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really just an ample scenario for the proposed drama. It was also an extraordinary record of inspiration, for I doubt if any writer has ever been more fully conscious of each step along the path of illumination or given more articulate utterance to the whole process of this experience. Death of the Lion he has himself described a scheme of the kind, attributing its authorship to Neil Paraday, the victim already doomed to be sacrificed on the altar of renown. "Loose, liberal, confident, it might have passed for a great gossiping eloquent letter-the overflow into talk of an artist's amorous plan." So he mapped out his design. But he mapped it out, at the same time, with the fullest recognition that at closer quarters with his subject he might more often than not find it refusing to be confined within the architectural limits provided. "In the intimacy of composition," as he remarked, "prenoted arrangements, proportions, and relations do most uncommonly insist on making themselves different by shifts and variations, always improving, which impose themselves as one goes and keep the door open always to something more right and more related. It is subject to that constant possibility, all the while, that one does pre-note and tentatively sketch."

For the two volumes of memories A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, he dictated no preliminary notes. He plunged straight into the stream of the past, without a doubt or an hesitation. The reading over each morning of the pages written the day before was all the stimulus needed to start him on a fresh effort to render adequately the depth and the delicacy of his early impressions. After about an hour of conscious effort he would often be caught on a rising wave of inspiration and would get up from his armchair

and pace up and down the room, sounding out his periods in tones of resonant assurance. He was then beyond the reach of unconnected sights or sounds. Hosts of cats-a tribe usually routed at the first cry, with shouts of execration might wail outside the window; phalanxes of dreaded motor-cars bearing incursive visitors might hoot at his door. He was impervious to them. The only thing that could arrest him was the escape of the word he wanted to use. When that had gone he paused, he left off walking about the room, and, standing by a bookcase or chimneypiece tall enough for him to support his arms on it, he rested his head in his hands and audibly pursued the fugitive.

III.

When I first went to Rye, in the autumn of 1907, Henry James was engaged in the immense business of preparing his novels and tales for the big, definitive New York edition, which was published in 1909. The mornings he devoted to dictating the illuminating prefaces, the interesting series of apologies prefixed to each of the works contained in that far from complete collection. Concurrently with this "inventive" work of the morning, the mass of arduous labor entailed by the careful revision of the included writings was performed in the evening. This revision was a task he had seen in advance as extremely formidable, one of the chief difficulties being that he had considerably forgotten his early work. Far from ever reposing, even for an instant, on any laurels already won, Henry James was always eagerly pressing forewards. His statement that "to get and to keep finished and dismissed work well behind one, and to have as little to say to it and about it as possible, had been for years one's only law," was the absolute truth.

If the question of the definitive edition had not come up, he would never have given another glance at the tales of his younger time. The thing he was going to write next always shone more splendidly before him than anything he had already achieved. And he was also conscious that his way of seeing and rendering a situation had greatly changed since the days when he was writing his early and more generally popular books. It had changed so much that he had come to believe that his younger productions would prove to be, from his later æsthetic standpoint, almost unreadably bad. On a morning when he was obliged to give the hours to making a selection among some of the shorter tales for one of the forthcoming volumes, he confessed that the difficulty of selection was mainly the difficulty of reading them at all. "They seem," he declared, "so bad until I have read them that I can't force myself to look at them except with a pen in my hand, altering as I go the crudities and ineptitudes that to my sense deform each page."

But when he had managed, by dint of treating each page as a proof-sheet, to read the older stories, he was relieved to find them, as a rule, really much better than he had feared. They were perhaps not, after all, he decided, the disgrace to his more mature artistic self that he had been persuaded they must be.

But he has himself dealt in the preface to The Golden Bowl with the whole debatable question of this "revised version," and there is no need to insist here on his point of view. Many of his readers have protested against the drastic pruning of old shoots and grafting of new ones on the fine old stock of the novels and tales they have known from far back. They have particularly denounced the imposition of a later system of punctuaLIVING AGE, VOL. VII, No. 339.

tion, and it has to be admitted that, logical and orderly as Henry James's fully evolved scheme of punctuation was, it sometimes fails to guide us to an immediate understanding of his meaning. He was occasionally misled himself. But anyone who takes the trouble to collate the earlier forms of the revised tales with the later can hardly fail, I think, to be struck by the increased vividness, the quality of life, the richer effect of atmosphere that has generally been gained. Sometimes this gain is at the expense of ease and smoothness. The final form is not so pretty, but it is ever so much more alive. It is not so pretty because, as the years went by, he became increasingly anxious to render adequately the whole truth and depth of his perceptions rather than to sketch a graceful surface. There are artists for whom beauty is truth, and others for whom truth is beauty. It was to the latter class that Henry James essentially belonged. His struggle was always to stretch his power of expression to the compass of the things he saw and felt; and it seemed to him, when he re-read his forgotten stories, that he had missed in writing them countless precious opportunities for rendering vision and feeling which the process of revision allowed him at last to retrieve. His labor was untiringly devoted to bringing out the visual values and to substituting wherever he could some definite sharp image for early loose vagueness. In The Madonna of the Future, a tale published in 1879, a sentence in the original form runs: "His professions, somehow, were all half-professions, and his allusions to his work and circumstances left something dimly ambiguous in the background." In the New York edition this is converted to: "His professions were practically, somehow, all masks and screens, and his personal allusions,

as to his ambiguous background, mere wavings of the dim lantern." That is a representative sample of the kind of thing he was trying to do to every tale he touched with his revising pen. Another sentence from the same story began as: "He turned upon me almost angrily, but perceiving the genial flavor of my sarcasm, he smiled gravely." In its final form it is: "He turned upon me at first almost angrily -then saw that I was but sowing the false to reap the true."

But the writing of explanatory prefaces and the revision of stories and novels was far from being the complete tale of literary labor even of the years when preparation for the edition was most actively going forward. The years 1907 and 1908 were bright with the promise of a new era for English drama. Valiantly led by Miss Horniman, the advocates of the repertory system were marching forward, capturing one by one the intellectual centers of the provinces. Henry James was quickly responsive to the appeal for non-commercial drama. The theatre had always allured him, even if it had also repelled. He had in earlier years written such plays as Covering End and The Other House, only to find them unproducibly on his hands, and he had thereupon, "economically," he said, turned them into works of fiction, "embedding the dialogue of the plays in a certain amount of descriptive commentary." A few attentive readers had guessed the origin of Covering End, or had, at any rate, recognized its dramatic possibilities, and when it was suggested to the author that he should re-write it as a three-act comedy to be performed by Mr. Forbes Robertson (as he then was) and Miss Gertrude Elliott, he willingly assented. The play, re-named The High Bid, was not produced in London until February, 1909, and then only for a series of

matinees, for the prodigious success of The Passing of the Third Floor Back precluded the possibility of an evening run for any other production under the same management. But in the meantime Henry James had felt encouraged to embark on other playwriting experiments. For a writer who had consistently seen his subjects in a dramatic light it was not difficult to put them into strictly dramatic form. It was the easiest thing in the world for him to turn The Other House

back again into a tragedy. It was scarcely less easy to take other published tales and make plays of them. The story of the exhibition of moral courage leading to the victorious death of the boy named with grim propriety "Owen Wingrave" was made into a one-act play, The Saloon, which was produced by Miss Gertrude Kingston at the Little Theatre in 1910. Finally, in 1909, an entirely new threeact comedy entitled The Outcry was written. Highly topical in its subject, it was meant for production at a London theatre pledged to a repertory season. The play was not produced. At the time when it should have been rehearsed Henry James was seriously ill and he afterwards went to America. When he returned the day of repertory performances in London had died in a fresh night of stars. The Outcry, like some of its predecessors, was published, not as a play, but as a novel.

It is almost literally true to say of the sheaf of stories collected in The Finer Grain that they were written in response to a request for a single short. story for Harper's Monthly Magazine. The desired length was, I think, about five thousand words, and each budding idea for a tale was cultivated in the optimistic hope that it might produce a flower too slight and frail to demand any exhaustive attention from the author. But each in turn insisted,

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even under the pressure of being written by hand, on developing to lengths that no amount of lopping or chopping could reduce to the Procrustean word limit. The tale eventually sent to the editor of Harper's Monthly was the appealing portrait of "Crapy Cornelia," and I seem to remember that though it was the shortest of the batch it could appear only in two halves, printed in successive numbers of the magazine.

The two volumes of memories, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, written after Henry James came back from the United States in 1911, were composed chiefly in London. He had by that time come back, after many seasons of country solitude, to his earlier love of the friendly London winter. During the first winter after his return he lodged at the Reform Club and repaired every morning to a room in an old house in Chelsea, which he had taken for his working hours and arranged as a study. It was a narrow, rather dark little room-it was his habit to allude to it as "my Chelsea cellar." But even under these gloomy conditions the charm of Chelsea worked its spell on him, and he decided to make a new London home for himself in that neighborhood. He took a flat on Cheyne Walk and there, in a big room overlooking a clear stretch of the river, he worked for the remainder of his time. He still spent the summer months at Rye; he was there when war began, engaged on a novel which he immediately abandoned because he felt it impossible to go on with such "utterly irrelevant" work. only thing he felt able to turn to, after he had recovered sufficiently from that tremendous shake of the ground under his feet to be able to turn to anything at all, was the beginning of what was intended to be a third volume of reminiscences. The fragment that

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he wrote he had meant to call the book The Middle Years-holds the sure promise that it would have been one of the most charming and valuable of his works. He laid it aside, however, to do work that seemed to be more immediately pressing. A novel begun many years before was taken up again because its subject was so independent of contemporary history that he found it possible to revert to it even during the war. But whenever an appeal came for him to write something in aid of one of the great works of charity called into being by war, whenever he felt that he could bear effective witness to his complete and ardent sympathy with the cause of the Allies, he set aside everything else to reaffirm his emphatic testimony. He

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For readers of his books it may well seem superfluous to lay any stress on the fact that his hours of work were what Henry James lived for. But if a man scarcely ever mentions the passion of his life, if he cultivates the art of conversation to a high pitch and yet is never to be heard conversing of that, the people among whom he chiefly moves and talks may not unnaturally thrust into the background of their view of him an object he himself leaves discreetly veiled and shrouded. And Henry James, exhaustively communicative on every other topic of his talk, maintained about his writing a marked reserve. This was not at all because he was indifferent to what his friends thought of it. He cared very much what they thought, too much to run the risk of feeling that he had not been com

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pletely understood. Invariably touched by any evidence that his books had been intelligently read and appreciated, he never sought such evidence for himself. He found it safest to assume that nobody read him, and liked his friends and acquaintances none the less for that. His enjoyment of human intercourse was unclouded by any breath of that uncomfortable consciousness known as an "author's vanity." And no man ever more keenly appreciated the beauty of a formed relation or kept more fresh his power of forming new ones to the end. But this very extremity of apparent disconnection from his work induced in him at times a corresponding extremity of loneliness. Meanwhile,

the volumes of his published works piled themselves up year by yearvisible, palpable, readable proofs of those unceasing travails of the creative spirit that was always laboring behind the barrier of his silence.

The lives of men of genius have too often resolved themselves into a desperate struggle between inner and outer necessity. Their temperamental need to express what is in them has been pitted against the need to make money, the need to be a satisfactory husband and father, the need to compromise with the claims of a neglected body and an overworked brain for rest and refreshment. From these hindering pressures Henry James was noticeably free. The economic basis of life is recognized in this country in so gentlemanly and unobtrusive a manner that it sometimes seems to escape attention altogether, and biographers and novelists alike leave us wondering how their interesting subjects managed to "live." The people of Henry James's own novels exist, for the most part, on unmentioned incomes which are at least ample for the provision of opportunities for enjoying travel and leisure, for visiting

in expensive country houses, and for making suitably clad appearances in the best society. The pursuit of riches beyond that necessary minimum is certainly branded as wrong, by implication if not by open admission. By that sin fall many of the worldly, predatory actors in his dramas, however splendidly they may blaze on their descent. The whole course of his life showed him to be without the least taint of the sordid passion. But, like his finer creations, he never lacked a liberty that rested on an income sufficient to gratify his taste for a life of impressions and appreciations. He had never known a time when the expense of travel was prohibitive; when hansoms or motor-cars, gondolas or vetture, were not at his service; when a struggle for the means to live obscured even for a moment his lucid vision of the ends for which life should be lived. His fundamental economic independence of his work enabled him to fashion it in the mould he desired, irrespective of the demands of the market.

From domestic anxieties he was also to a great extent free. No wife or child shared his hearth, and though his relatives in the United States enjoyed the highest measure of his affection and interest, the wide stretch of the Atlantic Ocean prevented his time or energy from being greatly occupied with family claims. If he had to consider his health carefully, he had, at any rate, the good fortune to possess, as the supporting ground of his rich consciousness, a really strong constitution. often suffering from various definite indispositions, but he had none of the frail delicacy that we almost expect to find in men of letters. He rallied quickly from illness, he threw off minor complaints with ease, and he was quite remarkably free in later life from headaches or any of those lesser

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