Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James

Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James

Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James

§ 1

The Garden by the Sea chapter was to have gone on discursively with a discussion upon this project of a conference upon the Mind of the Race. The automobile-ful of gentlemen who had first arrived was to have supplied the opening interlocutors, but presently they were to have been supplemented by the most unexpected accessories. It would have been an enormously big dialogue if it had ever been written, and Boon’s essentially lazy temperament was all against its ever getting written. There were to have been disputes from the outset as to the very purpose that had brought them all together. “A sort of  literary stocktaking” was to have been Mr. Archer’s phrase. Repeated. Unhappily, its commercialism was to upset Mr. Gosse extremely; he was to say something passionately bitter about its “utter lack of dignity.” Then relenting a little, he was to urge as an alternative “some controlling influence, some standard and restraint, a new and better Academic influence.” Dr. Keyhole was to offer his journalistic services in organizing an Academic plebiscite, a suggestion which was to have exasperated Mr. Gosse to the pitch of a gleaming silence.

In the midst of this conversation the party is joined by Hallery and an American friend, a quiet Harvard sort of man speaking meticulously accurate English, and still later by emissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr. Hearst, by Mr. Henry James, rather led into it by a distinguished hostess, by Mr. W. B. Yeats, late but keen, and by that Sir Henry Lunn who organizes the Swiss winter sports hotels. All these people drift in with an all too manifestly simulated accidentalness that at last arouses the distrust of the elderly  custodian, so that Mr. Orage, the gifted editor of the New Age, arriving last, is refused admission. The sounds of the conflict at the gates do but faintly perturb the conference within, which is now really getting to business, but afterwards Mr. Orage, slightly wounded in the face by a dexterously plied rake and incurably embittered, makes his existence felt by a number of unpleasant missiles discharged from over the wall in the direction of any audible voices. Ultimately Mr. Orage gets into a point of vantage in a small pine-tree overlooking the seaward corner of the premises, and from this he contributes a number of comments that are rarely helpful, always unamiable, and frequently in the worst possible taste.

Such was Boon’s plan for the second chapter of “The Mind of the Race.” But that chapter he never completely planned. At various times Boon gave us a number of colloquies, never joining them together in any regular order. The project of taking up the discussion of the Mind of the Race at the  exact point Mr. Mallock had laid it down, and taking the villa by the sea for the meeting-place, was at once opposed by Hallery and his American friend with an evidently preconcerted readiness. They pointed out the entire democratization of thought and literature that had been going on for the past four decades. It was no longer possible to deal with such matters in the old aristocratic country-house style; it was no longer possible to take them up from that sort of beginning; the centre of mental gravity among the English-speaking community had shifted socially and geographically; what was needed now was something wider and ampler, something more in the nature of such a conference as the annual meeting of the British Association. Science left the gentleman’s mansion long ago; literature must follow it—had followed it. To come back to Mr. Lankester’s Villa by the sea was to come back to a beaten covert. The Hearst representative took up a strongly supporting position, and suggested that if indeed we wished to move with the  times the thing to do was to strike out boldly for a special annex of the Panama Exhibition at San Francisco and for organization upon sound American lines. It was a case, he said, even for “exhibits.” Sir Henry Lunn, however, objected that in America the Anglo-Saxon note was almost certain to be too exclusively sounded; that we had to remember there were vigorous cultures growing up and growing up more and more detachedly upon the continent of Europe; we wanted, at least, their reflected lights … some more central position…. In fact, Switzerland … where also numerous convenient hotels … patronized, he gathered from the illustrated papers, by Lord Lytton, Mrs. Asquith, Mr. F. R. Benson … and all sorts of helpful leading people.

 § 2

Meanwhile Boon’s plan was to make Mr. George Moore and Mr. Henry James wander off from the general dispute, and he invented a dialogue that even at the time struck me as improbable, in which both gentlemen pursue entirely independent trains of thought.

Mr. Moore’s conception of the projected symposium was something rather in the vein of the journeyings of Shelley, Byron, and their charming companions through France to Italy, but magnified to the dimensions of an enormous pilgrimage, enlarged to the scale of a stream of refugees. “What, my dear James,” he asked, “is this mind of humanity at all without a certain touch of romance, of adventure? Even Mallock appreciated the  significance of frou-frou; but these fellows behind here….”

To illustrate his meaning better, he was to have told, with an extraordinary and loving mastery of detail, of a glowing little experience that had been almost forced upon him at Nismes by a pretty little woman from Nebraska, and the peculiar effect it had had, and particularly the peculiar effect that the coincidence that both Nebraska and Nismes begin with an “N” and end so very differently, had had upon his imagination….

Meanwhile Mr. James, being anxious not merely to state but also to ignore, laboured through the long cadences of his companion as an indefatigable steam-tug might labour endlessly against a rolling sea, elaborating his own particular point about the proposed conference.

“Owing it as we do,” he said, “very, very largely to our friend Gosse, to that peculiar, that honest but restless and, as it were, at times almost malignantly ambitious organizing energy of our friend, I cannot  altogether—altogether, even if in any case I should have taken so extreme, so devastatingly isolating a step as, to put it violently, stand out; yet I must confess to a considerable anxiety, a kind of distress, an apprehension, the terror, so to speak, of the kerbstone, at all this stream of intellectual trafficking, of going to and fro, in a superb and towering manner enough no doubt, but still essentially going to and fro rather than in any of the completed senses of the word getting there, that does so largely constitute the aggregations and activities we are invited to traverse. My poor head, such as it is and as much as it can and upon such legs—save the mark!—as it can claim, must, I suppose, play its inconsiderable part among the wheels and the rearings and the toots and the whistles and all this uproar, this—Mm, Mm!—let us say, this infernal uproar, of the occasion; and if at times one has one’s doubts before plunging in, whether after all, after the plunging and the dodging and the close shaves and narrow squeaks, one does begin to feel that one is getting through, whether  after all one will get through, and whether indeed there is any getting through, whether, to deepen and enlarge and display one’s doubt quite openly, there is in truth any sort of ostensible and recognizable other side attainable and definable at all, whether to put this thing with a lucidity that verges on the brutal, whether our amiable and in most respects our adorable Gosse isn’t indeed preparing here and now, not the gathering together of a conference but the assembling, the meet, so to speak, of a wild-goose chase of an entirely desperate and hopeless description.”

At that moment Mr. George Moore was saying: “Little exquisite shoulders without a touch of colour and with just that suggestion of rare old ivory in an old shop window in some out-of-the-way corner of Paris that only the most patent abstinence from baths and the brutality of soaping——”

Each gentleman stopped simultaneously.

Ahead the path led between box-hedges to a wall, and above the wall was a pine-tree, and the Editor of the New Age was reascending  the pine-tree in a laborious and resolute manner, gripping with some difficulty in his hand a large and very formidable lump of unpleasantness….

With a common impulse the two gentlemen turned back towards the house.

Mr. James was the first to break the momentary silence. “And so, my dear Moore, and so—to put it shortly—without any sort of positive engagement or entanglement or pledge or pressure—I came. And at the proper time and again with an entirely individual detachment and as little implication as possible I shall go….”

Subsequently Mr. James was to have buttonholed Hallery’s American, and in the warm bath of his sympathy to have opened and bled slowly from another vein of thought.

“I admit the abundance of—what shall I say?—activities that our friend is summoning, the tremendous wealth of matter, of material for literature and art, that has accumulated during the last few decades. No one could appreciate, could savour and watch and  respond, more than myself to the tremendous growing clangour of the mental process as the last half-century has exhibited it. But when it comes to the enterprise of gathering it together, and not simply just gathering it together, but gathering it all together, then surely one must at some stage ask the question, Why all? Why, in short, attempt to a comprehensiveness that must be overwhelming when in fact the need is for a selection that shall not merely represent but elucidate and lead. Aren’t we, after all, all of us after some such indicating projection of a leading digit, after such an insistence on the outstandingly essential in face of this abundance, this saturation, this fluid chaos that perpetually increases? Here we are gathering together to celebrate and summarize literature in some sort of undefined and unprecedented fashion, and for the life of me I find it impossible to determine what among my numerous associates and friends and—to embrace still larger quantities of the stuff in hand—my contemporaries is considered to be the literature in question. So  confused now are we between matter and treatment, between what is stated and documented and what is prepared and presented, that for the life of me I do not yet see whether we are supposed to be building an ark or whether by immersion and the meekest of submersions and an altogether complete submission of our distended and quite helpless carcasses to its incalculable caprice we are supposed to be celebrating and, in the whirling uncomfortable fashion of flotsam at large, indicating and making visible the whole tremendous cosmic inundation….”

Mr. James converses with Mr. George Moore upon matters of vital importance to both of them.

 § 3

It was entirely in the quality of Boon’s intellectual untidiness that for a time he should go off at a tangent in pursuit of Mr. Henry James and leave his literary picnic disseminated about the grounds of Mr. Mallock’s villa. There, indeed, they remained. The story when he took it up again picked up at quite a different point.

I remember how Boon sat on the wall of his vegetable garden and discoursed upon James, while several of us squatted about on the cucumber-frames and big flowerpots and suchlike seats, and how over the wall Ford Madox Hueffer was beating Wilkins at Badminton. Hueffer wanted to come and talk too; James is one of his countless subjects—and what an omniscient man he is  too!—but Wilkins was too cross to let him off….

So that all that Hueffer was able to contribute was an exhortation not to forget that Henry James knew Turgenev and that he had known them both, and a flat denial that Dickens was a novelist. This last was the tail of that Pre-Raphaelite feud begun in Household Words, oh! generations ago….

“Got you there, my boy!” said Wilkins. “Seven, twelve.”

We heard no more from Hueffer.

“You see,” Boon said, “you can’t now talk of literature without going through James. James is unavoidable. James is to criticism what Immanuel Kant is to philosophy—a partially comprehensible essential, an inevitable introduction. If you understand what James is up to and if you understand what James is not up to, then you are placed. You are in the middle of the critical arena. You are in a position to lay about you with significance. Otherwise….

“I want to get this Hallery of mine, who is to be the hero of ‘The Mind of the Race,’  into a discussion with Henry James, but that, you know, is easier said than imagined. Hallery is to be one of those enthusiastic thinkers who emit highly concentrated opinion in gobbets, suddenly. James—isn’t….”

Boon meditated upon his difficulties. “Hallery’s idea of literature is something tremendously comprehensive, something that pierces always down towards the core of things, something that carries and changes all the activities of the race. This sort of thing.”

He read from a scrap of paper—

“‘The thought of a community is the life of that community, and if the collective thought of a community is disconnected and fragmentary, then the community is collectively vain and weak. That does not constitute an incidental defect but essential failure. Though that community have cities such as the world has never seen before, fleets and hosts and glories, though it count its soldiers by the army corps and its children by the million, yet if it hold not to  the reality of thought and formulated will beneath these outward things, it will pass, and all its glories will pass, like smoke before the wind, like mist beneath the sun; it will become at last only one more vague and fading dream upon the scroll of time, a heap of mounds and pointless history, even as are Babylon and Nineveh.’”

“I’ve heard that before somewhere,” said Dodd.

“Most of this dialogue will have to be quotation,” said Boon.

“He makes literature include philosophy?”

“Everything. It’s all the central things. It’s the larger Bible to him, a thing about which all the conscious direction of life revolves. It’s alive with passion and will. Or if it isn’t, then it ought to be…. And then as the antagonist comes this artist, this man who seems to regard the whole seething brew of life as a vat from which you skim, with slow, dignified gestures, works of art. … Works of art whose only claim is their art…. Hallery is going to be very impatient about art.”

 “Ought there to be such a thing as a literary artist?” some one said.

“Ought there, in fact, to be Henry James?” said Dodd.

“I don’t think so. Hallery won’t think so. You see, the discussion will be very fundamental. There’s contributory art, of course, and a way of doing things better or worse. Just as there is in war, or cooking. But the way of doing isn’t the end. First the end must be judged—and then if you like talk of how it is done. Get there as splendidly as possible. But get there. James and George Moore, neither of them take it like that. They leave out getting there, or the thing they get to is so trivial as to amount to scarcely more than an omission….”

Boon reflected. “In early life both these men poisoned their minds in studios. Thought about pictures even might be less studio-ridden than it is. But James has never discovered that a novel isn’t a picture…. That life isn’t a studio….

“He wants a novel to be simply and completely done. He wants it to have a unity,  he demands homogeneity…. Why should a book have that? For a picture it’s reasonable, because you have to see it all at once. But there’s no need to see a book all at once. It’s like wanting to have a whole county done in one style and period of architecture. It’s like insisting that a walking tour must stick to one valley….

“But James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of art that must be judged by its oneness. Judged first by its oneness. Some one gave him that idea in the beginning of things and he has never found it out. He doesn’t find things out. He doesn’t even seem to want to find things out. You can see that in him; he is eager to accept things—elaborately. You can see from his books that he accepts etiquettes, precedences, associations, claims. That is his peculiarity. He accepts very readily and then—elaborates. He has, I am convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the whole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no penetration. He is the culmination  of the Superficial type. Or else he would have gone into philosophy and been greater even than his wonderful brother…. But here he is, spinning about, like the most tremendous of water-boatmen—you know those insects?—kept up by surface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would drown. It’s incredible. A water-boatman as big as an elephant. I was reading him only yesterday ‘The Golden Bowl’; it’s dazzling how never for a moment does he go through.”

“Recently he’s been explaining himself,” said Dodd.

“His ‘Notes on Novelists.’ It’s one sustained demand for the picture effect. Which is the denial of the sweet complexity of life, of the pointing this way and that, of the spider on the throne. Philosophy aims at a unity and never gets there…. That true unity which we all suspect, and which no one attains, if it is to be got at all it is to be got by penetrating, penetrating down and through. The picture, on the other hand, is forced to a unity because it can see only one aspect at a time. I am doubtful  even about that. Think of Hogarth or Carpaccio. But if the novel is to follow life it must be various and discursive. Life is diversity and entertainment, not completeness and satisfaction. All actions are half-hearted, shot delightfully with wandering thoughts—about something else. All true stories are a felt of irrelevances. But James sets out to make his novels with the presupposition that they can be made continuously relevant. And perceiving the discordant things, he tries to get rid of them. He sets himself to pick the straws out of the hair of Life before he paints her. But without the straws she is no longer the mad woman we love. He talks of ‘selection,’ and of making all of a novel definitely about a theme. He objects to a ‘saturation’ that isn’t oriented. And he objects, if you go into it, for no clear reason at all. Following up his conception of selection, see what in his own practice he omits. In practice James’s selection becomes just omission and nothing more. He omits everything that demands digressive treatment or collateral  statement. For example, he omits opinions. In all his novels you will find no people with defined political opinions, no people with religious opinions, none with clear partisanships or with lusts or whims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing. There are no poor people dominated by the imperatives of Saturday night and Monday morning, no dreaming types—and don’t we all more or less live dreaming? And none are ever decently forgetful. All that much of humanity he clears out before he begins his story. It’s like cleaning rabbits for the table.

“But you see how relentlessly it follows from the supposition that the novel is a work of art aiming at pictorial unities!

“All art too acutely self-centred comes to this sort of thing. James’s denatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those egg-faced, black-haired ladies, who sit and sit, in the Japanese colour-prints, the unresisting stuff for an arrangement of blacks….

“Then with the eviscerated people he has  invented he begins to make up stories. What stories they are! Concentrated on suspicion, on a gift, on possessing a ‘piece’ of old furniture, on what a little girl may or may not have noted in an emotional situation. These people cleared for artistic treatment never make lusty love, never go to angry war, never shout at an election or perspire at poker; never in any way date…. And upon the petty residuum of human interest left to them they focus minds of a Jamesian calibre….

“The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity, and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that these are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of attainment and over-perception begins…. His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his novel is about is always there. It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line  focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string…. Like his ‘Altar of the Dead,’ with nothing to the dead at all…. For if there was they couldn’t all be candles and the effect would vanish…. And the elaborate, copious emptiness of the whole Henry James exploit is only redeemed and made endurable by the elaborate, copious wit. Upon the desert his selection has made Henry James erects palatial metaphors…. The chief fun, the only exercise, in reading Henry James is this clambering over vast metaphors….

“Having first made sure that he has scarcely anything left to express, he then sets to work to express it, with an industry, a wealth of intellectual stuff that dwarfs Newton. He spares no resource in the telling of his dead inventions. He brings up every device of language to state and define. Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits his infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism  into his service. His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God Himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come. And all for tales of nothingness…. It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things, it insists, are beyond it, but it can, at any rate, modestly, and with an artistic singleness of mind, pick up that pea….”

 § 4

“A little while ago,” said Boon, suddenly struggling with his trouser pocket and producing some pieces of paper, “I sketched out a novel, and as it was rather in the manner of Henry James I think perhaps you might be interested by it now. So much, that is, as there is of it. It is to be called ‘The Spoils of Mr. Blandish,’ and it is all about this particular business of the selective life. Mr. Blandish, as I saw him, was pretty completely taken from the James ideal…. He was a man with an exquisite apprehension of particulars, with just that sense of there being a rightness attainable, a fitness, a charm, a finish…. In any little affair…. He believed that in speech and still more that in writing there was an inevitable right word, in actions great and  small a mellowed etiquette, in everything a possible perfection. He was, in fact, the very soul of Henry James—as I understand it…. This sort of man—

Mr. Blandish going delicately through life. “Oh no! oh no! But Yes! and This is it!”

“Going delicately.”

I was able to secure the sketch.

 “He didn’t marry, he didn’t go upon adventures; lust, avarice, ambition, all these things that as Milton says are to be got ‘not without dust and heat,’ were not for him. Blood and dust and heat—he ruled them out. But he had independent means, he could live freely and delicately and charmingly, he could travel and meet and be delighted by all the best sorts of people in the best sorts of places. So for years he enriched his resonances, as an admirable violin grows richer with every note it sounds. He went about elaborately, avoiding ugliness, death, suffering, industrialism, politics, sport, the thought of war, the red blaze of passion. He travelled widely in the more settled parts of the world. Chiefly he visited interesting and ancient places, putting his ever more exquisite sensorium at them, consciously taking delicate impressions upon the refined wax of his being. In a manner most carefully occasional, he wrote. Always of faded places. His ‘Ypres’ was wonderful. His ‘Bruges’ and his ‘Hour of Van Eyk’….

“Such,” said Boon, “is the hero. The  story begins, oh! quite in the James manner with——” He read—

“‘At times it seemed inaccessible, a thing beyond hope, beyond imagining, and then at times it became so concrete an imagination, a desire so specific, so nearly expressed, as to grow if not to the exact particulars of longitude and latitude, yet at any rate so far as county and district and atmosphere were concerned, so far indeed as an intuition of proximity was concerned, an intimation that made it seem at last at certain moments as if it could not possibly be very much farther than just round the corner or over the crest….’

“But I’ve left a good bit of that to write up. In the book there will be pages and sheets of that sentence. The gist is that Mr. Blandish wants a house to live in and that he has an idea of the kind of house he wants. And the chapter, the long, unresting, progressing chapter, expands and expands; it never jumps you forward, it never lets you off, you can’t skip and you can’t escape, until there comes at last a culminating distension of statement in which you realize more and  more clearly, until you realize it with the unforgettable certainty of a thing long fought for and won at last, that Mr. Blandish has actually come upon the house and with a vigour of decision as vivid as a flash of lightning in a wilderness of troubled clouds, as vivid indeed as the loud, sonorous bursting of a long blown bladder, has said ‘This is it!’ On that ‘This is it’ my chapter ends, with an effect of enormous relief, with something of the beautiful serenity that follows a difficult parturition.

“The story is born.

“And then we leap forward to possession.

“‘And here he was, in the warmest reality, in the very heart of the materialization of his dream——’ He has, in fact, got the house. For a year or so from its first accidental discovery he had done nothing but just covet the house; too fearful of an overwhelming disappointment even to make a definite inquiry as to its accessibility. But he has, you will gather, taken apartments in the neighbourhood, thither he visits frequently, and almost every day  when he walks abroad the coveted house draws him. It is in a little seaside place on the east coast, and the only available walks are along the shore or inland across the golf-links. Either path offers tempting digressions towards it. He comes to know it from a hundred aspects and under a thousand conditions of light and atmosphere…. And while still in the early stage he began a curious and delicious secret practice in relationship. You have heard of the Spaniard in love, in love with a woman he had seen but once, whom he might never see again, a princess, etiquette-defended, a goddess, and who yet, seeing a necklace that became her, bought it for the joy of owning something that was at least by fitness hers. Even so did Mr. Blandish begin to buy first one little article and then, the fancy growing upon him more and more, things, ‘pieces’ they call them, that were in the vein of Samphire House. And then came the day, the wonderful day, when as he took his afternoon feast of the eye, the door opened, some one came out towards him….

 “It was incredible. They were giving him tea with hot, inadvisable scones—but their hotness, their close heaviness, he accepted with a ready devotion, would have accepted had they been ten times as hot and close and heavy, not heedlessly, indeed, but gratefully, willingly paying his price for these astonishing revelations that without an effort, serenely, calmly, dropped in between her gentle demands whether he would have milk and her mild inquiries as to the exact quantity of sugar his habits and hygienic outlook demanded, that his hostess so casually made. These generous, heedless people were talking of departures, of abandonments, of, so they put it, selling the dear old place, if indeed any one could be found to buy a place so old and so remote and—she pointed her intention with a laugh—so very, very dear. Repletion of scones were a small price to pay for such a glowing, such an incredible gift of opportunity, thrust thus straight into the willing, amazed hands….

“He gets the house. He has it done  up. He furnishes it, and every article of furniture seems a stroke of luck too good to be true. And to crown it all I am going to write one of those long crescendo passages that James loves, a sentence, pages of it, of happy event linking to happy event until at last the incredible completion, a butler, unquestionably Early Georgian, respectability, competence equally unquestionable, a wife who could cook, and cook well, no children, no thought or possibility of children, and to crown all, the perfect name—Mutimer!

Mutimer at first.

 “All this you must understand is told retrospectively as Blandish installs himself in Samphire House. It is told to the refrain, ‘Still, fresh every morning, came the persuasion “This is too good to be true.”’ And as it is told, something else, by the most imperceptible degrees, by a gathering up of hints and allusions and pointing details, gets itself told too, and that is the growing realization in the mind of Blandish of a something extra, of something not quite bargained for,—the hoard and the haunting. About the house hangs a presence….

“He had taken it at first as a mere picturesque accessory to the whole picturesque and delightful wreathing of association and tradition about the place, that there should be this ancient flavour of the cutlass and the keg, this faint aroma of buried doubloons and Stevensonian experiences. He had assumed, etc…. He had gathered, etc…. And it was in the most imperceptible manner that beyond his sense of these takings and assumptions and gatherings there grew his perception that the delicate  quiver of appreciation, at first his utmost tribute to these illegal and adventurous and sanguinary associations, was broadening and strengthening, was, one hardly knew whether to say developing or degenerating, into a nervous reaction, more spinal and less equivocally agreeable, into the question, sensed rather than actually thought or asked, whether in fact the place didn’t in certain lights and certain aspects and at certain unfavourable moments come near to evoking the ghost—if such sorites are permissible in the world of delicate shades—of the ghost, of the ghost of a shiver—of aversion….

“And so at page a hundred and fifty or thereabouts we begin to get into the story,” said Boon.

“You wade through endless marshes of subtle intimation, to a sense of a Presence in Samphire House. For a number of pages you are quite unable to tell whether this is a ghost or a legend or a foreboding or simply old-fashioned dreams that are being allusively placed before you. But  there is an effect piled up very wonderfully, of Mr. Blandish, obsessed, uneasy, watching furtively and steadfastly his guests, his callers, his domestics, continually asking himself, ‘Do they note it? Are they feeling it?’

“We break at last into incidents. A young friend of the impossible name of Deshman helps evolve the story; he comes to stay; he seems to feel the influence from the outset, he cannot sleep, he wanders about the house…. Do others know? Others?… The gardener takes to revisiting the gardens after nightfall. He is met in the shrubbery with an unaccountable spade in his hand and answers huskily. Why should a gardener carry a spade? Why should he answer huskily? Why should the presence, the doubt, the sense of something else elusively in the air about them, become intensified at the encounter? Oh! conceivably of course in many places, but just there! As some sort of protection, it may be…. Then suddenly as Mr. Blandish sits at his lonely but beautifully  served dinner he becomes aware for the first time of a change in Mutimer.

Mutimer at the end of a year.

“Something told him in that instant that Mutimer also knew….

“Deshman comes again with a new and disconcerting habit of tapping the panelling and measuring the thickness of the walls when he thinks no one is looking, and then a sister of Mr. Blandish and a friend, a woman, yet not so much a woman as a disembodied intelligence in a feminine  costume with one of those impalpable relationships with Deshman that people have with one another in the world of Henry James, an association of shadows, an atmospheric liaison. Follow some almost sentenceless conversations. Mr. Blandish walks about the shrubbery with the friend, elaborately getting at it—whatever it is—and in front of them, now hidden by the yew hedges, now fully in view, walks Deshman with the married and settled sister of Mr. Blandish….

“‘So,’ said Mr. Blandish, pressing the point down towards the newly discovered sensitiveness, ‘where we feel, he it seems knows.’

“She seemed to consider.

“‘He doesn’t know completely,’ was her qualification.

“‘But he has something—something tangible.’

“‘If he can make it tangible.’

“On that the mind of Mr. Blandish played for a time.

“‘Then it isn’t altogether tangible yet?’

 “‘It isn’t tangible enough for him to go upon.’

“‘Definitely something.’

“Her assent was mutely concise.

“‘That we on our part——?’

“The we seemed to trouble her.

“‘He knows more than you do,’ she yielded.

“The gesture, the half turn, the momentary halt in the paces of Mr. Blandish, plied her further.

“‘More, I think, than he has admitted—to any one.’

“‘Even to you?’

“He perceived an interesting wave of irritation. ‘Even to me,’ he had wrung from her, but at the price of all further discussion.

“Putting the thing crassly,” said Boon, “Deshman has got wind of a hoard, of a treasure, of something—Heaven as yet only knows what something—buried, imbedded, in some as yet unexplained way incorporated with Samphire House. On the whole the stress lies rather on treasure, the treasure  of smuggling, of longshore practices, of illegality on the high seas. And still clearer is it that the amiable Deshman wants to get at it without the participation of Mr. Blandish. Until the very end you are never quite satisfied why Deshman wants to get at it in so private a fashion. As the plot thickens you are played about between the conviction that Deshman wants the stuff for himself and the firm belief of the lady that against the possible intervention of the Treasury, he wants to secure it for Mr. Blandish, to secure it at least generously if nefariously, lest perhaps it should fall under the accepted definition and all the consequent confiscations of treasure trove. And there are further beautiful subtleties as to whether she really believes in this more kindly interpretation of the refined but dubitable Deshman…. A friend of Deshman’s, shameless under the incredible name of Mimbleton, becomes entangled in this thick, sweet flow of narrative—the James method of introducing a character always reminds me of going round with the lantern when one  is treacling for moths. Mimbleton has energy. He presses. Under a summer dawn of delicious sweetness Mimbleton is found insensible on the croquet lawn by Mr. Blandish, who, like most of the characters in the narrative from first to last, has been unable to sleep. And at the near corner of the house, close to a never before remarked ventilator, is a hastily and inaccurately refilled excavation….

“Then events come hurrying in a sort of tangled haste—making sibyl-like gestures.

“At the doorway Mutimer appears—swaying with some profound emotion. He is still in his evening attire. He has not yet gone to bed. In spite of the dawn he carried a burning candle—obliquely. At the sight of his master he withdraws—backwards and with difficulty….

“Then,” said Boon, “I get my crowning chapter: the breakfast, a peculiar something, something almost palpable in the atmosphere—Deshman hoarse and a little talkative, Mimbleton with a possibly nervous headache, husky also and demanding tea  in a thick voice, Mutimer waiting uneasily, and Mr. Blandish, outwardly calm, yet noting every particular, thinking meanings into every word and movement, and growing more and more clear in his conviction that Mutimer knows—knows everything….

Mutimer as the plot thickens.

“Book two opens with Mr. Blandish practically in possession of the facts. Putting the thing coarsely, the treasure is—1813 brandy, in considerable quantities bricked up in a disused cellar of Samphire  House. Samphire House, instead of being the fine claret of a refuge Mr. Blandish supposed, is a loaded port. But of course in the novel we shall not put things coarsely, and for a long time you will be by no means clear what the ‘spirit’ is that Mr. Blandish is now resolved to exorcise. He is, in fact, engaged in trying to get that brandy away, trying to de-alcoholize his existence, trying—if one must put the thing in all the concrete crudity of his fundamental intention—to sell the stuff….

“Now in real life you would just go and sell it. But people in the novels of Henry James do not do things in the inattentive, offhand, rather confused, and partial way of reality: they bring enormous brains to bear upon the minutest particulars of existence. Mr. Blandish, following the laws of that world, has not simply to sell his brandy: he has to sell it subtly, intricately, interminably, with a delicacy, with a dignity….

“He consults friends—impalpable, intricate, inexhaustible friends.

“There are misunderstandings. One old  and trusted intimate concludes rather hastily that Mr. Blandish is confessing that he has written a poem, another that he is making a proposal of marriage, another that he wishes an introduction to the secretary of the Psychical Research Society…. All this,” said Boon, “remains, perhaps indefinitely, to be worked out. Only the end, the end, comes with a rush. Deshman has found for him—one never gets nearer to it than the ‘real right people.’ The real right people send their agent down, a curious blend of gentleman and commercial person he is, to investigate, to verify, to estimate quantities. Ultimately he will—shall we say it?—make an offer. With a sense of immense culmination the reader at last approaches the hoard….

“You are never told the thing exactly. It is by indefinable suggestions, by exquisite approaches and startings back, by circumlocution the most delicate, that your mind at last shapes its realization, that—the last drop of the last barrel has gone and that Mutimer, the butler, lies dead or  at least helpless—in the inner cellar. And a beautiful flavour, ripe and yet rare, rich without opulence, hangs—diminuendo morendo—in the air….”

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This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2011). Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34962/34962-h/34962-h.htm

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