no more profound or pungent than my own. All that is best in these authors goes into their work. But, though I complain of them on this count, I admit that the thrill for me of their triumphs is the more rapturous because every time it catches me unawares. One of the greatest emotions I ever had was from the triumph of THE GIFT OF GIFTS. Of this novel within a novel the author was not a young man at all, but an elderly clergyman whose life had been spent in a little rural parish. He was a dear, simple old man, a widower. He had a large family, a small stipend. Judge, then, of his horror when he found that his eldest son, `a scholar at Christminster College, Oxbridge,’ had run into debt for many hundreds of pounds. Where to turn? The father was too proud to borrow of the neighbourly nobleman who in Oxbridge days had been his `chum.’ Nor had the father ever practised the art of writing. (We are told that `his sermons were always extempore.’) But, years ago, `he had once thought of writing a novel based on an experience which happened to a friend of his.’ This novel, in the fullness of time, he now proceeded to write, though `without much hope of success.’ He knew that he was suffering from heart-disease. But he worked `feverishly, night after night,’ we are told, `in his old faded dressing-gown, till the dawn mingled with the light of his candle and warned him to snatch a few hours’ rest, failing which he would be little able to perform the round of parish duties that awaited him in the daytime.’ No wonder he had `not much hope.’ No wonder I had no spark of hope for him. But what are obstacles for but to be overleapt? What avails heart-disease, what avail eld and feverish haste and total lack of literary training, as against the romantic instinct of the lady who created the Rev.
Charles Hailing? `THE GIFT OF GIFTS was acclaimed as a masterpiece by all the first-class critics.’ Also, it very soon `brought in’ ten times as much money as was needed to pay off the debts of its author’s eldest son. Nor, though Charles Hailing died some months later, are we told that he died from the strain of composition. We are left merely to rejoice at knowing he knew at the last `that his whole family was provided for.’
I wonder why it is that, whilst these Charles Hailings and Aylmer Deanes delightfully abound in the lower reaches of English fiction, we have so seldom found in the work of our great novelists anything at all about the writing of a great book. It is true, of course, that our great novelists have never had for the idea of literature itself that passion which has always burned in the great French ones. Their own art has never seemed to them the most important and interesting thing in life. Also it is true that they have had other occupations—foxhunting, preaching, editing magazines, what not. Yet to them literature must, as their own main task, have had a peculiar interest and importance. No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt. It is nonsense to imagine that our great novelists have just forged ahead or ambled along, reaching their goal, in the good old English fashion, by sheer divination of the way to it. A fine book, with all that goes to the making of it, is as fine a theme as a novelist can have. But it is a part of English hypocrisy-or, let it be more politely said, English reserve—that, whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist on making light of any great difficulties or griefs that may beset us.
And just there, I suppose, is the reason why our great novelists have shunned great books as subject-matter. It is fortunate for us (jarring though it is to our patriotic sense) that Mr. Henry James was not born an Englishman, that he was born of a race of specialists—men who are impenitent specialists in whatever they take up, be it sport, commerce, politics, anything. And it is fortunate for us that in Paris, and in the straitest literary sect there, his method began to form itself, and the art of prose fiction became to him a religion. In that art he finds as much inspiration as Swinburne found in the art of poetry. Just as Swinburne was the most learned of our poets, so is Mr.
James the most learned of our—let us say `our’—prose-writers. I doubt whether the heaped total of his admirations would be found to outweigh the least one of the admirations that Swinburne had. But, though he has been a level-headed reader of the works that are good enough for him to praise, his abstract passion for the art of fiction itself has always been fierce and constant. Partly to the Parisian, partly to the American element in him we owe the stories that he, and of `our’ great writers he only, has written about books and the writers of books.
Here, indeed, in these incomparable stories, are imaginary great books that are as real to us as real ones are. Sometimes, as in `The Author of “Beltraffio,”’ a great book itself is the very hero of the story.
(We are not told what exactly was the title of that second book which Ambient’s wife so hated that she let her child die rather than that he should grow up under the influence of its author; but I have a queer conviction that it was THE DAISIES.) Usually, in these stories, it is through the medium of some ardent young disciple, speaking in the first person, that we become familiar with the great writer. It is thus that we know Hugh Vereker, throughout whose twenty volumes was woven that message, or meaning, that `figure in the carpet,’ which eluded even the elect. It is thus that we know Neil Paraday, the MS.
of whose last book was mislaid and lost so tragically, so comically.
And it is also through Paraday’s disciple that we make incidental acquaintance with Guy Walsingham, the young lady who wrote OBSESSIONS, and with Dora Forbes, the burly man with a red moustache, who wrote THE OTHER WAY ROUND. These two books are the only inferior books mentioned by Mr. James. But stay, I was forgetting THE TOP OF THE
TREE, by Amy Evans; and also those nearly forty volumes by Henry St.
George. For all the greatness of his success in life, Henry St. George is the saddest of the authors portrayed by Mr. James. His SHADOWMERE
was splendid, and its splendour is the measure of his shame—the shame he bore so bravely—in the ruck of his `output.’ He is the only one of those authors who did not do his best. Of him alone it may not be said that he was `generous and delicate and pursued the prize.’ He is a more pathetic figure than even Dencombe, the author of THE MIDDLE
YEARS. Dencombe’s grievance was against fate, not against himself.
“It had taken too much of his life to produce too little of his art The art had come, but it had come after everything else. `Ah, for another go !—ah, for a better chance.’… `A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’”
The scene of Dencombe’s death is one of the most deeply-beautiful things ever done by Mr. James. It is so beautiful as to be hardly sad; it rises and glows and gladdens. It is more exquisite than anything in THE MIDDLE YEARS. No, I will not say that. Mr. James’s art can always carry to us the conviction that his characters’ books are as fine as his own.
I crave—it may be a foolish whim, but I do crave—ocular evidence for my belief that those books were written and were published. I want to see them all ranged along goodly shelves. A few days ago I sat in one of those libraries which seem to be doorless. Nowhere, to the eye, was broken the array of serried volumes. Each door was flush with the surrounding shelves; across each the edges of the shelves were mimicked; and in the spaces between these edges the backs of books were pasted congruously with the whole effect. Some of these backs had been taken from actual books, others had been made specially and were stamped with facetious titles that rather depressed me. `Here,’
thought I, `are the shelves on which Dencombe’s works ought to be made manifest. And Neil Paraday’s too, and Vereker’s.’ Not Henry St.
George’s, of course: he would not himself have wished it, poor fellow!
I would have nothing of his except SHADOWMERE. But Ray Limbert!—I would have all of his, including a first edition of THE MAJOR KEY, `that fiery-hearted rose as to which we watched in private the formation of petal after petal, and flame after flame’; and also THE
