The Daily Henry James Read online

  May 4

  Pandora, 1884

  At last the new voyagers began to emerge from below and to look about them vaguely, with the suspicious expression of face which is to be perceived in the newly embarked, and which, as directed to the receding land, resembles that of a person who begins to perceive himself the victim of a trick. Earth and ocean, in such glances, are made the subject of a general objection, and many travellers, in these circumstances, have an air at once duped and superior, which seems to say that they could easily go ashore if they would.”

  May 5

  Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887

  It has become the fashion to be effective at the expense of the sitter, to make some little point, or inflict some little dig, with a heated party air, rather than to catch a talent in the fact, follow its line and put a ringer on its essence: so that the exquisite art of criticism, smothered in grossness, finds itself turned into a question of “sides.”

  May 6

  The Altar of the Dead, 1895

  A woman when she was wronged was always more wronged than a man, and there were conditions when the least she could have got off with was more than the most he could have to endure.

  May 7

  Browning in Westminster Abbey, 1891

  His voice sounds loudest, and also clearest, for the things that, as a race, we like best—the fascination of faith, the acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of the great human passion. If Browning had spoken for us in no other way, he ought to have been made sure of, tamed and chained as a classic, on account of the extraordinary beauty of his treatment of the special relation between man and woman.

  May 8

  The Papers, 1903

  Almost all they had with any security was their youth, complete, admirable, very nearly invulnerable, or as yet unattackable; for they didn’t count their talent, which they had originally taken for granted and had since then lacked freedom of mind, as well indeed as any offensive reason, to reappraise.

  May 9

  The Madonna of the Future, 1873

  “You see I have the great advantage that I lose no time. These hours I spend with you are pure profit. They are suggestive! Just as the truly religious soul is always at worship, the genuine artist is always in labour. He takes his property wherever he finds it, and learns some precious secret from every object that stands up in the light. If you but knew the rapture of observation!”

  May 10

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  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.

  May 11

  The Madonna of the Future, 1873

  “I’m the half of a genius—where in the wide world is my other half? Lodged perhaps in the vulgar soul, the cunning, ready ringers of some dull copyist or some trivial artisan, who turns out by the dozen his easy prodigies of touch! But it’s not for me to sneer at him, he at least does something. He’s not a dawdler!”

  May 12

  What Maisie Knew, 1898

  There was at this season a wonderful month of May—as soft as a drop of the wind in a gale that had kept one awake.

  May 13

  Eugene Pickering, 1874

  “I said just now I always supposed I was happy; it’s true. But now that my eyes are open I see I was only stultified. I was like a poodle-dog that is led about by a blue ribbon, and scoured and combed and fed on slops. It wasn’t life; life is learning to know oneself.”

  May 14

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  It had a vulgar sound—as throughout in love, the names of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared with love itself, vulgar.

  May 15

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  There hung about him still moreover the faded fragrance of the superstition that hospitality not declined is one of the things that “oblige.” It obliged the thoughts, for Mr. Longdon, as well as the manners.

  May 16

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  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 helplessly expensive little black frock that she drew over the grass—it was in the curious and splendid coils of hair “done” with no eye whatever to the mode du jour, that peeped from under the corresponding indifference of her hat, the merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of noble inelegance. She couldn’t dress it away, nor walk it away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it away in any dreamy absence, nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She couldn’t have lost it if she had tried—that was what it was to be really rich. It had to be the thing you were.

  May 17

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  The day was, even in the heart of London, of a rich, lowbrowed, weather-washed English type. So far as this was the case the impression of course could only be lost on a mere vague Italian; it was one of those things for which you had to be, blessedly, an American.

  May 18

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  Nanda hovered there slim and charming, feathered and ribboned, dressed in thin, fresh fabrics and faint colors.

  “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 moralized, “one must always, I consider, think, as a sort of point de repère, of some one good person. Only it’s best if it’s a person one’s afraid of. You do very well, but I’m not enough. What one really requires is a kind of salutary terror.”

  May 19

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  The nearest approach to anxiety indulged in as yet by the elder lady was on her taking occasion to wonder if what she had more than anything else got hold of mightn’t be one of the finer, one of the finest, one of the rarest—as she called it so that she might call it nothing worse—cases of American intensity. Meanwhile, decidedly, it was enough that the girl was as charming as she was queer and as queer as she was charming—all of which was a rare amusement.

  May 20

  The Lesson of Balzac, 1905

  “Complete” is of course a great word, and there is no art at all, we are often reminded, that is not on too many sides an abject compromise. The element of compromise is always there; it is of the essence; we live with it, and it may serve to keep us humble. The formula of the whole matter is sufficiently expressed perhaps in a reply I found myself once making to an inspired but discouraged friend, a fellow-craftsman who had declared in his despair that there was no use trying, that it [the novel] was a form absolutely too difficult. “Too difficult indeed; yet there is one way to master it—which is to pretend consistently that it isn’t.”

  May 21

  Washington Square, 1881

  Love demands certain things as a right; but Catherine had no sense of her rights; she had only a consciousness of immense and unexpected favours. Her very gratitude for these things had hushed itself, as it seemed to her there would be something of impudence in making a festival of her secret.

  May 22

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  There were ten days left of the beautiful month of May—the most precious month of all to the true Rome-lover. The sky was a blaze of blue, and the plash of the fountains, in their mossy niches, had lost its chill and doubled its music. On the corners of the warm, bright streets one stumbled upon bundles of flowers.

  May 23

  The Portrait o
f a Lady, 1881

  There was something in Miss Stackpole he had begun to like; it seemed to him that if she was not a charming woman she was at least a very good fellow. She was wanting in distinction, but, as Isabel had said, she was brave, and one never quite saw the end of the value of that.

  May 24

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  His life would be full of machinery, which was the antidote to superstition; which was, in its turn, too much the consequence, or at least the exhalation, of archives.

  May 25

  Emerton, 1887

  We have the impression, somehow, that life had never bribed him to look at anything but the soul; and indeed in the world in which he grew up and lived the bribes and lures, the beguilements and prizes, were few. He was in an admirable position for showing, what he constantly endeavored to show, that the prize was within.

  May 26

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  “You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views—that is your great illusion, my dear. But we can’t. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no-one at all—not even yourself.”

  May 27

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  It fell in easily with the tenderness of her disposition to remember she might occasionally make him happy by an intimate confidence. This was one of her rules—full as she was of little rules, considerations, provisions.

  May 28

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  “I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It’s a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge ‘squash,’ as we elegantly call it—an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.”

  May 29

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  “Oh, your friend’s a type, the grand old American—what shall one call it? The Hebrew prophet, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, who used when I was a little girl, in the rue Montaigne, to come to see my father, and who was usually the American minister to the Tuileries or some other court. I haven’t seen one these ever so many years; the sight of it warms my poor old chilled heart; this specimen is wonderful.”

  May 30

  James Russell Lowell, 1891

  To me, at any rate, there is something seductive in the way in which, in the Harvard “Commemoration Ode,” for instance, the air of the study mingles with the hot breath of passion. The reader who is eternally bribed by form may ask himself whether Mr. Lowell’s prose or his poetry has the better chance of a long life—the hesitation being justified by the rare degree in which the prose has the great qualities of style; but in the presence of some of the splendid stanzas inspired by the war-time (and among them I include, of course, the second series of “The Biglow Papers”) one feels that, whatever shall become of the essays, the transmission from generation to generation of such things as these may safely be left to the national conscience.

  [ Decoration Day ]

  May 31

  Pandora, 1854

  There appeared now to be a constant danger of marrying the American girl; it was something one had to reckon with, like the rise in prices, the telephone, the discovery of dynamite, the Chassepot rifle, the socialistic spirit; it was one of the complications of modern life.

  June

  The lower windows of the great white house, which stood high and square, opened to a wide flagged terrace, the parapet of which, an old balustrade of stone, was broken in the middle of its course by a flight of stone steps that descended to a wonderful garden. The terrace had the afternoon shade and fairly hung over the prospect that dropped away and circled 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 unoccupied as yet by other visitors, stood there awhile with an air of happy possession. She moved from end to end of the terrace, pausing, gazing about her, taking in with a face that showed the pleasure of a brief independence 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 solitude 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, 1904

  June 1

  Charles Baudelaire, 1878

  To deny the relevancy of subject-matter and the importance of the moral quality of a work of art strikes us as, in two words, very childish. We do not know what the great moralists would say about the matter—they would probably treat it very good-humouredly; but that is not the question. There is very little doubt what the great artists would say. People of that temper feel that the whole thinking man is one, and that to count out the moral element in one’s appreciation of an artistic total is exactly as sane as it would be (if the total were a poem) to eliminate all the words in three syllables, or to consider only such portions of it as had been written by candle-light.

  June 2

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  “The fact is I’ve been comfortable so many years that I suppose I’ve got so used to it I don’t know it.”

  “Yes, that’s the bore of comfort,” said Lord Warburton, “We only know when we’re uncomfortable.”

  June 3

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  He had perceived on the spot that any serious discussion of veracity, of loyalty, or rather of the want of them, practically took her unprepared, as if it were quite new to her. He had noticed it before: it was the English, the American sign that duplicity, like “love,” had to be joked about. It couldn’t be “gone into.”

  June 4

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  The boulevard was all alive, brilliant with illuminations, with the variety and gaiety of the crowd, the dazzle of shops and cafes seen through uncovered fronts or immense lucid plates, the flamboyant porches of theatres and the flashing lamps of carriages, the far-spreading murmur of talkers and strollers, the uproar of pleasure and prosperity, the general magnificence of Paris on a perfect evening in June.

  June 5

  The Great Condition, 1900

  “Well, that’s what struck me as especially nice, or rather as very remarkable in her—her being, with all her attraction, one of the obscure seventy millions; a mere little almost nameless tossed-up flower out of the mixed lap of the great American people. I mean for the charming person she is. I doubt if, after all, any other huge mixed lap—”

  “Yes, if she were English, on those lines, one wouldn’t look at her, would one? I say, fancy her English.”

  June 6

  The Reverberator, 1888

  A fate was rather a cumbersome and formidable possession, which it relieved her that some kind person should undertake the keeping of.

  June 7

  The Author of Beltraffio, 1885

  That was the way many things struck me at that time in England; as if they were reproductions of something that existed primarily in art or literature. It was not the picture, the poem, the Active page that seemed to me a copy; these things were the originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their image.

  June 8

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  She had sunk down upon the bench almost with a sense of adventure, yet, not too fluttered to wonder if it wouldn’t have been nappy to bring a book; the charm of which, precisely, would have been in feeling everything about her too beautiful to let her read.

  June 9

  Guy de Maupassant, 1888

  When it is a question of an artistic process we must always distrust very sharp distinctions, for there is surely in every living method a little of ever
y other method.

  June 10

  Charles Baudelaire, 1878

  People of a large taste prefer rich works to poor ones and they are not inclined to assent to the assumption that the process is the whole work. We are safe in believing that all this is comfortably clear to most of those who have, in any degree, been initiated into art by production. For them the subject is as much a part of their work as their hunger is a part of their dinner. Baudelaire was not so far from being of this way of thinking as some of his admirers would persuade us; yet we may say on the whole that he was the victim of a grotesque illusion. He tried to make fine verses on ignoble subjects, and in our opinion he signally failed. He gives, as a poet, a perpetual impression of discomfort and pain. He went in search of corruption, and the ill-conditioned jade proved a thankless muse. The thinking reader, feeling himself, as a critic, all one, as we have said, finds the beauty nullified by the ugliness.