The Daily Henry James Read online

  January 10

  The Given Case, 1900

  “We must do our duty—when once we see it. I didn’t know—I didn’t understand. But now I do. It’s when one’s eyes are opened that the wrong is wrong.”

  January 11

  The Art of Fiction, 1884

  But the only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be sincere. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it.

  January 12

  The Aspern Papers, 1888

  It is not supposed to be the nature of women to rise as a general thing to the largest and most liberal view—I mean of a practical scheme; but it has struck me that they sometimes throw off a bold conception—such as a man wouldn’t have risen to—with singular serenity.

  January 13

  The Reverberator, 1888

  “Against Americans I have nothing to say; some of them are the best thing the world contains. That’s precisely why one can choose.”

  January 14

  The Altar of the Dead, 1895

  She was always black-robed, as if she had had a succession of sorrows. People were not poor, after all, whom so many losses would overtake; they were positively rich when they had so much to give up.

  January 15

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  “One was no doubt a meddlesome fool; one always is, to think one sees peoples’ lives for them better than they see them for themselves. I always pay for it sooner or later, my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest.”

  January 16

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  “My dear young lady,” said Mrs. Touchett, “there are as many points of view in the world as there are people of sense. You may say that doesn’t make them very numerous! American? Never in the world; that’s shockingly narrow. My point of view, thank God, is personal!”

  January 17

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  “She does care for him you know,” said Mr. Langdon. —Mitchy, at this, gave a long, wide, glare.

  “With Nanda,” he next added, “it’s deep.”

  His companion took it from him. “Deep.”

  “And yet somehow it isn’t abject.”

  The old man wondered. “‘Abject’?”

  “I mean it isn’t pitiful. In its way,” Mitchy developed, “it’s happy.”

  This, too, though rather ruefully, Mr. Langdon would take from him. “Yes—in its way.”

  “Any passion so great, so complete,” Mitchy went on, is—satisfied or unsatisfied—a life.”

  January 18

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use than soap-bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn’t, and what one would quite differently have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or of the origin of things.

  January 19

  Washington Square, 1881

  “She’s like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy.”

  January 20

  What Maisie Knew, 1898

  In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a child’s mind, the past, on each occasion, became for her as indistinct as the future: she surrendered herself to the actual with a good faith that might have been touching to either parent.

  January 21

  Pandora, 1885

  “Haven’t you discovered that the American girl expects something especially adapted to herself? It’s very well in Europe to have a few phrases that will do for any girl. The American girl isn’t any girl; she’s a remarkable individual in a remarkable genus.”

  January 22

  The Papers, 1903

  She was only a suburban young woman in a sailor hat, and he a young man destitute in strictness of occasion for a “topper”; but they felt that they had in a peculiar way the freedom of the town, and the town, if it did nothing else, gave a range to the spirit.

  January 23

  George Sand, 1878

  People may like George Sand or not, but they can hardly deny that she is the great improvisatrice of literature—the writer who best answers to Shelley’s description of the sky-lark singing “in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.” No writer has produced such great effects with an equal absence of premeditation.

  January 24

  The Next Time, 1895

  There was something a failure was, a failure in the market, that a success somehow wasn’t. A success was as prosaic as a good dinner: there was nothing more to be said about it than that you had had it; and who but vulgar people, in such a case, made gloating remarks about the courses?

  January 25

  Eugene Pickering, 1874

  “The pearl of wisdom,” I cried, “is love; honest love in the most convenient concentration of experience! I advise you to fall in love.”

  January 26

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  Compressed and concentrated, confined to a single sharp pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there and lifting its head as that of a snake in the garden, was the disconcerting sense that “respect,” in their game, seemed somehow—he scarce knew what to call it—a fifth wheel to the coach. It was properly an inside thing, not an outside, a thing to make love greater, not to make happiness less.

  January 27

  Daisy Miller, 1878

  It seemed to him also that Daisy had never looked so pretty; but this had been an observation of his whenever he met her.

  January 28

  The Reverberator, 1888

  Like many unoccupied young men at the present hour he gave much attention to art, lived as much as possible in that alternative world, where leisure and vagueness are so mercifully relieved of their crudity.

  January 29

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  She appeared very nearly as resigned to the troubles of others as she was to her own.

  January 30

  Pandora, 1884

  She convinced him, rather effectually, that even in a great democracy there are human differences, and that American life was full of social distinctions, of delicate shades, which foreigners are often too stupid to perceive.

  January 31

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  It was one of the quiet instants that sometimes settle more matters than the outbreaks dear to the historic muse.

  February

  The winter was not over, but the spring had begun, and the smoky London air allowed the baffled citizens, by way of a change, to see through it. The town could refresh its recollections of the sky, and the sky could ascertain the geographical position of the town. The essential dimness of the low perspectives had by no means disappeared, but it had loosened its folds; it lingered as a blur of mist, interwoven with pretty suntints and faint transparencies. There was warmth and there was light, and a view of the shutters of shops, and the church bells were ringing.

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  February 1

  The Madonna of the Future, 1873

  “But meanwhile, the painter’s idea had taken wings. No lovely human outline could charm it to vulgar fact. He saw the fair form made perfect; he rose to the vision without tremor, without effort of wing; he communed with it face to face, and resolved into finer and lovelier truth the purity which completes it as the fragrance completes the rose. That’s what they call idealism; the word’s vastly abused, but the thing’s good. It’s my own creed at any rate.”

  February 2

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  She had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great account could have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived with them; such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet making it as light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it as clear as noon; of being unmistakably gay, and
yet making it as soft as dusk.

  February 3

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  She ultimately made up her mind that to be rich was a virtue, because it was to be able to do, and to do was sweet. It was the contrary of weakness. To be weak was, for a young lady, rather graceful, but, after all, as Isabel said to herself, there was a larger grace than that.

  February 4

  The Reverberator, 1888

  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.

  February 5

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  The recurrence of opportunity to observe them together would have taught a spectator that—on Mrs. Brook’s side, doubtless, more particularly—their relation was governed by two or three remarkably established and, as might have been said, refined laws, the spirit of which was to guard against the vulgarity so often coming to the surface between parent and child. That they were as good friends as if Nanda had not been her daughter was a truth that no passage between them might fail in one way or another to illustrate.

  February 6

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  “The whole matter of genius is a mystery. It bloweth where it listeth and we know nothing of its mechanism. If it gets out of order we can’t mend it; if it breaks down altogether we can’t set it going again. We must let it choose its own pace and hold our breath lest it should lose its balance. It’s dealt out in different doses, in big cups and little, and when you have consumed your portion it’s as naif to ask for more as it was for Oliver Twist to ask for more porridge. Lucky for you if you’ve got one of the big cups; we drink them down in the dark, and we can’t tell their size until we tip them up and hear the last gurgle. Those of some men last for life; those of others for a couple of years.”

  February 7

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  This was all he had to point to. However he pointed to nothing; which was very possibly just a sign of his real cleverness, one of those that the really clever had in common with the really void.

  February 8

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  Strange enough it was, and a proof, surely, of our little hero’s being a genuine artist, that the impressions he had accumulated during the last few months appeared to mingle and confound themselves with the very sources of his craft and to be susceptible of technical representation.

  February 9

  George Sand, 1878

  George Sand’s optimism, her idealism, are very beautiful, and the source of that impression of largeness, luminosity and liberality which she makes upon us, but we suspect that something even better in a novelist is that tender appreciation of actuality which makes even the application of a single coat of rose-color an act of violence.

  February 10

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  “Well,” said little Bilham, “you’re not a person to whom it’s easy to tell things you don’t want to know. Though it is easy, I admit—it’s quite beautiful,” he benevolently added, “when you do want to.”

  February 11

  The Altar of the Dead, 1895

  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.

  February 12

  James Russell Lowell, 1891

  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, everything that had color and character, and no gayety, 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.

  February 13

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  “It’s a sign that I am growing old—that I like to talk with younger people. I think it’s a very pretty compensation. If we can’t have youth within us we can have it outside of us, and I really think we see it and feel it better that way. Of course we must be in sympathy with it—that I shall always be. I don’t know that I shall ever be ill-natured with old people. I hope not; there are certainly some old people that I adore. But I shall never be ill-natured with the young; they touch me too much.”

  February 14

  The Marriages, 1892

  Mrs. Churchley 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.

  February 15

  The Liar, 1889

  When he was working well he found himself in that happy state—the happiest of all for an artist—in which things in general contribute to the particular idea and fall in with it, help it on and justify it, so that he feels for the hour as if nothing in the world can happen to him, even if it come in the guise of disaster or suffering, that will not be an enhancement of his subject.

  February 16

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  “Our troubles don’t kill us, Prince; it’s we who must try to kill them. I have buried not a few.”

  February 17

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  With his genius in his eyes, his manners on his lips, his long career behind him and his honors 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.

  February 18

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  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 it.

  February 19

  The Pension Beaurepas, 1880

  It sounds as if life went on in a very makeshift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas—as if the tone of the establishment was sordid. But such was not at all the case. We were simply very bourgeois; we practised the good old Genevese principle of not sacrificing to appearances. This is an excellent principle—when you have the reality.

  February 20

  The Madonna of the Future, 1873

  “The mystery was suddenly solved: my friend was an American! He must have been to take the picturesque so prodigiously to heart!”

  February 21

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  The single thing that was clear, in complications, was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman—to which was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining truth that complications might sometimes have their tedium beguiled by a study of the question how a gentleman would behave.

  February 22

  James Russell Lowell, 1891

  His America was a country worth hearing about, a magnificent conception, an admirably consistent and lovable object of allegiance. If the sign that in Europe one knew him best by was his intense national consciousness, one felt that this consciousness could not sit lightly on a man in whom it was the strongest form of piety. Fortunately for him and for his friends he was one of the most whimsical, one of the wittiest of human beings, so that he could play with his patriotism and make it various. All the same, one felt in it, in talk, the depth of passion that hums through his finest verse—almost the only passion that, to my sense, his poetry contains—the accent of chivalry, of the lover, the knight ready to do battle for his mistress.

  [James Russell Lowell born on this day in 1819]

  February 23

  A Landscape Painter, 1866

  “It is your own fault if people don’t care for you; you don’t care for them. That you should be indifferent to their good opinion is all very well; but you don’t care for their indifference.”

  February 24

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  It c
ame back—to his own previous perception—that of the Prince’s inability, in any matter in which he was concerned, to conclude. The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each stage, had to be demonstrated. And how, when you came to that, could you know that a horse wouldn’t shy at a brass-band, in a country road, because it didn’t shy at a traction engine? It might have been brought up to traction engines without having been brought up to brass-bands.