The Daily Henry James Read online

  August 24

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  “I judge more than I used to,—but it seems to me that I have earned the right. One can’t judge till one is forty; before that we are too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition too ignorant.”

  August 25

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  She had stature without height, grace without motion, presence without mass. Slender and simple, frequently soundless, she was somehow always in the line of the eye—she counted singularly for its pleasure. More “dressed,” often with fewer accessories, than other women, or less dressed, should occasion require, with more, she probably couldn’t have given the key to these felicities.

  August 26

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  He walked and walked as if to show himself how little he had now to do; he had nothing to do but turn off to some hillside, where he might stretch himself and hear the poplar’s rustle, and whence—in the course of an afternoon so spent, an afternoon richly suffused, too, with the sense of a book in his pocket—he should sufficiently command the scene to be able to pick out just the right little rustic inn for an experiment in respect to dinner.

  August 27

  The Reverberator, 1888

  His private invitation produced a kind of cheerful glow in regard to Mr. Dosson and Delia, whom he couldn’t defend nor lucidly explain nor make people like, but whom he had ended, after so many days of familiar intercourse, by liking extremely himself. The way to get on with them—it was an immense simplification—was just to love them; one could do that even if one couldn’t talk with them.

  August 28

  The Awkward Age, 1899

  “Nothing is more charming than suddenly to come across something sharp and fresh after we’ve thought there was nothing more that could draw from us a groan. We’ve supposed we’ve had it all, have squeezed the last impression out of the last disappointment, penetrated to the last familiarity in the last surprise; then some fine day we find that we haven’t done justice to life. There are little things that pop up and make us feel again. What may happen is after all incalculable. There’s just a little chuck of the dice, and for three minutes we win.”

  August 29

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  She always ended, however, by feeling that having a charming surface doesn’t necessarily prove that one is superficial.

  August 30

  Broken Wings, 1903

  Disappointment and despair were in such relations contagious, and there was clearly as much less again left to her as the little that was left to him. He showed her, laughing at the long queerness of it, how awfully little, as they called it, this was. He let it all come, but with more mirth than misery, and with a final abandonment of pride that was like changing at the end of a dreadful day from tight boots to slippers.

  August 31

  A Landscape Painter, 1866

  “How can a man be simple and natural who’s known to have a large income? That’s the supreme curse. It’s bad enough to have it; to be known to have it, to be known only because you have it, is most damnable.”

  September

  I woke up, by a quick transition, in the New Hampshire mountains, in the deep valleys and the wide woodlands, on the forest-fringed slopes, the far-seeing crests of the high places, and by the side of the liberal streams and the lonely lakes; things full, at first, of the sweetness of belated recognition, that of the sense of some bedimmed summer of the distant prime flushing back into life and asking to give again as much as possible of what it had given before. There hung over these things the insistent hush of a September Sunday morning. I went down into the valley—that was an impression to woo by stages; I walked beside one of those great fields of standing Indian-corn which make, to the eye, so perfect a note for the rest of the American rural picture, throwing the conditions back as far as our past permits, rather than forward, as so many other things do, into the age to come. The maker of these reflections betook himself at last, in any case, to an expanse of rock by a large bend of the Saco, and lingered there under the infinite charm of the place. The rich, full lapse of the river, the perfect brownness, clear and deep, as of liquid agate, in its wide swirl, the large indifferent ease in its pace and motion, as of some great benevolent institution working smoothly; all this, with the sense of the deepening autumn about, gave I scarce know what pastoral nobleness to the scene, something raising it out of the reach of even the most restless of analysts. The analyst in fact could scarce be restless here; the impression, so strong and so final, persuaded him perfectly to peace. This, on September Sunday mornings, was what American beauty should be.

  New England: An Autumn Impression, 1905

  September 1

  Guy de Maupassant, 1888

  It is as difficult to describe an action without glancing at its motive, its moral history, as it is to describe a motive without glancing at its practical consequence.

  September 2

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  It would doubtless be difficult to-day—to name her and place her; she would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who didn’t keep you explaining—minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at St. Peter’s.

  September 3

  The Author of Beltraffio, 1903

  “When I see the kind of things that life does I despair of ever catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, life! If one risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long to believe it. You don’t know yet, my dear fellow. It isn’t till one has been watching her for forty years that one finds out half of what she’s up to! Therefore one’s earlier things must inevitably contain a mass of rot.”

  September 4

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  “It only meant that there are perhaps better things to be done with Miss Stant than to criticise her. When once you begin that with anyone—!” He was vague and kind.

  “I quite agree that it’s better to keep out of it as long as one can. But when one must do it—”

  “Yes?” he asked as she paused.

  “Then know what you mean.”

  September 5

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  For this unfortunate but remarkably organized youth every displeasure or gratification of the visual sense coloured his whole mind, and though he lived in Pentonville and worked in Soho, though he was poor and obscure and cramped and full of unattainable desires, it may be said of him that what was most important in life for him was simply his impressions. They came from everything he touched, they kept him thrilling and throbbing through considerable parts of his waking consciousness, and they constituted as yet the principal events and stages of his career. Fortunately they were sometimes very delightful. Everything in the field of observation suggested this or that; everything struck him, penetrated, stirred; he had, in a word, more impressions than he knew what to do with—felt sometimes as if they would consume or asphyxiate him.

  September 6

  The Ambassadors, 1903

  These were instants at which he could ask whether, since there had been, fundamentally, so little question of his keeping anything, the fate after all decreed for him hadn’t been only to be kept. Kept for something, in that event, that he didn’t pretend, didn’t possibly dare, as yet, to divine; something that made him hover and wonder and laugh and sigh, made him advance and retreat, feeling half ashamed of his impulse to plunge and more than half afraid of his impulse to wait.

  September 7

  What Maisie Knew, 1898

  Maisie could appreciate her fatigue; the day hadn’t passed without such an observer’s discovering that she was excited and even mentally comparing her state to that of the breakers after a gale.

  September 8

  The Papers, 1903

  “I want, while I’m about it, to pity him in sufficient quantity.”

  “Precisely, which means, for a
woman, with extravagance and to the point of immorality.”

  September 9

  James Russell Lowell, 1891

  His robust and humourous optimism rounds itself more and more; he has even now something of the air of a classic, and if he really becomes one it will be in virtue of his having placed as fine an irony at the service of hope as certain masters of the other strain have placed at that of despair.

  September 10

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  He had felt an angry desire to protest against a destiny which seemed determined to be exclusively salutary. It seemed to him he should bear a little spoiling.

  September 11

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  The moods of an artist, his exultations and depressions, Rowland had often said to himself, were like the pen flourishes a writing master makes in the air when he begins to set his copy. He may bespatter you with ink, he may hit you in the eye, but he writes a magnificent hand.

  September 12

  The Ambassador, 1903

  The fact that he had failed, as he considered in everything, in each relation and in half a dozen trades, as he liked luxuriously to put it, might have made, might still make for an empty present, but stood expressively for a crowded past. It had not been, so much achievement missed, a light yoke nor a short road. It was at present as if the backward picture had hung there, the long crooked course, gray in the shadow of his solitude. It had been a dreadful, cheerful, sociable solitude, a solitude of life, of choice, of community; but though there had been people enough all round it, there had been but three or four persons in it.

  September 13

  The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1900

  Fate, as if to distinguish him as handsomely as possible, seemed to be ever treating him to some chance for an act or a course that had almost nothing in its favor but its inordinate difficulty. If the difficulty was, in these cases, not all the beauty for him, it at least never prevented his finding in it—or our finding, at any rate, as observers—so much beauty as comes from a great risk accepted either for an idea or for simple joy.

  September 14

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  “At any rate he would have conformed to the great religious rule—to live each hour as if it were to be one’s last.”

  “In holiness you mean—in great receuillement?” the Princess asked.

  “Oh dear, no; simply in extreme thankfulness for every minute that’s added.”

  September 15

  The Lesson of the Master, 1892

  “Ah, perfection, perfection—how one ought to go in for it! I wish I could.”

  “Everyone can in his way,” said Paul Overt.

  “In his way, yes; but not in hers. Women are so hampered—so condemned! But it’s a kind of dishonour if you don’t, when you want to do something, isn’t it?”

  September 16

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  The extent to which they enjoyed their indifference to any judgment of their want of ceremony, what did that of itself speak but for the way, that, as a rule, they almost equally had others on their mind? They each knew that both were full of the superstition of “not hurting,” but might precisely have been asking themselves, asking in fact each other, at this moment, whether that was to be, after all, the last word of their conscientious development.

  September 17

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  “What is your idea of success?”

  “You evidently think it must be very tame,” said Isabel.

  “It’s to see some dream of one’s youth come true.”

  September 18

  The Art of Fiction, 1884

  Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilizing when they are frank and sincere.

  September 19

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  He saw the immeasurable misery of the people, and yet he saw all that had been, as it were, rescued and redeemed from it: the treasures, the felicities, the splendours, the successes of the world.

  September 20

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  Rowland complimented her on her fund of useful information.

  “It’s not especially useful,” she answered; “but I like to know the names of plants as I do those of my acquaintances. When we walk in the woods at home—which we do so much—it seems as unnatural not to know what to call the flowers as it would be to see some one in the town with whom we should not be on speaking terms.”

  September 21

  The Great Good Place, 1900

  There, in its place, was life—with all its rage; the vague unrest of the need for action knew it again, the stir of the faculty that had been refreshed and reconsecrated.

  September 22

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  Anyhow, he went forth again into the streets, into the squares, into the parks, solicited by an aimless desire to steep himself yet once again in the great indifferent city which he knew and loved and which had had so many of his smiles and tears and confidences.

  September 23

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  There was something in Adam Verver’s eyes that both admitted the morning and the evening in unusual quantities and gave the modest area the outward extension of a view that was “big” even when restricted to the stars. Deeply and changeably blue, though not romantically large, they were yet youthfully, almost strangely beautiful, with their ambiguity of your scarce knowing if they most carried their possessor’s vision out or most opened themselves to your own.

  September 24

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  Her welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole setting and by the perception, at the same time, on the observer’s part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for effect and harmony, as much as it gave—her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering, dropping and quavering forth again, like vague, faint, snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music.

  September 25

  The Other House, 1896

  It would do with the question what it was Mrs. Beever’s inveterate household practice to do with all loose and unarranged objects—it would get it out of the way. There would have been difficulty in saying whether it was a I feeling for peace or for war, but her constant habit was to I lay the ground bare for complications that as yet at least had never taken place. Her life was like a room prepared for a dance: the furniture was all against the walls.

  September 26

  The Princess Casamassima, 1886

  “I haven’t the least objection to his feeling badly; that’s not the worst thing in the world! If a few more people felt badly, in this sodden, stolid, stupid race of ours, the world would wake up to an idea or two, and we should see the beginning of the dance. It’s the dull acceptance, the absence of reflection, the impenetrable density.”

  September 27

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

  The great historic house had—beyond terrace and garden, as the centre of an almost extravagantly grand Watteau composition, a tone as of old gold kept “down” by the quality of the air, summer full-flushed, but attuned to the general perfect taste.

  September 28

  Roderick Hudson, 1875

  “Her head has great character, great natural style. If a woman is not to be a brilliant beauty in the regular way, she will choose, if she’s wise, to look like that. She will not be thought pretty by people in general, and desecrated, as she passes, by the stare of every vile wretch who chooses to thrust his nose under her bonnet; but a certain number of intelligent people will find it one of the delightful things of life to look at her. That lot is as good as another! Then she has a beautiful character.”

  September 29

  The Beast in the Jungle, 1903

  “I sometimes a
sk myself if it’s quite fair. Fair I mean to have so involved and—since we may say it—interested you. I almost feel as if you hadn’t really had time to do anything else.”

  “Anything else but be interested?” she asked. “Ah, what else does one ever want to be?”

  September 30

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.