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Aspects and Impressions

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Title: Aspects and Impressions

Author: Edmund Gosse


        
Release date: April 10, 2011 [eBook #35813]

Language: English

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Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Google Print project.)









Aspects and Impressions

By

Edmund Gosse, C.B.

D.Litt. of Cambridge University; LL.D. of St. Andrews

Cassell and Company, Ltd

London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

1922




              To
           My Friend
         JOHN C. SQUIRE
    Poet, Editor, and Critic


These Essays are mainly reprinted from _The Edinburgh Review_, _The
London Mercury_, _The Modern Languages Review_, and _The Fortnightly
Review_. "Malherbe and the Classical Reaction" was the Taylorian Lecture
at Oxford for 1920, and is included here by the courtesy of the
authorities of the University.




Contents


                                                  PAGE

GEORGE ELIOT                                         1

HENRY JAMES                                         17

SAMUEL BUTLER                                       55

A NOTE ON CONGREVE                                  77

THE FIRST DRAFT OF SWINBURNE'S "ANACTORIA"          87

THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET                            97

MALHERBE AND THE CLASSICAL REACTION                123

THE FOUNDATION OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY               145

ROUSSEAU IN ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY      169

THE CENTENARY OF LECONTE DE LISLE                  193

TWO FRENCH CRITICS: EMILE FAGUET--REMY DE GOURMONT 203

THE WRITINGS OF M. CLEMENCEAU                      225

A VISIT TO THE FRIENDS OF IBSEN                    247

FAIRYLAND AND A BELGIAN ARIOSTO                    261

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF LORD WOLSELEY                273

INDEX                                              291




Aspects and Impressions

GEORGE ELIOT


In and after 1876, when I was in the habit of walking from the
north-west of London towards Whitehall, I met several times, driven
slowly homewards, a victoria which contained a strange pair in whose
appearance I took a violent interest. The man, prematurely ageing, was
hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right; this
was George Henry Lewes. His companion was a large, thickset sybil,
dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in
profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of
the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense
ostrich feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the
solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the headgear had something
pathetic and provincial about it.

All this I mention, for what trifling value it may have, as a purely
external impression, since I never had the honour of speaking to the
lady or to Lewes. We had, my wife and I, common friends in the gifted
family of Simcox--Edith Simcox (who wrote ingeniously and learnedly
under the pen-name of H. Lawrenny) being an intimate in the household at
the Priory. Thither, indeed, I was vaguely invited, by word of mouth, to
make my appearance one Sunday, George Eliot having read some pages of
mine with indulgence. But I was shy, and yet should probably have obeyed
the summons but for an event which nobody foresaw. On the 18th of
December, 1880, I was present at a concert given, I think, in the
Langham Hall, where I sat just behind Mrs. Cross, as she had then
become. It was chilly in the concert-room, and I watched George Eliot,
in manifest discomfort, drawing up and tightening round her shoulders a
white wool shawl. Four days later she was dead, and I was sorry that I
had never made my bow to her.

Her death caused a great sensation, for she had ruled the wide and
flourishing province of English prose fiction for ten years, since the
death of Dickens. Though she had a vast company of competitors, she did
not suffer through that period from the rivalry of one writer of her own
class. If the Brontes had lived, or Mrs. Gaskell, the case might have
been different, for George Eliot had neither the passion of _Jane Eyre_
nor the perfection of _Cranford_, but they were gone before we lost
Dickens, and so was Thackeray, who died while _Romola_ was appearing.
Charles Kingsley, whose _Westward Ho!_ had just preceded her first
appearance, had unluckily turned into other and less congenial paths.
Charles Reade, whose _It is Never Too Late to Mend_ (1856) had been her
harbinger, scarcely maintained his position as her rival. Anthony
Trollope, excellent craftsman as he was, remained persistently and
sensibly at a lower intellectual level. Hence the field was free for
George Eliot, who, without haste or hesitation, built up slowly such a
reputation as no one in her own time could approach.

The gay world, which forgets everything, has forgotten what a solemn,
what a portentous thing was the contemporary fame of George Eliot. It
was supported by the serious thinkers of the day, by the people who
despised mere novels, but regarded her writings as contributions to
philosophical literature. On the solitary occasion when I sat in company
with Herbert Spencer on the committee of the London Library he expressed
a strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished that for the
London Library no novels should be bought, "except, of course, those of
George Eliot." While she lived, critics compared her with Goethe, but to
the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar. People who started controversies
about evolutionism, a favourite Victorian pastime, bowed low at the
mention of her name, and her own strong good sense alone prevented her
from being made the object of a sort of priggish idolatry. A big-wig of
that day remarked that "in problems of life and thought which baffled
Shakespeare her touch was unfailing." For Lord Acton at her death "the
sun had gone out," and that exceedingly dogmatic historian observed, _ex
cathedra_, that no writer had "ever lived who had anything like her
power of manifold but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles
or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had
prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival." It is very
dangerous to write like that. A reaction is sure to follow, and in the
case of this novelist, so modest and strenuous herself, but so
ridiculously overpraised by her friends, it came with remarkable
celerity.

The worship of an intellectual circle of admirers, reverberating upon a
dazzled and genuinely interested public, was not, however, even in its
palmiest days, quite unanimous. There were other strains of thought and
feeling making way, and other prophets were abroad. Robert Browning,
though an optimist, and too polite a man to oppose George Eliot
publicly, was impatient of her oracular manner. There was a struggle,
not much perceived on the surface of the reviews, between her faithful
worshippers and the new school of writers vaguely called pre-Raphaelite.
She loved Matthew Arnold's poetry, and in that, as in so much else, she
was wiser and more clairvoyant than most of the people who surrounded
her, but Arnold preserved an attitude of reserve with regard to her
later novels. She found nothing to praise or to attract her interest in
the books of George Meredith; on the other hand, Coventry Patmore, with
his customary amusing violence, voted her novels "sensational and
improper." To D. G. Rossetti they were "vulgarity personified," and his
brother defined them as "commonplace tempering the stuck-up." Swinburne
repudiated _Romola_ with vigour as "absolutely false." I dare say that
from several of these her great contemporaries less harsh estimates of
her work might be culled, but I quote these to show that even at the
height of her fame she was not quite unchallenged.

She was herself, it is impossible to deny, responsible for a good deal
of the tarnish which spread over the gold of her reputation. Her early
imaginative writings--in particular _Janet's Repentance_, _Adam Bede_,
the first two-thirds of _The Mill on the Floss_, and much of _Silas
Marner_--had a freshness, a bright vitality, which, if she could have
kept it burnished, would have preserved her from all effects of
contemporary want of sympathy. When we analyse the charm of the stories
just mentioned, we find that it consists very largely in their felicity
of expressed reminiscence. There is little evidence in them of the
inventive faculty, but a great deal of the reproductive. Now, we have to
remember that contemporaries are quite in the dark as to matters about
which, after the publication of memoirs and correspondence and
recollections, later readers are exactly informed. We may now know that
Sir Christopher Cheverel closely reproduces the features of a real Sir
Roger Newdigate, and that Dinah Morris is Mrs. Samuel Evans
photographed, but readers of 1860 did not know that, and were at liberty
to conceive the unknown magician in the act of calling up a noble
English gentleman and a saintly Methodist preacher from the depths of
her inner consciousness. Whether this was so or not would not matter to
anyone, if George Eliot could have continued the act of pictorial
reproduction without flagging. The world would have long gazed with
pleasure into the camera obscura of Warwickshire, as she reeled off one
dark picture after another, but unhappily she was not contented with her
success, and she aimed at things beyond her reach.

Her failure, which was, after all (let us not exaggerate), the partial
and accidental failure of a great genius, began when she turned from
passive acts of memory to a strenuous exercise of intellect. If I had
time and space, it would be very interesting to study George Eliot's
attitude towards that mighty woman, the full-bosomed caryatid of
romantic literature, who had by a few years preceded her. When George
Eliot was at the outset of her own literary career, which as we know was
much belated, George Sand had already bewitched and thrilled and
scandalized Europe for a generation. The impact of the Frenchwoman's
mind on that of her English contemporary produced sparks or flashes of
starry enthusiasm. George Eliot, in 1848, was "bowing before George Sand
in eternal gratitude to that great power of God manifested in her," and
her praise of the French peasant-idyls was unbounded. But when she
herself began to write novels she grew to be less and less in sympathy
with the French romantic school. A French critic of her own day laid
down the axiom that "il faut bien que le roman se rapproche de la poesie
ou de la science." George Sand had thrown herself unreservedly into the
poetic camp. She acknowledged "mon instinct m'eut poussee vers les
abimes," and she confessed, with that stalwart good sense which carried
her genius over so many marshy places, that her temperament had often
driven her, "au mepris de la raison ou de la verite morale," into pure
romantic extravagance.

But George Eliot, whatever may have been her preliminary enthusiasms,
was radically and permanently anti-romantic. This was the source of her
strength and of her weakness; this, carefully examined, explains the
soaring and the sinking of her fame. Unlike George Sand, she kept to the
facts; she found that all her power quitted her at once if she dealt
with imaginary events and the clash of ideal passions. She had been
drawn in her youth to sincere admiration of the Indianas and Lelias of
her florid French contemporary, and we become aware that in the humdrum
years at Coventry, when the surroundings of her own life were arduous
and dusty, she felt a longing to spread her wings and fly up and out to
some dim Cloud-Cuckoo Land the confines of which were utterly vague to
her. The romantic method of Dumas, for instance, and even of Walter
Scott, appealed to her as a mode of escaping to dreamland from the
flatness and vulgarity of life under the "miserable reign of Mammon."
But she could not achieve such flights; her literary character was of a
totally different formation. What was fabulous, what was artificial, did
not so much strike her with disgust as render her paralysed. Her only
escape from mediocrity, she found, was to give a philosophical interest
to common themes. In consequence, as she advanced in life, and came more
under the influence of George Henry Lewes, she became less and less well
disposed towards the French fiction of her day, rejecting even Balzac,
to whom she seems, strangely enough, to have preferred Lessing. That
Lessing and Balzac should be names pronounced in relation itself throws
a light on the temper of the speaker.

Most novelists seem to have begun to tell stories almost as early as
musicians begin to trifle with the piano. The child keeps other children
awake, after nurse has gone about her business, by reeling off
inventions in the dark. But George Eliot showed, so far as records
inform us, no such aptitude in infancy or even in early youth. The
history of her start as a novel-writer is worthy of study. It appears
that it was not until the autumn of 1856 that she, "in a dreamy mood,"
fancied herself writing a story. This was, I gather, immediately on her
return from Germany, where she had been touring about with Lewes, with
whom she had now been living for two years. Lewes said to her, "You have
wit, description, and philosophy--those go a good way towards the
production of a novel," and he encouraged her to write about the virtues
and vices of the clergy, as she had observed them at Griff and at
Coventry. _Amos Barton_ was the immediate result, and the stately line
of stories which was to close in _Daniel Deronda_ twenty years later was
started on its brilliant career. But what of the author? She was a
storm-tried matron of thirty-seven, who had sub-edited the _Westminster
Review_, who had spent years in translating Strauss's _Life of Jesus_
and had sunk exhausted in a still more strenuous wrestling with the
_Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ of Spinoza, who had worked with
Delarive at Experimental Physics in Geneva, and who had censured, as
superficial, John Stuart Mill's treatment of Whewell's _Moral
Philosophy_. This heavily-built Miss Marian Evans, now dubiously known
as Mrs. Lewes, whose features at that time are familiar to us by the
admirable paintings and drawings of Sir Frederick Burton, was in
training to be a social reformer, a moral philosopher, an apostle of the
creed of Christendom, an anti-theological professor, anything in the
world rather than a writer of idle tales.

But the tales proved to be a hundredfold more attractive to the general
public than articles upon taxation or translations from German sceptics.
We all must allow that at last, however tardily and surprisingly, George
Eliot had discovered her true vocation. Let us consider in what capacity
she entered this field of fiction. She entered it as an observer of life
more diligent and more meticulous perhaps than any other living person.
She entered it also with a store of emotional experience and with a
richness of moral sensibility which were almost as unique. She had
strong ethical prejudices, and a wealth of recollected examples by which
she could justify them. Her memory was accurate, minute, and well
arranged, and she had always enjoyed retrospection and encouraged
herself in the cultivation of it. She was very sympathetic, very
tolerant, and although she had lived in the very Temple of Priggishness
with her Brays and her Hennells and her Sibrees, she remained singularly
simple and unaffected. Rather sad, one pictures her in 1856, rather
dreamy, burdened with an excess of purely intellectual preoccupation,
wandering over Europe consumed by a constant, but unconfessed, nostalgia
for her own country, coming back to it with a sense that the Avon was
lovelier than the Arno. Suddenly, in that "dreamy mood," there comes
over her a desire to build up again the homes of her childhood, to
forget all about Rousseau and experimental physics, and to reconstruct
the "dear old quaintnesses" of the Arbury of twenty-five years before.

If we wish to see what it was which this mature philosopher and earnest
critic of behaviour had to produce for the surprise of her readers, we
may examine the description of the farm at Donnithorne in _Adam Bede_.
The solemn lady, who might seem such a terror to ill-doers, had yet a
packet of the most delicious fondants in the pocket of her bombazine
gown. The names of these sweetmeats, which were of a flavour and a
texture delicious to the tongue, might be Mrs. Poyser or Lizzie Jerome
or the sisters Dodson, but they all came from the Warwickshire factory
at Griff, and they were all manufactured with the sugar and spice of
memory. So long as George Eliot lived in the past, and extracted her
honey from those wonderful cottage gardens which fill her early pages
with their colour and their odour, the solidity and weight of her
intellectual methods in other fields did not interfere, or interfered in
a negligible way, with the power and intensity of the entertainment she
offered. We could wish for nothing better. English literature has, of
their own class, nothing better to offer than certain chapters of _Adam
Bede_ or than the beginning of _The Mill on the Floss_.

But, from the first, if we now examine coldly and inquisitively, there
was a moth sleeping in George Eliot's rich attire. This moth was
pedantry, the result, doubtless, of too much erudition encouraging a
natural tendency in her mind, which as we have seen was acquisitive
rather than inventive. It was unfortunate for her genius that after her
early enthusiasm for French culture she turned to Germany and became, in
measure, like so many powerful minds of her generation, Teutonized. This
fostered the very tendencies which it was desirable to eradicate. One
can but speculate what would have been the result on her genius of a
little more Paris and a little less Berlin. Her most successful
immediate rival in France was Octave Feuillet; the _Scenes of Clerical
Life_ answer in time to _Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_, and
_Monsieur de Camors to Felix Holt_. There could not be a stronger or
more instructive contrast than between the elegant fairyland of the one
and the robust realism of the other. But our admirable pastoral writer,
whose inward eye was stored with the harmonies and humours of
Shakespeare's country, was not content with her mastery of the past.
She looked forward to a literature of the future. She trusted to her
brain rather than to those tired servants, her senses, and more and more
her soul was invaded by the ambition to invent a new thing, the
scientific novel, dealing with the growth of institutions and the
analysis of individual character.

The critics of her own time were satisfied that she had done this, and
that she had founded the psychological novel. There was much to be said
in favour of such an opinion. In the later books it is an undeniable
fact that George Eliot displays a certain sense of the inevitable
progress of life which was new. It may seem paradoxical to see the
peculiar characteristics of Zola or of Mr. George Moore in
_Middlemarch_, but there is much to be said for the view that George
Eliot was the direct forerunner of those naturalistic novelists. Like
them, she sees life as an organism, or even as a progress. George Eliot
in her contemplation of the human beings she invents is a traveller, who
is provided with a map. No Norman church or ivied ruin takes her by
surprise, because she has seen that it was bound to come, and recognizes
it when it does come. Death, the final railway station, is ever in her
mind; she sees it on her map, and gathers her property around her to be
ready when the train shall stop. This psychological clairvoyance gives
her a great power when she does not abuse it, but unfortunately from the
very first there was in her a tendency, partly consequent on her mental
training, but also not a little on her natural constitution, to dwell in
a hard and pedagogic manner on it. She was not content to please, she
must explain and teach as well.

Her comparative failure to please made its definite appearance first in
the laboured and overcharged romance of _Romola_. But a careful reader
will detect it in her earliest writings. Quite early in _Amos Barton_,
for instance, when Mrs. Hackit observes of the local colliers that they
"passed their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and smoking, like
the beasts that perish," the author immediately spoils this delightful
remark by explaining, like a schoolmaster, that Mrs. Hackit was
"speaking, we may presume, in a remotely analogical sense." The laughter
dies upon our lips. Useless pedantry of this kind spoils many a happy
touch of humour, Mrs. Poyser alone perhaps having wholly escaped from
it. It would be entirely unjust to accuse George Eliot, at all events
until near the end of her life, of intellectual pride. She was, on the
contrary, of a very humble spirit, timorous and susceptible of
discouragement. But her humility made her work all the harder at her
task of subtle philosophical analysis. It would have been far better for
her if she had possessed less of the tenacity of Herbert Spencer and
more of the recklessness of George Sand. An amusing but painful example
of her Sisyphus temper, always rolling the stone uphill with groans and
sweat, is to be found in her own account of the way she "crammed up" for
the composition of _Romola_. She tells us of the wasting toil with which
she worked up innumerable facts about Florence, and in particular how
she laboured long over the terrible question whether Easter could have
been "retarded" in the year 1492. On this, Sir Leslie Stephen--one of
her best critics, and one of the most indulgent--aptly queries, "What
would have become of _Ivanhoe_ if Scott had bothered himself about the
possible retardation of Easter? The answer, indeed, is obvious, that
_Ivanhoe_ would not have been written."

The effect of all this on George Eliot's achievement was what must
always occur when an intellect which is purely acquisitive and
distributive insists on doing work that is appropriate only to
imagination. If we read very carefully the scene preceding Savonarola's
sermon to the Dominicans at San Marco, we perceive that it is built up
almost in Flaubert's manner, but without Flaubert's magic, touch by
touch, out of books. The author does not see what she describes in a
sort of luminous hallucination, but she dresses up in language of her
own what she has carefully read in Burlamacchi or in Villari. The most
conscientious labour, expended by the most powerful brain, is incapable
of producing an illusion of life by these means. George Eliot may even
possibly have been conscious of this, for she speaks again and again,
not of writing with ecstasy of tears and laughter, as Dickens did, but
of falling into "a state of so much wretchedness in attempting to
concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my novel" that nothing
but a tremendous and sustained effort of the will carried her on at all.
In this vain and terrible wrestling with incongruous elements she wore
out her strength and her joy, and it is heart-rending to watch so noble
a genius and so lofty a character as hers wasted in the whirlpool. One
fears that a sense of obscure failure added to her tortures, and one is
tempted to see a touch of autobiography in the melancholy of Mrs.
Transome (in _Felix Holt_), of whom we are told that "her knowledge and
accomplishments had become as valueless as old-fashioned stucco
ornaments, of which the substance was never worth anything, while the
form is no longer to the taste of any living mortal."

The notion that George Eliot was herself, in spite of all the laudation
showered upon her, consciously in want of some element essential for her
success is supported by the very curious fact that from 1864 to 1869,
that is to say through nearly one-quarter of her whole literary career,
she devoted herself entirely to various experiments in verse. She was so
preternaturally intelligent that there is nothing unlikely in the
supposition that she realized what was her chief want as a writer of
imaginative prose. She claims, and she will always be justified in
claiming, a place in the splendid roll of prominent English writers. But
she holds it in spite of a certain drawback which forbids her from ever
appearing in the front rank as a great writer. Her prose has fine
qualities of force and wit, it is pictorial and persuasive, but it
misses one prime but rather subtle merit, it never sings. The masters of
the finest English are those who have received the admonition _Cantate
Domino!_ They sing a new song unto the Lord. Among George Eliot's prose
contemporaries there were several who obeyed this command. Ruskin, for
instance, above all the Victorian prose-writers, shouts like the
morning-star. It is the peculiar gift of all great prosaists. Take so
rough an executant as Hazlitt: "Harmer Hill stooped with all its pines,
to listen to a poet, as he passed!" That is the chanting faculty in
prose, which all the greatest men possess; but George Eliot has no trace
of it, except sometimes, faintly, in the sheer fun of her peasants'
conversation. I do not question that she felt the lack herself, and that
it was this which, subconsciously, led her to make a profound study of
the art of verse.

She hoped, at the age of forty-four, to hammer herself into poetry by
dint of sheer labour and will-power. She read the great masters, and she
analysed them in the light of prosodical manuals. In 1871 she told
Tennyson that Professor Sylvester's "laws for verse-making had been
useful to her." Tennyson replied, "I can't understand that," and no
wonder. Sylvester was a facetious mathematician who undertook to teach
the art of poetry in so many lessons. George Eliot humbly working away
at Sylvester, and telling Tennyson that she was finding him "useful,"
and Tennyson, whose melodies pursued him, like bees in pursuit of a
bee-master, expressing a gruff good-natured scepticism--what a picture
it raises! But George Eliot persisted, with that astounding firmness of
application which she had, and she produced quite a large body of
various verse. She wrote a Comtist tragedy, _The Spanish Gypsy_, of
which I must speak softly, since, omnivorous as I am, I have never been
able to swallow it. But she wrote many other things, epics and sonnets
and dialogues and the rest of them, which are not so hard to read. She
actually printed privately for her friends two little garlands, _Agatha_
(1868) and _Brother and Sister_ (1869), which are the only "rare issues"
of hers sought after by collectors, for she was not given to
bibliographical curiosity. These verses and many others she polished and
re-wrote with untiring assiduity, and in 1874 she published a
substantial volume of them. I have been reading them over again, in the
intense wish to be pleased with them, but it is impossible--the root of
the matter is not in them. There is an Arion, which is stately in the
manner of Marvell. The end of this lyric is tense and decisive, but
there is the radical absence of song. George Eliot admired Wordsworth
very much: occasionally she reproduces very closely the duller parts of
_The Excursion_. In the long piece of blank verse called _A College
Breakfast Party_, which she wrote in 1874, almost all Tennyson's faults
are reconstructed on the plan of the Chinese tailor who carefully
imitates the rents in the English coat he is to copy. There is a
Goethe-like poem, of a gnomic order, called _Self and Life_, stuffed
with valuable thoughts as a turkey is stuffed with chestnuts.

And it is all so earnest and so intellectual, and it does so much credit
to Sylvester. After long consideration, I have come to the conclusion
that the following sonnet, from Brother and Sister, is the best piece of
sustained poetry that George Eliot achieved. It deals with the pathetic
and beautiful relations which existed between her and her elder brother
Isaac, the Tom Tulliver of _The Mill on the Floss:_

    His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy
      Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame;
    My doll seemed lifeless, and no girlish toy
      Had any reason when my brother came.
    I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling,
      Cut the ringed stem and made the apple drop,
    Or watched him winding close the spiral string
      That looped the orbits of the humming-top.
    Grasped by such fellowship my vagrant thought
      Ceased with dream-fruit dream-wishes to fulfil;
    My aery-picturing fantasy was taught
      Subjection to the harder, truer skill
    That seeks with deeds to grave a thought-tracked line,
    And by "What is" "What will be" to define.

How near this is to true poetry, and yet how many miles away!

At last George Eliot seems to have felt that she could never hope, with
all her intellect, to catch the unconsidered music which God lavishes
on the idle linnet and the frivolous chaffinch. She returned to her own
strenuous business of building up the psychological novel. She wrote
_Middlemarch_, which appeared periodically throughout 1872 and as a book
early the following year. It was received with great enthusiasm, as
marking the return of a popular favourite who had been absent for
several years. _Middlemarch_ is the history of three parallel lives of
women, who "with dim lights and tangled circumstances tried to shape
their thought and deed in noble agreement," although "to common eyes
their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness." The three
ineffectual St. Theresas, as their creator conceived them, were
Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary, and they "shaped the thought and deed" of
Casaubon and Ladislaw and Fred Vincy. _Middlemarch_ is constructed with
unfailing power, and the picture of commonplace English country life
which it gives is vivacious after a mechanical fashion, but all the
charm of the early stories has evaporated, and has left behind it merely
a residuum of unimaginative satire. The novel is a very remarkable
instance of elaborate mental resources misapplied, and genius revolving,
with tremendous machinery, like some great water-wheel, while no water
is flowing underneath it.

When a realist loses hold on reality all is lost, and I for one can find
not a word to say in favour of _Daniel Deronda_, her next and last
novel, which came out, with popularity at first more wonderful than
ever, in 1876. But her inner circle of admirers was beginning to ask one
another uneasily whether her method was not now too calculated, her
effects too plainly premeditated. The intensity of her early works was
gone. Readers began to resent her pedantry, her elaboration of
allusions, her loss of simplicity. They missed the vivid rural scenes
and the flashes of delicious humour which had starred the serious pages
of _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill_ like the lemon-yellow pansies and
potentillas on a dark Welsh moor. They regretted the ease of the
conversation in her early books, where it had always been natural,
lively, and brief; it was now heavy and doctrinaire. Tennyson rebelled
against the pompousness, and said, in his blunt way, that Jane Austen
knew her business better, a courageous thing to say in Victorian circles
fifty years ago. Then came _Theophrastus Such_, a collection of cumbrous
and didactic essays which defy perusal; and finally, soon after her
death, her _Correspondence_, a terrible disappointment to all her
admirers, and a blow from which even the worship of Lord Acton never
recovered. Of George Eliot might have been repeated Swift's epitaph on
Sir John Vanbrugh:

    Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
    Laid many a heavy load on thee.

It was the fatal error of George Eliot, so admirable, so elevated, so
disinterested, that for the last ten years of her brief literary life
she did practically nothing but lay heavy loads on literature.

On the whole, then, it is not possible to regard the place which George
Eliot holds in English literature as so prominent a one as was rather
rashly awarded her by her infatuated contemporaries. It is the
inevitable result of "tall talk" about likeness to Dante and Goethe that
the figure so unduly magnified fails to support such comparisons when
the perspective is lengthened. George Eliot is unduly neglected now, but
it is the revenge of time on her for the praise expended on her works in
her lifetime. Another matter which militates against her fame to-day is
her strenuous solemnity. One of the philosophers who knelt at the
footsteps of her throne said that she was "the emblem of a generation
distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of
belief." Well, we happen to live, fortunately or unfortunately for
ourselves, in a generation which is "distracted" by quite other
problems, and we are sheep that look up to George Eliot and are not fed
by her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical influence. Perhaps
another generation will follow us which will be more patient, and
students yet unborn will read her gladly. Let us never forget, however,
that she worked with all her heart in a spirit of perfect honesty, that
she brought a vast intelligence to the service of literature, and that
she aimed from first to last at the loftiest goal of intellectual
ambition. Where she failed, it was principally from an inborn lack of
charm, not from anything ignoble or impure in her mental disposition.
After all, to have added to the slender body of English fiction seven
novels the names of which are known to every cultivated person is not to
have failed, but to have signally, if only relatively, succeeded.




HENRY JAMES

I


Voluminous as had been the writings of Henry James since 1875, it was
not until he approached the end of his career that he began to throw any
light on the practical events and social adventures of his own career.
He had occasionally shown that he could turn from the psychology of
imaginary characters to the record of real lives without losing any part
of his delicate penetration or his charm of portraiture. He had, in
particular, written the _Life of Hawthorne_ in 1879, between _Daisy
Miller_ and _An International Episode_; and again in 1903, at the height
of his latest period, he had produced a specimen of that period in his
elusive and parenthetical but very beautiful so-called _Life of W. W.
Story_. But these biographies threw no more light upon his own
adventures than did his successive volumes of critical and topographical
essays, in which the reader may seek long before he detects the sparkle
of a crumb of personal fact. Henry James, at the age of seventy, had not
begun to reveal himself behind the mask which spoke in the tones of a
world of imaginary characters.

So saying, I do not forget that in the general edition of his collected,
or rather selected, novels and tales, published from 1908 onwards, Henry
James prefixed to each volume an introduction which assumed to be wholly
biographical. He yielded, he said, "to the pleasure of placing on record
the circumstances" in which each successive tale was written. I well
recollect the terms in which he spoke of these prefaces before he began
to write them. They were to be full and confidential, they were to throw
to the winds all restraints of conventional reticence, they were to
take us, with eyes unbandaged, into the inmost sanctum of his soul. They
appeared at last, in small print, and they were extremely extensive, but
truth obliges me to say that I found them highly disappointing.
Constitutionally fitted to take pleasure in the accent of almost
everything that Henry James ever wrote, I have to confess that these
prefaces constantly baffle my eagerness. Not for a moment would I deny
that they throw interesting light on the technical craft of a
self-respecting novelist, but they are dry, remote, and impersonal to a
strange degree. It is as though the author felt a burning desire to
confide in the reader, whom he positively button-holes in the endeavour,
but that the experience itself evades him, fails to find expression, and
falls stillborn, while other matters, less personal and less important,
press in and take their place against the author's wish. Henry James
proposed, in each instance, to disclose "the contributive value of the
accessory facts in a given artistic case." This is, indeed, what we
require in the history or the autobiography of an artist, whether
painter or musician or man of letters. But this includes the production
of anecdotes, of salient facts, of direct historical statements, which
Henry James seemed in 1908 to be completely incapacitated from giving,
so that really, in the introductions to some of these novels in the
Collected Edition, it is difficult to know what the beloved novelist is
endeavouring to divulge. He becomes almost chimaera bombinating in a
vacuum.

Had we lost him soon after the appearance of the latest of these
prefaces--that prefixed to _The Golden Bowl_, in which the effort to
reveal something which is not revealed amounts almost to an agony--it
would have been impossible to reconstruct the life of Henry James by the
closest examination of his published writings. Ingenious commentators
would have pieced together conjectures from such tales as _The Altar of
the Dead_ and _The Lesson of the Master_, and have insisted, more or
less plausibly, on their accordance with what the author _must_ have
thought or done, endured or attempted. But, after all, these would have
been "conjectures," not more definitely based than what bold spirits
use when they construct lives of Shakespeare, or, for that matter, of
Homer. Fortunately, in 1913, the desire to place some particulars of the
career of his marvellous brother William in the setting of his
"immediate native and domestic air," led Henry James to contemplate,
with minuteness, the fading memories of his own childhood. Starting with
a biographical study of William James, he found it impossible to treat
the family development at all adequately without extending the survey to
his own growth as well, and thus, at the age of seventy, Henry became
for the first time, and almost unconsciously, an autobiographer.

He had completed two large volumes of _Memories_, and was deep in a
third, when death took him from us. _A Small Boy and Others_ deals with
such extreme discursiveness as is suitable in a collection of the
fleeting impressions of infancy, from his birth in 1843 to his all but
fatal attack of typhus fever at Boulogne-sur-Mer in (perhaps) 1857. I
say "perhaps" because the wanton evasion of any sort of help in the way
of dates is characteristic of the narrative, as it would be of childish
memories. The next instalment was _Notes of a Son and Brother_, which
opens in 1860, a doubtful period of three years being leaped over
lightly, and closes--as I guess from an allusion to George Eliot's
_Spanish Gypsy_--in 1868. The third instalment, dictated in the autumn
of 1914 and laid aside unfinished, is the posthumous _The Middle Years_,
faultlessly edited by the piety of Mr. Percy Lubbock in 1917. Here the
tale is taken up in 1869, and is occupied, without much attempt at
chronological order, with memories of two years in London. As Henry
James did not revise, or perhaps even re-read, these pages, we are free
to form our conclusion as to whether he would or would not have
vouchsafed to put their disjected parts into some more anatomical order.

Probably he would not have done so. The tendency of his genius had never
been, and at the end was less than ever, in the direction of concinnity.
He repudiated arrangement, he wilfully neglected the precise adjustment
of parts. The three autobiographical volumes will always be documents
precious in the eyes of his admirers. They are full of beauty and
nobility, they exhibit with delicacy, and sometimes even with splendour,
the qualities of his character. But it would be absurd to speak of them
as easy to read, or as fulfilling what is demanded from an ordinary
biographer. They have the tone of Veronese, but nothing of his
definition. A broad canvas is spread before us, containing many figures
in social conjuncture. But the plot, the single "story" which is being
told, is drowned in misty radiance. Out of this _chiaroscuro_ there leap
suddenly to our vision a sumptuous head and throat, a handful of roses,
the glitter of a satin sleeve, but it is only when we shut our eyes and
think over what we have looked at that any coherent plan is revealed to
us, or that we detect any species of composition. It is a case which
calls for editorial help, and I hope that when the three fragments of
autobiography are reprinted as a single composition, no prudery of
hesitation to touch the sacred ark will prevent the editor from
prefixing a skeleton chronicle of actual dates and facts. It will take
nothing from the dignity of the luminous reveries in their original
shape.

Such a skeleton will tell us that Henry James was born at 2 Washington
Place, New York, on April 15th, 1843, and that he was the second child
of his parents, the elder by one year being William, who grew up to be
the most eminent philosopher whom America has produced. Their father,
Henry James the elder, was himself a philosopher, whose ideas, which the
younger Henry frankly admitted to be beyond his grasp, were expounded by
William James in 1884, in a preface to their father's posthumous papers.
Henry was only one year old when the family paid a long visit to Paris,
but his earliest recollections were of Albany, whence the Jameses
migrated to New York until 1855. They then transferred their home to
Europe for three years, during which time the child Henry imbibed what
he afterwards called "the European virus." In 1855 he was sent to Geneva
for purposes of education, which were soon abandoned, and the whole
family began an aimless wandering through London, Paris,
Boulogne-sur-Mer, Newport, Geneva, and America again, nothing but the
Civil War sufficing to root this fugitive household in one abiding home.

Henry James's health forced him to be a spectator of the war, in which
his younger brothers fought. He went to Harvard in 1862 to study law,
but was now beginning to feel a more and more irresistible call to take
up letters as a profession, and the Harvard Law School left little or no
direct impression upon him. He formed a close and valuable friendship
with William Dean Howells, seven years his senior, and the pages of the
_Atlantic Monthly_, of which Howells was then assistant editor, were
open to him from 1865. He lived for the next four years in very poor
health, and with no great encouragement from himself or others, always
excepting Howells, at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Early in 1869 he
ventured to return to Europe, where he spent fifteen months in elegant
but fruitful vagabondage. There was much literary work done, most of
which he carefully suppressed in later life. The reader will, however,
discover, tucked away in the thirteenth volume of the Collected Edition,
a single waif from this rejected epoch, the tale called _A Passionate
Pilgrim_, written on his return to America in 1870. This visit to Europe
absolutely determined his situation; his arrival in New York stimulated
and tortured his nostalgia for the old world, and in May, 1872, he flew
back here once more to the European enchantment.

Here, practically, the biographical information respecting Henry James
which has hitherto been given to the world ceases, for the fragment of
_The Middle Years_, so far as can be gathered, contains few
recollections which can be dated later than his thirtieth year. It was
said of Marivaux that he cultivated no faculty but that _de ne vivre que
pour voir et pour entendre_. In a similar spirit Henry James took up his
dwelling in fashionable London lodgings in March, 1869. He had come from
America with the settled design of making a profound study of English
manners, and there were two aspects of the subject which stood out for
him above all others. One of these was the rural beauty of ancient
country places, the other was the magnitude--"the inconceivable
immensity," as he put it--of London. He told his sister, "The place sits
on you, broods on you, stamps on you with the feet of its myriad bipeds
and quadrupeds." From his lodgings in Half Moon Street, quiet enough in
themselves, he had the turmoil of the West End at his elbow, Piccadilly,
Park Lane, St. James's Street, all within the range of a five minutes'
stroll. He plunged into the vortex with incredible gusto, "knocking
about in a quiet way and deeply enjoying my little adventures." This was
his first mature experience of London, of which he remained until the
end of his life perhaps the most infatuated student, the most
"passionate pilgrim," that America has ever sent us.

But his health was still poor, and for his constitution's sake he went
in the summer of 1869 to Great Malvern. He went alone, and it is to be
remarked of him that, social as he was, and inclined to a deep
indulgence in the company of his friends, his habit of life was always
in the main a solitary one. He had no constant associates, and he did
not shrink from long periods of isolation, which he spent in reading and
writing, but also in a concentrated contemplation of the passing scene,
whatever it might be. It was alone that he now made a tour of the
principal English cathedral and university towns, expatiating to himself
on the perfection of the weather--"the dozen exquisite days of the
English year, days stamped with a purity unknown in climates where fine
weather is cheap." It was alone that he made acquaintance with Oxford,
of which city he became at once the impassioned lover which he continued
to be to the end, raving from Boston in 1870 of the supreme
gratifications of Oxford as "the most dignified and most educated" of
the cradles of our race. It was alone that during these enchanting weeks
he made himself acquainted with the unimagined loveliness of English
hamlets buried in immemorial leafage and whispered to by meandering
rivulets in the warm recesses of antiquity. These, too, found in Henry
James a worshipper more ardent, it may almost be averred, than any
other who had crossed the Atlantic to their shrine.

Having formed his basis for the main construction of his English
studies, Henry James passed over to the Continent, and conducted a
similar pilgrimage of entranced obsession through Switzerland and Italy.
His wanderings, "rapturous and solitary," were, as in England, hampered
by no social engagement; "I see no people to speak of," he wrote, "or
for that matter to speak to." He returned to America in April, 1870, at
the close of a year which proved critical in his career, and which laid
its stamp on the whole of his future work. He had been kindly received
in artistic and literary circles in London; he had conversed with
Ruskin, with William Morris, with Aubrey de Vere, but it is plain that
while he observed the peculiarities of these eminent men with the
closest avidity, he made no impression whatever upon them. The time for
Henry James to "make an impression" on others was not come yet; he was
simply the well-bred, rather shy, young American invalid, with excellent
introductions, who crossed the path of English activities, almost
without casting a shadow. He had published no book; he had no distinct
calling; he was a deprecating and punctilious young stranger from
somewhere in Massachusetts, immature-looking for all his
seven-and-twenty years.

Some further uneventful seasons, mainly spent in America but diversified
by tours in Germany and Italy, bring us to 1875, when Henry James came
over from Cambridge with the definite project, at last, of staying in
Europe "for good." He took rooms in Paris, at 29 Rue de Luxembourg, and
he penetrated easily into the very exclusive literary society which at
that time revolved around Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt. This year in
Paris was another highly critical period in Henry James's intellectual
history. He was still, at the mature age of thirty-two, almost an
amateur in literature, having been content, up to that time, to produce
scarcely anything which his mature taste did not afterwards repudiate.
_The Passionate Pilgrim_ (1870), of which I have spoken above, is the
only waif and stray of the pre-1873 years which he has permitted to
survive. The first edition of this short story is now not easy of
reference, and I have not seen it; the reprint of 1908 is obviously, and
is doubtless vigorously, re-handled. Enough, however, remains of what
must be original to show that, in a rather crude, and indeed almost
hysterical form, the qualities of Henry James's genius were, in 1869,
what they continued to be in 1909. He has conquered, however, in _A
Passionate Pilgrim_, no command yet over his enthusiasm, his delicate
sense of beauty, his apprehension of the exquisite colour of antiquity.

From the French associates of this time he derived practical help in his
profession, though without their being aware of what they gave him. He
was warmly attracted to Gustave Flaubert, who had just published _La
Tentation de St. Antoine_, a dazzled admiration of which was the excuse
which threw the young American at the feet of the Rouen giant. This
particular admiration dwindled with the passage of time, but Henry James
continued faithful to the author of _Madame Bovary_. It was Turgenev who
introduced him to Flaubert, from whom he passed to Guy de Maupassant,
then an athlete of four-and-twenty, and still scintillating in that
blaze of juvenile virility which always fascinated Henry James. In the
train of Edmond de Goncourt came Zola, vociferous over his late
tribulation of having _L'Assommoir_ stopped in its serial issue;
Alphonse Daudet, whose recent _Jack_ was exercising over tens of
thousands of readers the tyranny of tears; and Francois Coppee, the
almost exact coeval of Henry James, and now author of a _Luthier de
Cremone_, which had placed him high among French poets. That the young
American, with no apparent claim to attention except the laborious
perfection of his French speech, was welcomed and ultimately received on
terms of intimacy in this the most exclusive of European intellectual
circles is curious. Henry James was accustomed to deprecate the notion
that these Frenchmen took the least interest in him: "they have never
read a line of me, they have never even persuaded themselves that there
was a line of me which anyone could read," he once said to me. How
should they, poor charming creatures, in their self-sufficing Latin
intensity, know what or whether some barbarian had remotely "written"?
But this does not end the marvel, because, read or not read, there was
Henry James among them, affectionately welcomed, talked to familiarly
about "technique," and even about "sales," like a fellow-craftsman.
There must evidently have developed by this time something modestly
"impressive" about him, and I cannot doubt that these Parisian masters
of language more or less dimly divined that he too was, in some medium
not by them to be penetrated, a master.

After this fruitful year in Paris, the first result of which was the
publication in London of his earliest surviving novel, _Roderick
Hudson_, and the completion of _The American_, Henry James left his
"glittering, charming, civilized Paris" and settled in London. He
submitted himself, as he wrote to his brother William in 1878, "without
reserve to that Londonizing process of which the effect is to convince
you that, having lived here, you may, if need be, abjure civilization
and bury yourself in the country, but may not, in pursuit of
civilization, live in any smaller town." He plunged deeply into the
study of London, externally and socially, and into the production of
literature, in which he was now as steadily active as he was elegantly
proficient. These novels of his earliest period have neither the
profundity nor the originality of those of his middle and final periods,
but they have an exquisite freshness of their own, and a workmanship the
lucidity and logic of which he owed in no small measure to his
conversations with Daudet and Maupassant, and to his, at that time
almost exclusive, reading of the finest French fiction. He published
_The American_ in 1877, _The Europeans_ and _Daisy Miller_ in 1878, and
_An International Episode_ in 1879. He might advance in stature and
breadth; he might come to disdain the exiguous beauty of these
comparatively juvenile books, but now at all events were clearly
revealed all the qualities which were to develop later, and to make
Henry James unique among writers of Anglo-Saxon race.

His welcome into English society was remarkable if we reflect that he
seemed to have little to give in return for what it offered except his
social adaptability, his pleasant and still formal amenity, and his
admirable capacity for listening. It cannot be repeated too clearly that
the Henry James of those early days had very little of the
impressiveness of his later manner. He went everywhere, sedately,
watchfully, graciously, but never prominently. In the winter of 1878-79
it is recorded that he dined out in London 107 times, but it is highly
questionable whether this amazing assiduity at the best dinner-tables
will be found to have impressed itself on any Greville or Crabb Robinson
who was taking notes at the time. He was strenuously living up to his
standard, "my charming little standard of wit, of grace, of good
manners, of vivacity, of urbanity, of intelligence, of what makes an
easy and natural style of intercourse." He was watching the rather gross
and unironic, but honest and vigorous, English upper-middle-class of
that day with mingled feelings, in which curiosity and a sort of remote
sympathy took a main part. At 107 London dinners he observed the
ever-shifting pieces of the general kaleidoscope with tremendous
acuteness, and although he thought their reds and yellows would have
been improved by a slight infusion of the Florentine harmony, on the
whole he was never weary of watching their evolutions. In this way the
years slipped by, while he made a thousand acquaintances and a dozen
durable friendships. It is a matter of pride and happiness to me that I
am able to touch on one of the latter.

It is often curiously difficult for intimate friends, who have the
impression in later years that they must always have known one another,
to recall the occasion and the place where they first met. That was the
case with Henry James and me. Several times we languidly tried to
recover those particulars, but without success. I think, however, that
it was at some dinner-party that we first met, and as the incident is
dubiously connected with the publication of the _Hawthorne_ in 1879,
and with Mr. (now Lord) Morley, whom we both frequently saw at that
epoch, I am pretty sure that the event took place early in 1880. The
acquaintance, however, did not "ripen," as people say, until the summer
of 1882, when in connexion with an article on the drawings of George Du
Maurier, which I was anxious Henry James should write--having heard him
express himself with high enthusiasm regarding these works of art--he
invited me to go to see him and to talk over the project. I found him,
one sunshiny afternoon, in his lodgings on the first floor of No. 3
Bolton Street, at the Piccadilly end of the street, where the houses
look askew into Green Park. Here he had been living ever since he came
over from France in 1876, and the situation was eminently characteristic
of the impassioned student of London life and haunter of London society
which he had now become.

Stretched on the sofa and apologizing for not rising to greet me, his
appearance gave me a little shock, for I had not thought of him as an
invalid. He hurriedly and rather evasively declared that he was not
that, but that a muscular weakness of his spine obliged him, as he said,
"to assume the horizontal posture" during some hours of every day in
order to bear the almost unbroken routine of evening engagements. I
think that this weakness gradually passed away, but certainly for many
years it handicapped his activity. I recall his appearance, seen then
for the first time by daylight; there was something shadowy about it,
the face framed in dark brown hair cut short in the Paris fashion, and
in equally dark beard, rather loose and "fluffy." He was in deep
mourning, his mother having died five or six months earlier, and he
himself having but recently returned from a melancholy visit to America,
where he had unwillingly left his father, who seemed far from well. His
manner was grave, extremely courteous, but a little formal and
frightened, which seemed strange in a man living in constant
communication with the world. Our business regarding Du Maurier was soon
concluded, and James talked with increasing ease, but always with a
punctilious hesitancy, about Paris, where he seemed, to my dazzlement,
to know even a larger number of persons of distinction than he did in
London.

He promised, before I left, to return my visit, but news of the alarming
illness of his father called him suddenly to America. He wrote to me
from Boston in April, 1883, but he did not return to London until the
autumn of that year. Our intercourse was then resumed, and, immediately,
on the familiar footing which it preserved, without an hour's abatement,
until the sad moment of his fatal illness. When he returned to Bolton
Street--this was in August, 1883--he had broken all the ties which held
him to residence in America, a country which, as it turned out, he was
not destined to revisit for more than twenty years. By this means Henry
James became a homeless man in a peculiar sense, for he continued to be
looked upon as a foreigner in London, while he seemed to have lost
citizenship in the United States. It was a little later than this that
that somewhat acidulated patriot, Colonel Higginson, in reply to someone
who said that Henry James was a cosmopolitan, remarked, "Hardly! for a
cosmopolitan is at home even in his own country!" This condition made
James, although superficially gregarious, essentially isolated, and
though his books were numerous and were greatly admired, they were
tacitly ignored alike in summaries of English and of American current
literature. There was no escape from this dilemma. Henry James was
equally determined not to lay down his American birthright and not to
reside in America. Every year of his exile, therefore, emphasized the
fact of his separation from all other Anglo-Saxons, and he endured, in
the world of letters, the singular fate of being a man without a
country.

The collection of his private letters, therefore, which has just been
published under the sympathetic editorship of Mr. Percy Lubbock, reveals
the adventures of an author who, long excluded from two literatures, is
now eagerly claimed by both of them, and it displays those movements of
a character of great energy and singular originality which
circumstances have hitherto concealed from curiosity. There was very
little on the surface of his existence to bear evidence to the
passionate intensity of the stream beneath. This those who have had the
privilege of seeing his letters know is marvellously revealed in his
private correspondence. A certain change in his life was brought about
by the arrival in 1885 of his sister Alice, who, in now confirmed
ill-health, was persuaded to make Bournemouth and afterwards Leamington
her home. He could not share her life, but at all events he could
assiduously diversify it by his visits, and Bournemouth had a second
attraction for him in the presence of Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom
he had by this time formed one of the closest of his friendships.
Stevenson's side of the correspondence has long been known, and it is
one of the main attractions which Mr. Lubbock held out to his readers
that Henry James's letters to Stevenson are now published. No episode of
the literary history of the time is more fascinating than the
interchange of feeling between these two great artists. The death of
Stevenson, nine years later than their first meeting, though long
anticipated, fell upon Henry James with a shock which he found at first
scarcely endurable. For a long time afterwards he could not bring
himself to mention the name of R. L. S. without a distressing agitation.

In 1886 the publication of _The Bostonians_, a novel which showed an
advance in direct or, as it was then styled, "realistic" painting of
modern society, increased the cleft which now divided him from his
native country, for _The Bostonians_ was angrily regarded as satirizing
not merely certain types, but certain recognizable figures in
Massachusetts, and that with a suggestive daring which was unusual.
Henry James, intent upon making a vivid picture, and already perhaps a
little out of touch with American sentiment, was indignant at the
reception of this book, which he ultimately, to my great disappointment,
omitted from his Collected Edition, for reasons which he gave in a long
letter to myself. Hence, as his works now appear, _The Princess
Casamassima_, of 1886, an essentially London adventure story, takes its
place as the earliest of the novels of his second period, although
preceded by admirable short tales in that manner, the most
characteristic of which is doubtless _The Author of Beltraffio_ (1885).
This exemplifies the custom he had now adopted of seizing an incident
reported to him, often a very slight and bald affair, and weaving round
it a thick and glittering web of silken fancy, just as the worm winds
round the unsightly chrysalis its graceful robe of gold. I speak of _The
Author of Beltraffio_, and after thirty-five years I may confess that
this extraordinarily vivid story was woven around a dark incident in the
private life of an eminent author known to us both, which I, having told
Henry James in a moment of levity, was presently horrified and even
sensibly alarmed to see thus pinnacled in the broad light of day.

After exhausting at last the not very shining amenities of his lodgings
in Bolton Street, where all was old and dingy, he went westward in 1886
into Kensington, and settled in a flat which was both new and bright, at
34 De Vere Gardens, Kensington, where he began a novel called _The
Tragic Muse_, on which he expended an immense amount of pains. He was
greatly wearied by the effort, and not entirely satisfied with the
result. He determined, as he said, "to do nothing but short lengths" for
the future, and he devoted himself to the execution of _contes_. But
even the art of the short story presently yielded to a new and, it must
be confessed, a deleterious fascination, that of the stage. He was
disappointed--he made no secret to his friends of his disillusion--in
the commercial success of his novels, which was inadequate to his needs.
I believe that he greatly over-estimated these needs, and that at no
time he was really pressed by the want of money. But he thought that he
was, and in his anxiety he turned to the theatre as a market in which to
earn a fortune. Little has hitherto been revealed with regard to this
"sawdust and orange-peel phase" (as he called it) in Henry James's
career, but it cannot be ignored any longer. The memories of his
intimate friends are stored with its incidents, his letters will be
found to be full of it.

Henry James wrote, between 1889 and 1894, seven or eight plays, on each
of which he expended an infinitude of pains and mental distress. At the
end of this period, unwillingly persuaded at last that all his agony was
in vain, and that he could never secure fame and fortune, or even a
patient hearing from the theatre-going public by his dramatic work, he
abandoned the hopeless struggle. He was by temperament little fitted to
endure the disappointments and delays which must always attend the
course of a dramatist who has not conquered a position which enables him
to browbeat the tyrants behind the stage. Henry James was punctilious,
ceremonious, and precise; it is not to be denied that he was apt to be
hasty in taking offence, and not very ready to overlook an impertinence.
The whole existence of the actor is lax and casual; the manager is the
capricious leader of an irresponsible band of egotists. Henry James lost
no occasion of dwelling, in private conversation, on this aspect of an
amiable and entertaining profession. He was not prepared to accept young
actresses at their own valuation, and the happy-go-lucky democracy of
the "mimes," as he bracketed both sexes, irritated him to the verge of
frenzy.

It was, however, with a determination to curb his impatience, and with a
conviction that he could submit his idiosyncrasies to what he called the
"passionate economy" of play-writing, that he began, in 1889, to
dedicate himself to the drama, excluding for the time being all other
considerations. He went over to Paris in the winter of that year,
largely to talk over the stage with Alphonse Daudet and Edmond de
Goncourt, and he returned to put the finishing touches on _The
American_, a dramatic version of one of his earliest novels. He finished
this play at the Palazzo Barbaro, the beautiful home of his friends, the
Daniel Curtises, in Venice, in June, 1890, thereupon taking a long
holiday, one of the latest of his extended Italian tours, through
Venetia and Tuscany. Edward Compton had by this time accepted _The
American_, being attracted by his own chances in the part of Christopher
Newman. When Henry James reappeared in London, and particularly when
the rehearsals began, we all noticed how deeply the theatrical virus had
penetrated his nature. His excitement swelled until the evening of
January 3rd, 1891, when _The American_ was acted at Southport by
Compton's company in anticipation of its appearance in London. Henry
James was kind enough to wish me to go down on this occasion with him to
Southport, but it was not possible. On the afternoon of the ordeal he
wrote to me from the local hotel: "After eleven o'clock to-night I may
be the world's--you know--and I may be the undertaker's. I count upon
you and your wife both to spend this evening in fasting, silence, and
supplication. I will send you a word in the morning, a wire if I can."
He was "so nervous that I miswrite and misspell."

The result, in the provinces, of this first experiment was not decisive.
It is true that he told Robert Louis Stevenson that he was enjoying a
success which made him blush. But the final result in London, where _The
American_ was not played until September, 1891, was only partly
encouraging. Henry James was now cast down as unreasonably as he had
been uplifted. He told me that "the strain, the anxiety, the peculiar
form and colour of the ordeal (not to be divined in the least in
advance)" had "sickened him to death." He used language of the most
picturesque extravagance about the "purgatory" of the performances,
which ran at the Opera Comique for two months. There was nothing in the
mediocre fortunes of this play to decide the questions whether Henry
James was or was not justified in abandoning all other forms of art for
the drama. We endeavoured to persuade him that, on the whole, he was not
justified, but he swept our arguments aside, and he devoted himself
wholly to the infatuation of his sterile task.

_The American_ had been dramatized from a published novel. Henry James
now thought that he should do better with original plots, and he wrote
two comedies, the one named _Tenants_ and the other _Disengaged_, of
each of which he formed high expectations. But, although they were
submitted to several managers, who gave them their customary loitering
and fluctuating attention, they were in every case ultimately refused.
Each refusal plunged the dramatist into the lowest pit of furious
depression, from which he presently emerged with freshly-kindled hopes.
Like the moralist, he never was but always to be blest. _The Album_ and
_The Reprobate_--there is a melancholy satisfaction in giving life to
the mere names of these stillborn children of his brain--started with
wild hopes and suffered from the same complete failure to satisfy the
caprice of the managers. At the close of 1893, after one of these
"sordid developments," he made up his mind to abandon the struggle. But
George Alexander promised that, if he would but persevere, he really and
truly would produce him infallibly at no distant date, and poor Henry
James could not but persevere. "I mean to wage this war ferociously for
one year more," and he composed, with infinite agony and deliberation,
the comedy of _Guy Domvile_.

The night of January 5th, 1895, was the most tragical in Henry James's
career. His hopes and fears had been strung up to the most excruciating
point, and I think that I have never witnessed such agonies of
parturition. _Guy Domvile_--which has never been printed--was a delicate
and picturesque play, of which the only disadvantage that I could
discover was that instead of having a last scene which tied up all the
threads in a neat conclusion, it left all those threads loose as they
would be in life. George Alexander was sanguine of success, and to do
Henry James honour such a galaxy of artistic, literary, and scientific
celebrity gathered in the stalls of the St. James's Theatre as perhaps
were never seen in a London playhouse before or since. Henry James was
positively storm-ridden with emotion before the fatal night, and full of
fantastic plans. I recall that one was that he should hide in the bar of
a little public-house down an alley close to the theatre, whither I
should slip forth at the end of the second act and report "how it was
going." This was not carried out, and fortunately Henry James resisted
the temptation of being present in the theatre during the performance.
All seemed to be going fairly well until the close, when Henry James
appeared and was called before the curtain--only to be subjected--to our
unspeakable horror and shame--to a storm of hoots and jeers and catcalls
from the gallery, answered by loud and sustained applause from the
stalls, the whole producing an effect of hell broke loose, in the midst
of which the author, as white as chalk, bowed and spread forth
deprecating hands and finally vanished. It was said at the time, and
confirmed later, that this horrible performance was not intended to
humiliate Henry James, but was the result of a cabal against George
Alexander.

Early next morning I called at 34 De Vere Gardens, hardly daring to
press the bell for fear of the worst of news, so shattered with
excitement had the playwright been on the previous evening. I was
astonished to find him perfectly calm; he had slept well and was
breakfasting with appetite. The theatrical bubble in which he had lived
a tormented existence for five years was wholly and finally broken, and
he returned, even in that earliest conversation, to the discussion of
the work which he had so long and so sadly neglected, the art of direct
prose narrative. And now a remarkable thing happened. The discipline of
toiling for the caprices of the theatre had amounted, for so redundant
an imaginative writer, to the putting on of a mental strait-jacket. He
saw now that he need stoop no longer to what he called "a meek and lowly
review of the right ways to keep on the right side of a body of people
who have paid money to be amused at a particular hour and place." Henry
James was not released from this system of vigorous renunciation without
a very singular result. To write for the theatre the qualities of
brevity and directness, of an elaborate plainness, had been perceived by
him to be absolutely necessary, and he had tried to cultivate them with
dogged patience for five years. But when he broke with the theatre, the
rebound was excessive. I recall his saying to me, after the fiasco of
_Guy Domvile_, "At all events, I have escaped for ever from the foul
fiend Excision!" He vibrated with the sense of release, and he began to
enjoy, physically and intellectually, a freedom which had hitherto been
foreign to his nature.


II

THE abrupt change in Henry James's outlook on life, which was the result
of his violent disillusion with regard to theatrical hopes and
ambitions, took the form of a distaste for London and a determination,
vague enough at first, to breathe for the future in a home of his own by
the sea. He thought of Bournemouth, more definitely of Torquay, but
finally his fate was sealed by his being offered, for the early summer
months of 1896, a small house on the cliff at Point Hill, Playden,
whence he could look down, as from an "eagle's nest," on the exquisite
little red-roofed town of Rye and over the wide floor of the marsh of
Sussex. When the time came for his being turned out of this retreat, he
positively could not face the problem of returning to the breathless
heat of London in August, and he secured the Vicarage in the heart of
Rye itself for two months more. Here, as earlier at Point Hill, I was
his guest, and it was wonderful to observe how his whole moral and
intellectual nature seemed to burgeon and expand in the new and
delicious liberty of country life. We were incessantly in the open air,
on the terrace (for the Vicarage, though musty and dim, possessed, like
the fresher Point Hill, a sea-looking terrace), sauntering round the
little town, or roving for miles and miles over the illimitable flats,
to Winchelsea, to Lydd, to the recesses of Walland Marsh--even, on one
peerless occasion, so far afield as to Midley Chapel and the Romneys.

Never had I known Henry James so radiant, so cheerful or so
self-assured. During the earlier London years there had hung over him a
sort of canopy, a mixture of reserve and deprecation, faintly darkening
the fullness of communion with his character; there always had seemed to
be something indefinably non-conductive between him and those in whom he
had most confidence. While the play-writing fit was on him this had
deepened almost into fretfulness; the complete freedom of intercourse
which is the charm of friendship had been made more and more difficult
by an excess of sensibility. Henry James had become almost what the
French call a _buisson d'epines_. It was therefore surprising and highly
delightful to find that this cloud had ceased to brood over him, and had
floated away, leaving behind it a laughing azure in which quite a new
and charming Henry James stood revealed. The summer of 1896, when by a
succession of happy chances I was much alone with him at Rye, rests in
my recollection as made exquisite by his serene and even playful
uniformity of temper, by the removal of everything which had made
intercourse occasionally difficult, and by the addition of forms of
amenity that had scarcely been foreshadowed. On reflection, however, I
find that I am mixing up memories of June at Point Hill and of September
at the Vicarage with the final Rye adventure, which must now be
chronicled. When he was obliged to turn out of his second refuge, he
returned to London, but with an ever-deepening nostalgia for the little
Sussex town where he had been happy. In the following summer the voice
of Venice called him so loudly that he stayed in London longer than
usual, meaning to spend the autumn and winter in Italy. He thought
meanwhile of Bournemouth and of Saxmundham. He went on his bicycle round
the desolate ghost of Dunwich, but his heart was whispering "Rye" to him
all the while. Nothing then seemed available, however, when suddenly the
unexpected vacancy of the most eligible residence conceivable settled,
in the course of a couple of days, the whole future earthly pilgrimage
of Henry James. The huge fact was immediately announced in a letter of
September 25th, 1897:

     I am just drawing a long breath from having signed--a few moments
     since--a most portentous parchment: the lease of a smallish,
     charming, cheap old house in the country--down at Rye--for 21
     years. (It was built about 1705.) It is exactly what I want and
     secretly and hopelessly coveted (since knowing it) without
     dreaming it would ever fall. But it has fallen--and has a beautiful
     room for you (the King's Room--George II's--who slept there);
     together with every promise of yielding me an indispensable retreat
     from May to October (every year). I hope you are not more sorry to
     take up the load of life that awaits, these days, the hunch of
     one's shoulders than I am. You'll ask me what I mean by "life."
     Come down to Lamb House and I'll tell you.

There were the most delightful possibilities in the property, which
included a small garden and lawn, the whole hemmed in by a peaceful old
red wall, plentifully tapestried with espaliers. The noble tower of Rye
church looked down into it, and Henry James felt that the chimes sounded
sweetly to him as he faced his garden in monastic quiet, the little
market-town packed tightly about him, yet wholly out of sight.

Meanwhile the intellectual release had been none the less marked than
the physical. The earliest result of his final escape from the lures of
the Vivian of the stage had been the composition of a novel, _The Spoils
of Poynton_, in a manner entirely different from that of his earlier
long romances. This was published in 1897, and in the meantime he had
set to work on a longer and more ambitious romance, _What Maisie Knew_.
In these he began the exercise of what has been called his "later
manner," which it would be out of proportion to attempt to define in a
study which purports to be biographical rather than critical. It is
enough to remind the reader familiar with Henry James's writings that in
abandoning the more popular and conventional method of composition he
aimed at nothing less than a revolution in the art of the novelist.
While thus actively engaged in a new scheme of life, he found it more
and more difficult to break "the spell of immobility" which enveloped
him. He who had been so ready to start on any call of impulse in any
direction found it impossible to bring himself to respond, at Christmas,
1897, to the appeal of Madame Alphonse Daudet to come over to Paris to
grace the obsequies of her illustrious husband. The friends--and the
author of _Jack_ was the most intimate of James's Parisian
acquaintances--had not met after 1895, when Daudet had spent a month in
London mainly under the charge of Henry James, since which time the
French novelist's life had been sapped and drained from him by a disease
the symptoms of which were beginning to be painfully manifest when he
was with us in London. The old French friends were now disappearing.
Their places in Henry James's affection were partly filled by Paul
Bourget and by Maurice Barres, whose remarkable and rather "gruesome"
book, _Les Deracines_, now supplied James with an endless subject of
talk and reflection.

The first novel actually completed at Lamb House was _The Awkward Age_,
which was ready for the printers early in 1898. The ecstasy with which
he settled down to appreciate his new surroundings is reflected in that
novel, where the abode of Mr. Longdon is neither more nor less than a
picture of Lamb House. It was a wonderful summer and autumn, and, as
Henry James said: "The air of the place thrilled all the while with the
bliss of birds, the hum of little lives unseen, and the flicker of white
butterflies." The MS. of _The Awkward Age_ was no sooner finished than
he took up the germ of an incident dimly related to him years before at
Addington, by Archbishop Benson, and wove it into _The Turn of the
Screw_, a sort of moral (or immoral) ghost story which not a few readers
consider to be the most powerful of all his writings, and which others
again peculiarly detest. I admit myself to be a hanger-on of the former
group, and I have very vivid recollections of the period when _The Turn
of the Screw_ was being composed. The author discussed it with a freedom
not usual with him. I remember that when he had finished it he said to
me one day: "I had to correct the proofs of my ghost story last night,
and when I had finished them I was so frightened that I was afraid to go
upstairs to bed!"

By the close of 1898 he had got rid of the flat in De Vere Gardens,
which had become a mere burden to him, and had taken what he called an
"invaluable south-looking, Carlton-Gardens-sweeping bedroom" at the
Reform Club in Pall Mall, which served his brief and sudden pilgrimages
to town for many seasons. Lamb House, in the course of this year, became
his almost exclusive residence, and it is to be noted that at the same
time a remarkable change came over the nature of his correspondence. He
had been a meticulous but not very inspired letter-writer in early
youth; his capacity for epistolary composition and his appetite for it
had developed remarkably in the middle years (1882-1890). During the
hectic period of his theatrical ambition it had dwindled again. But when
he settled finally at Rye, spreading himself in luxurious contentment
within the protection of his old brick garden-wall, the pink and purple
surface of which stood in his fancy as a sort of bodyguard of security
passed down for that particular purpose through mild ages of
restfulness, as soon as he sat, with his household gods about him, in
the almost cotton-woolly hush of Lamb House, he began to blossom out
into a correspondent of a new and splendid class. The finest and most
characteristic letters of Henry James start with his fifty-fifth year,
and they continue to expand in volume, in richness and in
self-revelation almost to the close of his life. On this subject Mr.
Percy Lubbock, than whom no one has known better the idiosyncrasies of
Henry James, has described his method of correspondence in a passage
which could not be bettered:

     The rich apologies for silence and backwardness that preface so
     many of his letters must be interpreted in the light, partly indeed
     of his natural luxuriance of phraseology, but much more of his
     generous conception of the humblest correspondent's claim on him
     for response. He could not answer a brief note of friendliness but
     with pages of abounding eloquence. He never dealt in the mere small
     change of intercourse; the postcard and the half-sheet did not
     exist for him; a few lines of enquiry would bring from him a
     bulging packet of manuscript, overwhelming in its disproportion. No
     wonder that with this standard of the meaning of a letter he often
     groaned under his postal burden. He discharged himself of it, in
     general, very late at night; the morning's work left him too much
     exhausted for more composition until then. At midnight he would sit
     down to his letter-writing and cover sheet after sheet, sometimes
     for hours, with his dashing and not very readable script.
     Occasionally he would give up a day to the working off of arrears
     by dictation, seldom omitting to excuse himself to each
     correspondent in turn for the infliction of the "fierce legibility"
     of type.

This amplitude of correspondence was the outcome of an affectionate
solicitude for his friends, which led him in another direction, namely,
in that of exercising a hospitality towards them for which he had never
found an opportunity before. He did not, however, choose to collect
anything which might remotely be called "a party"; what he really
preferred was the presence of a single friend at a time, of a companion
who would look after himself in the morning, and be prepared for a
stroll with his host in the afternoon, and for a banquet of untrammelled
conversation under the lamp or on the expanse of the lawn after the
comfortable descent of nightfall.

His practice in regard to such a visitor was always to descend to the
railway station below the town to welcome the guest, who would instantly
recognize his remarkable figure hurrying along the platform. Under the
large soft hat would be visible the large pale face, anxiously scanning
the carriage-windows and breaking into smiles of sunshine when the
new-comer was discovered. Welcome was signified by both hands waved
aloft, lifting the skirts of the customary cloak, like wings. Then,
luggage attended to, and the arm of the guest securely seized, as though
even now there might be an attempt at escape, a slow ascent on foot
would begin up the steep streets, the last and steepest of all leading
to a discreet door which admitted directly to the broad hall of Lamb
House. Within were, to right and left, the pleasant old rooms, with low
windows opening straight into the garden, which was so sheltered and
economized as to seem actually spacious. Further to the left was a lofty
detached room, full of books and lights, where in summer Henry James
usually wrote, secluded from all possible disturbance. The ascent of
arrival from the railway grew to be more and more interesting as time
went on, and as the novelist became more and more a familiar and
respected citizen, it was much interrupted at last by bows from ladies
and salaams from shop-keepers; many little boys and girls, the latter
having often curtsied, had to be greeted and sometimes patted on the
head. 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"; as time went on his appearance became, on the
contrary, excessively noticeable and arresting. He removed the beard
which had long disguised his face, and so revealed the strong lines of
mouth and chin, which responded to the majesty of the skull. In the
breadth and smoothness of the head--Henry James became almost wholly
bald early in life--there was at length something sacerdotal. As time
went on, he grew less and less Anglo-Saxon in appearance and more Latin.
I remember once seeing a Canon preaching in the Cathedral of Toulouse
who was the picture of Henry James in his unction, his gravity, and his
vehemence. Sometimes there could be noted--what Henry would have hated
to think existing--a theatrical look which struck the eye, as though he
might be some retired _jeune premier_ of the Francais, _jeune_ no
longer; and often the prelatical expression faded into a fleeting
likeness to one or other celebrated Frenchman of letters (never to any
Englishman or American), somewhat of Lacordaire in the intolerable
scrutiny of the eyes, somewhat of Sainte-Beuve, too, in all except the
mouth, which, though mobile and elastic, gave the impression in rest of
being small. All these comparisons and suggestions, however, must be
taken as the barest hints, intended to mark the tendency of Henry
James's radically powerful and unique outer appearance. The beautiful
modelling of the brows, waxing and waning under the stress of
excitement, is a point which singularly dwells in the memory.

It is very difficult to give an impression of his manner, which was
complex in the extreme, now restrained with a deep reserve, now suddenly
expanding, so as to leave the auditor breathless, into a flood of
exuberance. He had the habit of keeping his friends apart from one
another; his intimacies were contained in many watertight compartments.
He disliked to think that he was the subject of an interchange of
impressions, and though he who discussed everybody and everything with
the most penetrating and analysing curiosity must have known perfectly
well that he also, in his turn, was the theme of endless discussion, he
liked to ignore it and to feign to be a bodiless spectator. Accordingly,
he was not apt to pay for the revelations, confidences, guesses and what
not which he so eagerly demanded and enjoyed by any coin of a similar
species. He begged the human race to plunge into experiences, but he
proposed to take no plunge himself, or at least to have no audience when
he plunged.

So discreet was he, and so like a fountain sealed, that many of those
who were well acquainted with him have supposed that he was mainly a
creature of observation and fancy, and that life stirred his intellect
while leaving his senses untouched. But every now and then he disclosed
to a friend, or rather admitted such a friend to a flash or glimpse of
deeper things. The glimpse was never prolonged or illuminated, it was
like peering down for a moment through some chasm in the rocks dimmed by
the vapour of a clash of waves. One such flash will always leave my
memory dazzled. I was staying alone with Henry James at Rye one summer,
and as twilight deepened we walked together in the garden. I forget by
what meanders we approached the subject, but I suddenly found that in
profuse and enigmatic language he was recounting to me an experience,
something that had happened, not something repeated or imagined. He
spoke of standing on the pavement of a city, in the dusk, and of gazing
upwards across the misty street, watching, watching for the lighting of
a lamp in a window on the third storey. And the lamp blazed out, and
through bursting tears he strained to see what was behind it, the
unapproachable face. And for hours he stood there, wet with the rain,
brushed by the phantom hurrying figures of the scene, and never from
behind the lamp was for one moment visible the face. The mysterious and
poignant revelation closed, and one could make no comment, ask no
question, being throttled oneself by an overpowering emotion. And for a
long time Henry James shuffled beside me in the darkness, shaking the
dew off the laurels, and still there was no sound at all in the garden
but what our heels made crunching the gravel, nor was the silence broken
when suddenly we entered the house and he disappeared for an hour.

But the gossamer thread of narrative must be picked up once more, slight
as it is. Into so cloistered a life the news of the sudden loss of
Edward Burne-Jones in June, 1898, fell with a sensation; he had "seen
the dear man, to my great joy, only a few hours before his death." In
the early spring of the next year Henry James actually summoned
resolution to go abroad again, visiting at Hyeres Paul Bourget and the
Vicomte Melchior de Voguee (of whose _Le Roman Russe_ and other essays he
was a sturdy admirer), and proceeding to Rome, whence he was "whirled by
irresistible Marion Crawford off to Sorrento, Capri, Naples," some of
these now seen for the first time. He came back to England and to Lamb
House at the end of June, to find that his novel of _The Awkward Age_,
which was just published, was being received with a little more
intelligence and sympathetic comprehension than had been the habit of
greeting his productions, what he haughtily, but quite justly, called
"the lurid asininity" of the Press in his regard now beginning to be
sensibly affected by the loyalty of the little clan of those who saw
what he was "driving at" in the new romances, and who valued it as a
pearl of price. Nevertheless, there was still enough thick-witted
denunciation of his novels to fill his own "clan" with anger, while some
even of those who loved him best admitted themselves bewildered by _The
Awkward Age_. Nothing is more steadily cleared away by time than the
impression of obscurity that hangs over a really fine work of
imagination when it is new. Twenty years have now passed, and no candid
reader any longer pretends to find this admirable story "bewildering."

The passing of old friends was partly healed by the coming of new
friends, and it was about this time that Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, and Mr. W. E. Norris began to be visited and corresponded with.
In 1900 and 1901 Henry James was slowly engaged, with luxurious throes
of prolonged composition, in dictating _The Ambassadors_, which he
"tackled and, for various reasons, laid aside," only to attack it again
"with intensity and on the basis of a simplification that made it
easier" until he brought it successfully through its voluminous career.
In the summer of 1902 Mrs. Wharton, who had dedicated to him, as a
stranger, her novel of _The Valley of Decision_, became a personal
acquaintance, and soon, and till the end, one of the most valued and
intimate of his friends. This event synchronized with the publication of
his own great book, _The Wings of a Dove_. It was followed by _The
Golden Bowl_. He now turned from such huge schemes as this--which in his
fatigue he described as "too inordinately drawn out and too inordinately
rubbed in"--to the composition of short stories, in which he found both
rest and refreshment.

On this subject, the capabilities of the _conte_ as a form of peculiarly
polished and finished literature, he regaled me--and doubtless other
friends--at this time with priceless observations. I recall a radiant
August afternoon when we sallied from his high abode and descended to
the mud of the winding waters of the Brede, where, on the shaky bridge
across the river, leaning perilously above the flood, Henry James held
forth on the extraordinary skill of Guy de Maupassant, whose posthumous
collection, _Le Colporteur_, had just reached him, and on the importance
of securing, as that inimitable artist so constantly secured, one
straight, intelligible action which must be the source of all vitality
in what, without it, became a mere wandering anecdote, more or less
vaguely ornamented. Henry James was at this time, I think, himself
engaged upon the series of short stories which ultimately appeared under
the title of _The Better Sort_, each one, as he said, being the
exhibition of a case of experience or conduct. He collected and
published in these years several such volumes of short compositions, in
which he endeavoured, and admirably effected his endeavour, to combine
neatness of handling with that beauty of conception which became more
and more the object of his passionate desire. The reader naturally
recalls such perfect specimens of his craft as _The Real Right Thing and
The Beast in the Jungle_.

For many years he had let his fancy toy with the idea of returning, on a
visit only, to America. In 1904 this project really took shape, and the
long-debated journey actually took place. He terminated another extended
romance, _The Golden Bowl_, and in August set sail for New York,
ostensibly for the purpose of writing a book of American impressions.
The volume called _The American Scene_, published in 1906, gives his
account of the adventure, or rather of certain parts of it. He lived
through the first autumn with his family in the mountains of New
Hampshire, and, after a sojourn in Cambridge, spent Christmas in New
York. He then went south in search of warmth, which he found at last in
Florida. By way of Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis he reached
California in April, 1905. He delivered in various American Colleges two
lectures, specially written for the purpose, which came out as a little
volume in the United States, but have not yet appeared in England. His
impressions of America, in the volume which he published after his
return, stop with Florida, and give therefore no record of the extreme
pleasure which he experienced in California, of which his private
letters were full. He declared, writing on April 5th, 1905, from
Coronado Beach, that "California has completely bowled me over.... The
flowers, the wild flowers, just now in particular, which fairly _rage_
with radiance over the land, are worthy of some purer planet than
this.... It breaks my heart to have so stinted myself here"; but return
eastward was imperative, and in August, 1905, he was back again safe in
the silence of Lamb House.

Throughout the following autumn and winter he was, as he said,
"squeezing out" his American impressions, which did not flow so easily
as he had hoped they would. Many other enterprises hung temptingly
before him, and distracted his thoughts from that particular occupation.
Moreover, just before his plan for visiting the United States had taken
shape, he had promised to write for a leading firm of English publishers
"a romantical-psychological-pictorial-social" book about London, and in
November, 1905, he returned to this project with vivacity. There is a
peculiar interest about works that great writers mean to compose and
never succeed in producing, and this scheme of a great picturesque book
about London is like a ghost among the realities of Henry James's
invention. He spoke about it more often and more freely than he did
about his solid creations; I feel as though I had handled and almost as
though I had read it. Westminster was to have been the core of the
matter, which was to circle out concentrically to the City and the
suburbs. Henry James put me under gratified contribution by coming
frequently to the House of Lords in quest of "local colour," and I took
him through the corridors and up into garrets of the Palace where never
foreign foot had stepped before. There was not, to make a clean breast
of it, much "local colour" to be wrung out, but Henry James was
indefatigable in curiosity. What really did thrill him was to stand
looking down from one of the windows of the Library on the Terrace,
crowded with its motley afternoon crew of Members of both Houses and
their guests of both sexes. He liked that better than to mingle with the
throng itself, and he should have written a superb page on the scene,
with its background of shining river and misty towers. Alas! it will not
be read until we know what songs the Sirens sang.

All through the quiet autumn and winter of 1906 he was busy preparing
the collective and definite, but far from complete, edition of his
novels and tales which began to appear some twelve months later. This
involved a labour which some of his friends ventured to disapprove of,
since it included a re-writing into his latest style of the early
stories which possessed a charm in their unaffected immaturity. Henry
James was conscious, I think, of the arguments which might be brought
against this reckless revision, but he rejected them with violence. I
was spending a day or two with him at Lamb House when _Roderick Hudson_
was undergoing, or rather had just undergone, the terrible trial; so the
revised copy, darkened and swelled with MS. alterations, was put into my
hands. I thought--I dare say I was quite mistaken--that the whole
perspective of Henry James's work, the evidence of his development and
evolution, his historical growth, were confused and belied by this
wholesale tampering with the original text. Accordingly I exclaimed
against such dribbling of new wine into the old bottles. This was after
dinner, as we sat alone in the garden-room. All that Henry James--though
I confess, with a darkened countenance--said at the time was, "The only
alternative would have been to put the vile thing"--that is to say the
graceful tale of _Roderick Hudson_--"behind the fire and have done with
it!" Then we passed to other subjects, and at length we parted for the
night in unruffled cheerfulness. But what was my dismay, on reaching the
breakfast-table next morning, to see my host sombre and taciturn, with
gloom thrown across his frowning features like a veil. I inquired rather
anxiously whether he had slept well. "Slept!" he answered with dreary
emphasis. "Was I likely to sleep when my brain was tortured with all the
cruel and--to put it plainly to you--monstrous insinuations which you
had brought forward against my proper, my necessary, my absolutely
inevitable corrections of the disgraceful and disreputable style of
_Roderick Hudson_?" I withered, like a guilty thing ashamed, before the
eyes that glared at me over the coffee-pot, and I inly resolved that not
one word of question should ever escape my lips on this subject again.

Early in 1907 he was tempted once more, after so long absence, to
revisit France. While in America he had acquired the habit of motoring,
which he learned to enjoy so much that it became the greatest physical
pleasure of his life, and one which seemed definitely to benefit his
health. He motored through a great part of France, and then proceeded to
his beloved Italy, where he spent some radiant summer days under the
pines near Vallombrosa, and later some more with his lifelong friend
Mrs. Curtis in her wonderful Palazzo Barbaro in Venice. Ten weeks in
Paris must be added to the foreign record of this year, almost the last
of those which Henry James was able to dedicate to the Latin world that
he loved so well and comprehended so acutely. The "nightmare," as he
called it, of his Collected Edition kept him closely engaged for months
after his return--it ultimately ran into a range of twenty-four
volumes--but he was also sketching a novel, _The Ivory Tower_, which was
to embody some of his American recollections; this was never finished.
He met new friends of the younger generation, such as Hugh Walpole and
Rupert Brooke, and they gave him great happiness.

He seemed to be approaching old age in placidity and satisfaction when,
towards the end of 1909, he was seized by a mysterious group of
illnesses which "deprived him of all power to work and caused him
immeasurable suffering of mind." Unfortunately his beloved brother
William was also failing in health, and had come to Europe in the vain
search for recovery; their conditions painfully interacted. The whole
year 1910 was one of almost unmitigated distress. Henry accompanied Mr.
and Mrs. William back to their home in New Hampshire, where in the
autumn not only the eminent philosopher, but a third brother, Robertson
James, died, leaving Henry solitary indeed, and weighed upon by a cloud
of melancholy which forbade him to write or almost to speak. Out of this
he passed in the spring of 1911, and returned to Lamb House, where he
had another sharp attack of illness in the autumn of 1912. It was now
felt that the long pale winters over the marsh at Rye were impossible
for him, and the bedroom at the Reform Club insufficient. He therefore
rented a small flat high up over the Thames in Cheyne Walk, where he was
henceforth to spend half of each year and die. He sat, on the occasion
of his seventieth birthday, to Mr. Sargent for the picture which is now
one of the treasures of the National Portrait Gallery; this was
surprisingly mutilated, while being exhibited at the Royal Academy, by a
"militant suffragette"; Henry James was extraordinarily exhilarated by
having been thus "impaired by the tomahawk of the savage," and displayed
himself as "breasting a wondrous high-tide of postal condolence in this
doubly-damaged state." This was his latest excitement before the war
with Germany drowned every other consideration.

The record of the last months of Henry James's life is told in the
wonderful letters that he wrote between the beginning of August, 1914,
and the close of November, 1915. He was at Rye when the war broke out,
but he found it absolutely impossible to stay there without daily
communication with friends in person, and, contrary to his lifelong
habit, he came posting up to London in the midst of the burning August
weather. He was transfigured by the events of those early weeks,
overpowered, and yet, in his vast and generous excitement, himself
overpowering. He threw off all the languor and melancholy of the recent
years, and he appeared actually grown in size as he stalked the streets,
amazingly moved by the unexpected nightmare, "the huge horror of
blackness" which he saw before him. "The plunge of civilization into the
abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of these two infamous
autocrats" made him suddenly realize that the quiet years of prosperity
which had preceded 1914 had been really, as he put it, "treacherous,"
and that their perfidy had left us unprotected against the tragic
terrors which now faced our world. It was astonishing how great Henry
James suddenly seemed to become; he positively loomed above us in his
splendid and disinterested faith. His first instinct had been horror at
the prospect; his second anger and indignation against the criminals;
but to these succeeded a passion of love and sympathy for England and
France, and an unyielding but anxious and straining confidence in their
ultimate success. Nothing could express this better than the language of
a friend who saw him constantly and studied his moods with penetrating
sympathy. Mr. Percy Lubbock says:

     To all who listened to him in those days it must have seemed that
     he gave us what we lacked--a voice; there was a trumpet note in it
     that was heard nowhere else and that alone rose to the height of
     the truth.

The impression Henry James gave in these first months of the war could
not be reproduced in better terms. To be in his company was to be
encouraged, stimulated and yet filled with a sense of the almost
intolerable gravity of the situation; it was to be moved with that
"trumpet note" in his voice, as the men fighting in the dark defiles of
Roncevaux were moved by the sound of the oliphant of Roland. He drew a
long breath of relief in the thought that England had not failed in her
manifest duty to France, nor "shirked any one of the implications of the
Entente." When, as at the end of the first month, things were far from
exhilarating for the Allies, Henry James did not give way to despair,
but he went back to Rye, possessing his soul in waiting patience,
"bracing himself unutterably," as he put it, "and holding on somehow
(though to God knows what!) in presence of the perpetrations so
gratuitously and infamously hideous as the destruction of Louvain and
its accompaniments."

At Lamb House he sat through that gorgeous tawny September, listening
to the German guns thundering just across the Channel, while the advance
of the enemy through those beautiful lands which he knew and loved so
well filled him with anguish. He used to sally forth and stand on the
bastions of his little town, gazing over the dim marsh that became
sand-dunes, and then sea, and then a mirage of the white cliffs of
French Flanders that were actually visible when the atmosphere grew
transparent. The anguish of his execration became almost the howl of
some animal, of a lion of the forest with the arrow in his flank, when
the Germans wrecked Reims Cathedral. He gazed and gazed over the sea
south-east, and fancied that he saw the flicker of the flames. He ate
and drank, he talked and walked and thought, he slept and waked and
lived and breathed only the War. His friends grew anxious, the tension
was beyond what his natural powers, transfigured as they were, could be
expected to endure, and he was persuaded to come back to Chelsea,
although a semblance of summer still made Rye attractive.

During this time his attitude towards America was marked by a peculiar
delicacy. His letters expressed no upbraiding, but a yearning,
restrained impatience that took the form of a constant celebration of
the attitude of England, which he found in those early months
consistently admirable. In his abundant and eloquent letters to America
he dealt incessantly on the shining light which events were throwing on
"England's moral position and attitude, her predominantly incurable
good-nature, the sublimity or the egregious folly, one scarcely knows
which to call it, of her innocence in face of the most prodigiously
massed and worked-out intentions of aggression." He admitted, with every
gesture of courtesy, that America's absence from the feast of allied
friendship on an occasion so unexampled, so infinitely momentous, was a
bitter grief to him, but he was ready to believe it a necessity. For his
own part, almost immediately on his return to London in October, 1914,
Henry James began to relieve the mental high pressure by some kinds of
practical work for which nothing in his previous life had fitted him,
but into which he now threw himself with even exhausting ardour. He had
always shrunk from physical contact with miscellaneous strangers, but
now nothing seemed unwelcome save aloofness which would have divided him
from the sufferings of others. The sad fate of Belgium particularly
moved him, and he found close to his flat in Cheyne Walk a centre for
the relief of Belgian refugees, and he was active in service there. A
little later on he ardently espoused the work of the American Volunteer
Motor Ambulance Corps. His practical experiences and his anxiety to take
part in the great English movement for relief of the Belgians and the
French are reflected in the essays which were collected in 1919 under
the title of _Within the Rim_.

We were, however, made anxious by the effect of all this upon his
nerves. The magnificent exaltation of spirit which made him a trumpeter
in the sacred progress of the Allies was of a nature to alarm us as much
as it inspirited and rejoiced us. When we thought of what he had been in
1911, how sadly he had aged in 1912, it was not credible that in 1915 he
could endure to be filled to overflowing by this tide of febrile
enthusiasm. Some of us, in the hope of diverting his thoughts a little
from the obsession of the war, urged him to return to his proper work;
and he responded in part to our observations, while not abandoning his
charitable service. He was at work on _The Ivory Tower_ when the war
began, but he could not recover the note of placidity which it demanded,
and he abandoned it in favour of a novel begun in 1900 and then laid
aside, _The Sense of the Past_. He continued, at the same time, his
reminiscences, and was writing the fragment published since his death as
_The Middle Years_. But all this work was forced from him with an
effort, very slowly; the old sprightly running of composition was at an
end, the fact being that his thoughts were now incessantly distracted by
considerations of a far more serious order.

The hesitations of Mr. Wilson, and Henry James's conviction that in the
spring of 1915 the United States government was "sitting down in
meekness and silence under the German repudiation of every engagement
she solemnly took with" America, led to his taking a step which he felt
to be in many respects painful, but absolutely inevitable. His heart was
so passionately united with England in her colossal effort, and he was
so dismally discouraged by the unending hesitation of America, that he
determined to do what he had always strenuously refused to do before,
namely, apply for British naturalization. Mr. Asquith (then Prime
Minister), Sir George Prothero (the Editor of the _Quarterly Review_),
and I had the honour and the gratification of being chosen his sponsors.
In the case of so illustrious a claimant the usual formalities were
passed over, and on July 26th, 1915, Henry James became a British
subject. Unhappily he did not live to see America join the Allies, and
so missed the joy for which he longed above all others.

But his radiant enthusiasm was burning him out. In August he had a
slight breakdown, and his autumn was made miserable by an affection of
the heart. He felt, he said, twenty years older, but "still, I
cultivate, I at least attempt, a brazen front." He still got about, and
I saw him at Westminster on the evening of November 29th. This was, I
believe, the last time he went out, and two days later, on the night
between the 1st and the 2nd of December, he had a stroke. He partly
rallied and was able to receive comfort from the presence of his
sister-in-law, Mrs. William James, who hurried across the Atlantic to
nurse him. At the New Year he was awarded the highest honour which the
King can confer on a British man of letters, the Order of Merit, the
insignia of which were brought to his bedside by Lord Bryce. On February
28th, 1916, he died, within two months of his 73rd birthday. His body
was cremated, and the funeral service held at that "altar of the dead"
which he had loved so much, Chelsea Old Church, a few yards from his own
door.

1920.




SAMUEL BUTLER


Let it be said at once that Mr. Henry Festing Jones's _Life of Samuel
Butler_ tells the history of a very remarkable man with a vividness
which leaves nothing to be desired. This is not a vain compliment; it is
a tribute which common justice demands on an unusual occasion. There
were ninety-nine chances in a hundred that Butler's life would never be
adequately, or even intelligently, recorded. Nature and circumstance had
done their best to make him obscure and incomprehensible. The situation
has been saved by two facts: the first, that Butler was excessively
interested in himself; the second, that Mr. Jones was always--not merely
since Butler's death, but always--excessively interested in Butler.
These are not conditions which are essential to the success of biography
in every case, especially when the general unanimity of admiration has
made all the contemporaries of a great man in some sort his biographers,
but they are absolutely required to preserve for us the features of an
eccentric and isolated person who failed almost all through his life to
attract admiration, and who laid himself out to be completely
misunderstood when the tide should at last turn in his favour. We are
preserved from such a loss by the meticulous attention which Samuel
Butler paid to himself, and by the infatuated zeal with which Mr. Jones
adopted, continued, and developed that attention. Butler lives twice
over, or rather has never ceased to live, in the mind and humour of Mr.
Henry Festing Jones.

We move in an age which prides itself more and more on being able to see
the mote in the eye of its immediate predecessor. But Samuel Butler was
the precursor of this rebellion, and is historically notable as the
earliest anti-Victorian. He was born at a moment which was to prove less
rich than almost any other of the remarkable nineteenth century, in
producing men who were to be eminent for intellectual talent. It almost
looks as though Nature, which had been so profuse, and was presently to
become so liberal again, paused for a few years, while she prepared to
let the Victorian Age proper wear itself out. The immediate
contemporaries of Butler were Shorthouse, whose _John Inglesant_ started
a new sentimentality, and William Morris, who combined a fresh aspect of
romance with an investigation of the bases of society which was
essentially revolutionary; with these were T. H. Green, who introduced a
new Hegelian spirit into philosophical speculation, and John Richard
Green, who re-examined the foundations of our history. But none of these
men displayed any real parallelism with Butler, by whose work they were
none of them at any time affected, and of whom perhaps none of them ever
heard. The only other name which can be quoted in this connexion is that
of Lecky, who may indeed be regarded as the exact opposite of Butler in
almost every respect--successful from earliest youth, at peace with the
world, reverently acceptive of every Victorian formula, and blandly
unconscious that everything was not permanently for the best in the best
of all possible worlds.

Butler is a curious example of a man of something very like genius, who
passed through a long life in the midst of intelligent fellow-men, not
rebuffing their attentions, but encouraging them; not escaping by a
mordid modesty from criticism, but doing everything in his power to
exasperate it; and yet failing to be observed. The strange thing about
his case is that he lived, mostly in London, for sixty-six years, and
that until nearly the close of that time scarcely anyone felt more than
the most tepid and casual curiosity about him. The only similar case
that occurs to the memory in the history of nineteenth-century
literature is Borrow, who in like manner, but not with a like desolating
completeness, simply was unable to catch the eye of criticism. When
each of these writers died, it seemed impossible that either of them
would ever occupy half a page in any history of literature. It now seems
equally difficult to suppose that any such history, if possessing the
least pretension to completeness, will in future omit either of them.
This is quite apart from any question which may present itself as to the
probability of a decline in the present "fashion" for them both. It
merely expresses the fact that while Borrow and Butler alike walked all
through their lives invisible, for the rest of time they must both be
patent, whether liked or disliked.

Borrow affected a certain disdain for the laudation which would not come
his way, and in later life seemed to have relinquished any desire to
move in the mouths of men. But Butler never ceased to long for fame, and
probably to expect it. Towards the close of his life, whenever he was
asked what new work might be expected from his ingenious pen, he used to
look demure and answer, "I am editing my remains; I wish 'to leave
everything in order for my executors.'" This was looked upon as a joke,
but it turns out to have been strictly true. No one ever laboured more
to appear at his best--in strict accordance with truth, but still, at
his best--to the world after his decease. His assiduities were like
those of the dying Narcissa--

    And Betty, give those cheeks a little red,
    One wouldn't, sure, look horrid when one's dead!

He recovered as many of his own letters as he could and annotated them;
he arranged the letters of his friends; he copied, edited, indexed, and
dated all this mass of correspondence, and he prepared those "Notes"
which have since his death provided his admirers with their choicest
repast. In doing all this he displayed an equal _naivete_ and
enthusiasm. Mr. Festing Jones, to whom all this industry has of course
been invaluable, puts the matter in a nutshell when he says that Butler
"was not contemplating publication, but neither was he contemplating
oblivion." He was simply putting the rouge-pot within Betty's reach.

Here is Butler's own account of the matter, and it throws a strong light
upon his character:

     People sometimes give me to understand that it is a piece of
     ridiculous conceit on my part to jot down so many notes about
     myself, since it implies a confidence that I shall one day be
     regarded as an interesting person. I answer that neither I nor they
     can form any idea as to whether I shall be wanted when I am gone or
     no. The chances are that I shall not.

But he was not inclined to take any risks. He was the residuary of his
own temperament, and if by chance posterity were to wake up and take a
violent interest in him, he personally would be to blame, and would
incur a very serious responsibility, if there were no documents
forthcoming to satisfy the curiosity of the new generation. It is to his
frank response to this instinct of self-preservation that we owe the
very exhaustive and faithful narrative of Mr. Festing Jones, as we did
the precious "Note-books" of 1912.

In consideration of the eagerness and sympathy with which Butler is
followed by an active group of admirers among the young writers of
to-day, it may be doubtful whether the extraordinary minuteness of
Butler's observation, continued as it is with an equally extraordinary
fullness by his biographer, may not have an evil effect in encouraging a
taste for excessive discursiveness in authorship of this class. There
have been very distinguished examples lately of abandonment to an
unchecked notation of detail. It is scarcely necessary to refer to the
texture of the later novels of Henry James, or to the amazing _Cote de
chez Swann_ of M. Marcel Proust, which latter is one of the most
characteristic successes of the moment. This widespread tendency to
consider every slight observation, whether phenomenal or emotional,
worthy of the gravest and tenderest analysis, develops at an epoch when
the world is becoming congested with printed matter, and when one might
imagine that conciseness and selection would be the qualities naturally
in fashion. Neither Samuel Butler nor his biographer conceives it
possible that anything can be negligible; to them the meanest flower
that blows by the wayside of experience gives thoughts that cannot be
brought to lie within one or even within ten pages. The complacency with
which Butler annotates his own childish letters to his mother is
equalled only by the gravity with which Mr. Jones examines those very
annotations.

Not without a qualm, however, do I note this redundancy, since it is a
source of pleasure to all but the hasty reader, who, indeed, should be
advised not to approach Butler at all. The charm of his mind lies in its
divagations, its inconsistencies, its puerile and lovable
self-revelations, and all these are encouraged by the wandering style
common to the author and to his biographer. One of the most
clear-sighted of his friends, trying to sum up his character at his
death, said that "he was too versatile a genius ever to be in the front
rank of one particular line, and he had too much fun in him to be really
serious when he ought to have been." But why ought he to have been
"really serious," and why should he have sought "front rank" in one
particular line? This is the inevitable way in which a man of ingenious
originality is misjudged by those who have loved him most and who think
they understood him best. Butler was not remarkable, and does not now
deserve the reputation which his name enjoys, on account of the subjects
about which he chose to write, nor on account of the measure of decorum
with which he approached those themes, but in consequence of the sinuous
charm, the irregular and arresting originality of his approach itself,
his fame having been indeed rather delayed, and the purgatory of his
obscurity prolonged, by the want of harmony between most of the subjects
he selected and the manner in which it was native to himself to treat
those subjects. In other words, what makes Butler a difficult theme for
analysis is that, unlike most authors, his genius is not illuminated,
but positively obscured for a student of to-day, by the majority of his
controversial writings. He was not a prophet; he was an inspired
"crank." He is most characteristic, not when he is discussing Evolution,
or Christianity, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare, or the Trapanese Origin
of the "Odyssey," but when he is meandering along, endlessly,
paradoxically, in the act of written conversation about everything at
large and nothing in particular, with himself as the central theme.

The most valuable of Butler's imaginative writings, and indeed the most
important from almost every point of view, are the two romances which
stand respectively at the opening and at the close of his career, like
two golden pillars supporting the roof of his reputation. His earliest
publication (for the slight and brief budget of letters from New Zealand
was not published by himself) was Erewhon--or "Nowhere"--a fantastic
Utopia of the class started a century and a half ago by Paltock in his
fascinating adventures of _Peter Wilkins_. Like Wilkins, the hero of
_Erewhon_ flies from civilization, and discovers in the Antarctic world
a race of semi-human beings, who obey a strict code of morals consistent
in itself, but in complete divergence from ours on many important
points. I discover no evidence that Butler ever saw Paltock's romance,
and he would probably have been scornful of the Glums and Gowries, and
of the gentle winged people wrapped in throbbing robes of their own
substance. But I think some dim report of an undiscovered country where
ethics were all turned topsy-turvy may have started him on _Erewhon_.
The other novel, that which closes Butler's career as a writer, is _The
Way of All Flesh_, without a careful consideration of which, by the
light of information now supplied by Mr. Festing Jones, no sketch of
Butler's career can, for the future, be attempted.

As early as 1873, Butler confided to Miss Savage--of whose place in his
life and influence upon his genius I shall presently have to speak--that
he was contemplating the composition of an autobiographical novel. She
read the opening, and wrote, "as far as it goes it is perfect, and if
you go on as you have begun, it will be a beautiful book." In case he
got tired of it, what he had already written might make "a very nice
finished sketch for a magazine." Evidently Miss Savage, who had an
almost uncanny penetration into Butler's nature, had little confidence
in his perseverance in the conduct of so large a design. She urged him
on, however, and it very early occurred to her that the value of the
story would consist in its complete veracity as an autobiography. She
faced Butler with the charge that he was not being faithful to himself
in this matter, and she said, "Is the narrator of the story to be an
impartial historian or a special pleader?" Butler wriggled under her
strictures, but failed to escape from them. Finally she faced him with a
direct question:

     You have chosen the disguise of an old man of seventy-three
     [exactly double Butler's real age at that time], and must speak and
     act as such. An old man of seventy-three would scarcely talk as you
     do, unless he was constantly in your company, and was a very docile
     old man indeed--and I don't think the old man who is telling the
     story is at all docile.

Young or old, Butler was never "docile," and he was not inclined to give
up his idealism without a struggle. But Miss Savage was indomitable. She
continued to undermine what she called "the special pleader," on the
ground that "I prefer an advocate in flesh and blood." Under this
pressure, and stimulated by Miss Savage's ingenuous annotations, Butler
adopted more and more a realistic tone, and kept the story more and more
closely on autobiographic lines. It was progressing steadily when Butler
had to go to Canada on the business expedition which cost him so many
months of his life, and when he returned to London he did not resume the
novel. He took it up again in 1878, and disliked it; it needed Miss
Savage's energy to start him again with proper gusto. Mr. Festing Jones
was by this time upon the spot, and though he does not say so, he
probably supported Miss Savage. They were the Aaron and Hur who held up
the arms of this incorrigible "special pleader," and insisted that he
should stick to the truth, and not embroider it. In 1884 _The Way of All
Flesh_ was finished; in 1885 it underwent some revision, and after that
was not touched again.

So long as Butler was alive, the uncompromising revelations of his
family life, and the bitterness of the censure of living persons, which
the novel contained, made it impossible to dream of issuing it. To do so
would have been to break a nest of hornets over Butler's pate. But the
moment he was dead, his executor, the late Mr. R. A. Streatfeild, acting
upon the author's known wishes, published _The Way of All Flesh_. This
was in 1903, and the publication synchronized with the surprising burst
of critical appreciation which the announcement of Butler's death had
awakened in the Press. In almost all unprejudiced quarters the value of
_The Way of All Flesh_ as a sincere and masterly contribution to
imaginative literature, was acknowledged, although it took five years
more for a second edition of the book to be called for. Butler, however,
was recognized at last as an author of distinguished merit, and there
was a reverberation of curiosity concerning so remarkable a man who had
walked about among us for nearly seventy years without attracting any
particular attention. This curiosity, it was indicated by his admirers,
could now be assuaged by a study of _The Way of All Flesh_, which was a
faithful portrait of the writer, and of all the persons who had checked
his growth or encouraged his development. So the legend was started that
no real _Life of Samuel_ Butler was required, because in _The Way of All
Flesh_ we already possessed a complete one.

Apart from the fact that the best of autobiographies can never be the
"real life," because it can never depict the man quite as others saw
him, it now transpires--and this is perhaps the most important feature
of Mr. Festing Jones's admirable volumes--that the novel cannot be
accepted as an autobiography sound at all points. In spite of the
warnings of Miss Savage, and, oddly enough, most of all in the person of
Miss Savage herself, Butler was incapable of confronting the incidents
of his own life without colouring them, and without giving way to
prejudice in the statement of plain facts. He disliked excessively the
atmosphere of middle-class Evangelicism in which he had been brought up,
and we must dislike it too, but we need not dislike the persons involved
so bitterly as Butler did. It was narrow, sterile and cruel, and it
deserved no doubt the irony which Butler expended upon it. So long as we
regard _The Way of All Flesh_ as a story, invented with the help of
recollections which the novelist was at liberty to modify in any way he
thought desirable, there is no quarrel to be picked with any part of it.
But when we are led, as we have been, to take it as a full and true
record of Butler's own life, with nothing changed but the names of the
persons, we see by the light of Mr. Festing Jones that this is an
absolutely untenable position. _The Way of All Flesh_ is not an
autobiography, but a romance founded on recollection.

The author of _Erewhon_, who was christened Samuel, not in honour of the
author of _Hudibras_, but in memory of his own grandfather, the Bishop
of Lichfield and Coventry, was the son of Canon Thomas Butler, incumbent
of Langor-with-Branston, in Nottinghamshire, where the younger Samuel
was born on the 4th of December, 1835. Readers of _The Way of All Flesh_
may recognize the Butler family at Langor in the very unflattering
picture of the Pontifexes in that novel. The Bishop's grandson disliked
him very much indeed--"bullying, irritable, stupid old turkey-cock"--until
1887, when he got hold of the Bishop's letters and papers, "and fell
over head and ears in love with him." He excused his earlier sarcasms by
saying--"When I wrote harshly describing him, I knew nothing about my
grandfather except that he had been a great schoolmaster--and I do not
like schoolmasters; and then a bishop--and I do not like bishops; and
that he was supposed to be like my father." For the latter, who is
Theobald Pontifex in _The Way of All Flesh_, he never expressed any
leniency whatever, yet it is impossible to avoid hoping that if he had
studied his father, as at the age of fifty he studied his grandfather,
he might have relented a little in that instance also.

Ernest Pontifex says, in _The Way of All Flesh_, that he could remember
no feeling towards his parents during his childhood except fear and
shrinking. To Butler, fathers in general, as a class, were "capable de
tout," like the prophet Habakkuk. Mr. Festing Jones prints a very
explicit paper he has found on this subject, the least distressing
paragraph in which is the last, where Butler says, "An unkind fate never
threw two men together who were more naturally uncongenial than my
father and myself." Canon Butler was an evangelical clergyman of the
Simeonite type, which flourished so intensely before and during the
development of the High Church revival. He believed in bringing up
children rigidly, from their infancy, in the strict practice of external
religion. If they were recalcitrant, the love of God must be driven into
them by their being whipped or shut up in a cupboard, or docked of some
little puerile pleasure. Samuel Butler secretly rebelled, from babyhood,
against this stern evangelical discipline, and the Canon, who had no
imagination, simply redoubled his severities. It is an amusing touch, in
this record of a dismal childhood, to learn that Samuel was excessively
pleased, at the age of eight, by hearing an Italian lady in Naples say
that a dear young friend of hers--poor unfortunate fellow, _povero
disgrasiato_!--had been obliged to murder his uncle and his aunt.
Probably the pleasure the little boy felt in hearing of this
"misfortune" was the earliest expression of that rebellious and
fantastic dislike of conventionality which was to run through the whole
series of the man's works.

In the letters from Butler to his family, written at school and at
college, there is, however, no trace of the violent antagonism which he
afterwards believed that he had always felt. It is true that a boy who
writes to his father and mother, and indeed in similar circumstances a
man too, is constrained to resign himself to a certain innocent
hypocrisy. Very few children are able to send to their parents, and very
few parents are able to endure from their children, a perfectly sincere
description of their crude sentiments during adolescence. But if Samuel
Butler was really tormented at home, as Ernest Pontifex was, it is odd
that some note of hostility should not have crept into his juvenile
correspondence. However, Mr. Festing Jones, who is as judicious as a
Lord of Appeal, seems to entertain no doubt that Canon Butler was a holy
horror, so that we must bow to his opinion.

The earliest overt evidence of a falling out between father and son is
delayed until, in Mr. Jones's unfaltering narrative, we reach the son's
twenty-third year. He does not seem, at first, to have combated his
father's obstinate demand that he should take orders in the Church of
England. That Canon Butler, a clergyman of clergymen, should have
desired to see his Samuel take this step, ought not to seem
unreasonable, though it certainly proved unlucky. In the novel, it will
be remembered, Ernest Pontifex actually was ordained, but to this length
Samuel Butler never proceeded. He went to a parish in the east of London
to work with a parson who had been one of his grandfather's pupils at
Shrewsbury. There his faith in the efficacy of infant baptism was
shaken, and presently falling, brought down about his ears the whole
fabric of Simeonite Christianity in which he had so assiduously been
trained. He suddenly, and no doubt abruptly, wrote to the Canon and said
that he "declined to be ordained." From a carnal as well as a spiritual
point of view this must have been a nasty shock for his parents, and Mr.
Festing Jones tells us "there was a long and painful correspondence."
This he mercifully spares us, but refers us to _The Way of All Flesh_,
where Butler made dauntless use of it.

The financial situation was difficult. Canon Butler was fairly
well-to-do, but he had other children to provide for, and Samuel, who
refused to be a clergyman, went on refusing, as it must have seemed to
his father, to be anything at all. Like the poet Cowley, he

    neither great at Court nor in the War,
    Nor at the Exchange would be, nor at the wrangling Bar.

All professions were suggested, and each in vain. At last it was decided
that Samuel should emigrate to New Zealand, and become a sheep farmer.
Only nine years earlier, a Church of England colony had been founded at
Canterbury, in the South Island, and the town of Christchurch had been
founded. It had enjoyed a great success, and by the year 1859, when
Butler landed, almost all the sheep lands had been already taken up. At
last he found an unoccupied run at the "back of beyond," and built a
little homestead for himself, which he called Mesopotamia. It is
needless to dwell on this episode of Butler's life, further than to
point out that it proved him capable of sustained physical industry and
of considerable financial adroitness. The remainder of his career hardly
suggests the possession of either. The New Zealand episode is
sufficiently dealt with in Butler's own book, _A First Year in
Canterbury Settlement_, which, by the way, shows no trace of the
author's subsequent merit as a writer. In June, 1864, he sailed homeward
from the port of Lyttelton, but not alone, and we now approach the
strangest incident of his life.

It was to be expected that the L4,400 which Butler had received from his
father in 1859 would by this time have dwindled to zero. Not at all; it
had swelled to L8,000. But just before he left New Zealand a young man,
called Charles Pauli, whom he had known but very slightly as a
journalist in Christchurch, and who had no claim upon Butler of any sort
or species, came to him and asked him to pay for his passage back to
England, and to advance him L200 a year for three years. "To me," wrote
Butler in 1897, "in those days this seemed perfectly easy; and Pauli, I
have not the smallest doubt, intended and fully believed--for his
temperament was always sanguine--that he should be able to repay me."
Butler had very little insight into the "temperament" of Pauli, and the
whole of the extraordinary story increases our conviction that this
sardonic and sarcastic analyst of imaginary life was as powerless as a
child in face of reality. The dreadful Pauli adventure, told for the
first time by Mr. Festing Jones, in his deliberate, unimpassioned way,
is the most amazing revelation of simplicity traded upon by fraud that
it is possible to imagine.

There soon proved to be a complete absence of harmony in the tastes of
Butler and Pauli, who had really nothing in common. Yet they settled
together, when they arrived in London, in rooms in Clifford's Inn, Fleet
Street. There Butler lived for all the rest of his life, thirty-eight
years; but presently Pauli went elsewhere. Then the relations of the two
became incomprehensible. Pauli was very irritable, and constantly found
fault with Butler. He refused to let Butler know his address, and yet
was continually sponging upon him. He said that he could get no help
from his own parents, and that Butler stood between him and starvation.
For three years Pauli did not attempt to work. At last, in 1867, he was
called to the Bar. He lunched with Butler three times a week, when he
always said that he was earning nothing. Butler's own statement, written
in 1898, the year after Pauli's death, is as follows:

     I have no means of ascertaining how much Pauli had from me between
     the years 1864 and 1881 (but it exceeded L3,500). I kept no
     accounts; I took no receipts from him; the understanding was that
     he would repay me when he came into his reversion.... In 1879 I
     only admitted to my father having helped Pauli from time to time;
     the fact was, I had done everything.... I had more than shared
     every penny I had with him, but I believed myself to be doing it
     out of income, and to have a right to do it.

Throughout the long periods in which Butler was hard pressed for
sufficient money to exist--times in which there were painful and
unseemly squabbles about an allowance between his father and himself--he
was supporting Pauli, whose means of subsistence he took no pains to
investigate, and who, in full cognition of Butler's attenuated sources
of income, punctually took half for himself. Mr. Festing Jones's
statement is amazing:

     Pauli was called to the Bar in 1867, and took chambers in Lincoln's
     Inn for his work. He told Butler where they were, so that he could
     write if he had any communication to make to him that would not
     wait till they met; but Butler was not to go there. Of course, he
     could have gone, but he did not. He could have found out in a
     hundred ways where Pauli lived if he had set about it; but, knowing
     that Pauli did not wish it, he did nothing.

At last, in 1897, after having shared his poverty with this strange
friend for thirty-three years, Butler read in _The Times_ that Pauli was
dead. Then, at last, he made inquiries, and found that for a great many
years past Pauli's income from the law had exceeded L700 a year, and for
nearly twenty had been over L1,000. Pauli left L9,000, not a penny of it
to Butler, whose parasite he had been for the greater part of his life,
when every five-pound note was of consequence to Butler. One knows not
which to be more astounded at--heartless greediness on the one side, or
fatuous simplicity on the other. When all the evidence came out at last
beyond all further concealment, Butler wrote: "I understand now why
Pauli preserved such an iron silence when I implored him to deal with me
somewhat after the fashion in which I had dealt with him." [That is to
say, in telling him precisely what Butler's exact financial position
was.] "The iniquity of the whole thing, as it first struck me in full
force, upset me."

This "squalid and miserable story" is told with inexorable fullness by
Mr. Festing Jones. What is very remarkable about it is the evidence it
gives of Butler's irregular penetration into character. He could be
extremely acute in one direction and absolutely obtuse in another. The
incredible indulgence which permitted him to be the dupe and victim of a
scoundrel like Pauli for more than thirty years seems incompatible with
the intense and suspicious analysis which he expended on the motives of
his father. After all, when the worst of Canon Butler is admitted, he
was a Christian and a gentleman by the side of the appalling Pauli. Yet
Butler would sacrifice his father, and actually tell falsehoods, for the
purpose of screening and enriching Pauli (see Vol. I., p. 114), of whose
villainy he could at any moment have assured himself, and with whom he
practically admits that he had nothing in common.

The Pauli episode is valuable in supplying light on certain defects in
Butler's intellectual composition. In measure, it tends to explain the
inconsistencies, the irregularities of his mental life, and of his
action as a scholar. He was the opposite of those who see life steadily,
and see it whole. He had no wide horizons, but he investigated a corner
or a section of a subject with a burning glass which left all other
parts of the surface in darkness. There were Paulis on his mental
horizon; there were in almost everything he approached passages where
his want of appreciation, his want (let us boldly say) of elementary
insight, produced the oddest effect of imperfection. His literary
judgments were _saugrenu_ to the last extreme. What are we to think of a
man who lays if down that "Blake was no good because he learnt Italian
to study Dante, and Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil,
and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him; and as for Tennyson,
well, Tennyson goes without saying"? There is no critical meaning in
such outbursts; they would be almost imbecile in their aimless petulance
if we did not understand that Virgil and Dante and Blake lay in the dark
segment of Butler's vision, and that he had not so much formed an
adverse opinion of their merits as no opinion at all. If, as
surprisingly he did on every occasion, he heaped contempt on Virgil, it
was simply because he wanted to get Virgil well out of the way of Homer,
on whom his enthusiasm was concentrated.

It was so in all things. Butler despised the great Venetian painters,
not because he had devoted attention to their faults, but because they
stood in the way of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, to whom he had
dedicated a frenzied cult. "Titian, Leonardo, Raffaelle and Michel
Angelo, well, to speak quite plainly, I like none of them," he wrote in
the last year of his life. In music it was just the same. Butler
attached himself, from early youth to the grave, to Handel in an almost
maniacal infatuation. In order to clear a space, as it were, round this
solitary object of his worship, he covered Beethoven and Bach with
contempt; and if anyone forced him to listen to the "Requiem" of Mozart,
he stopped his ears and hummed "Loathsome urns, disclose your treasure,"
to drown the hideous Austrian discord. For Butler, "Bach wriggles;
Wagner writhes." All the masterpieces of the world of music he sweeps
together in a universal disapproval as "heartless failures," whereas of
Handel's least remarkable passages he calls out, "Can human genius do
more?" The result is that Butler is interesting and sometimes valuable
when he praises; when he blames, he is sometimes amusing, but more often
impertinent and tiresome. What is the point of calling Plato one of the
"Seven Humbugs of Christendom," or of talking of "that damned Republic"?
To pretend to admire these peevish outbursts, however much we may be
stimulated by the better sides of Butler's intelligence, is abject.

No section of Mr. Resting Jones's biography is more interesting than
that in which, in the patient, judicious manner in which he so eminently
excels, he depicts the relation of Butler to Miss Savage. Readers of
_The Way of All Flesh_ are familiar with the figure of Alethea Pontifex,
who occupies the position of heroine in that novel. It has long been
known that this was the portrait of a friend whom Butler had studied,
confided in, and deeply valued. In what degree it was an accurate
portrait has not hitherto been known. I have no hesitation in saying
that the chapters which deal with this situation--and they are executed
with as much delicacy as realism--form the most unhackneyed and the
most exciting section of Mr. Jones's volumes. They illuminate in
portions, and they leave darker than ever in other parts, the rugged
surface of Butler's extraordinary character; and I regret that
exigencies of space do not permit me to do justice to documents so
remarkable. But yet, something I must say.

The Alethea of the novel was so far from being an exact portrait that
the sitter, after studying every line and touch of it, is supposed, was
supposed by Butler himself, not to have perceived that it was intended
for her. This, however, we must regard as hardly possible in the case of
one so passionately clear-sighted, but there were many reasons why she
should adopt such an attitude. Eliza Mary Ann Savage was a governess,
whom Butler met about 1870, when he and she were art students together
at Heatherley's. They were nearly of the same age, which at that time
would be thirty-four. They were immediately drawn together by a singular
parallelism in temper and sympathy. Miss Savage read the MS. of Erewhon,
and minutely criticized it. From this time, 1871 to 1885, when she died,
Butler submitted to her everything he wrote, and, obstinate as he was in
the face of all other censures, invariably remodelled his work in
accordance with her criticisms and suggestions. She supported him in all
his enthusiasms, and shared all his prejudices. She was a very well-read
woman, and was able to follow Butler into the remotest recesses of his
studies. She responded to his lightest touch like a delicate musical
instrument, and yet was rigid in opposing any divergence from what she
conceived to be the normal line his talent ought to take. She was as
stringently hostile to Christianity, as contemptuous of Darwin and
Huxley, as infatuated about Handel, as haughtily an enfant terrible of
the intelligence as he was, and the degree to which the admirers of
Butler's books are indebted to her can never be definitely known, but is
certainly very great.

Alethea Pontifex, in _The Way of All Flesh_, is tall, handsome, with
fine blue eyes. Miss Savage was short, insignificant, and plain, with
brown eyes; she suffered from hip disease; physically, she was quite
unattractive. This introduces into the real history an element of pathos
and of pain which raises it to a far higher level of human interest than
the novel has to offer us. To Miss Savage, in her isolated state, Butler
was the whole world; and it is perfectly evident--Mr. Festing Jones need
not hesitate so conscientiously in admitting it--that she was
absorbingly, unalterably in love with Butler. She lived, quite
unupbraiding, in the intermittent light of his countenance. For nearly
twenty years they were, mentally, like a devoted husband and wife, yet
the anomaly of their relations never struck Butler, to whom Miss Savage
was a comrade of perfect sympathy, and no more. He did not observe,
until Miss Savage was dead, that she had felt towards him otherwise than
he felt towards her. He wrote, "I valued her, but she perfectly
understood that I could do no more." Did she? Mr. Festing Jones prints a
sonnet of Butler's, written in 1901, which seems to me to be one of the
most amazing pieces of self-revelation that I know:

    And now, though twenty years are come and gone,
      That little lame lady's face is with me still;
    Never a day but what, on every one,
      She dwells with me as dwell she ever will.
    She said she wished I knew not wrong from right;
      It was not that; I knew, and would have chosen
    Wrong if I could, but, in my own despite,
      Power to choose wrong in my chilled veins was frozen.
    'Tis said that if a woman woo, no man
      Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true,
    A man will yield for pity if he can,
      But if the flesh rebels, what can he do?
          I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long
          The wrong I did in that I did no wrong.

Such fragments of Miss Savage's letters as Mr. Festing Jones prints show
that she was an admirable correspondent. Butler put her letters together
in a separate collection, edited, annotated, and ready for the Press.
This is to be published some day in a volume by itself, and will have a
pathetic value. But I confess to a certain feeling of regret that the
inner being of this obscure, pathetic, and self-sacrificing woman should
be immolated any further on the altar of Butler's egotism. My own
instinct would be to say: Let poor Miss Savage, out of whose painful and
imperfect existence so much "copy" has already been made, sleep on
undisturbed under her mouldering headstone at Finchley. But Mr. Festing
Jones knows best.

The most agreeable parts of this biography, at all events those which
give us the most genial impression of Butler as a companion, deal with
his repeated visits to Italy. These tours inspired, or were used to
produce material for, a very pleasant section of his literary work. If
we distinguish between the wit and picturesqueness of the ornament in
Butler's controversial writings, and the actual basal texture of those
writings, I do not see how a reasonable criticism can any longer pretend
to set high value on his angry denunciations of the whole Darwinian
theory of evolution, or on his diatribes about Unconscious Memory. There
is a terrible work of his, published in 1887, called _Luck or Cunning as
the Main Means of Organic Modification_; there is another, of 1882,
called _Evolution, Old and New_. They are unreadable. His religious
polemic was even more disagreeable than his scientific, and the
lumbering sarcasm of the attack on Christianity, called _The Fair
Haven_, is an epitome of all that is most unpleasing in the attitude of
Butler. Unctuous sarcasm so sustained as to deceive the very elect, and
"affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy," have a tendency to
grow rancid in the passage of years, and to become exceedingly
unappetizing. Samuel Butler, whose rashness was astounding, had the
courage to call his homonym of the _Analogy_ a "poor creature"! What
would Joseph Butler, revisiting the glimpses of the moon, think of the
author of _The Fair Haven_?

There is nothing of this incongruity in the books which are founded on
memories of Italian travel. Here the charm of Butler's style is
expended, with a thousand oddities and playfulnesses, on subjects which
blossom in its atmosphere. It is very strange that _Alps and
Sanctuaries_ (1882), and _Ex Voto_ (1888), should share the neglect
which was so unbrokenly the fate of Butler's publications, for these
were charming and original to a high degree, and they illustrate,
without any disadvantage, the whimsical penetration of his mind and the
playful melody of his style at its best. _The Authoress of the Odyssey_
(1897), which Hellenists found it impossible to take as a serious
contribution to scholarship, was another of these by-products of travel
in Sicily, and contained very numerous pages, which, whether convincing
or no, were exceedingly picturesque and entertaining. No cultivated man
or woman will, in the future, visit Trapani or ascend to the platforms
of Mount Eryx without remembering how Butler was taken to the grotto
where Ulysses hid his treasure, or how the Sicilian descendants of the
Cyclopes treated him as a royal personage.

Not much new light is thrown on the purely literary characteristics of
Butler by Mr. Festing Jones's biography. He has not dwelt at length on
the individual works, nor at all on the general position of their author
among his contemporaries. He left himself no space to go into such
questions, being fully occupied with the task of interpreting and
illuminating the personal characteristics of his subject. He is an
unflinching portraitist, and in a painting of Oliver Cromwell from the
life would be sure to do full justice to the wen. The rugged surface of
Samuel Butler lends itself to such realism--and I will not say that Mr.
Jones does not approach the confines of the superfluous in the excessive
minuteness of his notes. We are assured that Butler took eight
handkerchiefs and three pairs of socks with him when he went abroad, and
that he very wisely carried diarrhoea pills in the handle half of his
Gladstone bag. When Butler bought himself a new wash-hand basin, in
1887, the fact is duly recorded. We are told that once, in 1886, he
swept every corner of every room of his lodgings with tea-leaves, and
that it made him perspire freely. That there will be readers who do not
care how many times Butler brushed his hair every day, nor on what
occasion he wore "the high hat which appears in the corner of the
picture in his room," I am not inclined to deny, but I am not of them.
These little things, recounted with Mr. Festing Jones's humorous
serenity, are my delight. If some contemporary had recorded the fact
that Shakespeare habitually soaked the crust of his manchet in his last
mouthful of sack, or that he wore out his left shoe faster than his
right, how grateful we should be for the information. Only, there must
come into our consideration: Are Butler and Shakespeare figures of equal
significance, apart from their shoes and their hair-brushes?

There is less room for divergence of judgment on the question of the way
in which Mr. Jones has revealed the moral and social characteristics of
his hero. Here he could hardly be excessive. The amiability, the
ruggedness, the nervous instability, the obstinacy as of a rock, the
tenderness and the sardonic bitterness which made up so strange an
amalgam, are all frankly revealed. It is for us to arrange them, if we
can, into a consistent portrait of a most inconsistent figure. Here is,
taken at random, an entry of Butler's own, which gives a good example of
several of his characteristics:

     17th April 1895. I travelled from Patros to Athens with a young
     Turk, about thirty years old, and his dog--an English terrier. We
     were alone in the carriage the greater part of the time, and I
     suppose the poor dog was bored; at any rate, after a while, he made
     up to me. He licked me all over my face, and then began to pretend
     that my coat pocket had got a rat in it which he must catch. I was
     so flattered at being made up to by anyone or anything who seemed
     to tell me I was a nice person, that I let him go on and hunt for
     rats all over me, till at last his master interposed in beautiful
     English, and then we talked. He was a Secretary to the Turkish
     Legation, and was very clever and nice.

The incident could hardly be more trifling, but it is inimitably told;
and it reveals not merely a mastery of minute description, but the
self-tormenting temperament of a man of extraordinary talent who, for
some unfathomable reason, though love was in his heart, was for ever out
of harmony with the world, and suspicious of those whom he would fain
have ingratiated. Those are the main lineaments which Mr. Festing
Jones's biography reveals, and they are those of a miniaturist touching
his ivory with a fastidious brush, and of a "born orphan" who could not
find a home in the wilderness of jarring humanity.




A NOTE ON CONGREVE


Congreve's principal Continental critic has remarked that literary
history has behaved towards him in a very stepmotherly fashion (_sehr
stiefmuetterlich_). There is no other English poet of equal rank of the
last two centuries and a half whose biography has been so persistently
neglected. When, in 1888, I wrote my _Life of Congreve_ I had had no
predecessor since John Oldmixon, masquerading under the pseudonym of
"Charles Wilson," published that farrago of lies and nonsense which he
called _Memoirs of The Life, Writings and Amours of William Congreve,
Esq._, in 1730. In this kingdom of the blind, however one-eyed, I
continue to be king, since in the thirty-three years succeeding the
issue of my biography no one has essayed to do better what I did as well
as I could. The only exception is the _William Congreve, sein Leben und
seine Lustspiele_, published in 1897 by Dr. D. Schmid, who was, I
believe, and perhaps still is, a professor in the University of Graz in
Austria. I darted, full of anticipation, to the perusal of Dr. Schmid's
volume, but was completely disappointed. He reposes upon me with a
touching uniformity; he quotes me incessantly and with courteous
acknowledgment; but I am unable to discover in his whole monograph one
grain of fact, or correction of fact, not known to me in 1888.

In spite of this, I have always believed that someone with more patience
and skill than I possess would be able to add much to our knowledge of a
man who lived with the Pope and Swift and Addison of whom we know so
much. The late George A. Aitken, who seemed to carry about with him a
set of Roentgen rays which he applied to the members of the Age of Anne,
would have been the man to do it. Not very long before his lamented
death I urged the task upon Aitken; but his mind was set on other
things, on Prior in particular. I do not know why it is that Congreve,
one of the great dramatists of the world, perhaps our greatest social
playwright, seems to lack personal attractiveness. It is a scandal that
he has never been edited. His plays are frequently, but always
imperfectly, reprinted, and without any editorial care. I was rejoiced
to see that Mr. Montague Summers, than whom no one living is more
competent to carry out such a labour, proposed to edit Congreve's plays.
But even he did not intend to include the poems, the novel, or the
letters; and I have heard no more of his project. To the book collector
the folio publications of Congreve in verse are precious and amusing,
but they have never attracted the notice of a bibliographer. Scholarship
has, indeed, been _stiefmuetterlich_ towards Congreve, as the Austrian
critic said.

My excuse for recalling this subject is the fact that I am able, through
the kindness of Mr. Thos. J. Wise, to announce the existence of a work
by Congreve hitherto unknown and unsuspected in its original form. In
the matchless library of Mr. Wise there lurks an anonymous quarto of
which the complete title is: "_An Impossible Thing._ A Tale. London:
Printed: And Sold by J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane, MDCCXX." This was shown
by Mr. Wise to several of our best authorities, who combined in the
conjecture that it must be a hitherto unknown work by Prior. Yet since
the poet's death--and this shows how little anybody reads Congreve--the
contents of Mr. Wise's quarto have appeared in each successive edition
of the Poems. But before this was perceived the truth had dawned upon
Mr. Wise, who, turning over the _Historical Account of the English
Poets_, a publication by Curll in 1720, found that the following entry
occurs in the "Corrigenda":

Mr. Congreve. This Gentleman has lately oblig'd us with two Tales from
Fontaine, entitled,

    I. The Impossible Thing.
    II. The Man That lost his Heifer.

These form his pamphlet of the same year, 1720. When Mr. Wise was kind
enough to point this out to me it was only left for me to add that the
anonymous _Historical Account_ was the work of Giles Jacob, the friend
whose notes on Congreve's life form the nucleus of all we know about
him. Thus the authorship of the two poems was proved. And it was only
after that proof that I turned to the index of the old editions and
found there the two poems, lurking unsuspected. I blush to recall the
painful incident.

However, the separate publication of the two poems in a quarto of 1720
is a wholly unrecorded fact, and important to bibliographers. _The
Peasant in Search of his Heifer_ is added apparently as an
after-thought, to fill up the sheet. _An Impossible Thing_ opens with
these lines:

    To thee, Dear Dick, this Tale I send,
    Both as a Critick and a Friend.
    I tell it with some Variation
    (Not altogether a Translation)
    From _La Fontaine_; an Author, _Dick_,
    Whose Muse would touch thee to the quick.
    The Subject is of that same kind
    To which thy Heart seems most inclin'd.
    How Verse may alter it, God knows;
    Thou lov'st it well, I'm sure, in Prose.
    So without Preface, or Pretence,
    To hold thee longer in Suspense,
    I shall proceed, as I am able,
    To the Recital of my Fable.

He does proceed, not without considerable indelicacy, but in excellent
running verse. The "Dick" who was to enjoy it I conjecture--and in this
Mr. Austin Dobson confirmed me--to have been Richard Shelton, who is
connected with Prior's _Alma and A Case Stated_. Prior and Congreve have
so much in common that it is tantalizing not to be able to persuade
them to throw light upon one another; they were haunting the same
coffee-houses when Swift was writing to Stella in 1710.

The discovery, after 200 years, of a unique copy of an unsuspected
separate publication by Congreve confirms a suspicion of mine that other
such pamphlets may exist. The earliest attempt at a bibliography was
made by Giles Jacob, evidently under the poet's own eye, in 1720. Jacob
gives a list of poems, with which "the ingenious Mr. Congreve, besides
his excellent Dramatick Works, has oblig'd the Publick," but he adds no
dates. Of these poems the first is _An Epistle to the Right Honourable
Charles Lord Halifax_, and the six next are odes of each of which we
possess the text in folio form. But of the _Epistle to Halifax_ no
separate edition is known, and it appears first in the octavo of 1710.
But I cannot help suspecting that Giles Jacob possessed, or could refer
to, a folio sheet of (probably) 1694, the year in which Halifax, to
reward Congreve for the dedication of _The Double Dealer_, is supposed
to have appointed him a Commissioner for licensing hackney coaches. But
I have shown how confused is all the evidence with regard to Congreve's
offices, which roused Thackeray to such superfluous indignation. Perhaps
the shilly-shallying of Charles Montague had something to do with the
suppression of an original folio of the _Epistle_, if it ever existed.
In any case, a single sheet with, or more likely without, the signature
of Mr. Congreve is worth looking out for.

As thirty-three years have passed since my _Life of Congreve_ was
published I venture to take occasion to mention here one or two slight
matters which I should like any possessors of that volume to
interpolate. If I had the opportunity to issue a new edition I should
further enlarge on a matter which I did make prominent, the very leading
part which the veteran Dryden took in advancing the fortunes of his
young and hitherto unknown rival. The episode is a charming one, and I
have now some instances of it which escaped me in 1888. As is known,
Congreve came up from the country some time in 1692. He was introduced
by Southerne to Dryden, who took a great fancy to him at once. Dryden
was preparing a composite translation of _Juvenal_, and he gave the
young man the Eleventh Satire to turn. Next came Dryden's Persius, to
which Congreve prefixed a splendid poem of compliment: the triumph of
_The Old Bachelor_ followed in January. All this, and more, I worked
out; but one very interesting evidence of Dryden's assiduous kindness
escaped me. In 1705 was published as a folio pamphlet the _Ode on Mrs.
Arabella Hunt singing_, and I supposed that this was the original
appearance of this pindaric, which is one of Congreve's best. But my
attention has been arrested by observing that 1705 was the year in which
Arabella Hunt died, and also that so early as 1693 Dryden published this
ode in his _Third Miscellany_. The Arabella Hunt ode therefore belongs
to the beginning, and not, as I supposed, to the close, of Congreve's
brief poetic career. It is a beautiful thing:

    Let all be hushed, each softest motion cease;
    Be every loud tempestuous thought at peace;
    And every ruder gasp of breath
    Be calm, as in the arms of Death,

and ends with a Keats-like couplet:

    Wishing forever in that state to lie,
    For ever to be dying so, yet never die.

It is now plain that this ode was published as a book at the death of
the singer, but had been composed at least twelve years earlier. Another
instance of Dryden's connexion with Congreve, which I observed too late
to record it, is the fact that the latter contributed a song to the
_Love Triumphant_ of the former in 1694. In the dedication of that play
Dryden speaks of "my most ingenious friend, Mr. Congreve," who has
observed "the mechanic unities" of time and space strictly. _Love
Triumphant_ was Dryden's last play, and its failure was complete. A
spiteful letter-writer of the time gloats over its damnation because it
will "vex huffing Dryden and Congreve to madness." All this confirms the
idea that the elder poet's complaisance in the younger was matter of
general knowledge, and Dryden's withdrawal from the ungrateful theatre
must have been a blow to Congreve, who, however, practically stepped at
once into Dryden's shoes.

Another biographical crumb. Charles Hopkins, one of the poet-sons of
Ezekiel Hopkins, the once-famous Bishop of Derry, was a _protege_ of
Dryden, and in 1697 brought out his second play, _Boadicea_, which he
dedicated to Congreve in a long poem, from which we learn that Hopkins
was an intimate friend and disciple of the author of _The Double
Dealer_.

    You taught me first my Genius and my Power,
    Taught me to know my own, but gave me more.

He praises Congreve's verses, and then goes on to say, in lines of
conspicuous warmth and sincerity:

    Nor does your Verse alone our Passions move;
    Beyond the Poet, we the Person love.
    In you, and almost only you, we find
    Sublimity of Wit and Candour of the Mind.
    Both have their Charms, and both give that delight.
    'Tis pity that you should, or should not write.

He proceeds, enthusiastically, in this strain, and closes at last in
words which still carry a melodious echo:

    Here should I, not to tire your patience, end,
    But who can part so soon, with such a Friend?
    You know my Soul, like yours, without design,
    You know me yours, and I too know you mine.
    I owe you all I am, and needs must mourn
    My want of Power to make you some return.
    Since you gave all, do not a part refuse,
    But take this slender Offering of the Muse.
    Friendship, from servile Interest free, secures
    My Love, sincerely, and entirely yours.

This is by no means the only occasion on which Charles Hopkins
proclaimed his gratitude and affection. As early as 1694 he paid a
tribute of friendship to Congreve, who wrote a prologue to Hopkins's
first tragedy, _Pyrrhus King of Epirus_ (1695). I think we may presume
that it was owing to the greater poet's influence that Pyrrhus was put
on the stage, for Congreve wrote a prologue, in which he warmly
recommended it, saying:

    'Tis the first Flight of a just-feather'd Muse,

adding, to the audience:

    Then spare the Youth; or if you'll damn the Play,
    Let him but first have his, then take your Day,

words which Congreve would hardly have used unless he had been
responsible for the production.

It is odd that Hopkins should speak so humbly and Congreve dwell on his
friend's inexperience, since Hopkins was at least six years older than
Congreve, who was now twenty-seven and pretended to be only twenty-five.
He enjoyed no further advantage from the devoted attachment of Charles
Hopkins, who retired immediately to his father's home in Londonderry.
Already he felt the decay of "a weak and sickly tenement," and his last
play, pathetically entitled _Friendship Improv'd_ (1697), was sent to
London from Londonderry with a preface that bewailed his broken health.
According to Giles Jacob, he was "a martyr to the cause of hard
drinking, and a too Passionate fondness for the fair Sex." The same
authority says that Hopkins "was always more ready to serve others than
mindful of his own Affairs," and we can well believe it. An hour before
his death, which took place in 1700, Charles Hopkins, "when in great
pain," wrote a last copy of verses, which have been preserved. And so
Congreve lost this most faithful henchman at the very moment when his
own last and perhaps greatest play, _The Way of the World_, failed on
the stage, and when he was most in need of sympathy.

Now for a white sheet to wrap both Congreve and myself. In 1888 I took
credit, and not unjustly, for having discovered that Congreve prefixed
verses to the first edition of a little rare book called _Reliquae
Gethinianae_, which were never reprinted until I restored them, and that
these were entirely different from those he prefixed to the third
edition of the same book in 1703, the latter alone having been always
since reprinted among Congreve's verses. Both poems are conceived in a
Donne-like spirit of hyperbole. Grace, Lady Gethin, about whom I have
found out more since my _Life of Congreve_ was published, was a young
Irish lady, Miss Norton, who married an Irish baronet, Sir Richard
Gethin, and died at the age of twenty-one in 1697. She secured a wide
reputation for learning and piety, and she was actually buried in
Westminster Abbey. Her essays--with mortuary folding-plates, again in
the spirit of Donne--were posthumously published and produced a
favourable sensation. But to my great confusion Leslie Stephen, who had
(marvellously) studied Lady Gethin, pointed out to me, when he read my
biography, that she was a fraud, conscious or unconscious. Her so-called
works were cribbed out of several seventeenth-century writers of
morality, but particularly out of Bacon. She had copied them into her
commonplace book, doubtless without guile. My dear friend and master
grimly remarked, "I wonder neither you nor Congreve spotted 'reading
makes a full man'!" But he never said a word in print about our
negligence, which deepens my remorse. I suspect that Congreve, like
myself, did not read the _Reliquiae_ very carefully, but it is strange
that no other of Lady Gethin's numerous contemporary admirers discovered
the mare's-nest.

In 1888 I was not able to describe Congreve's ode on the Taking of Namur
in its original form, but since then I have secured a copy of the first
edition of 1695. The title is _A Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer'd to the
King, On His Taking Namure. By Mr. Congreve._ There are many differences
of text, showing that the poet subjected the poem to careful revision.
In this first form, the King, afterwards spoken of as "William," is
described and addressed as "Nassaw"; perhaps the poet was advised that
His Majesty did not care to be incessantly reminded of his Dutch origin.
Here is a cancelled passage, describing the horrors of the attack:

    Cataracts of Fire Precipitate are driv'n
    On their Adventurous Heads, as Ruin rain'd from Heaven...
        Echoes each scalding step resound,
    And horrid Flames, bellowing to be unbound,
    Tumble with hollow rage in Cavern'd Ground.

Perhaps Congreve thought this was too boisterous. In the Namur ode there
are curious reminiscences of the battle of the angels in Paradise Lost.
There was no half-title to this folio, let collectors take notice.

The complete neglect which has overtaken the minor writings of Congreve
is regrettable. His odes and pastorals are deformed by a too-conscious
rhetoric, and his imagery is apt to be what is called "artificial," that
is to say, no longer in fashion. But they bear evidence of high
cultivation and an elevated sense of style. When Dr. Johnson said that
_The Mourning Muse of Alexis_ (1695) was "a despicable effusion" he fell
into the sin of over-statement. I admit that this agony of regret for
the death of good Queen Mary II may not have been very sincere, and that
the imagery is often vapid. Yet the poem is an interesting and a skilful
exercise in a species of art which has its place in the evolution of our
literature. It is not so good as Marvell would have made it earlier or
as Collins later. But in 1695 I know not who could have done it better
except Dryden, and even he, if more vigorous, was not commonly so
melodious. That Congreve could not write a tolerable song I frankly
admit. To book-collectors, however, the separate minor publications of
our poet seem to offer a field which is still unharvested. With Mr.
Wise's new discovery, and with the posthumous _Letter to Viscount
Cobham_, there are some nine or ten separate publications, besides the
four (or five, with _The Judgment of Paris_ of 1701) quarto plays. When
to these we add the controversial pamphlets and _Squire Trelooby_, in
its two forms of 1704 and 1734, we have quite an interesting little body
of first editions for the bibliophile to expend his energy in
collecting.

Lovers of pleasure will think small beer of these desultory annotations.
But in the case of a great dramatist like Congreve, whose career is very
imperfectly known to us, I hold that all information is welcome, even
though the separate details of it seem to be trivial. I present these
glimmerings in the hope that they may not be useless to the future
editor and biographer, whoever he may be, whose lamp will throw my taper
into the shade.




THE FIRST DRAFT OF SWINBURNE'S ANACTORIA


No modern poet offers a more interesting field for critical examination
in his MSS. than Swinburne does, and in perhaps no other can the
movement of mind, under changes of mood, be so accurately followed. His
prose MSS. have a somewhat heavy uniformity, from which little is to be
gathered, but the aspect of his written verse is so diverse as to be
almost bewildering in its changes of form, not merely from one group of
years to another, but even in the effusions of a single day. After long
consideration, and a study of a multitude of MSS. written between 1857
and 1909, I have come to the conclusion that the critical value of
Swinburne's drafts depends very much upon the spirit in which he
happened to compose his poems. There were evidently three methods in his
use. Some time ago there turned up a large number of dramatic and
lyrical exercises, written by Swinburne as an undergraduate. These have
greatly modified our conception of his early work, and they reveal in
the apparently idle youth an amazing persistence in self-apprenticeship
to the craft of verse. I hope to find leisure on a future occasion to
describe these interesting and voluminous papers: in the meantime I only
mention them here, in order to point out that they are written, with
curious uniformity, and with very few corrections, in a hard, angular
handwriting which Swinburne presently abandoned, but which resembles the
formal script in which his later Putney poems appear to be composed.

I say "appear to be," because I am convinced, and my conviction is
supported by the evidence of those who lived with him, that he adopted
in later life the practice of composing and practically finishing his
poems in his head before he put anything down on paper. He used to be
heard walking up and down his room at The Pines, and then pausing
awhile, evidently to write down what he had polished in his head. This
accounts for the "clean" look of most of his later MSS., which appear to
be first drafts, and yet have few corrections. What we now discover from
the undergraduate MSS. of which I have spoken above is that, apparently,
he adopted in early youth the plan to which he was to revert in old age.
But of this plan there might be two varieties; Swinburne might work up
his stanzas to perfection in his brain before writing anything, or he
might be inspired with such a flow of language that the finished poem
would slip smoothly from his brain. Doubtless there was something of
both these in his practice, but I incline to think the former by far the
most frequent. From neither can we obtain much impression of the
mechanism of his invention.

But there was a third method, of which I am about to describe a
peculiarly interesting example, which the poet adopted in the hey-dey of
his poetical career. Soon after he left Oxford, perhaps in 1860, his
handwriting changed its character; it became less boyish, but more
crabbed and careless. I think that the weakness of his wrist may have
been the cause of this alteration. It is particularly marked in the
period from 1862 to 1870. His later writing was emphatic in its stiff
inelegance, but usually legible; the script of his middle period was, at
its best, lax and straggling, at its worst almost indecipherable. But it
varied extravagantly, so much so that it is often difficult to believe
that the same pen, and still more that the same hour, could have
produced such violently diverse exhibitions. It has gradually dawned
upon me, while helping Mr. Wise to disentangle an accumulation of rough
copies and fragments, that the cause of this diversity lay in the degree
of excitement which Swinburne put into the act of composition. He was
always paroxysmal, always the victim of excruciating intellectual
excitement which descended upon him like the beak of the Promethean
vulture. To discover the points at which, in a particular composition,
this fury of inspiration fell upon him, is to get a little closer to the
secret of Swinburne's astonishing virtuosity, and is my excuse for the
following observations.

So many of Swinburne's MSS. have been preserved, principally in the
newspaper bundles which he so oddly carried with him, without ever
examining, through all his peregrinations from Oxford to Putney, that it
is particularly vexatious that those which we could least afford to
spare, those of his blossoming period from 1861 to 1868, are very
exiguously represented. No scrap of _The Queen Mother_ has turned up,
nor of the published form of _Rosamond_ (an undergraduate sketch of this
play remains). The original MS. of _Chastelard_ exists only in a few
fragments, the MS. sold in New York in 1913 being a clean copy for the
press. According to the evidence of George Meredith, the first draft of
_Laus Veneris_ was written in red ink; the existing version, though
containing corrections and cancelled passages, is written in black ink,
and shows no sign of the frenzy of composition; it is evidently a
transcript. Of _Poems and Ballads_ no general MS. exists, but portions
of the "copy" sent to the printers are in various collections. Most of
these are transcripts, and show no sign of emotion or excitement.
Several first drafts of _Poems and Ballads_, however, have been
preserved, and of these the most remarkable that I have examined is that
of _Anactoria_, of which I will now give some account.

Swinburne's first drafts offer none of the attractions which collectors
of autographs commonly desiderate. They are never signed and rarely
headed. That of the long poem afterwards called _Anactoria_ has neither
a title nor the Greek epigraph from Sappho. It is written, or rather
wildly scribbled, on both sides of six sheets of blue foolscap, the
water-mark of one of which is 1863, doubtless the date of the
composition of the poem. These sheets were thrown away, and came into
our hands in a great disorder of papers, mostly worthless, which left
The Pines after Watts-Dunton's death. As we turned them over, in the
welter of manuscript, my eye caught the line

    Lilies, and languor of the Lesbian air,

and I realized what lay before us. Scattered through the bundle, five
sheets were identified, but unfortunately one sheet was missing. By a
happy chance, this also turned up in another parcel three years later,
and the first draft is now, I believe, complete, although one passage in
the published poem, as I shall presently show, is absent.

The text begins high up on the first sheet, and offers no peculiarity in
the opening eight lines, which, with the slight exception of "Sting"
instead of "Blind" in line 2, are identical with the published version
of 1866. The handwriting is the usual script of Swinburne in the 60's,
crabbed, but plain and calm. Suddenly, with line 7, a sort of frenzy
takes the poet's pen, and at the side of the paper, in lines that slope
more and more rapidly downwards, and in such a stumbling and trembling
hand that they are with great difficulty to be spelt out, are
interpolated the lines:

    Severed the bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves,
    And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves.
    I feel thy blood against my blood; my pain
    Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.

Then, in very small clear script, opposite this outburst, is written, by
itself, like a solo on a flute:

    Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower,
    Breast kindle breast and either burn one hour.

To this immediately follows:

    In her high place in Paphos,

which is the opening of line 64 in the published version. But the first
draft stops here, leaving that half-line uncancelled, and proceeds
quietly, in a large hand,

    Saw love, a burning flame from crown to feet,

and so on for six lines which are now to be found in the middle of the
poem. Thereupon follows a breathless interlude of six couplets,
scribbled with extreme violence and so curiously interwoven that the
only way to explain their relation is to quote them:

    I would my love could slay thee; I am satiated
    With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead,
    Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake
    Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache;
    Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill,
    Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill;
    I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat,
    And no mouth but some serpent's found thee sweet.
    I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,
    Intense device, and superflux of pain,
    Relapse and reluctation of the breath,
    Dumb tunes and shuddering semitones of death.

If this passage be compared with the published text, it will be observed
that firstly, there are, with the single alteration of "kill" for
"slay," no verbal modifications whatever: and that secondly the couplets
are shifted about like counters in a game, or as if they were solid
objects which might be put here, there, or anywhere in a liquid setting.
The first draft of _A Song of Italy_, now in the possession of Mr. Thos.
J. Wise, presents the same characteristics, though in a less degree.

We are still on the opening sheet of the draft of _Anactoria_, and it
now presents to us, quietly and conscientiously written in the middle of
the page:

    For I beheld in sleep the light that is
    In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss
    Of body and soul that mix with eager tears,
    And laughter stinging thro' the eyes and ears,

a sort of _tessera_ evidently left there to be fitted in whenever a
favourable blank presented itself; we find it, without the smallest
change of language, fixed in the middle of the poem. It is noticeable
that the fragment "In her high place in Paphos" is now utilized.

A storm of excitement presently ruffles the poet, and he turns the sheet
in such agitation that he holds it upside-down. Without leading up to it
in any way, he starts a passage

    _She came and touched me, saying_ "Who doth thee wrong,
    Sappho?"

which closes abruptly with lines which may be cited because they contain
several of the very rare instances in which the draft slightly differs
verbally from the text of 1866:

    Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead?
    _"Be of good cheer, wilt thou forget?" she_ said:
    _"For_ she that flies shall follow for thy sake,
    _For_ she shall give thee gifts that _will_ not take,
    Shall kiss that _will_ not kiss thee" (yea, kiss me)
    "When _I would_ not, etc."

We presently come across the only Couplet in the whole poem which was
cancelled in the first draft, and yet reappears in the published text.
This is:

    Bound with her myrtles, beaten with her rods,
    The young men and the maidens and the gods,

now very effectively introduced into the argument, but in the first
draft destroyed with a whirling movement of the pen, so that it looks as
if a dust-storm involved it. Written with frenzied violence, almost
perpendicularly, the draft then presents a couplet:

    Taught the sun ways to travel, woven most fine
    The moonbeams, shed the starbeams forth as wine,

for which a place is now found immediately before the "Bound with her
myrtles" couplet. The ecstasy of the poet seems to have suddenly flagged
here, and there follows immediately, in sedate script, with even lines,
the passage

    Alas, that neither moon nor sun nor dew
    Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through,
    Assuage me nor allay me nor appease,
    Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease,
    Till time wax faint in all his periods,

which now takes its place near the very close of the poem. The actual
closing lines are, in like fashion, appended to the third page of the
draft. They read as follows:

    Till fate undo the bondage of the gods,
    And lay to slake _the unquenchable desire
    Lethean lotus on a lip of fire,_
    And _pour_ around and over and under me
    _The wake of_ the insuperable sea.

There was evidently on the poet's part no original intention of
utilizing these lines as a conclusion to the poem. I give them here
because they present the solitary instance of important verbal
alteration to be found in the whole text of 1866.

It would baffle the most meticulous investigation to restore the
innumerable false starts, broken lines, and rejected readings which
underlie the text of the Draft. There is no question here of Swinburne's
creating or polishing anything in his mind, the whole work of
composition proceeds on the paper itself, and what is very curious is
the fact that nothing of any merit or technical beauty seems, so far as
it is possible to decipher the cancelled verses, to be lost. As soon as
ever the expression became adequate the line was left, and was never
modified; as long as it was inadequate, it was pitilessly rejected, and
the verse not passed till it satisfied the ear and imagination of the
poet. What is interesting is that this work was carried out with the
pen, and not, as was the practice in Swinburne's later years, with the
mind; and nothing could be more opposed to the popular notion of
Swinburne as the inspired improvisatore than all this evidence of
intense laborious application to his creative task. In fact the more the
original MSS. of Swinburne are examined, the more clearly is he revealed
to us as an artist equally sedulous and sensitive, working by fits and
starts, in gusts of overwhelming emotion, but always sufficiently master
of himself to recognize, with finality, when the exact form of
expression had been reached. Having recognized it, he did not, like
Tennyson, Landor and other poets, fidget any further with it, but left
it verbally permanent.

On the other hand, the draft of _Anactoria_ proves, what we might have
suspected, that if Swinburne completed his verbal text in his first
movement of laboured inspiration, he made no effort then to build up his
poem. It may be observed that _Dolores_ is a rosary of stanza-beads on
an invisible string; in other words, that the string might be broken,
the beads shaken together, and the stanzas arranged in an entirely new
sequence, without any injury to the effect of the poem. In other cases,
and these some of Swinburne's finest lyrics, the same want of
progression is to be noted. But we have not been able to witness the
process before, nor were we prepared to find it working in a poem which
is so elegiacal as _Anactoria_. Yet the evidence of the First Draft is
positive. It is now clear that Swinburne forged his brilliant
Dryden-like couplets as though each one were a stanza, and practically
treated them as bits of mosaic to be fitted, in cooler blood, into a
scheme not present to his mind when his inspiration seized him.

We seem, therefore, to be in the presence of a curious phenomenon.
Whereas in the case of most poets the general outline of the work
precedes the execution of it in detail, Swinburne offers us the paradox
of an execution carried to the utmost finish before the act of evolution
begins. He takes a bag-ful of couplets, all polished to the finest
point, and--on some subsequent occasion--he builds these up into a poem
which has the aspect of inevitable growth. The First Draft of
_Anactoria_, which I have attempted to describe, is totally
unintelligible, a chaos of Rodin-like fragments, unless we accept this
theory of the poet's method.

One point remains to be stated. The published text of _Anactoria_
contains 304 lines. Of these I have found, scattered over the tract of
delirious manuscript, 270. It is curious that not a single verse should
have been added by the poet when he came to distribute and arrange his
cluster of couplets, the solitary accession to the text being the solid
passage of 34 lines in the middle of the poem, beginning

    Or say what God above all gods and years
    With offering and blood-sacrifice of tears.

Of this, not a single trace is to be found in the Draft. My first
supposition was that the sheet containing these lines was lost, as might
well be when we consider the accidental and fortuitous way in which the
rest was retrieved. But I have come to the conclusion that this is not
the case. The text in the Draft stops at the line

    _The mystery of the cruelty of things_

without any sign that the idea of the impassive harshness of Fate was to
be expanded. The 34 lines which now follow have, moreover, a character
that distinguishes them from the rest of _Anactoria_, with which they
are not quite in keeping. They leave the individual passion of Sappho
entirely out of sight, and they are instinct with an order of
theological ideas which occupied Swinburne in 1864 and 1865, when he was
writing _Atalanta in Calydon_ and the earliest of _Songs before
Sunrise_. They are on a higher philosophical plane than the melodious
ravings of the love-sick poetess, and the more we read them, the more
may we be persuaded that they are an after-thought.




THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET


THE fashion of the moment, whether in literature or in art, whether in
England or in France, favours what is rough, vivid and undisciplined. A
new generation of readers welcomes the lyrical effusions of the cowboy,
the lumberman, the tramp, and even the apache. It accepts Bubu de
Montparnasse as a hero and does not shrink from overhearing the
confidences of a burglar. There is no reason why we should exercise our
sarcasm over these _naivetes_ of taste, while indeed, as social beings,
we are even entitled to rejoice at them, since, in the language of
practical aestheticism, a positive always involves a negative. If this
age dotes on the dirtiness of tramps, it is because every one of us is
obliged to be occupied and clean; and if the apache is the object of our
poetry, it is because, in our extremely settled, confident and
comfortable lives, we miss the excitement of being in personal danger.
But let the delicate social balance of our existence be again disturbed,
let us become practically accustomed to starvation and outrage and
murder, and not another strophe would our poets address to the drunken
navvy or the grimy bathchair-man. If London or Paris were to burn, if
only for a fortnight, literature and art would hurry back to the study
of princesses and to the language of the Golden Age.[1]

No more striking instance of this oscillation is to be found in history
than is afforded by France at the opening of the seventeenth century, in
the creation of what is called the vie de salon. This movement, the most
civilizing, the most refining in the intellectual life of France, was
the direct outcome of the convulsion of the civil wars. It was the
ugliness, the wickedness, the brutality of the reigns of the later
Valois which made the best minds of Paris determine to be gentle,
beautiful and delicate under Louis XIII. Forty years of savage rapine
had laid a severe embargo upon civilization, and no picture of France in
1625 can be complete without a glance at the background of 1575. In that
half-century of administrative disorder, in the bitter and distracted
state of country life, the population had lost confidence in virtue, and
had become rude and dishonest. One of the Venetian ambassadors,
travelling through France, declared of the Frenchmen whom he met, that
"the sight of blood had made them cunning, coarse and wild." If such was
the condition of the countryside, the towns were even worse. There
resulted from the misery after the siege of Paris a universal weariness,
a longing for tolerance in man to man, a yearning for refinement in
private life, for security, for cultivation, for repose of mind and body
and estate.

That Henri IV was a Protestant has led, perhaps, to some injustice being
done to his memory in a Catholic country. But he deserved well of France
in this critical moment. Every necessity of life had become
extravagantly dear, every branch of industry depressed, if not extinct,
when he came to the throne. He set himself to be the guardian of trade,
and of the arts. He rebuilt cities, and a contemporary reported of him
that "no sooner was he master of Paris, than the streets were swarming
with masons." The shrewdness of Henri IV broke down the old
superstition, of which Sully made himself the obstinate spokesman, that
agriculture was the only source of wealth for France. The King persisted
in encouraging the manufactures of silk and linen; in widening the
circle of commercial interests; in teaching Frenchmen to achieve wealth
and honour as architects, painters, sculptors and cabinet-makers. The
prestige of the military nobles grew less and less, that of the
_bourgeoisie_ grew more and more, while between them a new class,
refined, intelligent, a little timid and supple in their professional
adroitness, that _nouvelle aristocratic de robe_, of which M. Lavisse
has spoken, came to the front and gave its tone to the surface of life.

The general trend of the best thought, at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, was towards the polishing of society, left
roughened and rusty by the long wars of religion. But the court of Henri
IV was too coarse, and too little in sympathy with the mental
aspirations of the age, to carry out this design, which needed other
influences than those which could emanate from Marie de Medicis.
Meanwhile, the great importance of the provincial centres had rapidly
declined, and it was Paris that gave the tone to France. This then was
the moment when a peculiarly Parisian centre was needed, independent of
the court, yet in political sympathy with it, a centre of imagination
and intelligence not too austere in its morals, not too pedantic in its
judgments, to include the characteristic minds of the age, whatever
their limitation or peculiarity; and yet definitely, unflinchingly and
for a sufficient length of time, radiating politeness and authority.
Such a Parisian centre must be aristocratic, yet liberal and
intelligent; it must lay down rules of conduct, and contrive to get them
obeyed; it must be recognized and haunted by the first men and women of
the century; it must be actuated in equal proportions by the genius of
discipline, and by that of easy grace and accomplished gallantry. In
short, it must be what Providence astonishingly provided for French
society at that moment of its sorest need, the unparalleled Hotel de
Rambouillet, with, as its prophetess and chatelaine, one of the most
charming women who have ever occupied the pen of the memoir-maker.

In observing the history of the famous Chambre Bleue, it cannot but
strike an English critic how far more articulate French opinion was than
English in the seventeenth century. Although, as we shall presently see,
documents have been slow in forthcoming, they existed, and still exist,
in profusion. But while we can now study, almost from day to day, the
intrigues, the amusements and the enthusiasms of the group in the Rue
Saint-Thomas, the record of a similar _salon_ open in England at the
same epoch is still shrouded in a darkness which is likely never to be
penetrated. So far as we can venture to judge there must have been many
points of likeness between the Marquise de Rambouillet and Lucy Countess
of Bedford. The circle of the friends of each was illustrious. Donne was
a greater poet-divine than Cospeau or Godeau; our national vanity may
fairly set Daniel and Drayton against Voiture and Chapelain, while even
Corneille is not shamed by being balanced by Ben Jonson. The coterie of
the Countess of Bedford may probably have been less wealthy, less
sparkling, more provincial than that of Madame de Rambouillet, but the
melancholy thing is that we lack the opportunity of comparing them. Save
for vague allusions in the poets, and for a dim tradition of politeness,
we form no detailed impression of the feasts of wit at Twickenham,
whereas about those in the Rue Saint-Thomas we know almost as much as
heart can wish. In the communication of social impressions England stood
much farther behind France in the seventeenth century than the
individual genius of her writers accounts for. We have, however, one
possible recompense: the field of irresponsible conjecture is infinitely
wider in our island chronicle. In France, even the craziest of faddists
could not hope for a hearing if he suggested that the tragedies of
Pierre Corneille were secretly written by Richelieu in his lighter
moments.

On the history of the Hotel de Rambouillet the documents which survive
are very numerous, and probably have not yet been exhaustively examined.
The seventeenth century in France was awake to the importance of its own
immortality, and set down the records of its social and literary glory
with complacency. The memorials of the Hotel de R

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