Thirty years ago the novel was still the newest, as it remains the Cinderella, of art-forms. (That of the ‘Movies’ had not yet appeared.) The practice of novel writing had existed for a bare two hundred and fifty years: the novelist was still regarded as a rogue and vagabond, and the novel as a ‘waste of time’ – or worse. And the idea of the novel as a work of art, capable of possessing a form, even as sonnets or sonatas possess forms – that idea had only existed since 1850, and in the France of Flaubert alone, at that. Writers had certainly aimed at ‘progressions of effect’ in short efforts since the days of Margaret of Navarre: and obviously what the Typical English Novelist had always aimed at – if he had aimed at any form at all – and what the Typical English Critic looked for – if ever he condescended to look at a novel – was a series of short stories with linked characters and possibly a culmination. Indeed, that conception of the novel has been forced upon the English Novelist by the commercial exigencies of hundreds of years. The Romances of Shakespeare, novels written for ranted recitation and admirable in the technique of that form, were moulded by the necessity for concurrent action in varying places: the curtain had to be used. So you had the Strong Situation in order that the psychological stages of Othello should be firm in the hearer’s mind whilst Desdemona was alone before the audience. The novels of Fielding, of Dickens and of Thackeray were written for publication in parts; at the end of every part must come the Strong Situation, to keep the Plot in the reader’s head until the First of Next Month. So with the eminent contemporaries of ours in the ’nineties of last century; if the writer was to make a living wage he must aim at Serialisation; for that once again you must have a Strong Scene before you write ‘To be continued’, or the reader would not hanker for the next number of the magazine you served. But you do not need to go to Commercial Fiction to find the origin of the tendency: if the reader has ever lain awake in a long school dormitory or a well-peopled children’s bedroom, listening to or telling long, long tales that went on from day to day or from week to week, he will have known, or will have observed, the necessity to retain the story in the hearer’s mind, and to introduce, just before each listener’s head sank on the pillow – the Strong Situation. Indeed Scheherazade knew that pressing need.

It was against the tyranny of this convention that Conrad was revolting when so passionately he sought for the New Form. How often, in those distant days, lamenting the unlikelihood of our making even modest livings by our pens, have we not sighingly acknowledged that Serialisation was not for us! For I think we both started out with at least this much of a New Form in our heads: we considered a novel to be a rendering of an Affair. We used to say, I will admit, that a Subject must be seized by the throat until the last drop of dramatic possibility was squeezed out of it. I suppose we had to concede that much to the Cult of the Strong Situation. Nevertheless, a Novel was the rendering of an Affair: of one embroilment, one set of embarrassments, one human coil, one psychological progression. From this the Novel got its Unity. No doubt it might have its caesura – or even several; but these must be brought about by temperamental pauses, markings of time when the treatment called for them. But the whole novel was to be an exhaustion of aspects, was to proceed to one culmination, to reveal once and for all, in the last sentence, or the penultimate; in the last phrase, or the one before it – the psychological significance of the whole. (Of course, you might have what is called in music your Coda.) But it is perfectly obvious that such a treatment of an Affair could not cut itself up into Strong Situations at the end of every four or every seven thousand words. That market at least was closed to us.

I have suggested that we were more alone in our search for the New Form, than, very likely, we actually were. Mr Bennett at least, at that date, was engaged in acquiring the immense knowledge of French tricks and devices that his work afterwards displayed. And there was always Mr George Moore.

In the meantime, magisterially and at leisure, in Rye Henry James was performing the miracles after whose secrets we were merely groping. I don’t know why – but we rather ignored that fact. For, in the end, Conrad and I found salvation not in any machined Form, but in the sheer attempt to reproduce in words life as it presents itself to the intelligent observer. I daresay, if we could only perceive it, Life has a pattern. I don’t mean that of birth, apogee, and death, but a woven symbolism of its own. The Pattern in the Carpet, Henry James called it – and that he saw something of the sort was no doubt the secret of his magic. But, though I walked with and listened to the Master day after day, I remember only one occasion on which he made a remark that was a revelation of his own aims and methods. That I will reserve until it falls in place in the pattern of my own immediate carpet. For the rest, our intercourse resolved itself into my listening silently and wondering unceasingly at his observation of the littlest things of life.

‘Are you acquainted,’ he would begin, as we strolled under the gateway down Winchelsea Hill towards Rye … Ellen Terry would wave a gracious hand from her garden above the old Tower, the leash of Maximilian would require several readjustments, and the dog himself a great many sotto voce admonitions as to his expensive habit of chasing sheep into dykes. ‘Are you acquainted,’ the Master would begin again, ‘with the terrible words…’

A higgler, on a cart burdened with crates of live poultry, would pass us. The Master would drive the point of his cane into the roadway. ‘Now that man!’ he would exclaim. And he would break off to say what hideous, what appalling, what bewildering, what engrossing, Affairs were going on all round us in the little white cottages and farms that we could see, dotting Playden Hill and the Marsh to the verge of the great horizon. ‘Terrible things!’ he would say. ‘Appalling! … Now that man who just passed us…’ And then he would dig his stick into the road again and hurry forward, like the White Queen escaping from disaster, dropping over his shoulder the words: ‘But that probably would not interest you…’

I don’t know what he thought would interest me!

So he would finish his sentence before the door above the high steps of Lamb House:

‘Are you acquainted with the terrible, the devastating words, if I may call them so, the fiat of Doom: “I don’t know if you know, sir?” As when the housemaid comes into your bedroom in the morning and says: “I don’t know if you know, sir, that the bath has fallen through the kitchen ceiling.”’

It was held in Rye that he practised black magic behind the high walls of Lamb House…

I think I will, after reflection, lay claim to a very considerable degree of intimacy with Henry James. It was a winter, and a wholly non-literary intimacy. That is to say, during the summers we saw little of each other. He had his friends, and I mine. He was too often expecting ‘my friend Lady Maude’, or some orthodox critic to tea, and I, modern poets whom he could not abide. Occasionally, even during the summer, he would send from Rye to Winchelsea, a distance of two miles, telegrams such as the following which I transcribe:

And he would come.

But in the winters, when London visitors were scarce, he would come to tea every other day with almost exact regularity, and I would walk back with him to Rye. On the alternate days I would have tea with him and he would walk back to Winchelsea, in all weathers, across the wind-swept marshes. That was his daily, four miles, constitutional.

But it was, as I have said, an almost purely non-literary intimacy. I could, I think, put down on one page all that he ever said to me of books – and, although I used, out of respect, to send him an occasional book of my own on publication, and he an occasional book of his to me, he never said a word to me about my writings and I do not remember ever having done more than thank him in letters for his volume of the moment. I remember his saying of Romance that it was an immense English Plum Cake which he kept at his bedside for a fortnight and of which he ate a nightly slice.

He would, if he never talked of books, frequently talk of the personalities of their writers – not infrequently in terms of shuddering at their social excess, much as he shuddered at contact with Crane. He expressed intense dislike for Flaubert who ‘opened his own door in his dressing-gown’ and he related, not infrequently, unrepeatable stories of the menages of Maupassant – but he much preferred Maupassant to ‘poor dear old Flaubert’. Of Turgenev’s appearance, personality and habits, he would talk with great tenderness of expression – he called him nearly always ‘the beautiful Russian genius’, and would tell stories of Turgenev’s charming attentions to his peasant mistresses. He liked, in fact, persons who were suave when you met them – and I daresay that his preference of that sort coloured his literary tastes. He preferred Maupassant to Flaubert because Maupassant was homme du monde – or at any rate had femmes du monde for his mistresses; and he preferred Turgenev to either because Turgenev was a quiet aristocrat and invalid of the German Bathing Towns, to the finger tips. And he liked – he used to say so – people who treated him with deep respect.

Flaubert he hated with a lasting, deep rancour. Flaubert had once abused him unmercifully – over a point in the style of Prosper Merimée, of all people in the world. You may read about it in the Correspondence of Flaubert, and James himself referred to that occasion several times. It seemed to make it all the worse that, just before the outbreak, Flaubert should have opened the front door of his flat to Turgenev and James, in his dressing-gown.

Myself, I suppose he must have liked, because I treated him with deep respect, had a low voice – appeared, in short, a jeune homme modeste. Occasionally he would burst out at me with furious irritation – as if I had been a stupid nephew. This would be particularly the case if I ventured to have any opinions about the United States – which, at that date, I had visited much more lately than he had. I remember one occasion very vividly – the place, beside one of the patches of thorn on the Rye road, and his aspect, the brown face with the dark eyes rolling in the whites, the compact, strong figure, the stick raised so as to be dug violently into the road. He had been talking two days before of the provincialism of Washington in the ’sixties. He said that when one descended the steps of the Capitol in those days on trébuchait sur des vaches – one stumbled over cows, as if on a village green. Two days later, I don’t know why – I happened to return to the subject of the provincialism of Washington in the ’sixties. He stopped as if I had hit him and, with the coldly infuriated tone of a country squire whose patriotism had been outraged, exclaimed:

‘Don’t talk such damnable nonsense!’ He really shouted these words with a male fury. And when, slightly outraged myself I returned to the charge with his own on trébuchait sur des vaches, he exclaimed: ‘I should not have thought you would have wanted to display such ignorance,’ and hurried off along the road.

I do not suppose that this was as unreasonable a manifestation of patriotism as it appears. No doubt he imagined me incapable of distinguishing between material and cultural poverties and I am fairly sure that, at the bottom of his mind lay the idea that in Washington of the ’sixties there had been some singularly good cosmopolitan and diplomatic conversation and society, whatever the cows might have done outside the Capitol. Indeed I know that towards the end of his life, he came to think that the society of early, self-conscious New England, with its circumscribed horizon and want of exterior decoration or fumishings, was a spiritually finer thing than the mannered Europeanism that had so taken him to its bosom. As these years went on, more and more, with a sort of trepidation, he hovered round the idea of a return to the American Scene. When I first knew him you could have imagined no oak more firmly planted in European soil. But, little by little, when he talked about America there would come into his tones a slight tremulousness that grew with the months. I remember, once he went to see some friends – Mrs and Miss Lafarge, I think – off to New York from Tilbury Dock. He came back singularly excited, bringing out a great many unusually uncompleted sentences. He had gone over the liner: ‘And once aboard the lugger… And if… Say a toothbrush… And circular notes… And something for the night…’ All this with a sort of diffident shamefacedness.

I fancy that his mannerisms – his involutions, whether in speech or in writing, were due to a settled conviction that, neither in his public nor in his acquaintance, would he ever find anyone who would not need talking down to. The desire of the Artist, of the creative writer, is that his words and his ‘scenes’ shall suggest – of course with precision – far more than they actually express or project. But, having found that his limpidities, from Daisy Miller to the ‘Real Thing’, not only suggested less than he desired, but carried suggestions entirely unmeant, he gave up the attempt at Impressionism of that type – as if his audiences had tired him out. So he talked down to us, explaining and explaining, the ramifications of his mind. He was aiming at explicitness, never at obscurities – as if he were talking to children.

At any rate, then, he had none of that provincialism of the literary mind which must forever be dragging in allusions to some book or local custom. If he found it necessary to allude to one or the other he explained them and their provenance. In that you saw that he had learned in the same school as Conrad and Stephen Crane. And indeed he had.

It has always seemed to me inscrutable that he should have been so frequently damned for his depicting only one phase of life; as if it were his fault that he was not also Conrad, to write of the sea, or Crane, to project the life of the New York slums. The Old Man knew consummately one form of life; to that he restricted himself. I have heard him talk with extreme exactness and insight of the life of the poor – at any rate of the agricultural poor, for I do not remember ever to have heard him discuss industrialism. But he knew that he did not know enough to treat of farm labourers in his writing. So that, mostly, when he discoursed of these matters he put his observations in the form of question: ‘Didn’t I agree to this?’ ‘Hadn’t I found that?’

But indeed, although I have lived amongst agricultural labourers a good deal at one time or another, I would cheerfully acknowledge that his knowledge – at any rate of their psychologies – had a great deal more insight than my own. He had such an extraordinary gift for observing minutiae – and a gift still more extraordinary for making people talk. I have heard the secretary of a golf club, a dour silent man who never addressed five words to myself though I was one of his members, talk for twenty minutes to the Master about a new bunker that he was thinking of making at the fourteenth hole. And James had never touched a niblick in his life. It was the same with market-women, tram-conductors, ship-builders’ labourers, auctioneers. I have stood by and heard them talk to him for hours. Indeed, I am fairly certain that he once had a murder confessed to him. But he needed to stand on extraordinarily firm ground before he would think that he knew a world. And what he knew he rendered, along with its amenities, its gentlefolkishness, its pettinesses, its hypocrisies, its make-believes. He gives you an immense – and an increasingly tragic – picture of a Leisured Society that is fairly unavailing, materialist, emasculated – and doomed. No one was more aware of all that than he.

Stevie used to rail at English Literature, as being one immense petty, Parlour Game. Our books he used to say were written by men who never wanted to go out of drawing-rooms for people who wanted to live at perpetual tea-parties. Even our adventure-stories, colonial fictions and tales of the boundless prairie were conducted in that spirit. The criticism was just enough. It was possible that James never wanted to live outside tea-parties – but the tea-parties that he wanted were debating circles of a splendid aloofness, of an immense human sympathy, and of a beauty that you do not find in Putney – or in Passy!

It was his tragedy that no such five-o’clock ever sounded for him on the timepieces of this world. And that is no doubt the real tragedy of all of us – of all societies – that we never find in our Spanish Castle our ideal friends living in an assured and permanent republic. Crane’s Utopia, but not his literary method, was different. He gave you the pattern in – and the reverse of – the carpet in physical life – in wars, in slums, in Western saloons, in a world where the ‘gun’ was the final argument. The life that Conrad gives you is somewhere halfway between the two: it is dominated – but less dominated – by the revolver than that of Stephen Crane, and dominated, but less dominated, by the moral scruple than that of James. But the approach to life is the same with all these three: they show you that disillusionment is to be found alike at the tea-table, in the slum and on the tented field. That is of great service to our Republic.

It occurs to me that I have given a picture of Henry James in which small personal unkindlinesses may appear to sound too dominant a note. That is the misfortune of wishing to point a particular moral. I will not say that loveableness was the predominating feature of the Old Man: he was too intent on his own particular aims to be lavishly sentimental over surrounding humanity. And his was not a character painted in the flat, in water-colour, like the caricatures of Rowlandson. For some protective reason or other, just as Shelley used to call himself the Atheist, he loved to appear in the character of a sort of Mr Pickwick – with the rather superficial benevolences, and the mannerisms of which he was perfectly aware. But below that protective mask was undoubtedly a plane of nervous cruelty. I have heard him be – to simple and quite unpretentious people – more diabolically blighting than it was quite decent for a man to be – for he was always an artist in expression. And it needed a certain fortitude when, the studied benevolence and the chuckling, savouring, enjoyment of words, disappearing suddenly from his personality, his dark eyes rolled in their whites and he spoke very brutal and direct English. He chose in fact to appear as Henrietta Maria – but he could be atrocious to those who behaved as if they took him at that valuation.

And there was yet a third depth – a depth of religious, of mystical benevolence such as you find just now and again in the stories that he ‘wanted’ to write – in ‘The Great Good Place’… His practical benevolences were innumerable, astonishing – and indefatigable. To do a kindness when a sick cat or dog of the human race had ‘got through’ to his mind as needing assistance he would exhibit all the extraordinary ingenuities that are displayed in his most involved sentences.

I have said that my relation with James was in no sense literary – and I never knew what it was. I am perfectly sure that I never in my life addressed to the Master one word of praise or of flattery and, as far as I know, he called me le jeune homme modeste and left it at that. He did indeed confess to having drawn my externals in Morton Densher of The Wings of the Dove – the longish, leanish, loosish, rather vague Englishman who, never seeming to have anything to do with his days, occupied in journalism his night hours.

I daresay he took me to be a journalist of a gentle disposition, too languid to interrupt him. Once, after I had sent him one of my volumes of poems, he just mentioned the name of the book, raised both his hands over his head, let them slowly down again, made an extraordinary, quick grimace, and shook with an immense internal joke… Shortly afterwards he began to poke fun at Swinburne.

In revenge, constantly and with every appearance of according weight to my opinions, though he seldom waited for an answer, he would consult me about practical matters – investments now and then, agreements once or twice – and, finally, unceasingly as to his fantastic domestic arrangements. He had at one stage portentous but increasingly unsatisfactory servants of whom, in his kindness of heart, he would not get rid until their conduct became the talk of the Antient Town of Rye.

So, one day he came over to Winchelsea to ask me if I thought a Lady Help would be a desirable feature in an eminent bachelor’s establishment… Going as we seemed eternally in those days to be doing, down Winchelsea Hill under the Strand Gate, he said:

‘H… you seem worried!’ I said that I was worried. I don’t know how he knew. But he knew everything.

Ellen Terry waved her gracious hand from the old garden above the tower; the collar of Maximilian the dachshund called for adjustment. He began another interminable, refining, sentence – about housemaids and their locutions. It lasted us to the bridge at the western foot of Rye.

In Rye High Street he exclaimed – he was extraordinarily flustered:

‘I perceive a compatriot. Let us go into this shop!’ And he bolted into a fruiterer’s. He came out holding an orange and, eventually, throwing it into the air in an ecstasy of nervousness and stuttering like a schoolboy:

‘If it’s money H …’ he brought out. ‘Mon sac n’est pas grand… Mais puisez dans mon sac!’

I explained that it was not about money that I was worried, but about the ‘form’ of a book I was writing. His mute agony was a painful thing to see. He became much more appalled, but much less nervous. At last he made the great sacrifice:

‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I’m supposed to be … Um, um… There’s Mary … Mrs Ward … does me the honour… I’m supposed to know… In short: Why not let me look at the manuscript!’

I had the decency not to take up his time with it… Les beaux jours quand on était bien modeste! And how much I regret that I did not.

The last time I saw him was, accidentally, in August of 1915 – on the fourteenth of that month, in St. James’s Park. He said:

‘Tu vas te battre pour le sol sacré de Mme de Stael!’

I suppose it was characteristic that he should say ‘de Mme de Stael’ – and not of Stendhal, or even of George Sand! He added – and how sincerely and with what passion – putting one hand on his chest and just bowing, that he loved and had loved France as he had never loved a woman!

I have said that I remember only one occasion on which Henry James spoke of his own work. That was like this: he had published The Sacred Fount, and was walking along beside the little shipyard at the foot of Rye Hill. Suddenly he said:

‘You understand … I wanted to write “The Great Good Place” and “The Altar of the Dead”… There are things one wants to write all one’s life but one’s artist’s conscience prevents one… And then… perhaps one allows oneself…’

I don’t know what he meant… Or I do! For there are things one wants to write all one’s life – only one’s artist’s conscience prevents one. That is the first – or the final, bitter – lesson that the Artist has to learn: that he is not a man to be swayed by the hopes, fears, consummations or despairs of a man. He is a sensitised instrument, recording to the measure of the light vouchsafed him what is – what may be the Truth.