The Portrait of a Lady Henry James The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, Vol. XI. Selected by Charles William Eliot Copyright © 2001 Bartleby.com, Inc. Bibliographic Record Contents Biographical Note Criticisms and Interpretations I. By William Dean Howells II. From “The Nation” III. By W. C. Brownell IV. By R. A. Scott List of Characters Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI Chapter XVII Chapter XVIII Chapter XIX Chapter XX Chapter XXI Chapter XXII Chapter XXIII Chapter XXIV Chapter XXV Chapter XXVI Chapter XXVII Chapter XXVIII Chapter XXIX Chapter XXX Chapter XXXI Chapter XXXII Chapter XXXIII Chapter XXXIV Chapter XXXV Chapter XXXVI Chapter XXXVII Chapter XXXVIII Chapter XXXIX Chapter XL Chapter XLI Chapter XLII Chapter XLIII Chapter XLIV Chapter XLV Chapter XLVI Chapter XLVII Chapter XLVIII Chapter XLIX Chapter L Chapter LI Chapter LII Chapter LIII Chapter LIV Chapter LV Biographical Note THOUGH Henry James lived to the age of seventy-three, and though his literary career covered half a century, the story of his external life can be told in a few sentences. He was born in New York on April 15, 1843, the son of Henry James, a Swedenborgian minister who wrote on theology with an originality and in a style which go far to explain the source of the most remarkable characteristics of both the novelist and of his elder brother William, the psychologist and philosopher. Henry James, Jr., has given in “A Small Boy and Others,” if not a chronicle, at least a series of pictures of persons and places, and still more of the atmospheres of persons and places, that impressed his youthful imagination and stayed in his memory till old age. The family, we gather, was in race a mixture of Irish, Scottish, and English, and had been established at Albany, where Henry spent part of his boyhood. His youth was a wandering one, with “small vague spasms of school,” but with abundance of educative and imaginatively stimulating associations and experiences, first in New York, then in London, Paris, and Geneva. At seventeen he returned to America and entered the Harvard Law School, but soon gave up the law for literature. He published his first story in the “Atlantic Monthly” in 1865, and four years later went back to Europe. His home for the rest of his life was in England, in London or at Rye in Sussex, though he made occasional visits to the Continent and to America. When the war broke out in 1914 he took an active interest in the relief of the Belgian refugees, and he testified to his allegiance to the cause of the country in which he had spent the greater part of his life by becoming a citizen of Britain. On February 28, 1916, he died in London. Though Henry James’s reputation rests chiefly on his fiction, he was a critic of exquisite taste and rare delicacy of expression. Among the most important of his writings in this field are “French Poets and Novelists” (1878), “Life of Hawthorne” (1879), “Partial Portraits” (1888), and “The Lesson of Balzac” (1905). His gift for conveying the special flavor and distinction of places found expression in several volumes of impressions of travel, such as “Portraits of Places” (1884), “A Little Tour in France” (1884), and “The American Scene” (1906). His more important fiction began with “Watch and Ward” (1871), “A Passionate Pilgrim” (1875)—one of the best of his shorter stories, “Roderick Hudson” (1875), and “The American” (1877). He reached the larger public in 1878 with “Daisy Miller,” and from this date he was justly regarded as the most successful interpreter of American character from the cosmopolitan point of view. “The Portrait of a Lady” appeared in 1881 when he was at the height of his powers, and, as much as any of his books, is agreed upon as his masterpiece. As time went on James’s prose became more and more intricate and allusive, and though such later works as “The Wings of the Dove” (1902), “The Ambassadors” (1903), and “The Golden Bowl” (1904) show an increase rather than a falling off in his power of subtle analysis and his feeling for the individual quality of people and of social groups, many of his readers were estranged by the difficulty of the style, and his vogue remained limited. Henry James was the most conscientious of artists. His motive for writing lay in the impulse to represent those things in life that roused his own interest and curiosity, and to such representation he confined himself, making no concession to “what the public wants.” Thus we must take him on his own terms or not at all. But if we do take him on his own terms, we are rewarded by a unique rendering of human motive and behavior in a series of the most interesting predicaments, a rendering which yields an intense intellectual pleasure and not infrequently touches even tragic depths. And his instrument of expression, however involved it may later have become, is seen in such a book as “The Portrait of a Lady” to be unsurpassed in its power of portraying those subtleties and refinements of mood and character for which the author had an eye keen beyond that of any of his rivals in English. W. A. N. Criticisms and Interpretations I. By William Dean Howells IF we take him at all we must take him on his own ground, for clearly he will not come to ours. We must make concessions to him, not in this respect only, but in several others, chief among which is the motive for reading fiction. By example, at least, he teaches that it is the pursuit and not the end which should give us pleasure; for he often prefers to leave us to our own conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he has interested us. There is no question, of course, but he could tell the story of Isabel in “The Portrait of a Lady” to the end, yet he does not tell it. We must agree, then, to take what seems a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name for this new kind in fiction. Evidently it is the character, not the fate, of his people which occupies him; when he has fully developed their character he leaves them to what destiny the reader pleases. The analytic tendency seems to have increased with him as his work has gone on. Some of the earlier tales were very dramatic: “A Passionate Pilgrim,” which I should rank above all his other short stories, and for certain rich poetical qualities, above everything else that he has done, is eminently dramatic. But I do not find much that I should call dramatic in “The Portrait of a Lady,” while I do find in it an amount of analysis which I should call super-abundance if it were not all such good literature. The novelist’s main business is to possess his reader with a due conception of his characters and the situations in which they find themselves. If he does more or less than this he equally fails. I have sometimes thought that Mr. James’s danger was to do more, but when I have been ready to declare this excess an error of his method I have hesitated. Could anything be superfluous that had given me so much pleasure as I read? Certainly from only one point of view, and this is a rather narrow, technical one. It seems to me that an enlightened criticism will recognize in Mr. James’s fiction a metaphysical genius working to æsthetic results, and will not be disposed to deny it any method it chooses to employ. No other novelist, except George Eliot, has dealt so largely in analysis of motive, has so fully explained and commented upon the springs of action in the persons of the drama, both before and after the facts. These novelists are more alike than any others in their processes, but with George Eliot an ethical purpose is dominant, and with Mr. James an artistic purpose. I do not know just how it should be stated of two such noble and generous types of character as Dorothea and Isabel Archer, but I think that we sympathize with the former in grand aims that chiefly concern others, and with the latter in beautiful dreams that primarily concern herself. Both are unselfish and devoted women, sublimely true to a mistaken ideal in their marriages; but, though they come to this common martyrdom, the original difference in them remains. Isabel has her great weaknesses, as Dorothea had; but these seem to me, on the whole, the most nobly imagined and the most nobly intentioned women in modern fiction; and I think Isabel is the more subtly divined of the two. If we speak of mere characterization, we must not fail to acknowledge the perfection of Gilbert Osmond. It was a profound stroke to make him an American by birth. No European could realize so fully in his own life the ideal of a European dilettante in all the meaning of that cheapened word; as no European could so deeply and tenderly feel the sweetness and loveliness of the English past as the sick American, Searle, in “The Passionate Pilgrim.”—From “Henry James, Jr.,” in “The Century Magazine” (November, 1882). Criticisms and Interpretations From “The Nation” IT has long been evident that Mr. James’s powers of observation are not only remarkably keen, but sleepless as well. But “The Portrait of a Lady” would not be what it is if it did not possess a fond of moral seriousness, in addition to and underlying its extraordinary interest of purely intellectual curiosity. There is a specific lesson for the American girl in the first place; there are others, more general, which accompany every imaginative work of large importance. That these are nowhere distinctly stated is now nothing new in fiction even of a distinctly moral purpose. But Mr. James has carried suggestiveness in this regard further than any rival novelist, and though, unless one has ears to hear, it is entirely possible to miss the undertone of his book, to an appreciative sense there is something exquisite in the refinement with which it is conveyed. Refinement in this respect cannot be carried too far. In strictly literary matters Mr. James’s fastidiousness may be objected to, perhaps, if one chooses; he has carried the method of the essayist into the domain of romance: its light touch, its reliance on suggestiveness, its weakness for indirect statement, its flattering presupposition of the reader’s perceptiveness, its low tones, its polish. Upon occasion, where the circumstances really seem to warrant a little fervor, you only get from the author of “The Portrait of a Lady” irreproachability. Objection to this may easily be carried too far, however; and those who do thus carry it too far, and argue that no people ever spoke and acted with the elegance and precision of the personages here portrayed, must of necessity pay the penalty of ultra-literalness and miss the secret of Mr. James’s success. To characterize this secret with adequate fulness would require far more than the space at our disposal; but it may be sufficiently indicated by calling it the imaginative treatment of reality. In this unquestionably lies Mr. James’s truly original excellence. “The Portrait of a Lady” is the most original example we have thus far had of realistic art in fiction á outrance, because its substance is thoroughly, and at times profoundly, real and at the same time its presentation is imaginative. On the one hand, wilfulness and fantasticality are avoided, and on the other, prose and flatness. One may even go further, and say that the book succeeds in the difficult problem of combining a scientific value with romantic interest and artistic merit.—From a review in “The Nation” (February 2, 1882). Criticisms and Interpretations III. By W. C. Brownell THE LIST of Mr. James’s novels is a long one, and his short stories are very numerous; and among them all there is not one with a perfunctory or desultory inspiration. Why is it that they in no sense constitute a comédie humaine? They are very populous; why is it that the characters that people them have so little relief? Taken together they constitute the least successful element of his fiction. Partly this is because, as I say, they possess so little typical quality. But why also do they possess so little personal interest? They have, seemingly, astonishingly little, even for their creator. So far from knowing the sound of their voices, as Thackeray said of his, he is apparently less pre-occupied with them than about the situation—the “predicament,” he would aptly say—in which he places them. Apparently he is chiefly concerned with what they are to do when confronted with the complications his ingenuity devises for them—how they are to “pull it off.” These complications are sometimes very slight, in order to show, or at least showing, what trifles control destinies; sometimes they are very grave, and exhibit the conflict of the soul with warring desires and distracting perplexities. And they are never commonplace—any more than the characters themselves, each one of which is intimately observed and thoroughly respected as an individuality. But their situation rather than themselves is what constitutes the claim, the raison d’être, of the book in which they figure. The interest in the book, accordingly, becomes analogous to that of a game in which the outcome rather than the pieces monopolizes the attention. It cannot be said that the pieces are not attentively described—some of them, indeed, are very artistically and even beautifully carved—but it is the moves that count most of all. Will Densher give a plausible solution to the recondite problem of how to combine the qualities of a cad and of a gentleman? Will Maisie decide for or against Sir Claude? What decision will Sir Claude himself make? Has Vanderbank ideality enough to marry Nanda? Will Chad Newsome go back to Woollett? The game is very well, often exquisitely, played; and the result, which, nevertheless, from all we know of the characters, we can rarely foresee, wears—when we argue it out in retrospect as the author clearly has done in advance—the proper artistic aspect of a foregone conclusion. Mr. James rarely seems to impose it himself; except on the few occasions when, as in “The Princess Casamassima” or “The Other House,” he deals in melodrama, in which he almost never succeeds in being convincing, his rectitude is so strong a reliance as to exclude all impression of perversity or wilfulness and convey the agreeable sense of sufficiently fatalistic predestination. Meantime you find out about the characters from the result. Since it has turned out in this way, they must have been such and such persons. In other words, they have not been characterized very vividly, have not been presented very completely as human beings. At least they do not people one’s memory, I think, as the personages of many inferior artists do. When one thinks of the number of characters that Mr. James has created, each, as I have said, carefully individualized, and none of them replicas—an amazing world they certainly compose in their originality and variety—it is odd what an effort it is to recall even their names. The immortal Daisy Miller, the sensitive and highly organized Ralph Touchett, the robust and thoroughly national Christopher Newman, the gentle Miss Pynsent, and a number of others that do remain in one’s memory, mainly belong to the earlier novels and form but a small proportion of the great number of their author’s creations. Different readers, however, would no doubt answer this rather crude test differently, and in any case it is not because they fail in precision that Mr. James’s personages lose distinctness as their story, like all stories, fades from the recollection. They have a sharp enough outline, but they are not completely enough characterized. Why? Why is it that when the American heroine of one of his stories, beautifully elaborated in detail, a perfect specimen of Dutch intarsia, kills herself because her English husband publishes a savage book about her country, we find ourselves perfectly unprepared for this dénouement? Why is it that with all the pains expended on the portrait of the extraordinary Mrs. Headway of “The Siege of London,” we never quite get his point of view, but are kept considering the social duty of the prig who passes his valuable time in observing her attempts at rehabilitation and—no doubt most justly—exposes her in the end? There is nothing to complain of in the result, the problem is worked out satisfactorily enough, but Mrs. Headway herself does not count for us, does not hang together, in the way in which Augier’s Aventurière does, or even Dumas’s Baronne d’Ange. It would be difficult, for example, for this reason, to make a play of “The Siege of London.” The answer to this query, the explanation of this incompleteness of characterization in Mr. James’s nevertheless very precise personages, consists, I think, in the fact that he rather pointedly neglects the province of the heart. This has been from the first the natural peril of the psychological novelist, the neglect of what in the Scripture view constitutes “the whole man,” just as the neglect of the mind—which discriminates and defines personalities once constituted—was the defect of the psychological novelist’s predecessor. But for Mr. James this peril has manifestly no terrors. The province of the heart seems to him, perhaps, so much to be taken for granted as to be on the whole rather negligible, so far as romantic exploitation is concerned. Incidentally, one may ask, if all the finest things in the world are to be assumed, what is there left for exploitation? Matter for curiosity mainly—the curiosity which in Mr. James is so sharp and so fruitful. The realm of the affections is that which—ex vi termini, one may say—most engages and attaches. Are we to be interested in fiction without liking it? And are we to savor art without experiencing emotion? The fact that few reread Mr. James means that his form, however adequate and effective, is not in itself agreeable. But it means still more that his “content” is not attaching. When Lockhart once made some remark to Scott about poets and novelists looking at life as mere material for art, the “veteran Chief of Letters” observed: “I fear you have some very young ideas in your head. We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling, unless we have taught ourselves to consider everything as moonshine compared with the education of the heart.” Is it possible that Mr. James’s controlling idea is a “young one”? Is his undoubted originality, after all, the exploitation of what seemed to so wise a practitioner as Scott, “moonshine”? That would account, perhaps, for the pallid light that often fills his canvas when his characters are grouped in a scene where “the human heart”—insight into which used to be deemed the standard of the novelist’s excellence—has a part of any prominence to play. The voluntary abandonment by the novelist of such a field of interest as the province of the heart is witness, at all events, of an asceticism whose compensations ought in prudence to be thoroughly assured. Implied, understood—this domain! Very well, one may reply, but what a field of universal interest you neglect, what a rigorously puritanic sacrifice you make!… He has, however, chosen to be an original writer in a way that precludes him from being, as a writer, a great one. Just as his theory of art prevents his more important fiction from being a rounded and synthetic image of life seen from a certain centralizing point of view, and makes of it an essay at conveying the sense and illusion of life by following, instead of focussing, its phenomena, so his theory of style prevents him from creating a texture of expression with any independent interest of its own. The interest of his expression consists solely in its correspondence to the character of what it endeavors to express. So concentrated upon this end is he that he very rarely gives scope to the talent for beautiful and effective expression which occasional lapses from his rigorous practice show him to possess in a distinguished degree. There are entire volumes of his writings that do not contain a sentence like, for example, this from a brief essay on Hawthorne: “His beautiful and light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky pane.” Of a writer who has this touch, this capacity, in his equipment, it is justifiable to lament that his theory of art has so largely prevented his exercise of it. The fact that his practice has not atrophied the faculty—clear enough from a rare but perfect exhibition of it from time to time—only increases our regret. We do not ask of Mr. James’s fastidiousness the purple patch of poetic prose, any more than we expect from him any kind of mediocrity whatever. But when a writer, who shows us unmistakably now and then that he could give us frequent equivalents of such episodes as the death of Ralph. Touchett, rigorously refrains through a long series of admirable books from producing anything of greater extent than a sentence or a paragraph that can be called classic, that has the classic “note,” we may, I think, legitimately complain that his theory of art is exasperatingly exacting.—From “American Prose Masters” (1909). Criticisms and Interpretations IV. By R. A. Scott AND so again, if we take a modern author of a very different type, such a one as Henry James, whose concern it is to state life, with a view to throwing into relief the finer shades, we shall observe that most of his work is characterised by a kind of intensive culture, as opposed to that extensive method which, through lack of form, was abused in Dickens, and through obedience to form was satisfactorily applied by the poet Swinburne at his best. We may safely say that when Swinburne was at his best, when he was “himself,” his world was a world of rhythmical energy, of impetuous freedom and sensuous activity which, translated into poetry, was expressed through the symbols of love and sea-foam and battle; to be true to the genius which was central to himself, he required no pregnancy or subtle suggestiveness of phrase; he needed no more than rhyme, rhythm, and onomatopœic words, and with these he gave all he had to give—the sense of energy remembered, the sensuous delight of physical activity, a world of divinely glorified sensation. Mature readers do not seek him often, for there are only a few moods which he can satisfy. A writer such as Mr. Henry James stands at the exactly opposite pole. It is the proper business of such a man as Swinburne merely to affirm sensation, and he could do it perfectly. It is the proper business of Mr. James, not to affirm sensation or any experience—he could not do it with sincerity—but to question sensation, to question emotion and sentiment; it is his proper business to examine experience with the amused, searching gaze of one who expects the unexpected. It is his business to make experience interesting, not, like Swinburne, by multiplication, but rather by division—by the method of the microscope, which reveals in a fly’s wing some unsuspected fineness of pattern and variegated brilliance of colour. He himself is fond of the word “curiosity”; it defines something that is central to his personality; this, brought into activity by the “representational impulse” (which in his opinion is the one justification for the artist), takes form in the intricate and delicately woven patterns of human temperament which are the objects of his curiosity.—From “Literature as a Fine Art,” in “The English Review” (April, 1913). List of Characters MR. TOUCHETT, an American who has lived in England for many years, head of a banking house in London. MRS. TOUCHETT, his wife. RALPH TOUCHETT, his son. ISABEL ARCHER, “The Lady,” niece of Mrs. Touchett. LORD WARBURTON, a fine specimen of a liberal English peer, friend of Ralph Touchett. HENRIETTA STACKPOLE, American friend of Isabel Archer, and a young lady journalist. MR. BANTLING, Miss Stackpole’s English conquest. CASPER GOODWOOD, of Boston, Mass. A young man of determination MADAM MERLE, friend of Mrs. Touchett, a woman of the world. GILBERT OSMOND, an American gentleman living in retirement in Florence. PANSY OSMOND, his daughter. EDWARD ROSIER, of the American colony in Paris. Several incidental characters, relatives of Lord Warburton and Isabel Archer, two Sisters of Charity, etc., etc. Chapter I UNDER certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure. The persons concerned in it were taking their pleasure quietly, and they were not of the sex which is supposed to furnish the regular votaries of the ceremony I have mentioned. The shadows on the perfect lawn were straight and angular; they were the shadows of an old man sitting in a deep wickerchair near the low table on which the tea had been served, and of two younger men strolling to and fro, in desultory talk, in front of him. The old man had his cup in his hand; it was an unusually large cup, of a different pattern from the rest of the set, and painted in brilliant colours. He disposed of its contents with much circumspection, holding it for a long time close to his chin, with his face turned to the house. His companions had either finished their tea or were indifferent to their privilege; they smoked cigarettes as they continued to stroll. One of them, from time to time, as he passed, looked with a certain attention at the elder man, who, unconscious of observation, rested his eyes upon the rich red front of his dwelling. The house that rose beyond the lawn was a structure to repay such consideration, and was the most characteristic object in the peculiarly English picture I have attempted to sketch. It stood upon a low hill, above the river—the river being the Thames, at some forty miles from London. A long gabled front of red brick, with the complexion of which time and the weather had played all sorts of picturesque tricks, only, however, to improve and refine it, presented itself to the lawn, with its patches of ivy, its clustered chimneys, its windows smothered in creepers. The house had a name and a history; the old gentleman taking his tea would have been delighted to tell you these things: how it had been built under Edward the Sixth, had offered a night’s hospitality to the great Elizabeth (whose august person had extended itself upon a huge, magnificent, and terribly angular bed which still formed the principal honour of the sleeping apartments), had been a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell’s wars, and then, under the Restoration, repaired and much enlarged; and how, finally, after having been remodelled and disfigured in the eighteenth century, it had passed into the careful keeping of a shrewd American banker, who had bought it originally because (owing to circumstances too complicated to set forth) it was offered at a great bargain; bought it with much grumbling at its ugliness, its antiquity, its incommodity, and who now, at the end of twenty years, had become conscious of a real æsthetic passion for it, so that he knew all its points, and would tell you just where to stand to see them in combination, and just the hour when the shadows of its various protuberances—which fell so softly upon the warm, weary brickwork—were of the right measure. Besides this, as I have said, he could have counted off most of the successive owners and occupants, several of whom were known to general fame; doing so, however, with an undemonstrative conviction that the latest phase of its destiny was not the least honourable. The front of the house overlooking that portion of the lawn with which we are concerned, was not the entrance-front; this was in quite another quarter. Privacy here reigned supreme, and the wide carpet of turf that covered the level hill-top seemed but the extension of a luxurious interior. The great still oaks and beeches flung down a shade as dense as that of velvet curtains; and the place was furnished, like a room, with cushioned seats with rich-coloured rugs, with the books and papers that lay upon the grass. The river was at some distance; where the ground began to slope, the lawn, properly speaking, ceased. But it was none the less a charming walk down to the water. The old gentleman at the tea-table, who had come from America thirty years before, had brought with him, at the top of his baggage, his American physiognomy; and he had not only brought it with him, but he had kept it in the best order, so that, if necessary, he might have taken it back to his own country with perfect confidence. But at present, obviously, he was not likely to displace himself; his journeys were over, and he was taking the rest that precedes the great rest. He had a narrow, clean-shaven face, with evenly distributed features, and an expression of placid acuteness. It was evidently a face in which the range of expression was not large; so that the air of contented shrewdness was all the more of a merit. It seemed to tell that he had been successful in life, but it seemed to tell also that his success had not been exclusive and invidious, but had had much of the inoffensiveness of failure. He had certainly had a great experience of men; but there was an almost rustic simplicity in the faint smile that played upon his lean, spacious cheek, and lighted up his humorous eye, as he at last slowly and carefully deposited his big tea-cup upon the table. He was neatly dressed, in well-brushed black; but a shawl was folded upon his knees, and his feet were encased in thick, embroidered slippers. A beautiful collie dog lay upon the grass near his chair, watching the master’s face almost as tenderly as the master contemplated the still more magisterial physiognomy of the house; and a little bristling, bustling terrier bestowed a desultory attendance upon the other gentlemen. One of these was a remarkably well-made man of five-and-thirty, with a face as English as that of the old gentleman I have just sketched was something else; a noticeably handsome face, fresh-coloured, fair, and frank, with firm, straight features, a lively grey eye, and the rich adornment of a chestnut beard. This person had a certain fortunate, brilliant exceptional look—the air of a happy temperament fertilised by a high civilisation—which would have made almost any observer envy him at a venture. He was booted and spurred, as if he had dismounted from a long ride; he wore a white hat, which looked too large for him; he held his two hands behind him, and in one of them—a large, white, well-shaped fist—was crumpled a pair of soiled dog-skin gloves. His companion, measuring the length of the lawn beside him, was a person of quite another pattern, who, although he might have excited grave curiosity, would not, like the other, have provoked you to wish yourself, almost blindly, in his place. Tall, lean, loosely and feebly put together, he had an ugly, sickly, witty, charming face—furnished, but by no means decorated, with a straggling moustache and whisker. He looked clever and ill—a combination by no means felicitous; and he wore a brown velvet jacket. He carried his hands in his pockets, and there was something in the way he did it that showed the habit was inveterate. His gait had a shambling, wandering quality; he was not very firm on his legs. As I have said, whenever he passed the old man in the chair, he rested his eyes upon him; and at this moment, with their faces brought into relation, you would easily have seen that they were father and son. The father caught his son’s eye at last, and gave him a mild, responsive smile. “I am getting on very well,” he said. [...]... glimpse of contemporary æsthetics These things now, as memory played over them, resolved themselves into a multitude of scenes and figures Forgotten things came back to her; many others, which she had lately thought of great moment, dropped out of sight The result was kaleidoscopic; but the movement of the instrument was checked at last by the servant’s coming in with the name of a gentleman The name of the. .. father’s death Her grandmother, old Mrs Archer, had exercised, chiefly within the limits of the family, a large hospitality in the early period, and the little girls often spent weeks under her roof—weeks of which Isabel had the happiest memory The manner of life was different from that of her own home—larger, more plentiful, more sociable; the discipline of the nursery was delightfully vague, and the. .. to the moderate character of her own triumphs Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgment, had the entertainment of thinking all the others a parcel of fools Isabel had in the depths of her nature an even more unquenchable desire to please than Edith; but the depths of this... disgust with the place, and had been allowed to stay at home, where in the September days, when the windows of the Dutch House were open, she used to hear the hum of childish voices repeating the multiplication table—an incident in which the elation of liberty and the pain of exclusion were indistinguishably mingled The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house,... the pictures; there were a great many of them in the house, most of them of his own choosing The best of them were arranged in an oaken gallery of charming proportions, which had a sitting-room at either end of it, and which in the evening was usually lighted The light was insufficient to show the pictures to advantage, and the visit might have been deferred till the morrow This suggestion Ralph had... old man; “she has given the hotel-clerk a dressing.” “I am not sure even of that, since he has driven her from the field We thought at first that the sister mentioned might be the sister of the clerk; but the subsequent mention of a niece seems to prove that the allusion is to one of my aunts Then there was a question as to whose the two sisters were; they are probably two of my late aunt’s daughters... fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own heart and the agitations of the world For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures—a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject... answered Ralph knew what to think of his father’s impatience; but making no rejoinder, he offered his mother his arm This put it into his power, as they descended together, to stop her a moment on the middle landing of the staircase the broad, low, wide-armed staircase of time-stained oak which was one of the most striking ornaments of Garden-court “You have no plan of marrying her?” he said, smiling... father, as he had often said to himself, was the more motherly; his mother, on the other hand, was paternal, and even, according to the slang of the day, gubernatorial She was nevertheless very fond of her only child, and had always insisted on his spending three months of the year with her Ralph rendered perfect justice to her affection, and knew that in her thoughts his turn always came after the. .. want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel The visitor had not been announced; the girl heard her at last walking about the adjoining room It was an old house at Albany—a large, square, double house, with a notice of sale in the windows of the parlour There were two entrances, one of which had long been out of use, but had never been removed They . conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he has interested us. There is no question, of course, but he could tell the story of Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady to the end, yet he does. with all the pains expended on the portrait of the extraordinary Mrs. Headway of The Siege of London,” we never quite get his point of view, but are kept considering the social duty of the prig. he rather pointedly neglects the province of the heart. This has been from the first the natural peril of the psychological novelist, the neglect of what in the Scripture view constitutes “the