Henry James by Fred Kaplan

Author:Fred Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

Eleven

“THE DARK ABYSS”

1888–1895

( 1 )

On a moist March day in 1888, sharing a carriage to Kensal Green Cemetery with Robert Browning, he entered a long season of deaths. They dramatized his sense that a great age was passing. His friend Adelaide Procter, a celebrated ancient lady of social and literary distinction, “a kind of window in[to] the past,” had died. Having visited her three weeks before her death, she had seemed to him “very pathetic—it was such an image of defeat—almost humiliation.” She had had a painful, harassing illness, “a difficult physical extinction.” He would miss her greatly, for, though she was “often sad and bitter,” she had never been dull, “never common or commonplace.” With her great passion for life, her intense social partisanship, he did not see why “when one minds as much as that, one shouldn’t live for ever.” It had been rumored that she had quietly become a Catholic convert so that she could be buried next to her daughter, but he noticed at Kensal Green, with a large number of people attending the funeral, many her old friends, that she was buried at the edge of the Protestant section, “where it touches the Catholic.” Someone told him that “she had said almost on her deathbed that the adoration of the Virgin was, for her, an insurmountable stumbling-block and she had not that exalted idea of her sex!” During the long, slow ride to Kensal Green and back, the seventy-six-year-old Browning, who had recently become his neighbor across the street at De Vere Gardens, “was infinitely talkative,” their other companion, Alexander Kinglake, a well-known historian, “old, deaf, delicate, distinguished … infinitely silent. Mrs. Procter, whose displeasure [Kinglake] had incurred, had not spoken to him for a quarter of a century. She was magnificent.”1

Late the next year, his neighbor at De Vere Gardens, the chatty, perplexing Browning, whose artistry James thought the most brilliant of any poet of his generation, died in Venice. Having seen Browning often in their overlapping London lives and having liked him a great deal, he felt pleased that it had been “a supremely happy and enviable death,” the great poet dying without illness, delay, or pain in his son’s Venetian palace, his life culminated “in the fullness of years and honours.” When he had been Katherine Bronson’s guest at Ca’ Alvisi in late winter 1887, James had been honored to work at the same desk at which Browning had written many of his poems. He had probably last seen him in March 1889, before the poet’s final trip to Italy, at a dinner to which Browning had been accompanied by his spinster sister. “I talk of Venice with Browning when I meet him,” James had written to Ariana Curtis, “& he always tells me the same thing—that the ‘dealers’ have offered [his son] the eyes of their head for the mere … fixtures of his disproportionate palace.… I took Miss Browning down, the other day, at a long, dull dinner & Parnell was opposite to us—& he dozed.

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