoration. The figures inThe Eve of St. Agnesand the later narratives are a part of the general beauty of the poems; but even there they are made, as it were, to match the furniture. It is the same in all his best poems. Keats's imagination lived in castles, and he loved the properties, and the men and women were among the properties. We may forget the names of Porphyro and Madeline, but we do not forget the background of casement and arras and golden dishes and beautiful sensual things against which we see them, charming figures of love-sickness. Similarly, inLamia, we may remember the name of the serpent-woman's lover with difficulty; but who can forget the colours of her serpent-skin or the furnishing of her couch and of her palace in Corinth:—

That purple-lined palace of sweet sin?

In Keats every palace has a purple lining.

So much may be said in definition of Keats's genius. It was essentially an aesthetic genius. It anticipated both William Morris and Oscar Wilde. There is in Keats a passion for the luxury of the world such as we do not find in Wordsworth or Shelley. He had not that bird-like quality of song which they had—that happiness to be alive and singing between the sky and the green earth. He looked on beautiful things with the intense devotion of the temple-worshipper rather than with the winged pleasure of the great poets. He was love-sick for beauty as Porphyro for Madeline. His attitude to beauty—the secret and immortal beauty—is one of "love shackled with vain-loving." It is desire of an almost bodily kind. Keats's work, indeed, is in large measure simply the beautiful expression of bodily desire, or of something of the same nature as bodily desire. His conception of love was almost entirely physical. He was greedy for it to the point of green-sickness. His intuition told him that passion so entirely physical had in it something fatal. Love in his poems is poisonous and secret in its beauty. It is passion for a Lamia, for La Belle Dame sans Merci. Keats's ecstasies were swooning ecstasies. They lacked joy. It is not only in theOde to a Nightingalethat he seems to praise death more than life. This was temperamental with him. He felt the "cursed spite" of things as melancholily as Hamlet did. He was able to dream a world nearer his happiness than this world of dependence and church bells and "literary jabberers"; and he could come to no terms except with his fancy. I do not mean to suggest that he despised the beauty of the earth. Rather he filled his eyes with it:—

Hill-flowers running wildIn pink and purple chequer—

and:—

Up-pil'd,The cloudy rack slow journeying in the West,Like herded elephants.

But the simple pleasure in colours and shapes grows less in his later poems. It becomes overcast. His great poems have the intensity and sorrow of a farewell.

It would be absurd, however, to paint Keats as a man without vitality, without pugnacity, without merriment. His brother declared that "John was the very soul of manliness and courage, and as much like the Holy Ghost as Johnny Keats"—the Johnny Keats who had allowed himself to be "snuffed out by an article." As a schoolboy he had been fond of fighting, and as a man he had his share of militancy. He had a quite healthy sense of humour, too—not a subtle sense, but at least sufficient to enable him to regard his work playfully at times, as when he commented on an early version ofLa Belle Dame sans Mercicontaining the lines:—

And there I shut her wild, wild eyesWith kisses four.

"Why four kisses?" he writes to his brother:—

Why four kisses—you will say—why four? Because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse—she would have fain said "score" without hurting the rhyme—but we must temper the imagination, as the critics say, with judgment. I was obliged to choose an even number, that both eyes might have fair play, and to speak truly I think two apiece quite sufficient. Suppose I had said seven, there would have been three and-a-half apiece—a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side.

That was written nearly a year after the famousQuarterlyarticle onEndymion, in which the reviewer had so severely taken to task "Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody)." It suggests that Keats retained at least a certain share of good spirits, in spite of theQuarterlyand Fanny Brawne and the approach of death. His observation, too, was often that of a spirited common-sense realist rather than an aesthete, as in his first description of Fanny Brawne:—

She is about my height—with a fine style and countenance of the lengthened sort—she wants sentiment in every feature—she manages to make her hair look well—her nostrils are fine—though a little painful—her mouth is bad and good—her profile is better than her full face, which, indeed, is not full but pale and thin, without showing any bone—her shape is very graceful, and so are her movements—her arms are good, her hands bad-ish—her feet tolerable—she is not seventeen [nineteen?]—but she is ignorant monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names—that I was forced lately to make use of the termminx; this is, I think, not from any innate vice but from a penchant she has of acting stylishly. I am, however, tired of such style, and shall decline any more of it.

Yet before many months he was writing to the "minx," "I will imagine you Venus to-night, and pray, pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen." Certain it is, as I have already said, that it was after his meeting with Fanny Brawne that he grew, as in a night, into a great poet. Let us not then abuse Keats's passion for her as vulgar. And let us not attempt to make up for this by ranking him with Shakespeare. He is great among the second, not among the first poets.

Henry James is an example of a writer who enjoyed immense fame but little popularity. Some of his best books, I believe, never passed into second editions. He was, above all novelists, an esoteric author. His disciples had the pleasure of feeling like persons initiated into mysteries. He was subject, like a religious teacher, to all kinds of conflicting interpretations. He puzzled and exasperated even intelligent people. They often wondered what he meant and whether it was worth writing about. Mr. Wells, or whoever wroteBoon, compared him to a hippopotamus picking up a pea.

Certainly he laboured over trifles as though he were trying to pile Pelion on Ossa. He was capable, had he been a poet, of writing an epic made up of incidents chosen from the gossip of an old maid in the upper middle classes. He was the novelist of grains and scruples. I have heard it urged that he was the supreme incarnation of the Nonconformist conscience, perpetually concerned with infinitesimal details of conduct. As a matter of fact, there was much more of the aesthete in him than of the Nonconformist. He lived for his tastes. It is because he is a novelist of tastes rather than of passions that he is unlikely ever to be popular even to the degree to, which Meredith is popular.

One imagines him, from his childhood, as a perfect connoisseur, a dilettante. He has told us how, as a child, in New York, Paris, London, and Geneva, he enjoyed more than anything else the "far from showy practice of wondering and dawdling and gaping." And, while giving us this picture of the small boy that was himself, he comments:

There was the very pattern and measure of all he was to demand: just tobesomewhere—almost anywhere would do—and somehow receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration.

That is the essential Henry James—the collector of impressions and vibrations. "Almost anywhere would do": that is what makes some of his stories just miss being as insipid as the verse in a magazine. On the other hand, of few of his stories is this true. His personality was too definitely marked to leave any of his work flavourless. His work reflects him as the arrangement of a room may reflect a charming lady. He brings into every little world that he enters the light of a new and refined inquisitiveness. He is as watchful as a cat. Half his pleasure seems to come from waiting for the extraordinary to peep and peer out of the ordinary. That is his adventure. He prefers it to seas of bloodshed. One may quarrel with it, if one demands that art shall be as violent as war and shall not subdue itself to the level of a game. But those who enjoy the spectacle of a game played with perfect skill will always find reading Henry James an exciting experience.

It would be unfair, however, to suggest that the literature of Henry James can be finally summed up as a game. He is unquestionably a virtuoso: he uses his genius as an instrument upon which he loves to reveal his dexterity, even when he is shy of revealing his immortal soul. But he is not so inhuman in his art as some of his admirers have held him to be. Mr. Hueffer, I think, has described him as pitiless, and even cruel. But can one callDaisy Millerpitiless? OrWhat Maisie Knew? Certainly, those autobiographical volumes,A Small Boy and OthersandNotes of a Son and Brother, which may be counted among the most wonderful of the author's novels, are pervaded by exquisite affections which to a pitiless nature would have been impossible.

Henry James is even sufficiently human to take sides with his characters. He never does this to the point of lying about them. But he is in his own still way passionately on the side of the finer types. InThe Turn of the Screw, which seems to me to be the greatest ghost-story in the English language, he has dramatized the duel between good and evil; and the effect of it, at the end of all its horrors, is that of a hymn in praise of courage. One feels—though a more perverse theory of the story has been put forward—that the governess, who fights against the evil in the big house, has the author also fighting as her ally and the children's. Similarly, Maisie has a friend in the author.

He is never more human, perhaps, than when he is writing, not about human beings, but about books. It is not inconceivable that he will live as a critic long after he is forgotten as a novelist. No book of criticism to compare with hisNotes on Novelistshas been published in the present century. He brought his imagination to bear upon books as he brought his critical and analytical faculty to bear upon human beings. Here there was room for real heroes. He idolized his authors as he idolized none of his characters. There is something of moral passion in the reverence with which he writes of the labours of Flaubert and Balzac and Stevenson and even of Zola.

He lied none of them into perfection, it is true. He accepted, and even advertised their limitations. But in each of them he found an example of the hero as artist. His characterization of Flaubert as the "operative conscience or vicarious sacrifice" of a styleless literary age is the pure gold of criticism. "The piety most real to her," Fleda says inThe Spoils of Poynton, "was to be on one's knees before one's high standard." Henry James himself had that kind of piety. Above all recent men of letters, he was on his knees to his high standard.

People may wonder whether his standard was not, to an excessive degree, a standard of subtlety rather than of creative imagination—at least, in his later period. And undoubtedly his subtlety was to some extent a matter of make-believe. He loved to take a simple conversation, and, by introducing a few subtle changes, to convert it into a sort of hieroglyphics that need an interpreter. He grew more and more to believe that it was not possible to tell the simple truth except in an involved way. He would define a gesture with as much labour as Shakespeare would devote to the entire portrait of a woman. He was a realist of civilized society in which both speech and action have to be sifted with scientific care before they will yield their grain of motive. The humorous patience with which Henry James seeks for that grain is one of the distinctive features of his genius.

But, it may be asked, are his people real? They certainly are real in the relationships in which he exhibits them, but they are real like people to whom one has been introduced in a foreign city rather than like people who are one's friends. One does not remember them like the characters in Meredith or Mr. Hardy. Henry James, indeed, is himself the outstanding character in his books. That fine and humorous collector of European ladies and gentlemen, that savourer of the little lives of the Old World and the little adventures of those who have escaped from the New, that artist who brooded over his fellows in the spirit less of a poet than a man of science, that sober and fastidious trifler—this is the image which presides over his books, and which gives them their special character, and will attract tiny but enthusiastic companies of readers to them for many years to come.

Henry James's amanuensis, Miss Theodora Bosanquet, wrote an article a year or two ago in theFortnightly Review, describing how the great man wrote his novels. Since 1895 or 1896 he dictated them, and they were taken down, not in shorthand, but directly on the typewriter. He was particular even about the sort of typewriter. It must be a Remington. "Other kinds sounded different notes, and it was almost impossibly disconcerting for him to dictate to something that made no responsive sound at all." He did not, however, pour himself out to his amanuensis without having made a preliminary survey of the ground. "He liked to 'break ground' by talking to himself day by day about the characters and the construction until the whole thing was clearly before his mind's eye. This preliminary talking out the scheme was, of course, duly recorded by the typewriter. "It is not that he made rough drafts of his novels-sketches to be afterwards amplified. "His method might better be compared with Zola's habit of writing long letters to himself about characters in his next book until they became alive enough for him to begin a novel about them." Henry James has himself, as Miss Bosanquet points out, described his method of work inThe Death of a Lion, in which it is attributed to his hero, Neil Paraday. "Loose, liberal, confident," he declares of Faraday's "scenario," as one might call it, "it might be passed for a great, gossiping, eloquent letter—the overflow into talk of an artist's amorous plan."

Almost the chief interest of Henry James's two posthumous novels is the fact that we are given not only the novels themselves—or, rather, the fragments of them that the author had written—but the "great, gossiping, eloquent letters" in which he soliloquized about them. As a rule, these preliminary soliloquies ran to about thirty thousand words, and were destroyed as soon as the novel in hand was finished. So delightful are they—such thrilling revelations of the workings of an artist's mind—that one does not quite know whether or not to congratulate oneself on the fact that the last books have been left mere torsos. Which would one rather have—a complete novel or the torso of a novel with the artist's dream of how to make it perfect? It is not easy to decide. What makes it all the more difficult to decide in the present instance is one's feeling thatThe Sense of the Past, had it been completed, would have been very nearly a masterpiece. In it Henry James hoped to get what he called a "kind of quasi-turn-of-screw effect." Here, as inThe Turn of the Screw, he was dealing with a sort of ghosts—whether subjective or objective in their reality does not matter. His hero is a young American who had never been to Europe till he was about thirty, and yet was possessed by that almost sensual sense of the past which made Henry James, as a small boy, put his nose into English books and try to sniff in and smell from their pages the older world from which they came. The inheritance of an old house in a London square—a house in which the clocks had stopped, as it were, in 1820—brings the young man over to England, though the lady with whom he is in love seeks to keep him in America and watch him developing as a new species—a rich, sensitive, and civilized American, untouched and unsubdued by Europe. This young man's emotions in London, amid old things in an atmosphere that also somehow seemed mellow and old, may, I fancy, be taken as a record of the author's own spiritual experiences as he drew in long breaths of appreciation during his almost lifelong wanderings in this hemisphere. For it is important to remember that Henry James never ceased to be a foreigner. He was enchanted by England as by a strange land. He saw it always, like the hero ofThe Sense of the Past, under the charm ... of the queer, incomparable London light—unless one frankly loved it rather as London shade—which he had repeatedly noted as so strange as to be at its finest sinister."

However else this air might have been described it was signally not the light of freshness, and suggested as little as possible the element in which the first children of nature might have begun to take notice. Ages, generations, inventions, corruptions, had produced it, and it seemed, wherever it rested, to be filtered through the bed of history. It made the objects about show for the time as in something "turned on"—something highly successful that he might have seen at the theatre.

Henry James saw old-world objects in exactly that sort of light. He knew in his own nerves how Ralph Pendrel felt on going over his London house. "There wasn't," he says, "... an old hinge or an old brass lock that he couldn't work with love of the act." He could observe the inanimate things of the Old World almost as if they were living things. No naturalist spying for patient hours upon birds in the hope of discovering their secrets could have had a more curious, more hopeful, and more loitering eye. He found even fairly common things in Europe, as Pendrel found the things in the house he inherited, "all smoothed with service and charged with accumulated messages."

He was like the worshipper in a Spanish church, who watches for the tear on the cheek or the blood-drop from the wound of some wonder-working effigy of Mother and Son.

InThe Sense of the Past, Henry James conceived a fantastic romance, in which his hero steps not only into the inheritance of an old house, but into 1820, exchanging personalities with a young man in one of the family portraits, and even wooing the young man's betrothed. It is a story of "queer" happenings, like the story of a dream or a delusion in which the ruling passion has reached the point of mania. It is the kind of story that has often been written in a gross, mechanical way. Here it is all delicate—a study of nuances and subtle relationships. For Ralph, though perfect in the 1820 manner, has something of the changeling about him—something that gradually makes people think him "queer," and in the end arouses in him the dim beginnings of nostalgia for his own time. It is a fascinating theme as Henry James works it out—doubly fascinating as he talks about it to himself in the "scenario" that is published along with the story. In the latter we see the author groping for his story, almost like a medium in a trance. Like a medium, he one moment hesitates and is vague, and the next, as he himself would say, fairly pounces on a certainty. No artist ever cried with louder joy at the sight of things coming absolutely right under his hand. Thus, at one moment, the author announces:—

The more I get into my drama the more magnificent upon my word I seem to see it and feel it; with such a tremendous lot of possibilities in it that I positively quake in dread of the muchness with which they threaten me.

At a moment of less illumination he writes:—

There glimmers and then floats shyly back to me from afar, the sense of something likethis, a bit difficult to put, though entirely expressible with patience, and as I catch hold of the tip of the tail of it yet again strikes me as adding to my action but another admirable twist.

He continually sees himself catching by the tip of the tail the things that solve his difficulties. And what tiny little animals he sometimes manages to catch by the tip of the tail in some of his trances of inspiration! Thus, at one point, he breaks off excitedly about his hero with:—

As to which, however, on consideration don't I see myself catch a bright betterment by not at all making him use a latch-key?... No, no—no latch-key—but a rat-tat-tat, on his own part, at the big brass knocker.

As the writer searches for the critical action or gesture which is to betray the "abnormalism" of his hero to the 1820 world in which he moves, he cries to himself:—

Find it, find it; get it right, and it will be the making of the story.

At another stage in the story, he comments:—

All that is feasible and convincing; rather beautiful to do being what I mean.

At yet another stage:—

I pull up, too, here, in the midst of my elation—though after a little I shall straighten everything out.

He discusses with himself the question whether Ralph Pendrel, in the 1820 world, is to repeat exactly the experience of the young man in the portrait, and confides to himself:—

Just now, a page or two back, I lost my presence of mind, I let myself be scared, by a momentarily-confused appearance, an assumption, that he doesn't repeat it. I see, on recovery of my wits, not to say of my wit, that he very exactly does.

Nowhere in the "scenario" is the artist's pleasure in his work expressed more finely than in the passage in which Henry James describes his hero at the crisis of his experience, when the latter begins to feel that he is under the observation of hisalter ego, and is being vaguely threatened. "There must," the author tells himself—

There must be sequences here of the strongest, I make out—the successive driving in of the successive silver-headed nails at the very points and under the very tops that I reserve for them. That's it, the silver nail, the recurrence of it in the right place, the perfection of the salience of each, and the trick is played.

"Trick," he says, but Henry James resorted little to tricks, in the ordinary meaning of the word. He scorns the easy and the obvious, as in preparing for the return of the young hero to the modern world—a return made possible by a noble act of self-sacrifice on the part of a second 1820 girl who sends him from her, yet "without an excess of the kind of romanticism I don't want." There is another woman—the modern woman whom Ralph had loved in America—who might help the machinery of the story (as the author thinks) if he brought her on the scene at a certain stage. But he thinks of the device only to exclaim against it:—

Can't possibly do anything so artistically base.

The notes forThe Ivory Towerare equally alluring, thoughThe Ivory Toweris not itself so good asThe Sense of the Past. It is a story of contemporary American life, and we are told that the author laid it aside at the beginning of the war, feeling that "he could no longer work upon a fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life." Especially interesting is the "scenario," because of the way in which we find Henry James trying—poor man, he was always an amateur at names!—to get the right names for his characters. He ponders, for instance, on the name of his heroine:—

I want her name ... her Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have some bright combination with that; the essence of which is a surname of two syllables and ending in a consonant—also beginning with one. I am thinking of Moyra Grabham, the latter excellent thing was inThe Timesof two or three days ago; the only fault is a little too much meaning.

Consciousness in artistry can seldom have descended to minuter details with a larger gesture. One would not have missed these games of genius with syllables and consonants for worlds. Is it all an exquisite farce or is it splendidly heroic? Are we here spectators of the incongruous heroism of an artist who puts a hero's earnestness into getting the last perfection of shine on to a boot or the last fine shade of meaning into the manner in which he says, "No, thank you, no sugar"? No, it is something more than that. It is the heroism of a man who lived at every turn and trifle for his craft—who seems to have had almost no life outside it. In the temple of his art, he found the very dust of the sanctuary holy. He had the perfect piety of the artist in the least as well as in the greatest things.

As one reads the last fragment of the autobiography of Henry James, one cannot help thinking of him as a convert giving his testimony. Henry James was converted into an Englishman with the same sense of being born again as is felt by many a convert to Christianity. He can speak of the joy of it all only in superlatives. He had the convert's sense of—in his own phrase—"agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know how endearingly enough to name them I)." He speaks of "this really prodigious flush" of his first full experience of England. He passes on the effect of his religious rapture when he tells us that "really wherever I looked, and still more wherever I pressed, I sank in and in up to my nose." How breathlessly he conjures up the scene of his dedication, as he calls it, in the coffee-room of a Liverpool hotel on that gusty, "overwhelmingly English" March morning in 1869, on which at the age of almost twenty-six he fortunately and fatally landed on these shores,

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 ofbric-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, "oneunderstood." 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 tobesomebody, or at least to have been talked about by somebody. They were figures, not cyphers. They were characters in a play with cross-references.

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