Collected Stories by Henry James
‘Base impostor!’ his ironic host went on; ‘I’ve treated you handsomely on the article of that young lady: I won’t make another concession. Wait three minutes – I’ll be with you.’ He gave himself to his departing guests, went with the long-trained ladies to the door. It was a hot night, the windows were open, the sound of the quick carriages and of the linkmen’s call came into the house. The company had been brilliant; a sense of festal things was in the heavy air: not only the influence of that particular entertainment, but the suggestion of the wide hurry of pleasure which, in London, on summer nights, fills so many of the happier quarters of the complicated town. Gradually Mrs St George’s drawing-room emptied itself; Paul Overt was left alone with his hostess, to whom he explained the motive of his waiting. ‘Ah yes, some intellectual, some professional, talk,’ she smiled; ‘at this season doesn’t one miss it? Poor dear Henry, I’m so glad!’ The young man looked out of the window a moment, at the called hansoms that lurched up, at the smooth broughams that rolled away. When he turned round Mrs St George had disappeared; her husband’s voice came up to him from below – he was laughing and talking, in the portico, with some lady who awaited her carriage. Paul had solitary possession, for some minutes, of the warm, deserted rooms, where the covered, tinted lamplight was soft, the seats had been pushed about and the odour of flowers lingered. They were large, they were pretty, they contained objects of value; everything in the picture told of a ‘good house’. At the end of five minutes a servant came in with a request from Mr St George that he would join him downstairs; upon which, descending, he followed his conductor through a long passage to an apartment thrown out, in the rear of the habitation, for the special requirements, as he guessed, of a busy man of letters.
St George was in his shirt-sleeves in the middle of a large, high room – a room without windows, but with a wide skylight at the top, like a place of exhibition. It was furnished as a library, and the serried bookshelves rose to the ceiling, a surface of incomparable tone, produced by dimly-gilt ‘backs’, which was interrupted here and there by the suspension of old prints and drawings. At the end furthest from the door of admission was a tall desk, of great extent, at which the person using it could only write standing, like a clerk in a counting-house; and stretching from the door to this structure was a large plain band of crimson cloth, as straight as a garden-path and almost as long, where, in his mind’s eye, Paul Overt immediately saw his host pace to and fro during his hours of composition. The servant gave him a coat, an old jacket with an air of experience, from a cupboard in the wall, retiring afterwards with the garment he had taken off. Paul Overt welcomed the coat; it was a coat for talk and promised confidences – it must have received so many – and had pathetic literary elbows. ‘Ah, we’re practical – we’re practical!’ St George said, as he saw his visitor looking the place over. ‘Isn’t it a good big cage, to go round and round? My wife invented it and she locks me up here every morning.’
‘You don’t miss a window – a place to look out?’
‘I did at first, awfully; but her calculation was just. It saves time, it has saved me many months in these ten years. Here I stand, under the eye of day – in London of course, very often, it’s rather a bleared old eye – walled in to my trade. I can’t get away, and the room is a fine lesson in concentration. I’ve learned the lesson, I think; look at that big bundle of proofs and admit that I have.’ He pointed to a fat roll of papers, on one of the tables, which had not been undone.
‘Are you bringing out another—?’ Paul Overt asked, in a tone of whose deficiencies he was not conscious till his companion burst out laughing, and indeed not even then.
‘You humbug – you humbug! Don’t I know what you think of them?’ St George inquired, standing before him with his hands in his pockets and with a new kind of smile. It was as if he were going to let his young votary know him well now.
‘Upon my word, in that case you know more than I do!’ Paul ventured to respond, revealing a part of the torment of being able neither clearly to esteem him nor distinctly to renounce him.
‘My dear fellow,’ said his companion, ‘don’t imagine I talk about my books, specifically; it isn’t a decent subject – il ne manquerait plus que ça – I’m not so bad as you may apprehend! About myself, a little, if you like; though it wasn’t for that I brought you down here. I want to ask you something – very much indeed – I value this chance. Therefore sit down. We are practical, but there is a sofa, you see, for she does humour me a little, after all. Like all really great administrators she knows when to.’ Paul Overt sank into the corner of a deep leathern couch, but his interlocutor remained standing and said: ‘If you don’t mind, in this room this is my habit. From the door to the desk and from the desk to the door. That shakes up my imagination, gently; and don’t you see what a good thing it is that there’s no window for her to fly out of? The eternal standing as I write (I stop at that bureau and put it down, when anything comes, and so we go on) was rather wearisome at first, but we adopted it with an eye to the long run; you’re in better order (if your legs don’t break down!) and you can keep it up for more years. Oh, we’re practical – we’re practical!’ St George repeated, going to the table and taking up, mechanically, the bundle of proofs. He pulled off the wrapper, he turned the papers over with a sudden change of attention which only made him more interesting to Paul Overt. He lost himself a moment, examining the sheets of his new book, while the younger man’s eyes wandered over the room again.
‘Lord, what good things I should do if I had such a charming place as this to do them in!’ Paul reflected. The outer world, the world of accident and ugliness was so successfully excluded, and within the rich, protecting square, beneath the patronising sky, the figures projected for an artistic purpose could hold their particular revel. It was a prevision of Paul Overt’s rather than an observation on actual data, for which the occasions had been too few, that his new friend would have the quality, the charming quality, of surprising him by flashing out in personal intercourse, at moments of suspended, or perhaps even of diminished expectation. A happy relation with him would be a thing proceeding by jumps, not by traceable stages.
‘Do you read them – really?’ he asked, laying down the proofs on Paul’s inquiring of him how soon the work would be published. And when the young man answered, ‘Oh yes, always,’ he was moved to mirth again by something he caught in his manner of saying that. ‘You go to see your grandmother on her birthday – and very proper it is, especially as she won’t last for ever. She has lost every faculty and every sense; she neither sees, nor hears, nor speaks; but all customary pieties and kindly habits are respectable. But you’re strong if you do read ’em! I couldn’t, my dear fellow. You are strong, I know; and that’s just a part of what I wanted to say to you. You’re very strong indeed. I’ve been going into your other things – they’ve interested me exceedingly. Some one ought to have told me about them before – some one I could believe. But whom can one believe? You’re wonderfully in the good direction – it’s extremely curious work. Now do you mean to keep it up? – that’s what I want to ask you.’
‘Do I mean to do others?’ Paul Overt asked, looking up from his sofa at his erect inquisitor and feeling partly like a happy little boy when the schoolmaster is gay and partly like some pilgrim of old who might have consulted the oracle. St George’s own performance had been infirm, but as an adviser he would be infallible.
‘Others – others? Ah, the number won’t matter; one other would do, if it were really a further step – a throb of the same effort. What I mean is, have you it in your mind to go in for some sort of little perfection?’
‘Ah, perfection!’ Overt sighed, ‘I talked of that the other Sunday with Miss Fancourt.’
‘Oh yes, they’ll talk of it, as much as you like! But they do mighty little to help one to it. There’s no obligation, of course; only you strike me as capable,’ St George went on. ‘You must have thought it all over. I can’t believe you’
‘I could do it for one, if you were the one.’
‘Don’t say that – I don’t deserve it; it scorches me,’ St George exclaimed, with eyes suddenly grave and glowing. ‘The “one” is of course oneself – one’s conscience, one’s idea, the singleness of one’s aim. I think of that pure spirit as a man thinks of a woman whom, in some detested hour of his youth, he has loved and forsaken. She haunts him with reproachful eyes, she lives for ever before him. As an artist, you know, I’ve married for money.’ Paul stared and even blushed a little, confounded by this avowal; whereupon his host, observing the expression of his face, dropped a quick laugh and went on: ‘You don’t follow my figure. I’m not speaking of my dear wife, who had a small fortune, which, however, was not my bribe. I fell in love with her, as many other people have done. I refer to the mercenary muse whom I led to the altar of literature. Don’t do that, my boy. She’ll lead you a life!’
‘Haven’t you been happy?’
‘Happy? It’s a kind of hell.’
‘There are things I should like to ask you,’ Paul Overt said, hesitating.
‘Ask me anything in all the world. I’d turn myself inside out to save you.’
‘To save me?’ Paul repeated.
‘To make you stick to it – to make you see it through. As I said to you the other night at Summersoft, let my example be vivid to you.’
‘Why, your books are not so bad as that,’ said Paul, laughing and feeling that he breathed the air of art.
‘So bad as what?’
‘Your talent is so great that it is in everything you do, in what’s less good as well as in what’s best. You’ve some forty volumes to show for it – forty volumes of life, of observation, of magnificent ability.’
‘I’m very clever, of course I know that,’ St George replied, quietly. ‘Lord, what rot they’d all be if I hadn’t been! I’m a successful charlatan – I’ve been able to pass off my system. But do you know what it is? It’s carton-pierre.’
‘Carton-pierre?’
‘Lincrusta-Walton!’
‘Ah, don’t say such things – you make me bleed!’ the younger man protested. ‘I see you in a beautiful, fortunate home, living in comfort and honour.’
‘Do you call it honour?’ St George interrupted, with an intonation that often comes back to his companion. ‘That’s what I want you to go in for. I mean the real thing. This is brummagem.’
‘Brummagem?’ Paul ejaculated, while his eyes wandered, by a movement natural at the moment, over the luxurious room.
‘Ah, they make it so well to-day; it’s wonderfully deceptive!’
‘Is it deceptive that I find you living with every appearance of domestic felicity – blessed with a devoted, accomplished wife, with children whose acquaintance I haven’t yet had the pleasure of making, but who must be delightful young people, from what I know of their parents?’
‘It’s all excellent, my dear fellow – Heaven forbid I should deny it. I’ve made a great deal of money; my wife has known how to take care of it, to use it without wasting it, to put a good bit of it by, to make it fructify. I’ve got a loaf on the shelf; I’ve got everything, in fact, but the great thing—’
‘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 may still hear a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible silence of Fame. I have squared her, you may say, for my little hour – but what is my little hour? Don’t imagine for a moment I’m such a cad as to have brought you down here to abuse or to complain of my wife to you. She is a woman of very distinguished qualities, to whom my obligations are immense; so that, if you please, we will say nothing about her. My boys – my children are all boys – are straight and strong, thank God! and have no poverty of growth about them, no penury of needs. I receive, periodically, the most satisfactory attestation from Harrow, from Oxford, from Sandhurst (oh, we have done the best for them!) of their being living, thriving, consuming organisms.’
‘It must be delightful to feel that the son of one’s loins is at Sandhurst,’ Paul remarked, enthusiastically.
‘It is – it’s charming. Oh, I’m a patriot!’
‘Then what did you mean – the other night at Summersoft – by saying that children are a curse?’
‘My dear fellow, on what basis are we talking?’ St George asked, dropping upon the sofa, at a short distance from his visitor. Sitting a little sideways he leaned back against the opposite arm with his hands raised and interlocked behind his head. ‘On the supposition that a certain perfection is possible and even desirable – isn’t it so? Well, all I say is that one’s children interfere with perfection. One’s wife interferes. Marriage interferes.’
‘You think then the artist shouldn’t marry?’
‘He does so at his peril – he does so at his cost.’
‘Not even when his wife is in sympathy with his work?’
‘She never is – she can’t be! Women don’t know what work is.’
‘Surely, they work themselves,’ Paul Overt objected.
‘Yes, very badly. Oh, of course, often, they think they understand, they think they sympathise. Then it is that they are most dangerous. Their idea is that you shall do a great lot and get a great lot of money. Their great nobleness and virtue, their exemplary conscientiousness as British females, is in keeping you up to that. My wife makes all my bargains with my publishers for me, and she has done so for twenty years. She does it consummately well; that’s why I’m really pretty well off. Are you not the father of their innocent babes, and will you withhold from them their natural sustenance? You asked me the other night if they were not an immense incentive. Of course they are – there’s no doubt of that!’
‘For myself, I have an idea I need incentives,’ Paul Overt dropped.
‘Ah well, then, n’en parlons plus!’ said his companion, smiling.
‘You are an incentive, I maintain,’ the young man went on. ‘You don’t affect me in the way you apparently would like to. Your great success is what I see – the pomp of Ennismore Gardens!’
‘Success? – do you call it success to be spoken of as you would speak of me if you were sitting here with another artist – a young man intelligent and sincere like yourself? Do you call it success to make you blush – as you would blush – if some foreign critic (some fellow, of course, I mean, who should know what he was talking about and should have shown you he did, as foreign critics like to show it!) were to say to you: “He’s the one, in this country, whom they consider the most perfect, isn’t he?” Is it success to be the occasion of a young Englishman’s having to stammer as you would have to stammer at such a moment for old England? No, no; success is to have made people tremble after another fashion. Do try it!’
‘Try it?’
‘Try to do some really good work.’
‘Oh, I want to, Heaven knows!’
‘Well, you can’t do it without sacrifices; don’t believe that for a moment,’ said Henry St George. ‘I’ve made none. I’ve had everything. In other words, I’ve missed everything.’
‘You’ve
‘Amusing?’
‘For a strong man – yes.’
‘They’ve given me subjects without number, if that’s what you mean; but they’ve taken away at the same time the power to use them. I’ve touched a thousand things, but which one of them have I turned into gold? The artist has to do only with that – he knows nothing of any baser metal. I’ve led the life of the world, with my wife and my progeny; the clumsy, expensive, materialised, brutalised, Philistine, snobbish life of London. We’ve got everything handsome, even a carriage – we are prosperous, hospitable, eminent people. But, my dear fellow, don’t try to stultify yourself and pretend you don’t know what we haven’t got. It’s bigger than all the rest. Between artists – come! You know as well as you sit there that you would put a pistolball into your brain if you had written my books!’
It appeared to Paul Overt that the tremendous talk promised by the master at Summersoft had indeed come off, and with a promptitude, a fullness, with which his young imagination had scarcely reckoned. His companion made an immense impression on him and he throbbed with the excitement of such deep soundings and such strange confidences. He throbbed indeed with the conflict of his feelings – bewilderment and recognition and alarm, enjoyment and protest and assent, all commingled with tenderness (and a kind of shame in the participation) for the sores and bruises exhibited by so fine a creature, and with a sense of the tragic secret that he nursed under his trappings. The idea of his being made the occasion of such an act of humility made him flush and pant, at the same time that his perception, in certain directions, had been too much awakened to conceal from him anything that St George really meant. It had been his odd fortune to blow upon the deep waters, to make them surge and break in waves of strange eloquence. He launched himself into a passionate contradiction of his host’s last declaration; tried to enumerate to him the parts of his work he loved, the splendid things he had found in it, beyond the compass of any other writer of the day. St George listened awhile, courteously; then he said, laying his hand on Paul Overt’s: