by Henry James
Therefore it is that I feel I keep nearer to him in memory by not breaking ground on his writings than by attempting to speak of them. The best were those in which he most gave his whimsical humour its head. These were admirable and, on a sifting, ought to be gathered together. But whether for comedy or drama, he gave even to the end of his sad last few years—in perpetual confinement and pain—the impression of the command of an independent faculty of laughter and sighs, a blessed chamber of the brain that could remain clear, show at last, at the top of the lighthouse, the lamp trimmed and the spark red, while darkness crept steadily on. His imagination had not made so much of the human bustle that to miss it was to miss all things. He wrought, like a good workman, to the latest hour, and as the world shrank more to what was devotedly close to him he had more and more affection to take and more and more gentleness to show.
April 9, 1898
From the Notebooks, 1905
Coronado Beach, Cal.
Wednesday March 29th
1905.
I needn’t take precious time with marking & re-marking here how the above effort to catch up with my “impressions” of the early winter was condemned to speedy frustration & collapse. I struggled, but it all got beyond me,—any opportunity for the process of this little pressing, this sacred little record & register—but the history is written in my troubled & anxious, my always so strangely, more or less aching, doubting, yearning, yet also more or less triumphant, or at least, uplifted heart. Basta! I sit here, after long weeks, at any rate, in front of my arrears with an inward accumulation of material of which I feel the wealth, & as to which I can only invoke my familiar demon of patience, who always comes, doesn’t he? when I call. He is here with me, in front of this green Pacific—he sits close & I feel his soft breath, which cools & steadies & inspires, on my cheek. Everything sinks in: nothing is lost; everything abides & fertilizes & renews its golden promise, making me think, with closed eyes of deep & grateful longing when, in the full summer days of L.H., my long dusty adventure over, I shall be able to [plunge?] my hand, my arm, in, deep & far, & up to the shoulder—into the heavy bag of remembrance—of suggestion—of imagination—of art—& fish out every little figure & felicity, every little fact & fancy that can be to my purpose. These things are all packed away, now, thicker than I can penetrate, deeper than I can fathom, & there let them rest, for the present, in their sacred cool darkness, till I shall let in upon them the mild still light of dear old L.H.—in which they will begin to gleam & glitter & take form like the gold & jewels of a mine. X X X X X X X X X
The question, however, is with, is of, what I want now, & how I need to hark back, & hook on, to those very 1st little emotions & agitations & stirred sensibilities of the first Cambridge hours & days & even weeks—though it’s really a matter, for any acuteness, for any quality, of but the hours, the very first, during which the charm of the brave handsome autumn (I woo it, stretching a point with soft names,) lingered & hung about, & made something of a little medium for the sensibility to act in. That was a good moment, genuine so far as it went & just enough, no doubt, under an artful economy, to conjure with. What it is a question of at present is the putting together, with some blessed little nervous intensity of patience, of a Third Part to the “New England: An Autumn Impression” now begun in the N.A. Review. I drop out Boston—to come in later (next,) into “Three Cities,” the three being B., Philadelphia & Washington. There is absolutely no room here to squeeze in a stinted, starved little Boston picture. Oh, the division is good, I see—the “three” will do beautifully, and so for winding up the little “New England,” will Cambridge & its accessories. I feel as if I could spread on C., & that is my danger, as it’s my danger everywhere. For my poor little personal C., of the far-off unspeakable first years, hangs there behind, like a pale pathetic ghost, hangs there behind, fixing me with tender, pleading eyes, eyes of such exquisite, pathetic appeal, & holding up the silver mirror, just faintly dim, that is like a sphere peopled with the old ghosts. How can I speak of Cambridge at all, e.g., without speaking of dear J. R. L. & even of the early Atlantic, by ah, such a delicate, ironic implication?—[to] say nothing of the old Shady Hill & the old Quincy St. & those days that bring tears, & the figure, for Shady Hill, the figure & presence, of J. N., & of S. N., & even of G. W. C., & the reminiscence of that night of Dickens, & the emotion, abiding, that it left with me. How it did something for my thought of him & his work—& would have done more without the readings, the hard charmless readings, (or à peu près) that remained with me. (This is of course an impossible side-issue, but one just catches there the tip of the tail of such an old emotion of the throbbing prime!) The point for me (for fatal, for impossible expansion,) is that I knew there, had there, in the ghostly old C. that I sit & write of here by the strange Pacific, on the other side of the continent, l’initiation première (the divine, the unique;) there & in Ashburton Place (which I just came in time to have that October or November glimpse of before seeing its site swept bare a month ago.) Ah, the “epoch-making” weeks of the spring of 1865!—from the 1st days of April or so on to the summer (partly spent at Newport &c, partly at North Conway!) Something—some fine, superfine, supersubtle mystic breath of that may come in perhaps in the Three Cities, in relation to any reference to the remembered Boston of the “prime.” Ah, that pathetic, heroic, little personal prime of my own, which stretches over into the following summer at Swampscott—’66, that of the Seven Weeks War, & of unforgettable gropings & findings & sufferings & strivings & play of sensibility & of inward passion there. The hours, the moments, the days, come back to me—on into the early autumn before the move to Cambridge & with the sense, still, after such a lifetime, of particular little thrills & throbs & daydreams there. I can’t help, either, just touching with my pen-point (here, here, only here,) the recollection of that (probably August) day when I went up to Boston from Swampscott & called in Charles St for news of O. W. H., then on his 1st flushed & charming visit to England, & saw his mother in the cool dim matted drawingroom of that house (passed, never, since, without the sense,) & got the news, of all his London, his general English, success & felicity, & vibrated so with the wonder & romance & curiosity & dim, weak tender (oh tender!) envy of it, that my walk up the hill, afterwards, up Mount Vernon St & probably to Athenaeum was all coloured & gilded & humming with it, & the emotion, exquisite of its kind, so remained with me that I always think of that occasion, that hour, as a sovereign contribution to the germ of that inward romantic principle which was [to] determine, so much later on, (ten years!) my own vision-haunted migration. I recall, I can feel, now the empty August St, the Mt. Vernon St. of the closed houses & absent “families” & my slow, upward, sympathetic, excited stroll there, & my sense of the remainder of the day in town,—before the old “cars” for the return home—so innocently to make a small adventure: “vision”-haunted as I was already even then: linking on to which somehow, moreover, too, is the memory of lying on my bed at Swampscott, later than that, somewhat, & toward the summer’s end, & reading, in ever so thrilled a state, George Eliot’s Felix Holt, just out & of which I was to write, & did write, a review in the Nation. (I had just come back from a bad little “sick” visit to the Temples somewhere—I have forgotten the name of the place—in the White Mountains; & the Gourlays were staying with us at S., & I was miserably stricken [by] my poor broken, at least unbearable, & unsurvivable, back of those (& still, under fatigue, even of these) years.[)] To read over the opening pages of Felix Holt makes, even now, the whole time softly & shyly live again. Oh, strange little intensities of history, of ineffaceability; oh delicate little odd links in the long chain, kept unbroken for the fingers of one’s tenderest touch! Sanctities, pieties, treasures, abysses! X X X X X X X
But these are wanton lapses & impossible excursions; irrelevant strayings of the pen, in defiance of every economy. My subject awaits me, all too charged & too bristling with the most artful economy possible. What I seem to feel is that the Cambri
dge tendresse stands in the path like a waiting lion—or, more congruously, like a cooing dove that I shrink from scaring away. I want a little of the tendresse, but it trembles away over the whole field—or would if it could. Yet to present these accidents is what it is to be a master: that & that only. Isn’t the highest deepest note of the whole thing the never-to-be-lost memory of that evening hour at Mount Auburn—at the Cambridge Cemetery when I took my way alone,—after much waiting for the favouring hour—to that unspeakable group of graves? It was late, in November; the trees all bare, the dusk to fall early, the air all still (at Cambridge, in general, so still;) with the western sky more & more turning to that terrific deadly pure polar pink that shows behind American winter woods. But I can’t go over this—I can only, oh, so gently, so tenderly, brush it & breathe upon it—breathe upon it & brush it. It was the moment; it was the hour; it was the blessed flood of emotion that broke out at the touch of one’s sudden vision & carried me away. I seemed then to know why I had done this; I seemed then to know why I had come—& to feel how not to have come would have been miserably, horribly to miss it. It made everything right—it made everything priceless. The moon was there, early, white & young, & seemed reflected in the white face of the great empty Stadium, forming one of the boundaries of Soldiers’ Field, that looked over at me, stared over at me, through the clear twilight, from across the Charles. Everything was there; everything came; the recognition, stillness, the strangeness, the pity & the sanctity & the terror, the breath-catching passion & the divine relief of tears. William’s inspired transcript, on the exquisite little Florentine urn of Alice’s ashes, William’s divine gift to us, & to her, of the Dantean lines—
Dopo lungo esilio & martir
Venne a questa pace—
took me so at the throat by its penetrating rightness, that it was as if one sank down on one’s knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude before something for which one had waited with a long, deep ache. But why do I write of the all unutterable & the all abysmal? Why does my pen not drop from my hand on approaching the infinite pity & tragedy of all the past? It does, poor he[l]pless pen, with what it meets of the ineffable, what it meets of the cold Medusa-face of life, of all the life lived, on every side. Basta, basta! X X X X
An American Art-Scholar: Charles Eliot Norton
I GLADLY embrace the occasion to devote a few words to the honoured memory of my distinguished friend the late Charles Eliot Norton, who, dying at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 21st of October last, after having reached his eightieth year, had long occupied—and with an originality of spirit and a beneficence of effect all his own—the chair of the History of the Fine Arts at Harvard University, as well as, in the view of the American world surrounding that seat of influence, the position of one of the most accomplished of scholars and most efficient of citizens. This commemorative page may not disclaim the personal tone, for I can speak of Charles Norton but in the light of an affection which began long years ago, even though my part in our relation had to be, for some time, markedly that of a junior; of which tie I was to remain ever after, despite long stretches of material separation, a conscious and grateful beneficiary. I can speak of him therefore as I happened myself to see and know him—with interest and sympathy acting, for considerable periods together, across distances and superficial differences, yet with the sense of his extremely individual character and career suffering no abatement, and indeed with my impression of the fine consistency and exemplary value of these things clear as never before.
I find this impression go back for its origin very far—to one autumn day when, an extremely immature aspirant to the rare laurel of the critic, I went out from Boston to Cambridge to offer him a contribution to the old, if I should not rather say the then middle-aged, “North American Review,” of which he had recently undertaken the editorship. I already knew him a little, enough to have met casual kindness at his hands; but my vision of his active presence and function, in the community that had happily produced and that was long to enjoy him, found itself, I think, completely constituted at that hour, with scarce an essential touch to be afterwards added. He largely developed and expanded as time went on; certain more or less local reserves and conservatisms fell away from him; but his temper and attitude, all his own from the first, were to give a singular unity to his life. This intensity of perception on his young visitor’s part may perhaps have sprung a little from the fact that he accepted on the spot, as the visitor still romantically remembers, a certain very first awkward essay in criticism, and was to publish it in his forthcoming number; but I little doubt whether even had he refused it the grace of the whole occasion would have lost anything to my excited view, and feel sure that the interest in particular would have gained had he charmingly put before me (as he would have been sure to do) the ground of his discrimination. For his eminent character as a “representative of culture” announced itself exactly in proportion as one’s general sense of the medium in which it was to be exerted was strong; and I seem verily to recall that even in the comparative tenderness of that season I had grasped the idea of the precious, the quite far-reaching part such an exemplar might play. Charles Norton’s distinction and value—this was still some years before his professorate had taken form—showed early and above all the note and the advantage that they were to be virtues of American application, and were to draw their life from the signal American opportunity; to that degree that the detailed record of his influence would be really one of the most interesting of American social documents, and that his good work is best lighted by a due acquaintance with the conditions of the life about him, indispensable for a founded recognition of it. It is not too much to say that the representative of culture—always in the high and special sense in which he practised that faith—had before him in the United States of those days a great and arduous mission, requiring plentiful courage as well as plentiful knowledge, endless good humour as well as assured taste.
What comes back to me then from the early day I have glanced at is exactly that prompt sense of the clustered evidence of my friend’s perfect adaptation to the civilising mission, and not least to the needfully dauntless and unperturbed side of it. His so pleasant old hereditary home, with its ample acres and numerous spoils—at a time when acres merely marginal and, so to speak, atmospheric, as well as spoils at all felicitously gathered, were rare in the United States—seemed to minister to the general assurance, constituting as they did such a picture of life as one vaguely supposed recognisable, right and left, in an old society, or, otherwise expressed, in that “Europe” which was always, roundabout one, the fond alternative of the cultivated imagination, but of which the possible American copy ever seemed far to seek. To put it in a nutshell, the pilgrimage to the Shady Hill of those years had, among the “spoils,” among pictures and books, drawings and medals, memories and relics and anecdotes, things of a remote but charming reference, very much the effect of a sudden rise into a finer and clearer air and of a stopgap against one’s own coveted renewal of the more direct experience. If I allude to a particular, to a personal yearning appreciation of those matters, it is with the justified conviction—this justification having been all along abundantly perceptible—that appreciation of the general sort only waited to be called for, though to be called for with due authority. It was the sign of our host, on the attaching spot, and almost the principal one, that he spoke, all round and with the highest emphasis, as under the warrant of authority, and that at a time when, as to the main matter of his claim and his discourse, scarce anyone pretended to it, he carried himself valiantly under that banner. The main matter of his discourse offered itself just simply as the matter of civilisation—the particular civilisation that a young roaring and money-getting democracy, inevitably but almost exclusively occupied with “business success,” most needed to have brought home to it. The New England air in especial was no natural conductor of any appeal to an esthetic aim, but the interest of Professor Norton’s general work, to say n
othing of the interest of his character for a closer view, is exactly that the whole fruitful enterprise was to prove intimately a New England adventure; illustrating thus at the same time and once more the innate capacity of New England for leavening the great American mass on the finer issues.
To have grown up as the accomplished man at large was in itself at that time to have felt, and even in some degree to have suffered, this hand of differentiation; the only accomplished men of the exhibited New England Society had been the ministers, the heads of the congregations—whom, however, one docks of little of their credit in saying that their accomplishments and their earnestness had been almost wholly in the moral order. The advantage of that connection was indeed what Norton was fundamentally to have enjoyed in his descent, both on his father’s and his mother’s side (pre-eminently on the latter, the historic stock of the Eliots) from a long line of those stalwart pastoral worthies who had notably formed the aristocracy of Massachusetts. It was largely, no doubt, to this heritage of character and conscience that he owed the strong and special strain of confidence with which he addressed himself to the business of perfect candour toward his fellow-citizens—his pupils in particular; they, to whom this candour was to become in the long run the rarest and raciest and most endearing of “treats,” being but his fellow-citizens in the making. This view of an urgent duty would have been a comparatively slight thing, moreover, without the special preoccupations, without the love of the high humanities and curiosities and urbanities in themselves, without the conception of science and the ingrained studious cast of mind, which had been also an affair of heredity with him and had opened his eyes betimes to educative values and standards other than most of those he saw flourish near at hand. He would defer to dilettantism as little as to vulgarity, and if he ultimately embraced the fine ideal of taking up the work that lay close to him at home, and of irrigating the immediate arid tracts and desert spaces, it was not from ignorance of the temptation to wander and linger where the streams already flowed and the soil had already borne an abiding fruit.