Old and New Masters — 12 - Ch.6.iii - Henry James: 3. How He was Born Again

3. HOW HE WAS BORN AGAIN

As one reads the last fragment of the autobiography of Henry James, one cannot help thinking of him as a convert giving his testimony.

Henry James was converted into an Englishman with the same sense of being born again as is felt by many a convert to Christianity.

He can speak of the joy of it all only in superlatives.

He had the convert's sense of--in his own phrase--"agitations, explorations, initiations (I scarce know how endearingly enough to name them I)."

He speaks of "this really prodigious flush" of his first full experience of England.

He passes on the effect of his religious rapture when he tells us that "really wherever I looked, and still more wherever I pressed, I sank in and in up to my nose."

How breathlessly he conjures up the scene of his dedication, as he calls it, in the coffee-room of a Liverpool hotel on that gusty, "overwhelmingly English" March morning in 1869, on which at the age of almost twenty-six he fortunately and fatally landed on these shores, with immediate intensities of appreciation, as I may call the muffled accompaniment, for fear of almost indecently overnaming it.

He looks back, with how exquisite a humour and seriousness, on that morning as having finally settled his destiny as an artist.

"This doom," he writes:-- This doom of inordinate exposure to appearances, aspects, images, every protrusive item almost, in the great beheld sum of things, I regard ...

as having settled upon me once for all while I observed, for instance, that in England the plate of buttered muffins and its cover were sacredly set upon the slop-bowl after hot water had been ingenuously poured into the same, and had seen that circumstance in a perfect cloud of accompaniments.

It is characteristic of Henry James that he should associate the hour in which he turned to grace with a plate of buttered muffins.

His fiction remained to the end to some extent the tale of a buttered muffin.

He made mountains out of muffins all his days.

His ecstasy and his curiosity were nine times out of ten larger than their objects.

Thus, though he was intensely interested in English life, he was interested in it, not in its largeness as life so much as in its littleness as a museum, almost a museum of _bric-à-brac_.

He was enthusiastic about the waiter in the coffee-room in the Liverpool hotel chiefly as an illustration of the works of the English novelists.

Again and again in his reminiscences one comes upon evidence that Henry James arrived in England in the spirit of a collector, a connoisseur, as well as that of a convert.

His ecstasy was that of a convert: his curiosity was that of a connoisseur.

As he recalls his first experience of a London eating-house of the old sort, with its "small compartments, narrow as horse-stalls," he glories: in the sordidness of it all, because "every face was a documentary scrap."

I said to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour that this it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and one could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one's elbows or one's feet, with an immunity from intermittance of the "plain boiled" much better than one could dispense with that.

Here, again, one has an instance of the way in which the show of English life revealed itself to Henry James as an exhibition of eating.

"As one sat there," he says of his reeking restaurant, "one _understood.

_" It is in the same mood of the connoisseur on the track of a precious discovery that he recalls "the very first occasion of my sallying forth from Morley's Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house of sustaining, of inspiring hospitality in the Kensington quarter."

What an epicure the man was!

"The thrill of sundry invitations to breakfast" still survived on his palate more than forty years afterwards.

Not that these meals were recalled as gorges of the stomach: they were merely gorges of sensation, gorges of the sense of the past.

The breakfasts associated him "at a jump" with the ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Rogers.

They had also a documentary value as "the exciting note of a social order in which every one wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon an office or a store...."

It was one morning, "beside Mrs. Charles Norton's tea-room, in Queen's Gate Terrace," that his "thrilling opportunity" came to sit opposite to Mr. Frederic Harrison, eminent in the eyes of the young American, not for his own sake so much as because recently he had been the subject of Matthew Arnold's banter.

Everybody in England, like Mr. Harrison, seemed to Henry James to _be_ somebody, or at least to have been talked about by somebody.

They were figures, not cyphers.

They were characters in a play with cross-references.

The beauty was ...

that people had references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures here and there, whether animate or no, quite groan under the accumulation and the weight of.

It is surprising that, loving this new life so ecstatically, James should so seldom attempt to leave any detailed description of it in his reminiscences.

He is constantly describing his raptures: he only occasionally describes the thing he was rapturous about.

Almost all he tells us about "the extravagant youth of the aesthetic period" is that to live through it "was to seem privileged to such immensities as history would find left her to record but with bated breath."

He recalls again "the particular sweetness of wonder" with which he haunted certain pictures in the National Gallery, but it is himself, not the National Gallery, that he writes about.

Of Titian and Rembrandt and Rubens he communicates nothing but the fact that "the cup of sensation was thereby filled to overflowing."

He does, indeed, give a slender description of his first sight of Swinburne in the National Gallery, but the chief fact even of this incident is that "I thrilled ...

with the prodigy of this circumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same breath with Mr. Swinburne."

Thus the reminiscences are, in a sense, extraordinarily egotistic.

This is, however, not to condemn them.

Henry James is, as I have already said, his own greatest character, and his portrait of his excitements is one of the most enrapturing things in the literature of autobiography.

He makes us share these excitements simply by telling us how excited he was.

They are exactly the sort of excitements all of us have felt on being introduced to people and places and pictures we have dreamed about from our youth.

Who has not felt the same kind of joy as Henry James felt when George Eliot allowed him to run for the doctor?

"I shook off my fellow-visitor," he relates, "for swifter cleaving of the air, and I recall still feeling that I cleft it even in the dull four-wheeler."

After he had delivered his message, he "cherished for the rest of the day the particular quality of my vibration."

The occasion of the message to the doctor seems strangely comic in the telling.

On arriving at George Eliot's, Henry James found one of G. H.

Lewes's sons lying in horrible pain in the middle of the floor, the heritage of an old accident in the West Indies, or, as Henry James characteristically describes it:-- a suffered onset from an angry bull, I seem to recall, who had tossed or otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off, left him considerably compromised.

There is something still more comic than this, however, to be got out of his visits to George Eliot.

The visit he paid her at Witley under the "much-waved wing" of the irrepressible Mrs. Greville, who "knew no law but that of innocent and exquisite aberration," had a superb conclusion, which "left our adventure an approved ruin."

As James was about to leave, and indeed was at the step of the brougham with Mrs. Greville, G.

H.

Lewes called on him to wait a moment.

He returned to the doorstep, and waited till Lewes hurried back across the hall, "shaking high the pair of blue-bound volumes his allusion to the uninvited, the verily importunate loan of which by Mrs. Greville had lingered on the air after his dash in quest of them":-- "Ah, those books--take them away, please, away, away!"

I hear him unreservedly plead while he thrusts them again at me, and I scurry back into our conveyance.

The blue-bound volumes happened to be a copy of Henry James's own new book--a presentation copy he had given to Mrs. Greville, and she, in turn, with the best intentions, had tried to leave with George Eliot, to be read and admired.

George Eliot and Lewes had failed to connect their young visitor with the volumes.

Hence a situation so comic that even its victim could not but enjoy it:-- Our hosts hadn't so much as connected book with author, or author with visitor, or visitor with anything but the convenience of his ridding them of an unconsidered trifle; grudging, as they so justifiedly did, the impingement of such matters on their consciousness.

The vivid demonstration of one's failure to penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes's gesture, which could scarcely have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom.

Henry James Was more fortunate in Tennyson as a host.

Tennyson had read at least one of his stories and liked it.

All the same, James was disappointed in Tennyson.

He expected to find him a poet signed and stamped, and found him only a booming bard.

Not only was Tennyson not Tennysonian: he was not quite real.

His conversation came as a shock to his guest:-- He struck me as neither knowing nor communicating knowledge.

As Tennyson read _Locksley Hall_ to his guests, Henry James had to pinch himself, "not at all to keep from swooning, but much rather to set up some rush of sensibility."

What a lovely touch of malice there is in his description of Tennyson on an occasion on which the ineffable Mrs. Greville quoted some of his own verse to him:-- He took these things with a gruff philosophy, and could always repay them, on the spot, in heavily-shovelled coin of the same mint, since it _was_ a question of his genius.

Henry James ever retained a beautiful detachment of intellect, even after his conversion.

He was a wit as well as an enthusiast.

_The Middle Years_, indeed, is precious in every page for its wit as well as for its confessional raptures.

It may be objected that Henry James's wit is only a new form of the old-fashioned periphrasis.

He might be described as the last of the periphrastic humorists.

At the same time, if ever in any book there was to be found the free play of an original genius--a genius however limited and even little--it is surely in the autobiography of Henry James.

Those who can read it at all will read it with shining eyes.

VII