by Henry James

“ It takes space to feel, it takes time to know, and great organisms as well as small have to pause, more or less, to possess themselves and to be aware. Monstrous masses are, by this truth, so impervious to vibration that the sharpest forces of feeling, locally applied, no more penetrate than a pin or a paper-cutter penetrates an elephant’s hide. Thus the very tradition of sensibility would perish if left only to their care. ”

“ I never ceased, I say, to ask myself what lodgement, on such premises, the rich proud genius one adored could ever have contrived, what domestic commerce the subtlety that was its prime ornament and the world’s wonder have enjoyed, under what shelter the obscurity that was its luckless drawback and the world’s despair have flourished. The whole aspect and allure of the fresh sane man, illustrious and undistinguished – no ‘sensitive poor gentleman’ he! ”

“ It is n’t however that one ‘minds’ not recovering lost hints; the special pride of any tinted flower of fable, however small, is to be able to opine with the celebrated Topsy that it can only have ‘growed’. Does n’t the fabulist himself indeed recall even as one of his best joys the particular pang (both quickening and, in a manner, profaning possession) of parting with some conceit of which he can give no account but that his sense – of beauty or truth or whatever – has been for ever so long saturated with it? ”

“ Thus it was amusing to think of the real great man as a presence known, in the late London days, all and only to himself – unseen of other human eye and converted into his perfectly positive, but quite secondary, alter ego by any approach to a social contact. To the same tune was the social personage known all and only to society, was he conceivable but as ‘cut dead’, on the return home and the threshold of the closed study, by the waiting spirit who would flash at that signal into form and possession. ”

“ At any rate, odd though it may sound to pretend that one feels on safer ground in tracing such an adventure as that of the hero of The Jolly Corner than in pursuing a bright career among pirates or detectives, I allow that composition to pass as the measure or limit, on my own part, of any achievable comfort in the ‘adventure-story’ ”

“ He has built, rejoicingly, on that blest faculty of wonder just named, in the latent eagerness of which the novelist so finds, throughout, his best warrant that he can but pin his faith and attach his car to it, rest in fine his monstrous weight and his queer case on it, as on a strange passion planted in the heart of man for his benefit, a mysterious provision made for him in the scheme of nature. ”

“ They were those – as distinct as possible save for belonging alike to the ‘world’, the London world of a time when Discrimination still a little lifted its head – of a highly distinguished man, constantly to be encountered, whose fortune and whose peculiarity it was to bear out personally as little as possible (at least to my wondering sense) the high denotements, the rich implications and rare associations, of the genius to which he owed his position and his renown. One may go, naturally, in such a connexion, but by one’s own applied measure ”

“ The other lives, the rest of the quantity of life, press in, squeeze forward, to the best of their ability; but, restricted as the whole thing is to implications and involutions only, they prevail at best by indirectness; and the bid for amusement, the effect presumably sought, is by making us conceive and respond to them, making us feel, taste, smell and enjoy them, without our really knowing why or how. ”

“ We but too probably break down, I have ever reasoned, when we attempt the prodigy, the appeal to mystification, in itself ; with its ‘objective’ side too emphasised the report (it is ten to one) will practically run thin. We want it clear, goodness knows, but we also want it thick, and we get the thickness in the human consciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and interprets it. That indeed, when the question is (to repeat) of the ‘supernatural’, constitutes the only thickness we do get; here prodigies, when they come straight, come with an effect imperilled ”

“ Like the blinded seeker in the old-fashioned game he ‘burns’, on occasion, as with the sense of the hidden thing near – only to deviate again however into the chill; the chill that indeed settles on him as the striking of his hour is deferred. His career thus resolves itself into a great negative adventure, my report of which presents, for its centre, the fine case that has caused him most tormentedly to ‘burn’, and then most unprofitably to stray. ”

“ This was to be again, after years, the idea entertained for The jolly corner, about the composition of which there would be more to say than my space allows; almost more in fact than categorical clearness might see its way to. A very limited thing being on this occasion in question, I was moved to adopt as my motive an analysis of some one of the conceivably rarest and intensest grounds for an ‘unnatural’ anxiety, a malaise so incongruous and discordant, in the given prosaic prosperous conditions, as almost to be compromising. ”

“ It struck me, at any rate, that here, if ever, was the perfect theme of a nouvelle – and to some such composition I addressed myself with a confidence unchilled by the certainty that it would nowhere, at the best (a prevision not falsified) find ‘acceptance’. For the rest I must but leave The birthplace to plead its own cause; only adding that here afresh and in the highest degree were the conditions reproduced for that mystic, that ‘chemical’ change wrought in the impression of life by its dedication to an æsthetic use, that I lately spoke of in connexion with The Coxon fund. ”

“ There are no connexions; not only, I mean, in the sense of further statement, but of our own further relation to the elements, which hang in the void: whereby we see the effect lost, the imaginative effort wasted.
I dare say, to conclude, that whenever, in quest, as I have noted, of the amusing, I have invoked the horrific, I have invoked it, in such air as that of The turn of the screw, that of The jolly corner, that of The friends of the friends, that of Sir Edmund Orme, that of The real right thing, in earnest aversion to waste and from the sense that in art economy is always beauty. ”

“ He has seen this particular sensibility, the need and the love of wondering and the quick response to any pretext for it, as the beginning and the end of his affair – thanks to the innumerable ways in which that chord may vibrate. His prime care has been to master those most congruous with his own faculty, to make it vibrate as finely as possible – or in other words to the production of the interest appealing most (by its kind) to himself. ”

“ How had the prime idea come to me, in the first place, but as possibly and perhaps even minutely illustrating, in respect of consequences and remoter bearings, that freedom repeatedly to contract for the fond preliminaries of marriage which has been immemorially cherished by the American female young? The freedoms of American life are, together with some of its queer restrictions and timidities, the suggestive matter for painter, poet or satirist ”

“ Our friends’ respective minds about them, on the other hand, are a different matter – challengeable, and repeatedly, if you like, but never challengeable without some consequent further stiffening of the whole texture. Which proposition involves, I think, a moral. The moving accident, the rare conjunction, whatever it be, does n’t make the story – in the sense that the story is our excitement, our amusement, our thrill and our suspense; the human emotion and the human attestation, the clustering human conditions we expect presented, only make it. ”

“ We clutch indeed at some shadow of these things, we stay our yearning with snatches and stop-gaps; but our struggle yields to the other arrayed things that defeat the cultivation, in such an air, of the finer flowers – creatures of cultivation as the finer flowers essentially are. ”

“ Such are both the penalties and the profits of that obsession by the sense of an ampler comedy in human things�– latent and a little lost, but all responsive to the interested squeeze, to the roused passion of pursuit – than even quite expert and anxious preliminaries of artistic relation to any theme may always be trusted to give the measure of. So what does this truth amount to, after all, but a sort of consecration of what I have called, for Julia Bride, my predicament? ”

“ Most of all, of a certainty, is brought back, before these promiscuities, the old burden of the much life and the little art, and of the portentous dose of the one it takes to make any show of the other. ”

“ This would n’t seem, I allow, the general requirement – as appears from the fact that so many persons profess delight in the picture of marvels and prodigies which by any, even the easiest, critical measure is no picture; in the recital of wonderful horrific or beatific things that are neither represented nor, so far as one makes out, seen as representable: a weakness not invalidating, round about us, the most resounding appeals to curiosity. ”

“ From far back a more perverse student, doubtless, of the human scene in general had ventured to suspect in it some at least of the properties of presentable truth: so hard it appeared to believe that the number of a young lady’s accepted lovers would n’t in some degree determine the mixture of the elements in the young lady’s consciousness and have much to ‘say’, in one way and another, to the young lady’s general case. ”

“ Such a course of existence naturally involves a climax – the final flash of the light under which he reads his lifelong riddle and sees his conviction proved. He has indeed been marked and indeed suffered his fortune – which is precisely to have been the man in the world to whom nothing whatever was to happen. My picture leaves him overwhelmed – at last he has understood; though in thus disengaging my treated theme for the reader’s benefit I seem to acknowledge that this more detached witness may not successfully have done so. ”

“ Other conceits might indeed come and go, born of light impressions and passing hours, for what sort of free intelligence would it be that, addressed to the human scene, should propose to itself, all vulgarly, never to be waylaid or arrested, never effectively inspired, by some imaged appeal of the lost Dead? ”

“ One’s harmless formula for the poetic employment of this pair of conceits could n’t go much further than ‘Play them against each other’ – the ingenuity of which small game The private life reflects as it can.
I fear I can defend such doings but under the plea of my amusement in them – an amusement I of course hoped others might succeed in sharing. ”

“ On this ground, as I say, the fond interpreter of life has had, wherever we observe him, the acute appeal apparently enough in his ears; and it was to reach me in the present connexion but as a source of sound re-enforcement to my possibly too exiguous other example. “Superadd some view of the so enjoyed and so typical freedoms of the mother to the element, however presented, of the daughter’s inimitable career of licence; work in, as who should say, a tablespoonful of the due display of responsible consciousness, of roused and reflective taste, of delicacy spreading a tentative wing ”

“ Frankly, I can but gather, the desire, at last of the acutest, to give an example and represent an instance of some such practised communion, was a foredoomed consequence of life, year after year, amid the densest and most materialised aggregation of men upon earth, the society most wedded by all its conditions to the immediate and the finite. ”

“ The friends of the friends, to which I here change the colourless title of The way it came (1896) , Owen Wingrave (1893) , Sir Edmund Orme (1891) , The real right thing (1900) , would obviously never have existed but for that love of ‘a story as a story’ which had from far back beset and beguiled their author. To this passion, the vital flame at the heart of any sincere attempt to lay a scene and launch a drama, he flatters himself he has never been false ”

“ There are portentous situations, there are prodigies and marvels and miracles as to which this communication, whether by necessity or by chance, works comparatively straight – works, by our measure, to some convincing consequence; there are others as to which the report, the picture, the plea, answers no tithe of the questions we would put. ”

“ These are easily, one is obliged to add, too many for it; nothing being more visible for instance than that the life of inordinately numerous companies is hostile to friendship and intimacy – unless indeed it be the impropriety of such names applied to the actual terms of intercourse. The sense of the state of the dead is but part of the sense of the state of the living ”

“ He perforce lets everything go – leaving all the while his general presumption disguised and his general abstention unexplained; since he ’s ridden by the idea of what things may lead to, since they mostly always lead to human communities, wider or intenser, of experience, and since, above all, in his uncertainty, he must n’t compromise others. ”

“ He is afraid to recognise what he incidentally misses, since what his high belief amounts to is not that he shall have felt and vibrated less than any one else, but that he shall have felt and vibrated more ”