^ -.< BERKELEY .IBRARY IN I VERM TY OF CALIFORNIA PICTURES AND OTHER PASSAGES FROM HENRY JAMES PICTURES And Other Passages from HENRY JAMES SELECTED BY RUTH HEAD LONDON CHATTO &? WINDUS MCMXVI PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. 1 All rights reserved PREFACE " JOHN LA FARGE became at once, in breaking on our view, quite the most interesting person we knew, and for a time remained so, he became a great many other things beside a character, above all, if there ever was one ; but he opened up to us, though perhaps to me in particular, who could absorb all that was given me on those suggestive lines, prospects and possibilities that made the future flush and swarm." * Long ago in the 'eighties, to me a bookish girl whose world was sharply divided into books which were delightful, and life which was at best pleasant only in streaks, there came, not in person but in his books, the magic influence of a new author, Henry James. And thus the miracle happened ; for books were to me no longer a world apart in which I happily wandered, but an integral portion of my individual life, and the two worlds became indis- solubly mingled, so that the future did indeed " flush and swarm" for me with "prospects and possi- bilities" many-tinted as the rainbow. For the illuminating point in all Mr. James's books was to me just this, that their drama depended not at all on the ease with which his heroines crossed * "Notes of a Son and a Brother." V '85 PREFACE oceans, sojourned in foreign hotels, hired villas at Florence or palaces in Rome, but entirely on their mental capacity for receiving impressions ; and like Hyacinth,* I realised with intensity that "poor and obscure and cramped and full of unattainable de- sires" as I might be, such impressions were to be always the one thing of importance which life would throughout hold for me. The pleasure of my discovery was the greater in that not one of my contemporaries shared my enthusiasm it was a secret garden of which I alone possessed the key, and in which I could pass golden hours, with the power there acquired of making my own life into a garden too, where common things were no longer boring but endowed with a curious significance, and every smile or fluttering eyelid had its own interest and peculiar meaning. I did not even possess one of these magic volumes as yet that came later with the Tauchnitz editions and the second-hand copies, found by rare and happy chance on bookstalls at stations or in booksellers' sales. In those early days the precious volumes were brought home to read at twopence a time from the lending library, and taken out again and again until they became in this laborious way really a part of myself. And when in due course Italy was visited and France, it was in this same happy secret companion- ship; for I found myself in a world with which I was already acquainted, and through what gorgeously appreciative spectacles lovers of Henry James's novels will understand and I may truly say that I never lifted the heavy leather curtain of some old Church, or smelt the air of some bright prosperous Paris morning, or crossed the shining floor of some great picture-gallery sumptuously housed, but it was with the ardour of a disciple treading a pathway * " Princess Casamassima." vi PREFACE whose windings had long before been indicated by a Master's hand for my enjoyment. Those were the days of the " Portrait of a Lady," of "Roderick Hudson," and the "Princess Casa- massima." Later, much later, came the era of " The Awkward Age," and "What Maisie Knew," to be followed, read, and conquered with growing excite- ment until the full glories of "The Golden Bowl" and the "Wings of the Dove" burst upon us. I say "us," for by now of course I was no longer a solitary worshipper I had found co-religionists. Only, at the same time, I had learnt that amongst busy people, however framed for appreciative wor- ship, there was a feeling that the long stories were "too difficult," and thus the habit arose of culling passages to read aloud, when small audiences of two or three could be charmed by a written picture of an inn in a French countryside, tinted like a fine water-colour, a restaurant-lunch on the Rive Gauche, or a sketch of a rarely decorative woman's head clear beautiful passages fit for enjoyment quite apart from their context. Small private successes of this nature fired me with strength for a very bold venture, and some twenty years after my first acquaintance with his writings, I took my courage in both hands and wrote a letter to Mr. James himself, saying very much what I have put down here, adding, I re- member, that I wished to treat him as schoolmasters treat the classics, by making a little anthology from his works, and would he please give me leave ? At the end, my own temerity frightened me, and I pleaded that, not bearing to think I might have given him cause for displeasure by my letter, would he, if he disliked what I had said, be kind enough to signify his disapprobation by silence. I received an answer by return of post. vn PREFACE Lamb House, Rye, Sussex. My dear Madam, I am so far from being disposed to ' ' signify by silence " my appreciation of your charming letter which greatly interests and touches me that I am, as you see, acknowledging it on the day it comes. I thank you very kindly for your general expressions of sympathy and intelligence. These expressions give me the greatest pleasure. And I find, I think, a great deal of intrinsic possibility in the application of so practical a test as the little compendium you have so ingeniously conceived of such value as my writings may have to show. I would gladly assent / do so assent to the idea of your undertaking such a gathering-in ; I even see in advance the good title, ''Pictures and other Passages from the Writings of H. J., etc.' 9 But . . . (There was of course a "but" a doubt whether Publishers would consent to permit such extracts being made from his books, a doubt which has most happily been removed and the letter ends ) Please believe meanwhile that as a token of real appreciation generously expressed your proposal very positively gratifies yours, My dear Madam, Most truly, HENRY JAMES. And now the great Master is dead, and the little compendium so joyously planned is to see the light without, alas, the seal of his approbation, but in this place my thanks are all the more due to those Publishers without whose generous permission freely accorded such an Anthology would have been viii PREFACE impossible to Messrs. Macmillan, to Mr. Heinemann, and to Messrs. Methuen; and, for such readers as are connoisseurs of my author, I must add that I have collated my extracts with the great edition definitive of Henry James's works published in 1909 by Messrs. Macmillan, without, however, in every case changing the original text some sentences have been enshrined too long in my memory to be changed at the last ; and in matters of punctuation, particu- larly, the earlier habit of plentiful stops makes to my mind more for general clarity than the long almost unpunctuated sentences in some of the revised works. And, finally, since this is a book of quotations, may I be allowed to write here the words of another great Master of fiction, peculiarly applicable, it appears to me, in this context ? " You remember," he said, " a reflection of Auguste Comte's, 'Humanity is composed of the dead and the living. The dead are by far the more numerous.' True, the dead are by far the more numerous. By their multitude and the greatness of the work they have accomplished, they are the more powerful. They govern us; we obey them. Our masters lie beneath these stones. There lies the lawgiver who made the law to which I submit, the architect who planned my house, the poet who created the illusions which still move us, the orator who won us over before our birth. There lie the builders of our know- ledge whether false or true, of our wisdom as of our folly. They are there, our inflexible leaders, whose word is our law. In them is strength and sequence and continuity." RUTH HEAD. May 28, 1916. IX At Mr. Heinemann's desire the names of the volumes published by him, from which extracts have been made in the Anthology, are here added " The Other House." "The Spoils of Poynton." "The Awkward Age." "What Maisie Knew." "Embarrassments," from which come the short stories "The Figure in the Carpet." "Glasses." "The Way It Came." " The Next Time." " Terminations," from which came " The Altar of the Dead." CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE SEASONS NATIONALITY CHAPTER II AMERICA 10 FRANCE AND PARIS 15 SWITZERLAND 24 ITALY 26 CHAPTER III LONDON 36 COUNTRY ENGLAND 38 COUNTRY HOUSES, GARDENS, AND PARKS 42 THE WORLD OF ART 47 INTERIORS : MEN, WOMEN, AND THEIR ROOMS 53 CHAPTER IV PASSION 68 PORTRAITS OF WOMEN 74 CHARACTER, FEMININE 9! PORTRAITS OF MEN IO6 CHARACTER, MALE 112 CHAPTER V MORALITIES AND APHORISMS 123 SIMILES AND METAPHORS 129 Pictures from Henry James CHAPTER I THE SEASONS EARLY Spring. The day was favourable to patience a day of relaxed rigour and intense brilliancy. It was as if the touch of the air itself was gloved, and the street-colouring had the richness of a superficial thaw. The Bostonians. The Spring softened and deepened, reached out its tender arms and scattered its shy graces ; the earth broke, the air stirred, with emanations that were as touches and voices of the past ; our friends bent their backs in their garden and their noses over its symptoms ; they opened their windows to the mild- ness and tracked it in the lanes and by the hedges. The deepest sweetness of the spring at Marr was just in its being in this way an attestation of age and rest. The place never seemed to have lived and lingered so long as when kind Nature, like a maiden blessing a crone, laid rosy hands on its grizzled head. Then the new season was a light held up to show all the dignity of the years, but also all the wrinkles and scars. The Third Person. PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES That long, fresh light of waning April days which affects us often with a sadness sharper than the grayest hours of autumn. The Beast in the Jungle. April at Matcham. What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the generous mood of the sunny, gusty, lusty English April, all panting and heaving with impatience, or kicking and crying even, at moments, like some infant Hercules who wouldn't be dressed ; what with these things and the bravery of youth and beauty, the insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused among his fellow-guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively marked maturity and their comparatively small splendour, were the only approach to a false note in the concert. The Golden Bowl. Ralph's funeral. It was a solemn occasion, but it was not a disagreeable one ; there was a certain geniality in the appearance of things. The weather had changed to f air ; the day, one of the last of the treacherous May-time, was warm and windless, and the air had the brightness of the hawthorn and the blackbird. There were tears in Isabel's eyes, but they were not tears that blinded. She looked through them at the beauty of the day, the splendour of nature, the sweetness of the old English churchyard, the bowed heads of good friends. The Portrait of a Lady. A window near her was half open, and the soft clearness of the day and all the odour of the spring diffused themselves, and made the place cheerful and pure. Two or three times she turned her eyes upon him, and then they shone with the wonderful 2 THE SEASONS expression which was the essence of her beauty ; that profuse, mingled light which seemed to belong to some everlasting summer, and yet to suggest seasons that were past and gone, some experience that was only an exquisite memory. The Princess Casamassima. During these closing days of the Roman May Osmund had a gaiety that matched with slow irregular walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, among the small sweet meadow-flowers and the mossy marbles. The Portrait of a Lady. The summer day was splendid and the world, as he looked at it from the terrace, offered no more worrying ambiguity than a vault of airy blue arching over a lap of solid green. The wide, still trees in the park appeared to be waiting for some daily inspection, and the rich fields, with their official frill of hedges to rejoice in the light. The Tragic Muse. The great historic house had, for Milly, beyond terrace and garden, as the centre of an almost extravagantly grand Watteau composition, a tone as of old gold kept " down " by the quality of the air, summer full-flushed, but attuned to the general perfect taste. The Wings of the Dove. The ardent girl was always climbing the slope of the Rue Constantinople, on the shady side, where in the July mornings there was a smell of violets from the moist flower-stands of fat, white-capped 3 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES bouquetieres, in the angles of doorways. Miriam liked the Paris of the summer mornings, the clever freshness of all the little trades and the open-air life, the cries, the talk from door to door ; and most of all the enviable baskets of the laundress, piled up with frilled and fluted whiteness. The Tragic Muse. There were certain afternoons in August, long, beautiful and terrible, when one felt that summer was rounding its curve, and the rustle of the full- leaved trees in the slanting golden light, in the breeze that ought to be delicious, seemed to be the voice of the coming autumn, of the warnings and dangers of life portentous, insufferable hours. The Bostonians. August in London. It had rained heavily in the night, and though the pavements were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the August morning, with its hovering, thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was cool and grey. The multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened, and a wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and odours less acceptable, rose from the earth. The day was, even in the heart of London, of a rich, low-browed, weather-washed English type. The Golden Bowl. Summer in Portland Place. Maggie's mind, in its restlessness, even played a little with the prospect ; the high cool room, with its afternoon shade, with its old tapestries uncovered, with the perfect polish of its wide floor reflecting the bowls of | gathered flowers and the silver and linen of the prepared tea-table. The Golden Bowl. 4 THE SEASONS The summer had turned, the summer had gone ; the autumn had dropped upon Ely and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its grey sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theatre after the performance all strewn with crumpled play bills. The Turn of the Screw. The charm, happily, was in other things too ; . . . in the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned ; in the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low, sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour. The Beast in the Jungle. The weather changed, the stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days, but now hot and vindictive, came into its own again, and, with an almost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed and plashed and called and chimed again ; the air was like a clap of hands, and the scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of vivid stuffs, a laying down of fine carpets. The Wings of the Dove. Winter. They sat together like very old friends, whom long pauses, during which they simply looked at each other with kind, acquainted eyes, could not make uncomfortable. . . . For intercourse of that sort, intimate, easy, humorous, circumscribed by drawn curtains and shaded lamplight, the Princess was incomparable. , . . There was a household quietude in her step and gestures, in the way she sat, in the way she listened, in the way she played with the cat, or looked after the fire. There was an 5 PICTURES FEOM HENRY JAMES extraordinary charm in this mixture of liberty and humility in seeing a creature capable socially of immeasurable flights sit dove-like, with folded wings. The Princess Casamassima. Boston. The western windows of Olive's drawing- room, looking over the water, took on the red sunsets of winter ; the long, low bridge that crawled, on its staggering posts, across the Charles, the casual patches of ice and snow ; the desolate suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigour of the season ; the general hard, cold void of the prospect ; the extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few chimneys and steeples, straight, sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops, or spare, heavenward finger of the New England meeting-house. . . . Verena thought such a view lovely, and she was by no means without excuse when, as the afternoon closed, the ugly picture was tinted with a clear, cold rosiness. The air, in its windless chill, seemed to tinkle like a crystal, the faintest gradations of tone were perceptible the sky, the west became deep and delicate, everything became doubly distinct before taking on the dimness of evening. There were pink flushes on the snow, " tender " reflections in patches of stiffened marsh, sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar, but almost silvery on the long bridge. The Bostonians. They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas this year was, as in London of so many other years, disconcertingly mild ; the still air was soft, the thick light was grey, the great town looked empty, and in the Park, where the grass was green, where the sheep browsed, where the birds multitudinously twittered, the straight walks lent themselves to slowness and the dim vistas to privacy. The Wings of the Dove. 6 NATIONALITY NATIONALITY That air of under-valued merit which in Italy, for some reason or other, always gracefully invests any one who confidently assumes a perfectly passive attitude. The Portrait of a Lady. Miss Hemming was, to her blunt, expanded finger- tips, a daughter of London, of the crowded streets and bustling traffic of the great city ; she had drawn her health and strength from its dingy courts and foggy thoroughfares, and peopled its parks and squares and crescents with her ambitions ; it had entered into her blood and bone, the sound of her voice and the carriage of her head ; she understood it by instinct and loved it with passion ; she represented its immense vulgarities and curiosities, its brutality and knowingness, its good nature and its impudence, and might have figured, in an allegorical procession, as a kind of glorified townswoman, a nymph of the wilderness of Middlesex, a flower of the accumulated parishes, the genius of urban civilisation, the muse of cockneyism. Princess Casamassima. English people, in my opinion, and contrary to common report, are the most demonstrative, the most expansive, the most gushing in the world. The Path of Duty. The question but sank for him again into the fathomless depths of English equivocation. He knew them all, as was said, " well " ; he had lived with them, dined, hunted, shot, and done various other things with them ; but the number of questions about them he couldn't have answered had much 7 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES rather grown than shrunken, so that experience struck him for the most part as having left in him but one residual impression. They didn't like les situations nettes that was all he was very sure of. They wouldn't have them at any price ; it had been their national genius and their national success to avoid them at every point. The Golden Bowl. London Ideals. " She has no features. No, not one," Vanderbank inexorably pursued ; " unless, indeed, you put it that she has two or three too many. What I was going to say was that she has in her expression all that's charming in her nature. But beauty, in London " and, feeling that he held his visitor's attention, he gave himself the pleasure of freely unfolding his idea " staring, glaring, ob- vious, knock-down beauty, as plain as a poster on a wall, an advertisement of soap or whiskey, something that speaks to the crowd and crosses the footlights, fetches such a price in the market that the absence of it, for a woman with a girl to marry, inspires endless terrors and constitutes for the wretched pair to speak of mother and daughter alone a sort of social bankruptcy. London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter, and letters ten feet high." The Awkward Age. Monsieur de Bellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, but there was something in his physio- gnomy which seemed to cast a sort of aerial bridge over the impassable gulf produced by the difference of race. He had a round head, high above the ears, a broad low forehead, a short nose, of the ironical and inquiring, rather than the dogmatic or sensitive 8 NATIONALITY cast, and a moustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance. The great point about his face was that it was intensely alive, ardently, gallantly alive. There was something in his quick, light brown eye which assured you that he was not economising consciousness. He was not living in a corner of it to spare the furniture of the rest. He was squarely encamped in the centre and he was keeping open house. The American. The traces of national origin are a matter of ex- pression even more than of feature : Newman's had that typical vagueness which is not vacuity, that blankness which is not simplicity, that look of being committed to nothing in particular, of standing in an attitude of general hospitality to the chances of life so characteristic of many American faces. The American. Another American gentleman, Edward Rosier. You found in him " Extreme good sense concealed under a surface suggesting sprigged porcelain. . . . He was a very gentle and gracious youth, with what are called cultivated tastes an acquaintance with old china, with good wine, with the bindings of books, with the Almanack de Gotha, with the best shops, the best hotels, the hours of railway-trains. He usually spent a part of every winter at Pau, and had once passed a couple of months in the United States." The Portrait of a Lady. CHAPTER II AMERICA New York in April. Central Park. The long, narrow enclosure, across which the houses in the streets that border it look at each other with their glittering windows, bristled with the raw delicacy of April, and, in spite of its rockwood grottoes and tunnels, its pavilions and statues, its too numerous paths and pavements, lakes too big for the landscape and bridges too large for the lakes, expressed all the fragrance and freshness of the most charming moment of the year. The Bostonians. It was a charming autumn day, there was a golden haze in the air, he supposed it was the Indian summer. The broad side-walk of the Fifth Avenue was scattered over with dry leaves crimson and orange and amber. Bernard Longueville, as he went, paid his compli- ments to his mother-city. The brightness and gaiety of the place seemed a greeting to a returning son, and he felt a throb of affection for the freshest, the youngest, and easiest, and most good-humoured of great capitals. Confidence. He knew a very quiet, luxurious French restaurant near the top of the Fifth Avenue ... it had been part of his plan that she should sit opposite him at a 10 AMERICA little table, taking her napkin out of its curious folds sit there smiling back at him while he said to her certain things that hummed, like the memories of tunes, in his fancy, and they waited till something extremely good, and a little vague, chosen out of the French carte, was brought to them. The Bostonians. The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide- fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing- room windows, and a flight of white marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble ... In front was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of repose which is not of frequent occurence in other quarters of the long, shrill city. It was here that your grand- mother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself to the infant imagination and the infant palate ; it was here that you took your first steps abroad, following the nursery- maid with unequal steps and sniffing up the strange odours of the ailanthus-trees, which diffused an aroma you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved. Washington Square. Newport. The morning was brilliant and cool, the villas were smart and snug, and the walk of the young travellers was very entertaining. Everything looked as if it had received a coat of fresh paint the day before the red roofs, the green shutters, the ii PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES clean bright houses, the browns and buffs of the house-fronts. The flower-beds on the little lawns seemed to sparkle in the radiant air, and the gravel in the short carriage-sweeps to flash and twinkle. Along the road came a hundred little basket-phaetons, in which, almost always, a couple of ladies were sitting ladies in white dresses and long white gloves, holding the reins and looking at the two Englishmen, whose nationality was not elusive, through thick blue veils, tied tightly about their faces. An International Episode. Newport. The broad light loggia surrounds the house with a movement as free as the expanded wings of a bird, and the wandering airs come up from the deep sea, which murmurs on the rocks at the end of the lawn. . . . Large, light, luxurious houses are planted with a kind of Dutch definiteness all over the green carpet of the cliff. This carpet is very neatly laid and wonderfully well swept, and the sea, just at hand, is capable of prodigies of blue . . . Altogether the effect is very delicate, and anything that is delicate counts immensely over here. The Point of View. Rowland walked homewards, thinking of many things. The great Northampton elms inter-arched far above in the darkness, but the moon had risen, and through scattered apertures, was hanging the dusky vault with silver lamps. Roderick Hudson. Harvard. The rectangular structure of old red brick especially gratified his eye ; the afternoon sun was yellow on their homely faces ; their windows showed a peep of flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains ; they wore an expression of scholastic quietude, and exhaled for the young Mississippian a tradition, an antiquity. 12 AMERICA The Memorial Hall. The effect of the place is singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honour, it speaks of sacrifice and ex- ample, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of them had fallen. The Bostonians. Between Boston and Marmion. The ripeness of summer lay upon the land, and yet there was nothing in the country that seemed susceptible of maturity ; nothing but the apples in the little tough, dense orchards, which gave a suggestion of sour fruition here and there, and the tall, bright golden-rod at the bottom of the bare stone dykes. But there was a kind of soft scrubbiness in the landscape, and a sweetness begotten of low horizons, of mild air, with a possibility of summer haze, of unregarded inlets where on August mornings the water must be brightly blue. The Bostonians. Marmion. Here all the homely languor of the region, the mild, fragrant Cape-quality, the sweet- ness of white sands, quiet waters, low promontories where there were paths among the barberries and tidal pools gleamed in the sunset here all the spirit of a ripe summer afternoon seemed to hang in the air. The Bostonians. Chowderville. When I went to my window on rising, I found sky and sea looking, for their brightness and freshness, like a clever English water-colour. The ocean is of a deep purple blue ; above it the pure, bright sky looks pale, though it hangs over the inland horizon a canopy of denser tissue. . . . There is a purity in the air which I have never seen surpassed 13 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES a lightness, a brilliancy, a crudity, which allows perfect liberty of self-assertion to each individual object in the landscape. The Landscape Painter. When Americans went abroad in 1820, there was something romantic, almost heroic in it. ... Miss Bordereau had sailed with her family in a tossing brig in the days of long voyages and sharp differences ; she had had her emotions on the top of yellow dili- gences, and passed the night at inns where she dreamed of travellers' tales. The Aspern Papers. The early 'Forties. In those days in New York there were still a few altar-fires flickering in the temple of Republican simplicity, and Dr. Sloper would have been glad to see his daughter present herself, with a charming grace, as a priestess of this mild faith. Washington Square. Literary ladies, old style and new. Isabel wondered whether Miss Stacpole had come on account of her mother whether she had heard of the American Corinne. Her mother used to wear a Roman scarf thrown over a pair of bare shoulders, and a gold laurel wreath set upon a multitude of glossy ringlets. She spoke softly and vaguely, with a kind of Southern accent ; she sighed a great deal, and was not at all enterprising. But Henrietta was always closely buttoned and compactly braided ; there was some- thing brisk and business-like in her appearance, and her manner was almost conscientiously familiar. The Portrait of a Lady. Ransom had read, of old, of the improvisatrice of Italy, and Verena's speech was a chastened, modern, 14 FRANCE AND PARIS American version of the type, she was a New England Corinna, with a mission instead of a lyre. The Bostonians. He liked, in this preliminary stage, to feel that he should be able to " speak," and that he would ; the word itself being romantic, pressing for him the spring of association with stories and plays where handsome and ardent young men, in uniform, tights, cloaks, high boots, had it, in soliloquies, ever on the lips. The Golden Bowl. American tourists in the National Gallery. Milly would have been able to say where they lived, and how, had the place and the way been but amenable to the position ; she bent tenderly, in imagination, over marital paternal Mr. Whatever-he-was, at home, eter- nally named, with all the honours and placidities, but eternally unseen and existing only as some one who could be financially heard from. The mother, the puffed and composed whiteness of whose hair had no relation to her apparent age, showed a countenance almost chemically clean and dry; her companions wore an air of vague resentment humanized by fatigue, and the three were equally adorned with short cloaks of coloured cloth surmounted by little tartan hoods. The Wings of the Dove. FRANCE AND PARIS Boulogne. She was " abroad," and she gave herself up to it, responded to it, in the bright air, before the pink houses, among the bare-legged fish-wives and the red-legged soldiers, with the instant certitude of a vocation. Her vocation was to see the world and to thrill with enjoyment of the picture ; she had grown older in five minutes, and had by the time they reached the hotel, recognised in the institutions and manners of France a multitude of affinities and messages . . . 15 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES To drive on the long cliff was splendid, but it was, perhaps, better still to creep in the shade for the sun was strong along the many-coloured and many odoured port, and through the streets in which, to English eyes, everything that was the same was a mystery, and everything that was different was a joke. Best of all was to continue the creep up the long Grand* Rue to the gate of the haute ville, and, passing beneath it, mount to the quaint and crooked rampart, with its rows of trees, its quiet corners and friendly benches, where brown old women in such white frilled caps and such long gold earrings sat and knitted or snoozed ; its little yellow-faced houses that looked like the homes of misers or of priests, and its dark chateau where small soldiers lounged on the bridge that stretched across an empty moat, and military washing hung from the windows of towers. What Maisie Knew. Havre. We walked along the sunny, noisy quays, and then turned into a wide, pleasant street, which lay half in sun and half in shade, a French provincial street, that looked like an old water-colour drawing ; tall, grey, steep-roofed, red-gabled, many-storied houses, green shutters or windows and old scroll- work above them ; flower-pots in balconies and white- capped women in doorways. The " Belle Normande " was a modest inn in a shady by-street. There was a crooked little court, where much of the hospitality of the house was carried on ; there was a staircase climbing to bedrooms on the outer side of the wall ; there was a small trickling fountain with a stucco statuette in the midst of it ; there was a little boy in a white cap and apron cleansing copper vessels at a conspicuous kitchen door ; there was a chattering landlady, neatly laced, arranging apricots and grapes into an artistic pyramid upon a pink plate. Four Meetings. 16 FRANCE AND PARIS Normandy. The air was freshened by a breeze from the sea ; the blooming country, without walls or fences, lay open to the traveller's eye ; the grain- fields and copses were shimmering in the summer wind ; the pink-faced cottages peeped through the ripening orchard boughs, and the gray towers of the old churches were silvered by the morning light of France. Confidence. Paris to Poitiers. The journey took him far south- ward, through green Touraine and across the far- shining Loire, into a country where the early spring deepened about him as he went. . . . The next morning be drove to the village of Fleurieres. It was what the French call a petit bourg. The church was simply the former chapel of the castle, fronting upon its grass-grown court, which, however, was of generous enough width to have given up its quaintest corner to a little graveyard. Here the very headstones themselves seemed to sleep, as they slanted into the grass ; the patient elbow of the rampart held them together on one side, and in front, far beneath their mossy lids, the green plains and blue distances stretched away. The American, It was a perfectly rural scene, and the still summer day gave it a charm for which its meagre elements but half accounted. Longmore thought he had never seen anything so characteristically French ; all the French novels seemed to have described it, all the French landscapists to have painted it. The fields and trees were of a cool metallic green. . . . The clear light had a sort of mild grayness ; the sun- beams were of silver rather than gold. A great red- roofed, high-stacked farmhouse, with whitewashed walls and a straggling yard, surveyed the high road 17 c PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES on one side, from behind a transparent curtain of poplars. A narrow stream, half choked with emerald rushes and edged with grey aspens, occupied the opposite quarter. The meadows rolled and sloped away gently to the low horizon, which was barely concealed by the continuous line of clipped and marshalled trees. Madame de Mauves. The garden of the " Cheval Blanc/' It was essen- tially, more than anything else, a scene and a stage, the very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows and the tone of the sky. . . . Strether sat there and, though hungry, felt at peace ; the confidence that had so gathered for him deepened with the lap of the water, the ripple of the surface, the rustle of the reeds on the opposite bank, the faint diffused coolness and the slight rock of a couple of small boats attached to a rough landing-place hard by. The valley on the further side was all copper-green level and glazed pearly sky, a sky hatched across with screens of trimmed trees, which looked flat like espaliers. The Ambassadors. Rural France. There was a train back to Paris at 9.20, and he saw himself partaking, at the close of the day, with the enhancements of a coarse white cloth and a sanded floor, of something fried and felicitous, washed down with authentic wine ; after which he might, as he liked, either stroll back to his station in the gloaming, or propose for the local carriole and converse with his driver, a driver who naturally wouldn't fail of a stiff clean linen blouse, of a knitted night-cap and of the genius of response who, in fine would sit on the shafts, tell him what the French people were thinking, and remind him, as indeed the whole episode would incidentally do, of Maupassant. The Ambassadors. 18 FRANCE AND PAEIS Towards six o'clock, he found himself amicably engaged with a stout, white-capped, deep- voiced woman at the door of the auberge of the village, a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and crookedness set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing behind or before it one couldn't say which. The Ambassadors. Paris. Notre Dame. " Ah, the beautiful there it stands ! " said Nick Dormer. " Come over and look at her ! " They had come abreast of the low island from which the great cathedral rises high and fair, with her front of beauty and her majestic mass, darkened at that hour, or at least simplified, under the stars, but only more serene and sublime for her happy union, far aloft, with the cool distance and the night. The lamp- light of the great city washed its foundations, but the towers and buttresses, the arches, the galleries, the statues, the vast rose-window, the large, full composition, seemed to grow clearer while they climbed higher, as if they had a conscious benevolent answer for the upward gaze of men. The Tragic Muse. " Splendid Paris, charming Paris " that refrain, the fragment of an invocation, a beginning without an end, hummed itself perpetually in Hyacinth's ears. All Paris struck him as tremendously artistic and decorative ; he felt as if hitherto he had lived in a dusky, frowsy, Philistine world, in which the taste was the taste of Little Peddlington and the idea of beautiful arrangement had never had an influence. In his ancestral city it had been active from the first and that was why his quick sensibility responded; and he murmured again his constant refrain, when the fairness of the great monuments arrested him, in the 19 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES pearly, silvery light, or he saw them take gray-blue, delicate tones at the end of stately vistas. Princess Casamassima. Notre Dame. The great church had no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul ; but it was none the less soothing even to sanctity ; for he could feel while there what he couldn't elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday he had earned. ... He trod the long, dim nave, sat in the splendid choir, paused before the clustered chapels of the east end, and the mighty monument laid upon him its spell. . . . Justice was outside, in the hard light, and injustice too ; but one was as absent as the other from the air of the long aisles and the brightness of the many altars. The Ambassadors. In the garden of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three spots, to look ; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him as he roamed. The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes in a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of bare-headed girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace- walls were warm, in the blue-frocked, brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered, red-legged soldier. The Ambassadors. It was the evening hour, but daylight was long now and Paris more than ever penetrating. The scent of flowers was in the streets, he had the whiff of violets perpetually in his nose ; and he had attached himself to sounds and suggestions, vibrations of the air, human and dramatic, he imagined, as they were 20 FRANCE AND PARIS not in other places, that came out for him more and more as the mild afternoon deepened, a far-off hum, a sharp, near click on the asphalt, a voice calling, replying, somewhere, and as full of tone as an actor's in a play. The Ambassadors. The autumn sun was warm in the alleys and terraces of the Luxembourg ; the masses of foliage above them, clipped and squared, rusty with ruddy patches, shed a thick lace-work over the white sky, which was streaked with the palest blue. The beds of flowers near the palace were of the vividest yellow and red, and the sunlight rested on the smart smooth gray walls of those parts of its basement that looked south ; in front of which, on the long green benches, a row of brown-cheeked nurses, in white caps and white aprons, sat offering nutrition to as many bundles of white drapery. An old lady in black, with white hair fastened over each of her temples by a large black comb, sat on the edge of a stone bench (too high for her delicate length), motionless, staring straight before her and holding a large door-key ; under a tree a priest was reading you could see his lips move at a distance ; a young soldier, dwarfish and red-legged, strolled past with his hands in his pockets, which were very much distended. Water- ville sat down with Mrs. Headway on the straw- bottomed chairs, and she presently said, " I like this, it's even better than the pictures in the gallery. It's more of a picture." " Everything in France is a picture even things that are ugly," Waterville replied. The Siege of London. The afternoon was a lovely one the day was a perfect example of the mellowest mood of autumn. The air was warm, and filled with a golden haze, 21 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES which seemed to hang about the bare Parisian trees, as if with a tender impulse to drape their nakedness. The American. Hotel in the Rue de Rivoli. The glazed and gilded room all red damask, ormolu, mirrors, clocks looked south, and the shutters were bowed upon the summer morning ; but the Tuileries gardens and what was beyond it, over which the whole place hung, were things visible through gaps ; so that the far-reaching spreading presence of Paris came up in coolness, dimness and invitation, in the twinkle of gilt-tipped palings, the crunch of gravel, the click of hoofs, the crack of whips that suggested some parade of the circus. The Ambassadors. On the Rive Gauche. They seated themselves, on either side of a small table, at a window adjusted to the busy quay and the shining barge-burdened Seine. Mme. de Vionnet opposite him over their intensely white table-linen, their omelette aux tomates, their bottle of straw-coloured Chablis, thanked him for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her gray eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter of the warm spring air, in which early summer had already begun to throb, and then back again to his face and their human questions. The Ambassadors. The little waxed salle-d-manger was sallow and sociable ; Franois dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a brother ; the high-shouldered patronne, with her high-held, much-rubbed hands, seemed always assenting exuberantly to something unsaid ; the Paris evening in short, was, for Strether, in the very taste of the soup, in the goodness, as he was inno- cently pleased to think, of the wine, in the pleasant 22 FRANCE AND PARIS coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the thick-crusted bread. The Ambassadors. An entresol in the Quartier Marboeuf . Her compact and crowded little chambers, almost dusky, as they at first struck him, with accumulations, represented a supreme general adjustment to opportunity and conditions. Wherever he looked he saw an old ivory or an old brocade, and he scarce knew where to sit for fear of a misappliance. . . . Wide as his glimpse had lately become of the empire of " things," what was before him still enlarged it ; the lust of the eyes and the pride of life had indeed thus thek temple. It was the innermost nook of the shrine as brown as a pirate's cave. In the brownness were glints of gold ; patches of purple were in the gloom ; objects, all, that caught through the muslin, with their high rarity, the light of the low windows. The Ambassadors. Interieur. Boulevard Malesherbes. The mellowest lamplight and the easiest chair had been placed at his disposal by Baptiste subtlest of servants ; the novel half -uncut, the novel lemon-coloured and tender, with the ivory knife athwart it like the dagger in a contadina's hair, had been pushed within the soft circle. . . . The night was hot and heavy, and the single lamp sufficient ; the great flare of the lighted city, rising high, spending itself afar, played up from the Boulevard and, through the vague vista of the successive rooms, brought objects into view and added to their dignity. The Ambassadors. It was late in the afternoon when Bernard was ushered into Mrs. Vivian's little high-nestling drawing- room, and the dying sunshine, faintly red, rested 23 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES softly upon the gilded wall. The long windows opened upon one of those solid balconies, which are often in Paris a compensation for living up five nights of stairs. Bernard stepped out upon it to await the coming of Mrs. Vivian, and he had time to see that his friends enjoyed a magnificent view. They looked up at the Triumphal Arch, which presented itself at a picturesque angle, and over the green tree-tops of the Champs Elysees, beyond which they caught a broad gleam of the Seine, and a glimpse, blue in the distance, of the great towers of Notre Dame. The whole vast city lay before them and beneath them, with its ordered brilliancy and its mingled aspect of confusion and expansion. Confidence. Mrs. Tristam had a balcony before her windows, upon which, during the June evenings, she was fond of sitting. It had a fringe of perfumed plants in tubs, and enabled you to look up the broad street and see the Arch of Triumph vaguely massing its heroic sculptures in the summer starlight. The American. A saloon in the quarter of the Pare Monceau. The odour of success was in the warm, slightly heavy air, which seemed distilled from rare old fabrics, from brocades and tapestries, from the deep, mingled tones of the pictures, the subdued radiance of cabinets and old porcelain and the jars of winter roses standing in soft circles of lamplight. Mrs. Temperly. SWITZERLAND Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of thrilled recognitions, small sharp echoes of a past which she kept in a well-thumbed case, but which, on 24 SWITZERLAND pressure of a spring and exposure to the air, still showed itself ticking as hard as an honest old watch. The embalmed " Europe " of her younger time had partly stood for three years of Switzerland, a term of continuous school at Vevey, with rewards of merit in the form of silver medals tied by blue ribbons, and mild mountain-passes attacked with alpenstocks. . . . The irrevocable days had come back to her from far off ; they were part of the sense of the cool upper air and of everything else that hung like an indescribable scent to the torn garment of youth in the taste of honey and the luxury of milk, the sound of cattle-bells and the rush of streams, the fragrance of trodden balms and the dizziness of deep gorges. The Wings of the Dove. The Pension Beaurepas was one of the most esteemed in Geneva, and, standing in a little garden of its own, not far from the lake, had a very homely, comfortable, sociable aspect. ... I always enjoyed my morning walk across the long bridge which spans the deep blue out-gush of the lake, and up the dark steep streets of the old Calvinistic city. The garden faced this way, toward the lake and the old town. There was a high wall, with a double gate in the middle, flanked by a couple of ancient massive posts ; the big rusty grille contained some old- fashioned iron- work. The garden was rather mouldy and weedy, tangled and untended ; but it contained a little thin-flowing fountain, several green benches, a rickety table of the same complexion, and three orange trees, hi tubs, which were deposited as effec- tively as possible in front of the windows of the salon. The Pension Beaurepas. Newman strolled forth into the village and looked at the fountain, the geese, the open barn-doors, the 25 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES brown, bent old women, showing their hugely darned stocking-heels at the ends of their slowly-clicking sabots, and the beautiful view of snowy Alp and purple Jura at either end of the little street. The day was brilliant ; early spring was in the air and in the sunshine, and the winter's damp was trickling out of the cottage eaves. It was birth and bright- ness for all nature, even for chirping chickens and waddling goslings, and it was to be death and burial for poor, foolish, generous, delightful Bellegarde. The American. ITALY The two young men followed the winding footway that led toward Como, close to the lake-side, past the gates of villas and the walls of vine-yards, through little hamlets propped on a dozen arches, and bathing their feet and their pendent tatters in the gray-green ripple ; past frescoed walls and crumbling campanili and grassy village piazzas and the mouth of soft ravines that wound upward through belts of swinging vine and vaporous olive and splendid chestnut, to high ledges where white chapels gleamed amid the paler boskage, and bare cliff-surfaces, with their blistered lips, drank in the liquid light. ... It was Italy, the Italy that we know from the steel-en- gravings in old keepsakes and annuals, from the vignettes on music-sheets, and the drop-curtains at theatres. Roderick Hudson. They had the garden all to themselves, and it was filled with things that Bernard liked inequalities of level, with mossy steps connecting them, rose-trees trained upon old brick walls, horizontal trellises arranged like Italian pergolas, and here and there 26 ITALY a towering poplar, looking as if it had survived from some more primitive stage of culture, with its stiff boughs motionless and its leaves for ever trembling. Confidence. Florence in midsummer was perfectly void of travellers, and the dense little city gave forth its aesthetic aroma with a larger frankness, as the nightingale sings when the listeners have departed. The churches were deliciously cool, but the gray streets were stifling, and the great dovetailed polygons of pavement were hot to the lingering tread. Roderick Hudson. Gilbert Osborne's Villa. An ancient villa which stood on the summit of an olive-muffled hill, outside the Roman gate of Florence. The house looked off behind into splendid openness and the range of the afternoon light. In that quarter, the villa overhung the slope of the hill and the long valley of the Arno, hazy with Italian colour. It had a narrow garden, in the manner of a terrace, productive chiefly of tangles of wild roses and old stone benches, mossy and sun-warmed. The parapet of the terrace was just the height to lean upon, and beneath it the ground declined into the vagueness of olive-crops and vine-yards. . . . The sun had got low, the golden light took a deeper tone, and on the mountains and the plain that stretched beneath them, the masses of purple shadow seemed to glow as richly as the places that were still exposed. The air was almost solemnly still, and the large expanse of the landscape, with its garden-like culture and nobleness of outline, its teeming valley and delicately-fretted hills, its pecu- liarly human-looking touches of habitation, lay there in splendid harmony and classic grace. The Portrait of a Lady. 27 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES The Villa Pandolfini. This garden was a charming place. Its southern wall was curtained with a screen of orange-blossoms, a dozen fig-trees here and there offered you their large-leaved shade, and over the low parapet the soft grave Tuscan landscape kept you company. The rooms themselves were as high as chapels and as cool as royal sepulchres. Roderick Hudson. The Palazzo Crescentini. The stillness of noontide hung over the garden ; the warm shade was motion- less, and the hot light made it pleasant. Ralph was sitting there in the clear gloom, at the base of a statue of Terpsichore a dancing nymph with taper fingers and inflated draperies, in the manner of Bernini. The Portrait of a Lady. In a palace little Pansy lived, which had frescoes by Caravaggio in the piano nobile, and a row of mutilated statues and dusty urns in the wide, nobly- arched loggia overlooking the damp court where a fountain gushed out of a mossy niche. The Portrait of a Lady. The gondola stopped, the old palace was there . . . It was not particularly old, only two or three centuries ; and it had an air not so much of decay as of quiet discouragement. But its wide front with a stone balcony from end to end of the piano nobile was architectural enough, with the aid of various pilasters and arches ; and the stucco with which in the intervals it had long ago been endued was rosy in the April afternoon. The Aspern Papers. Rome. When the spring began to muffle the rugged old city with its tremulous festoons . . . Rowland took his way through one of the quiet corners of 28 ITALY the Trastevere. He was particularly fond of this part of Rome, though he could hardly have expressed the sinister charm of it. As you pass away from the dusky swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses seem mouldering away in disuse. There are few monuments here, but no part of Rome seemed more historic, in the sense of being weighted with a ponderous past, blighted with the melancholy of things that had had their day. When the yellow afternoon sunshine slept on the sallow battered walls and lengthened the shadows in the grassy courtyards of small closed churches, the place acquired a strange fascination. The church of St. Cecilia has one of these sunny waste-looking courts ; the edifice seems abandoned to silence and the charity of chance devotion. Roderick Hudson. They went a great deal to St. Peter's, and Mary confessed very speedily that to climb the long, yellow low steps, beneath the huge florid fa$ade, and then, pushing the ponderous leathern apron of the door, find one's self a mere sentient point in that brilliant immensity was a sensation of which the keenness never failed to renew itself. Roderick Hudson. The first time Isabel found herself beneath the far- reaching dome and saw the light drizzle down through the air thickened with incense and with the reflections of marble and gilt, of mosaic and bronze, her concep- tion of greatness received an extension. She saw the afternoon light, silvered by clouds of incense that seemed to mingle with the splendid chant, sloping through the embossed recesses of high windows. The Portrait of a Lady. 29 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES The Vatican. Here and there was an open window, where they lingered and leaned, looking out in to the warm dead air, over the towers of the city, at the soft-hued historic hills, at the stately shabby gardens of the palace, or at some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile. Roderick Hudson. The Gallery of the Capitol. He left her there alone in the beautiful room, among the shining antique marbles. She sat down in the middle of the circle of statues, looking at them vaguely, resting her eyes on their beautiful blank faces, listening as it were, to their eternal silence. . . . The Roman air is an ex- quisite medium for such impressions. The golden sunshine mingles with them, the great stillness of the past, so vivid yet, seems to throw a solemn spell upon them. . . . Isabel sat there a long time, under the charm of their motionless grace, seeing life between their gazing eyelids and purpose in their marble lips. The dark red walls of the room threw them into relief; the polished marble floor reflected their beauty. The Portrait of a Lady. The early Roman spring had filled the air with bloom and perfume, and the rugged surface of the Palatine was muffled with tender verdure. Winterbourne stood looking at the enchanting harmony of line and colour that remotely encircles the city, inhaling the softly humid odours and feeling the freshness of the year and the antiquity of the place re-affirm themselves in mysterious interfusion. Daisy Miller. Isabel took a drive, alone, that afternoon ; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage, and tread upon the daisies. 30 ITALY She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright ; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places. . . . She had come to think of Rome chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to orfer her a companionship of endurance. The Portrait of a Lady. She felt the touch of a vanished world. The carriage, passing out of the walls of Rome, rolled through narrow lanes, where the honeysuckle had begun to tangle itself in the hedges, or waited for her in quiet places, while she strolled further and further over the flower-freckled turf, or sat on a stone that had once had a use, and gazed through the veil of her personal sadness at the splendid sadness of the scene at the dense warm light, the far gradations and soft confusions of colour, the motionless shepherds in lonely attitudes, the hills where the cloud-shadows had the lightness of a blush. The Portrait of a Lady. The three ladies went into the Coliseum together. . . . The great inclosure was half in shadow ; the western sun brought out the pale red tone of the great blocks of travertine the latent colour which is the only living element in the immense ruin. Here and there wandered a peasant or a tourist, looking up at the far sky-line where in the clear stillness a multitude of swallows kept circling and plunging. The Portrait of a Lady. . . . When the air was aglow with the sunset, I was PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES standing before the church of Saints John and Paul, and looking up at the small square- jawed face of Bartolommeo Colleoni, the terrible condottiere who sits so sturdily astride of his huge bronze horse on the high pedestal on which Venetian gratitude maintains him. The statue is incomparable, the finest of all mounted figures, unless that of Marcus Aurelius, who rides benignant before the Roman Capitol, be finer. . . . The western light shines into all his grimness at that hour, and makes it wonder- fully personal. But he continued to look over my head, at the red immersion of another day he had seen so many go down into the lagoon through the centuries and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they were of a different quality from any I had to tell him of. The Aspern Papers. " Meanwhile, aren't we in Venice together, and what better place is there for the meeting of dear friends ? See how it glows with the advancing summer ; how the sky, and the sea, and the rosy air, and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together." The Aspern Papers. Venice. The Palazzo Leporelli. Not yet so much as this morning had she felt herself sink into posses- sion ; gratefully glad that the warmth of the southern summer was still in the high, florid rooms, palatial chambers where hard, cool pavements took reflections in their lifelong polish, and where the sun on the stirred sea-water, flickering up through open windows, played over the painted " subjects " in the splendid ceilings medallions of purple and brown, of brave old melancholy colour, medals as of old reddened gold, embossed and beribboned, all toned with time and all flourished and scalloped, and gilded about, 32 ITALY set in their great moulded and figured concavity (a nest of white cherubs, friendly creatures of the air). The Wings of the Dove. Venice. From a letter. " I have a room in a little campo opposite to a small old church, which has cracked marble slabs let into the front ; and in the cracks grow little wild delicate flowers, of which I don't know the names. Over the door of the church hangs an old battered leather curtain, polished and tawny, as thick as a mattress, and with buttons in it, like a sofa ; and it flops to and fro laboriously, as women and girls, with shawls on their heads, pass in and out." Princess Casamassima. On a Balcony. I opened the balcony window, and we passed out on the balcony. The air of the canal seemed even heavier, hotter than that of the sala. The place was hushed and void ; the quiet neigh- bourhood had gone to sleep. A lamp, here and there, over the narrow black water, glimmered in double ; the voice of a man going home singing, his jacket on his shoulder and his hat on his ear, came to us from a distance. The Aspern Papers. I took more and more care to be in the garden whenever it was not too hot. I had an arbour arranged and a low table and an armchair put into it ; and I carried out books and portfolios and worked and waited and mused and hoped, while the golden hours elapsed and the plants drank in the light and the inscrutable old palace turned pale and then, as the day waned, began to recover and flush and my papers rustled in the wandering breeze of the Adriatic. The Aspern Papers. 33 D PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES I spent the late hours either on the water or in the splendid square which serves as a vast fore-court to the strange old church of Saint Mark. . . . The whole place, of a summer's evening, under the stars and with all the lamps, all the voices, and the light foot- steps on marble is an open-air saloon. . . . The great basilica, with its low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and sculpture, looked ghostly in the tempered gloom, and the sea-breeze passed between the twin columns of the Piazetta, and lintels of a door no longer guarded, as gently as if a rich curtain swayed them. The Aspern Papers. We swept into the Grand Canal ; whereupon she uttered a murmur of ecstasy. . . . She had forgotten the splendours of the great waterway on a clear summer evening, and how the sense of floating between marble palaces and reflected lights disposed the mind to freedom and ease. The Aspern Papers. ... I was more than ever struck with that queer air of sociability, of cousinship and family life, which makes up half the expression of Venice. Without streets and vehicles, the uproar of wheels, the brutality of horses, and with its little winding ways where people loved to crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of furniture and shoes never wear out, the place has the character of an immense collective apartment, in which Piazza San Marco is the most ornamented corner, and palaces and churches, for the rest, play the part of great divans of repose, tables of enter- tainment, expanses of decoration. And somehow the splendid common domicile, familiar, domestic, and resonant, also resembles a theatre with its actors 34 ITALY clicking over bridges and, in straggling processions, tripping along fondamentas. As you sit in your gondolas the footways that in certain parts edge the canals assume to the eye the importance of a stage, meeting it at the same angle, and the Venetian figures, moving to and fro against the battered scenery of their little houses of comedy, strike you as members of an endless dramatic troupe. The Aspern Papers. Venice in the rain. It was a Venice all of evil that had broken out for them alike ; a Venice of cold, lashing rain from a low black sky, of wicked winds raging through narrow passes ; of general arrest and interruption, with the people engaged in all the water-life huddled, stranded and wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridges. . . . He had to walk in spite of the weather, and he took his course, through crooked ways, to the Piazza, where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here, in the high arcades, half Venice was crowded close, while, on the Molo, at the limit of the expanse, the old columns of St. Mark and the Lion were like the lintels of a door wide open to the storm. . . . There were stretches of the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasy now with the salt spray ; and the whole place, in its huge elegance, the grace of its conception and the beauty of its detail, was more than ever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, prepared, profaned and bewildered by some reverse of fortune. The Wings of the Dove. 35 CHAPTER III LONDON HE walked into Hyde Park, and was slowly threading his way through the human maze which edges the drive. He saw a great many pretty cheeks beneath high-plumed hats as he squeezed his way through serried waves of crumpled muslin ; and sitting on little chairs at the base of the great serious English trees, he observed a number of quiet-eyed maidens who seemed only to remind him afresh that the magic of beauty had gone out of the world with Madame de Cintr6. The American. He put out a big military hand which she im- mediately took, and they turned off together to where a couple of chairs had been placed under one of the trees . . . and presently she was close to him in one of the chairs, with the prettiest of pictures the sheen of the lake through other trees before them, and the sound of birds, the plash of boats, the play of children in the air. What Maisie Knew. The Temple Gardens. Leaving the room, they passed together down to the court and through other battered courts and crooked ways. The dim London sunshine in the great surrounded garden had a kind- ness, and the hum of the town was as hindered and yet as present as the faint sense of spring. The Great Condition. 36 LONDON In Saint John's Wood the tide of human life flows at no time very fast ; and in the first days of September Lyon found more desolation in the straight summery roads where the little plastered garden-walls, with their incommunicative doors looked feebly Oriental. The Liar. A London Courtship. They crossed * the river ; they wandered in neighbourhoods sordid and safe ; the winter was mild, so that, mounting to the top of trams, they could rumble together to Clapham or to Greenwich. . . . They concealed their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm of their manner ; they took precautions for a courtesy that they had formerly left to come of itself. He would have described their change had he so far faced it as to describe it by their being so damned civil. ... He hadn't, in fine, reckoned that she would still have something fresh for him ; yet this was what she had that on the top of a tram in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner. The Wings of the Dove. He watched her then slightly pause at the wide window that, in Buckingham Crescent, commanded the prospect they had ramified rearward to enjoy ; a medley of smoky brick and spotty stucco, of other undressed backs, of glass invidiously opaque, of roofs and chimney-pots and stables unnaturally near one of the private pictures that in London, in select situations, run up, as the phrase is, the rent. The Awkward Age. A London dinner-party. The entertainment offered a few evenings before Easter was a discharge of obligations not insistently incurred, and had thereby, possibly, all the more, the note of this almost Arca- dian optimism : a large, bright, dull, murmurous, 37 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES mild-eyed, middle-aged dinner, involving for the most part very bland, though very exalted, immensely announceable and hierarchically placeable couples, and followed, without the oppression of a later con- tingent, by a brief instrumental concert. The Golden Bowl. COUNTRY ENGLAND Hyacinth had never in his life been in the country the real country, as he called it, the country which was not the mere ravelled fringe of London and there entered through his open casement the breath of a world enchantingly new and inexpressibly refreshing to him ; a sense of sweet sunny air and mingled odours, all strangely pure and agreeable, and a kind of musical silence, the greater part of which seemed to consist of the voices of the birds. There were tall, quiet trees near by, and afar off, and everywhere. There was a world to be revealed to him : it lay waiting, with the dew upon it, under his windows. Princess Casamassima. He rambled for an hour, in a state of breathless ecstasy. . . . His whole walk was peopled with recognitions ; he had been dreaming all his life of just such a place and such objects, such a morning and such a chance. It was the last of April, and everything was fresh and vivid ; the great trees, in the early air, were a blur of tender shoots. Round the admirable house he revolved repeatedly. . . . There was some- thing in the way the grey walls rose from the green lawn that brought tears to his eyes ; the spectacle of long duration unassociated with some sordid infirmity or poverty was new to him. In the majestic pre- servation of Medley there was a kind of serenity of success, an accumulation of dignity and honour. Princess Casamassima. 38 COUNTRY ENGLAND Hyacinth took several long walks by himself, beyond the gates of the park and through the neigh- bouring country walks during which he had a delighted attention to spare for the green dimness of leafy lanes, the attraction of meadow-paths that led from stile to stile and seemed a clue to some pastoral happiness, some secret of the fields ; the hedges thick with flowers the picture-making quality of thatched cottages, the mystery and sweetness of blue distances the soft sense of turf under feet that had never ached but from paving-stones. Princess Casamassima. The Easter holdays that year were unusually genial ; mild watery sunshine assisted the progress of the spring. The high, dense hedges, in Warwickshire, were like walls of hawthorn imbedded in banks of primrose, and the finest trees in England, springing out of them with a regularity which suggested con- servative principles, began to cover themselves with a kind of green downiness. The Siege of London. We made our way along the rounded ridge of the downs, and descended through slanting, oblique fields, green to cottage doors. . . . Beside the road we saw a plough-boy straddle, whistling on a stile, and he had the merit of being not only a ploughboy but a Gains- borough. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a meadow, a footpath wandered like a streak drawn by a finger over the surface of a stuff. A Passionate Pilgrim. Surrey in June. We kept to the fields and copses and commons, and breathed the same sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose woolliness seemed to me but a part of the general texture of the small dense landscape, which looked 39 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES as if the harvest were gathered by thej[shears. . . . I admired the hedgerows, I plucked the faint-hued heather, and I was for ever stopping to say how charm- ing I thought the thread-like footpaths across the fields, which wandered in a diagonal of finer grain, from one smooth stile to another. The Author of " Beltraffio." Isabel was never weary of driving her uncle's capital horses through winding lanes and by-ways full of rural incident ; past cottages thatched and timbered, past ale-houses latticed and sanded, past patches of ancient commons and glimpses of empty parks, between hedgerows made thick by summer. The Portrait of a Lady. A garden in Surrey. It was a perfect spot for the middle period of a Sunday in June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from an antique sundial, which, rising in front of us, and forming the centre of a small, intricate parterre, measured the moments ever so slowly, and made them safe for leisure and talk. The garden bloomed in the suffused afternoon, the tall beeches stood still for an example, and behind and above us, a rose-tree of many seasons, clinging to the faded grain of the brick, expressed the whole character of the scene in a familiar, exquisite smell. The Author of " Beltraffio." A Surrey cottage. It was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale it was an old English demesne. It nestled under a cluster of magnificent beeches, it had little creaking lattices that opened out of, or into, pendent mats of ivy, and gables, and old red tiles, as well as a general aspect of being painted in water- colours and inhabited by people whose lives would go on in chapters and volumes. The Author of " Beltraffio." 40 COUNTRY ENGLAND Chester. The tortuous wall girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands wanders in narrow file, between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country. The Ambassadors. Chester Cathedral. They had stopped in the after- noon sunshine and Strether rested on one of the high sides of the old stony groove of the little rampart. He leaned back on this support with his face to the tower of the cathedral, now admirably commanded by their stand-point, the high red-brown mass, square and subordinately spired and crocketted, retouched and restored, but charming to his long- sealed eyes, and with the first swallows of the year weaving their flight all around it. The Ambassadors. We walked over to Worcester, through such a mist of local colour that I felt like one of Smollett's pedestrian heroes, faring tavernward for a night of adventures. As we neared the provincial city, we saw the steepled mass of the cathedral, long and high, rise far into the cloud-freckled blue. . . . We lounged in the gravelled close and gazed insatiably at that most soul-soothing sight, the waning, wasting afternoon light, the visible ether which feels the voices of the chimes, clinging far aloft to the quiet sides of the cathedral-tower. A Passionate Pilgrim. PICTURES FROM HENEY JAMES COUNTRY HOUSES, GARDENS AND PARKS The terrace had the afternoon shade and fairly hung over the prospect that dropped away and encircled it^-the prospect, beyond the series of gardens, of scattered, splendid trees and green glades, an horizon mainly of woods. Nanda Brookenham, one day at the end of July, coming out to find the place as yet unoccupied by other visitors, stood there a while with an air of happy possession. She moved from end to end of the terrace, pausing, gazing about her, taking in the combination of delightful things of old rooms with old decorations that gleamed and gloomed through the high windows, of old gardens that squared themselves in the wide angles of old walls, of wood-walks rustling in the afternoon breeze and stretching away to further reaches of soli- tude and summer. The scene had an expectant stillness that she was too charmed to desire to break ; she watched it, listened to it, followed with her eyes the white butterflies among the flowers below her, then gave a start as the cry of a peacock came to her from an unseen alley. The Awkward Age. Beyond the lawn the house was before him, old, square, red-roofed, well assured of its right to the place it took up in the world. This was a considerable space in the little world at least of Beccles and the look of possession had everywhere mixed with it, in the form of old windows and doors, the tone of old red surfaces, the style of old white facings, the age of old high creepers, the long confirmation of time. Suggestive of panelled rooms, of precious mahogany, of portraits of women dead, of coloured china glim- mering through glass doors, and delicate silver reflected 42 COUNTRY HOUSES AND PARKS on bared tables the thing was one of those impressions of a particular period that it takes two centuries to produce. The Awkward Age. At Mr. Longdon's. The windows of the drawing- room looked at the wet garden, all vivid and rich in the summer shower, and Mitchy accepted freely and familiarly the prospect not only of a grateful, freshened lawn, but of a good hour in the very pick, as he called it, of his actual happy conditions. The favouring rain, the dear old place, the charming serious house, the large inimitable room, the absence of the others the sense of these delights was expressed in his fixed, generous glare. He was at first too pleased even to sit down ; he measured the great space from end to end, admiring again everything he had admired before and protesting afresh that no modern ingenuity could create effects of such purity. The final touch in the picture before them was just the composer's ignorance. Mr. Longdon had not made his house, he had simply lived in it, and the " taste " of the place Mitchy in certain connections abominated the word was nothing more than the beauty of his life. Everything on every side had dropped straight from heaven, with nowhere a bargaining thumb-mark, a single sign of the shop. The Awkward Age. Mr. Longdon's garden took in three acres, and, full of charming features, had for its greatest wonder the extent and colour of its old brick wall, in which the pink and purple surface was the fruit of the mild ages and the protective function, for a visitor strolling, sitting, talking, reading, that of a nurse of reverie. The air of the place, in the August time, thrilled all the while with the bliss of birds, the hum of little lives unseen and the flicker of white butterflies. 43 PICTURES FROM HENEY JAMES The grayish day was soft and still and the sky faintly marbled. . . . There were sitting-places, out of the full light, cushioned benches in the thick wide spread of old mulberry-boughs. . . . The Awkward Age. Little Aggie on the terrace at Mertle. This young lady, established in the pleasant shade on a sofa of light construction designed for the open air, offered the image of a patience of which it was a questionable kindness to break the^spell. It was that beautiful hour when, toward the close of [the happiest days of summer, such places as the great terrace at Mertle present to the fancy a recall of the banquet- hall deserted. . . . There were scattered couples in sight below, and an idle group on the lawn, out of the midst of which, in spite of its detachment, somebody was sharp enough sometimes to cry " Out ! " The high daylight was still in the sky, but with just the fore-knowledge already of the long golden glow in which the many- voiced caw of the rooks would sound at once sociable and sad. The Awkward Age. One of the gardens at Medley took the young man's heart beyond the others : it had high brick walls, on the sunny side of which was a great training of apricots and plums, and straight walks, bordered with old-fashioned, homely flowers, inclosing immense squares where other fruit-trees stood upright, and mint and lavender floated in the air. In the southern quarter it overhung a small, disused canal, and here a high embankment had been raised, which was also long and broad, and covered with fine turf ; so that the top of it made a magnificent grassy terrace. At either end was a curious pavilion, in the manner of a tea-house. One of these pavilions was an asylum for gardeners' tools and superfluous flower-pots ; the 44 COUNTRY HOUSES AND PARKS other was covered inside, with a queer Chinese paper, representing ever so many'times over a group of people with faces like blind kittens, having tea while they sat on the floor. It also contained a big, clumsy, inlaid cabinet, in which cups and saucers showed themselves through doors of greenish glass, together with a carved cocoa-nut and a pair of outlandish idols. On the chimney-piece was a bowl of dried rose-leaves, mixed with some aromatic spice, and the whole place suggested a certain dampness. Princess Casamassima. At Burbeck wherever tea might be served, it went forward with matchless pomp, weather permitting, on a shaded stretch of one of the terraces, and in presence of one of the prospects. It might be said that at Burbeck it was, like everything else, made the most of. It constituted immediately, with multiplied tables and glittering plate, with rugs and cushions and ices and fruit and wonderful porcelain and beautiful women, a scene of splendour, almost an incident of grand opera. One of the beautiful women might have been expected to rise with a gold cup and a celebrated song. The Two Faces. The rich perfection of Gardencourt at once revealed a world and satisfied a need. The large low rooms, with brown ceilings and dusky corners, the deep embrasures and curious ornaments, the quiet light on dark, polished panels, the deep greenness outside, the sense of well-ordered privacy, where in the thick mild air all shrillness dropped out of conversation these things were much to the taste of our young lady, whose taste played a considerable part in her emotions. The Portrait of a Lady. Lord Warburton showed her the house after 45 PICTUBES FROM HENRY JAMES luncheon. Within, it had been a good deal modern- ised ; but as they saw it from the gardens, a stout, gray pile, of the softest, deepest, most weather-fretted hue, rising from a broad, still moat, it seemed to Isabel a castle in a fairy-tale. The day was cool and rather lustreless ; and the watery sunshine rested on the walls in blurred and desultory gleams, washing them, as it were, in places tenderly chosen, where the ache of antiquity was keenest. The Portrait of a Lady. The Wood at Newmarch. Evening. There was a general shade in all the lower reaches a fine clear dusk in garden and grove, a thin suffusion of twilight out of which the greater things, the high tree-tops and pinnacles, the long crests of motionless wood and chimnied roof, rose into the golden air. The last calls of birds sounded extra- ordinarily loud, they were like the timed, serious splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again. I scarce know what odd consciousness I had of roaming at close of day in the grounds of some castle of enchantment. I had positively en- countered nothing to compare with this since the days of fairy tales, and of the childish imagination of the impossible. Then I used to circle round enchanted castles, for then I moved in a world in which the strange " came true." " It was the coming true that was the proof of the enchantment. . . . This was the light in which Mrs. Server, walking alone now, apparently, in the grey wood and pausing at sight of me, showed herself in her clear dress at the end of a vista. It was exactly as if she had been there by the operation of my intelligence, or even by that in a still happier way of my feeling. . . . My few steps brought me to a spot where another perspective crossed our own, so that they made together a verdurous circle with an evening sky above 46 THE WORLD OF ART and great lengthening, arching recesses in which the twilight thickened. Oh, it was quite sufficiently the castle of enchantment, and when I noticed four old stone seats, massive and mossy and symmetrically placed, I recognised not only the influence, in my adventure, of the grand style, but the familiar identity of this consecrated nook, which was so much of the type of all the bemused and remembered. We were in a beautiful old picture, we were in a beautiful old tale, and it wouldn't be the fault of Newmarch if some other green carrefour, not far off, didn't balance with this one and offer the alternative of niches, in the greenness, occupied by weather-stained statues on florid pedestals. The Sacred Fount. THE WORLD OF ART The Picture-Gallery at Newmarch. But we had reached the great pictured saloon with which I had proposed to assist her to renew acquaintance, and in which two visitors had anticipated us. " Why, here he is ! " she exclaimed as we paused, for admiration, in the doorway. The high frescoed ceiling arched over a floor so highly polished that it seemed to reflect the faded pastels set, in rococo borders, in the walls and constituting the distinction of the place. I kept my companion purposely, for a little while, on our side of the room, leaving the others, interested in their observations, to take their time to join us. It gave me occasion to wonder if the question mightn't be cleared up on the spot. . . . Mrs. Server, with her eyes raised to the painted dome, with response charmed almost to solemnity in her exquisite face, struck me at this moment, I had to concede, as more than ever a person to have a lover imputed. The 47 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES place, save for its pictures of later date, a triumph of the florid decoration of two centuries ago, evidently met her special taste, and a kind of profane piety had dropped on her, drizzling down, in the cold light, in silver, in crystal, in faint, mixed delicacies of colour, almost as on a pilgrim at a shrine. I don't know what it was in her save, that is, the positive pitch of delicacy in her beauty that made her, so impressed and presented, indescribably touching. She was like an awestruck child ; she might have been herself all Greuze tints, all pale pinks and blues and pearly whites and candid eyes an old dead pastel under glass. The Sacred Fount. The best of the pictures were arranged in an oaken gallery, of charming proportions, which had a sitting- room at the end of it, and which in the evening was usually lighted. The lamps were on brackets at intervals, and if the light was imperfect, it was genial. It fell upon the vague squares of rich colour and on the faded gilding of heavy frames ; it made a shining on the polished floor of the gallery. The Portrait of a Lady. Oliver Lyon took but a few steps into the wide saloon ; he stood here a moment looking at the bright composition of the lamplit group of fair women, the single figures, the great setting of white and gold, the panels of old damask, in the centre of each of which was a single celebrated picture. There was a subdued lustre in the scene, and an air as of the shining trains of dresses tumbled over the carpet. The Liar. The sala had a gloomy grandeur, but owed its character almost all to its noble shape and to the fine architectural doors, as high as those of grand THE WORLD OF ART frontages, which, leading into the various rooms, repeated themselves on either side at intervals. They were surmounted with old faded painted es- cutcheons, and here and there in the spaces between them hung brown pictures in battered and tarnished frames that were yet more desirable than the canvases themselves. With the exception of several straw- bottomed chairs that kept their backs to the wall, the grand obscure vista contained little else to minister to effect. The Aspern Papers. Bent as he was on working in the modern, which spoke to him with a thousand voices, he judged it better, for long periods, not to haunt the earlier masters, but he was liable to accidental deflections from this theory liable in particular to want to take a look at one of the great portraits of the past. As he stood before them sometimes the perfection of their survival struck him as the supreme eloquence, the reason that included all others, thanks to the language of art, the richest and most universal. Empires and systems and conquests had rolled over the globe and every kind of greatness had risen and passed away ; but the beauty of the great pictures had known nothing of death or change, and the ages had only sweetened their freshness. The same faces, the same figures looked out at different centuries, and when they joined hands they made the indestructible thread on which the pearls of history were hung. The Tragic Muse. The Bronzino was, it appeared, deep within, and the long afternoon light lingered for them on patches of old colour and waylaid them, as they went, in nooks and opening vistas. She found herself for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair : the face of a young woman, 49 E PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES all magnificently drawn, down to the hands, and magnificently dressed ; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high. . . . The lady, with her slightly Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full red lips, her long neck, her re- corded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage only unaccompanied by joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. The Wings of the Dove. He had found Susan Shepherd alone in the great saloon, where even more candles than their friend's large common allowance lighted up the pervasive mystery of Style. . . . Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him. " Well, it is lovely, isn't it ? I want the whole thing. She's lodged for the first time as she ought, from her type, to be ; and doing it I mean bringing out all the glory of the place makes her really happy. It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be with me as the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for effect. If only I had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I should do the scene more honour. The old housekeeper, the woman in charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my thumb for the evening." The Wings of the Dove. The Marriage of Cana by Veronese. The picture had an illusion for him ; it satisfied his conception, which was ambitious, of what a splendid banquet should be. In the left-hand corner is a young woman with yellow tresses confined in a golden head-dress ; she is bending forward and listening, with the smile of a charming woman at a dinner-party, to her neighbour. The American. THE WORLD OF ART At our left, almost from the zenith of the pale evening-sky was suspended one of those gorgeous vertical sunsets that Turner sometimes painted a splendid confusion of purple and green and gold the clouds flying and floating in the wind like the folds of a mighty banner borne by some triumphal fleet which had rounded the curve of the globe. The Landscape Painter. The Collector's daughter. She stood there before him with that particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit of their life together had not closed his sense the appearance of some slight slim draped " antique " of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue ; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of the creature lost in an alien age, and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase, She had always had odd moments of striking him, daughter of his very own though she was, as a figure thus simplified, " generalised " in its grace, a figure with which his human connection was fairly interrupted by some vague analogy of turn and attitude, some- thing shyly mythological and nymph-like. The trick, he was not uncomplacently aware, was mainly of his own mind ; it came from his caring for precious vases only less than for precious daughters. The Golden Bowl. The Golden Bowl. The dealer placed the box on the counter, pushed back a pair of small hooks, lifted the lid and removed from its nest a drinking-vessel larger than a common cup, yet not of exorbitant size, and formed, to appearance, either of old fine gold or PICTURES FROM HENEY JAMES of some material once richly gilt. He handled it with tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin mat. Simple, but singularly elegant, it stood on a circular foot, a short pedestal with a slightly spreading base, and, though not of signal depth, justified its title by the charm of its shape as well as by the tone of its surface. Charlotte, with care, immediately took it up, holding it in both her fine hands, turning it to the light. It was heavier than she had thought. The Golden Bowl. Mr. Gutermann-Seuss. Our visitors found them- selves introduced by the operation of close con- tiguity, to a numerous group of ladies and gentlemen older and younger, and of children larger and smaller, who produced at first the impression of a birthday party, of some anniversary gregariously and religi- ously kept, though they subsequently fell into their places as members of one quiet domestic circle, pre- ponderantly indebted for their being, in fact, to Mr. Gutermann-Suess. To the casual eye a mere smart and shining youth of less than thirty summers, fault- lessly appointed in every particular, he yet stood among his progeny eleven in all, as he confessed without a sigh, eleven little brown clear faces, yet with such impersonal old eyes astride of such imper- sonal old noses. TJ /~ u 7 The Golden Bowl. Mr. Gutermann-Suess had truly, for the crisis, the putting down of his cards, a rare manner ; he was perfect master of what not to say to such a personage as Mr. Verver while the particular importance that dispenses with chatter was diffused by his movements themselves, his repeated act of passage between a featureless mahogany meuUe and a table so virtuously disinterested as to look fairly smug under a cotton cloth of faded maroon and indigo, all redolent of 52 SOME INTERIORS patriarchal teas. The Damascene tiles, successively, and oh so tenderly, unmuffled and revealed, lay there at last in their full harmony and their venerable splendour, the infinitely ancient, the immemorial amethystine blue of the glaze, scarcely more meant to be breathed upon, it would seem, than the cheek of royalty. The Golden Bowl. INTERIORS: MEN, WOMEN AND THEIR ROOMS At noon she awaited him in the cool shade of her little Dutch-looking dining-room. This retreat was at the back of the house, with a view of a scrap of old garden that had been saved from modern ravage ; and though he had on more than one other occasion had his legs under its small and peculiarly polished table of hospitality, the place had never before struck him as so sacred to pleasant knowledge, to intimate charm, to antique order, to a neatness that was almost august. To sit there was, as he had told her before, to see life reflected for the time in ideally kept pewter ; which was somehow becoming, improving to life, so that one's eyes were held and comforted. Strether's were comforted, at all events, now with the charming effect, on the board bare of a cloth and proud of its perfect surface, of the small old crockery and old silver, matched by the more substantial pieces happily disposed about the room. The specimens of vivid Delft, in particular, had the dignity of family portraits. The Ambassadors. Nothing was now likely, he knew, ever to make Alice Staverton better off than she found herself, in the afternoon of life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in Irving Place ... a small, still scene where items and shades, 53 PICTURES FROM HENEY JAMES all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid, and herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver . . . and yet, with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or a prim smooth older one, she looked young through successful indifference. The Jolly Corner. The billiard-room at Fawns. The vast, square, clean apartment was empty, and its clear windows looked out into spaces of terrace and garden, of park and woodland and shining artificial lake, of richly condensed horizon, all dark blue upland and church- towered village and strong cloud-shadow, which were, together, a thing to create the sense, with every one else at church, of one's having the world to one's self. The Golden Bowl. Maggie's room at Fawns. Turned to the east, this side of her room was now in shade, with the two wings of the casement folded back and the charm she always found in her seemingly perched position as if her outlook, from above the high terraces, was that of some castle-tower mounted on a rock. When she stood there she hung over, over the gardens and the woods all of which drowsed below her, at this hour, in the immensity of light. The miles of shade looked hot, the banks of flowers looked dim ; the peacocks on the balustrades let their tails hang limp and the smaller birds lurked among the leaves. The Golden Bowl. Maggie's bedroom in London. Her maid had already left her, and she presented herself, in the large, clear 54 SOME INTERIORS room, where everything was admirable, but where nothing was out of place. She stood there circled about and furnished forth, as always, in a manner that testified to her perfect little personal processes. It had ever been her sign that she was, for all occasions, found ready, without loose ends or exposed accessories or unremoved superfluities ; a suggestion of the swept and garnished, in her whole splendid, yet thereby more or less encumbered and embroidered setting, that reflected her small still passion for order and symmetry, for objects with their backs to the walls, and spoke even of some probable reference, in her American blood, to dusting and polishing New England grandmothers. The Golden Bowl. Nanda's sitting-room. She was in unusual posses- sion of that chamber of comfort in which so much of her life had lately been passed, the redecorated and rededicated room upstairs, in which she had enjoyed a due measure both of solitude and society. Passing the objects about her in review she gave especial attention to her rather marked wealth of books ; changed repeatedly for five minutes the position of various volumes, transferred to tables those that were on shelves and rearranged shelves with an eye to the effect of backs. " Company " in short was in the air and expectation in the picture. The flowers on the little tables bloomed with a consciousness sharply taken up by the glitter of knick-knacks and repro- duced in turn in the light exuberance of cushions on sofas and the measured drop of blinds in windows. The friends in the photographs in particular were highly prepared, with small intense faces each, that happened in every case to be turned to the door. The Awkward Age. Tishy Grendon's drawing-room. The footman, 55 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES opening the door, mumbled his name without sin- cerity, and Vanderbank, passing in, found in fact for he had caught the symptom the chairs and tables, the lighted lamps and the flowers alone in possession. There was nothing indeed but Mrs. Grendon's want of promptness that failed of a wel- come : her drawing-room, on the January night, showed its elegance through a suffusion of pink electricity which melted, at the end of the vista, into the faintly golden glow of a retreat still more sacred. Vanderbank walked after a moment into the second room, which also proved empty and which had its little globes of white fire discreetly limited in number coated with lemon-covered silk. The walls, covered with delicate French mouldings, were so fair that they seemed vaguely silvered ; the low French chimney had a French fire. There was a lemon-coloured stuff on the sofa and chairs, a wonderful polish on the floor that was largely exposed, and a copy of a French novel in blue paper on one of the spindle-legged tables. The Awkward Age. The hall at Bounds. Bright, large and high, richly decorated and freely used, full of " corners " and communications, it evidently played equally the part of a place of reunion and of a place of transit. It contained so many large pictures that if they hadn't looked somehow so recent it might have passed for a museum. The shaded summer was in it now, and the odour of many flowers, as well as the tick from the chimney-piece of a huge French clock which Jean recognised as modern. The colour of the air, the frank floridity, amused and charmed her. The Other House. The greatest of the parlourmaids came from the hall into the drawing-room at Eastmead the high, 56 SOME INTERIORS square temple of mahogany and tapestry in which, the last few years, Mrs. Beever had spent much time in rejoicing that she had never set up new gods. She had left it from the first, as it was she had not unassistedly discovered the beauty of her heritage, and she had not from any such subtle suspicion kept her hands off it. She had never in her life taken any course with regard to any object for reasons that had so little to do with her duty. Everything in her house stood, at an angle of its own, on the solid rock of the discipline it had cost her. She had therefore lived with mere dry wistfulness through the age of rosewood, and had been rewarded by finding that, like those who sit still in runaway vehicles, she was the only person not thrown out. Her mahogany had never moved, but the way people talked about it had, and the people who talked were now eager to sit down with her on everything that both she and they had anciently thought plainest and poorest. It was Jean, above all, who had opened her eyes opened them in particular to the great wine-dark doors, polished and silver-hinged, with which the lady of Eastmead, arriving at the depressed formula that they were " gloomy," had for thirty years, prudently on the whole, as she considered, shut out the question of taste. The Other House. Poynton. Wandering through clear chambers where the general effect made preferences almost as impossible as if they had been shocks, pausing at open doors where vistas were long and bland, she would, even if she had not already known, have discovered for herself that Poynton was the record of a life. It was written in great syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you looked out 57 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES of old windows it was England that was the wide embrace. While outside, on the low terraces, she contradicted gardeners and refined on nature, Mrs. Gereth left her guest to finger fondly the brasses that Louis Quinze might have thumbed, to sit with Venetian velvets just held in a loving palm, to hang over cases of enamels and pass and repass before cabinets. There were not many pictures the panels and the stuffs were themselves the picture : and in all the great wainscoted house there was not an inch of pasted paper. . . . The whole place, perversely fair on October afternoons, looked, to begin with, through some effect of season and light, larger than ever, immense, and it was all filled with the hush of sorrow, which in turn was all charged with memories. . . . Mrs. Gereth had drawn back every curtain and removed every cover ; she prolonged the vistas, opened wide the whole house, gave it an appearance of awaiting a royal visit. The shimmer of wrought substances spent itself in the brightness ; the old golds and brasses, old ivories and bronzes, the fresh old tapestries and deep old damasks threw out a radiance in which the poor woman saw in solution all her old loves and patiences, all her old tricks and triumphs. The Spoils of Poynton. I sat alone, conscious, in the dark, dismantled, simplified room, in the deep silence of the strange influence, half sad, half sweet, that abides in houses uninhabited or about to become so in places muffled and bereaved, where the unheeded sofas and patient belittered tables seem to know that it is the eve of a journey. The Patagonia. Ricks. " Why, it's charming ! " she exclaimed, turning back again into the small prim parlour from a 58 SOME INTERIORS friendly advance to the single plate of the window. Mrs. Gereth hated such windows, the one flat glass, sliding up and down, especially when they enjoyed a view of four iron pots on pedestals, painted white and containing ugly geraniums, ranged on the edge of a gravel-path and doing their best to give it the air of a terrace. . . . The room was practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling guiltless of curve or cornice and marked merely by the little band of crimson paper glued round the top of the other paper, a turbid grey sprigged with silver flowers. . . . The Spoils of Poynton. The consulting-room. The very place, at the end of a few minutes, the commodious, " handsome " room, far back in the fine old house, soundless from position, somewhat sallow with years of celebrity, somewhat sombre even at midsummer the very place put on for her a look of custom and use, squared itself solidly round her as with promises and certainties. The Wings of the Dove. Before the fire in the great room that was all arabesques and cherubs, all gaiety and gilt, and that was warm at that hour too with a wealth of autumn sun, the situation had been sublime. The Wings of the Dove. The horrible word (divorce) had been bandied lightly enough in her presence under those somewhat austere ceilings of Mellows, of which the admired decorations and mouldings, in the taste of the middle of the last century, all in delicate plaster and reminding her of Wedgwood pottery, consisted of slim festoons, urns and trophies and knotted ribbons, so many symbols of domestic affection and irrevocable union. A London Life. 59 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES An American Library. At one end stands a great fireplace, with a florid, fantastic mantelpiece in carved white marble. Over the mantelshelf is a large landscape, a fine Gainsborough, full of the complicated harmonies of an English summer. Beneath it stands a row of bronzes of the Renaissance and potteries of the Orient. . . . The charm of the room lies in the absence of certain pedantic tones the browns, blacks and grays which distinguish most libraries. The apartment is of the feminine gender. There are half a dozen light colours scattered about pink in the carpet, tender blue in the curtains, yellow in the chairs. A Light Man. The place was almost luxuriously furnished and comfortable ; it told of habitation being practised as a fine art. It contained a variety of those faded hangings of damask and tapestry, those chests and cabinets of carved and time-polished oak, those perverse-looking relics of mediaeval brass and pottery, of which Italy has long been the not quite exhausted storehouse. The Portrait of a Lady. Verena told him that Olive had taken her cottage furnished, but that the paucity of chairs and tables and bedsteads was such that their little party used almost to sit down, and to lie down, in turns. On the other hand they had all George Eliot's writings, and two photographs of the Sistine Madonna. The Bostonians. The room had its bright, durable, sociable air, the air that Laura Wing liked in so many English things that of being meant for daily life, for long periods, for uses of high decency. A London Life. 60 SOME INTERIORS A Studio. The place, high, handsome, neat, with two or three pale tapestries and several rare old pieces of furniture, showed a perfection of order, an absence of loose objects, as if it had been swept and squared for the occasion and made almost too immacu- late. It was polished and cold rather cold for the season and the weather, and Stuart Straith himself, buttoned and brushed, as fine and as clean as his room, might at her arrival have reminded her of the master of a neat, bare ship on his deck awaiting a cargo. Broken Wings. He introduced them to the rather cold and blank little studio which he had lent to a comrade. . . . The comrade was another ingenuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea was to await them " regard- less " ; and this reckless repast, and the second in- genuous compatriot, and the far-away make-shift life, with its jokes and its gaps, its delicate daubs and its three or four chairs, its overflow of taste and its lack of almost all else these things wove round the occa- sion a spell to which our hero unreservedly surrendered. The Ambassadors. The Sculptor's home. The place itself was a great impression a small pavilion, clear-faced and seques- tered, an effect of polished parquet, of fine white panel and spare, sallow gilt, of decoration delicate and rare in the heart of the Faubourg St. Germain and on the edge of a cluster of gardens attached to old, noble houses. ... It was in the garden, a spacious, cherished remnant, that Chad's host presently met them ; while the tall, bird-haunted trees, all of a twitter with the spring and the weather, and the high party-walls on the other side of which grave hdtels stood off for privacy, spoke of survival, transmission, association, a strong, indifferent, persistent order. The Ambassadors. 61 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES Her small rooms had the peculiarity that everything they contained appeared to testify with vividness to her position in society, quite as if they had been furnished by the bounty of admiring friends. They were adorned indeed almost exclusively with objects that nobody buys, as had more than once been re- marked by. spectators of her own sex, for herself, and would have been luxurious if luxury consisted mainly in photographic portraits slashed across with signa- tures, in baskets of flowers beribboned with the cards of passing compatriots, and in a neat collection of red volumes, blue volumes, alphabetical volumes, aids to London lucidity, of every sort, devoted to adiesses and engagements. Mrs. Medwin. A small drawing-room, a faded bower of photo- graphs fenced in and bedimmed by folding screens out of which sallow persons of fashion with dashing signatures looked at you from retouched eyes and little windows of plush. The Next Time. Lancaster Gate looked rich He hadn't known that he should " mind " so much how an independent lady might decorate her house. It was the language of the house itself that spoke to him, writing out for him, with surpassing breadth and freedom, the associations and conceptions, the ideals and possi- bilities of the mistress. He had never dreamed of anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and corded, drawn everywhere so tight, and curled every- where so thick. He had never dreamed of so much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush, so much rosewood and marble and malachite. The Wings of the Dove. Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once 62 SOME INTERIORS as a distinguished stranger a stranger to the little Chelsea street who was making the best of a queer episode and a place of exile. A part of the queerness sprang from the air as of a general large misfit im- posed on the narrow room by the scale and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments were, clearly, relics and survivals of what would have been called better days. The curtains that over-draped the windows, the sofas and tables that stayed circulation, the chimney-ornaments that reached to the ceiling, and the florid chandelier that almost dropped to the floor, were so many mementoes of earlier homes. The Wings of the Dove. She occupied in the Rue de Bellechasse, the first floor of an old house to which our visitors had had access from an old clean court. The court was large and open, full of revelations, for our friend, of the habit of privacy, the peace of intervals, the dignity of distances and approaches ; the house, to his rest- less sense, was in the high, homely style of an elder day, and the ancient Paris that he was always looking for was in the immemorial polish of the wide waxed staircase and in the fine boiseries, the medallions, the mouldings, mirrors, great clear spaces, of the greyish- white salon into which he had been shown. He seemed to see her, at the outset, in the midst of possessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary, cherished, charming. ... He found himself making out, as a background of the occupant, some glory, some prosperity of the first Empire, some Napoleonic glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend ; elements clinging still to all the consular chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes' heads and faded surfaces of satin striped with alternate silk. . . . The Ambassadors. In Mme. de Vionnet's drawing-room. How old 63 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES Paris continued to echo there ; but the post-revo- lutionary period, the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand, of Mme. de Stael, of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects, ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his knowledge, been in the presence of relics, of any special dignity, of a private order little old minia- tures, medallions, pictures, books ; books in leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back, ranged, together with other promis- cuous properties, under the glass of brass-mounted cabinets. The Ambassadors. She was seated, near the fire, on a small stuffed and fringed chair, one of the few modern articles in the room ; and she leaned back in it with her hands clasped in her lap and no movement, in all her person, but the fine, prompt play of her deep young face. The fire, under the low white marble, undraped and academic, had burnt down to the silver ashes of light wood ; one of the windows, at a distance, stood open to the mildness and the stillness, out of which, in the short pauses, came the faint sound, pleasant and homely, almost rustic, of a plash and a clatter of sabots from some coach-house on the other side of the court. The Ambassadors. She went part of the way with him, accompanying him out of the room and into the next and the next. . . . The whole thing made a vista, which he found high, melancholy and sweet full, once more, of dim, historic shades, of the faint, far-away cannon-roar of the great Empire. It was doubtless half the pro- jection of his mind, but his mind was the thing that, among the old waxed parquets, pale tones of pink 64 SOME INTERIORS and green, pseudo-classic candelabra, he had always needfully to reckon with. The Ambassadors. The light in her beautiful formal room was dim, though it would do, as everything would always do ; the hot night had kept out lamps, but there was a pair of clusters of candles that glimmered over the chimney- piece like the tall tapers of an altar. The windows were all open, their redundant hangings swaying a little, and he heard once more, from the empty court, the small plash of the fountain. The Ambassadors. His hostess was dressed as for thunderous times, and it fell in with the kind of imagination we have attributed to him that she should be in simplest, coolest white, of a character so old-fashioned, if he were not mistaken, that Madame Roland on the scaffold, must have worn something like it. This effect was enhanced by a small black fichu, or scarf, of crape or gauze, disposed quaintly round her bosom and now completing, as by a mystic touch, the pathetic, the noble analogy. Poor Strether in fact scarce knew what analogy was evoked for him as the charming woman, receiving and making him, as she could do such things, at once familiarly and gravely welcome, moved over her great room with her image almost repeated in its polished floor, which had been fully bared for summer. The Ambassadors. She had stood a stair or two below him ; where, while she looked up at him beneath the high, domed light of the hall, she rubbed with her palm the polished mahogany of the balustrade, which was mounted on fine ironwork, Eighteenth-Century English. The Golden Bowl. 6 5 F PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES The salon of the dowager Marquise de Bellegarde. It was a vast high room, with elaborate and ponderous mouldings, painted a whitish grey ; with a great deal of faded and carefully repaired tapestry in the door- ways and chair-backs ; a Turkey carpet in light colours, still soft and deep, in spite of great antiquity ; and portraits of each of Madame de Bellegarde's children, at the age of ten, suspended against an old screen of red silk. The room was illumined, exactly enough for conversation, by half a dozen candles, placed in odd corners, at a great distance apart. In a deep armchair, near the fire, sat an old lady in black. . . . She wore a little black velvet hood tied under her chin, and she was wrapped in an old black cashmere shawl. The American. She (the daughter of the house) was the best thing they had to show she was the flower and the charm of the place. It had other charms as well it was a sleepy, silvery old home, exquisitely grey and ex- quisitely green ; a house where you could have con- fidence in your leisure ; it would be as genuine as the butter and the claret. The very look of the pleasant, prosaic drawing-room suggested long mornings of fancy work, of Berlin wool and premeditated patterns, new stitches and mild pauses. My good Helen was always in the middle of some thing eternal, of which the past and the future were rolled up in oilcloth and tissue paper, and the intensest moments of conversa- tion were when it was spread out for pensive opinions. These used to drop sometimes even from Christopher Chantry when he straddled vaguely in with muddy leggings and the raw materials of a joke. He had a mind like a large, full milk-pan, and his wit was as thick as cream. The Visits. 66 SOME INTERIORS Charlotte at the piano. Every evening, after dinner, Charlotte Stant played to him ; seated at the piano and requiring no music, she went through his " favourite things " and he had many favourites with a facility that never failed, or that failed just enough to pick itself up at a touch from his fitful voice. It was a manner of passing the time that rather replaced conversation, but the air, at the end, none the less, before they separated, had a way of seeming full of the echoes of talk. The Golden Bowl. CHAPTER IV THE PASSIONS MADAME DE CINTRE paused again, and her mingled sound and silence were so sweet to him that he had no wish to hurry her, any more than he would have had a wish to hurry a golden sunrise. " Your being so different, which at first seemed a difficulty, a trouble, began one day to seem to me a pleasure, a great pleasure. My family would have said I could never be happy with you you were too different ; and I would have said it was just because you were so different that I might be happy. . . . My only reason " and she paused again. But this time, in the midst of his golden sunrise, Newman felt the impulse to grasp at a rosy cloud. " Your only reason is that you love me ! " he murmured. The American. The tide was rather low ; he walked slowly down to the line of the breaking waves. The sea looked huge and black and simple. Bernard stood there some time ; there was nothing but the sound and the sharp fresh smell. Suddenly he put his hand to his heart ; it was beating very fast. An immense conviction had come over him and for a moment he held his breath. It was like a word spoken into the darkness ; he held his breath to listen. He was in love with Angela Vivian, and his love was a throbbing passion ! Confidence. 68 THE PASSIONS It was on the journey to London that Sherringham indulged in some of those questionings of his state. By the time he reached Charing Cross it suddenly came over him that they were futile. Now that he had left the girl, a subversive, unpremeditated heart- beat told him it made him hold his breath a minute in the carriage that he had after all not escaped. He was in love with her ; he had been in love with her from the first hour. The Tragic Muse. And so for a minute they stood together, as strongly held and as closely confronted as any hour of their easier past ever had seen them. They were silent at first, only facing and faced, only grasping and grasped, only meeting and met. " It's sacred/' he said at last. "It's sacred," she breathed back to him. They vowed it, gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more closely together. Then of a sudden, through this tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow strait into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure their response, and their response their pressure ; with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately sealed their pledge. The Golden BowL She had lived long enough to make out for herself that any deep-seated passion has its pangs as well as its joys, and that we are made by its aches and its anxieties most richly conscious of. She had never doubted of the force of the feeling that bound her to her husband ; but to become aware, almost suddenly, that it had begun to vibrate with a violence that had some of the effect of a strain would, rightly looked at, after all but show that she was, like thousands of PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES women, every day, acting up to the full privilege of passion. The Golden Bowl. Jealousy. A definition. " My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous or are only jealous a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you are, in the same proportion, jealous ; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When, however, you love in the most abyssmal and unutterable way of all why then you're beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down." The Golden Bowl. " Ah, when it isn't mere misery ! " The words had broken from her in a sudden loud cry, and what next happened was that the very sound of her pain upset her. She heard her own true note ; she turned short away from him ; in a moment she had burst into sobs ; in another his arms were round her ; the next she had let herself go. ... He clasped her, and she gave herself she poured out her tears on his breast. Something prisoned and pent throbbed and gushed ; something deep and sweet surged up some- thing that came from far within and far off, that had begun with the sight of him in his indifference and had never had rest since then. The surrender was short, but the relief was long : she felt his warm lips on her face and his arms tighten with his full divination. What she did, what she had done, she scarcely knew ; she only was aware, as she broke from him again of what had taken place within his panting soul. What had taken place was that, with the click of a spring, he saw. He had cleared the high wall at a bound ; they were together without a veil. She had not a shred of a secret left ; it was as if a whirlwind had come and gone, laying low the great false front that 70 THE PASSIONS she had built up stone by stone. The strangest thing of all was the momentary sense of desolation. The Spoils of Poynton. He had told her that she was an enchantress, and this assertion, too, had its measure of truth. But her spell was a steady one ; it sprang not from her beauty, her wit, her grace it sprang from her character. In other words Gertrude exercised the magnificent power of making her lover forget her face. Poor Richard. Pieties. Women were capable of these mysteries o: sentiments, these intensities of fidelity and there were moments in which Maurice GlanviTs heart beat strangely before a vision really so sublime. He seemed to understand now by what miracle Fanny Knocker had been beautified the miracle of heroic docilities and accepted pangs and vanquished egotisms. It had never come in a night, but it had come by living for others. She was living for others still. . . . The Wheel of Time. What could be a happier gift in a companion than a quick, fanciful mind, which saved one repetitions, and reflected one's thoughts upon a scintillating surface ? Osmund disliked to see his thought repro- duced literally that made it look stale and stupid ; this lady's intelligence was to be a silver plate, not an earthen one a plate that he might heap up with ripe fruits, to which it would give a decorative value, so that conversation might become a sort of perpetual dessert. He found the silvery quality in perfection in Isabel. The Portrait of a Lady. Their worship of their mother's memory, their recognition of her sacred place in their past, 71 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES her exquisite influence in their father's life, his fortune, his career, in the whole history of the family and welfare of the house their hushed tenderness over all this was a kind of religion, and also a sort of honour, in falling away from which there was a semblance of treachery. This was not the way people usually felt in London, she knew ; but, strenuous, ardent, observant girl as she was, with secrecies of sentiment and dim originalities of attitude, she had already made up her mind that London was no place to look for delicacies. Remembrance there was hammered thin, and to be faithful was to be a bore. The patient dead were sacrificed ; they had no shrines, for people were literally ashamed of mourning. When they had hustled all sensibility out of their lives, they invented the fiction that they felt too much to utter. The Marriages. George Stransom had formed little by little the habit of remembering his Dead : it had come to him tolerably early in life that there was something one had to do for them. They were there in their simpli- fied, intensified essence, their conscious absence and expressive patience, as personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb. When all sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if their purgatory were really still on earth ; they asked so little that they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day of the hard usage of life. They had no organised service, no reserved place, no honour, no shelter, no safety. ... So, on George Stransom's part, there grew up with the years a determination that he at least would do something, do it, that is for his own, and perform the great charity without reproach. Every man had his own, and. every man had, to meet this charity, the ample resources of the soul. ... It suited his inclination, it satisfied his spirit, it gave employment 72 THE PASSIONS to his piety. It answered his love of great offices, of a solemn and splendid ritual ; for no shrine could be more bedecked and no ceremonial more stately than those to which his worship was attached. He had no imagination about these things save that they were accessible to every one who should ever feel the need of them. The poorest could build such temples of the spirit could make them blaze with candles and smoke with incense, make them flush with pictures and flowers. The cost, in the common phrase, of keeping them up fell entirely on the liberal heart. The Altar of the Dead. The dead friend. She was all cleverness and sympathy and charm ; her house had been the very easiest in all the world, and her friendship the very firmest. Without accidents he had loved her, without accidents every one had loved her : she had made the passions about her as regular as the moon makes the tides. While he smoked, after dinner, he had a book in his lap, but he had no eyes for his page ; his eyes, in the swarming void of things, seemed to have caught Kate Creston's, and it was into their sad silences he looked. It was to him her sentient spirit had turned, knowing that it was of her he would think. He thought for a long time, of how the closed eyes of dead women could still live how they could open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their last. They had looks that remained, as great poets had quoted lines. The Altar of the Dead. To the treatment of time the malady of life begins at a given moment to succumb. The Altar of the Dead. The home of Stransom's friend. The vanished aunt was present, as he looked about him, in the small 73 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES complacencies of the room, the beaded velvet and the fluted moreen ; and though, as we know, he had the worship of the Dead, he found himself not definitely regretting this lady. . . . When they had sat a while in the pale parlour, she got up and said : " This isn't my room ; let us go into mine/' They had only to cross the narrow hall, as he found, to pass into quite another air. When she had closed the door of the second room, as she called it, he felt that he had at last real possession of her. The place had the flush of life it was expressive ; its dark red walls were articulate with memories and relics. These were simple things photographs and water-colours, scraps of writing framed and ghosts of flowers em- balmed ; but only a moment was needed to show him they had a common meaning. The Altar of the Dead. PORTRAITS OF WOMEN Madame de Cintre was so tall and yet so light, so active and yet so still, so elegant and yet so simple, so frank and yet so mysterious ! . . . Newman could not have told you what warrant he had for talking about mysteries ; if it had been his habit to express himself in poetic figures he might have said that in observing her he seemed to see the vague circle which sometimes accompanies the partly-filled disk of the moon. . . . She gave him the sense of an elaborate education, of her having passed through mysterious ceremonies and processes of culture in her youth, of her having been fashioned and made flexible to certain exalted social needs. . . . Her personal qualities the luminous sweetness of her eyes, the delicate mobility of her face, the deep liquidity of her voice filled all his consciousness. A rose-crowned Greek of old, gazing at a marble goddess with his whole bright intellect resting satisfied in the act, could not have 74 PORTRAITS OF WOMEN been a more complete embodiment of the wisdom that loses itself in the enjoyment of quiet harmonies. The American. ^Madame de Vionnet. She was dressed in black, but in black that struck him as light and transparent ; she was exceedingly fair, and, though she was as markedly slim, her face had a roundness, with eyes far apart and a little strange. Her smile was natural and dim ; her hat not extravagant ; he had only perhaps a sense of the clink, beneath her fine black sleeves, of more gold bracelets and bangles than he had ever seen a lady wear. The Ambassadors. Madame Vionnet at a party. Her bare shoulders and arms were white and beautiful ; the materials of her dress, a mixture, as he supposed, of silk and crape, were of a silvery grey so artfully composed as to give an impression of warm splendour ; and round her neck she wore a collar of large old emeralds, the green note of which was more dimly repeated, at the points of her apparel, in embroidery, in enamel, in satin, in substances and textures vaguely rich. Her head, extremely fair and exquisitely festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion of the antique, on an old precious medal, some silver coin of the Renaissance ; while her slim lightness and brightness, her gaiety, her expres- sion, her decision, contributed to an effect that might have been felt by a poet as half -mythological and half- conventional. He could have compared her to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud, or to a sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge. The Ambassadors. Madame Vionnet in Notre Dame. She reminded our friend since it was the way of nine-tenths of his current impressions to act as recalls of things imagined 75 PICTURES FROM HENEY JAMES of some fine, firm, concentrated heroine of an old story, something he had heard, read, something that, had he had a hand for drama, he might himself have written, renewing her courage, renewing her clearness, in splendidly protected meditation. . . . She carried her head moreover, even in the sacred shade, with a discernible faith in herself, a kind of implied conviction of consistency, serenity, impunity. The Ambassadors. Eugenia, Baroness Munster. She carried her three- and-thirty years as a light-wristed Hebe might have carried a brimming wine-cup. . . . She had a great abundance of crisp, dark hair, finely frizzled, which was always braided in a manner that suggested some Southern or Eastern, some remotely foreign woman. She had a large collection of earrings, and wore them in alternation ; and they seemed to give point to her Oriental or exotic aspect. The Europeans. Madame Clairin. Fortune had played her a terrible trick, but had found an adversary and not a victim. Though quite without beauty, she had always had what is called the grand air, and her air from this time forth was grander than ever. As she trailed about in her sable furbelows, tossing back her well-groomed head, and holding up her vigilant eye-glass, she seemed to be sweeping the whole field of society and asking herself where she should pluck her revenge. . . . Mme. de Mauves. Cecilia was a very clever woman, and a skilful counter-plotter to adversity. She had made herself a charming home, her economies were not obtrusive, and there was always a cheerful flutter in the folds of her crape. Roderick Hudson. PORTRAITS OF WOMEN Charlotte Stant. He saw again that her thick hair was, vulgarly speaking, brown, but that there was a shade of tawny autumn leaf in it, for " appreciation " a colour indescribable and of which he had known no other case, something that gave her at moments the sylvan head of a huntress. He saw the sleeves of her jacket drawn to her wrists, but he again made out the free arms within them to be the completely rounded, the polished slimness that Florentine sculptors, in the great time, had loved, and of which the apparent firmness is expressed in their old silver and old bronze. He knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers and the shape and colour of her finger-nails, he knew her special beauty of movement and line when she turned her head back, and the perfect working of all her main attachments, that of some wonderful finished instrument, something in- tently made for exhibition, for a prize. He knew above all the extraordinary fineness of her flexible waist, the stem of an expanded flower. The Golden Bowl. Verena Tarrant had curious, radiant, liquid eyes (their smile was a sort of reflection, like the glisten of a gem), and though she was not tall, she appeared to spring up, and carried her head as if it reached rather high. Her splendid hair seemed to shine ; her cheek and chin had a curve which struck him by its fineness ; her eyes and lips were full of smiles and greetings. She had appeared to him before as a creature of brightness, but now she lighted up the place, she irradiated, she made everything that surrounded her of no consequence ; dropping upon the shabby sofa with an effect as charming as if she had been a nymph sinking on a leopard-skin, and with the native sweet- ness of her voice forcing him to listen till she spoke again. The Bostonians. 77 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES Mrs. Pocock. He had always seen Sarah gracious had in fact rarely seen her shy or dry ; her marked, thin-lipped smile, intense without brightness, and as prompt to act as the scrape of a safety-match ; the protrusion of her rather remarkably long chin, which in her case represented invitation and urbanity, and not, as in most others, pugnacity and defiance ; the pene- tration of her voice to a distance, the general en- couragement and approval of her manner, were all elements with which intercourse had made him familiar. The Ambassadors. Mamie. She was robust and conveniently tall, just a trifle too bloodlessly fair perhaps, but with a pleasant, public, familiar radiance that affirmed her vitality. She might have been " receiving " for Woollett wherever she found herself, and there was something in her manner, her tone, her motion, her pretty blue eyes, her pretty perfect teeth, and her very small too small nose that immediately placed her, to the fancy, between the windows of a hot, bright room in which voices were high up at that end to which people were brought to be " presented." The Ambassadors. Maria Gostrey. She waited for him in the garden, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh, soft and elastic light gloves, and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which, as he approached her over the small, smooth lawn and in the watery English sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation, have marked as the model for such an occasion. . . . She affected him as almost insolently young ; but an easily-carried five-and-thirty could still do that. . . . Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face to face over a small table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades ; and the rose-coloured shades PORTRAITS OF WOMEN and the small table and the soft fragrance of the lady had anything to his mere sense ever been so soft ? were so many touches in he scarce knew what positive high picture. The Ambassadors. Fanny, Mrs. Assingham. The spectator might have found his account, aesthetically, in some gratified play of our modern sense of type, so scantly to be distin- guished from our modern sense of beauty. Type was there, at the worst, in Mrs. Assingham's dark, neat head, on which the crisp black hair made waves so fine and numerous that she looked even more in the fashion of the hour than she desired. . . . Her rich- ness of hue, her generous nose, her eyebrows marked like those of an actress these things, with an added amplitude of person on which middle age had set its seal, seemed to present her insistently as a daughter of the South, or still more of the East, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets, and waited upon by slaves. She looked as if her most active effort might be to take up, as she lay back, her mandolin, or to share a sugared fruit with a pet gazelle. She was in fact, however, neither a pampered Jewess nor a lazy Creole ; New York had been, recordedly, her birth-place, and " Europe " punctually her discipline. The Golden Bowl. The many friends of the Faranges drew together to differ about them. . . . The pair appeared to have a social attraction which failed merely as regards each other. ... It was generally felt, to begin with, that they were awfully good-looking they had really not been analysed to a deeper residuum. They made up together, for instance, some twelve feet of stature, and nothing was more discussed than the apportionment of this quantity. . . . Billiards were Ida's great 79 PICTURES FROM HENEY JAMES accomplishment, and the distinction her name always first produced the mention of. Notwithstanding some very long lines everything about her that might have been large, and that in many women profited by the licence was, with a single exception, admired and cited for its smallness. The exception was her eyes, which might have been of mere regulation size, but which overstepped the modesty of nature ; her mouth, on the other hand, was barely perceptible, and odds were freely taken as regards the measurement of her waist. What Maisie Knew. Kate Croy. She stared into the tarnished glass too hard indeed to be staring at her beauty alone. She readjusted the poise of her black, closely- feathered hat. She was dressed altogether in black, which gave an even tone, by contrast to her clear face and made her hair more harmoniously dark. Outside, on the balcony, her eyes showed as blue ; within, at the mirror, they showed almost as black. She was handsome, but the degree of it was not sustained by items and aids ; she had stature without height, grace without motion, presence without mass. Slender and simple, frequently soundless, she was somehow always in the line of the eye she counted singularly for its pleasure. The Wings of the Dove. Julia Dallow. If it had not been for her extreme delicacy of line and surface she might have been called bold ; but as it was she looked refined and quiet refined by tradition and quiet for a purpose. And altogether she was beautiful, with the pure style of her capable head, her hair like darkness, her eyes like early twilight, her mouth like a rare pink flower. The Tragic Muse. 80 PORTRAITS OF WOMEN Mrs. Dallow never offered explanations : she always assumed that no one could invent them so well as those who had the florid taste to desire them. The Tragic Muse. Lady Fanny, magnificent, simple, stupid, had almost the stature of her brother, a forehead un- surpassably low and an air of sombre concentration just sufficiently corrected by something in her move- ments that failed to give it a point. Her blue eyes were heavy in spite of being perhaps a couple of shades too clear, and the wealth of her black hair, the disposition of the massive coils of which was all her own, had a satin sheen depreciated by the current fashion. But the great thing in her was that she was, with unconscious heroism, thoroughly herself. . . . The Awkward Age. Miss Searle, as she stood there, half in the cool twilight, half in the arrested glow of the fire as it spent itself in the vastness of the marble cave, was a figure for a painter. She was habited in some faded splendour of sea-green crape and silk, a piece of millinery which, though it must have witnessed a number of dull dinners, preserved still a festive air. Over her white shoulders she wore an ancient web of the most precious and venerable lace, and about her rounded throat a single circle of large pearls. A Passionate Pilgrim. Lady Davenant struck the girl rather as a fine portrait than as a living person. ... It was the hand of a master that Laura seemed to see in her face, the witty expression of which shone like a lamp through the ground-glass of her good breeding. She expected a great deal of attention, always wore gloves in the house, and never had anything in her hand but a book. 81 G PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES Mrs. Berrington had long cheeks and kind eyes, and was devoted to birds ; somehow she always made Laura think secretly of a tablet of fine white soap nothing else was so smooth and clean. A London Life. Madame Grandoni had worn from time immemorial an old blue satin dress and a white crape shawl embroidered in colours ; her appearance was ridicu- lous, but she had an interminable Teutonic pedigree, and her manners in every presence were easy and jovial, as became a lady whose ancestor had been cup- bearer to Frederick Barbarossa ; she had beneath her crumpled bodice a deep-welling fund of Teutonic sentiment. Roderick Hudson. Mrs. Meldrum. She was the heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women, the least apologetic, the least morbid in her misfortune. She carried it high aloft, with loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the breeze as if had been the flag of her country. She had the tread of a grenadier and the voice of an angel. Glasses. Miss Wenham, fifty-five years of age, and un- appeasably timid, unaccountably strange, had, on her reduced scale, an almost Gothic grotesqueness. . . . More flurried, more spasmodic, more apolo- getic, more completely at a loss at one moment and more precipitately abounding at another, he had never before in all his days seen any maiden lady. . . . Her eyes protruded, her chin receded and her nose carried on in conversation a queer little independent motion. She wore on the top of her head an upright circular cap that made her resemble a caryatid dis- burdened, and on other parts of her person strange 82 PORTRAITS OF WOMEN combinations of colours, stuffs, shapes, of metal, mineral and plant. The term of comparison most present to him was that of some obsolete musical instrument. The old-time order of her mind and her air had the stillness of a painted spinnet that was duly dusted, gently rubbed, but never tuned nor played on. Her opinions were like dried rose leaves ; her attitudes like British sculpture ; her voice was what he imagined of the possible tone of the old gilded, silver-stringed harp in one of the corners of the drawing-room. The lonely little decencies and modest dignities of her life, the fine grain of its conservatism, the innocence of its ignorance, all its monotony of stupidity and salubrity, its cold dulness and dim brightness, were there before him. Flickerbridge. The Misses Molyneux were not in then: first youth, but they had bright, fresh complexions, and something of the smile of childhood. Their eyes were quiet and contented, and their figures, of a generous roundness, were encased in sealskin jackets. The Portrait of a Lady. Miss Frush. She was a bland, shy, sketching person, whom fate had condemned to a monotony triumphing over variety of Swiss and Italian pensions ; in any of which, with her well-fastened hat, her gauntlets and her stout boots, her camp- stool, her sketch-book, her Tauchnitz novel, she would have served with peculiar propriety as a frontispiece to the natural history of the English old maid. She would have struck you indeed, poor Miss Frush, as so happy an instance of the type that you would perhaps scarce have been able to equip her with the dignity of the individual. This was what she enjoyed, however, for those brought nearer a very insistent 83 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES identity once even of prettiness, but which now, blanched and bony, timid and inordinately queer, with its utterance all vague interjection and its aspect all eye-glass and teeth, might be acknowledged without inconvenience and deplored without reserve. Miss Amy, her kinswoman who, ten years her junior, showed a different figure Miss Amy was brown, brisk, expressive, and when really young she had even been pronounced showy. She had an innocent vanity on the subject of her foot, a member which she somehow regarded as a guarantee of her wit, or at least of her good taste. The Third Person. Mrs. Lowder. She would have been a wonderful lioness for a show, an extraordinary figure in a cage or anywhere ; majestic, magnificent, high-coloured, all brilliant gloss, perpetual satin, twinkling bugles, and flashing gems, with a lustre of agate eyes, a sheen of raven hair, a polish of complexion that was like that of well-kept china and that as if the skin were too tight told especially at curves and corners. Her niece had a quiet name for her she talked to herself of Britannia of the Market Place. The Wings of the Dove. Mrs. Churchley. She had big eyes, big teeth, big shoulders, big hands, big rings and bracelets, big jewels of every sort and many of them. The train of her crimson dress was longer than any other ; her house was huge ; her drawing-room looked vast, and it offered to the girl's eyes a collection of the largest sofas and chairs, pictures, mirrors and clocks that she had ever beheld. Mrs. Churchley had a high-hung carriage drawn by the tallest horses, and in the Row she was to be seen perched on a mighty hunter. She was high and expansive herself, though not exactly fat ; her bones were big, her limbs were long, and she PORTRAITS OF WOMEN had a loud, hurrying voice, like the bell of a steamboat. ... She had every intention of getting, as she would have said she was perpetually using the expression into touch ; but her good intentions were as depressing as a tailor's misfits. . . . She was as un domestic as a shop-front, and as out of tune as a parrot. The Marriages. Miss Blanchard's name was Augusta ; she was slender, pale and elegant ; she had a very pretty head and brilliant auburn hair, which she braided with classic simplicity. She talked in a sweet soft voice, used language at times a trifle superfine, and made literary allusions. . . . Rowland congratulated her upon her engagement, and she received his good wishes with a touch of primness. But she was always a trifle prim, even when she was quoting Mrs. Browning and George Sand. Roderick Hudson. Miss Stacpole contracted friendships, in travel- ling, with great freedom, and had formed several in railway-carriages, which were among her most valued ties. The Portrait of a Lady. Mrs. Gresham lived so much in the world that being alone had become her idea of true sociability. The Tragic Muse. Mrs. Medwin was not in the first flush of her youth ; her appearance the scattered remains of beauty manipulated by taste resembled one of the light repasts in which the fragments of yesterday's dinner figure with conscious ease that makes up for the want of presence. She was perhaps of an effect still too immediate to be called interesting, but she was candid, gentle and surprised not fatiguingly surprised, only 85 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES just in the right degree ; and her white face it was too white with the fixed eyes, the somewhat touzled hair, and the Louis Seize hat, might at the end of the very long neck have suggested the head of a princess carried, in a revolution, on a pike. Mrs. Medwin. Miss Banker was stout, red, rich, mature, universal and massive a massive, much-fingered volume, alphabetical, wonderful, indexed, that opened of itself at the right place. The Two Faces. The Countess Gemini was thin and dark, and not at all pretty, having features that suggested some tropical bird the soft brilliancy of her toilet had the look of shimmering plumage, and her attitudes were light and sudden, like those of a creature that perched upon twigs. . . . She kissed Isabel, first on her lips, and then on each cheek, in the short, quick manner of a bird drinking. The Portrait of a Lady. Agnes was pretty and silly, as distinctly as an orange is yellow and round ; and Kate Theory would have as soon have thought of looking to her to give interest to the future as she would have thought of looking to an orange to impart solidity to the prospect of dinner. Georgina's Reasons. Mrs. Penniman was a tall, thin, fair, rather faded woman, with a perfectly amiable disposition, a high standard of gentility, a taste for light literature, and a certain foolish indirectness and obliquity of character. She was not absolutely veracious ; but that defect was of no great consequence, for she never had anything to conceal. She would have liked to have a lover, and 86 PORTRAITS OF WOMEN to correspond with him under an assumed name in letters left at a shop. Washington Square. Mrs. Wix's own hair was indeed very remarkable still, and Maisie had felt at first that she should never get on with it. It played a large part in the sad and strange appearance, the appearance as of a kind of greasy greyness, which Mrs. Wix presented. It had originally been yellow, but time had turned its glow to ashes, to a turbid, sallow, un venerable white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner of which the poor lady appeared not yet to have recognised the supersession, with a glossy braid, like a large diadem, on the top of the head, and behind, at the nape of the neck, a dingy rosette like a large button. She wore glasses which, in humble reference to a divergent obliquity of vision, she called her straight - eners, and a little ugly snuff-coloured dress trimmed with satin bands in the form of scallops and glazed with antiquity. With the added suggestion of her goggles her melancholy attire reminded her pupil of the polished shell or corslet of a horrid beetle. What Maisie Knew. Miss Birdseye had a sad, soft, pale face, which (and it was the effect of her whole head) looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent. The long practice of philanthropy had not given accent to her features ; it had rubbed out their transitions, their meanings. The waves of sympathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in the same way in which the waves of time finally modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually washing away their sharpness, their details. The Bostonians. Mrs. Farrinder was a copious, handsome woman, PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES in whom angularity had been corrected by the air of success. . . . There was a lithographic smoothness about her, and a mixture of the American matron and the public character. There was something public in her eye, which was large, cold and quiet ; it had acquired a sort of exposed reticence from the habit of looking down from a lecture-desk over a sea of heads. The Bostonians. Mrs. Tarrant, with her soft corpulence, looked to her guest very bleached and timid ; her complexion had a kind of withered glaze ; her hair, very scanty, was drawn off her forehead a la Chinoise ; she had no eyebrows, and her eyes seemed to stare, like those of a figure of wax. The Bostonians. Dr. Prance had begun to appear to Ransom more susceptible of domestication, as if she had been a small forest-creature, a catamount or a ruffled doe, that had learned to stand still while you stroked it, or even to extend a paw. . . . Ransom could see that she was impatient of the general question and bored with being reminded, even for the sake of her rights, that she was a woman a detail she was in the habit of forgetting, having as many rights as she had time for. The Bostonians. Miss Chancellor was a signal old maid. That was her quality, her destiny. There are women who are unmarried by accident, and others who are unmarried by option ; but Olive Chancellor was unmarried by every implication of her being. She was a spinster as Shelley was a lyric poet, or as the month of August is sultry. The Bostonians. 88 PORTRAITS OF WOMEN Olive's displeasures, disappointments, disapprovals, were tragic, truly memorable ; she grew white under them, not shedding many tears as a general thing, like an inferior woman, but limping and panting morally, as if she had received a wound that she would carry for life. The Bostonians. May Bartram. Almost as white as wax, with the marks and signs in her face as numerous and as fine as if they had been etched by a needle, with soft white draperies relieved by a faded green scarf, the delicate tone of which had been consecrated by the years, she was the picture of a serene, exquisite, but impenetrable sphinx, whose head, or indeed whose whole person, might have been powdered with silver. The Beast in the Jungle. Jean Martle. A slim, fair girl who struck her as a light sketch for something larger, a cluster of happy hints with nothing yet quite " put in " but the splendour of the hair and the grace of the clothes. The Other House. Mrs. Beever. Short and solid, with rounded corners and full supports, her hair very black and very flat, her eyes very small for the amount of expression they could show, Mrs. Beever was so " early Victorian " as to be almost pre-historic was constructed to move amid massive mahogany, and sit upon banks of Berlin-wool. She was like an odd volume, " sensibly " bound, of some old magazine. Jean knew that the great social event of her younger years had been her going to a fancy-ball in the character of an Andalusian, an incident of which she still carried a memento in the shape of a hideous fan. The Other House. PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES His wife was a large, bright, negative woman who had the air of being somehow tremendously new ; an appearance as of fresh varnish so that one felt she ought to sit in a gilt frame and be dealt with by reference to a catalogue or price-list. It was as if she were already rather a bad though expensive portrait, knocked off by an eminent hand. The Liar. Madame de Brindes. She wears her eternal mourning (I admit it's immensely becoming) for a triple woe, for multiplied griefs and wrongs, all springing from the crash of the Empire, from the battlefields of 1870. . . . There was always something symbolic and slightly ceremonial to me in her delicate cameo-face and her general black-robed presence ; she made me think of a priestess or a mourner, of revolutions and sieges, detested treaties and ugly public things. Collaboration. Mrs. Church was very simply and frugally dressed, and she had an air of quiet distinction that was an excellent defensive weapon. She exhibited a polite disposition to listen to what Mr. Ruck might have to say, but her manner was equivalent to an intimation that what she valued least in boarding-house life was its social opportunities. Pension Beaurepas. Mark Ambient 's sister was pale and angular, with a long, thin face, inhabited by sad, dark eyes, and black hair intertwined with golden fillets and curious chains. She wore a faded velvet robe, which clung to her when she moved, fashioned, as to the neck and sleeves, like the garments of old Venetians and Florentines. She looked pictorial and melancholy. She suggested a symbolic picture, something akin even to Diirer's Melancholia. 90 CHARACTER, FEMININE Mrs. Ambient, smooth-haired, thin-lipped, per- petually fresh, was not a Rossetti, but a Gainsborough or a Lawrence, and she had in her appearance no elements more romantic than a cold, ladylike candour, and a well-starched muslin dress. The Author of Beltraffio. Pansy. A little girl whose sympathetic docility gave a new aspect to childhood so neat, so complete in her manners ; and yet, as one could see, so innocent and infantile. She sat on the sofa ; she wore a small grenadine mantle, and a pair of useful gloves little grey gloves, with a single button. She was like a sheet of blank paper the ideal jeunefille of foreign fiction At nineteen Pansy had the style of a little princess. ... It was not modern, it was not conscious, it would produce no impression in Broadway ; the small serious damsel, in her stiff little dress, only looked like an Infanta of Velasquez. . . . Though she delighted in approbation, to the point of turning pale when it came to her, she never held out her hand to it. She only looked towards it wistfully an attitude which, as she grew older, made her eyes the prettiest in the world. The Portrait of a Lady. Jeanne at a party. " She's the real thing. I believe the pale pink petals are folded up there for some wonderful efflorescence in time to open, that is, to some great golden sun. I'm unfortunately but a small farthing candle. What chance, in such a field, for a poor little artist-man ? " The Ambassadors. CHARACTER, FEMININE Isabel. Altogether, with her meagre knowledge, her inflated ideals, her confidence at once innocent 91 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES and dogmatic, her temper at once exacting and in- dulgent, her mixture of curiosity and fastidiousness, of vivacity and indifference, her desire to look very well, and to be, if possible, even better ; her determi- nation to see, to try, to know, her combination of the delicate, desultory, flame-like spirit and the eager and personal young girl ; she would be an easy victim of scientific criticism, if she were not intended to awaken an impulse more tender. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one's mind was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses. The Portrait of a Lady. Isabel's notion of the aristocratic life was simply the union of great knowledge with great liberty ; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty, and the liberty a sense of enjoyment. But for Osmond it was altogether a thing of forms, a conscious, calcu- lated attitude. . . . The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. The Portrait of a Lady. " You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rose- bud a missile that should never have reached you and down you drop to the ground. It hurts me," said Ralph, " as if I had fallen myself. . . ." The Portrait of a Lady. When she bent her deep eyes upon him they seemed 92 CHARACTER, FEMININE to speak of safety and freedom and to make a green garden of the future. Nona Vincent. Her charm was always great, and the whole air of her house, which was simply a sort of ordered diffusion of her presence, so soothing, so beguiling that he always made several false starts before departing. Nona Vincent. " All women but you are stupid. How can I look at another ? You're different and different and then you're different again. . . . The women one meets what are they but books one has already read ? You're a whole library of the unknown, the uncut." He almost moaned, he ached from the depth of his content. " Upon my word, I've a subscription ! " . . . The Wings of the Dove. The charming woman was, to Chilver's view, about of his own age and that evidently did give time for a certain quantity of more or less trying, of really complicating experience. There it practically was, this experience, in the character of her delicacy, in her kindly, witty, sensitive face, worn fine, too fine, perhaps, but only to its increase of expression. She was neither a young fool nor an old one, assuredly ; but if the intenser acquaintance with life had made the object of one's affection neither false nor hard, how could one, on the whole, since the story might be so interesting, wish it away ? The Great Condition. A prouder nature never affronted the long humilia- tion of life. Frances Anne Kemble. 93 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES Her triumph was gentle, and she really had tones to make justice weep. The Ambassadors. She laughed and shook her head ; she had head- shakes whose [impulse seemed to come from as far away as the breeze that stirs a flower. The Way It Came. I perceive that she is perfectly natural. She only wants not to suffer she is immensely afraid of that. Therefore, she wishes to be universally tender to mitigate the general sum of suffering in the hope that she herself may come off easily. The Impressions of a Cousin. Her noble pagan head gave her privileges that she neglected, and when people were admiring her brow she was wondering whether there was a good fire in her bedroom. The Liar. Her life was made up of items, but she had never had to deal, intellectually, with a fine shade. The Chaperon. A less vulgarly, a less obviously purchasing or parading person she couldn't have imagined ; but it was all the same the truth of truths that the girl couldn't get away from her wealth. She might leave her conscientious companion as freely alone with it as possible, and never ask a question, scarce even tolerate a reference ; but it was in the fine folds of the help- lessly expensive little black frock that she drew over the grass it was in the curious and splendid coils of her hair " done " with no eye whatever to the mode du jour, that peeped from under the corresponding 94 CHARACTER, FEMININE indifference of her hat, the merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of noble inelegance. . . Palazzo Leporelli held its history still in its great lap, even like a painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decoration. Hung about with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable character, was here the presence revered and served. . . . Milly moved slowly to and fro as the priestess of the worship. Certainly it came from the sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour ; always a need of her nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with penetration. It was mostly in stillness that they spoke to her best ; amid voices she lost the sense. The Wings of the Dove. Isabel had never encountered a more agreeable and interesting woman than Madame Merle ; she had never met a woman who had less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship the air of reproducing the more tiresome parts of one's own personality. The Portrait of a Lady. Madame Merle was rarely guilty of the awkward- ness of retracting what she had said ; her wisdom was shown rather in maintaining it and placing it in a favourable light. The Portrait of a Lady. Madame Merle's will was mistress of her life ; there was something brilliant in the way she kept going. It was as if the art of life were some clever trick she had guessed. Isabel, as she herself grew older, became acquainted with revulsions, with disgust ; there were days when the world looked black, and she asked herself with some peremptoriness what it was that she was pretending to live for. Her 95 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES old habit had been to live by enthusiasm, to fall in love with suddenly-perceived possibilities. Madame de Merle had suppressed enthusiasm ; she lived entirely by reason. Isabel had become aware more than before of the advantage of being like that of having made one's self a firm surface, a sort of corselet of silver. The Portrait of a Lady. One of these gaps in Mrs. Assingham's complete- ness was her want of children ; the other was her want of wealth. It was wonderful how little either, in the fulness of time, came to show ; sympathy and curiosity could render their objects practically filial, just as an English husband who in his military years had " run " everything in his regiment could make economy blossom like the rose. The Golden Bowl. Catherine was always agitated by an introduction ; it seemed a difficult moment, and she wondered that some people should mind it so little. Washington Square. Catherine seemed not only incapable of giving surprises ; it was almost a question whether she could have received one she was so quiet and irresponsive. People who expressed themselves roughly called her stolid. But she was irresponsive because she was shy, uncomfortably, painfully shy. This was not always understood, and she sometimes produced an impression of insensibility. In reality she was the softest creature in the world. . . . She would have made a wife of the gentle old-fashioned pattern regarding reasons as favours and windfalls, but no more expecting one every day then she would have expected a bouquet of camellias. Washington Square. CHARACTER, FEMININE Mrs. Montgomery was evidently a thrifty and self- respecting little person who took a virtuous satis- faction in keeping herself tidy, and had resolved that, since she might not be splendid, she would be at least immaculate. Washington Square. Mrs. Westgate was extremely spontaneous. She was very frank and demonstrative, and appeared always while she looked at you delightedly with her beautiful young eyes to be making sudden con- fessions and concessions after momentary hesitations. An International Episode. The Duchess was a person of no small presence, filling her place, however, without ponderosity, with a massiveness indeed that her art fully kept in bounds. Her head, her chin, her shoulders were well aloft, but she had not abandoned the cultivation of a " figure," or any of the distinctively finer reasons for passing as a handsome woman. She was secretly at war moreover, in this endeavour, with a lurking no less than with a public foe, and thoroughly aware that if she didn't look well she might at times only, and quite dreadfully, look good. There were definite ways of escape, none of which she neglected, and from the total of which, as she flattered herself, the air of distinction almost mathematically resulted. This air corresponded superficially with her acquired Cala- brian sonorities, from her voluminous title down, but the colourless hair, the passionless forehead, the mild cheek and long lip of the British matron, the type that had set its trap for her earlier than any other, were elements difficult to deal with, and were all, at moments, that a sharp observer saw. The Awkward Age. Little Aggie. That young lady was certainly a 97 H PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES figure to have offered a foundation for the highest hopes. As slight and white, as delicately lovely, as a gathered garden lily, her admirable training appeared to hold her out to them all as with pre- cautionary finger-tips. Little Aggie presented, up and down, an arrangement of dress exactly in the key of her age, her complexion, her emphasised virginity. She might have been prepared by a cluster of doting nuns, cloistered daughters of ancient houses and educators of similar products, whose taste, hereditarily good, had grown, out of the world and most delightfully, so queer as to leave on every- thing they touched a particular shade of distinction. The Awkward Age. Little Aggie differed from any young person he had ever met in that she had been deliberately pre- pared for consumption, and in that, furthermore, the gentleness of her spirit had immensely helped the preparation. Nanda, beside her, was a northern savage, and the reason was partly that the elements of that young lady's nature were already, were publicly, were almost indecorously active. Both the girls struck him as lambs with the great shambles of life in their future ; but while one, with its neck in a pink ribbon, had no consciousness but that of being fed from the hand with the small, sweet biscuit of unobjectionable knowledge, the other struggled with instincts and forebodings, with the suspicion of its doom and the far-borne scent, in the flowery fields, of blood. The Awkward Age. Mrs. Brookenham, who had many talents, had none perhaps that she oftener found useful than that of listening with the appearance of being fairly hypno- tised. . . . She was, in her forty-first year, still charmingly pretty. . . . She had about her the 98 CHARACTER, FEMININE pure light of youth would always have it ; her head, her figure, her flexibility, her flickering colour, her lovely, silly eyes, her natural, quavering tone, all played together toward this effect by some trick that had never yet been exposed. . . . She suggested, for the most part, the luxury, the novelty of woe, the excitement of strange sorrows and the cultivation of fine indifferences. . . . It was either, as her friends chose to think it, an advantage or a drawback of intercourse with her that, her face being at any moment charged with the woe of the world, it was unavoidable to remain rather in the dark as to the effect of particular strokes. Her supreme rebellion against fate was just to show with the last frankness how much she was bored. The Awkward Age. It was Mrs. Gereth's ambition, that she successfully made a secret of that awkward oddity, her proneness to be rendered unhappy by the presence of the dread- ful. Her passion for the exquisite was the cause of this, but it was a passion she considered that she never advertised nor gloried in, contenting herself with letting it regulate her steps and show quietly in her life, remembering at all times that there are few things more soundless than a deep devotion. The Spoils of Poynton. Mrs. Gereth. It was hard for her to believe that a woman could look presentable who had been kept awake for hours by the wall-paper in her room ; yet none the less, as in her fresh widow's weeds she rustled across the hall, she was sustained by the consciousness, which always added to the unction of her social Sundays, that she was, as usual, the only person in the house incapable of wearing in her pre- parations the horrible stamp of the same exceptional 99 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES smartness that would be conspicuous in a grocer's wife. She would rather have perished than have looked endimanMe. The Spoils of Poynton. Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps not with much else ; and that made a bond when there was none other, especially as in this case the idea was real, not imitation. This young person had even from herself wonderful secrets of delicacy and pride ; but she came as near distinctness as in the consideration of such matters she had ever come at all in now surrendering herself to the idea that it was of a pleasant effect, and rather remarkable to be stupid without offence of a pleasanter effect and more remarkable indeed than to be clever and horrid. The Spoils of Poynton. Mrs. Stringham's little life had often been visited by shy conceits secret dreams that had fluttered their hour between its narrow walls, without, for any great part, so much as mustering courage to look out of its rather dim windows. The Wings of the Dove. Miss Teagle was always anticipating her cue. Sir Dominick Ferrand. It had never been pride, Maud Manningham had hinted, that kept her from crying, when other things made for it ; it had only been that these same things, at such times, made still more for business, arrangements, correspondence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling of servants, the taking of decisions. " I might be crying now," she said, " if I weren't writing letters." The Wings of the Dove. 100 CHARACTER, FEMININE Miss Wingrave. She was a high, distinguished person ; angular but not awkward, with a large forehead and abundant black hair, arranged like that of a woman conceiving perhaps excusably of her head as " noble," and irregularly streaked to-day with white. ... He wondered why when she came up to town she always resorted to Baker Street for lodgings. He had never known nor heard of Baker Street as a residence he associated it only with bazaars and photographers. He divined in her a rigid indifference to everything that was not the passion of her life. Nothing really mattered to her but that, and she would have occupied apartments in Whitechapel if they had been a feature in her tactics. She had received her visitor in a large cold, faded room, furnished with slippery seats and decorated with alabaster vases and wax-flowers. The only little personal comfort for which she appeared to have looked out was a fat catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, which reposed on a vast, desolate table-cover of false blue. Her clear forehead it was like a porce- lain slate, a receptacle for addresses and sums had flushed when he told her the extraordinary news ; but he saw she was fortunately more angry than fright- ened. She had essentially, she would always have, too little imagination for fear, and the healthy habit moreover of facing everything had taught her that the occasion usually found her a quantity to reckon with. Owen Wingrave. People all convention and patent-leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation. The Real Thing. Lady Barberina had no idea of a tradition of conversation, of a social agreement that the con- tinuity of talk, its accumulations from season to season, should not be lost. Her conversation had 101 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES been occasional and fragmentary, a trifle jerky, with allusions that were never explained ; it had a dread of detail ; it seldom pursued anything very far, or kept hold of it very long. Lady Barberina. Mrs. Gresham's figure was admired that is it was sometimes mentioned and she dressed as if it was expected of her to be smart, like a young woman in a shop or a servant much in view. It was her peculi- arity that people were always saying things to her in a lowered voice. She had all sorts of acquaint- ances and in small establishments she sometimes wrote the menus. The Tragic Muse. Miss Tramore was inferior to her niece in capa- city for retort, and her limitations made the girl appear pert. The Chaperon. Mrs. Hudson was sitting at one of the windows, empty-handed save for the pocket-handkerchief in her lap, which was held with an air of familiarity with its sadder uses. . . . She was at one of the smaller hotels, and her sitting-room was frugally lighted by a couple of candles. Mary Garland had remained with her to attend to her personal wants, which the latter seemed to think, now that she was in a foreign land with a Southern climate and a Catholic religion, would forthwith become very complex and formidable, though as yet they had simply resolved themselves into a desire for a great deal of tea and for a certain extremely familiar old black-and-white shawl across her feet, as she lay on the sofa. . . . Her felicity betrayed itself in a 102 CHARACTER, FEMININE remarkable tendency to finish her sentences and wear her best silk gown. Roderick Hudson. Her governess took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there flowed the blue river of truth. She knew swarms of stories, mostly those of the novels she had read : relating them with a memory that never faltered and a wealth of detail that was Maisie's delight. They were all about love and beauty, and countesses and wickedness. Her conversation was practically an endless narrative, a great garden of romance, with sudden vistas into her own life and gushing fountains of facts. What Maisie Knew. The guest next to me, dear woman, was Miss Poyle, the vicar's sister, a robust, unmodulated person. The Figure on the Carpet. Gwendolen. She had indeed no sense of humour, and, with her pretty way of holding her head on one side, was one of those persons whom you want, as the phrase is, to shake, but who have learnt Hun- garian by themselves. She conversed perhaps in Hungarian with Corvick ; she had remarkably little English for his friend. ... He more than once exclaimed to me : " She's quite incredibly literary, you know quite fantastically ! " I remember his saying of her that she felt in italics and thought in capitals. The Figure on the Carpet. Miss Barrace. She seemed, with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like the darts of some firm, fine, high-feathered, free-peck- ing bird, to stand before life as before some full 103 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES shop-window. You could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoise-shell against the glass. The Ambassadors. The little mottled maidservant tried to look detached without looking indifferent. Greville Fane. Miss Pynsent could not embrace the state of mind of people who didn't apologise, though she vaguely envied and admired it ; she herself spending much of her time in making excuses for obnoxious acts she had not committed. Princess Casamassima. Mrs. Beever. Her constant habit was to lay the ground bare for complications that as yet at least had never taken place. Her life was like a room prepared for a dance : the furniture was all against the walls. The Other House. Miss Theory. The failure of her health had not caused her to relax any form that it was possible to keep up. There was a slim erectness even in the way she lay on her sofa ; and she always received the doctor as if he were calling for the first time. Georgina's Reasons. Miss Adela Moore was accounted clever without detriment to her amiability and amiable without detriment to her wit. A Day of Days. Mrs. Brigstock. She had a face of which it was impossible to say anything but that it was pink, and a mind that it would be possible to describe only if 104 CHARACTER, FEMININE one had been able to mark it in a similar fashion. As nature had made this organ neither green nor blue nor yellow, there was nothing to know it by : it strayed and bleated like an unbranded sheep. The Spoils of Poynton. Bessie Alden was very fond of the poets and historians, of the picturesque, of the past, of retro- spect, of mementoes and reverberations of greatness ; so that on coming into the great English world, where strangeness and familiarity would go hand in hand, she was prepared for a multitude of fresh emotions. They began very promptly those tender, fluttering sensations ; they began with the sight of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened and brightened by the season ; with the carpeted fields and flowering hedgerows, as she looked at them from the window of the train ; with the spires of rural churches, peeping above the rook- haunted tree-tops ; with the oak-studded, deer-peopled parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light, the thousand differences. An International Episode. Lavinia was one of nine, and her brothers and sisters, who have never done anything for her, help, actually, in different countries and on something, I believe, of that same scale, to people the globe. There were mixed in her then, in a puzzling way, two qualities that mostly exclude each other an extreme timidity and, as the smallest fault that could qualify a harmless creature for a world of wickedness, a self- complacency hard in tiny, unexpected spots, for which I used sometimes to take her up, but which, I sub- sequently saw, would have done something for the flatness of her life, had they not evaporated with everything else. Maud-Evelyn. 105 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES PORTRAITS OF MEN The Prince. A sobriety that might have consorted with failure sat in his handsome face, constructively regular and grave, yet at the same time oddly and, as might be, functionally almost radiant, with its dark blue eyes, its dark brown moustache and its expression no more sharply " foreign " to an English view than to have caused it sometimes to be observed of him with a shallow felicity that he looked like a " refined " Irishman. The Golden Bowl. The Prince's dark blue eyes were of the finest and, on occasion, precisely, resembled nothing so much as the high windows of a Roman palace, of an historic front by one of the great old designers, thrown open on a feast-day to the golden air. His look itself, at such times, suggested an image that of some very noble personage who, expected, acclaimed by the crowd in the street and with old precious stuffs falling over the sill for his support, had gaily and gallantly come to show himself. . . . The young man's ex- pression became after this fashion something vivid and concrete a beautiful personal presence, that of a prince in very truth, a ruler, warrior, patron, lighting up brave architecture and diffusing the sense of a function. . . . The Prince seemed, leaning on crimson damask, to take in the bright day. He looked younger than his years ; he was beautiful, innocent, vague. The Golden Bowl. Owen in London. He rose before her with a different air : he looked less ruffled and bruised than he had done at Ricks ; he showed a recovered fresh- ness. ... In the country, heated with the chase and 106 PORTRAITS OF MEN splashed with the mire, he had always rather reminded her of a picturesque peasant in national costume. This costume, as Owen wore it, varied from day to day ; it was as copious as the wardrobe of an actor ; but it never failed of suggestions of the earth and the weather, the hedges and the ditches, the beasts and the birds. There had been days when he struck her as all nature in one pair of boots. It didn't make him now another person that he was delicately dressed, shining and splendid that he had a higher hat and light gloves with black seams and a spear-like umbrella ; but it made him, she soon decided, really handsomer, and that in turn gave him for she never could think of him, or indeed of some other things, without the aid of his vocabulary a tremendous pull. The Spoils of Poynton. Peter Brench. He was massive but mild large and loose and ruddy and curly, with deep tones, deep eyes, deep pockets, to say nothing of the habit of long pipes, soft hats and brownish, greyish, weather- faded clothes, apparently always the same. The Tree of Knowledge. Lord Petherton, a man of five-and-thirty, whose robust but symmetrical proportions gave to his dark blue double-breasted coat an air of tightness that just failed of compromising his tailor, had for his main facial sign a certain pleasant brutality, the effect partly of a bold, handsome parade of carni- vorous teeth, partly of an expression of nose suggesting that this feature had paid a little in the heat of youth, for some aggression at the time admired and even publicly commemorated. He would have been ugly, he substantively granted, had he not been happy ; he would have been dangerous had he not been warranted. Many things doubtless performed for him this last service, but none so much as the delightful 107 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES sound of his voice, the voice, as it were, of another man, a nature reclaimed, super-civilised, adjusted to the perpetual " chaff " which kept him smiling in a way that would have been a mistake, and indeed an impossibility if he had been really witty. His bright familiarity was that of a young prince whose con- fidence had never had to falter, and the only thing that at all qualified the resemblance was the equal familiarity excited in his subjects. The Awkward Age. The picture is before me now. ... It represents a man of about five-and-thirty, seen only as to the head and shoulders, but dressed in a fashion now almost antique. . . . His high, slightly narrow face, which would be perhaps too aquiline but for the beauty of the forehead and the sweetness of the mouth, has a charm that even, after all these years, still stirs my imagination. His type has altogether a distinction that you feel to have been firmly caught and yet not vulgarly emphasised. The eyes are just too near together, but they are, in a wondrous way, both careless and intense, while lip, cheek and chin, smooth and clear, are admirably drawn. Youth is still, you see, in all his presence, the joy and pride of life, the perfection of a high spirit and the expectation of a great fortune, which he takes for granted with un- conscious insolence. Nothing has ever happened to humiliate or disappoint him, and if my fancy doesn't run away with me the whole presentation of him is a guarantee that he will die without having suffered. He is so handsome, in short, that you can scarcely say what he means, and so happy that you can scarcely guess what he feels. The Tone of Time. Felix Young was eight-and-twenty years old ; he had a short, slight, well-made figure, and an expression 108 PORTRAITS OF MEN at once urbane and not at all serious, a warm blue eye, an eye-brow finely drawn and excessively arched and a light moustache that flourished upwards as if blown that way by the breath of a constant smile. The Europeans. Chad. There he was in all the pleasant morning freshness of it strong and sleek and gay, easy and fragrant and fathomless, with happy health in his colour, and pleasant silver in his thick young hair, and the right word for everything on the h'ps that his clear brownness caused to show as red. The Ambassadors. Jim. Small and fat, and constantly facetious, straw-coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been practically indistinguishable had not his constant preference for light -grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories, done what it could for his identity. The Ambassadors. Tony Bream. To look at him was immediately to see that he was a collection of gifts, which presented themselves as such precisely by having in each case slightly overflowed the measure. His dress was just too fine, his colour just too high, his moustache just too long, his voice just too loud, his smile just too gay. His movement, his manner, his tone were respectively just too free, too easy and too familiar ; his being a very handsome, happy, clever, active, ambitiously local young man was in short just too obvious. The Other House. Dennis Vidal. With his want of stature and pre- sence, his upward look at Rose, his small, smooth head, his seasoned sallowness and simple eyes, he might at this instant have struck a spectator as a 109 PICTURES FROM HENEY JAMES figure actually younger and slighter than the ample, accomplished girl whose gesture protected and even a little patronised him. The Other House. Harold Brookenham. He was small and had a slight stoop, which somehow gave him character a character of the insidious sort, carried out in the acuteness, difficult to trace to a source, of his smooth fair face, whose lines were all curves and its expres- sion all needles. He had the voice of a man of forty and was dressed as if markedly not for London with an air of experience that seemed to match it. The Awkward Age. Colonel Capadose might still be called young, and his features were regular ; he had a plentiful mous- tache that curled up at the ends, a brilliant, gallant, almost adventurous air, together with a big shining breast-pin in the middle of his shirt. He appeared a fine satisfied soul, and Lyon perceived that wherever he rested his friendly eye there fell an influence as pleasant as the September sun as if he could make grapes and pears or even human affection ripen by looking at them. The Liar. Beale Farange had natural decorations, a kind of costume in his vast, fair beard, burnished like a gold breastplate, and in the eternal glitter of the teeth that his long moustache had been trained not to hide and that gave him, in every possible situation, the look of the joy of life. What Maisie Knew. Strether. When he came down, what his hostess saw, what she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the lean, slightly loose figure of a no PORTRAITS OF MEN man of the middle height and something more, perhaps, than the middle age a man of five-and- fifty, whose most immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face, a thick, dark moustache, of characteristically American cut, growing strong and falling low, a head of hair still abundant, but abundantly streaked with grey, and a nose of bold, free prominence, the even line, the high finish, as it might have been called, of which, had a certain effect of mitigation. The Ambassadors. Waymarsh. He had a large, handsome head and a large, sallow, seamed face a striking, significant physiognomic total, the upper range of which, the great political brow, the thick, loose hair, the dark fulginous eyes, recalled even to a generation whose standard had dreadfully deviated the impressive image, familiar by engravings and busts, of some great national worthy of the earlier part of the mid- century. . . . He shook his mane ; he fixed, with his admirable eyes, his auditor or his observer ; he wore no glasses and had a way, partly formidable, yet also partly encouraging, as from a representative to a constituent, of looking very hard at those who approached him. He met you as if you had knocked and he had bidden you enter. The Ambassadors. Mr. Cashmore, who would have been very red- haired if he had not been very bald, showed a single eye-glass and a long upper Hp ; he was large and jaunty, with little petulant movements and intense ejaculations that were not in the line of his type. The Awkward Age. Mr. Leavensworth was a tall, expansive, bland gentleman, with a carefully brushed whisker and a in PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES spacious, fair, well-favoured face, which seemed some- how to have more room than was occupied by a smile of superior benevolence, so that it bore a certain resemblance to a large parlour with a very florid carpet, but no pictures on the walls. Roderick Hudson. Mr. Roy suggested squareness and solidity ; he was a broad-based, comfortable, polished man, with a surface in which the rank tendrils of irritation would not easily obtain a foothold. Georgina's Reasons. CHARACTER, MALE, AND PROFESSIONAL MEN CHARACTER MALE Lord Warburton had a certain fortunate, brilliant, exceptional look the air of a happy temperament fertilised by a high civilisation which would have made almost any observer envy him at a venture ; his whole person seemed to emit that radiance of good feeling and good fare which had formed the charm of Isabel's first impression of him. It surrounded him like a zone of fine June weather. The Portrait of a Lady. Mr. Osmond had the interest of rareness ; he was an original without being an eccentric. His sensibility had led him to live by himself, in a serene, impersonal way, thinking about art and beauty and history. Ralph had something of this same quality, this appearance of thinking that life was a matter of connoisseurship ; but in Ralph's it was an anomaly, a kind of humorous excrescence, whereas in Mr. Osmond it was the key-note, and everything was in harmony with it. Ralph was imperturbable Ralph had a 112 CHARACTER, MALE kind of loose-fitting urbanity that wrapped him about like an ill-made overcoat. The Portrait of a Lady. Hyacinth. For this unfortunate but remarkably organised youth, every displeasure or gratification of the visual sense coloured his whole mind, and though he lived in Pentonville and worked in Soho, though he was poor and obscure and cramped and full of unattainable desires, it may be said of him that what was most important in life for him was simply his impressions. Princess Casamassima. He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted ; except indeed that he remembered thoughts a few of them which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures. The Wings of the Dove. Strether would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous, and he drew back, as well, with a smothered, inward shudder, from the consideration of what women of highly-developed type in particular might think of each other. The Ambassadors. He was so framed by nature as to be able to keep his inconveniences separate from his resent- ments. The Golden Bowl. Peter Baron had some of the plasticity of the raw contributor. ... He sat there throbbing with 113 I PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES emotion, irrecoverable ever after in its freshness, of the young artist in the presence for the first time of " production " the proofs of his book. Sir Dominick Ferrand. Singleton was a diminutive attenuated personage like a precocious child. He had a high protuberant forehead, a transparent brown eye, a perpetual smile, an extraordinary expression of modesty and patience. He listened much more willingly than he talked, with a little grateful grin ; he blushed when he spoke, and always offered his ideas in a sidelong fashion, as if the presumption were against them. Roderick Hudson. Little Bilham. Strether gathered from him that he had not saved from his shipwreck a scrap of any- thing but his beautiful intelligence and his confirmed habit of Paris. He referred to these things with an equal fond familiarity, and it was sufficiently clear that, as an outfit, they still served him. The Ambassadors. Mr. Longdon's smile was beautiful it supplied so many meanings that when he presently spoke he seemed already to have told half his story. . . . He was slight and neat, delicate of body and both keen and kind of face, with black brows finely marked and thick, smooth hair in which the silver had deep shadows. He wore neither whisker nor moustache and seemed to carry in the flicker of his quick, brown eyes and the positive sun-play of his smile even more than the equivalent of what might, superficially or stupidly, elsewhere be missed in him ; which was mass, substance, presence what is vul- garly called importance. He had indeed no presence, 114 CHARACTER, MALE but he had somehow an effect. He^'might almost Jiave been a priest, if priests were ever such dandies. r v He had at all events conclusively doubled the^Cape of the years he would never again see fifty-five ; to the warning light of that bleak headland he presented a back sufficiently conscious. . . . Nothing in him was more amiable than the terms maintained between the rigour of his personal habits and his free imagina- tion of the habits of others. The Awkward Age. Mr. Verver. His neat, colourless face, provided with the merely indispensable features, suggested immediately, for a description, that it was clear, and in this manner somewhat resembled a small, decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture, but drawing a particular advantage, as might presently be noted, from the outlook of a pair of ample and uncurtained windows. There was something in Adam Verver's eyes that both admitted the morning and the evening in unusual quantities and gave the modest area the outward extension of a view that was " big " even when restricted to the stars. Deeply and changeably blue, though not romantically large, they were yet youthfully, almost strangely, beautiful. . . . When he took a rare moment "off," he did so with the touching, confessing eyes of a man of forty-seven caught in the act of handling a relic of infancy sticking on the head of a broken soldier or trying the lock of a wooden gun. In spite of practice he was still imperfect, for these so artlessly- artful interludes were condemned, by the nature of the case, to brevity. He had fatally stamped himself it was his own fault a man who could be inter- rupted with impunity. The Golden Bowl. PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES " There have been things before," his wife went on, "but I haven't felt sure. Don't you know how one has sometimes a flash ? " It could not be said of Edward Brookenham, who seemed to bend for sitting down more hinges than most men, that he looked as if he knew either this or anything else. He had a pale, cold face, marked and made regular, made even in a manner handsome, by a hardness of line in which, oddly, there was no signi- ficance, no accent. Clean-shaven, slightly bald, with unlighted grey eyes and a mouth that gave the im- pression of not working easily, he suggested a stippled drawing by an inferior master. Lean moreover and stiff, and with the air of having here and there in his person a bone or two more than his share, he had once or twice, at fancy-balls, been thought striking in a dress copied from one of Holbein's English portraits. But when once some such meaning as that had been put into him it took a long time to put another, a longer time than even his extreme exposure, or any- body's study of the problem, had yet made possible. If anything particular had finally been expected from him it might have been a summary or an explanation of the things he had always not said, but there was something in him that had long since pacified im- patience and drugged curiosity. The Awkward Age. " Oh, I daresay she's all right," Brookenham returned as if his interest in the case had dropped. You might have felt yp ( u got a little nearer to him on guessing that in so peopled a circle satiety was never far from him. The Awkward Age. Maurice Glanvil wafc forty-nine to-day, and he thought a great deal o*f his youth. He regretted it, he missed it, he tried to beckon it back ; but the 116 CHARACTER, MALE differences in London made him feel that it had gone for ever. There might perhaps be some sudden compensation in being fifty, some turn of the dim telescope, some view from the brow of the hill ; it was a round, gross, stupid number, which probably would make one pompous, make one think one's self venerable. Meanwhile at any rate it was odious to be forty-nine. Maurice observed the young now more than he had ever done ; observed them, that is, as the young. He wished he could have had a son, to be twenty with again. . . . The Wheel of Time. Mr. Mitchett had so little intrinsic appearance that an observer would have felt indebted, for help in placing him, to the rare prominence of his colourless eyes and the positive attention drawn to his chin by the precipitation of its retreat from discovery. Dressed, on the other hand, not as gentlemen dress in London to pay their respects to the fair, he excited, by the exhibition of garments that had nothing in common save the violence and the independence of their pattern, a suspicion that in the desperation of humility he wished to make it public that he had thrown to the winds the effort to please. The Awkward Age. If to the day of his death, after mortal disenchant- ments, the impression he first produced always evoked the word " ingenuous/' those to whom his face was familiar can easily imagine what it must have been when it still had the light of youth. I had never seen a man of genius look so passive, a man of ex- perience so off his guard. At the period I made his acquaintance this freshness was all unbrushed. . . . Black-haired and pale, deceptively languid, he had the eyes of a clever child and the voice of a bronze bell. The Next Time. 117 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES Limbert gathered, to make his pudding, dry bones and dead husks, how then was one to formulate the law that made the dish prove a feast ? What was the cerebral treachery that defied his own vigilance ? There was some obscure interference of taste, some obsession of the exquisite. When he went abroad to gather garlic he came home with heliotrope. The Next Time. This love of life was so strong in him that he could lose himself in little diversions as well as in big books. He was fond of everything human and natural, every- thing that had colour and character, and no gaiety, no sense of comedy, was ever more easily kindled by contact. When he was not surrounded by great pleasures he could find his account in small ones, and no situation could be dull for a man in whom all reflection, all reaction, was witty. James Russell Lowell. His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual. TroUope, therefore, with his eyes comfortably fixed on the familiar, the actual, was far from having invented a new category ; his distinction is that in resting just there his vision took in so much of the field. And then he felt all daily and immediate things as well as saw them; felt them in a simple, direct, salubrious way, with their sadness, their gladness, their charm, their comicality, all their obvious and}measureable meanings. Anthony Trollope. PROFESSIONAL MEN The Specialist. The great man had, by a rare accident for he kept his consulting-hours in general rigorously free but ten minutes to give her ; ten mere minutes which he yet placed at her service in a 118 CHARACTER, MALE manner that she admired even more than she could meet it, so crystal-clean the great empty cup of attention that he set between them at the table. . . . His large, settled face, though firm, was not, as she had thought at first, hard ; he looked, in the oddest manner, to her fancy, half like a general and half like a bishop, and she was soon sure that, within some such handsome range, what it would show her would be what was good, what was best for her. The Wings of the Dove. The Consultant. Sir Luke had clean forgotten the rather remarkable young man he had formerly gone about with, though he picked him up again, on the spot, with one large quiet look. The young man felt himself so picked, and the thing immediately affected him as the proof of a splendid economy. The eminent pilgrim, in the train, all the way, had used the hours as he had needed, thinking not a moment in advance of what finally awaited him. An exquisite case awaited him of which, in this queer way, the remarkable young man was an outlying part ; but the single motion of his face, the motion into which Densher, from the platform, lightly stirred its stillness, was his first renewed cognition. The Wings of the Dove. . The General Practitioner. Doctor Ramage was a little man who moved, with a warning air, on tiptoe, as if he were playing some drawing-room game of surprises, and who had a face so candid and circular that it suggested a large white pill. Mrs. Beever had once said with regard to sending for him : "It isn't to take his medicine, it's to take him. I take him twice a week in a cup of tea/' The Other House. The Sculptor. Gloriani showed him, on Chad's 119 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES introduction of him, a fine, worn, handsome face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue. With his genius in his eyes, his manners on his lips, his long career behind him and his honours and rewards all round, the great artist, in the course of a single sustained look and a few words of delight at receiving him, affected our friend as a dazzling prodigy of type. . . . Strether was to see again repeatedly, in remembrance, the medal-like Italian face, in which every line was an artist's own, in which time told only as tone and consecration ; and he was to recall in especial, as the penetrating radiance, as the communication of the illustrious spirit itself, the manner in which, while they stood briefly, in welcome and response, face to face, he was held by the sculptor's eye. The Ambassadors. The Sculptor. Morgan had everything of the sculptor, but the spirit of Phidias the brown velvet, the becoming beretto, the " plastic " presence, the fine fingers, the beautiful accent in Italian and the old Italian factotum. He seemed to make up for every- thing when he addressed Egidio with the " tu " and waved to him to turn one of the rotary pedestals of which the place was full. The Tree of Knowledge. The Lawyer. Barton Reeve. The face the girl now took in was smooth-shaven and fine, a face expressing penetration up to the limit of decorum. It was full of the man's profession passionately legal. The Given Case. The retired Colonial Governor. Colonel Bob Assingham. He " did " himself as well as his friends 120 CHARACTER, MALE mostly knew, yet remained hungrily thin, with facial, with abdominal cavities quite grim in their effect, and with a consequent looseness of apparel that, combined with a choice of queer light shades and of strange straw-like textures, of the aspect of Chinese mats, provocative of wonder at his sources of supply, suggested the habit of tropic islands, a continual cane-bottomed chair, a governorship exercised on wide verandahs. His smooth round head, with the particular shade of its white hair, was like a silver pot reversed ; his cheekbones and the bristles of his moustache were worthy of Attila the Hun. The hollows of his eyes were deep and darksome, but the eyes, within them, were like little blue flowers plucked that morning. He knew everything that could be known about life, which he regarded as, for far the greater part, a matter of pecuniary arrangement. The Golden Bowl. The Government Official. Mr. Crichton of the British Museum. Mr. Crichton was the most accom- plished and obliging of public functionaries, whom every one knew and who knew every one who had from the first, in particular, lent himself freely, and for the love of art and history, to becoming one of the steadier lights of Mr. Verver's adventurous path. The custodian of one of the richest departments of the great national collection of precious things, he could feel for the sincere private collector and urge him on his way even when condemned to be present at his capture of trophies sacrificed by the country to parliamentary thrift. Visits of gracious ladies, under his protection, lighted up rosily, for this perhaps most flower-loving and honey-sipping member of the great Bloomsbury hive, its packed passages and cells ; and though not sworn of the province towards which his friend had found herself yearning, nothing was easier for him 121 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES than to put her in relation with the presiding urbanities. The Golden Bowl. The Courier. Gracefully, respectfully, consumately enough always with hands in position and the look, in his thick, neat, white hair, smooth, fat face and black, professional, almost theatrical eyes, as of some famous tenor grown too old to make love, but with an art still to make money did he, on occasions, convey to her that she was, of all the clients of his glorious career, the one in whom his interest was most personal and paternal. The Wings of the Dove, The Parasite. I could take his measure at a glance he was six feet two and a perfect gentle- man. It would have paid any club in process of formation and in want of a stamp to engage him at a salary to stand in the principal window. ... To listen to him was to combine the excitement of going out with the economy of staying at home. The Real Thing. 122 CHAPTER V MORALITIES AND APHORISMS GABRIEL NASH talked about the possible greatness of the art of the portraitist its reach, its range, its fascination, the magnificent example it had left us in the past : windows open into history, into psychology, things that were amongst the most precious posses- sions of the human race. He insisted, above all, on the interest, the richness arising from this great peculiarity of it ; that, unlike most other forms, it was a revelation of two realities, the man whom it was the artist's conscious effort to reveal, and the interpreter expressed in the very quality and temper of that effort. It offered a double vision, the strongest dose of life that art could give. The Tragic Muse. " To be what one may be, really and efficaciously/' Nash went on, " to feel it and understand it, to accept it, adopt it, embrace it that's conduct, that's life. ... We must recognise our particular form, the instrument that each of us carries in his being. Mastering this instrument, learning to play it in perfection, that's what I call duty, what I call conduct, what I call success." The Tragic Muse. Madame Merle tossed away the music with a smile. " What is your idea of success ? " " You evidently 123 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES think it must be very tame/' said Isabel. " It's to see some dream of one's youth come true." The Portrait of a Lady. " I know that a large part of myself is in the dresses I choose to wear. I have a great respect for things ! One's self for other people is one's ex- pression of one's self ; and one's house, one's clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps these things are all expressive." The Portrait of a Lady. " Yes," Mrs. Brook resignedly mused ; " you dress for yourself." " Oh, how can you say that," the girl asked, " when I never stick in a pin but what I think of you ? " " Well," Mrs. Brook moralised, " one must always, I consider, think, as a sort of point de repere, of some one good person. Only it's best if it's a person one's afraid of. What one really requires is a kind of salutary terror. / never stick in a pin without thinking of your cousin Jane." The Awkward Age. When he was working well he found himself in that happy state in which things in general interweave with his particular web and make it thicker and stronger and more many-coloured. The Liar. Women have no faculty of imagination with regard to a man's work beyond a vague idea that it doesn't matter. The Liar. Women's ways. "At the period at Malvern Lady Julia was already married, and during those first years she was whirled out of my ken. Then her own life 124 MORALITIES AND APHORISMS took a quieter turn ; we met again ; I went, for a long time, often to her house. I think she rather liked the state to which she had reduced me, though she didn't, you know, in the least presume upon it. The better a woman is it has often struck me the more she enjoys, in a quiet way, some fellow's having been rather bad, rather dark, and desperate, about her." The Awkward Age. Once more, as a man conscious of having known many women, he could assist, as he would have called it, at the recurrent, the predestined phenomenon, the thing always as certain as sunrise or the coming round of Saints' days, the doing by the woman of the things that gave her away. She did it ever, inevitably, infallibly she couldn't possibly not do it. It was her nature, it was her life, and the man could always expect it without lifting a finger. The Golden Bowl. " A sculptor now ! That's a pretty trade for a fellow who has his living to make, and yet is so damnably constituted that he can't work to order. You can't model the serge-coated cypresses, nor those mouldering old Tritons, and all the sunny sadness of that dried-up fountain ; you can't put the light into marble the lovely, caressing, consenting, Italian light that you get so much of for nothing." Roderick Hudson. 11 1 drift, I feel ; my feelings direct me if such a life as mine may be said to have a direction. Where there's anything to feel I try to be there ! " the young man continued with his confiding laugh. . . . "To me, personally, the simplest ways are those that appeal most," he went on, " we pay too much atten- tion to the ugly ; we notice it, we magnify it. The 125 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES great thing is to leave it alone and encourage the beautiful." " You must be very sure you get hold of the beautiful," said Nick. " Ah, precisely, and that's just the importance of the faculty of apprecia- tion. We must train our special sense. It is capable of extraordinary extension. Life's none too long for that." The Tragic Muse. " Nothing is more charming than suddenly to come across something sharp and fresh after we've thought there was nothing more that could draw from us a groan. We've supposed we've had it all, have squeezed the last impression out of the last disappoint- ment, penetrated to the last familiarity in the last surprise ; then some fine day we find that we haven't done justice to life. There are little things that pop up and make us feel again. What may happen is after all incalculable. There's just a little chuck of the dice, and for three minutes we win." The Awkward Age. Miriam's Juliet was an exquisite image of a young passion and young despair, expressed in the divinest, truest music that had ever poured from tragic lips. The great childish audience, gaping at her points, expanded there before her like a lap to catch flowers. The Tragic Muse. She was beauty, she was music, she was truth ; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwin- ing arms and carried it into the high places of poetry, of style the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, as if pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. . . . Nick felt excited and flushed the night had turned into a 126 MORALITIES AND APHORISMS feast of fraternity, and he expected to see people embrace each other. The Tragic Muse. The Theatre. " Yes, it's still my little hobby : my little folly, if you like. I don't see that I get tired of it. What will you have ? Strong predilections are rather a blessing ; they are simplifying. I am fond of representation the representation of life ; I like it better, I think, than the right thing." The Tragic Muse. The art of dying. " It is congestion of the lungs," Dr. Sloper said to Catherine, " I shall need very good nursing. It will make no difference, for I shall not recover ; but I wish everything to be done, to the smallest detail, as if I should. I hate an ill-conducted sick-room ; and you will be so good as to nurse me on the hypothesis that I shall get well." But he had never been wrong in his life, and he was not wrong now. He died after three weeks' illness. Washington Square. The medical profession in America has constantly been held in honour. ... In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn it, the healing art has appeared in a high degree to combine two recognised sources of credit. It belongs to the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a great recommendation ; and it is touched by the light of science a merit appreciated by leisure and oppor- tunity. It was an element in Dr. Sloper's reputation that his learning and his skill were very evenly balanced ; he was what you might call a scholarly doctor, and yet there was nothing abstract in his remedies he always ordered you to take something. Washington Square. 127 PICTURES FROM HENEY JAMES Jeffrey Aspern. She pretended to make light of his genius and I took no pains to defend him. One doesn't defend one's god ; one's god is in himself a defence. The Aspern Papers. I reflected indeed that the heat of the admirer was sometimes grosser even than the appetite of the scribe. The Figure in the Carpet. His idea of loyalty was that he should scarcely smoke a cigar unless his friend were there to take another, and he felt rather mean if he went round alone to get shaved. The Reverberator. She thought of the lively and chatty letters that they had always seen in the papers, and wondered whether they all meant a violation of sanctities, a convulsion of homes, a burning of smitten faces, a rupture of girls' engagements. The Reverberator. Nanda had gathered up early in life a flower of maternal wisdom, " People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your con- science alone if you're nice to the second housemaid." The Awkward Age. The sweetest things in the world of art or the life of letters are the irresponsible sympathies that seem to rest on divination. Flaubert's hardness was only the act of holding his breath in the reverence of his search for beauty ; his universal renunciation, the long spasm of his too-fixed attention, was only one of the absurdest sincerities of his art. Essay on Flaubert. 128 SIMILES AND METAPHORS I delight in a palpable visitable past in the nearer distances and the rarer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table. The table is the one, the common expanse, and where we lean, so stretching, we find it firm and that, to my imagination is the past fragrant of all, or almost all the poetry of the thing out- lived and lost and gone. Preface to the Aspern Papers. The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use ; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take. Preface to the Aspern Papers. SIMILES AND METAPHORS. Pansy had a passionate pleasure in this exercise (dancing), taking her steps to the music like a con- scientious fairy. A young gentlewoman without visible relations had always struck her as a flower without foliage. " You don't offend me/' the young girl murmured, smiling as if an angel had kissed her. Our rustling, quickly-moving, clear-voiced heroine was as agreeable to his sense as the sound of flowing water. The Portrait of a Lady. " She is extremely perfect ; she is as hard and clear- cut as some little figure of a sea-nymph in an antique intaglio, and I will warrant that she has not a grain more of sentiment or heart than if she was scooped out of a big amethyst." The American. 129 K PICTURES FROM HENRJ JAMES He found her in the garden, wandering about in the warm starlight, like an indolent nymph. Daisy Miller. A voice like the tinkle of a silver bell. The Tragic Muse. Lady Tester was as fresh as a new-laid egg, as light as a feather, and as strong as a mail-phaeton. The Path of Duty. Mrs. Penniman took children too hard, both for good and for evil, and had an oppressive air of expecting subtle things of them, so that going to see her was a good deal like being taken to church and made to sit in a front pew. Washington Square. Mr. Longdon's impenetrability crashed like glass at the elbow-touch of this large, handsome, practised woman, who walked for him, like some brazen pagan goddess, in a cloud of queer legend. The Awkward Age. It was an oddity of Mrs. Lowder's that her face in speech was like a lighted window at night, but that silence immediately drew the curtain. The Wings of 1he Dove, Flora Saunt. I had been struck by the beauty of a face that approached us, and I was still more affected when I saw the face, at the sight of my companion, open like a window thrown wide. A smile fluttered out of it as brightly as a drapery dropped from a sill a drapery shaken there in the sun by a young lady flanked with two young men, a wonderful young lady who, as we drew nearer, rushed up to Mrs. Meldrum with arms flourished for an embrace. Glasses. 130 SIMILES AND METAPHORS He thumbed the proposition as if it had been a hard peach. Sir Dominick F err and. " He's not in love with her be comforted ! But she's amusing highly amusing. I do her perfect justice. As your women go, she's rare. If she were French she'd be a femme d' esprit. She has invented a nuance of her own and has done it all by herself, for Edward figures in her drawing-room only as one of those queer extinguishers of fire in the corridors of hotels. He's just a bucket on a peg." The Awkward Age. The joy almost overflowed in tears when he laid his hand on her and drew her to him, telling her, with a smile of which the promise was as bright as that of a Christmas-tree, that he knew her ever so well by her mother, but had come to see her now so that he might know her really. What Maisie Knew. There was something in his friendship which appeared a kind of resource in case of indefinite need ; it was like having a large balance at the bank. She felt happier when he was in the room. There was something reassuring in his approach, the sound of his voice reminded her of the benefices of nature. The American. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not to know anything more this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber in a hot land. The American. She was fairly beautiful to him a faint pastel in an oval frame ; he thought of her already as of some 131 K 2 PICTURES FROM HENEY JAMES lurking image in a long gallery, the portrait of a small old-time princess of whom nothing was known but that she had died young. The Ambassadors. Certain aspects of the connection of these two young women show for us, such is the twilight that gathers about them, in the likeness of some dim scene in a Maeterlinck play ; we have positively the image, in the delicate dusk, of the figures so associated and yet so opposed, so mutually watchful ; that of the angular, pale princess, ostrich-plumed, black-robed, hung about with amulets, reminders, relics, mainly seated, mainly still, and that of the upright, restless, slow-circling lady of her court, who exchanges with her, across the black water streaked with evening gleams, fitful questions and answers. The Wings of the Dove. Thin lips, curving like scorched paper. The American. Her face looked as hopelessly blank as the tide- smoothed sea-sand. The American. His neighbour had a sociable manner and evidently was accustomed to quick transitions ; she turned from her other interlocutor with the promptness of a good cook who lifts the cover of the next saucepan. . . . Her talkativeness was systematic she fraternised as seriously as she might have played whist. The Liar. Basil Ransom made the reflection that to see a place for the first time at night is like reading a foreign author in a translation. The Bostonians. 132 SIMILES AND METAPHORS Douglas had begun to read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty of his author's hand. The Turn of the Screw. She could imagine something better, more poetic than spending the winter in Paris Paris was like smart, neat prose. The Portrait of a Lady. Lectures in Gower Street. The institution became, in the glow of such a spirit, a thrilling place, and the walk to it from the station a pathway literally strewn with " subjects/' Maisie seemed to herself to pluck them as she passed, though they thickened in the great grey rooms where the fountain of knowledge, in the form usually of a high voice that she took at first to be angry, plashed in the stillness of rows of faces thrust out like empty jugs. What Maisie Knew. " It was a truth of which I had for some time been conscious that a figure with a good deal of frontage was, as one might say, almost never a public institu- tion/' The Real Thing. Isabel sat staring at her companion's story as at a bale of fantastic wares that some strolling gipsy might have unpacked on the carpet at her feet. The Portrait of a Lady. Mrs. Lowder sat back there, her knees apart, not unlike a picturesque ear-ringed matron at a market- stall ; while her friend, before her, dropped their items, tossed the separate truths of the matter one by one into her capacious lap. The Wings of the Dove. 133 PICTURES FROM HENRY JAMES Kate was the handsomest thing there this last a declaration made by Milly, in a sort of soft mid- summer madness, a straight skylark flight of charity, to aunt Maud. The Wings of the Dove. I questioned my servant about their habits and let him infer that I should be interested in any infor- mation he might glean. But he gleaned amazingly little for a knowing Venetian ; it must be added that where there is a perpetual fast there are very few crumbs on the floor. The Aspern Papers. PRINTED BV WILCIA.M CLOWES AND 3ONS, LIMITED, LONDON A.ND BECCLES. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall ^c'p CD 1962 . LD 21A-50m-3, > 62 TTn-^^frl^m!, ( C709 781 ) 47 6B Srkeky^ :