The Daily Henry James Read online

  November 5

  Broken Wings, 1903

  One had but one’s hour, and if one had it soon—it was really almost a case of choice—one didn’t have it late.

  November 6

  The Pupil, 1892

  The Moreens were adventurers not merely because they didn’t pay their debts, because they lived on society, but because their whole view of life, dim and confused and instinctive, like that of clever colour-blind animals, was speculative and rapacious and mean—they were adventurers because they were abject snobs.

  November 7

  The Europeans, 1878

  Never was a nature more perfectly fortunate. It was not a restless, apprehensive, ambitious spirit, running a race with the tyranny of fate, but a temper so unsuspicious as to put adversity off her guard, dodging and evading her with the easy, natural motion of a wind-shifted flower.

  November 8

  The Pupil, 1892

  They had a theory that they were very thorough, and yet they seemed always to be in the amusing part of lessons, the intervals between the tunnels, where there were way sides and views.

  November 9

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  Surely youth and genius hand in hand were the most beautiful sight in the world.

  November 10

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  The beauty of the bloom had gone from the small old sense of safety—that was distinct. She had left it behind her there forever. But the beauty of the idea of a great adventure, a big dim experiment or struggle in which she might, more responsibly than ever before, take a hand, had been offered her instead. It was as if she had to pluck off her breast, to throw away, some friendly ornament, a familiar flower, a little old jewel, that was part of her daily dress, and to take up and shoulder as a substitute some queer defensive weapon, a musket, a spear, a battleaxe—conducive possibly in a higher degree to a striking appearance, but demanding all the effort of the military posture.

  November 11

  The Lesson of the Master, 1892

  “Look at me well and take my lesson to heart, for it is a lesson. Let that good come of it at least that you shudder with your pitiful impression and that this may help to keep you straight in the future. Don’t become in your old age what I am in mine—the depressing, the deplorable illustration of the worship of false gods!”

  “What do you mean by false gods?” Paul inquired.

  “The idols of the market—money and luxury and ‘the world,’ placing one’s children and dressing one’s wife—everything that drives one to the short and easy way. Ah, the vile things they make one do!”

  November 12

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  Only a few of Chad’s guests had dined—that is fifteen or twenty, a few compared with the large concourse offered to sight by eleven o’clock; but number and mass, quantity and quality, light, fragrance, sound, the overflow of hospitality meeting the high tide of response, had all, from the first, pressed upon Strether’s consciousness, and he felt himself somehow part and parcel of the most festive scene, as the term was, in which he had ever in his life been engaged.

  November 13

  The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1900

  The fascination in him from the first is the mixture, and the extraordinary charm of his letters is that they are always showing this. It is the proportions, moreover, that are so admirable—the quantity of each different thing that he fitted to each other one and to the whole. The free life would have been all his dream, if so large a part of it had not been that love of letters, of expression and form, which is but another name for the life of service. Almost the last word about him, by the same law, would be that he had, at any rate, supremely written, were it not that he seems still better characterized by his having at any rate supremely lived.

  [Robert Louis Stevenson born on this day in 1850]

  November 14

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  “I wouldn’t in any case have let her tell me what would have been dreadful to me—I don’t want to know! There are things that are sacred—whether they’re joys or pains. But one can always, for safety, be kind,” she kept on; “one feels when that’s right.”

  November 15

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  “She always looks the same: like an angel who came down from heaven yesterday and has been rather disappointed in her first day on earth.”

  November 16

  The Lesson of the Master, 1892

  “What I mean is, have you it in your mind to go in for some sort of little perfection? You must have thought it all over, I can’t believe you’re without a plan. That’s the sensation you give me, and it’s so rare that it really stirs up one; it makes you remarkable.”

  November 17

  Mérimée’s Letters, 1878

  Most forms of contempt are unwise; but one of them seems to us peculiarly ridiculous—contempt for the age one lives in. Men with but a little of Mérimée’s ingenuity have been able, and have not failed, in every age, to make out a deplorable case for mankind. His imagination faded early, and it is certainly a question whether this generous spirit, half-sister at least to charity, will remain under a roof in which the ideal is treated as uncivilly as Mérimée treated it.

  November 18

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  Whatever were the facts, their perfect manners, all round, saw them through.

  November 19

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  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.

  November 20

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  “Take things more easily. Don’t ask so much whether this or that is good for you. Don’t question your conscience so much—it will get out of tune, like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don’t try so much to form your character—it’s like trying to pull open a rose-bud.”

  November 21

  The Papers, 1903

  Their general irony, which they tried at the same time to keep gay and to make amusing at least to each other, was their refuge from the want of savour, the want of napkins, the want, too often of shillings, and of many things besides that they would have liked to have.

  November 22

  The Life of George Eliot, 1885

  George Eliot of course had drawbacks and difficulties, physical infirmities, constant liabilities to headache, dyspepsia, and other illness, to deep depression, to despair about her work; but these jolts of the chariot were small in proportion to the impetus acquired, and were hardly greater than was necessary for reminding her of the secret of all ambitious workers in the field of art—that effort, effort, always effort, is the only key to success. Her great furtherance was that, intensely intellectual being as she was, the life of affection and emotion was also widely open to her.

  [George Eliot born on this day in 1819]

  November 23

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  “Will she understand? She has everything in the world but one,” he added. “But that’s half.”

  “What is it?”

  “A sense of humor.”

  November 24

  Louise Pallant, 1888

  Never say you know the last word about any human heart! I was once treated to a revelation which startled and touched me, in the nature of a person with whom I had been acquainted (well, as I supposed) for years, whose character I had had good reasons, heaven knows, to appreciate and in regard to whom I flattered myself that I had nothing more to learn.

  November 25

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  “I’m a little mad, you know; you needn’t be surprised if you hear it. That’s because I stop in town when they go into the country; all the autumn, all the winter, when there’s no one here (save three or four millions), and the r
ain drips, drips, drips from the trees in the big dull park where my people live.”

  November 26

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  He suggested above all, however, that wondrous state of youth in which the elements, the metals more or less precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that the question of the final stamp, the pressure that fixes the value, must wait for comparative coolness.

  November 27

  Frances Anne Kemble, 1893

  I remember that at the play she often said, “Yes, they’re funny; but they don’t begin to know how funny they might be!” Mrs. Kemble always knew, and her good humor effectually forearmed her. She had more “habits” than most people have room in life for, and a theory that to a person of her disposition they were as necessary as the close meshes of a strait-waistcoat. If she had not lived by rule (on her showing), she would have lived infallibly by riot. Her rules and her riots, her reservations and her concessions, all her luxuriant theory and all her extravagant practice, her drollery that mocked at her melancholy, her imagination that mocked at her drollery, and her rare forms and personal traditions that mocked a little at everything—these were part of the constant freshness which made those who loved her love her so much.

  [Fanny Kemble born on this day in 1809]

  November 28

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  “We know too much about people in these days; we hear too much. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed with personalities. Don’t mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.”

  November 29

  The Next Time, 1895

  The happiness that sat with us when we talked and that made it always amusing to talk, the sense of his being on the heels of success, coming closer and closer, touching it at last, knowing that he should touch it again and hold it fast and hold it high.

  November 30

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  “The very essence of her, as you surely by this time have made out for yourself, is that, when she adopts a view, she—well to her own sense, really brings the thing about, fairly terrorizes with her view any other, an opposite view, and those with it who represent it.”

  December

  There was a splendid sky, all blue-black and silver—a sparkling wintry vault where the stars were like a myriad points of ice. The air was silent and sharp, and the vague snow looked cruel.

  The Bostonians, 1886

  · · ·

  The early dusk had gathered thick, but the evening was fine and the lighted streets had the animation and variety of a winter that had begun with brilliancy. The shop fronts glowed through frosty panes, the bells of the street cars jangled in the cold air, the newsboys hawked the evening-paper, the vestibules of the theatres, illuminated and flanked with colored posters and the photographs of actresses, exhibited seductively their swinging doors of red leather or baize, spotted with little brass nails. Behind great plates of glass the interior of the hotels became visible, with marble-paved lobbies, white with electric lamps, and columns, and Westerners on divans stretching their legs, while behind a counter, set apart and covered with an array of periodicals and novels in paper covers, little boys, with the faces of old men, showing plans of the play houses and offering librettos, sold orchestra chairs at a premium.

  The Bostonians, 1886

  December 1

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  He felt the fiction of existence more than was suspected; but he asked no allowance on grounds of temper, he assumed that fate had treated him inordinately well and that he had no excuse for taking an ill-natured view of life, and he undertook to believe that all women were fair, all men were brave, and the world was a delightful place of sojourn, until the contrary should be distinctly proved.

  December 2

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  Variety of imagination—what is that but fatal, in the world of affairs, unless so disciplined as not to be distinguished from monotony?

  December 3

  The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1900

  Stevenson never covered his tracks, and the tracks prove perhaps to be what most attaches us. We follow them here from year to year and from stage to stage, with the same charmed sense with which he has made us follow one of his hunted herds in the heather. Life and fate and an early catastrophe were ever at his heels, and when he at last falls fighting, sinks down in the very act of valor, the “happy ending,” as he calls it for some of his correspondents, is, though precipitated and not conventional, assuredly there.

  December 4

  The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1900

  It took his own delightful talk to show how more than absurd it might be, and, if convenient, how very obscurely so, that such an incurable rover should have been complicated both with such an incurable scribbler and sad and incurable invalid, and that a man should find himself such an anomaly as a drenched yachtsman haunted with “style,” a shameless Bohemian haunted with duty, and a victim at once of the personal hunger and instinct for adventure and of the critical, constructive, sedentary view of it. He had everything all round—adventure most of all; to feel which we have only to turn from the beautiful flush of it in his text to the scarce less beautiful vision of the great hilltop in Pacific seas to which, after death, he was borne by islanders and chiefs.

  December 5

  Washington Square, 1881

  “You women are all the same! But the type to which your brother belongs was made to be the ruin of you, and you were made to be its handmaids and victims. The sign of the type in question is the determination—sometimes terrible in its quiet intensity—to accept nothing of life but its pleasures, and secure the pleasures chiefly by the aid of your complaisant sex. Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others, that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women. What our young friends chiefly insist upon is that someone else shall suffer for them; and women do that sort of thing, as you must know, wonderfully well.”

  December 6

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  It was a mark of the special intercourse of these good friends that though they had for each other, in manner and tone, such a fund of consideration as might almost have given it the stamp of diplomacy, there was yet in it also something of that economy of expression which is the result of a common experience.

  December 7

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  She was a success, that was what it came to and that was what it was to be a success: it always happened before one could know it. One’s ignorance was in fact often the greatest part of it.

  December 8

  The Great Condition, 1900

  “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?”

  December 9

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  Hyacinth found it less amusing, but the theatre, in any conditions, was full of sweet deception for him. His imagination projected, itself lovingly across the footlights, gilded and coloured the shabby canvas and battered accessories, and lost itself so effectually in the future world that the end of the piece, however long, or however short, brought with it a kind of alarm, like a stoppage of his personal life. It was impossible to be more friendly to the dramatic illusion.

  December 10

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  His duty was obscure, but he never lost a certain private satisfaction in remembering that on two or three occasions it had been performed with something of an ideal precision.
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  December 11

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  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.