Henry James

by Henry James

  When I began to make these rather ineffectual records I had no idea that I should have in a few weeks to write such a tale of sadness as to-day. I came back from Washington on the 30th of last month (reached Cambridge the next day,) to find that I should never again see my dear mother. On Sunday Jan. 29th, as Aunt Kate sat with her in the closing dusk (she had been ill with an attack of bronchial asthma, but was apparently recovering happily,) she passed away. It makes a great difference to me! I knew that I loved her—but I didn’t know how tenderly till I saw her lying in her shroud in that cold North Room, with a dreary snow-storm outside, & looking as sweet & tranquil & noble as in life. These are hours of exquisite pain; thank heaven this particular pang comes to us but once. On Sunday evening (at 10 o’clock—in Washington) I was dressing to go to Mrs. Robeson’s—who has written me a very kind letter, when a telegram came in from Alice (William’s.) “Your mother exceedingly ill. Come at once.” It was a great alarm, but it didn’t suggest the loss of all hope; & I made the journey to New York with whatever hope seemed to present itself. In New York at 5 o’clock I went to Cousin H.P.’s—& there the telegram was translated to me. Eliza Ripley was there—& Katie Rodgers—& as I went out I met Lily Walsh. The rest was dreary enough. I went back to the Hoffman House, where I had engaged a room on my way up town & remained there till 9.30, when I took the night-train to Boston. I shall never pass that place in future without thinking of the wretched hours I spent there. At home the worst was over; I found Father & Alice & A.K. extraordinarily calm—almost happy. Mother seemed still to be there—so beautiful, so full of all that we loved in her, she looked in death. We buried her on Wednesday Feb. 1st; Wilkie arrived from Milwaukee a couple of hours before. Bob had been there for a month—he was devoted to mother in her illness. It was a splendid winter’s day—the snow lay deep & high. We placed her for the present in a temporary vault in the Cambridge cemetery—the part that lies near the river. When the spring comes on we shall go & choose a burial place. I have often walked there in the old years—in those long, lonely, rambles that I used to take about Cambridge, & I had, I suppose, a vague idea that some of us would some day lie there, but I didn’t see just that scene. It is impossible to me to say—to begin to say—all that has gone down into the grave with her. She was our life, she was the house, she was the key-stone of the arch. She held us all together, & without her we are scattered reeds. She was patience, she was wisdom, she was exquisite maternity. Her sweetness, her mildness, her quiet natural beneficence were unspeakable, & it is infinitely touching to me to write about her here as that was. When I think of all that she had been, for years—when I think of her hourly devotion to each & all of us—& that when I went to Washington the last of December I gave her my last kiss, I heard her voice for the last time,—there seems not to be enough tenderness in my being to register the extinction of such a life. But I can reflect, with perfect gladness, that her work was done—her long patience had done its utmost. She had had heavy cares & sorrows, which she had borne without a murmur, & the weariness of age had come upon her. I would rather have lost her forever than see her begin to suffer as she would probably have been condemned to suffer, & I can think with a kind of holy joy of her being lifted now above all our pains and anxieties. Her death has given me a passionate belief in certain transcendent things—the immanence of being as nobly created as hers—the immortality of such a virtue as that—the reunion of spirits in better conditions than these. She is no more of an angel to-day than she had always been; but I can’t believe that by the accident of her death all her unspeakable tenderness is lost to the beings she so dearly loved. She is with us, she is of us—the eternal stillness is but a form of her love. One can hear her voice in it—one can feel, forever, the inextinguishable vibration of her devotion. I can’t help feeling that in those last weeks I was not tender enough with her—that I was blind to her sweetness & beneficence. One can’t help wishing one had only known what was coming, so that one might have enveloped her with the softest affection. When I came back from Europe I was struck with her being worn & shrunken, & now I know that she was very weary. She went about her usual activities, but the burden of life had grown heavy for her, & she needed rest. There is something inexpressibly touching to me in the way in which, during these last years, she went on from year to year without it. If she could only have lived she should have had it, & it would have been a delight to see her have it. But she has it now, in the most complete perfection! Summer after summer she never left Cambridge—it was impossible that father should leave his own house. The country, the sea, the change of air & scene, were an exquisite enjoyment to her; but she bore with the deepest gentleness & patience the constant loss of such opportunities. She passed her nights & her days in that dry, flat, hot, stale & odious Cambridge, & had never a thought while she did so but for Father & Alice. It was a perfect mother’s life—the life of a perfect wife. To bring her children into the world—to expend herself, for years, for their happiness & welfare—then, when they had reached a full maturity & were absorbed in the world & in their own interests—to lay herself down in her ebbing strength & yield up her pure soul to the celestial power that had given her this divine commission. Thank God one knows this loss but once; and thank God that certain supreme impressions remain! x x x x x x x x x x x x

  x x x x x x x All my plans are altered—my return to England vanishes for the present. I must remain near father; his infirmities make it impossible I should leave him. This means an indefinite detention in this country—a prospect far enough removed from all my recent hopes of departure.

  August 3d 1882. 3 Bolton St. W. From time to time one feels the need of summing-up. I have done it little in the past, but it will be a good thing to do it more in the future. The prevision with which I closed my last entry in these pages was not verified. I sailed from America on the date I had in my mind when I went home—May 10th. Father was materially better and had the strongest wish that I should depart; he and Alice had moved into Boston, and were settled very comfortably in a small, pretty house (101 Mt. Vernon St.) Besides, their cottage at Manchester was rapidly being finished; shortly before sailing I went down to see it. Very pretty—bating the American scragginess; with the sea close to the piazzas, and the smell of bayberries in the air. Rest, coolness, peace, society enough, charming drives; they will have all that.—

  Very soon after I had got back here my American episode began to fade away, to seem like a dream; a very painful dream, much of it. While I was there, it was Europe, it was England, that was dreamlike—but now all this is real enough. The Season is over thank God; I came in for as much of it as could crowd itself into June and July. I was out of the mood for it, preoccupied, uninterested, bored, eager to begin work again; but I was obliged, being on the spot, to accommodate myself to the things of the day, and always with my old salve to a perturbed spirit, the idea that I was seeing the world. It seemed to me on the whole a poor world this time; I saw and did very little that was interesting. I am extremely glad to be in London again; I am deeply attached to London; I always shall be; but decidedly I like it best when it is “empty,” as during the period now beginning. I know too many people—I have gone in too much for society. x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

  Grand Hotel, Paris, November 11th. Thanks to “society,” which, in the shape of various surviving remnants of the season, to a succession of transient Americans and to several country visits, continued to mark me for its own during the greater part of the month of August, I had not even time to finish that last sentence, written more than three months ago. I can hardly take up at this date the history of these three months: a simple glance must suffice. I remained in England till the 12th of September. Bob, whom I had found reclining on my sofa in Bolton St when I arrived from America toward the last of May—(I hadn’t even time, above, to mention my little disembarkation in Ireland and the few days I spent there—) Bob, who as I say was awaiting me at my lodgings in London—greatly to my surprise, and in
a very battered & depressed condition, thanks to his unhappy voyage to the Azores—sailed for home again in the last days of August, after having spent some weeks in London, at Malvern and at Llandudno, in Wales. The last days, before sailing, he spent with me. About the 10th of September William arrived from America, on his way to the continent to pass the winter. After being with him for a couple of days, I came over to Paris via Folkestone (I came down there & slept, before crossing,) while he crossed to Flushing, from Queenborough. All summer I had been trying to work, but my interruptions had been so numerous that it was only during the last weeks that I succeeded, even moderately, in doing something. My record of work for the whole past year is terribly small, and I opened this book, just now, with the intention of taking several solemn vows in reference to the future. But I don’t even know whether I shall accomplish that. However, I am not sure that such solemnities are necessary, for God knows I am eager enough to work, and that I am deeply conscious of the need of it, both for fortune and for happiness. x x x x x x x x x x x x x I scarcely even remember the three or four visits to which, in the summer, I succeeded in restricting my “social activity.” A pleasant night at Losely—Rhoda Broughton was there. Another day I went down there to lunch, to take Howells (who spent all August in London) and Bob. Two days at Mentmore, a Saturday-to-Monday episode (very dull) at Miss de Rothschild’s, at Wimbledon; a very pleasant day at the Arthur Russells’, at Shiere. This last was charming; I think I went nowhere else—having wriggled out of Midelney, from my promised visit to Mrs. Pakenham, and from pledges more or less given to Tilliepronie. Toward the last, in London, I had my time pretty well to myself, and I felt, as I have always felt before, the charm of those long, still days, in the empty time, when one can sit and scribble, without notes to answer and visits to pay. Shall I confess, however, that the evenings had become dull? x x x x x x x x x x x x x x I had meant to write some account of my last months in America, but I fear the chance for this has already passed away. I look back at them, however, with a great deal of tenderness. Boston is absolutely nothing to me—I don’t even dislike it. I like it, on the contrary; I only dislike to live there. But all those weeks I spent there, after Mother’s death, had an exquisite stillness and solemnity. My rooms in Mt. Vernon St. were bare and ugly; but they were comfortable—even, in a certain way, pleasant. I used to walk out, and across the Common, every morning, and take my breakfast at Parker’s. Then I walked back to my lodgings and sat writing till four or five o’clock; after which I walked out to Cambridge over that dreary Bridge whose length I had measured so often in the past, and, four or five days in the week, dined in Quincy St. with Father and Alice. In the evening I walked back, in the clear American starlight—I got in this way plenty of exercise. It was a simple, serious, wholesome time. Mother’s death appeared to have left behind it a soft beneficent hush in which we lived for weeks, for months, and which was full of rest and sweetness. I thought of her, constantly, as I walked to Boston at night along those dark vacant roads, where, in the winter air, one met nothing but the coloured lamps and the far-heard jingle of the Cambridge horse-cars. My work at this time interested me too, and I look back upon the whole three months with a kind of religious veneration. My work interested me even more than the importance of it would explain—or than the success of it has justified. I tried to write a little play (D. M.) & I wrote it; but my poor little play has not been an encouragement. I needn’t enter into the tiresome history of my ridiculous negotiations with the people of the Madison Square Theatre, of which the Proprietors behaved like asses and sharpers combined; this episode, by itself, would make a brilliant chapter in a realistic novel. It interested me immensely to write the piece, and the work confirmed all my convictions as to the fascination of this sort of composition. But what it has brought [me] to know, both in New York and in London, about the manners and ideas of managers & actors and about the conditions of production on our unhappy English stage, is almost fatally disgusting and discouraging. I have learned, very vividly, that if one attempts to work for it one must be prepared for disgust, deep and unspeakable disgust. But though I am disgusted, I do not think I am discouraged. The reason of this latter is that I simply can’t afford to be. I have determined to take a year—even two years, if need be, more, in experiments, in studies, in attempts. The dramatic form seems to me the most beautiful thing possible; the misery of the thing is that the baseness of the English-speaking stage affords no setting for it. How I am to reconcile this with the constant solicitation that presses upon me, both from within and from without, to get at work upon another novel, is more than I can say. It is surely the part of wisdom, however, not to begin another novel at once—not to commit myself to a work of longue haleine. I must do short things, in such measure as I need, which will leave me intervals for dramatic work. I say this rather glibly—and yet I sometimes feel a woful hunger to sit down to another novel. If I can only concentrate myself: this is the great lesson of life. I have hours of unspeakable reaction against my smallness of production; my wretched habits of work—or of no-work; my levity, my vagueness of mind, my perpetual failure to focus my attention, to absorb myself, to look things in the face, to invent, to produce, in a word. I shall be 40 years old in April next: it’s a horrible fact! I believe however that I have learned how to work and that it is in moments of forced idleness, almost alone, that these melancholy reflections seize me. When I am really at work, I’m happy, I feel strong, I see many opportunities ahead. It is the only thing that makes life endurable. I must make some great efforts during the next few years, however, if I wish not to have been on the whole a failure. I shall have been a failure unless I do something great!

  Wolcott Balestier

  THEY HAVE a place apart in the record of the dead, the young names which represent less for the big indifferent public than for a knot of friends who remember and regret, and yet on behalf of which we discreetly plead for some attenuation, in the general memory, of the common fate. So far as they are spared by oblivion they form a ghostly but enviable little band—the company of those who were estimated early and rescued early, who created expectations and cherished hopes, and for whom there remains no question of disappointment or of failure. We can think of them as it most pleases us to think, allude to them with unchallengeable faith, and give our imagination the luxury of filling out the vague disc of the possible. Charles Wolcott Balestier, who died in Dresden on the 6th of December 1891, just before he had reached his thirtieth year, participates in this dim distinction and becomes one of the mute appealers to whom we are indulgent in proportion as we recognise that what there is to “show” for them accounts but imperfectly for our plea. We make the plea for the plea’s sake, and because that is fairer than not to make it. He had not had time, though he had so many of the other conditions, and this particular use of a little of the time that we ourselves feel half-ashamed to have gained—as if we had gained it at his expense—presents itself as an act of common generosity.

  Wolcott Balestier loved literature better than anything but his friends, and he had found opportunity to testify to this in a career as eagerly active as it was short. He left behind him a youthful unpublished novel, which is, conspicuously, to see the light; three very short tales, and the vivid mark of his collaboration with Mr. Rudyard Kipling in The Naulahka. His memory therefore may take its stand on a certain quantity of performance; but I confess that it is not mainly under the impression of this little sum of literary achievement that I find myself moved to speak of him. What he wrote, what he would have published, will be largely and sympathetically scrutinised, but there are persons for whom it will remain both only the smaller part of what he did and the pledge of a talent smothered at the very moment it had begun to expand. He was conscious that he had only begun, and it would be an unkindness to his memory to represent that in spite of the extreme vividness of “Reffey,” and of “Captain, my Captain!” his slender relics were very sacred in his own eyes. They are interesting, and in glimpses orig
inal, but their greatest merit is perhaps that by making him for the hour an actuality they give us a pretext for attempting to preserve some little record of his beneficence. He was a man of business of altogether peculiar genius, and it was in this light that he figured, with singular intensity, to a large number of charmed, befriended people during the part of his brief life in which I judge that he had lived more than in all its preceding time, the three crowded London years that began in December 1888. This was the period of my acquaintance with him; my personal relations with him became close, and I speak of him, of course, essentially as I had the good fortune to know him. I freely confess that I should not add my voice to the commemorative hum if it were a question of taking any less affectionate a point of view.

  I speak of his having “figured” in London, because he was from the first, in his bright young ingenuity, his suggestion of immediate capacity, an apparition essentially salient. This was what he remained to the end, unmistakably an influence exotic and curious, dropped down from without, not thrown up from within. He made London, on the ground on which he dealt with it, so extraordinarily his own that the contrast between the spirit and the matter, the agent and the medium, could only grow more striking and, if I may frankly say so, more amusing. Nothing feeds more actively some of our reflections than the sight of that animated symbol, the “cultured American,” entangled for the first time in the dense meshes of the great London net. The manner in which his native faculty deals with them is often an instructive spectacle. We see it, however, for the most part, exercised in a merely contemplative or “sightseeing” way, in the interest of leisure and shopping, or at the most of patriotism and consolation. But Wolcott Balestier, at twenty-seven, with a very complicated and characteristic American past already behind him—born at Rochester, N.Y., in 1861, he had haunted colleges, administered libraries, started “businesses,” explored territories, conducted theatricals, edited periodicals and published “works”—this penetrating representative of a peculiarly transatlantic interest in books alighted in the formidable city, in the dusky void of Christmas week, on no merely passive errand. He had a specific mission, business to transact for an American publishing firm, but I trust I do no injustice to the perfection with which he transacted it if I say that such things could, in the nature of the case, give him only his pretext and his introduction. What he had really come for, as it turned out, was to find a field large enough for his admirable spirit. The field was largest in London because London was an extension without being a substitution. It “took in,” as it were, the great agglomerations he had left beyond the sea and added others to them. It had, in a word—it always has—the advantage of being the biggest box at the theatre, the highest seat of observation of the English-speaking multitude as a whole—with nothing less than which was Wolcott Balestier prompted to concern himself.