The Daily Henry James Read online

July 17

  The Lesson of the Master, 1892

  He saw more in his face, and he liked it the better for its not telling its whole story in the first three minutes. That story came out as one read, in short instalments.

  July 18

  Washington Square, 1881

  In a country in which, to play a social part, you must either earn your income or make believe that you earn it, the healing art has appeared in a high degree to combine the two recognized sources of credit. It belongs to the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a great recommendation; and it is touched by the light of science—a merit appreciated in a community in which the love of knowledge has not always been accompanied by leisure and opportunity.

  July 19

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  The thick warm air of a London July floated beneath them, suffused with the everlasting uproar of the town, which appeared to have sunk into quietness but again became a mighty voice as soon as one listened for it; here and there, in poor windows, glimmered a turbid light, and high above, in a clearer, smokeless zone, a sky still fair and luminous, a faint silver star looked down. The sky was the same that, far away, in the country, bent over golden fields and purple hills and copses where nightingales sang; but from this point of view everything that covered the earth was ugly and sordid, and seemed to express or to represent the weariness of toil.

  July 20

  The Papers, 1903

  What held them together was in short that they were in the same boat, a cockle-shell in a great rough sea, and that the movements required for keeping it afloat were not only what the situation safely permitted but also made for reciprocity and safety.

  July 21

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  “The crop we gather depends upon the seed we sow. He may be the biggest genius of the age; his potatoes won’t come up without his hoeing them. If he takes things so almighty easy as—well, as one or two young fellows of genius I’ve had under my eye—his produce will never gain the prize. Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch and doesn’t believe that we wake up to find our work done because we have lain all night a dreaming of it; any thing worth doing is devilish hard to do! If your young gentleman finds things easy and has a good time of it and says he likes the life, it’s a sign that—as I may say—you had better step round to the office and look at the books.”

  July 22

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  At the thought of her limited, stinted life, the patient, humdrum effort of her needle and scissors, which had ended only in a showroom where there was nothing to show and a pensive reference to the cut of sleeves no longer worn, the tears again rose to his eyes.

  July 23

  The Other House, 1896

  “He’s full of stuff—there’s a great deal of him, too much to come out all at once. He has ability, he has ideas; he has absolute honesty; and he has moreover a good stiff back of his own. He’s a fellow of head; he’s a fellow of heart—in short he’s a man of gold.

  July 24

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  “Beyond giving her credit for everything, it’s none of my business.”

  “I don’t see how you can give credit without knowing the facts.”

  “Can’t I give it generally—for dignity? Dignity I mean, in misfortune.”

  “You’ve got to postulate the misfortune first.”

  “Well,” said Maggie, “I can do that. Isn’t it always a misfortune to be—when you’re so fine—so wasted? And yet,” she went on, “not to wail about it, not to look even as if you knew it?”

  July 25

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  Nothing in him was more amiable than the terms maintained between the rigor of his personal habits and his free imagination of the habits of others.

  July 26

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  “The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one’s ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room and take boarders.”

  July 27

  The Ambassadors, 1901

  It was nothing new to him, however, as we know, that a man might have—at all events such a man as he was—an amount of experience out of any proportion to his adventures.

  July 28

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  This was the real thing; the real thing was to be quite away from the pompous roads, well within the centre and on the stretches of shabby grass. Here were benches and smutty sheep; here were idle lads at games of ball, with their cries mild in the thick air; here were wanderers, anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless were hundreds of others just in the same box.

  July 29

  The Next Time, 1895

  ‘‘You can’t make of a silk purse a sow’s ear! It’s grievous indeed if you like—there are people who can’t be vulgar for trying. He can’t—it wouldn’t come off, I promise you, even once. It takes more than trying—it comes by grace.”

  July 30

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  Her head, extremely fair and exquisitely festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion of the antique, on an old precious medal, some silver coin of the Renaissance; while her slim lightness and brightness, her gayety, her expression, her decision, contributed to an effect that might have been felt by a poet as half mythological and half conventional. He could have compared her to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud, or to a sea-nymph waist high in the summer surge.

  July 31

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  Mr. Longdon’s smile was beautiful—it supplied so many meanings that when presently he spoke he seemed already to have told half his story.

  August

  The ripeness of summer lay upon the land, and yet there was nothing in the country Basil Ransom traversed that seemed of maturity; nothing but the apples in the little tough dense orchards which gave a suggestion of sour fruition here and there, and the tall, bright golden-rod at the bottom of the bare stone dykes. There were no fields of yellow grain; only here and there a crop of brown hay. But there was a kind of soft scrubbiness in the landscape, and a sweetness begotten of low horizons, of mild air, with a possibility of summer haze, of unguarded inlets where on August mornings the water must be brightly blue. He liked the very smell of the soil as he wandered along; cool, soft whiffs of evening met him at bends of the road which disclosed very little more—unless it might be a band of straight-stemmed woodland, keeping, a little, the red glow from the west, or (as he went further) an old house shingled all over, gray and slightly collapsing, which looked down at him from a steep bank, at the top of wooden steps. He was already refreshed; he had tasted the breath of nature, measured his long grind in New York without a vacation, with the repetition of the daily movement up and down the long, straight, maddening city, like a bucket in a well or a shuttle in a loom.

  The Bostonians, 1886

  August 1

  The Lesson of the Master, 1892

  “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.”

  August 2

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  It had rained heavily in the night, and though the pavements were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the August morning, with its hovering, thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was cool and grey. The multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened, and a wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of odours less acceptable, rose from the earth.

  August 3

  Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887

  The novelist who leaves the extraordinary out of his account is liable to awkward confrontations, as we are compelled to reflect in this age of newspapers and of universal publicity. The next report of the next divorce case (to give an instance) shall offer us a picture of astounding combinations of circumstance and behaviour, and
the annals of any energetic race are rich in curious anecdote and startling example.

  August 4

  The Life of George Eliot, 1885

  The world was, first and foremost, for George Eliot, the moral, the intellectual world; the personal spectacle came after; and lovingly, humanly as she regarded it we constantly feel that she cares for the things she finds in it only so far as they are types. The philosophic door is always open, on her stage, and we are aware that the somewhat cooling draught of ethical purpose draws across it.

  August 5

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  He felt his own holiday so successfully large and free that he was full of allowances and charities in respect to those cabined and confined: his instinct towards a spirit so strapped down as Waymarsh’s was to walk round it on tiptoe for fear of waking it up to a sense of losses by this time irretrievable.

  August 6

  The Altar of the Dead, 1895

  He knew the small vista of her street, closed at the end and as dreary as an empty pocket, where the pairs of shabby little houses, semi-detached but indissolubly united, were like married couples on bad terms.

  August 7

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  She liked almost everything, including the English rain. “There is always a little of it, and never too much at once,” she said; “and it never wets you, and it always smells good.” She declared that in England the pleasures of smell were great—that in this inimitable island there was a certain mixture of fog and beer and soot which, however odd it might sound, was the national aroma, and most agreeable to the nostril.

  August 8

  The Lesson of the Master, 1892

  “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.”

  August 9

  The Lesson of the Master, 1892

  “One would like to paint such a girl as that,” Overt continued.

  Ah, there it is—there’s nothing like life! When you’re finished, squeezed dry and used up and you think the sack’s empty, you’re still spoken to, you still get touches and thrills, the idea springs up—out of the lap of the actual—and shows you there’s always something to be done.”

  August 10

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  Miss Pynsent couldn’t embrace the state of mind of people who didn’t apologize, though she vaguely envied and admired it, she herself spending much of her time in making excuses for obnoxious acts she had not committed.

  August 11

  Eugene Pickering, 1874

  “I find I’m an active, sentient, intelligent creature, with desires, with passions, with possible convictions,—even with what I never dreamed of, a possible will of my own! I find there is a world to know, a life to lead, men and women to form a thousand relations with. It all lies there like a great surging sea, where we must plunge and dive and feel the breeze and breast the waves. I stand shivering here on the brink, staring, longing, wondering, charmed by the smell of the brine and yet afraid of the water.”

  August 12

  James Russell Lowell, 1891

  After a man’s long work is over and the sound of his voice is still, those in whose regard he has held a high place find his image strangely simplified and summarized. The hand of death in passing over it, has smoothed the folds, made it more typical and general. The figure retained by the memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count; it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather than, nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities.

  August 13

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  She was in short a most comfortable, profitable, agreeable person to live with. If for Isabel she had a fault it was that she was not natural; by which the girl meant, not that she was affected or pretentious, for from these vulgar vices no woman could have been more exempt; but that her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and her angles too much smoothed. She had become too flexible, too supple; she was too finished, too civilized. She was, in a word, too perfectly the social animal that man and woman are supposed to have been intended to be; and she had rid herself of every remnant of that tonic wildness which we may assume to have belonged even to the most amiable persons in the ages before country-house life was the fashion.

  August 14

  The Bostonians, 1886

  There were certain afternoons in August, long, beau-tiful and terrible, when one felt that the summer was rounding its curve, and the rustle of the full-leaved trees in the slanting golden light, in the breeze that ought to be delicious, seemed the voice of the coming autumn, of the warnings and dangers of life.

  August 15

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  She wrote short stories, and she fondly believed she had her “note,” the art of showing New England without showing it wholly in the kitchen.

  August 16

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  And he gave Rowland to understand that he meant to live freely and largely and be as interested as occasion demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of grossness, because in the first place there was in all dissipation, refine it as one might, a vulgarity which would disqualify it for Roderick’s favour; and because in the second the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his genius to be dealt with, and to find that he could live largely enough without exceeding the circle of pure delights.

  August 17

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  She summed up the sociable, humorous, ignorant chatter of the masses, their capacity for offensive and defensive passion, their instinctive perception of their strength on the day they should really exercise it; and, as much as any of this, their ideal of something snug and prosperous, where washed hands and plates in rows on dressers, and stuffed birds under glass, and family photographs, would symbolize success.

  August 18

  The Golden Bowl, 1901

  Besides, who but himself really knew what he, after all, hadn’t, or even had, gained? The beauty of her condition was keeping him, at any rate, as he might feel, in sight of the sea, where, though his personal dips were over, the whole thing could shine at him, and the air and the plash and the play become for him too a sensation. That couldn’t be fixed upon him as missing; since if it wasn’t personally floating, if it wasn’t even sitting in the sand, it could yet pass very well for breathing the bliss, in a communicated irresistible way—for tasting the balm.

  August 19

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  The great church had no altar for his worship, no direct voice for his soul: but it was none the less soothing even to sanctity; for he could feel while there what he couldn’t elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holiday he had earned.

  August 20

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  “After all, the opinions of our friends are not what we love them for, and therefore I don’t see why they should be what we hate them for.”

  August 21

  The Great Condition, 1900

  The near view of the big queer country had at last, this summer, imposed itself: so many other men had got it and were making it, in talk, not only a convenience but a good deal of a nuisance, that it appeared to have become, defensively, as necessary as the electric light in the flat one might wish to let; as to which, the two friends, after their ten bustling weeks, had now in fact grown to feel that they could press the American button with the best.

  August 22

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  “Do you know I sometimes think I’m a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my day
s groping for the latch of a closed door.”

  August 23

  The Madonna of the Future, 1873

  “There is only one Raphael, but an artist may still be an artist; the days of illumination are gone; visions are rare; we have to look long to see them. But in meditation we may still cultivate the ideal; round it, smooth it, perfect it. The result certainly may be less than this; but still it may be good, it may be great!—it may hang somewhere, in after years, in goodly company, and keep the artist’s memory warm. Think of being known to mankind after some such fashion as this! suspended here through the slow centuries in the gaze of an altered world; living on and on in the cunning of an eye and hand that are part of the dust of ages, a delight and a law to remote generations; making beauty a force and purity an example!”