by Henry James
October
It might be an ado about trifles—and half the poetry, roundabout, the poetry in solution in the air, was doubtless but the alertness of the touch of Autumn, the imprisoned painter, the Bohemian with a rusty jacket, who had already broken out with palette and brush; yet the way the color begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes. One speaks, at the same time of the orchards; but there are properly no orchards when half the countryside shows, the easiest, most familiar sacrifice to Pomona. The apple tree in New England plays the part of the olive in Italy, charges itself with the effect of detail, for the most part otherwise too scantly produced, and, engaged in this charming care, becomes infinitely decorative and delicate. What it must do for the too under-dressed land in May and June is easily supposable; but its office in the early autumn is to scatter coral and gold. The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old clearing, an orchard. You pick them up from under your feet but to bite into them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their young brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of strange-colored pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you notice their manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gayety, they seem to ask to be praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe.
New England: An Autumn Impression, 1905
October 1
The Ambassadors, 1903
“What I hate is myself—when I think that one has to take so much, to be happy, out of the lives of others, and that one isn’t happy, even then. One does it to cheat one’s self and to stop one’s mouth—but that’s only, at the best, for a little. The wretched self is always there, always making one somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is this, that it’s not, that it’s never, a happiness, any happiness at all, to take. The only safe thing is to give. It’s what plays you least false.”
October 2
The Madonna of the Future, 1873
“He did his best at a venture.” I went in and turned my steps to the chapel of the tombs. Viewing in sadness the sadness of its immortal treasures, I fancied, while I stood there, that they needed no ampler commentary than those simple words.
October 3
A Most Extraordinary Case, 1868
For ten long days, the most memorable days of his life—days which, if he had kept a journal, would have been left blank—he held his tongue.
October 4
The Golden Bowl, 1904
She had found sympathy her best resource. It gave her plenty to do; it made her, as she also said, sit up. She had in her life two great holes to fill, and she described herself as dropping social scraps into them as she had known old ladies, in her early American time, drop morsels of silk into the baskets in which they collected the material for some eventual patchwork quilt.
October 5
The Portrait of a Lady, 1881
You think that you can lead a romantic life, that you can live by pleasing yourself and pleasing others. You’ll find you are mistaken. Whatever life you lead you must put your soul into it—to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you; it becomes reality! And you can’t always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you are very ready to do; but there is another thing that is still more important—you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that—you must never shrink from it.”
October 6
The Portrait of a Lady, 1881
“I like places in which things have happened—even if they are sad things.”
October 7
The Wings of the Dove, 1903
The weather changed, the stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days, but now hot and almost vindictive, came into its own again and, with an almost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed and plashed and called and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and the scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of vivid stuffs, a laying down of fine carpets.
October 8
The Golden Bowl, 1904
“What it comes to is the way she believes in one. That is if she believes at all.”
“Yes that’s what it comes to.”
“And why should it be terrible?”
“Because it’s always so—the idea of having to pity people.”
“Not when there’s also the idea of helping them.”
“Yes, but if we can’t help them?”
“We can—we always can. That is,” he competently added, “if we care for them.”
October 9
Eugene Pickering, 1874
“A man with as good a head and heart as yours has a very ample world within himself, and I’m no believer in art for art, nor in what’s called ‘life for life’s sake.’ Nevertheless take your plunge, and come and tell me whether you’ve found the pearl of wisdom.”
October 10
The Golden Bowl, 1904
“I believe enough things about you, my dear, to have a few left if most of them, even, go to smash. I’ve taken care of that. I’ve divided my faith into water-tight compartments. We must manage not to sink.”
“You do believe I’m not a hypocrite? You recognize that I don’t lie or dissemble or deceive? Is that water-tight?”
“Water-tight—the biggest compartment of all? Why, it’s the best cabin and the main deck and the engine-room and the steward’s pantry! It’s the ship itself—it’s the whole line. It’s the captain’s table and all one’s luggage—one’s reading for the trip.”
October 11
The Golden Bowl, 1904
“My idea is this, that when you only love a little you’re naturally not jealous—or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn’t matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you are, in the same proportion, jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When, however, you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all—why then you’re beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down.”
October 12
The Papers, 1903
She knew little enough of what she might have to do for him, but her hope, as sharp as a pang, was that, if anything, it would put her in danger too.
October 13
The Wings of the Dove, 1903
Certainly it came from the sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour; always a need of her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with penetration. It was mostly in stillness that they spoke to her best; amid voices she lost the sense.
October 14
The Bostonians, 1886
Positive it is that she spared herself none of the inductions of a reverie that seemed to dry up the mists and ambiguities of life. These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.
October 15
The Portrait of a Lady, 1881
To be so graceful, so gracious, so wise, so good, and to make so light of it all—that was really to be a great lady.
October 16
The Princess Casamassima, 1886
“I’m acquainted with many of our most important men.”
“Do you mention it as a guarantee, so that I may know you’re genuine?”
“Not exactly; that would be weak, wouldn’t it?” the Princess asked. “My genuineness must be in myself—a matter for you to appreciate as you know me better; not in my references and vouchers.”
October 17
&nb
sp; The Madonna of the Future, 1873
“I suppose we are a genus by ourselves in the providential scheme—we talents that can’t act, that can’t do not dare. We take it out in talk, in plans and promises, in study, in visions. But our visions, let me tell you—have a way of being brilliant, and a man has not lived in vain who has seen the things I’ve seen!”
October 18
The Golden Bowl, 1904
“Great in nature, in character, in spirit. Great in life.”
“So?” Mr. Verver echoed, “What has she done—in life?”
“Well she has been brave and bright,” said Maggie.
“That mayn’t sound like much, but she has been so in the face of things that might well have made it too difficult for many other girls.”
October 19
The Altar of the Dead, 1895
But half the satisfaction of the spot, for this mysterious and fitful worshipper, was that he found the years of his life there, and the ties, the affections, the struggles, the submissions, the conquests—all conducing as to a record of that adventurous journey in which the beginnings and the endings of human relations are the lettered mile-stones.
October 20
Roderick Hudson, 1875
The vivacity of his perceptions, the audacity of his imagination, the picturesqueness of his phrase when he was pleased—and even more when he was displeased—his abounding good-humour, his candour, his unclouded frankness, his unfailing impulse to share every emotion and impression with his friend; all this made comradeship a high felicity.
October 21
French Poets and Novelists, 1878
The personal optimism of most of us no romancer can confirm or dissipate, and our personal troubles, generally, place fiction of all kinds in an impertinent light.
October 22
The Ambassadors, 1903
It came to him in fact that just here was his usual case: he was forever missing things through his general genius for missing them, while others were forever picking them up through a contrary bent. And it was others who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he, somehow, who finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook. Yes, he should go to the scaffold yet for he wouldn’t quite know whom.
October 23
The Papers, 1903
The talk was so low, with pauses somehow so not of embarrassment that it could only have been earnest, and the air, an air of privilege and privacy to our young woman’s sense, seemed charged with fine things taken for granted.
October 24
The Princess Casamassima, 1886
One of the things she loved him for, however, was that he gave you touching surprises in this line, had sudden inconsistencies of temper that were all to your advantage. He was by no means always mild when he ought to have been, but he was sometimes so when there was no obligation.
October 25
Ivan Turgénieff, 1878
Sanin’s history is weighted with the moral that salvation lies in being able, at a given moment, to turn on one’s will like a screw. If Mr. Turgénieff pays his tribute to the magic of sense he leaves us also eloquently reminded that soul in the long run claims her own.
October 26
The Reverberator, 1888
The old gentleman, heaven knew, had prejudices, but if they were numerous, and some of them very curious, they were not rigid. He had also such nice inconsistent feelings, such irrepressible indulgences, and they would ease everything off.
October 27
The Ambassadors, 1903
Surprise, it was true, was not, on the other hand, what the eyes of Strether’s friend most showed him. They had taken hold of him straightway, measuring him up and down, as if they knew how; as if he were human material they had already in some sort handled. Their possessor was in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases or categories, receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for convenience, in which, from a full experience, she pigeon-holed her fellow-mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor scattering type.
October 28
What Maisie Knew, 1898
“If you’ll help me, you know, I’ll help you,” he concluded in the pleasant fraternizing, equalizing, not a bit patronizing way which made the child ready to go through anything for him, and the beauty of which, as she dimly felt, was that it was not a deceitful descent to her years, but a real indifference to them.
October 29
The Awkward Age, 1899
A suppositious spectator would certainly, on this, have imagined in the girl’s face the delicate dawn of a sense that her mother had suddenly become vulgar, together with a general consciousness that the way to meet vulgarity was always to be frank and simple.
October 30
The Next Time, 1895
The only success worth one’s powder was success in the line of one’s idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be? One’s things were characteristic or were nothing.
October 31
The Portrait of a Lady, 1881
She often checked herself with the thought of the thousands of people who were less happy than herself—a thought which for the moment made her absorbing happiness appear to her a kind of immodesty. What should we do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for oneself?
November
I think the romance of a winter afternoon in London arises partly from the fact that when it is not altogether smothered the general lamp-light takes this hue of hospitality. Such is the colour of the interior glow of the clubs in Pall Mall, which I positively like best when the fog loiters upon their monumental stair-cases. . . . London is infinite. It is one of your pleasures to think of the experiments and excursions you may make in it, even when the adventures don’t particularly come off. The friendly fog seems to protect and enrich them—to add both to the mystery and security, so that it is most in the winter months that the imagination weaves such delights.—Then the big fires blaze in the lone twilight of the clubs, and the new books on the tables say, “now at last you have time to read me,” and the afternoon tea and toast appear to make the assurance good. It is not a small matter either, to a man of letters, that this is the best time for writing, and that during the lamp-lit days the white page he tries to blacken becomes, on his table, in the circle of the lamp, with the screen of the climate folding him in, more vivid and absorbent. The weather makes a kind of sedentary midnight and muffles the possible interruptions. It’s bad for the eyesight, but excellent for the image.
Essays in London and Elsewhere, 1893
November 1
Roderick Hudson, 1875
“A man should make the most of himself and be helped if he needs help,” Rowland answered after a long pause. “Of course when a body begins to expand, there comes in the possibility of bursting; but I nevertheless approve of a certain tension of one’s being. It’s what a man is meant for. And then I believe in the essential salubrity of genius—true genius.”
November 2
The Bostonians, 1886
Miss Birdseye had given herself away so lavishly all her life that it was rather odd there was anything left of her for the supreme surrender.
November 3
The Princess Casamassima, 1886
Hyacinth had roamed through the great city since he was an urchin, but his imagination had never ceased to be stirred by the preparations for Sunday that went on in the evening among the toilers and spinners, his brothers and sisters, and he lost himself in all the quickened crowding and pushing and staring at lighted windows and chaffering at the stalls of fishmongers and hucksters. He liked the people who looked as if they had got their week’s wage and were prepared to lay it out discreetly; and even those whose use of it would plainly be extravagant and intemperate; and best of all, those who evidently hadn’t received it at all and who wandered about, disinterestedly, vaguely, with their hands in empty pockets,
watching others make their bargains and fill their satchels, or staring at the striated sides of bacon, at the golden cubes and triangles of cheese, at the graceful festoons of sausage, in the most brilliant windows.
November 4
Roderick Hudson, 1875
His was neither an irresponsibly contemplative nature nor a sturdily practical one, and he was forever looking in vain for the uses of the things that please and the charm of the things that sustain. He was an awkward mixture of moral and aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made an ineffective reformer and an indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action of some immensely solid kind on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.