The Daily Henry James

by James, Henry

  Two of these happy summer days on the occasion of his last visit to Whitby are marked possessions of my memory; one of them a ramble on the warm, wide moors, after a rough lunch at a little, stony upland inn, in company charming and intimate, the thought of which to-day is a reference to a double loss. [An allusion to the late Alfred St. Johnston]

  April 3

  The Author of Beltraffio,1885

  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.

  April 4

  The Europeans, 1878

  His faculty of enjoyment was so large, so unconsciously eager, that one felt it had a permanent advance on embarrassment and sorrow.

  April 5

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  Mr. Longdon hadn’t made his house, he had simply lived it, and the “taste” of the place—Mitchy in certain connections abominated the word—was nothing more than the beauty of his life.

  April 6

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  “She lets it go.”

  “She lets what?”

  “Anything—anything that you might do and that you don’t. She lets everything go but her own disposition to be kind to you. It’s of herself that she asks efforts—so far as she ever has to ask them. She hasn’t, much. She does everything herself. And that’s terrible.”

  April 7

  What Maisie Knew, 1898

  The joy of the world so waylaid the steps of his friends that little by little the spirit of hope filled the air and finally took possession of the scene.

  April 8

  The Lesson of the Master, 1892

  “She gives away because she overflows. She has her own feelings, her own standards; she doesn’t keep remembering that she must be proud.”

  April 9

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  He had not had the gift of making the most of what he tried, and if he had tried and tried again—none but himself knew how often—it appeared to have been that he might demonstrate what else, in default of that, could be made. Old ghosts of experiments came back to him, old drudgeries and delusions and disgusts, old recoveries with their relapses, old fevers with their chills, broken moments of good faith, others of still better doubt; adventures, for the most part, of the sort qualified as lessons.

  April 10

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  There were things in his heart and a torment and a hidden passion in his life which he should be glad enough to lay open to some woman. He believed that perhaps this would be the cure ultimately; that in return for something he might drop, syllable by syllable, into a listening feminine ear, certain other words would be spoken to him which would make his pain forever less sharp.

  April 11

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  She was somehow at this hour a very happy woman, and a part of her happiness might precisely have been that her affections and her views were moving as never before in concert.

  April 12

  The Author of Beltraffio, 1885

  It was the point of view of the artist to whom every manifestation of human energy was a thrilling spectacle, and who felt it forever the desire to resolve his experience of life into a literary form.

  April 13

  Washington Square, 1881

  Washington Square, where the doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of white marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbors, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honorable dwellings.

  April 14

  The Lesson of the Master, 1892

  “Fancy an artist with a plurality of standards to do it: to do it and make it divine is the only thing he has to think about. ‘Is it done or not?’ is his only question.”

  April 15

  Washington Square, 1881

  The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square. In front was the large quadrangle, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it be owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most engaging. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority, that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal step and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailanthus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and your sensations.

  April 16

  The Figure in the Carpet, 1896

  “By my little point I mean—what shall I call it?—the particular thing I’ve written my books most for. Isn’t there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn’t write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? Well, it’s that!”

  April 17

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  Beyond the lawn the house was before him, old, square, red-roofed, well assured of its right to the place it took up in the world. This was a considerable space—in the little world at least of Beccles—and the look of possession had everything mixed with it, in the form of old windows and doors, the tone of old red surfaces, the style of old white facings, the age of old high creepers, the long confirmation of time. Suggestive of panelled rooms, of precious mahogany, of portraits of women dead, of colored china glimmering through glass doors, and delicate silver reflected on bared tables, the thing was one of those impressions of a particular period that it takes two centuries to produce.

  April 18

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  “The other day when I was looking at Michael Angelo’s Moses I was seized with a kind of defiance—a reaction against all this mere passive enjoyment of grandeur. It was a rousing great success, certainly, that sat there before me, but somehow it wasn’t an inscrutable mystery, and it seemed to me, not perhaps that I should some day do as well, but that at least I might!”

  “As you say, you can but try,” said Rowland. “Success is only passionate effort.”

  April 19

  The Art of Fiction, 1884

  There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together, that is in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. In proportion as that intelligence is fine will the novel, the picture, the statue partake of the substance of beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my vision, to have purpose enough.

  April 20

  The Next Time, 1895

 
Popular?—how on earth could it be popular? The thing was charming with all his charm and powerful with all his power; it was an unscrupulous, an unsparing, a shameless, merciless masterpiece.

  April 21

  The Bostonians, 1886

  She was barely conscious of the loveliness of the day, the perfect weather, all suffused and tinted with spring which sometimes descends upon New York when the winds of March have been stilled. She held her way to the Square, which, as all the world knows, is of great extent and open to the encircling street. The trees and grass-plats had begun to bud and sprout, the fountains plashed in the sunshine, the children of the quarter, both the dingier types from the south side, who played games that required much chalking of the paved walks, and much sprawling and crouching there, under the feet of passers, and the little curled and feathered people who drove their hoops under the eyes of French nurse maids—all the infant population filled the vernal air with small sounds which had a crude, tender quality, like the leaves and the thin herbage.

  April 22

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  “I’m sure you’ve an excellent spirit; but don’t try to bear more things than you need.” Which after an instant he further explained. “Hard things have come to you in youth, but you mustn’t think life will be for you all hard things. You’ve the right to be happy. You must make up your mind to it. You must accept any form in which happiness may come.”

  April 23

  The Birthplace, 1903

  He felt as if a window had opened into a great green woodland, a woodland that had a name, glorious, immortal, that was peopled with vivid figures, each of them renowned, and that gave out a murmur, deep as the sound of the sea, which was the rustle in forest shade of all the poetry, the beauty, the colour of life.

  · · ·

  “It’s rather a pity, you know, that He isn’t here. I mean as Goethe’s at Weimar. For Goethe is at Weimar.” “Yes, my dear; that’s Goethe’s bad luck. There he sticks. This man [Shakespeare] isn’t anywhere. I defy you to catch Him.” “Why not say beautifully,” the young woman laughed, “that, like the wind, He’s everywhere?”

  April 24

  The Next Time, 1895

  Her disappointments and eventually her privations had been many, her discipline severe; but she had ended by accepting the long grind of life, and was now quite willing to be ground in good company.

  April 25

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  Their rightness, the justification of everything—something they so felt the pulse of—sat there with them; but mightn’t the moment possibly count for them as the dawn of the discovery that it doesn’t always meet all contingencies to be right?

  April 26

  The Tragic Muse, 1889

  The other, though only asking to live without too many questions and work without too many disasters, to be glad and sorry in short on easy terms, had become aware of a certain social tightness, of the fact that life is crowded and passion restless, accident frequent and community inevitable. Everybody with whom one had relations had other relations too, and even optimism was a mixture and peace an embroilment. The only chance was to let everything be embroiled but one’s temper and everything spoiled but one’s work.

  April 27

  Anthony Trollope, 1883

  His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual. Trollope, therefore, with his eyes comfortably fixed on the familiar, the actual, was far from having invented a new category; his distinction is that in resting just there his vision took in so much of the field. And then he felt all daily and immediate things as well as saw them; felt them in a simple, direct, salubrious way, with their sadness, their gladness, their charm, their comicality, all their obvious and measurable meanings.

  April 28

  The Altar of the Dead, 1895

  Stransom sincerely considered that he had forgiven him; how little he had achieved the miracle that she had achieved! His forgiveness was silence, but hers was mere unuttered sound.

  April 29

  The Beast in the Jungle, 1903

  He told her everything, all his secrets. He talked and talked, often making her think of herself as a lean, stiff person, destitute of skill or art, but with ear enough to be performed to, sometimes strangely touched, at moments completely ravished, by a fine violinist. He was her fiddler and genius, she was sure neither of her taste nor of his tunes, but if she could do nothing else for him she could hold the case while he handled the instrument.

  April 30

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  Such a reflection as that, however, ceased to trouble him after he had passed out of doors and begun to roam through the park, into which he let himself loose at first, and then, in narrowing circles, through the nearer grounds. He rambled for an hour in a state of breathless ecstasy; brushing the dew from the deep fern and bracken and the rich borders of the garden, tasting the fragrant air and stopping everywhere, in murmuring rapture, at the touch of some exquisite impression. His whole walk was peopled with recognitions; he had been dreaming all his life of just such a place and such objects, such a morning and such a chance. It was the last of April and everything was fresh and vivid; the great trees, in the early air, were a blur of tender shoots. Round the admirable house he revolved repeatedly—there was something in the way the gray walls rose from the green lawn that brought tears to his eyes. The spectacle of long duration unassociated with some sordid infirmity or poverty was new to him; he had lived with people among whom old age meant, for the most part, a grudged and degraded survival. In the majestic preservation of Medley there was a kind of serenity of success, an accumulation of dignity and honour.

  May

  He had for the next hour an accidental air of looking for it in the windows of shops; he came down the Rue de la Paix in the sun and, passing across the Tuileries and the river, indulged more than once—as if on finding himself determined—in a sudden pause before the bookstalls of the opposite quay. In the garden of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three spots, to look; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had stayed him as he roamed. The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes—in a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in a light flit, over the garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace walls were warm, in the blue-frocked, brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered, red-legged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a whitecapped master-chef. The palace was gone; Strether remembered the palace; and when he gazed into the irremediable void of its site the historic sense in him might have been freely at play—the play under which in Paris indeed it so often winces like a touched nerve. He filled out spaces with dim symbols of scenes; he caught the gleam of white statues at the base of which, with his letters out, he could tilt back a straw-bottomed chair. But his drift was to the other side, and it floated him unspent up the Rue de Seine and as far as the Luxembourg gardens, where terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls at play all sunnily “composing” together, he passed an hour in which the cup of his impressions truly overflowed.

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  May 1

  The Lesson of the Master, 1892

  “The great thing?”

  “The sense of having done the best—the sense which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn’t—and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of. And precisely those who really know don’t speak of him. He ma
y still hear a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible silence of Fame.”

  May 2

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  Practically, Mrs. Varian’s acquaintance with literature was confined to the New York Interviewer; as she very justly said, after you had read the Interviewer, you had no time for anything else.

  May 3

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  One of these gaps in Mrs. Assingham’s completeness was her want of children; the other was her want of wealth. It was wonderful how little either, in the fullness of time, came to show; sympathy and curiosity could render their objects practically filial, just as an English husband who in his military years had “run” everything in his regiment could make economy blossom like the rose.