Henry James

“ Henry James, indeed, is himself the outstanding character in his books. That fine and humorous collector of European ladies and gentlemen, that savourer of the little lives of the Old World and the little adventures of those who have escaped from the New, that artist who brooded over his fellows in the spirit less of a poet than a man of science, that sober and fastidious trifler—this is the image which presides over his books, and which gives them their special character, and will attract tiny but enthusiastic companies of readers to them for many years to come. ”

“ They were curiously unlike in their whole cast of mind; nothing could have been further from Henry James's massive and ruminatory imagination than his brother's quick-footed, freely-ranging, experimental genius. But their devotion to each other grew only the closer as their intellectual lives diverged; and as they approached old age together, there was still something protective in William James's attitude, and in Henry something that appealed to his brother, and to his brother only, for moral support and reassurance. ”

“ Henry James stayed by his father for some months after her death, and would have stayed longer; but his father was anxious that he should return to his own work and life. He sailed for England accordingly in May 1882.
A summer in London was followed by the autumn excursion to Touraine and Provence portrayed in A Little Tour in France. At Tours he had the company of Mrs. Fanny Kemble and her daughter; and as usual he spent a few weeks in Paris before going home. He arrived in London in December to receive almost at once a message announcing that his father was seriously ill. ”

“ Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly. ”

“ His father was Henry James (1811–1882) , a theological writer of great originality, from whom both he and his brother Professor William James derived their psychological subtlety and their idiomatic, picturesque English. Most of Henry’s boyhood was spent in Europe, where he studied under tutors in England, France and Switzerland. In 1860 he returned to America, and began reading law at Harvard, only to find speedily that literature, not law, was what he most cared for. ”

“ As a novelist, Henry James is a modern of the moderns both in subject matter and in method. He is entirely loyal to contemporary life and reverentially exact in his transcription of the phase. His characters are for the most part people of the world who conceive of life as a fine art and have the leisure to carry out their theories. Rarely are they at close quarters with any ugly practical task. ”

“ Henry James is, as I have already said, his own greatest character, and his portrait of his excitements is one of the most enrapturing things in the literature of autobiography. He makes us share these excitements simply by telling us how excited he was. They are exactly the sort of excitements all of us have felt on being introduced to people and places and pictures we have dreamed about from our youth. Who has not felt the same kind of joy as Henry James felt when George Eliot allowed him to run for the doctor? ”

“ For a man of letters with moderate tastes and no family, Henry James's circumstances were more than easy, even if his writings should earn him nothing at all; and he had no reason to doubt that his future was sufficiently assured. Moreover, though his work might have no great popular vogue—it had had a measure of that too, at the time of Daisy Miller—it still never wanted its own attentive circle; so that he had not to complain of the utter indifference that may wear upon the nerves of even the most disinterested artist. ”

“ To reveal the power and the tragedy of life through so many minutely limiting and apparently artificial conditions, and by means of characters who are somewhat self-conscious and are apt to make of life only a pleasant pastime, might well seem an impossible task. Yet it is precisely in this that Henry James is pre-eminently successful. The essentially human is what he really cares for, however much he may at times seem preoccupied with the technique of his art or with the mask of conventions through which he makes the essentially human reveal itself. ”

“ Henry James is dead. The news came to-day. A sudden warmth of old friendship, a kindness of other years leaps up within me, and the memory of how he looked at our house in Rome on a certain birthday of his that corresponds to my own latest milestone.
It was a warm day in mid-April. We were lunching on the terrace of the Palazzo Rusticucci, among the roses that shielded us from the windows of the Vatican. ”

“ One thing may be said of him: if he has been estranged from life, his lot has been cast amid conditions that are the least calculated to win him back again. . . . "The generation between 1865 and 1894," as Henry Adams remarks, "was already mortgaged, and no one knew it better than the generation itself." . . . Henry James knows it, knows it in advance: has he failed to catch the signs of the times, to foresee the chaos of the new age, the decline of the social life of his countrymen, the drop of the American barometer? Far from reassuring is the spectacle that lies before him. ”

“ Again and again in his reminiscences one comes upon evidence that Henry James arrived in England in the spirit of a collector, a connoisseur, as well as that of a convert. His ecstasy was that of a convert: his curiosity was that of a connoisseur. As he recalls his first experience of a London eating-house of the old sort, with its "small compartments, narrow as horse-stalls," he glories: in the sordidness of it all, because "every face was a documentary scrap." ”

“ The fact that concerns us now is to note that Henry James has still no rival, nor anything approaching a rival, in his universal treatment of European Society. None, even among our most cynical and disillusioned younger writers, are able to get as completely rid as he of any "a priori" system or able to envisage, as he did, in passionate colourless curiosity, the panorama of human characters drawn out along the common road of ordinary civilised life. ”

“ Emerson's room." The evening firelight played so long for me upon the door—that is to the length probably of three days, the length of a child's impression. But I must not let this carry me beyond the second note of the Diary, this time of May 1852. "'I do not wish this or that thing my fortune will procure, I wish the great fortune,' said Henry James, and said it in the noblest sense." The report has a beauty to me without my quite understanding it; the union of the two voices in it signifies quite enough. ”

“ These social movements used to inspire in me the inquiry: "Well, how soon are you to be the Mayor-Elect of Rye?" a pleasantry which was always well received. So obviously did Henry James, in the process of years, become the leading inhabitant that it grew to seem no impossibility. Stranger things had happened! No civic authority would have been more conscientious and few less efficient.
His outward appearance developed in accordance with his moral and intellectual expansion. I have said that in early life Henry James was not "impressive" ”

“ Henry James entered the law school at Harvard in 1862, and lived with his parents at Cambridge, near Boston, until he finally settled in Europe in 1875. From 1865 onwards he was a regular contributor of reviews, sketches, and short stories, to several American periodicals; his life as a writer began from that year, and owed much to his acquaintance, soon a close friendship, with the novelist W. D. Howells. James’s first piece of fiction long enough to be called a novel, Watch and Ward, appeared serially in 1871 ”

“ Unless one is devoted to the gospel of art for art’s sake, one cannot appreciate the good of this sort of endeavor. In his narrowly limited field Mr. James is a master. For more than forty years and in more than thirty volumes he did the thing that he elected to without compromise in behalf of popularity. Yet admire him as much as they may, most readers turn from him with relief to the literature of activity and of the normal, healthy human beings who are seldom to be encountered in the pages of Henry James. ”

“ People take it for granted that he belongs where he happens to be living when they find him. Henry James had lived among us so long that he was quite commonly taken for an Englishman even before he became naturalized during the War. ”

“ So long as he was in the thick of it, the task occupied the whole of his attention. He took it with full seriousness; there never was a scholar more immersed in research than was Henry James in the study of his chosen world. There were times indeed when he might be thought to take it even more seriously than the case required. The world is not used to such deference from a rare critical talent, and it certainly has much less respect for its own standards than Henry James had, or seemed to have. ”

“ The portrait of Geoffrey Dowling is a masterpiece of characterization. And there are sentences, unobtrusive asides, which flash with the brilliancy of true wit.”—New York Tribune.
“Mr. James’s writings are distinctively works of art. One and all of them appeal most strongly to cultivated minds. In no instance does he descend from his transcendent ideals of literature. An acquaintance with Henry James means an appreciation of the finer style of written English, and an inhalation of the atmosphere of purest English literature. ”

“ One knows next to nothing at all about the faith consciously rejected or adopted by Henry James, and whether the atmosphere of speculative theology in which he was bred had made him think religion as far beyond his mental range as mathematics, or whether Christianity seemed to him just the excuse of the Latin races for building high cool places, very grateful in the heat, and filling them with incense and images of kind, interceding people. ”

“ England and France and Italy are to Henry James like Egypt and Morocco; and as long as he finds us picturesquely and charmingly ourselves; set that is, in our proper setting, and with the picturesque background of local colour behind us—he naturally does not feel it incumbent upon him to worry himself very greatly over our social inequalities. ”

“ Lacking any strong roots into the American soil, Henry James, though he returned to Cambridge in 1870 for two years, and after a further European sojourn during 1872-1874, for one year more, now succumbed to the centripetal pull which all along had been acting upon him, and in 1875 finally decided that his future belonged to Europe. For a year he tried Paris, where he met Turgenev and the Flaubert group—Edmond de Goncourt, Daudet, Maupassant, Zola; but he there felt too much a foreigner for comfort, and late in 1876 he settled for good in London, the natural home of his imagination. ”

“ The next generation, moreover, were by this time growing up and were beginning to take a place in Henry James's life that was a source of ever-increasing pride and pleasure to him. From now onward there was nothing he so welcomed as the recurring visits to Lamb House of one or other of his elder brother's children. William James was again in Europe in 1902, delivering at Edinburgh the lectures that presently appeared as The Varieties of Religious Experience. ”

“ And I laughed, too; for with what an unbuttoned exuberance must I have engulfed him! 'Spilling all over the place.' I can quite believe it. I had, I suppose, been reading or re-reading something of his, and had been swept off sobriety of expression by delight, and in that condition of emotional unsteadiness and molten appreciation must have rushed impetuously to the nearest pen.
How warmly, with what grateful love, one thinks of Henry James. How difficult to imagine anyone riper in wisdom, in kindliness, in wit; greater of affection; more generous of friendship. ”

“ Henry James, who, we may hope, may resemble his father in time, has arranged them so well, and kept himself so tactfully in the background, that you feel, too, that whether young Henry is a pragmatist or not, he is a most understanding human being. ”

“ Sir Henry preserved his loyalty to James during the revolution of 1688, but illness prevented him taking an active share in the contest (Hist. MSS. Comm. 11th Rep. App. v. 202, 233, 236, 247) . He followed the example of his patron, Dartmouth, in peacefully submitting to the new rulers when their authority was established. But he retained his devotion to James, and was twice arrested on suspicion of conspiring on his behalf, in June 1690 and in March 1695–6. ”

“ He was the second child of his parents, the elder by a year being his brother William. The younger members of the family were Wilkinson ('Wilky') , Robertson ('Bob') , and Alice. Their father Henry James the elder, was a man whose striking genius has never received full justice except at the hands of his illustrious sons, though from them with profound and affectionate admiration. He was the most brilliant of a remarkable group of many brothers and sisters, whose portraits, or some of them, are sketched in A Small Boy and Others. ”

“ AFTER his long absence Henry James had a few crowded months of American impressions, during the winter of 1881-2, in Boston, New York, and Washington. He was as sociable as usual, where-ever he went, and he used to the full the opportunity of reviving old memories and creating new. It will be seen that he confesses to having enjoyed "a certain success"; since the publication of Daisy Miller, three years before, he had known what it was to be a well-known author in London, but it was a fresh sensation on his native ground. ”