by Henry James
Lady Barb didn’t trouble herself to denounce this gentleman; her manner was that of having for a long time expected the worst. She simply remarked after having listened to her husband for some minutes in silence: “I’d quite as lief she should marry Doctor Feeder!”
The day after this he closeted himself for an hour with his sister-in-law, taking great pains to set forth to her the reasons why she shouldn’t marry her Californian. Jackson was kind, he was affectionate; he kissed her and put his arm round her waist, he reminded her that he and she were the best of friends and that she had always been awfully nice to him: therefore he counted on her. She’d break her mother’s heart, she’d deserve her father’s curse, and she’d get him, Jackson, into a pickle from which no human power might ever disembroil him. Lady Agatha listened and cried, she returned his kiss very affectionately and admitted that her father and mother would never consent to such a marriage; and when he told her that he had made arrangements that she should sail for Liverpool, with some charming people, the next day but one, she embraced him again and assured him she could never thank him enough for all the trouble he had taken about her. He flattered himself he had convinced and in some degree comforted her, and he reflected with complacency that even should his wife take it into her head Barb would never get ready to embark for her native land between a Monday and a Wednesday. The next morning Lady Agatha failed to appear at breakfast, though as she usually rose very late her absence excited no immediate alarm. She hadn’t rung her bell and was supposed still to be sleeping. But she had never yet slept later than mid-day; and as this hour approached her sister went to her room. Lady Barb then discovered that she had left the house at seven o’clock in the morning and had gone to meet Mr. Longstraw at a neighbouring corner. A little note on the table explained it very succinctly, and put beyond the power of the Jackson Lemons to doubt that by the time this news reached them their wayward sister had been united to the man of her preference as closely as the laws of the State of New York could bind her. Her little note set forth that as she knew she should never be permitted to marry him she had resolved to marry him without permission, and that directly after the ceremony, which would be of the simplest kind, they were to take a train for the Far West.
Our record is concerned only with the remote consequences of this affair, which made of course a great deal of trouble for poor Jackson. He pursued the fugitives to remote rocky fastnesses and finally overtook them in California; but he hadn’t the boldness to propose to them to separate, for he promptly made out that Herman Longstraw was at least as well married as himself. Lady Agatha was already popular in the new States, where the history of her elopement, emblazoned in enormous capitals, was circulated in a thousand newspapers. This question of the newspapers had been for our troubled friend one of the most definite results of his sister-in-law’s coup de tête. His first thought had been of the public prints and his first exclamation a prayer that they shouldn’t get hold of the story. They had, however, got hold of it with a myriad wildly-waved hands and were scattering it broadcast over the world. Lady Barb never caught them in the act—she succeeded perfectly in not seeing what she needn’t; but an affectionate friend of the family, travelling at that time in the United States, made a parcel of some of the leading journals, and sent them to Lord Canterville. This missive elicited from her ladyship a letter, addressed to her son-in-law, which shook the young man’s position to the base. The phials of a rank vulgarity had been opened on the house of Canterville, and the noble matron demanded that in compensation for the affronts and injuries heaped upon her family, and bereaved and dishonoured as she was, she should at least be allowed to look on the face of her second daughter. “I suppose you’ll not, for very pity, be deaf to such a prayer as that,” said Lady Barb; and though loth to record a second act of weakness on the part of a man with pretensions to be strong, I may not disguise the fact that poor Jackson, who blushed dreadfully over the newspapers and felt afresh as he read them the force of Mrs. Freer’s terrible axiom, poor Jackson paid a visit to the office of the Cunarders. He said to himself later on that it was the newspapers that had done it; he couldn’t decently appear to be on their side: they made it so hard to deny that the country was impossible at a time when one was in need of all one’s arguments. Lady Barb, before sailing, definitely refused to mention any week or month as the date of their prearranged return to New York. Very many weeks and months have elapsed since then, and she gives no sign of coming back. She will never fix a date. She is much missed by Mrs. Vanderdecken, who still alludes to her—still says the line of the shoulders was superb; putting the statement pensively in the past tense. Lady Beauchemin and Lady Marmaduke are much disconcerted; the international project has not, in their view, received an impetus.
Jackson Lemon has a house in London and he rides in the Park with his wife, who is as beautiful as the day and who a year ago presented him with a little girl exhibiting features that he already scans for the look of race—whether in hope or in fear to-day is more than my muse has revealed. He has occasional scenes with Lady Barb during which the look of race is very clear in her own countenance; but they never terminate in a visit to the Cunarders. He’s exceedingly restless and is constantly crossing to the Continent; but he returns with a certain abruptness, for he hates meeting the Dexter Freers, who seem to pervade the more comfortable parts of Europe. He dodges them in every town. Sidney Feeder feels very badly about him; it’s months since Jackson has sent him any “results.” The excellent fellow goes very often, in a consolatory spirit, to see Mrs. Lemon, but has not yet been able to answer her standing question—“Why that girl more than another?” Lady Agatha Longstraw and her husband arrived a year ago in England, and Mr. Longstraw’s personality had immense success during the last London season. It’s not exactly known what they live on, though perfectly known that he’s looking for something to do. Meanwhile it’s as good as known that their really quite responsible brother-in-law supports them.
The Author of Beltraffio
The Author of Beltraffio
IN THE eighties and nineties James wrote a number of short stories and short novels about the life of artists and writers. The Author of Beltraffio (1884) is one of the earliest and finest narratives in this series, which includes The Figure in the Carpet, The Lesson of the Master, The Death of the Lion, The Coxon Fund, The Middle Years, The Next Time, Greville Fane, The Real Thing, and Broken Wings. It is his own artistic idealism, the lessons he drew from his experience as a professional writer, and his complex and ironic sense of the artist’s position in society that James dramatized in these stories. And their importance is not limited to their Jamesian reference; for complete understanding, it is necessary to grasp their significant relation to that entire section of modern literature in which the creative process and the creative personality are at once analyzed and celebrated.
The hero of some of these stories is a novelist who, in his literary if not personal traits, bears a distinct resemblance to Henry James himself. Such types as Hugh Vereker in The Figure in the Carpet and Dencombe in The Middle Years appear in no other role than that of the literary artist; their sole function is to exhibit the triumphs and passions, embarrassments and humiliations of the artist qua artist. Other stories of a more mixed intention, recall the English literary world of the late nineteenth century, though none so concretely as The Author of Beltraffio—its hero, Mark Ambient, being a character said to be modeled on John Addington Symonds. For a long time, because of certain statements made by Edmund Gosse, it was thought that the original of Mark Ambient was Robert Louis Stevenson; but Professor F. O. Matthiessen, who had had access to James’s unpublished notebooks, has recently established the identity of Symonds as the subject of the anecdote that James was told one day about the situation of an eminent author whose wife found his work objectionable—“immoral, pagan, hyperaesthetic.” Such was the “air-blown grain” which produced the story of Mark Ambient—a figure interesting not so much for his perso
nal qualities as for qualities richly evocative of the aesthetic movement in England at the time of Pater and Swinburne. This is what makes Mark Ambient perhaps the very best portrait in fiction of the English gentleman-aesthete of the late Victorian age.
The plot of the story is a piece of wonderful invention from beginning to end. The deathly struggle between the author of Beltraffio and his wife—the guardian-spirit of British respectability—for the possession of their beautiful child has that element of psychological horror which James knew so well how to manipulate. One of the typical motives of his fiction is the use of the innocence of children as the precipitant of the corrupt and the sinister. Mark Ambient’s child is the little brother of Pansy in The Portrait of a Lady, and of Maisie in What Maisie Knew, and of Morgan Moreen in The Pupil, and of course of those two strange children in The Turn of the Screw who are really beyond everything.
PART I
MUCH AS I wished to see him, I had kept my letter of introduction for three weeks in my pocket-book. I was nervous and timid about meeting him,—conscious of youth and ignorance, convinced that he was tormented by strangers, and especially by my country-people, and not exempt from the suspicion that he had the irritability as well as the brilliancy of genius. Moreover, the pleasure, if it should occur (for I could scarcely believe it was near at hand), would be so great that I wished to think of it in advance, to feel that it was in my pocket, not to mix it with satisfactions more superficial and usual In the little game of new sensations that I was playing with my ingenuous mind, I wished to keep my visit to the author of Beltraffio as a trump card. It was three years after the publication of that fascinating work, which I had read over five times, and which now, with my riper judgment, I admire on the whole as much as ever. This will give you about the date of my first visit (of any duration) to England; for you will not have forgotten the commotion—I may even say the scandal—produced by Mark Ambient’s masterpiece. It was the most complete presentation that had yet been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of aesthetic war-cry. People had endeavored to sail nearer to “truth” in the cut of their sleeves and the shape of their sideboards; but there had not as yet been, among English novels, such an example of beauty of execution and genuineness of substance. Nothing had been done in that line from the point of view of art for art. This was my own point of view, I may mention, when I was twenty-five; whether it is altered now I won’t take upon myself to say—especially as the discerning reader will be able to judge for himself. I had been in England, briefly, a twelvemonth before the time to which I began by alluding, and had learned then that Mr. Ambient was in distant lands—was making a considerable tour in the East: so there was nothing to do but to keep my letter till I should be in London again. It was of little use to me to hear that his wife had not left England, and, with her little boy, their only child, was spending the period of her husband’s absence—a good many months—at a small place they had down in Surrey. They had a house in London which was let. All this I learned, and also that Mrs. Ambient was charming (my friend the American poet, from whom I had my introduction, had never seen her, his relations with the great man being only epistolary); but she was not, after all, though she had lived so near the rose, the author of Beltraffio, and I did not go down into Surrey to call on her. I went to the Continent, spent the following winter in Italy, and returned to London in May. My visit to Italy opened my eyes to a good many things, but to nothing more than the beauty of certain pages in the works of Mark Ambient. I had every one of his productions in my portmanteau,—they are not, as you know, very numerous, but he had preluded to Beltraffio by some exquisite things,—and I used to read them over in the evening at the inn. I used to say to myself that the man who drew those characters and wrote that style understood what he saw and knew what he was doing. This is my only reason for mentioning my winter in Italy. He had been there much in former years, and he was saturated with what painters call the “feeling” of that classic land. He expressed the charm of the old hill-cities of Tuscany, the look of certain lonely grass-grown places which, in the past, had echoed with life; he understood the great artists, he understood the spirit of the Renaissance, he understood everything. The scene of one of his earlier novels was laid in Borne, the scene of another in Florence, and I moved through these cities in company with the figures whom Mark Ambient had set so vividly upon their feet. This is why I was now so much happier even than before in the prospect of making his acquaintance.
At last, when I had dallied with this privilege long enough, I despatched to him the missive of the American poet He had already gone out of town; he shrank from the rigor of the London “season” and it was his habit to migrate on the first of June. Moreover, I had heard that this year he was hard at work on a new book, into which some of his impressions of the East were to be wrought, so that he desired nothing so much as quiet days. This knowledge, however, did not prevent me—cet âge est sans pitié—from sending with my friend’s letter a note of my own, in which I asked Mr. Ambient’s leave to come down and see him for an hour or two, on a day to be designated by himself. My proposal was accompanied with a very frank expression of my sentiments, and the effect of the whole projectile was to elicit from the great man the kindest possible invitation. He would be delighted to see me, especially if I should turn up on the following Saturday and would remain till the Monday morning. We would take a walk over the Surrey commons, and I could tell him all about the other great man, the one in America. He indicated to me the best train, and it may be imagined whether on the Saturday afternoon I was punctual at Waterloo. He carried his benevolence to the point of coming to meet me at the little station at which I was to alight, and my heart beat very fast as I saw his handsome face, surmounted with a soft wide-awake, and which I knew by a photograph long since enshrined upon my mantelshelf, scanning the carriage windows as the train rolled up. He recognized me as infallibly as I had recognized him; he appeared to know by instinct how a young American of an æsthetic turn would look when much divided between eagerness and modesty. He took me by the hand, and smiled at me, and said: “You must be—a—you, I think!” and asked if I should mind going on foot to his house, which would take but a few minutes. I remember thinking it a piece of extraordinary affability that he should give directions about the conveyance of my bag, and feeling altogether very happy and rosy, in fact quite transported, when he laid his hand on my shoulder as we came out of the station.
I surveyed him, askance, as we walked together; I had already—I had indeed instantly—seen that he was a delightful creature. His face is so well known that I needn’t describe it; he looked to me at once an English gentleman and a man of genius, and I thought that a happy combination. There was just a little of the Bohemian in his appearance; you would easily have guessed that he belonged to the guild of artists and men of letters. He was addicted to velvet jackets, to cigarettes, to loose shirt-collars, to looking a little dishevelled. His features, which were fine, but not perfectly regular, are fairly enough represented in his portraits; but no portrait that I have seen gives any idea of his expression. There were so many things in it, and they chased each other in and out of his face. I have seen people who were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and the same moment. There were other strange oppositions and contradictions in his slightly faded and fatigued countenance. He seemed both young and old, both anxious and indifferent. He had evidently had an active past, which inspired one with curiosity, and yet it was impossible not to be more curious still about his future. He was just enough above middle height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean and long in the flank. He had the friendliest, frankest manner possible, and yet I could see that he was shy. He was thirty-eight years old at the time Beltraffio was published. He asked me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in England, about the last news in London and the people I had seen there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the very form of his questions, and th
inking I found it. I liked his voice.
There was genius in his house, too, I thought, when we got there; there was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and books, in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of one of the pre-Raphaelites. 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 fictive 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. Mark Ambient called his house a cottage, and I perceived afterwards that he was right; for if it had not been a cottage it must have been a villa, and a villa, in England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy him at home. But it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and translated; 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-colors and inhabited by people whose lives would go on in chapters and volumes. The lawn seemed to me of extraordinary extent, the garden-walls of incalculable height, the whole air of the place delightfully still, private, proper to itself. “My wife must be somewhere about,” Mark Ambient said, as we went in. “We shall find her perhaps; we have got about an hour before dinner. She may be in the garden. I will show you my little place.”
