Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.H.J.: Preface to Roderick Hudson.
WE have, it would seem, at last reluctantly decided to claim Henry James as our own, in spite of his having renounced, two years before his death, so serious an obligation as his citizenship, but with a disturbing tendency among his critics and admirers of certain schools to go a step further and claim him for the New England, or Puritan, tradition.
This is merely the revival and extension of an old error first made by Carlyle in regard to Henry James the elder: “Mr. James, your New-England friend,” wrote Carlyle in a letter, “I saw him several times and liked him.” This baseless remark set up, years later, a train of reverberations in the mind of Mr. James’s son Henry, who took pains to correct the “odd legend” that the James family were a New England product, mentioning that Carlyle’s mistake was a common one among the English, who seemed to have no faintest care or notion about our regional differences. With his intense feeling for place and family relations and family history, Henry James the younger could not allow this important error to pass uncorrected. With his very special eyes, whose threads were tangled in every vital center of his being, he looked long through “a thin golden haze” into his past, and recreated for our charmed view an almost numberless family connection, all pure Scotch-Irish so far back as the records run, unaltered to the third generation in his branch of the family; and except for the potent name-grandfather himself—a Presbyterian of rather the blue-nosed caste, who brought up his eleven or was it thirteen children of three happy marriages in the fear of a quite improbable God—almost nothing could be less Puritanic, less New England, than their careers, even if they were all of Protestant descent. The earliest branch came late to this country (1764) according to Virginia or New England standards, and they settled in the comparatively newly opened country of upstate New York—new for the English and Scotch-Irish, that is, for the Dutch and the French had been there a good while before, and they married like with like among the substantial families settled along the Hudson River. Thus the whole connection in its earlier days was spared the touch of the specifically New England spirit, which even then was spreading like a slow blight into every part of the country.
(But the young Henry James feared it from the first, distrusted it in his bones. Even though his introduction to New England was by way of “the proud episcopal heart of Newport,” when he was about fifteen years old, and though he knew there at least one artist, and one young boy of European connection and experience, still, Boston was not far away, and he felt a tang of wintry privation in the air, a threat of “assault and death.” By way of stores against the hovering famine and siege, he collected a whole closet full of the beloved Revue des Deux Mondes, in its reassuring salmon-pink cover.)
Henry James’s grandfather, the first William James, arrived in America from Ireland, County Cavan, an emigrant boy of seventeen, and settled in Albany in 1789. He was of good solid middle-class stock, he possessed that active imagination and boundless energy of the practical sort so useful in ancestors; in about forty years of the most blameless, respected use of every opportunity to turn an honest penny, on a very handsome scale of operations, he accumulated a fortune of three million dollars, in a style that was to become the very pattern of American enterprise. The city of Albany was credited to him, it was the work of his hands, it prospered with him. His industries and projects kept hundreds of worthy folk gainfully employed the year round, in the grateful language of contemporary eulogy; in his time only John Jacob Astor gathered a larger fortune in New York state. We may as well note here an obvious irony, and dismiss it: James’s grandfather’s career was a perfect example of the sort of thing that was to become “typically American,” and still is, it happens regularly even now; and Henry James the younger had great good of it, yet it did create the very atmosphere which later on he found so hard to breathe that he deserted it altogether for years, for life.
The three millions were divided at last among the widow and eleven surviving children, the first Henry James, then a young man, being one of them. These twelve heirs none of them inherited the Midas touch, and all had a taste for the higher things of life enjoyed in easy, ample surroundings. Henry the younger lived to wonder, with a touch of charming though acute dismay, just what had become of all that delightful money. Henry the elder, whose youth had been gilded to the ears, considered money a topic beneath civilized discussion, business a grimy affair they all agreed to know nothing about, and neglected completely to mention what he had done with his share. He fostered a legend among his children that he had been “wild” and appeared, according to his fascinating stories, to have been almost the only young man of his generation who had not come to a bad end. His son Henry almost in infancy had got the notion that the words “wild” and “dissipated” were synonymous with “tipsy.” Be that as it may, Henry the first in his wild days had a serious if temporary falling out with his father, whom he described as the tenderest and most sympathetic of parents; but he also wrote in his fragment of autobiography, “I should think indeed that our domestic intercourse had been on the whole most innocent as well as happy, were it not for a certain lack of oxygen which is indeed incidental to the family atmosphere and which I may characterize as the lack of any ideal of action except that of self-preservation.” Indeed, yes. Seeking fresh air, he fled into the foreign land of Massachusetts: Boston, precisely: until better days should come. “It was an age,” wrote his son Henry, “in which a flight from Albany to Boston. . . counted as a far flight.” It still does. The point of this episode for our purposes was, that Henry the first mildewed in exile for three long months, left Boston and did not again set foot there until he was past thirty-five. His wife never went there at all until her two elder sons were in Harvard, a seat of learning chosen faute de mieux, for Europe, Europe was where they fain all would be; except that a strange, uneasy, even artificially induced nationalism, due to the gathering war between the states, had laid cold doubts on their minds—just where did they belong, where was their native land? The two young brothers, William and Henry, especially then began, after their shuttlings to and from Europe, to make unending efforts to “find America” and to place themselves once for all either in it or out of it. But this was later.
It is true that the elder Jameses settled in Boston, so far as a James of that branch could ever be said to settle, for the good reason that they wished to be near their sons; but they never became, by any stretch of the word, New Englanders, any more than did their son William, after all those years at Harvard; any more than did their son Henry become an Englishman, after all those years in England. He realized this himself, even after he became a British subject in 1914; and the British agree with him to this day. He was to the end an amiable, distinguished stranger living among them. Yet two generations born in this country did not make them Americans, either, and in the whole great branching family connection, with its “habits of ease” founded on the diminishing backlog of the new fortune, the restless blood of the emigrant grandparents ran high. Europe was not so far away as it is now, and though Albany and “the small, warm dusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century” were dear to them, they could not deny, indeed no one even thought of denying, that all things desirable in the arts, architecture, education, ways of living, history, the future, the very shape of the landscape and the color of the air, lay like an inheritance they had abandoned, in Europe.
“This question of Europe” which never ceased to agitate his parents from his earliest memory was paradoxically the only permanent element in the Jameses’ family life. All their movements, plans, interests were based, you might say, on that perpetually unresolved problem. It was kept simmering by letters from friends and relatives traveling or living there; cousins living handsomely at Geneva, enjoying the widest possible range of desirable social amenities; other cousins living agreeably at Tours, or Trouville; the handsomest of the Albany aunts married advantageously and living all over Europe, urging the Henry Jameses to come with their young and do likewise for the greater good of all. There was an older cousin who even lived in China, came back to fill a flat in Gramercy Square with “dim Chinoiseries” and went on to old age in Surrey and her last days in Versailles. There was besides the constant delicious flurry of younger cousins and aunts with strange wonderful clothes and luggage who had always just been there, or who were just going there, “there” meaning always Europe, and oddly enough, specifically Paris, instead of London. The infant Henry, at the age of five, received his “positive initiation into History” when Uncle Gus returned bringing the news of the flight of Louis Philippe to England. To the child, flight had been a word with a certain meaning; king another. “Flight of kings” was a new, portentous, almost poetic image of strange disasters, it early gave to political questions across the sea a sense of magnificence they altogether lacked at home, where society outside the enthralling family circle and the shimmering corona of friends seemed altogether to consist of “the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster.”
Within that circle, however, nothing could exceed the freedom and ease with which artists of all sorts, some of them forgotten now, seemed to make the James fireside, wherever it happened to be, their own. The known and acclaimed were also household guests and dear friends.
Mr. Emerson, “the divinely pompous rose of the philosophical garden,” as Henry James the elder described him, or, in other lights and views, the “man without a handle”—one simply couldn’t get hold of him at all—had been taken upstairs in the fashionable Astor Hotel to admire the newly born William; and in later times, seated in the firelit dusk of the back parlor in the James house, had dazzled the young Henry, who knew he was great. General Winfield Scott in military splendor had borne down upon him and his father at a street corner for a greeting; and on a boat between Fort Hamilton and New York Mr. Washington Irving had apprised Mr. James of the shipwreck of Margaret Fuller, off Fire Island, only a day or so before. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the “acclaimed,” the idolized, most read and recited of poets; his works were on every drawing room or library table that Henry James knew, and he never outgrew his wonder at the legend that Poe was neglected in his own time.
Still it was Dickens who ruled and pervaded the literary world from afar; the books in the house, except for a few French novels, were nearly all English; the favorite bookstore was English, where the James children went to browse, sniffing the pages for the strong smell of paper and printer’s ink, which they called “the English smell.” The rule of the admired, revered Revue des Deux Mondes was to set in shortly; France and French for Henry James, Germany and German for William James, were to have their great day, and stamp their images to such a degree that ever after the English of the one, and of the other, were to be “larded” and tagged and stuffed with French and German. In the days before, however, the general deliciousness and desirability of all things English was in the domestic air Henry James breathed; his mother and father talked about it so much at the breakfast table that, remembering, he asked himself if he had ever heard anything else talked about over the morning coffee cups. They could not relive enough their happy summer in England with their two babies, and he traveled again and again with them, by way of “Windsor and Sudbrook and Ham Common”; an earthly Paradise, they believed, and he believed with them. A young aunt, his mother’s sister, shared these memories and added her own: an incurable homesickness for England possessed her. Henry, asking for stories, listened and “took in” everything: taking in was to be his life’s main occupation: as if, he said, his “infant divination proceeded by the light of nature,” and he had learned already the importance of knowing in advance of any experience of his own, just what life in England might be like. A small yellow-covered English magazine called Charm also “shed on the question the softest lustre” and caused deep pangs of disappointment when it failed to show up regularly at the bookstore.
Henry James refers to all these early impressions as an “infection,” as a sip of “poison,” as a “twist”—perhaps of some psychological thumbscrew—but the twinges and pangs were all exciting, joyful, mysterious, thrilling, sensations he enjoyed and sought eagerly, half their force at least consisting of his imaginative projection of his own future in the most brilliant possible of great worlds. He saw his parents and his aunt perpetually homesick for something infinitely lovable and splendid they had known, and he longed to know it too. “Homesickness was a luxury I remember craving from the tenderest age,” he confessed, because he had at once perhaps too many homes and therefore no home at all. If his parents did not feel at home anywhere, he could not possibly, either. He did not know what to be homesick for, unless it were England, which he had seen but could not remember.
This was, then, vicarious, a mere sharing at second-hand; he needed something of his own. When it came, it was rather dismaying; but it was an important episode and confirmed in him the deep feeling that England had something formidable in its desirability, something to be lived up to: in contrast to France as he discovered later, where one “got life,” as he expressed it; or Germany, where the very trees of the great solemn forests murmured in his charmed ear of their mystical “culture.” What happened was this: the celebrated Mr. Thackeray, fresh from England, seated as an honored much-at-ease guest in the James library, committed an act which somehow explains everything that is wrong with his novels.
“Come here, little boy,” he said to Henry, “and show me your extraordinary jacket.” With privileged bad manners he placed his hand on the child’s shoulder and asked him if his garments were the uniform of his “age and class,” adding with brilliant humor that if he should wear it in England he would be addressed as “Buttons.” No matter what Mr. Thackeray thought he was saying—very likely he was not thinking at all—he conveyed to the overwhelmed admirer of England that the English, as so authoritatively represented by Mr. Thackeray, thought Americans “queer.” It was a disabling blow, recalled in every circumstance fifty years later, with a photograph, of all things, to illustrate and prove its immediate effect.
Henry was wearing that jacket, buttoned to the chin with a small white collar, on the hot dusty summer day when his companionable father, who never went anywhere without one or the other of his two elder sons, brought him up from Staten Island, where the family were summering, to New York, and as a gay surprise for everybody, took him to Mr. Brady’s for their photograph together. A heavy surprise indeed for Henry, who forever remembered the weather, the smells and sights of the wharf, the blowzy summer lassitude of the streets, and his own dismay that by his father’s merry whim he was to be immortalized by Mr. Brady in his native costume which would appear so absurd in England. Mr. Brady that day made one of the most expressive child pictures I know. The small straight figure has a good deal of grace and dignity in its unworthy (as he feared) clothes; the long hands are holding with what composure they can to things they know; his father’s shoulder, his large and, according to the fashion plates of the day, stylish straw hat. All the life of the child is in the eyes, rueful, disturbed, contemplative, with enormous intelligence and perception, much older than the face, much deeper and graver than his father’s. His father and mother bore a certain family resemblance to each other, such as closely interbred peoples of any nation are apt to develop; Henry resembled them both, but his father more neatly, and judging by later photographs, the resemblance became almost identical, except for the expression of the eyes—the unmistakable look of one who was to live intuitively and naturally a long life in “the air of the passions of the intelligence.”
In Mr. Brady’s daguerreotype, he is still a child, a stranger everywhere, and he is unutterably conscious of the bright untimeliness of the whole thing, the lack of proper ceremony, ignored as ever by the father; the slack, unflattering pose. His father is benevolent and cheerful and self-possessed and altogether pleased for them both. He had won his right to gaiety of heart in his love; after many a victorious engagement with the powers of darkness, he had Swedenborg and all his angels round about, bearing him up, which his son was never to have; and he had not been lately ridiculed by Mr. Thackeray, at least not to his face. Really it was not just the jacket that troubled him—that idle remark upon it was only one of the smallest of the innumerable flashes which lighted for him, blindingly, whole territories of mystery in which a long lifetime could not suffice to make him feel at home. “I lose myself in wonder,” he wrote in his later years, “at the loose ways, the strange process of waste, through which nature and fortune may deal on occasion with those whose faculty for application is all and only in their imagination and sensibility.”
By then he must have known that in his special case, nothing at all had been wasted. He was in fact a most glorious example in proof of his father’s favorite theories of the uses and virtues of waste as education, and at the end felt he had “mastered the particular history of just that waste.” His father was not considered a good Swedenborgian by those followers of Swedenborg who had, against his expressed principles, organized themselves into a church. Mr. James could not be organized in the faintest degree by anyone or anything. His daughter Alice wrote of him years later: “. . . Father, the delicious infant, couldn’t submit even to the thralldom of his own whim.” That smothering air of his childhood family life had given him a permanent longing for freedom and fresh air; the atmosphere he generated crackled with oxygen; his children lived in such a state of mental and emotional stimulation that no society ever again could overstimulate them. Life, as he saw it—was nobly resolved to see it, and to teach his beloved young ones to see it—was so much a matter of living happily and freely by spiritual, ethical, and intellectual values, based soundly on sensuous richness, and inexhaustible faith in the goodness of God; a firm belief in the divinity in human nature, God’s self in it; a boundlessly energetic aspiration toward the higher life, the purest humanities, the most spontaneous expression of feeling and thought.
Despair was for the elder James a word of contempt. He declared “that never for a moment had he known a skeptical state.” Yet, “having learned the nature of evil, and admitted its power, he turned towards the sun of goodness.” He believed that “true worship is always spontaneous, the offspring of delight, not duty.” Thus his son Henry: “The case was really of his feeling so vast a rightness close at hand or lurking immediately behind actual arrangements that a single turn of the inward wheel, one real response to the pressure of the spiritual spring, would bridge the chasms, straighten the distortions, rectify the relations, and in a word redeem and vivify the whole mass.” With all his considerable powers of devotion translated into immediate action, the father demonstrated his faith in the family circle; the children responded to the love, but were mystified and respectful before the theory: they perceived it was something very subtle, as were most of “father’s ideas.” But they also knew early that their father did not live in a fool’s paradise. “It was of course the old story that we had only to be with more intelligence and faith—an immense deal more, certainly, in order to work off, in the happiest manner, the manysided ugliness of life; which was a process that might go on, blessedly, in the quietest of all quiet ways. That wouldn’t be blood and fire and tears, or would be none of these things stupidly precipitated; it would simply take place by enjoyed communication and contact, enjoyed concussion or convulsion even—since pangs and agitations, the very agitations of perception itself, are the highest privilege of the soul, and there is always, thank goodness, a saving sharpness of play or complexity of consequence in the intelligence completely alive.”
Blood and fire and tears each in his own time and way each of them suffered, sooner or later. Alice, whose life was a mysterious long willful dying, tragic and ironic, once asked her father’s permission to kill herself. He gave it, and she understood his love in it, and refrained: he wrote to Henry that he did not much fear any further thoughts of suicide on her part. William took the search for truth as hard as his father had, but by way of philosophy, not religion; the brave psychologist and philosopher was very sick in his soul for many years. Henry was maimed for life in an accident, as his father had been before him, but he of them all never broke, never gave way, sought for truth not in philosophy nor in religion, but in art, and found his own; showed just what the others had learned and taught, and spoke for them better than they could for themselves, thus very simply and grandly fulfilling his destiny as artist; for it was destiny and he knew it and never resisted a moment, but went with it as unskeptically as his father had gone with religion.
The James family, as we have seen, were materially in quite comfortable circumstances. True the fine fortune had misted away somewhat, but they had enough. If people are superior to begin with, as they were, the freedom of money is an added freedom of grace and the power of choice in many desirable ways. This accounts somewhat then for the extraordinary ability, ease of manners, and artless, innocent unselfconsciousness of the whole family in which Henry James was brought up, which he has analyzed so acutely, though with such hovering tenderness. It was merely a fact that they could afford to be beyond material considerations because in that way they were well provided. Their personal virtues, no matter on what grounds, were real, their kindness and frankness were unfeigned. “The cousinship,” he wrote, “all unalarmed and unsuspecting and unembarrassed, lived by pure serenity, sociability, and loquacity.” Then with the edge of severity his own sense of truth drew finally upon any subject, he added: “The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not conscious—really not conscious of anything in the world; or was conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate, and so a matter of course, that it came to the same thing.” There he summed up a whole society, limited in number but of acute importance in its place; and having summed up, he cannot help returning to the exceptions, those he loved and remembered best.
There were enough intellectual interests and consciousness of every kind in his father’s house to furnish forth the whole connection, and it was the center. Education, all unregulated, to be drawn in with the breath, and absorbed like food, proceeded at top speed day and night. Though William, of all the children, seemed to be the only one who managed to acquire a real, formal university training of the kind recognized by academicians, Henry got his, in spite of the dozen schools in three countries, in his own time and his own way; in the streets, in theaters (how early grew in him that long, unrequited passion for the theater!), at picture galleries, at parties, on boats, in hotels, beaches, at family reunions; by listening, by gazing, dawdling, gaping, wondering, and soaking in impressions and sensations at every pore, through every hair. Though at moments he longed to be an orphan when he saw the exciting life of change and improvisation led by his cheerful orphaned cousins, “so little sunk in the short range,” it is clear that his own life, from minute to minute, was as much as he could endure; he had the only family he could have done with at all, and the only education he was capable of receiving. His intuitions were very keen and pure from the beginning, and foreknowledge of his ineducability in any practical sense caused him very rightly to kick and shriek as they hauled him however fondly to his first day of school. There he found, as he was to find in every situation for years and years, elder brother William, the vivid, the hardy, the quick-learning, the outlooking one, seated already: accustomed, master of his environment, lord of his playfellows. For so Henry saw him; William was a tremendous part of his education. William was beyond either envy or imitation: the younger brother could only follow and adore at the right distance.
So was his mother his education. Her children so possessed her they did not like her even to praise them or be proud of them because that seemed to imply that she was separate from them. After her death, the younger Henry wrote of her out of depths hardly to be stirred again in him, “she was our life, she was the house, she was the keystone of the arch”—suddenly his language took on symbols of the oldest poetry. Her husband, who found he could not live without her, wrote in effect to a friend that very early in their marriage she had awakened his torpid heart, and helped him to become a man.
The father desired many things for the childen, but two things first: spiritual decency, as Henry James says it, and “a sensuous education.” If Henry remembered his share in the civilizing atmosphere of Mr. Jenks’s school as “merely contemplative,” totally detached from any fact of learning, at home things were more positive. Their father taught them a horror of piggishness, and of conscious virtue; guarded them, by precept and example, from that vulgarity he described as “flagrant morality”; and quite preached, if his boundless and changing conversation could be called that, against success in its tangible popular meaning. “We were to convert and convert, success—in the sense that was in the general air—or no success; and simply everything that happened to us, every contact, every impression and every experience we should know, were to form our soluble stuff; with only ourselves to thank should we remain unaware, by the time our perceptions were decently developed, of the substance finally projected and most desirable. That substance might be just consummately Virtue, as a social grace and value. . . the moral of all of which was that we need never fear not to be good enough if only we were social enough. . . .”
Again he told them that the truth—the one truth as distinguished from the multiple fact—“was never ugly and dreadful, and (we) might therefore depend upon it for due abundance, even of meat and drink and raiment, even of wisdom and wit and honor.”
No child ever “took in” his father’s precepts more exactly and more literally than did Henry James, nor worked them more subtly and profoundly to his own needs. He was at last, looking back, “struck. . . with the rare fashion after which, in any small victim of life, the inward perversity may work. It works by converting to its uses things vain and unintended, to the great discomposure of their prepared opposites, which it by the same stroke so often reduces to naught; with the result indeed that one may most of all see it—so at least have I quite exclusively seen it, the little life out for its chance—as proceeding by the inveterate process of conversion.”
The little life out for its chance was oh how deeply intent on the chance it chose to take; and all this affected and helped to form a most important phase of his interests: money, exactly, and success, both of which he desired most deeply, but with the saving justifying clause that he was able only to imagine working for and earning them honestly—and though money was only just that, once earned, his notion of success was really his father’s, and on nothing less than the highest ground did it deserve that name. In the meantime, as children, they were never to be preoccupied with money. But how to live? “The effect of his attitude, so little thought out as shrewd or vulgarly providential, but. . . so socially and affectionately founded, could only be to make life interesting to us at worst, in default of making it extraordinarily paying.” His father wanted all sorts of things for them without quite knowing what they needed, but Henry the younger began peering through, and around the corners of, the doctrine. “With subtle indirectness,” the children, perhaps most of all Henry, got the idea that the inward and higher life, well rounded, must somehow be lived in good company, with good manners and surroundings fitting to virtue and sociability, good, you might say, attracting good on all planes: of course. But one of the goods, a main good, without which the others might wear a little thin, was material ease. Henry James understood and anatomized thoroughly and acutely the sinister role of money in society, the force of its corrosive powers on the individual; the main concern of nearly all his chief characters is that life shall be, one way or another, and by whatever means, a paying affair. . . and the theme is the consequences of their choice of means, and their notion of what shall pay them.
This worldly knowledge, then, was the end-product of that unworldly education which began with the inward life, the early inculcated love of virtue for its own sake, a belief in human affections and natural goodness, a childhood of extraordinary freedom and privilege, passed in a small warm world of fostering love. This world for him was never a landscape with figures, but a succession of rather small groups of persons intensely near to him, for whom the landscape was a setting, the houses they lived in the appropriate background. The whole scene of his childhood existed in his memory in terms of the lives lived in it, with his own growing mind working away at it, storing it, transmuting it, reclaiming it. Through his extreme sense of the appearance of things, manners, dress, social customs, the lightest gesture, he could convey mysterious but deep impressions of individual character. In crises of personal events, he could still note the look of tree-shaded streets, family gardens, the flash of a grandmother’s scissors cutting grapes or flowers, fan-shaped lights, pink marble steps; the taste of peaches, baked apples, custards, ice creams, melons, food indeed by the bushel and the barrel; the colors and shapes of garments, the headdresses of ladies, their voices, the way they lifted their hands. If these were all, they would have been next to nothing, but the breathing lives are somewhere in them.
The many schools he attended, if that is the word, the children he knew there, are perfectly shown in terms of their looks and habits. He was terrorized by the superior talents of those boys who could learn arithmetic, apparently without effort, a branch of learning forever closed to him, as by decree of nature. A boy of his own age, who lived in Geneva, “opened vistas” to him by pronouncing Ohio and Iowa in the French manner: an act of courage as well as correctness which was impressive, surrounded as he was by tough little glaring New Yorkers with stout boots and fists, who were not prepared to be patronized in any such way. Was there anybody he ever thought stupid, he asked himself, if only they displayed some trick of information, some worldly sleight of hand of which he had hitherto been ignorant? On a sightseeing tour at Sing Sing he envied a famous criminal his self-possession, inhabiting as he did a world so perilous and so removed from daily experience. His sense of social distinctions was early in the bud: he recognized a Dowager on sight, at a very tender age. An elegant image of a “great Greek Temple shining over blue waters”—which seems to have been a hotel at New Brighton called the Pavilion—filled him with joy when he was still in his nurse’s arms. He had thought it a finer thing than he discovered it to be, and this habit of thought was to lead him far afield for a good number of years.
For his freedoms were so many, his instructions so splendid, and yet his father’s admirable, even blessed teachings failed to cover so many daily crises of the visible world. The visible world was the one he would have, all his being strained and struggled outward to meet it, to absorb it, to understand it, to be a part of it. The other children asked him to what church he belonged, and he had no answer; for the even more important question, “What does your father do?” or “What business is he in?” no reply had been furnished him for the terrible occasion. His father was no help there, though he tried to be. How could a son explain to his father that it did no good to reply that one had the freedom of all religion, being God’s child; or that one’s father was an author of books and a truth-seeker?
So his education went forward in all directions and on all surfaces and depths. He longed “to be somewhere—almost anywhere would do—and somehow to receive an impression or an accession, feel a relation or a vibration”; while all the time a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which gave him his first lesson in ironic appreciation of the dowdy, the overwrought and underdone; or Mrs. Cannon’s mystifyingly polite establishment full of scarfs, handkerchiefs, and colognes for gentlemen, with an impalpable something in the air which hinted at mysteries, and which turned out to be only that gentlemen, some of them cousins, from out of town took rooms there; or the gloomy show of Italian Primitives, all frauds, which was to give him a bad start with painting—such events were sinking into him as pure sensation to emerge from a thousand points in his memory as knowledge.
Knowledge—knowledge at the price of finally, utterly “seeing through” everything—even the fortunate, happy childhood; yet there remained to him, to the very end, a belief in that good which had been shown to him as good in his infancy, embodied in his father and mother. There was a great deal of physical beauty in his family, and it remained the kind that meant beauty to him: the memory of his cousin Minnie Temple, the face of his sister Alice in her last photograph, these were the living images of his best-loved heroines; the love he early understood as love never betrayed him and was love at the latest day; the extraordinarily sensitive, imaginative excitements of first admirations and friendships turned out to be not perhaps so much irreplaceable as incomparable. What I am trying to say is that so far as we are able to learn, nothing came to supplant or dislocate in any way those early affections and attachments and admirations.
This is not to say he never grew up with them, for they expanded with his growth, and as he grew his understanding gave fresh life to them; nor that he did not live to question them acutely, to inquire as to their nature and their meaning, for he did; but surely no one ever projected more lovingly and exactly the climate of youth, of budding imagination, the growth of the tender, perceptive mind, the particular freshness and keenness of feeling, the unconscious generosity and warmth of heart of the young brought up in the innocence which is their due, and the sweet illusion of safety, dangerous because it must be broken at great risk. He survived all, and made it his own, and used it with that fullness and boldness and tenderness and intent reverence which is the sum of his human qualities, indivisible from his sum as artist. For though no writer ever “grew up” more completely than Henry James, and “saw through” his own illusions with more sobriety and pure intelligence, still there lay in the depths of his being the memory of a lost paradise; it was in the long run the standard by which he measured the world he learned so thoroughly, accepted in certain ways—the ways of a civilized man with his own work to do—after such infinite pains: or pangs, as he would have called them, that delight in deep experience which at a certain point is excruciating, and by the uninstructed might be taken for pain itself. But the origin is different, it is not inflicted, not even invited, it comes under its own power and the end is different; and the pang is not suffering, it is delight.
Henry James knew about this, almost from the beginning. Here is his testimony: “I foresee moreover how little I shall be able to resist, throughout these notes, the force of persuasion expressed in the individual vivid image of the past wherever encountered, these images having always such terms of their own, such subtle secrets and insidious arts for keeping us in relation with them, for bribing us by the beauty, the authority, the wonder of their saved intensity. They have saved it, they seem to say to us, from such a welter of death and darkness and ruin that this alone makes a value and a light and a dignity for them. . . . Not to be denied also, over and above this, is the downright pleasure of the illusion yet again created, the apparent transfer from the past to the present of the particular combination of things that did at its hour ever so directly operate and that isn’t after all then drained of virtue, wholly wasted and lost, for sensation, for participation in the act of life, in the attesting sights, sounds, smells, the illusion, as I say, of the recording senses.”
Brother William remained Big Brother to the end, though Henry learned to stand up to him manfully when the philosopher invaded the artist’s territory. But William could not help being impatient with all this reminiscence, and tried to discourage Henry when he began rummaging through his precious scrapbags of bright fragments, patching them into the patterns before his mind’s eye. William James was fond of a phrase of his philosopher friend Benjamin Paul Blood: “There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it?”
That is all very well for philosophy, and it has within finite limits the sound of truth as well as simple fact—no man has ever seen any relations concluded. Maybe that is why art is so endlessly satisfactory: the artist can choose his relations, and “draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” While accomplishing this, one has the illusion that destiny is not absolute, it can be arranged, temporized with, persuaded, a little here and there. And once the circle is truly drawn around its contents, it too becomes truth.
First version: July, 1943
Revised: 27 February 1952