Henry James by Rebecca West

Author:Rebecca West [West, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Autobiography, History, Authors, 19th Century
ISBN: 9781110468584
Google: BLNWKLMFbXUC
Publisher: BiblioBazaar
Published: 2009-06-14T23:00:00+00:00

IV

THE CRYSTAL BOWL

IN that octagonal room at the Prado, where each wall is an altar raised to beauty, because it is hung with pictures by Velasquez, in all the lesser works one finds some intimation of the grave, fine personality who produced all this wonder. At the sacred picture that was his first one says, "He was a pupil, and very proud of painting the old things better than the old men could, even though they meant nothing to him"; at the squat, black dwarfs, "He was so sure that the truth about the world was kind that he could look upon horror without fear"; and at the sketches of the Villa Medici Gardens, "After hot, bleak Spain he loved Italy as one who has known passion loves a passionless girl." And the recreated personality, tangible enough to be liked, passes with one about the gallery until suddenly, before the masterpieces, it vanishes. With those it had nothing to do; the thing that was his character, shaped out of the innate traits of his dark stock by the raw beauty of the land and the stiff rich life of the court, brought him to the conception of these works but lay sleeping through their execution. When he was painting Las Hilanderas he knew nothing save that the weavers' flesh glowed golden in the dusty sunlight of the factory; for the state of genius consists of an utter surrender of the mind to the subject. The artist at the moment of creation must be like a saint awaiting the embrace of God, scourging appetite out of him, shrinking from sensation as though it were a sin, deleting self, lifting his consciousness like an empty cup to receive the heavenly draught.

And so, with the beginning of his second period of genius, the reading of Mr James ceased to give us the companionship of the gentle, very pleasant American who seemed homeless but quite serene, as though he were tired of living in his boxes, but on the other hand was very fond of travelling, that we had grown to like in his books of the eighties. He went away and sent no letter; but instead, with a lavishness one would never have suspected from his uneasy bearing, sent a succession of jewels, great globed jewels of experience, from which marvellously conceived characters gave out their milky gleams or fiery rays. The first tentative try at the mere impression, The Aspern Papers (1888), gave an earnest of his generosity. There one passes into the golden glow of Venice, "where the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together.... The gondola stopped, the old palace was there.... How charming! it's grey and pink!" And under the painted ceiling of the old palace sits bleached and shrivelled Juliana Bordereau, the memory of her love affair with the great poet Aspern hanging in the air like incense and filling the mind with tears that such splendid lovers buy no immortality, but grow old like the rest.

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