Notes on Novelists, with Some Other Notes. Henry Foss James
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are done; like the truant child, I am beginning to grow weary and timid in this big, jostling city, and could run to my nurse, even although she should have to whip me before putting me to bed.” This charming renunciation expresses itself at the very time his talent was growing finer; he was so fond of the sense of youth and the idea of play that he saw whatever happened to him in images and figures, in the terms almost of the sports of childhood. “Are you coming over again to see me some day soon? I keep returning, and now hand over fist, from the realms of Hades. I saw that gentleman between the eyes, and fear him less after each visit. Only Charon and his rough boatmanship I somewhat fear.”
The fear remained with him, sometimes greater, sometimes less, during the first years after his marriage, those spent abroad and in England in health resorts, and it marks constantly, as one may say, one end of the range of his humour—the humour always busy at the other end with the impatience of timidities and precautions and the vision and invention of essentially open-air situations. It was the possibility of the open-air situation that at last appealed to him as the cast worth staking all for—on which, as usual in his admirable rashnesses, he was extraordinarily justified. “No man but myself knew all my bitterness in those days. Remember that, the next time you think I regret my exile. … Remember the pallid brute that lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit.”
He found after an extraordinarily adventurous quest the treasure island, the climatic paradise that met, that enhanced his possibilities; and with this discovery was ushered in his completely full and rich period, the time in which—as the wondrous whimsicality and spontaneity of his correspondence testify—his genius and his character most overflowed. He had done as well for himself in his appropriation of Samoa as if he had done it for the hero of a novel, only with the complications and braveries actual and palpable. “I have no more hope in anything”—and this in the midst of magnificent production—“than a dead frog; I go into everything with a composed despair, and don’t mind—just as I always go to sea with the conviction I am to be drowned, and like it before all other pleasures.” He could go to sea as often as he liked and not be spared such hours as one of these pages vividly evokes—those of the joy of fictive composition in an otherwise prostrating storm, amid the crash of the elements and with his grasp of his subject but too needfully sacrificed, it might have appeared, to his clutch of seat and ink-stand. “If only I could secure a violent death, what a fine success! I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse—aye, to be hanged rather than pass again through that slow dissolution.”
He speaks in one of the “Vailima Letters,” Mr. Colvin’s publication of 1895, to which it is an office of these volumes promptly to make us return, of one of his fictions as a “long tough yarn with some pictures of the manners of to-day in the greater world—not the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs and colleges, but the world where men still live a man’s life.” That is distinct, and in the same letter he throws off a summary of all that in his final phase satisfied and bribed him which is as significant as it is racy. His correspondent, as was inevitable now and then for his friends at home, appears to have indulged in one of those harmless pointings of the moral—as to the distant dangers he would court—by which we all were more or less moved to relieve ourselves of the depressed consciousness that he could do beautifully without us and that our collective tameness was far (which indeed was distinctly the case) from forming his proper element. There is no romantic life for which something amiable has not to be sweepingly sacrificed, and of us in our inevitable category the sweep practically was clean.
Your letter had the most wonderful “I told you so” I ever heard in the course of my life. Why, you madman, I wouldn’t change my present installation for any post, dignity, honour, or advantage conceivable to me. It fills the bill; I have the loveliest time. And as for wars and rumours of wars, you surely know enough of me to be aware that I like that also a thousand times better than decrepit peace in Middlesex. I do not quite like politics. I am too aristocratic, I fear, for that. God knows I don’t care who I chum with; perhaps like sailors best; but to go round and sue and sneak to keep a crowd together—never.
His categories satisfied him; he had got hold of “the world where men still live a man’s life”—which was not, as we have just seen, that of “cities, clubs and colleges.” He was supremely suited in short at last—at the cost, it was to be said, of simplifications of view that, intellectually, he failed quite exactly (it was one of his few limitations) to measure; but in a way that ministered to his rare capacity for growth and placed in supreme relief his affinity with the universal romantic. It was not that anything could ever be for him plain sailing, but that he had been able at forty to turn his life into the fairytale of achieving, in a climate that he somewhere describes as “an expurgated heaven,” such a happy physical consciousness as he had never known. This enlarged in every way his career, opening the door still wider to that real puss-in-the-corner game of opposites by which we have critically the interest of seeing him perpetually agitated. Let me repeat that these new volumes, from the date of his definite expatriation, direct us for the details of the picture constantly to the “Vailima Letters;” with as constant an effect of our thanking our fortune—to say nothing of his own—that he should have had in these years a correspondent and a confidant who so beautifully drew him out. If he possessed in Mr. Sidney Colvin his literary chargé d’affaires at home, the ideal friend and alter ego on whom he could unlimitedly rest, this is a proof the more—with the general rarity of such cases—of what it was in his nature to make people wish to do for him. To Mr. Colvin he is more familiar than to any one, more whimsical and natural and frequently more inimitable—of all of which a just notion can be given only by abundant citation. And yet citation itself is embarrassed, with nothing to guide it but his perpetual spirits, perpetual acuteness and felicity, restlessness of fancy and of judgment. These things make him jump from pole to pole and fairly hum, at times, among the objects and subjects that filled his air, like a charged bee among flowers.
He is never more delightful than when he is most egotistic, most consciously charmed with something he has done.
And the papers are some of them up to dick, and no mistake. I agree with you, the lights seem a little turned down.
When we learn that the articles alluded to are those collected in “Across the Plains” we quite assent to this impression made by them after a troubled interval, and envy the author who, in a far Pacific isle, could see “The Lantern Bearers,” “A Letter to a Young Gentleman” and “Pulvis et Umbra” float back to him as a guarantee of his faculty and between covers constituting the book that is to live. Stevenson’s masculine wisdom moreover, his remarkable final sanity, is always—and it was not what made least in him for happy intercourse—close to his comedy and next door to his slang.
And however low the lights are, the stuff is true, and I believe the more effective; after all, what I wish to fight is the best fought by a rather cheerless presentation of the truth. The world must return some day to the word “duty,” and be done with the word “reward.” There are no rewards, and plenty duties. And the sooner a man sees that and acts upon it, like a gentleman or a fine old barbarian, the better for himself.
It would perhaps be difficult to quote a single paragraph giving more than that of the whole of him. But there is abundance of him in this too:
How do journalists fetch up their drivel? … It has taken me two months to write 45,500 words; and, be damned to my wicked prowess, I am proud of the exploit! … A respectable little five-bob volume, to bloom unread in shop windows. After that I’ll have a spank at fiction. And rest? I shall rest in the grave, or when I come to Italy. If only the public will continue to support me! I lost my chance not dying; there seems blooming little fear of it now. I worked close on five hours this morning; the day before, close on nine; and unless I finish myself off with this letter I’ll have another hour and a half, or aiblins twa, before dinner. Poor man, how you must envy me as you hear of these orgies of work, and you scarce able for a letter. But Lord! Colvin, how lucky the situations are not reversed, for I have no situation, nor am fit for any. Life is a steigh brae. Here, have at Knappe, and no more clavers!
If he talked profusely—and this is perfect talk—if he loved to talk above all of his work in hand, it was because,