Henry James

by Henry James

  I met him, accidentally, soon after his arrival, and was struck with his happy perceptions and with his acute appreciation of London. Young and fresh as he was, he rejoiced in the dim vastness of the great city—this was a quality which he found altogether inspiring. He delighted in space and number, and dealt with the latter element in particular in a way which, at his age, was already masterly. He never was so happy as when he had too many things to do, and he could view the infinite multiplication of detail with pure exhilaration. This is partly what I mean by his admirable spirit, which was his love of handling large things, of handling everything in a large way. In the poor little three years to which the best of his activity was restricted he of course had established but imperfectly his independence; but they were sufficient to give the measure of his capacity. It was those who knew him best who “chaffed” him most about his Napoleonic propensities—his complete incapacity to recognise difficulties, his immediate adoption of his own or, in other words, of an original solution. It never could have occurred to him that there was not a way round an obstacle so long as a way was inventible, and the invented way, which in almost all cases was the one he embraced—he suspected stupidity, with which he had no patience, in the ready-made—always proved in fact the most amusing. This was a high recommendation to him, for, observant and genial as he was, he liked to enjoy transactions for themselves, as one is happy in the exercise of any implanted faculty, quite apart from purpose and profit. The Copyright Bill had not yet been passed, and it appeared to him that there might be much to be done in helping the English author in America to a temporary modus vivendi. This was an idea at the service of which he put all his ingenuity—an ingenuity sharpened by his detestation of the ignoble state of the law. This acute and sympathetic interest in the fruits of literary labour, as they concern the labourer, generalised and systematised itself with extraordinary rapidity, and became, by the time he had been six months in London, a very remarkable and singularly interesting passion, a passion which, for those who had the advantage of seeing it in exercise, quickly assumed all the authority of genius.

  It was a faculty altogether individual and one of the most original I have ever known. It consisted, in its simplest expression, of an extraordinary agility in putting himself in the place of the man, and quite as easily, when the need was, of the woman, of letters; and it sprang from an intense and curious appreciation of the literary character and an odd, charmed, amused acceptance of the dominion of the book. Nothing could be quite ultimate for a spirit so humorous, but Wolcott Balestier found in the importunity of the book the elements of a kind of cheerful fatalism, a state of mind that went hand in hand, in a whimsical way, with the critical instinct. To see the book through—almost even through the press—was a perpetual pastime to him, and one that varied of course according to what the book might be. It was far greater in some cases than in others; but in the free play of his ingenuity he could faire un sort, prepare a kind of respectable future, for almost anything newly printed and published, take a peep from any point of view that passed muster as literary. In this way, in our scribbling hour, he multiplied immensely his relations with the pen-driving class, even in the persons of some of its most pathetic representatives, of whom he became, in the shortest space of time, the clever providence and kindly adviser. Signs were not wanting from many of these after his death, signs of their mourning for him as the most trusted of friends. And all this, on the young man’s part, in a spirit so disinterested and so sincerely sympathetic that one hardly knew what name to give to the genius of the market when the genius of the market appeared in a form so human.

  He had the greatest appetite for success and had begun to be a man of business of the very largest conceptions, but I have never seen this characteristic combined with so visible an indifference to the usual lures and ideals of commerce. As the faithful representative of others he could only be jealous of their interests, but a high and imaginative talent for affairs could not well have been associated with less reverence for mere acquisition. He had in fact none at all—he seemed to me to care nothing for money. What he cared for was the drama of business, the various human game. To make money, up to a certain point, would have been convenient to him, and if he proposed to do so it was simply because this meant freedom, freedom to make a very different use of his time when (at no very distant day, as he hoped), the hour should strike. Much as he was absorbed in the literary affairs of other people, he was excusable for keeping a commodious chamber of his brain open to his own; and he had the most definite purpose of hammering away at the modern, the very modern novel, as soon as he should get out of the glare of the market-place and be able to command the conditions. He had already given pledges in this direction—had published two boyish fictions before coming to England, and in the intervals of his busy first year in London had put together a long story of much maturer, of really confident promise. An intimate personal alliance with Mr. Rudyard Kipling had led to his working in concert with that extraordinary genius, a lesson precious doubtless and wasted, like so many of his irrepressible young experiments—wasted, I mean, in the sense of its being a morning without a morrow.

  Wolcott Balestier’s death came too soon, in my judgment, to permit of a just calculation of what he might have done; we must recognise the limits of the evidence that his talent was real and remarkably capable of growth—evidence confirmed, on the part of those who knew him, by the sense of his acuteness and his ambition. He was all for the novel of observation, the undiscourageable study of the actual; he professed an intense relish for the works of Mr. Howells, and there is little reason to doubt that if he had lived to give what was in him the followers of some of the ancient ways would have had many a bone to pick with him. The prospect of picking such bones was, for himself, a thing to add zest to the existence he was not destined to enjoy. His imagination, so far as he had given a hint of it, was all American, and a long stay in the far west, a familiarity with mining-camps and infant cities, had given it, for the time at least, the turn of the new convention. He was prejudiced in favour of American humour—it was his only prejudice that I can remember; fortunately it is not one that is fatal to intellectual growth. He liked little raw new places only one degree less than he liked London, where he had established himself, in the heart of Westminster, under the Abbey towers, just within the old archway of that Dean’s Yard which makes a kind of provincial backwater, like the corner of a cathedral close, in a roaring “imperial” neighbourhood. But when once it had begun to go, his talent would probably have had many moods and seasons. I remember thinking (on first observing what dreams he had of becoming a literary artist), that as the presumption is always against the duplication of a special gift, it was not particularly probable that the subtle secret of creation had been vouchsafed to a man who, in his natural mastery of affairs, might already account himself fortunately equipped. What community was there, in the same mind, between the noisy world of affairs and the hushed little chamber of literary art? That question was eventually answered—there could be none unless such a mind should be a rare exception. This was indeed the fact with Wolcott Balestier, and it made him, in my experience, unique.

  I have known literary folk who were full, for themselves, of the commercial spirit, but I have in no other case known a commercial connection with literature to have had a twinship with an artistic one. Wolcott Balestier, however, was commercial, as I may say, for others; it was for himself that he cherished the hope of achieving some painted picture of life. Moreover the technical term seems invidious as applied to a part played so easily and gracefully, with such friendly personal perceptions. This function cost him nothing intellectually—it was too instinctive and, incidentally, as I have said, too suggestive. It had advantages from the point of view of what he intended when a better day should have begun; it meant perpetual contact with the world of men and women and innumerable opportunities for observation. In this he ironically exulted, and indeed it made him enviable. He had a p
articular aptitude for the personal part of affairs, for arranging things in talk and face to face. He had instincts and ideals of rapidity, and a talent for dispensing with the matter of course (which seemed to him flat and prosaic), calculated often to bewilder the children of a postponing habit. And it was given to him moreover to encounter the human, not to say the supposedly literary spirit, bared of factitious graces, in the simple severity of some of its appetites. He saw many realities and had already learned not to blink many uglinesses. Young as he was he had perceived what was of the essence. He was a well of discretion, and it was charming and interesting in him that even when he was most humorously communicative his talk was traversed by little wandering airs of the unsaid; nevertheless he was not without nameless anecdotes and illustrations of this same tenacity of grasp—all the more striking that in general no man could be less prejudiced in favour of the publishing interest. Such an incident as the quick foundation of the “English Library”—an association for the larger diffusion on the Continent of English and American books—not only was a remarkable example of his fertility of resource (his idea always became a fact as soon as he could personally represent it and act for it), but brought with it an extension of experience of the sort which was really most remunerative to him and as to which he could be independently and delightfully descriptive. It was partly on business connected with this happy undertaking and partly exactly to do nothing at all—to rest from a torment of detail and a strain of responsibility—that he made, sadly unwell when he started, in November 1891, that excursion to Germany from which he was not to return. He had only once or twice in his life been gravely ill, but those who were fond of him were never persuaded by his gallantry of optimism about himself, reinforced as it was by a thoroughly consistent and characteristic ingenuity in neglecting dull precautions, to think of his slender structure as really adequate to the service—the formidable service—of his generously restless spirit. It was not, in fact, and the disparity made him touching—makes his present image so in memory, though he doubtless would have carried on the brave deception much longer had it not been for the miserable typhoidal infection, from an undiscoverable source, that he bore with him from London and to which, in happy unconsciousness, he succumbed.

  It is vain to attempt to exclude the egotistical note from a memorial like the present, and the better course is frankly to enjoy the benefit of it. I may therefore mention that during the last year of his life in particular I saw him so often and so closely that, as I write, my page is overscored with importunate reminiscence and picture. These things are the possession of the private eye, but one would fain reflect something of their clearness in one’s words. A wet winter night in a windy Lancashire town, for instance—a formidable “first night” at a troubled provincial theatre to which he had made a long and loyal pilgrimage for purposes of “support” at a grotesquely nervous hour—such an occasion comes back to me, vividly, with the very quality of the support afforded, lavish and eager and shrewd; with the pleasantness of the little commemorative inn-supper, half histrionic and wholly confident, and with the dragged-out drollery of the sequel next day, our sociable, amused participation in a collective theatrical flitting, effected in pottering Sunday trains, besprinkled with refreshment-room impressions and terminating, that night, at an all but inaccessible Birmingham, in independent repose and relaxed criticism. He had taken, the summer before his death, a house on the Isle of Wight—on the south shore, well on the way to the Freshwater end—and I cannot withhold the emphasis of an allusion to a couple of August days spent there with him. One of them had a rare perfection and made the purest medium for the high finish—as if it were a leaf out of an old-fashioned drawing-book—of the little pencilled island. It was given all to a long drive to Freshwater, much of the way over the firm grass of the great downs, and a lunch there and a rambling lazy lounge on the high cliffs, with the full sense of summer, for once, in a summerless year, and a still lazier return in the golden afternoon, amid all sorts of delicacies of effect of sea and land. He loved the little temporary home he had made on the edge of the sea and even the great wind-storms of the early autumn, and no season of his life, probably, in spite of haunting illness, had given him more contented hours. Now he lies in the last place he could have dreamed of, the bristling alien cemetery, contracted and charmless, of the foreign city to which he had made his feverish way only to die. There was something in him so actively modern, so open to new reciprocities and assimilations, that it is not fanciful to say that he would have worked originally, in his degree, for civilisation. He had the real cosmopolitan spirit, the easy imagination of differences and hindrances surmounted. He struck me as a bright young forerunner of some higher common conveniences, some greater international transfusions. He had just had time to begin, and that is exactly what makes the exceeding pity of his early end.

  1892

  Dumas the Younger

  ONE Of the things that most bring home his time of life to a man of fifty is the increase of the rate at which he loses his friends. Some one dies every week, some one dies every day, and if the rate be high among his coevals it is higher still in the generation that, on awaking to spectatorship, he found in possession of the stage. He begins to feel his own world, the world of his most vivid impressions, gradually become historical. He is present, and closely present, at the process by which legend grows up. He sees the friends in question pictured as only death can picture them—a master superior to the Rembrandts and Titians. They have been of many sorts and many degrees, they have been private and public, but they have had in common that they were the furniture of this first fresh world, the world in which associations are formed. That one by one they go is what makes the main difference in it. The landscape of life, in foreground and distance, becomes, as the painters say, another composition, another subject; and quite as much as the objects directly under our eyes we miss the features that have educated for us our sense of proportion.

  Among such features for the author of these lines the younger Dumas, who has just passed away, was in the public order long one of the most conspicuous. Suffused as he is already with the quick historic haze, fixed, for whatever term, in his ultimate value, he appeals to me, I must begin by declaring, as a party to one of these associations that have the savour of the prime. I knew him only in his work, but he is the object of an old-time sentiment for the beginning of which I have to go back absurdly far. He arrived early—he was so loudly introduced by his name. I am tempted to say that I knew him when he was young, but what I suppose I mean is that I knew him when I myself was. I knew him indeed when we both were, for I recall that in Paris, in distant days and undeveloped conditions, I was aware with perhaps undue and uncanny precocity of his first successes. There emerges in my memory from the night of time the image of a small boy walking in the Palais Royal with innocent American girls who were his cousins and wistfully hearing them relate how many times (they lived in Paris) they had seen Madame Doche in “La Dame aux Camélias” and what floods of tears she had made them weep. It was the first time I had heard of pockethandkerchiefs as a provision for the play. I had no remotest idea of the social position of the lady of the expensive flowers, and the artless objects of my envy had, in spite of their repeated privilege, even less of one; but her title had a strange beauty and her story a strange meaning—things that ever after were to accompany the name of the author with a faint yet rich echo. The younger Dumas, after all, was then not only relatively but absolutely young; the American infants, privileged and unprivileged, were only somewhat younger; the former going with their bonne, who must have enjoyed the adventure, to the “upper boxes” of the old Vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where later on I remember thinking Madame Fargueil divine. He was quite as fortunate moreover in his own designation as in that of his heroine; for it emphasised that bloom of youth (I don’t say bloom of innocence—a very different matter) which was the signal-note of the work destined, in the world at large, to bring him nine-t
enths of his celebrity.

  Written at twenty-five “La Dame aux Camélias” remains in its combination of freshness and form, of the feeling of the springtime of life and the sense of the conditions of the theatre, a singular, an astonishing production. The author has had no time to part with his illusions, but has had full opportunity to master the most difficult of the arts. Consecrated as he was to this mastery he never afterwards showed greater adroitness than he had then done in keeping his knowledge and his naïveté from spoiling each other. The play has been blown about the world at a fearful rate, but it has never lost its happy juvenility, a charm that nothing can vulgarise. It is all champagne and tears—fresh perversity, fresh credulity, fresh passion, fresh pain. We have each seen it both well done and ill done, and perhaps more particularly the latter—in strange places, in barbarous tongues, with Marguerite Gautier fat and Armand Duval old. I remember ages ago in Boston a version in which this young lady and this young gentleman were represented as “engaged”: that indeed for all I know may still be the form in which the piece most enjoys favour with the Anglo-Saxon public. Nothing makes any difference—it carries with it an April air: some tender young man and some coughing young woman have only to speak the lines to give it a great place among the love-stories of the world. I recollect coming out of the Gymnase one night when Madame Pierson had been the Marguerite—this was very long since—and giving myself up on the boulevard to a fine critical sense of what in such a composition was flimsy and what was false. Somehow, none the less, my fine critical sense never prevented my embracing the next opportunity to expose it to the same irritation; for I have been, I am happy to think to-day, a playgoer who, whatever else he may have had on his conscience, has never had the neglect of any chance to see this dramatist acted. Least of all, within a much shorter period, has it undermined one’s kindness to have had occasion to admire in connection with the piece such an artist for instance as Eleonora Duse. We have seen Madame Duse this year or two in her tattered translation, with few advantages, with meagre accessories and with one side of the character of the heroine scarcely touched at all—so little indeed that the Italian version joins hands with the American and the relation of Marguerite and Armand seems to present itself as a question of the consecrated even if not approved “union.” For this interesting actress, however, the most beautiful thing is always the great thing, and her performance—if seen on a fortunate evening—lives in the mind as a fine vindication of the play. I am not sure indeed that it is the very performance Dumas intended; but he lived long enough to have forgotten perhaps what that performance was. He might on some sides, I think, have accepted Madame Duse’s as a reminder.